The Salvaging Of Civilization The Probable Future Of Mankind

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THE SALVAGING OP CIVILIZATION

THE PROBABLE FUTUBE OF MANKIND

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THE SALVAGING OF
CIVILISATION

THE

PROBABLE FUTURE OF
MANKIND

BY

H. G. WELLS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921

All right* reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CorntMHT, 1921,

BY H. G. WELLS.

Bet up and lctrotyped. Published Mar* 1921.

ftnmm

HINTING COMPANY
NCW YORK CITY

THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

THE PROBABUB FUTURE CMP MANK30STD

THE SALVAGING OF
CIVILIZATION

I

THE PBOBABLE FTJTTJEE OF MANKIND*

THE present outlook of human affairs is one that
admits of broad generalizations and that seems to
require broad generalizations. We are in one of
those phases of experience which becom cardinal
in history. A series of immense and tragic events
have shattered the self-complacency and chal-
lenged the will and intelligence of mankind. That
easy general forward movement of human affairs
which for several generations had seemed to jus-
tify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible
progress, progress towards greater powers,
greater happiness, and a continual enlargement of
life, has been checked violently and perhaps ar-
rested altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of
the great war has revealed an accumulation of
destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous
society, of which few of us had dreamt ; and it has

* S^rst published in the Review of Reviews.

2 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

also revealed a profound incapacity to deal with
and restrain these forces. The two years of want,
confusion, and indecision that have followed the
great war in Europe and Asia, and the uncertain-
ties that have disturbed life even in the compara-
tively untouched American world, seem to many
watchful minds even more ominous to our social
order than the war itself. What is happening to
our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and con-
fident hopes with which the twentieth century
opened, mark nothing more than a culmination of
fortuitous good luck? Plas the cycle of prosperity
and progress closed ? To what will this staggering
and blundering, the hatreds and mischievous ad-
ventures of the present time, bring us? Is the
world in the opening of long centuries of confusion
and disaster such as ended the Western Eoman
Empire in Europe or the Han prosperity in China ?
And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or
is the American (and Pacific?) system still suffi-
ciently removed and still sufficiently autonomous
to maintain a progressive movement of its own if
the Old World collapse?

Some sort of answer to these questions, vast and
vague though they are, we must each one of tis
have before we can take an intelligent interest
or cast an effective vote in foreign affairs. Even
though a man formulate no dennite answet, he
must still have ap, implicit persuasion before he
can act in these matters. If he have no clear
conclusions openly arrived at, then he must act

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 3

upon subconscious conclusions instinctively ar-
rived at Far better is it that lie should bring them
into the open light of thought.

The suppression of war is generally regarded as
central to the complex of contemporary problems.
But war is not a new thing in human experience,
and for scores of centuries mankind has managed
to get along in spite of its frequent recurrence.
Most states and empires have been intermittently
at war throughout their periods of stability and
prosperity. But their warfare was not the warfare
of the present time. The thing that has brought
the rush of progressive development of the past
century and a half to a sudden shock of arrest is
not the old and familiar warfare, but warfare
strangely changed and exaggerated by novel con-
ditions. It is this change in conditions, therefore,
and not war itself, which is the reality we have to
analyze in its bearing upon onr social and political
ideas. In 1914 the European Great Powers re-
sorted to war, as they had resorted to war on many
previous occasions, to decide certain open issues.
This war flamed out with an unexpected rapidity
until all the world was involved ; and it developed
a horror, a monstrosity of destructiveness, and,
above all, an, inconclusiveness quite unlike any
preceding war. That unlikeness was the essence
of the matter. Whatever justifications could be
found for its use in the past, it became^ clear to
many minds that under the new conditions war
was no longer a possible method of international

4 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

dealing. The thing lay upon the surface. The
idea of a League of Nations sustaining a Supreme
World Court to supersede the arbitrament of war,
did not so much arise at any particular point as
break out simultaneously wherever there were
intelligent men.

Now what was this change in conditions that
had confronted mankind with the perplexing
necessity of abandoning war? For perplexing it
certainly is. War has been a ruling and con-
structive idea in all human societies up to the
present time; few will be found to deny it.
Political institutions have very largely developed
in relation to the idea of war; defence and
aggression have shaped the outer form of every
state in the world, just as co-operation sustained
by compulsion has shaped its inner organization.
And if abruptly man determines to give up the
waging of war, he may find that this determination,
involves the most extensive and penetrating modi-
fications of political and social conceptions that do
not at the first glance betray any direct connection
with belligerent activities at all.

It is to the general problem arising out of this
consideration, that this and the three following
essays will be addressed; the question: What else
has to go if war is to go out of human life? and
the problem of what has to be done if it is to be
banished and barred out for ever from the future
experiences of our race. For let us face the truth

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 5

in this matter; the abolition of war is no casting
of ancient, barbaric, and now obsolete traditions,
no easy and natural progressive step ; the abolition
of war, if it can be brought about, will be a reversal
not only of the general method of human life
hitherto but of the general method of nature, the
method, that is, of conflict and survival. It will
be a new phase in the history of life, and not
simply an incident in the history of man. These
brief essays will attempt to present something
like the true dimensions of the task before man-
kind if war is indeed to be superseded, and to show
that the project of abolishing war by the oc-
casional meeting of some Council of a League of
Nations or the like, is, in itself, about as likely to
succeed as a proposal to abolish thirst, hunger,
and death by a short legislative act.

Let us first examine the change in the conditions
of human life that has altered war from a normal
aspect of the conflict for existence of human so-
cieties into a terror and a threat for the entire
species. The change is essentially a change in the
amount of power available for human purposes,
and more particularly in the amount of material
power that can be controlled by one individual.
Human society Tip to a couple of centuries ago
wa& essentially a man-power and horse-power
system. There was in addition a certain limited
use of water power and wind power, but that was
not on a scale to affect the general truth of the
proposition. The first intimation of the great

6 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

change "began seven centuries ago with the appear-
ance of explosives. In the thirteenth century the
Mongols made a very effective military use of the
Chinese discovery of gunpowder. They conquered
most of the known world, and their introduction
of a low-grade explosive in warfare rapidly de-
stroyed the immunity of castles and walled cities,
abolished knighthood, and utterly wrecked and
devastated the irrigation system of Mesopotamia,
which had been a populous and civilized region
since before the beginnings of history. But the
restricted metallurgical knowledge of the time set
definite limits to the size and range of cannon. It
was only with the nineteenth century that the large
scale production of cast steel and the growth of
chemical knowledge made the military use of a
variety of explosives practicable. The systematic
extension of human power began in the eighteenth
century with the utilization of steam and coal.
That opened a crescendo of invention and dis-
covery which thrust rapidly increasing quantities
of material energy into men's hands. ^ Even now
that crescendo may not have reached its climax.

We need not rehearse here the familiar story
of the abolition of distance that ensued; how the
radiogram and the telegram have made every
event of importance a simultaneous event for the
minids of everyone in the world, how journeys
which formerly took months or weeks now take
days or hours, nor how printing and paper have
made possible a universally informed community,

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 7

and so forth. Nor will we describe the effect of
these things upon warfare. The point that con-
cerns us here is this, that before this age of dis-
covery, communities had fought and struggled
with each other much as naughty children might
do in a crowded nursery, within the measure of
their strength. They had hurt and impoverished
each other, but they had rarely destroyed each
other completely. Their squabbles may have been
distressing, but they were tolerable. It is even
possible to regard these former wars as healthy,
hardening and invigorating conflicts. But into
this nursery has come Science, and has put into
the fists of these children razor blades with poison
on them, bombs of frightful explosive, corrosive
fluids and the like. The comparatively harmless
conflicts of these infants are suddenly fraught with
quite terrific possibilities, and it is only a question
of sooner or later before the nursery becomes a
heap of corpses or is blown to smithereens. A
real nursery invaded by a reckless person dis-
tributing such gifts, would be promptly saved by
the intervention of the nurse; but humanity has
no nurse but its own poor wisdom. And whether
that poor wisdom can rise to the pitch of effectual
intervention is the most fundamental problem in
mundane affairs at the present time.

The deadly gifts continue. There was a steady
Increase in the frightfulness and destructiveness
of belligerence from 1914 up to the beginning of
1918, when shortage of material and energy

8 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

checked the process ; and since the armistice there
has been an industrious development of military
science. The next well-organized war, we are as-
sured, will be far more swift and extensive in its
destruction more particularly of the civilian
population. Armies will advance no longer along
roads but extended in line, with heavy tank
transport which will plough up the entire surface
of the land they traverse; aerial bombing, with
bombs, each capable of destroying a small town,
will be practicable a thousand miles beyond the
military front, and the seas will be swept clear of
shipping by mines and submarine activities.
There will be no distinction between combatants
and non-combatants, because every able-bodied
citizen, male or female, is a potential producer of
food and munitions ;, % and probably the safest, and
certainly the best sup*plied shelters in the universal
cataclysm, will be the carefully buried, sand-
bagged, and camouflaged general-headquarters of
the contending armies. There military gentlemen
of limited outlook and high professional training
will, in comparative security, achieve destruction
beyond their understanding. The hard logic of
war which gives victory always to the most
energetic and destructive combatant, will turn
warfare more and more from mere operations for
loot or conquest or predominance into operations
for the conclusive destruction of the antagonists.
A relentless thrust towards strenuousness is a
characteristic of belligerent conditions. War is
war, and vehemence is in its nature. You must

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 9

hit always as hard as you can. Offensive and
counter-offensive methods continue to prevail over
merely defensive ones. The victor in the next
great war will be bombed from the air, starved,
and depleted almost as much as the loser. His
victory will be no easy one ; it will be a triumph
of the exhausted and dying over the dead.

It has been argued that such highly organized
and long prepared warfare as the world saw in
1914-18 is not likely to recur again for a consider-
able time because of the shock inflicted by it upon
social stability. There may be spasmodic wars
with improvised and scanty supplies, these super-
ficially more hopeful critics admit, but there re-
main no communities now so .stable and so sure of
their people as to- prepare and wage again a fully
elaborated scientific war. But this view implies
no happier outlook for mankind. It amounts to
this, that so long as men remain disordered and
impoverished they will not rise again to the full
height of scientific war. But manifestly this will
only be for as long as they remain disordered and
impoverished. "When they recover they will re-
cover to repeat again their former disaster with
whatever modern improvements and intensifies
tions the ingenuity of the intervening time may
have devised. This new phase of disorder, conflict,
and social unravelling upon which we have en-
tered, this phase of decline due to the enhanced
and increasing powers for waste and destruction
in mankind, is bound, therefore, to continue so
long as the divisions based upon ancient ideas of

10 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

conflict remain; and if for a time the decadence
seems to be arrested, it will only be to accumu-
late under the influence of those ideas a fresh war
storm sufficiently destructive and disorganizing to
restore the decadent process.

TJnless mankind can readjust its political and
social ideas to this essential new fact of its enor-
mously enlarged powers, unless it can eliminate
or control its pugnacity, no other prospect seems
open to us but decadence, at least to such a level
of barbarism as to lose and forget again all the
scientific and industrial achievements of our pres-
ent age. Then, with its powers shrunken to their
former puny scale, our race may recover some sort
of balance between the injuries and advantages of
conflict. Or, since our decadent species may have
less vitality and vigour than it had in its primitive
phases, it may dwindle and fade out altogether
before some emboldened animal antagonist, or
through some world-wide disease brought to it
perhaps by rats and dogs and insects and what
not, who may be destined to be heirs to the rust-
ing and mouldering ruins of the cities and ports
and ways and bridges of to-day.

Only one alternative to some such retrogression
seems possible, and that is the conscious, system-
atic reconstruction of human society to avert it.
The world has been brought into one community,
and the human mind and will may be able to recog-

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 11

nize and adapt itself to this fact in time. Men,
as a race, may succeed in turning their backs upon
the method of warfare and the methods of conflict
and in embarking upon an immense world-wide
effort of co-operation and mutual toleration and
salvage. They may have the vigour to abandon
their age-long attempt to live in separate sover-
eign states, and to grapple with and master the
now quite destructive force that traditional hostil-
ity has become, and bring their affairs together
under one l&w and one peace. These new vast
powers over nature which have been given to
them, and which will certainly be their destruction
if their purposes remain divergent and conflicting,
will then be the means by which they may set up
a new order of as yet scarcely imaginable interest
and happiness and achievement. But is our race
capable of such an effort, such a complete reversal
of its instinctive and traditional impulses? Can
we find premonitions of any such bold and revo-
lutionary adaptations as these, in the mental and
political life of to-day? How far are we, reader
and writer, for example, working for these large
new securities? Do we even keep them stesui-
fastly in our minds? How is it with the people
around us? Are not we and they and all the race
still just as much adrift in the current of cir-
cumstances as we were before 1914? Without a
great effort on our part (or on someone's part)
that current which swirled our kind into a sun-
shine of hope and opportunity for a while will

12 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh
wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries, and social
debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to
a degradation beyond our present understand-
ing.

The urgent need for a, great creative effort has
become apparent in the affairs of mankind. It is
manifest that unless some unity of purpose can be
achieved in the world, unless the ever more violent
and disastrous incidence of war can be averted,
unless some common control can be imposed on
the headlong waste of man's limited inheritance
of coal, oil, and moral energy that is now going
on, the history of humanity must presently cul-
minate in some sort of disaster, repeating and
exaggerating the disaster of the great war, pro-
ducing chaotic social conditions, and going on
thereafter in a degenerative process towards ex-
tinction. So much all reasonable men seem now
prepared to admit. But upon the question of how
and in what form a unity of purpose and a com-
mon control of human affairs is to be established,
there is still a great and lamentable diversity of
opinion and, as a consequence, an enfeeblement
and wasteful dispersal of will. At present nothing
has been produced but the manifestly quite inade-
quate League of Nations at Geneva, and a num-
ber of generally very vague movements for a
world law, "world disarmament, and the like,
among the intellectuals of the various civilized
countries of the world.

13

14 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

The common failings of all these initiatives are
a sort of genteel timidity and a defective sense of
the scale of the enterprise before us. A neglect of
the importance of scale is one of the gravest
faults of contemporary 'education. Because a
world-wide political organ is needed, it does not
follow that a so-called League of Nations with-
out representative sanctions, military forces, or
authority of any kind, a League from which large
sections of the world are excluded altogether, is
any contribution to that need. People have a way
of saying it is better than nothing. But it may
be worse than nothing. It may create a feeling of
disillusionment about world-unifying efforts. If a
mad elephant were loose in one's garden, it would
be an excellent thing to give one's gardener a gun.
But it would have to be an adequate gun, an
elephant gun. To give him a small rook-rifle and
tell him it was better than nothing, and encourage
him to face the elephant with that in his hand,
would be the directest way of getting rid not of
the elephant but of the gardener,

It is, if people will but think steadfastly, incon-
ceivable that there should be any world control
without a merger of sovereignty, but the framers
of these early tentatives towards world unity have
lacked the courage of frankness in this respect.
They have been afraid of outbreaks of bawling
patriotism, and they have tried to believe, and to
make others believe, that they contemplate nothing
more than a league of nations, when in reality they
contemplate a subordination of nations and admin-

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 15

istrations to one common law and rule. The
elementary necessity of giving the council of any
world-peace organization, which, is to be more than
a sentimental international gesture, not only a
complete knowledge but an effective control of all
the military resources and organizations in the
world, appalled them. They did not even ask for
such a control. The frowning solidity of existing
things was too much for them. They wanted to
change them, but when it came to laying hands on
them No! They decided to leave them alone.
They wanted a new world and it is to contain just
the same things as the old.

But are these intellectuals right in their estimate
of the common man? Is he such a shallow and
vehement fool as they seem to believe? Is he so
patriotic as they make out? If mankind is to be
saved from destruction there must be a world con-
trol; a world control means a world government,
it is only another name for it, and manifestly that
government must have a navy that will supersede
the British navy, artillery that will supersede the
French artillery, air forces superseding all exist-
ing air forces, and so forth. For many flags there
must be one sovereign flag; orlis terrarum. Un-
less a world control amounts to that it will be
ridiculous, just as a judge supported by two or
three unarmed policemen, a newspaper reporter
and the court chaplain, proposing to enforce his
decisions in a court packed with the heavily armed
friends of the plaintiff and defendant would be
ridiculous. But the common man is supposed to

1G THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

be so blindly and incurably set upon his British
navy or his French army, or whatever his pet
national instrument of violence may be, that it is
held to be impossible to supersede these beloved
and adored forces. If that is so, then a world law
is impossible, and the wisest course before us is
to snatch such small happiness as we may hope to
do and leave the mad elephant to work its will in
the garden.

But is it so? If the mass of common men are
incurably patriotic and belligerent why is there a
note of querulous exhortation in nearly all
patriotic literature? "Why, for instance, is Mr.
Budyard Kipling's "History of England " so full
of goading and scolding? And very significant in-
deed to any student of the human outlook was the
world response to President "Wilson's advocacy of
the League of Nations idea, in its first phase in
1918, before the weakening off. and disillusionment
of the Versailles conference. Just for a little while
it seemed that President Wilson stood for a new
order of things in the world, that he had the
wisdom and will and power to break the net of
hatreds and nationalisms and diplomacies in which
the Old World was entangled. And while he
seemed to bo capable of that, while he promised
most in the way of change and national control,
then it was that he found his utmost support in
every country in the world. In the latter half of
1918 there was scarcely a country anywhere in
which one could not have found men ready to die
for President Wilson. A great hopefulness was

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 17

manifest in the world. It faded, it faded very
rapidly again. But that brief wave of enthusiasm,
which set minds astir with the same great idea of
one peace of justice throughout the earth in China
and Bokhara and the Indian bazaars, in Iceland
and Basutoland and Ireland and Morocco, was in-
deed a fact perhaps more memorable in history
even than the great war itself. It displayed a pos-
sibility of the simultaneous operation of the same
general ideas throughout the world quite beyond
any previous experience. It demonstrated that
the generality of men are as capable of being cos-
mopolitan and pacifist as they are of being
patriotic and belligerent. Both moods are exten-
sions and exaltations beyond the everyday life,
which itself is neither one thing nor the other.
And both are transitory moods, responses to ex-
ternal suggestion.

It is to that first wave of popular feeling for a
world law transcending and moving counter to all
contemporary diplomacies, and not to the timid
legalism of the framers of the first schemes for a
League of Nations that we must look, if we are to
hope at all for the establishment &f a new order in
human affairs- It is upon the spirit of that tran-
sitory response to the transitory greatness of
President Wilson, that we have to seize ; we have
to lay hold of that, to recall it and confirm it and
enlarge and" strengthen it, to make it a flux of
patriotisms and a creator of new loyalties and
devotions, and out of the dead dust of our pres-

18 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

ent institutions to build up for it and animate
with it the body of a true world state.

We have already stated the clear necessity, if
mankind is not to perish by the hypertrophy of
warfare, for the establishment of an armed and
strong world law. Here in this spirit that has
already gleamed upon the world is the possible
force to create and sustain such a world law
"What is it that intervenes between the ^universal
human need and its satisfaction? "Why, since there
are overwhelming reasons for it and a widespread
disposition for it, is there no world-wide creative
effort afoot now in which men and women by the
million are participating and participating with
all their hearts ? Why is it that, except f or^ the
weak gestures of the Q-eneva League of Nations
and a little writing of books and articles, a little
pamphleteering, some scattered committee activi-
ties on the part of people chiefly of the busybody
class, an occasional speech and a diminishing
volume of talk and allusion, no attempts are
apparent to stay the plain, drift of human society
towards new conflicts and the sluices of final dis-
aster?

The answer to that Why, probes deep into the
question of human motives.

It must be because we are all creatures of our
immediate surroundings, because our minds and
energies are chiefly occupied by the affairs of
every day, because we are all chiefly living our
own lives, and very f ew^ of us, except by a kind
of unconscious contribution, the life of mankind.

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OP MANKIND 19

In moments of mental activity, in the study or
in contemplation, we may rise to a sense of the
dangers and needs of human destiny, but it is only
a few minds and characters of prophetic quality
that, without elaborate artificial assistance, seem
able to keep hold upon and guide their lives by
such relatively gigantic considerations. The gen-
erality of men and women, so far as their natural
disposition goes, are scarcely more capable of
apprehending and consciously serving the human
future than a van full of well-fed rabbits would
be of grasping the fact that their van was running
smoothly and steadily down an inclined plane into
the sea. It is only as the result of considerable
educational effort and against considerable resist-
ance that our minds are brought to a broader view.
In every age for many thousands of years men of
exception! vision have spent their lives in pas-
sionate efforts to bring us ordinary men into some
relation of response and service to the greater
issues of life. It is these pioneers of vision who
have given the world its religions and its philo-
sophical cults, its loyalties and observances ; and
who have imposed ideas of greatness and duty on
their fellows. In every age the ordinary man has
submitted reluctantly to such teachings, has made
his peculiar compromises with them, has reduced
them as far as possible to formula and formality,
and got back as rapidly as possible to the eating
and drinking and desire, the personal spites and
rivalries and glories which constitute his reality.
The mass of men to-day do not seem to care, nor

20 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

want to care, whither the political and social insti-
tutions to which they are accustomed are taking
them. Such considerations overstrain us. And it
is only by the extremest effort of those who are
capable of a sense of racial danger and duty that
the collective energies of men can ever be gathered
together and organized and orientated towards
the common good. To nearly all men and women,
unless they are in the vein for it, such discussion
as this in these essays does not appeal as being
right or wrong; it does not really interest them,
rather it worries them ; and for the most part they
would be glad to disregard it as completely as a
lecture on wheels and gravitation and the physio-
logical consequences of prolonged submergence
would be disregarded by those rabbits in the van.
But man is a creature very different in his
nature from a rabbit, and if he is less instinctively
social, he is much more consciously social. Chief
among his differences must be the presence of
those tendencies which we call conscience, that
haunting craving to be really right and to do the
really right thing which is the basis of the moral
and perhaps also of most of the religious life. In
this lies our hope for mankind, Man hates to be
put right, and yet also he wants to be right. He
is a creature divided against himself, seeking both
to preserve and to overcome his egotism. It is
upon the presence of the latter strand in man's
complex make-up that we must rest our hopes of
a developing will for the world state which will

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 21

gradually gather together and direct into a
massive constructive effort the now quite dis-
persed chaotic and traditional activities of
men.

As we have examined this problem it has be-
come clear that the task of bringing about that
consolidated world state which is necessary to pre-
vent the de'cline and decay of mankind is not
primarily one for the diplomatists and lawyers
and politicians at all It is an educational one.
It is a moral based on an intellectual reconstruc-
tion. The task immediately before mankind is to
find release from the contentious loyalties and
hostilities of the past which make collective world-
wide action impossible at the present time, in a
world-wide common vision of the history and des-
tinies of the race. On that as a basis, and on that
alone, can a world control be organized and main-
tained. The effort 'demanded from mankind,
therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold re-
construction of the outlook upon life of hundreds
of millions of minds. The idea of a world com-
monweal has to be established as the criterion of
political institutions, and also as the 'criterion of
general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains.
It has to dominate education everywhere in the
world. When that enxi is achieved, then the world
state will be achieved, and it can be achieved in
no other way. And unless that world state can
be achieved, it would seem that the outlook before
mankind is a continuance of disorder and of more

22 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

and more destructive and wasteful conflicts, a
steady process of violence, decadence, and misery
towards extinction, or towards modifications of
our type altogether beyond our present under-
standing and sympathy.

3

In framing an. estimate of the human future
two leading facts are dominant. The first is the
plain necessity for a political reorganization, of the
world as a unity, to save our race from th social
disintegration and complete physical destruction
which war, under modern conditions, must ulti-
mately entail, and the second is the manifest
absence of any sufficient will in the general mass
of mankind at the present time to make such a
reorganization possible. There appear to be the
factors of such a will in men, but they are for the
most part unawakened, or they are unorganized
and ineffective. And there is a very curious, in-
capacity to grasp the reality of the human situa-
tion, a real resistance to seeing things as they are
for man is an effort-shirking animal which
greatly impedes the development of such a "will,
Failing the operation of such a sufficient will,
human affairs are being directed by use and wont,
by tradition and accidental deflections. Mankind,
after the tragic concussion of the great war, seems
now to be drifting again towards- new and proba-
bly more disastrous concussions.

The catastrophe of the great war did more or
less completely awaken a certain limited number
of intelligent people to the need of some general

23

24 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

control replacing this ancient traditional driftage
of events. But they shrank from the great impli-
cations of snch a world control. The only prac-
ticable -way to achieve a general control in the face
of existing governments, institutions and preju-
dices, interested obstruction and the common dis-
regard, is by extending this awakening to great
masses of people. This means an unprecedented
educational effort, an appeal to men's intelligence
and men's imagination such as the world has never
seen before. Is it possible to rationalize the at
present chaotic will of mankind ? That possibility,
if it is a possibility, is the most important thing in
contemporary human affairs,

We are asking here for an immense thing, for
a change of ideas, a vast enlargement of ideas, and
for something very like a change of heart in
hundreds of millions of human beings. But then
we are dealing with the fate of the entire species.
We a#e discussing the prevention of wars, dis-
orders, shortages, famines and miseries for cen-
turies ahead. The initial capital we have to go
upon is as yet no more than the aroused under-
standing and conscience of a few thousands, at
most of a few score thousands of people. Can so
little a leaven leaven so great a lump? Is a re-
sponse to this appeal latent in the masses of maii-
Mnd? Is there anything in history to justify hope
for so gigantic a mental turnover in our race?

A consideration of the spread of Christianity
in the first four centuries A.D. or of the spread
of Islam in the seventh century will, we believe,

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 25

support a reasonable hope that such a change in
the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a
practicable change, that it can be done and that
it may even probably be done. Consider our two
instances. The propagandas of those two great
religions changed and changed for ever the politi-
cal and social outlook over vast areas of the
world's surface. Yet while the stir for world
unity begins now simultaneously in many coun-
tries and many groups of people, those two propa-
gandas each radiated from one single centre and
were in the first instance the teachings of single
individuals; and while to-day we can deal with
great reading populations and can reach them by
press and printed matter, by a universal distribu-
tion of books, by great lecturing organizations
and the like, those earlier great changes in human
thought were achieved mainly by word of mouth
and by crabbed manuscripts, painfully copied and
passed slowly from hand to hand. So far it is
only the trader who has made any effectual use
of the vast facilities the modern world has pro-
duced for conveying a statement simultaneously
to great numbers of people at a distance. The
world of thought still hesitates to use the means
of power that now exist for it. History and politi-
cal philosophy in the modern world are like bash-
ful dons at a dinner party; they crumble their
bread and talk in undertones and clever allusions
to their nearest neighbour, abashed at the thought
of addressing the whole table. But in a world
where Mars can reach out in a single night and

26 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

smite a city a thousand miles away, we cannot suf-
fer wisdom to hesitate in an inaudible gentility.
The knowledge and vision that is good enough for
the "best of us is good enough for all. This gospel
of human brotherhood and a common law and rule
for all mankind, the attempt to meet this urgent
necessity of a common control of human affairs,
which indeed is no new religion but only an at-
tempt to realize practically the common teaching
of all the established religions of the world, has
to speak with dominating voice everywhere Be-
tween the poles and round about the world.

And it must become part of the universal edu-
cation. It must speak through the school and
university. It is too often forgotten, in America,
perhaps, even more than in Europe, that education
exists for the community, and for the individual
only so far as it makes him a sufficient member of
the community. The chief end of education is to
subjugate and sublimate for the collective pur-
poses of our kind the savage egotism we inherit.
Every school, every college, teaches directly and
still more by implication, relationship to a com-
munity and devotion to a community. In too
many cases that community we let our schools and
colleges teach to our children is an extremely nar-
row one ; it is the community of a sect, of a class,
or of an intolerant, greedy and unrighteous na-
tionalism. Schools have increased greatly in num-
bers throughout the world during the last century,
but there has been little or no growth in the con-
ception of education in schools. Education has

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 27

been extended, but it lias not been developed. If
man is to be saved from self-destruction by the
organization of a world community, there must be
a broadening of the reference of the teaching in
the schools of all the world to that community of
the world. "World-wide educational development
and reform are the necessary preparations for
and the necessary accompaniments of a political
reconstruction of the world. The two are the
right and left hands of the same thing. Neither
can effect much without the other.

Now it is manifest that this reorganization of
the world's affairs and of the world's education
which we hold to be imperatively dictated by the
change in warfare, communications and other
conditions of human life brought about by scien-
tific discovery during ''he last hundred years, car-
ries with it a practical repudiation of the claims
of every existing sovereign government in the
world to be final and sovereign, to be anything
more than provisional and replaceable. There is
the difficulty that has checked hundreds of men
after their first step' towards this work for a uni-
versal peace. It involves, it eannt but involve, a
revision of their habitual allegiances. At "best
existing governments are to be regarded as local
trustees and caretakers for the coming human
commonweal. If they are not that, then they are
necessarily obstructive and antagonistic. But few
rulers, few governments, few officials, will have
the greatness of mind to recognize and admit
this plain reality. By a kind of necessity they

28 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

force upon tlieir subjects and publics a conflict of
loyalties. Tlie feeble driftage of human affairs
from one "base or greedy arrangement or cowardly
evasion to another, since the Armistice of 1918,
is very largely due to the obstinate determination
of those who are in positions of authority and
responsibility to ignore the plain teachings of the
great war and its sequelae. They are resisting
adjustments ; their minds are fighting against the
sacrifices of pride and authority that a full recog-
nition of their subordination to the world com-
monweal will involve. They are prepared, it
would seem, to fight against the work of human
.salvation basely and persistently, whenever their
accustomed importance is threatened.

Even in the schools and in the 'world of thought
the established thing will make its unrighteous
fight for life. The dull and the dishonest in high
places will suppress these greater ideas when they
can, and ignore when they dare not suppress. It
seems too much to hope for that there should be
any willingness on the part of any established au-
thority to admit its obsolescence and prepare the
way for its merger in a world authority. It is not
creative minds that produce revolutions, but the
obstinate conservatism of established authority.
It is the blank refusal to accept the idea of an
orderly evolution towards new things that gives a
revolutionary quality to -every constructive pro-
posal The huge task of political and educational
reconstruction which is needed to arrest the pres-
ent drift of human affairs towards catastrophe,

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 29

must be achieved, if it is to be achieved at all,
mainly by voluntary and unofficial effort ; and for
the most part in the teeth of official opposition.

There are one or two existing states to which
men have looked for some open recognition of
their dnty to mankind as a whole, and of the
necessarily provisional nature of their contempo-
rary constitutions. The United States of America
constitute a political system, profoundly different
in its origin and in its spirit, from any old-world
state;, it T^as felt that here at least might be an
evolutionary state; and in the palmy days of
President Wilson it did seem for a brief interval
as if the New "World was indeed coming to the
rescue of the old, as if America was to play the
role of a propagandist continent, bringing its
ideas of equality and freedom, and extending the
spirit of its union to all the nations of the earth.
From that expectation, the world opinion is now
in a state of excessive and unreasonable recoil.
President Wilson fell away from his first intima-
tions of that world-wide federal embrace, his mind
and will were submerged by the clamour of con-
tending patriotisms and the subtle expedients of
old-world diplomacy in Paris ; but American acces-
sibility to the idea of a f ederalized world neither
began with him nor will it end with his failure.
America is still a hopeful laboratory of world-
unifying thought. A long string of arbitration
treaties stands to the credit of America, and a
series of developing Pan- American projects, point-
ing clearly to at least a continental synthesis

30 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

-"within a measurable time. There has been, and
there still is, a better understanding of, and a
greater receptivity to, ideas of international syn-
thesis in America than in any European state.

And the British Empire, which, according to
many of its liberal apologists is already a league
of nations, linked together in a mutually advan-
tageous peace, to that too men have looked for
some movement of adaptation to this greater syn-
thesis which is the world's pre-eminent need. But
so far the British Empire has failed to respond to
such expectations. The war has left it strained
and bruised and with its affairs very much in the
grip of the military class, the most illiterate and
dangerous class in the community. They have
done, perhaps, irreparable mischief to the peace
of the empire in Ireland, India and Egypt, and
they have made the claim of the British system
to be an exemplary unification of dissimilar peo-
ples seem now to many people incurably absurd.
It is a great misfortune for mankind that the Brit-
ish Empire, which played so sturdy and central a
part in the great war, could at its close achieve no
splendid and helpful gesture towards a generous
reconstruction.

Since the armistice there has been an extraor-
dinary opportunity for the British monarchy to
have displayed a sense of the new occasions before
the world, and to have led the way towards the
efforts and renunciations of an international
renascence. It could have taken up a lead that
the President of the United States had initiated

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 31

and relinquished ; it could have used its peculiar
position to make an unexampled appeal to the
whole world. It could have created a new epoch in
history. The Prince of Wales has been touring
the world-wide dominions of which, some day, he
is to be the crowned head. He has received ad-
dresses, visited sights, been entertained, shaken
hands with scores of thousands of people and sub-
mitted himself to the eager, yet unpenetrating
gaze of vast multitudes. His smallest acts have
been observed with premeditated admiration, his
lightest words recorded. He is not now a boy ; he
saw something of the great war, even if his exalted
position denied him any large share of its severer
hardships and dangers ; he cannot be blind to the
general posture of the world's affairs. Here,
surely, was a chance of saying something that
would be heard from end to end of the earth,
something kingly and great-minded. Here was
the occasion for a fine restatement of the obliga-
tions and duties of empire. But from first to last
the prince has said nothing to quicken the imagi-
nations of the multitude of his future subjects to
the gigantic possibilities of these times, nothing
to reassure the foreign observer that the British
Empire embodies anything more than the colossal
national egotism and impenetrable self-satisfac-
tion of the British peoples. "Here we are," said
the old order in those demonstrations, "and here
we mean to stick. Just as we have been, so we
remain. British! we are Bourbons." These
smiling tours of the Prince of Wales in these

32 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

years of shortage, stress, and insecurity, consti-
tute a propaganda of inanity unparalleled in the
world's history.

Nor do we find in the nominal rulers and official
representatives of other countries any clear ad-
mission of the necessity for a great and funda-
mental change in the scope and spirit of govern-
ment. These official and ruling people, more than
any other people, are under the sway of that life
of use and wont which dominates us all. They are
often trained to their positions, or they have won
their way to their positions of authority through
a career of political activities which amounts to a
training. And that training is not a training in
enterprise and change ; it is a training in sticking
tight and getting back to precedent. "We can ex-
pect nothing from them. We shall be lucky if
the resistance of the administrative side of exist-
ing states to the conception of a world common-
weal is merely passive. There is little or no pros-
pect of any existing governing system, unless it
be such a federal system as Switzerland or the
United States, passing directly and without exten-
sive internal changes into combination with other
sovereign powers as part of a sovereign world
system. At some point the independent states
will as systems resist, and unless an overwhelming
world conscience for the world state has been
brought into being and surrounds them with an
understanding watchfulness, and invades the con-
sciences of their supporters a&d so weakens their

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 33

resisting power, they will resist violently and dis-
astrously. But it will be an incoherent resistance
because the very nature of the sovereign states of
to-day is incoherence. There can be no world-
wide combination of sovereign states to resist the
world state, because that would be to create the
world state in the attempt to defeat it.

In the three preceding 1 essays an attempt has
been made to state the pass at which mankind has
arrived, the dangers and mischiefs that threaten
our race, and the need there is and the oppor-
tunities there are for a strenuous attempt to end
the age-long bickerings of nations and 'empires
and establish one community of law and effort
throughout the whole world. Stress has been laid
chiefly upon the monstrous evils and disasters a
continuation of our present divisions, our nation-
alisms and imperialisms and the like, will certainly
entail. These considerations of evil, however, are
only the negative argument for this creative ef-
fort ; they have been thrust forward because war,
disorder, insufficiency, and the ill health, the part-
ings, deprivations, boredom and unhappiness that
arise out of theso things are well within our expe-
rience and entirely credible ; the positive argument
for a world order demands at once more faith and
imagination.

Given a world law and world security, a release
from the net of bickering frontiers, world-wide
freedom, of movement, and world-wide fellowship,
a thousand good things that are now beyond hope
or dreaming would come into the ordinary life.
The whole world would be our habitation, and the

34

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 35

energies of men, released from their preoccupa-
tion with, contention, would go more and more
abundantly into the accumulation and application
of scientific knowledge, that is to say into the in-
crease of mental and bodily health, of human
power, of interest and happiness. Even to-day
the most delightful possibilities stand waiting,
inaccessible to nearly all of us because of the
general insecurity, distrust and anger. Flying, in
a world safely united in peace, could take us now
to the ends of the earth smoothly, securely through
the sweet upper air, in five or sis days. In two
or three years there could again Tbe abundance of
food and pleasant clothing for everyone through-
out the whole world. Men could be destroying
their slums and pestilential habitations and re-
building spacious and beautiful cities. Given only
peace and confidence and union we could double
our yearly production of all that makes life de-
sirable and still double our leisure for thought
and growth. We could live in a universal palace
and make the whole globe our garden and play-
ground.

But these are not considerations that sway peo-
ple to effort. Fear and hate, not hope and desire,
have been, hitherto the effective spurs for men.
The most popular religions are those which hold
out the widest hopes of damnation. Our lives
are lives of use and wont, we distrust the promise
of delightful experience and achievements beyond
our accustomed ways ; it offends our self-satisfac-
tion even to regard them as possibilities; we do

36 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

not like the implied cheapening of familiar things.
We are all ready to sneer at "Utopias," as elderly
invalids sneer at the buoyant hopes of youth and
do their best to think them sure of frustration.
The aged and disillusioned profess a keen appreci-
ation of the bath chair and the homely spoonful of
medicine, and pity a crudity that misses the fine
quality of those ripe established things. Most
people are quite ready to dismiss the promise of
a full free life for all mankind with a sneer. That
would rob the world of romance, they say, the
romance of passport offices, custom houses, short-
ages of food, endless petty deprivations, slums,
pestilence, under-educated stunted children,
youths* dying in heaps in muddy trenches, an
almost universal lack of vitality, and all the pic-
turesque eventfulness of contemporary conditions.
So that we have not dwelt here upon the life-
giving aspect of a possible world-state, but only on
its life-saving aspects. We have not argued that
our present life of use and wont could be replaced
by an infinitely better way of living. We have
rather pointed out that if things continue to drift
as they are doing, the present life of use and wont
will become intolerably insecure. It is the thought
of the large bombing aeroplane and not the hope
of swift travelling across the sky that will move
the generality of men, if they are to be moved at
all, towards a world peace.

But whether the lever that moves them is desire
or fear the majority of men, unless the species is
to perish, must be brought within a measurable

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OP MANKIND 37

time to an understanding of, and a will for, a
single world government. And since at first exist-
ing institutions, established traditions, educa-
tional organizations and the like, will all Tbe pas-
sively if not actively resistant to the spread of this
saving idea, and much more so to any attempts to
realize this saving idea, there remains nothing
for us to look to, at the present time, for the first
organization of this immense effort of mental re-
versal, but the zeal and devotion and self-sacrifice
of convinced individuals. The world state must
begin; it can only begin, as a propagandist cult, or
as a group of propagandist cults, to which men
and women must give themselves and their ener-
gies, regardless of the consequences to themselves.
Laying the foundations of a world state upon a
site already occupied by a muddle of buildings is
an undertaking which will almost necessarily
bring its votaries into conflict with established
authority and current sentiment ; they, will have
to face the possibility of lives of conflict, misun-
derstanding, much thankless exertion,- they must
count on little honour and considerable active dis-
like; and they will have to find what consolation
they can in the interest of the conflict itself and
in the thought of a world, made at last by such
efforts as theirs, peaceful and secure and vigor-
ous, a world they can never hope to see. So stated
it seems a bad bargain that the worker for the
world-state is invited to make, yet the world has
never lacked people prepared to make such a bar-
gain and they will not fail it now. There are

38 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

worse things than conflict without manifest vic-
tory and effort without apparent reward. To the
finer kind of mind it Is infinitely more tragic and
distressing to find that existence bears a foolish
aimless face. Many people, tormented by the dis-
content of conscience, and wanting, more than they
can ever want any satisfaction, some satisfying
rule of life, some criterion of conduct, will find in
this cult of the world-state just that sustaining
reality they need. And their number will grow.
Because it is a practical and reasonable shape for
a life, arising naturally out of a proper under-
standing of history and physical science, and em-
bodying in a unifying plan the teaching of all the
great religions of the world. It comes to us not
to destroy but to fulfil.

The activities of a cult which set itself to bring
about the world-state would at first be propa-
gandist, they would be intellectual and educa-
tional, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and
will had accumulated would they become to a pre-
dominant extent politically constructive. Such a
cult must direct itself particularly to the teaching
of the young. So far the propaganda for a world
law, the League of Nations propaganda, since it
has sought immediate political results, has been
addressed almost entirely to adults ; and as a con-
sequence it has had to adapt itself as far as pos-
sible to their preconceptions about the history and
outlook of their own nationality, and to the gen-
eral absence as yet in the world of any vision of
the welfare of mankind as one whole. It is be-

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 39

cause of this acceptance of current adult ideas
about patriotism and nationality that the move-
ment has adopted the unsatisfactory phrase, a
League of Nations, when what is contemplated is
much more than a league and a very considerable
subordination of national sovereignty. And a
large share in the current ineffectiveness of the
League of Nations is evidently due to the fact that
men interpret the phrase and the proposition of
the League of Nations differently in accordance
with the different fundamental historical ideas
they possess, ideas that propaganda has hitherto
left unassailed. The worker for the world-state
will look further and plough deeper. It is these
fundamental ideas which are the vitally important
objective of a world-unifying movement, and they
can only be brought into that world-wide uni-
formity which is essential to the enduring peace
of mankind, by teaching children throughout all
the earth the common history of their kind, and
so directing their attention to the common future
of their descendants. The driving force that
makes either war or peace is engendered where
the young are taught. The teacher, whether
mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker
of history; rulers, statesmen and soldiers do but
work out the possibilities of co-operation or con-
flict the teacher creates. This is no rhetorical
flourish; it is a sober fact. The politicians and
masses of our time dance on the wires of their
early education.
Teaching then is the initial and decisive factor

40 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

in the future of mankind, and the first duty of
everyone who has the ability and opportunity, is
to teach, or to subserve the teaching- of, the true
history of mankind and of the possibilities of this
vision of a single world-state that history opens
out to us. Men and women can help the spread
of the saving doctrine in a thousand various ways ;
for it is not only in homes and schools that minds
are shaped. They can p^rint and publish books,
endow schools and teaching, organize the distri-
bution of literature, insist upon the proper in-
struction of children in world-wide charity and
fellowship, fight against every sort of suppression
or restrictive control of right education, bring
pressure through political and social channels
upon every teaching organization to teach history
aright, sustain missions and a new t sort of mis-
sionary, the missionaries to all mankind of knowl-
edge and the idea of one world civilization and one
world community ; they can promote and help the
progress of historical and ethnological and politi-
cal science, they can set their faces against every
campaign of hate, racial suspicion, and patriotic
falsehood, they can refuse, they are bound to re-
fuse, obedience to any public authority which
oppresses and embitters class against class, race
against race, and people against people. A bel-
ligerent government as such, they can refuse to
obey; and they can refuse to help or suffer any
military preparations that are not directed whojly
and plainly to preserving the peace of the world.
This is the plain duty of every honest man to-day,

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 41

to judge his magistrate before he obeys him, and
to render unto Caesar nothing that he owes to God
and mankind. And those who are awakened to
the full significance of the vast creative effort
now before mankind will set themselves particu-
larly to revise the common moral judgment upon
many acts and methods of living that obstruct
the way of the world-state. Blatant, aggressive
patriotism and the incitements against foreign
peoples that usually go with it, are just as crimi-
nal and far more injurious to our race than, for
example, indecent provocations and open incite-
ments to sexual vice ; they produce a much beast-
lier and crueller state of mind, and they deserve
at least an equal condemnation. Yet you will find
even priests and clergymen to-day rousing the
war passions of their flocks and preaching con-
flict from the very steps of the altar*

So far the movement towards a world-state has
lacked any driving power of passion. We have
been passing through a phase of intellectual re-
vision. The idea of a world unity and brother-
hood has come back again into the world almost
apologetically, deferentially, asking for the kind
words of successful politicians and for a gesture
of patronage from kings. Tet this demand for
one world-empire of righteousness was inherent in
the teachings of Buddha, it flashed for a little
while behind the sword of Islam, it is the embodi-
ment in earthly affairs of the spirit of Christ. It
is a call to men for service as of right, it is not an
appeal to them that they may refuse, not a voice

42 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

that they may disregard. It is too great a thing
to hover for long thus deferentially on the out-
skirts of the active world it has come to save.
To-day the world-state says : " Please listen; make
way for me." To-mox^row it will say: "Make
way for me, little people." The day is not re*'
mote when disregardful ''patriotic' 3 men hector-
ing in the crowd will be twisted round perforce to
the light they refuse to see. First comes the idea
and then slowly the full comprehension of the idea,
comes realization, and with that realization will
come a kindling anger at the vulgarity, the mean-
ness, the greed and baseness and utter stupidity
that refuses to attend to this clear voice, this defi-
nite demand of our racial necessity. To-day we
teach, but as understanding grows we must begin
to act. We must put ourselves and our rulers and
our fellow men on trial. We must ask: "What
have you done, and what are you doing to- help or
hinder the peace and order of mankind! 7 ' A time
will come when a politician who has wilfully made
war and promoted international dissension will be
as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose
than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that
those who gamble with men's lives should not
stake their own. The service of the world-state
calls for much more than passive resistance to
belligerent authorities, for much more than exem-
plary martyrdoms. It calls for the greater effort
of active interference with mischievous men. "I
will believe in the League of Nations/' one man
has written, "when men will fight for it." For

THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 43

tMs League of Nations at GTeneva, this little corner
of Balfourian jobs and gentility, no man would
dream of fighting, "but for the great state of man-
kind, men will presently be yery ready to fight
and, as the thing may go, either to Mil or die.
Things must come in their order; first the idea,
then the kindling of imaginations, then the world-
wide battle. We who live in the bleak days after
a great crisis, need be no more discouraged by the
apparent indifference of the present time than
are fields that are ploughed and sown by the wet
days of February and the cold indifference of the
winds of early March. The ploughing has been
done, and the seed is in the ground, and the world-
state stirs in a multitude of germinating -minds.

n

IIJT this paper, I want to tell yon of the idea that
now shapes and dominates my public life the
idea of a world politically united of a "world se-
curely and permanently at peace. And I -want to
say what I have to say, so far as regards the main
argument of it, as accurately and plainly as possi-
ble, without any eloquence or flourishes.

When I first planned this paper, I chose as the
title * 4 The Utopia of a World State. > f Well, there
is something a little too flimsy and unpracticable
about that word Utopia. To most people Utopia
conveys the idea of a high-toned political and
ethical dream agreeable and edifying, no doubt,
but of no practical value whatever. What I have
to talk about this evening is not a bit dreamlike,
it is about real dangers and urgent necessities. It
is a Project and not a Utopia. It may "be a vast
and impossible Project. It may be a hopeless
Project: But if it fails our Civilization fails.
And so I have called this paper not the Utopia
but The Project of a World State.

There are some things that it is almost impos-
sible to tell without seeming to scream and exag-

* Written, originally as a lecture to be delivered in America.

44

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 45

gerate, and yet these things may be in reality the
soberest matter of fact. I want to say that this
civilization in which we are living is tumbling
down, and I think tumbling down very fast; that
I think rapid enormous efforts will be needed to
save it; and that I see no such efforts being made
at the present time. I do not know if these words
convey any concrete ideas to the reader's mind.
There are statements that can open such unfa-
miliar vistas as to seem devoid of any real prac-
tical meaning at all, and this I think may be one of
them.

In the past year I have been going about Eu-
rope. I have had glimpses of a new phase of this
civilization of ours a new phase that would have
sounded like a fantastic dream if one had told
about it ten years ago. I have seen a great city
that had over two million inhabitants, dying and
dying with incredible rapidity. In 1914 I was in
the city of St. Petersburg and it seemed as safe
and orderly a great city as yours. I went thither
in comfortable and punctual trains* I stayed in
an hotel as well -equipped and managed as any
American hotel. I went to dine with and visit
households of cultivated people. I walked along
streets of brilliantly lit and well-furnished shops.
It was, in fact, much the same sort of life that you
are living here to-day-^-a ^ part of our (then)
world-wide modern civilization.

I revisited these things last summer. I found
such a spectacle of decay that it seems almost im-
possible to describe it to those who have never

46 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

seen the like. Streets with great holes where the
drains had fallen in. Stretches of roadway from
which the wood paving had been torn for fire-
wood. Lampposts that had been knocked over
lying as they were left, without an attempt to set
them up again. Shops and markets deserted and
decayed and ruinous. Not closed shops but aban-
doned shops, as abandoned-looking as an old boot
or an old can by the wayside. The railways fall-
ing out of use. A population of half a million
where formerly there had been two. A strangely
homeless city, a city of discomforts and anxieties,
a city of want and ill-health and death. Such was
Petersburg in 1920.

I know there are people who have a quick and
glib explanation of this vast and awe-inspiring
spectacle of a great empire in collapse. They say
it is Bolshevism has caused all this destruction.
But I hope to show here, among other more im-
portant things, that Bolshevism is merely a part
of this immense collapse that the overthrow of a
huge civilized organization needs some more com-
prehensive explanation than that a little man
named Lenin was able to get from Geneva to
Eussia at a particular crisis in Eussian history.
And particularly is it to be noted that this im-
mense destruction of civilized life has not been
confined to Eussia or to regions under Bolshevik
rule. Austria and Hungary present spectacles
hardly less desolating than Eussia. There is a
conspicuous ebb in civilization in Eastern Ger-
many. And even when you come to France and

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 47

Italy and Ireland there are cities, townships,
whole wid^ regions, where you can say : This has
gone back since 1914 and it is still going back in
material prosperity, in health, in social order.

Even in England and Scotland, in Holland and
Denmark and Sweden, it is hard to determine
whether things are stagnant or moving forward or
moving back they are certainly not going ahead
as they were before 1913-14. The feeling in Eng-
land is rather like the feeling of a man who is not
quite sure whether he has caught a slight chill or
whether he is in the opening stage of a serious
illness.

Now what I want to do here is to theorize
about this shadow, this chill and arrest, that seems
to have come upon the flourishing and expanding
civilization in which all of us were born and
reared. I want to put a particular view of what
is happening before you, and what it is that we
are up against. I want to put before you for
your judgment the view that this overstrain and
breaking down and stoppage of the great uprush
of civilization that has gone on for the past three
centuries is due to the same forces and is the logi-
cal outcome of the same forces that led to that
uprush, to that tremendous expansion of human
knowledge and power and life. And that that
breaking up is an inevitable thing unless we meet
it by a very great effort of a particular kind.

Now the gist of my case is this : That the civ-
ilization of the past three centuries has produced
a great store of scientific knowledge, and that this

48 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

scientific knowledge has altered the material scale
of human affairs and enormously enlarged the
physical range of human activities, but that there
has been no adequate adjustment of men's politi-
cal ideas to the new conditions.

This adjustment is a subtle and a difficult task.
It is also a greatly neglected task. And upon the
possibility of our making this adjustment depends
the issue whether the ebb of civilizing energy, the
actual smashing and breaking down of modern
civilization, which has already gone very far in-
deed in Eussia and which is going on in most of
Eastern and Central Europe, extends to the whole
civilized world.

Let me make a very rough and small scale anal-
ysis of what is happening to the world to-day.
And let us disregard many very important issues
and concentrate upon the chief, most typical issue,
the revolution in the facilities of locomotion and
communication that has occurred to the world and
the consequences of that revolution. For the in-
ternational problem to-day is essentially depend-
ent upon the question of transport and communi-
cation all others are subordinate to that. I shall
particularly call your attention to certain wide
differences between the American case and the
old-world case in this matter.

It is not understood clearly enough at the pres-
ent time how different is the American interna-
tional problem from the European international
problem, and how inevitable it is that America and
Europe should approach, international problems

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 49

from a different angle and in a different spirit.
Both, lines of thought and experience do, I be-
lieve, lead at last to .the world state, but they get
there by a different route and in a different
manner.

The idea that the government of the United
States can take its place side by side with the
governments of the old world on terms of equality
with those governments in order to organize the
peace of the world, is, I believe, a mistaken and
unworkable idea. I shall argue that the govern-
ment of the United States and the community .of
the United States are things different politically
and mentally from those of the states of the old
world, and that the role they are destined to play
in the development of a world state of mankind
is essentially a distinctive one. And I sliall try
to show cause for regarding tHe very noble and
splendid project of a world-wide League of Na-
tions that has held the attention of the world for
the past three years, as one that is, at once, a little
too much for complete American participation,
and not sufficient for the urgent needs of Europe.
It is not really so practicable and reasonable a
proposition as it seemed at first.

The idea of a world state, though it looks a far
greater and more difficult project, is, in the long
run, a sounder and more hopeful proposition.

Now let me make myself as clear as I can be
about the central idea upon which the wliole of the
arguments in this lecture rests. It is this : forgive
me for a repetition that there has been a com-

50 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

plete alteration in the range and power of human
activities in the last hundred years. Men can
react upon men with a rapidity and at a distance
inconceivable a hundred years ago. This is
particularly the case with locomotion and methods
of communication generally. I will not remind
you in any detail of facts with which you are
familiar; how that in the time of Napoleon the
most rapid travel possible of the great coiiqueror
himself did not average all over as much as four
and a half miles an hour. A hundred and seven
miles a day for thirteen days the pace of his rush
from Vilna to Paris after the Moscow disaster
was regarded as a triumph of speed. In those
days too, it was a marvel that by means of sema-
phores it was possible to transmit a short mes-
sage from London to Portsmouth in the course
of an hour or so.

Since then we have seen a development of teleg-
raphy that has at last made news almost simul-
taneous about the world, and a stea.dy increase in
the rate of travel until, as we worked it out in the
Civil Air Transport Committee in London, it is
possible, if not at present practicable, to fly from
London to Australia, half way round the earth,
in about eight days. I say possible, but not prac-
ticable, because at present properly surveyed
routes, landing grounds and adequate supplies of
petrol and spare parts do not exist. Given those
things, that journey could be done now in the
time I have stated. This tremendous ehange in
the range of human activities involves changes in

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 51

the conditions of our political life that we are only
beginning to work out to their proper conse-
quences to-day.

It is a curious thing that America, which owes
most to this acceleration in locomotion, has felt it
least. The United States have taken the railway,
the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth
as though they were a natural part of their
growth. They were not. These things happened
to come along just in time to save Ajneriean unity.
The United States of to-day were made first by the
river steamboat, and then by the railway. With-
out these things, the present United States, this
vast continental nation, would have been alto-
gether impossible. The westward flow of popu-
lation would have been far more sluggish. It
might never have crossed the great central plains.
It took, you will remember, nearly two hundred
years for effective settlement to reach from the
coast to the Missouri, much less than half-way
across the continent. The first state established
beyond the river was the steamboat state of Mis-
souri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the
Pacific was done in a few decades.

If we had the resources of the cinema it
would be interesting to show a map of North
America year by year from 1600 onward, with
little dots to represent hundreds of people, each
dot a hundred, and stars to represent cities of a
hundred thousand people.

For two hundred years you would see that stip-
pling creeping slowly along the coastal districts

52 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

and navigable waters, spreading still more gradu-
ally into Indiana, Kentucky, and so forth. Then
somewhere about 1810 would come a change.
Things would get more lively along the river
courses. The dots would be multiplying and
spreading. That would be the steamboat. The
pioneer dots would be spreading soon from a num-
ber of jumping-oU places along the great rivers
over Kansas and Nebraska.

Then from about 1830 onward would come the
black lines of the railways, and after that the little
black dots would not simply creep but run. They
would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost
as though they were being put on by some sort of
spraying machine. And suddenly here and then
there would appear the first stars to indicate the
first great cities of a hundred thousand people.
First one or two and then a multitude of cities
each like a knot in the growing net of the railways.

This is a familiar story. I recall it to you now
to enforce this point that the growth of the
United States is a process that has no precedent
in the world's history; it is a new kind of occur-
rence. Such a community could not have come
into existence before, and if it had it would, with-
out railways, have certainly dropped to pieces
long before now. Without railways or telegraph
it would be far easier to administer California
from Pekin than from Washington. But this great
population of the United States of America has
not only grown outrageously; it has kept uniform.
Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 53

San Francisco is more like the man of New York
to-day than the man of Virginia was like the man
of New England a century ago. And the process
of assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United
States is being woven by railway, by telegraph,
more and more into one vast human unity, speak-
ing, thinking, and acting harmoniously with itself.
Soon aviation will be helping in the work.

Now this great community of the United States
is, I repeat, an altogether new thing in history.
There have been great empires before with popu-
lations exceeding 100 millions, but these were asso-
ciations of divergent*peoples ; there has never been
one single people on this scale before. We want a
new term for this new thing. We call the United
States a country, just as we call France or Hol-
land a country. But really the two things are as
different as an automobile and a one-horse shay.
They are the .creations of different periods and
different conditions; they are going to work at
a different pace and in an entirely different way.
If you propose as I gather some of the League
of Nations people propose to push the Peace of
the World along on a combination of these two
sorts of vehicle, I venture to think the Peace of
the World will be subjected to some very consid-
erable strains.

Let me now make a brief comparison between
the American and the European situation in rela-
tion to these vital matters, locomotion ^and the
general means of communicating. I said just now
that the United States of America owe most to the

54 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

revolution in locomotion and have felt it least.
Europe on the other hand owes least to the revolu-
tion in locomotion and has felt it most. The revo-
lution in locomotion found the United States of
America a fringe of population on the sea mar-
gins of a great rich virgin empty country into
which it desired to expand, and into which it was
free to expand. The steamboat and railway
seemed to come as a natural part of that expan-
sion. They came as unqualified blessings. But
into Western Europe they came as a frightful
nuisance.

The States of Europe, excepting Russia, were
already a settled, established and balanced system,.
They were living in final and conclusive boundaries
with no further possibility of peaceful expansion.
Every extension of a European state involved a
war; it was only possible through war. And while
the limits to the United States have been set by
the steamship and the railroad, the limits to the
European sovereign states were drawn at a much
earlier time. They were drawn by the horse, and
particularly the coach-horse travelling along the
high road. If you will examine a series of political
maps of Europe for the last two thousand years,
you will see that there has evidently been a definite
limit to the size of sovereign states through all that
time, due to the impossibility of keeping them
together because of the difficulty of intercommuni-
cation if they grew bigger. And this was in spite
of the fact that there were two great unifying
ideas present in men's minds in Europe through-

THE PROJECT OP A WORLD STATE 55

out that period, namely, the unifying idea of the
Roman Empire, and the unifying idea of Christen-
dom. Both these ideas tended to make Europe
one, but the difficulties of communication defeated
thai; tendency. It is quite interesting- to watch the
adventures of what is called first the Roman Em-
pire and afterwards the Holy Roman Empire, in a
series of historical maps. It keeps expanding and
then dropping to pieces again. It is like the efforts
of someone who is trying to pack up a parcel which
is much took big, in wet blotting paper. The cohe-
sion was inadequate. And so it was that the eight-
eenth century found Europe still divided up into
what I may perhaps call these high-road and
coach-horse states, each with a highly developed
foreign policy, each with an intense sense of na-
tional difference and each with intense traditional
antagonisms.

Then came this revolution in the means of loco-
motion, which has increased the normal range of
human activity at least ten times. The effect of
that in Ainerica was opportunity; the effect of it
in Europe was congestion. It is as if some rather
careless worker of miracles had decided suddenly
to make giants of a score of ordinary men, and
chose the moment for the miracle when they were
all with one exception strap-hanging in a street
car. The United States was that fortunate ex-
ception.

Now this is what modern civilization has come
up against, and it is the essential riddle of the
modern sphinx which must be solved if we are to

56 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

live. All the European boundaries of to-day are
impossibly small for modern conditions. And they
are sustained by an intensity of ancient tradition
and patriotic passion. . . . That is where we
stand.

The citizens of the United States of America are
not without their experience in this matter. The
crisis of the national history of the American
community, the war between Union and Secession,
was essentially a crisis between the great state of
the new age and the local feeling of an earlier
period. But Union triumphed. Americans live
now in a generation that has almost forgotten that
there once seemed a possibility that the map of
North America might be broken up at last Into as
many communities as the map of Europe. Except
by foreign travel, the present generation of Ameri-
cans can have no idea of the net of vexations and
limitations in which Europeans are living at the
present time because of their political disunion.

Let me take a small but quite significant set of
differences, the inconveniences of travel upon a
journey of a little over a thousand miles. They
are in themselves petty inconveniences, but they
will serve to illustrate the net that is making free
civilized life in Europe more and more impossible.

Take first the American case. An American
wants to travel from New York to St. Louis. He
looks up the next train, packs his bag, gets aboard
a sleeper and turns out at St. Louis next day
ready for business.

Take now the European parallel. A European

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 57

wants to travel from London to Warsaw. Now
that is a shorter distance by fifty or sixty miles
than the distance from New York to St. Louis.
Will he pack his bag, get aboard a train and go
there ? He will not. He will have to get a pass-
port, and getting a passport involves all sorts of
tiresome little errands. One has to go to a photog-
rapher, for example, to get photographs to stick
on the passport. The good European has then to
take his passport to the French representative in
London for a French visa, or, if he is going
through Belgium, for a Belgian visa. After that
he must get a German visa. Then he must go
round to the Ozecho-Slovak office for a Czecho-
slovak visa. Finally willcome the Polish visa.

Each of these endorsements necessitates some-
thing vexatious, personal attendance, photogra-
phy, stamps, rubber stamps, mysterious signa-
tures and the like, and always the payment of fees.
Also they necessitate delays. The other day I had
occasion to go to Moscow, and I learnt that it
takes three weeks to get a visa for Finland and
three weeks to get a visa for Esthonia. You see
you can't travel about Europe at all without weeks
and weeks of preparation. The preparations for
a little journey to Russia the other day took three
whole days out of my life, cost me several pounds
in stamps and fees, and five in bribery.

Ultimately, however, the good European is free
to start. Arriving at the French frontier in an
hour or so, he wiU be held up for a long customs J
examination. Also he will need to change some

58 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

of Ms money into francs. His English money will
be no good in France. The exchange in Europe
is always fluctuating, and he will be cheated on the
exchange. All European countries, including my
own, cheat travellers on the exchange that is
apparently what the exchange is for.

He will then travel for a few hours to the Ger-
man frontier. There he will be bundled out again.
The French will investigate him closely to see that
he is not carrying gold or large sums of money
out of France. Then he will be handed over to the
Germans. He will go through the same business
with the customs and the same business with the
money. His French money is no further use to
him and he must get German. A few more hours
and he will arrive on the frontier of Bohemia.
Same search for gold. Then customs ' examination
and change of money again. A few hours more
and he will be in Poland. Search for gold, cus-
toms, fresh money.

As most of these countries are pursuing differ-
ent railway policies, he will probably have to
change trains and rebook his luggage three or four
times. The trains may be ingeniously contrived
not to connect so as to force him to take some
longer route politically favoured by one of the in-
tervening states. He will be lucky if he gets to
Warsaw in four days.

Arrived in Warsaw, he will probably need a
permit to stay there, and he will certainly need no
end of permits to leave.

Now here is a fuss over a fiddling little journey

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 59

of 1,100 miles. Is it any wonder that the book-
ings from London to "Warsaw are infinitesimal in
comparison with the bookings from New York to
St. Louis? But what I have noted here are only
the- normal inconveniences of the traveller. They
are by no means the most serious inconveniences.

The same obstructions ' that hamper the free
movement of a traveller, hamper the movement
of foodstuffs and all sorts of merchandise in a
much greater degree. Everywhere in Europe
trade is being throttled by tariffs and crippled by
the St. Vitus' dance of the exchanges. Each of
these European sovereign states turns out paper
money at its own sweet will. Last summer I went
to Prague and exchanged pounds for kr oners.
They ought to have been 25 to the poamd. On
Monday they were 180 to the pound : on Friday
169. They jump about between 220 and 150, and
everybody is inconvenienced except the bankers
and money changers. And this uncertain exchange
diverts considerable amounts of money that should
be stimulating business -enterprise into a barren
and mischievous gambling with the circulation.

Between each one of these compressed European
countries the movement of food or labour is still
more blocked and impeded. And in addition to
these nuisances of national tariffs and independ-
ent national coinages at every few score miles,
Europe is extraordinarily crippled by its want of
any central authority to manage the most ele-
mentary collective interests; the control of vice,

60 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

for example ; the handling of infectious diseases ;
the suppression of international criminals.

Europe is now confronted by a new problem
the problem of air transport. So far as I can see,
air transport is going to be strangled in Europe
by international difficulties. One can fly comfort-
ably and safely from London to Paris in two or
three hours. But the passport preliminaries will
take days beforehand.

The other day I wanted to get quickly to Beval
in Esthonia from England and back again. The
distance is about the same as from Boston to Min-
neapolis, and it could be done comfortably in 10
or 12 hours ' flying. I proposed to the Handley,
Page Company that they should arrange this for
me. They explained that they had no power to
fly beyond Amsterdam in Holland; thence it might
be possible to get a German plane to Hamburg,
and thence again a Danish plane to Copenhagen
leaving about 500 miles which were too compli-
cated politically to fly. Each stoppage would in-
volve passport and other difficulties. In the end
it took me five days to get to Eeval and seven days
to get back. In Europe, with its present frontiers,
flying is not worth having. It can never be worth
having it can never be worked successfully until
it is worked as at least a pan-European affair.

All these are the normal inconveniences of the
national divisions of Europe in peace time. By
themselves they are strangling all hope of eco-
nomic recovery. For Europe is not getting on to
its feet economically. Only a united effort can

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 61

effect that. But along each, of the ridiculously
restricted frontiers into which the European coun-
tries are packed, lies also the possibility of war.
National independence means the right to declare
war. And so each of these packed and strangu-
lated European countries is obliged, by its blessed
independence, to maintain as big an army and as
big a military equipment as its bankrupt condition
for we are all bankrupt permits.

Since the end of the great war, nothing has
been done of any real value to ensure any Euro-
pean country against the threat of war, and noth-
ing will be done, and nothing can be done to lift
that threat, so long as the idea of national inde-
pendence overrides all other considerations.

And again, it is a little difficult for a mind accus-
tomed to American conditions, to realize what
modern war will mean in Europe.

Not one of these sovereign European states I
have named between London and Warsaw is any
larger than the one single American state of
Texas, and not one has a capital that cannot be
effectively bombed by aeroplane raiders from its
frontier within five or six hours of a declaration
of war. We can fly from London to Paris in two or
three hours. And the aerial bombs of to-day, I
can assure you, will make the biggest bombs of
1918 seem like little crackers. Over all these Euro-
pean countries broods this immediate threat of a
warfare that will strain and torment the nerves^of
every living man, woman or child in the countries
affected. Nothing- of the sort can approach the

62 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

American citizen except after a long" warning.
The worst war that could happen to ajay North
American country would merely touch its coasts.

Now I have dwelt 011 these differences between
America and Europe because they involve an ab-
solute difference in outlook towards world peace
projects, towards leagues of nations, world states
and the like, between the American and the
European.

The American lives in a political unity on the
big modern scale. He can go on comfortably for
a hundred years yet before he begins to feel tight
in his political skin, and before he begins to feel
the threat of immediate warfare close to his do-
mestic life. He believes by experience in peace,
but he feels under no passionate urgency to organ-
ize it. So far as he himself is concerned, he has
got peace organized for a good long time ahead. I
doubt if it would make any very serious difference
for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas
City, let us say, if all Europe were reduced to a
desert in the next five years.

But on the other hand, the intelligent European
is up against the unity of Europe problem night
and day. Europe cannot go on. European civili-
zation cannot go on, unless that net of boundaries
which strangles her is dissolved away. The dif-
ficulties created by language differences, by bit-
ter national traditions, by bad political habits and
the like, are no doubt stupendous. But stupendous
though they are, they have to be faced. Unless
they are overcome, and overcome in a very few

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 63

years, Europe entangled in this net of bound-
aries, and under a perpetual fear of war, will, I
am convinced, follow Russia and slide down be-
yond any hope of recovery into a process of social
dissolution as profound and disastrous as that
which closed the career of the Western Roman
Empire.

The American intelligence and the European
intelligence approach this question of a world
peace, therefore, from an entirely different angle
and in an entirely different spirit. To the Ameri-
can in the blessed ease of his great unbroken ter-
ritory, it seems a matter simply of making his
own ample securities world-wide by treaties of
arbitration and such-like simple agreements. And
my impression is that he thinks of Europeans as
living under precisely similar conditions.

Nothing of that sort will meet the problem of
the old world. The European situation is alto-
gether more intense and tragic than the American.
Europe needs not treaties but a profound change
in its political ideas and habits. Europe is satu-
rated with narrow patriotism like a body saturated
by some evil inherited disease. She is haunted by
narrow ambitions and ancient animosities.

It is because of this profound difference of situ-
ation and outlook that I am convinced of the im-
possibility of any common political co-operation
to organize a world peace between America and
Europe at the present time.

The American type of state and the European
type of state are different things, incapable of an

64 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

effectual alliance; the steam tractor and the ox
cannot plough this furrow together. American
thought, American individuals, may no doubt play
a very great part in the task of reconstruction that
lies before Europe, but not the American federal
government as a sovereign state among equal
states.

The United States constitute a state on a dif-
ferent scale and level from any old world state.
Patriotism and the national idea in America is a
different thing and a bigger scale thing than the
patriotism and national idea in any old world
state.

Any League of Nations aiming at stability now,
would necessarily be a league seeking to stereo-
type existing boundaries and existing national
ideas. Now these boundaries and these ideas are
just what have to be got rid of at any cost. Be-
fore Europe can get on to a level and on to equal
terms with the United States, the European com-
munities have to go through a process that Amer-
ica went through under much easier conditions
a century and a half ago. They have to repeat, on
a much greater scale and against prof ounder prej-
udices, the feat of understanding and readjust-
ment that was accomplished by the American peo-
ple between 1781 and 1788.

As you will all remember, these States after
they had decided upon Independence, framed cer-
tain Articles of Confederation ; they were articles
of confederation between thirteen nations, between
the people of Massachusetts, the people of Vir-

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 65

ginia, the^ people of Georgia, and so forth thir-
teen distinct and separate sovereign peoples.
They made a Union so lax and feeble that it could
neither keep order at home nor maintain respect
abroad Then they produced another constitu-
tion. They swept aside all that talk about the peo-
ple of Massachusetts, the people of Virginia, and
the rest of their thirteen nations. They based their
union on a wider idea: the people of the United
States.

Now Europe, if it is not to sink down to anar-
chy, has to do a parallel thing. If Europe is to
be saved from ultimate disaster, Europe has to
stop thinking in terms of the people of France,
the people of England, the people of Germany,
the French, the British, the Germans, and so forth.
Europe has to think at least of the people of
Europe, if not of the civilized people of the, world.
If we Europeans cannot bring our minds to that,
there is no hope for us. Only by thinking of all
peoples can any people be saved in Europe. Fresh
wars will destroy the social fabric of Europe, and
Europe will perish as nations, fighting.

There are many people who think that there is at
least one political system in the old world which,
like the United States, is large enough and world-
wide enough to go on by itself under modern con-
ditions for some considerable time. They think
that the British Empire can, as it were, stand out
of the rest of the Old World as a self-sufficient
system. They think that it can stand out freely
as the United States can stand out, and that these

66 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

two English-speaking powers have merely to agree
together to dominate and keep the peace of the
world.

Let me give a little attention to this idea. It
is I believe a wrong idea, and one that may be
very disastrous to our common English-speaking
culture if it is too fondly cherished.

There can be no denying that the British Im-
perial system is a system different in its nature
and size from a typical European state, from a
state of the horse and road scale, like France, let
us say, or Germany, And equally it is with the
United States a new growth. The present British
Empire is indeed a newer growth than the United
States. But while the United States constitute a
homogeneous system and grow more homogeneous,
the British Empire is heterogeneous and shows lit-
tle or no assimilative power. And while the
United States are all gathered together and are
still very remote from any serious antagonist the
British Empire is scattered all over the world, en-
tangled with and stressed against a multitude of
possible antagonists.

I have been arguing that the size and manage-
ability of all political states is finally a matter of
transport and communications. They grow to a
limit strictly determined by these considerations.
Beyond that limit they are unstable. Let us now
apply these ideas to the British Empire.

I have shown that the great system of the
United States is the creation of the river steam-
boat and the railway. Quite as much so is the

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 67

present British Empire the creation of the ocean-
going steamship protected by a great navy.

The British Empire is a modern ocean state just
as the United States is a modern continental state.
The political and economic cohesion of the British
Empire rests upon this one thing, upon the steam-
ship remaining the dominant and secure means of
world transport in the future. If the British Em-
pire is to remain sovereign and secure and inde-
pendent of the approval and co-operation of other
states, it is necessary that steamship transport
(ocean transport) should remain dominant in
peace and invulnerable in war.

Well, that brings us face to face with two com-
paratively new facts that throw a shadow upon
both that predominance and upon that invulnera-
bility* One is air transport the other the subma-
rine. The possibilities of the ocean-going subma-
rine I will not enlarge upon now. They will be
familiar to everyone who followed the later phases
of the great war.

It must be clear that sea power is no longer the
simple and decisive thing it was before the com-
ing of the submarine. The sea ways can no longer
be taken and possessed completely. To no other
power, except Japan, is this so grave a considera-
tion as it is to Britain.

And if we turn to the possibilities of air-trans-
port in the future we are forced towards the same
conclusion, that the security of the British Empire
must rest in the future not on its strength in

68 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

warfare, but on its keeping the peace within and
without its boundaries.

I was a member of the British Civil Air Trans-
port Committee, and we went with care and thor-
oughness into the possibilities and probabilities
of the air. My work on that committee convinced
me that in the near future the air may be the chief
if not the only highway for long-distance mails,
for long-distance passenger traffic, and for the
carriage of most valuable and compact commodi-
ties. The ocean ways are likely to be only the
ways for slow travel and for staple and bulky
trade.

And my studies on that committee did much to
confirm my opinion that in quite a brief time the
chief line of military attack will be neither by sea
nor land but through the air. Moreover, it was
borne in upon me that the chief air routes of the
world will lie over the great plains of the world,
that they will cross wide stretches of sea or moun-
tainous country only very reluctantly.

Now think of how the British Empire lies with
relation to the great sea and land masses of the
world. There has been talk in Great Britain of
what people have called "aU-red air routes, " that
is to say, all-British air routes. There are no all-
red air routes. You cannot get out of Britain to
any other parts of the Empire, unless perhaps it is
Canada, without crossing foreign territory. That
is a fact that British people have to face and di-
gest, and the sooner they grasp it the better for
them. Britain cannot use air ways even to develop

THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 69

her commerce in peace time without tlie consent
and co-operation of a large number of lier inter-
vening 1 neighbours. If she embarks single-handed
on any considerable war she will find both her air
and her sea communications almost completely cut.
And so the British Empire, in spite of its size
and its modernity, is not much better off now in the
way of standing- alone than the other European
countries. It is no exception to our generalization
that (apart from all other questions) the scale and
form of the European states are out of harmony
with contemporary and developing transport con-
ditions, and that all these powers are, if only on
this account, under one urgent necessity to sink
those ideas of complete independence that have
hitherto dominated them. It is a life and death
necessity. If they cannot obey it they will all be
destroyed.

in

THE E^LABGEMEIsTT OB 1 PATKIOTISM TO A WORLD STATE

IN- my opening argument I have shown the con-
nection between the present intense political trou-
bles of the world and more particularly of Europe,
and the advance in mechanical knowledge during
the past hundred and fifty years. I have shown
that without a very drastic readjustment of politi-
cal ideas and habits, there opens before Europe
and the world generally, a sure prospect of degen-
erative conflicts ; that without such a readjustment,
our civilization has passed its zenith and must
continue the process of collapse that has been in
progress since August, 1914.

Now this readjustment meazrs an immediate con-
flict with existing patriotism. We have embarked
here upon a discussion in which emotion and pas-
sion seem quite unavoidable, the discussion of
nationality. At the very outset we bump violently
against patriotism as any European understands
that word. And it is, I hold, impossible not to
bump against European patriotisms. We cannot
temporize with patriotism, as one finds it in Eu-
rope, and get on towards a common, human wel-
fare. The two things are flatly opposed. One or the
other must be sacrificed. The political and social

70

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 71

muddle of Europe at tlie present time is yerj
largely due to the attempt to compromise between
patriotism and the common good of Europe.

Do we want to get rid of patriotism altogether?

I do not think we want to get rid of patriotism,
and I do not think we could, even if we wanted to
do so. It seems to be necessary to his moral life,
that a man should feel himself part of a commu-
nity, belonging to it, and it belonging to him. And
that this community should be a single and lovable
reality, inspired by a common idea, with a common
f ashion and aim.

But a point I have been trying to bring out
throughout all this argument so far is this that
when a European goes to the United States of
America he 'finds a new sort of state, materially
bigger and materially less encumbered than any
European state. And he also finds an intensely
patriotic people whose patriotism isn't really the
equivalent of a European patriotism. It is his-
torically and practically a synthesis of European
patriotisms. It is numerically bigger. It is geo-
graphically ten times as big. That is very impor-
tant indeed from the point of view of this discus-
sion. And it is synthetic; it is a thing made out
of something smaller. People, I believe, talk of
100 per cent. Americans. There is no 100 per cent.
American except the Bed Indian. There isn't a
white man in the United States from whose blood
a large factor of European patriotism hasn't been
washed out to make way for Ms American patri-
otism.

72 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

Upon tHs faet of American patriotism, as a
larger different thing than European patriotism, I
build. The thing can be done. If it can be done
in the Europeans and their descendants who have
come to America, it can conceivably be done in the
Europeans who abide in Europe. And how can
we set aJbout doing it?

America, the silent, comprehensive continent of
America, did the thing by taMng all the various
nationalities who have made up her population and
obliging them to live together.

Unhappily we cannot take the rest of our Euro-
pean nations now and put them on to a great virgin
continent to learn a wider political wisdom. There
are no more virgin continents. Europe must stay
where she is. ...

Now I am told it sometimes helps scientific men
to clear up their ideas about a process by imagin-
ing that process reversed and so getting a view 'of
it from a different direction. Let us then, for a
few moments, instead of talking of the expansion
and synthesis of patriotism in Europe, imagine a
development of narrow patriotism in America and
consider how that case could be dealt with.

Suppose, for instance, there was a serious out-
break of local patriotism in Kentucky. Suppose
you found the people of Kentucky starting a flag
of their own and objecting to what they would
probably call the " vague internationalism" of the
stars and stripes. Suppose you found them want-
ing to set up tariff barriers to the trade of the
states round about them. Suppose you found they

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 73

were preparing- to annex considerable parts of the
State of Virginia by force, in order to secure a
proper strategic frontier among the mountains to
the east, and that they were also talking darkly of
their need for an outlet to the sea of their very
own..

"What would an American citizen think of such
an outbreak? He would probably think that Ken-
tucky had gone mad. But this, which seems such
fantastic behaviour when we imagine it occurring
in Kentucky, is exactly what is happening in Eu-
rope in the case of little states that are hardly
any larger than Kentucky. They have always
been so. They have not gone mad; if this sort
of thing is madness then they were born mad.
And they have never been cured. A state of af-
fairs that is regarded in Europe as normal would
be regarded in the United States as a grave case
of local mental trouble.

And what would the American community prob-
ably do in such a case? It would probably begin
by inquiring where Kentucky had got these
strange ideas. They would look for sources of
infection. Somebody must have been preaching
there or writing in the newspapers or teaching
mischief in the school. And I suppose the people
of the United States would set themselves very
earnestly to see that sounder sense was talked and
taught to the people of Kentucky about these
things.

Now that is precisely what has to be done* in
the parallel European case. Everywhere in Eu-

74 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

rope there goes on in the national schools, in the
patriotic churches, in the national presses, in the
highly nationalized literatures, a unity-destroying
propaganda of patriotism. The schools of all the
European countries at the present time with
scarcely an exception, teach the most rancid patri-
otism; they are centres of an abominable political
infection. The children of Europe grow up with
an intensity of national egotism that makes them,
for all practical international purposes, insane.
They are not born with it, but they are infected
with it as soon as they can read and write. The
British learn nothing but the glories of Britain
and the British Empire; the French are, if posr
sible, still more insanely concentrated on France ;
the Germans are just recovering from the bitter
consequences of forty years of intensive national-
ist education. And so on. Every country in
Europe is its own Sinn Fein, cultivating that ugly
and silly obsession of " ourselves alone. n "Our-
selves alone " is the sure guide to conflict and dis-
aster, to want, misery, violence, degradation and
death for our children and our children's children
until our race is dead.

The first task before us in Europe is, ,at any
cost, to release our children from this nationalist
obsession, to teach the mass of European people
a little truthful history in which each one will sec
the past and future of his own country in their
proper proportions, and a little truthful ethnology
in which each country will get over the delusion
that its people are a distinct and individual race*

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 75

The history teaching in the schools of Europe is
at the very core of this business.

But that is only, so to speak, the point of appli-
cation of great complex influences, the influences
that mould us in childhood, the teachings of litera-
ture, of the various religious bodies, and the daily
reiteration of the press. Before Europe can get
on, there has to be a colossal turnover of these
moral and intellectual forces in the direction of
creating an international mind. If that can be
effected then there is hope for Europe and the Old
World. If it cannot be effected, then certainly
Europe will go down with its flags nailed to its
masts. "We are on a sinking ship that only one
thing* can save. We have to oust these European
patriotisms by some greater idea or perish.

What is this greater idea to be?

Now I submit that this greater idea had best be
the idea of the World State of All Mankind.

I will admit that so far I have made a case only
for teaching the idea of a United States of Europe
in Europe. I have concentrated our attention
upon that region of maximum congestion and con-
flict. But as a matter of fact there are no real and
effective barriers and boundaries in the Old
World between Europe and Asia and Africa. The
ordinary Eussian talks of "Europe" as one who
is outside it. The European political ^systems
flow over and have always overflowed into the
greater areas to the east and south. Remember
the early empires of Macedonia and Rome. See
how the Russian language runs to the Pacific, and

76 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

how Islam radiates into all three continents. I
will not elaborate this case.

When you bear such things in mind, I think
you will agree with me that if we are to talk of
a United States of Europe, it is just as easy and
practicable to talk of a United States of the Old
World. And are we to stop at a United States
of the Old World!

No doubt the most evident synthetic forces in
America at the present time point towards some
sort of pan- American unification. That is the
nearest thing. That may come first.

But are we to contemplate a sort of dual world
the New World against the Old?

I do not think that would be any very perma-
nent or satisfactory stopping-place. "Why make
two bites at a planet? If we work for unity on
the large scale we are contemplating, we may as
well work for world unity.

Not only in distance but in a score of other
matters are London and Rome nearer to New
York than is Patagonia, and San Francisco is
always likely to be more interesting to Japan than
Paris or Madrid. I cannot see any reason for
supposing that the mechanical drawing together
of the peoples of the world into one economic
and political unity is likely to cease unless our
civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present
facilities for transport a,nd communication are the
ultimate possible facilities. Once we break away
from current nationalist limitations in our politi-
cal ideas, then there is no reason and no advantage

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 77

in contemplating any halfway house to a complete
human unity.

Now after what I have been saying it is very
easy to explain why I would have this idea of
human unity put before people's minds in the form
of a World State and not of a League of Nations.

Let me first admit the extraordinary educa-
tional value of the League of Nations propaganda,
and of the attempt that has been made to create
a League of Nations. It has brought before the
general intelligence of the world the proposition
of a world law and a world unity that could not
perhaps have been broached in any other way.

But is it a league of nations that is wanted?

I submit to you that the word " nations" is
just the word that should have been avoided that
it admits and tends to stereotype just those con-
ceptions of division and difference that we must
at any cost minimize and obliterate if our species
is to continue. And the phrase has a thin, and
legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what
devotion can we expect this multiple association to
command? It has no unity no personality. It
is like asking a man to love the average member
of a woman's club instead of loving his wife.

For the idea of Man, for human unity, for our
common blood, for the one order of the world, I
can imagine men living and dying, but not for a
miscellaneous assembly that will not mix even
in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to
it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak
and compromising just where it should be strong

78 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

in defining its antagonism to separate national
sovereignty. For that is what it aims at, if it
means business. If it means business it means at
least a super-state overriding the autonomy of
existing states, and if it does not mean business
then we have no use for it whatever.

It may seem a much greater undertaking to
attack nationality and nationalism instead of
patching up a compromise with these things, but
along the line of independent -nationality lies no
hope of unity and peace and continuing progress
for mankind. "We cannot suffer these old concen-
trations of loyalty because we want that very
loyalty which now concentrates upon them to
cement and sustain the peace of all the world.
Just as in the past provincial patriotisms have
given place to national patriotisms, so now we
need to oust these still top narrow devotions by a
new unity and a new reigning idea, the idea of
one state and one flag in all the earth.

The idea of the World States stands to the idea
of the League of Nations much as the idea of the
one God of Earth and Heaven stands to a Divine
Committee composed of Wodin and Baal and
Jupiter and Amnon Ea and Mumbo Jumbo and
all the other national and tribal gods. There is
no compromise possible in the one matter as in
the other. There is no way round. The task be-
fore mankind is to substitute the one common idea
of an overriding world commonweal for the multi-
tudinous ideas of little commonweals that prevail
everywhere to-day. We have already glanced at

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 79

the near and current consequences of our failure
to bring about that substitution.

Now this is an immense proposal. Is it a
preposterous one? Let us not shirk the tremen-
dous scale upon which the foundations of a world-
state of all mankind must be laid. But remember
however great that task before us may seem, how-
ever near it may come to the impossible, never-
theless, in the establishment of one world rule and
one world law lies the only hope of escape from
an increasing tangle of wars, from social over-
strain, and at last a social dissolution so complete
as to end for ever the tale of mankind as we under-
stand mankind.

Personally I am appalled by the destruction
already done in the world in the past seven years.
I doubt if any untravelled American can realize
how much of Europe is already broken up. I do
not think many people realize how swiftly Europe
is still sinking, how urgent it is to get European
affairs put back upon a basis of the common good
if civilization is to be saved.

And now, as to the immensity of this project
of substituting loyalty to a world commonweal for
loyalty to a single egotistical belligerent nation.
It is a project to invade hundreds of millions of
minds, to attack certain ideas established in those
minds and either to efface those ideas altogether
or to supplement and correct them profoundly by
this new idea of a human commonweal. We have
to get not only into the at present intensely
patriotic minds of Frenchmen, G-ermans, English,

80 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

Irish and Japanese, but Into tlie remote and
difficult minds of Arabs and Indians and into the
minds of the countless millions of China. Is there
any precedent to justify us in hoping that such a
change in world ideas is possible?

I think there is. I would suggest that the
general tendency of thought about these things
to-day is altogether too sceptical of what teaching
and propaganda can do in these matters. In the
past there have been very great changes in human
thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread
of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few
centuries the whole of Western Europe was
changed from the wild confusion of warring tribes
that succeeded the breakdown of the Eoman
Empire, into the unity of Christendom, into a
community with such an idea of unity that it could
be roused from end to end by the common idea
of the Crusades.

Still more remarkable was the swift trans-
formation in less than a century of all the nations
and peoples to the south and west of the Medi-
terranean, from Spain to Central Asia, into the
unity of Islam, a unity which has lasted to this
day. In both these cases, what I may call the
mental turnover was immense.

I think if yon will consider the spread of these
very complex and difficult religions, and compare
the means at the disposal of their promoters with
the means at the disposal of intelligent people
to-day, you will find many reasons for believing
that a recasting of people's ideas into the frame-

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 81

work of a universal state is by no means an
impossible project.

Those great teachings of the past were spread
largely by word of month. Their teachers had
to travel slowly and dangerously. People were
gathered together to hear with great difficulty, ex-
cept in a few crowded towns. Books conld be used
only sparingly. Few people could read, fewer still
could translate, and MSS. were copied with
extreme slowness upon parchment. There was
no printing, no paper, no post. And except for a
very few people there were no schools. Both
Christendom and Islam had to create their com-
mon schools in order to preserve even a

of their doctrine intact from generation to genera-
tion. All this was done in the teeth of much bitter
opposition and persecution.

Now to-day we have means of putting ideas and
arguments swiftly and effectively before people all
over the world at the same time, such as no one
could have dreamt of a hundred years ago. We
have not only books and papers, but in the cinema
we have a means of rapid, vivid presentation still
hardly used. We have schools nearly everywhere.
And here in the need for an overruling world state,
and the idea of world service replacing combative
patriotism, we have an urgent, a commanding
human need. We have an invincible case for this
world state and an unanswerable objection to the
nationalisms and patriotisms that would oppose
it.

Is it not almost inevitable that some of us should

82 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

get together and begin a propaganda upon modern
lines of this organized world peace, without which
our race must perish? The world perishes for the
want of a common political idea. It is still quite
possible to give the world this common political
idea, the idea of a federal world state. We can-
not help but set about doing it.

So I put it to you that the most important
work before men and women to-day is the preach-
ing and teaching, the elaboration and then at last
the realization of this Project of the World State,
We have to create a vision of it, to make it seem
first a possibility and then an approaching reality.
This is a task that demands the work and thought
of thousands of minds. We have to spread the
idea of a Federal World State, as an approaching
reality, throughout the world. We can do this
nowadays through a hundred various channels.
We can do it through the press, through all sorts
of literary expression, in our schools, colleges, and
universities, through political mouthpieces, by
special organizations, and last, but not least,
through the teaching of the churches. For remem-
ber that all the great religions of the world are in
theory universalist; they may tolerate the divi-
sions of men but they cannot sanction them. We
propose no religious revolution, but at most a
religious revival. We can spread ideas and sug-
gestions now with a hundred times the utmost
rapidity of a century ago.

TMs movement need not at once intervene in
politics. It is a prospective movement, and its

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 83

special concern will be with young and still grow-
ing minds. But as it spreads it will inevitably
change politics. The nations, states, and king-
doms of to-day, which fight and scheme against
each other as though they had to go on fighting
and scheming for ever, will become more and more
openly and manifestly merely guardian govern-
ments, governments playing a waiting part in the
world, while the world state comes of age. For
this World State, for which the world is waiting^
must necessarily be a fusion of all governments,
and heir to all the empires.

So far I have been occupied by establishing a
case for the World State. It has been, I fear,
rather an abstract discussion. I have kept closely
to the bare hard logic of the present human sit-
uation.

But now let me attempt very briefly, in the
barest outline, some concrete realization of what
a World State would mean. Let us try and con-
ceive for ourselves the form a World State would
take. I do not care to leave this discussion with
nothing to it but a phrase which is really hardly
more than a negative phrase until we put some
body to it. As it stands World State means simply
a politically undivided world. Let us try and
carry that over to the idea of a unified organized
state throughout the world.

Let us try to imagine what a World Govern-
ment would be like. I find that when one speaks
of a World State people think at once of some
existing government and magnify it to world pro-

84 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

portions. They ask, for example, where will the
"World Congress meet ; and how will you elect your
World President? Won't your World President,
they say, be rather a tremendous personage? How
are we to choose him? Or will there be a World
King? These are very natural questions, at the
first onset. But are they sound questions?
May they not be a little affected by false anal-
ogies? The governing of the whole of the world
may turn out to be not a magnified version of
governing a part of the world, but a different sort
of job altogether. These analogies that people
draw so readily from national states may not
really work in a World State.

And first with regard to this question of a
king or president. Let us ask whether it is prob-
able that the World State will have any single
personal head at all?

Is the World State likely to be a monarchy
either an elective short term limited monarchy
such as is the United States, or an inherited
limited monarchy like the British Empire?

Many people will say, you mu'st have a head of
the state. But must you? Is not this idea a
legacy from the days when states were small com-
munities needing a leader in war and diplomacy?

In the World State we must remember there
will be no war and no diplomacy as such.

I would even question whether in such a great
modern state as the U.S.A. the idea and the
functions of the president may not be made too
important. Indeed I believe that question has

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM, 85

been asked by many people in the States lately,
and has been answered in the affirmative.
^ The broad lines of the United States Constitu-
tion were drawn in a period of almost universal
monarchy. American affairs were overshadowed
by the personality of George "Washington, and as
you know, monarchist ideas were so rife that there
was a project, during the years of doubt and
division that followed the War of Independence,
for importing a German King, a Prussian Prince,
in imitation of the British Monarchy, But if the
United States were beginning again to-day on its
present scale, would it put so much power and
importance upon a single individual as it put
upon George "Washington and his successors in
the White House? I doubt it very much.

There may be a limit, I suggest, to the size and
complexity of a community that can be directed
by a single personal head. Perhaps that limit
may have been passed by both the United States
and by the British Empire at the present time.
It may be possible for one person to be leader
and to have an effect of directing personality in a
community of millions or even of tens of millions.
But is it possible for one small short-lived in-
dividual to get over and affect and make any sort
of contact with hundreds of millions in thousands
of towns and cities?

Eecently we have watched with admiration and
sympathy the heroic efforts of the Prince of Wales
to shake hands with and get his smile well home
into the hearts of the entire population of the

86 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

British Empire of which he is destined to become
the " golden link." After tremendous exertions
a very large amount of the ground still remains
to be covered.

I will confess I cannot see any single individual
human head in my vision of the World State.

The linking reality of the World State is much
more likely to be not an individual but an idea
such an idea as that of a human commonweal
under the G-od of all mankind.

If at any time, for any purpose, some one in-
dividual had to step out and act for the World
State as a whole, then I suppose the senior judges
of the Supreme Court, or the Speaker of the
Council, or the head of the Associated Scientific
Societies, or some such person, could step out and
do what had to be done.

But if there is to be no single head person,
there must be at least some sort of assembly or
council. That seems to be necessary. But will
it be a gathering at all like Congress or the British
Parliament, with a Government side and an
opposition ruled by party traditions and party
ideas?

^There again, I think we may be too easily
misled by existing but temporary conditions. I
do not think it is necessary to assume that the
council of the World State will be an assembly of
party politicians. I believe it will be possible to
have it a real gathering of representatives, a fair
sample of the thought and will of mankind at
large, and to avoid a party development by a more

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM^ 87

scientific method of voting than the barbaric
devices used for electing representatives to Con-
gress or the British Parliament, devices that play
directly into the hands of the party organizer who
trades upon the defects of political method.

Will this council be directly elected! That, I
think, may be found to be essential. And upon
a very broad franchise. Because, firstly, it is
before all things important that every adult in the
world should feel a direct and personal contact
between himself and the World State, and that he
is an assenting and participating citizen of the
world; and secondly, because if your Council is
appointed by any intermediate body, all sorts of
local and national considerations, essential in the
business of the subordinate body, will get in the
way of a simple and direct regard for the world
commonweal.

And as to this council: Will it have great
debates and wonderful scenes and crises and so
forth the sort of thing that looks well in a large
historical painting? There again we may be easily
misled by analogy. One consideration that bars
the way to anything of that sort is that its mem-
bers will have no common language which they
will be all able to speak with the facility necessary
for eloquence. Eloquence is far more adapted to
the conditions of a Bed Indian pow-wow than to
the ordering of large and complicated affairs.
The World Council may be a very taciturn assem-
bly. It may even meet infrequently. Its members
may communicate their views largely by notes

88 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

which may have to be very clear and explicit,
"because they will have to stand translation, and
short to escape neglect.

And what will be the chief organs and organiza-
tions and works and methods with which this
Conncil of the World State will be concerned?

There will be a Supreme Court determining
not International Law, but World Law. There
will be a growing Code of World Law.

There will be a world currency.

There will be a ministry of posts, transport and
communications generally.

There will be a ministry of trade in staple pro-
ducts and for the conservation and development
of the natural resources of the earth.

There will be a ministry of social and labour
conditions.

There will be a ministry of world health.

There will be a ministry, the most important
ministry of all, watching and supplementing
national educational work and taking up the qare
and stimulation of backward communities.

And instead of a War Office and Naval and
Military departments, there will be a Peace
Ministry studying the belligerent possibilities of
every new invention, watching for armed disturb-
ances everywhere, and having complete control of
every armed force that remains in the world. All
these world ministries will be working in co-
operation with local authorities who will apply
world-wide general principles to local conditions.

These items probably comprehend everything

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 89

that the government of a World State would have
to do. Much of its activity would be merely the
co-ordination and adjustment of activities already
very thoroughly discussed and prepared for it by
local and national discussions. I think it will be
a mistake for us to assume that the work of a
world government will be vaster and more complex
than that of such governments as those of the
United States or the British Empire. In many
respects it will have an enormously simplified task..
There will be no foreign enemy, no foreign com-
petition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or
tariff wars. It will be keeping order ; it will not
be carrying on a contest. There will be no neces-
sity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have
a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed
doors; there will be no general policy except a
steady attention to the common welfare. Even
the primary origin of a World Council must neces-
sarily be different from that of any national gov-
ernment. Every existing government owes its
beginnings to force and is in its fundamental
nature militant. It is an offensive-defensive
organ. This fact saturates our legal and social
tradition more than one realizes at first. There is,
about civil law everywhere, a faint flavour of a
relaxed state of siege. But a world government
will arise out of different motives and realize a
different ideal. It will be primarily an organ for
keeping the peace.

And now perhaps we may look at this project
of a World State mirrored in the circumstances of

90 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

the life of one individual citizen. Let ns consider
very briefly the life of an ordinary young man
living in a World State and consider how it would
differ from a commonplace life to-day.

He will have been born in some one of the
United States of the World in New York or
California or Ontario or New Zealand or Portu-
gal or France or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever
his lot may fall, the first history he will learn will
be the wonderful history of mankind, from its
nearly animal beginnings, a few score thousand
years ago, with no tools, but implements of chipped
stone and hacked wood, up to the power and
knowledge of our own time. His education will
trace for him the beginnings of speech, of writing,
of cultivation and settlement.

He will learn of the peoples and nations of the
past, and how each one has brought its peculiar
gifts and its distinctive contribution to the accu-
mulating inheritance of our race.

He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles,
conquests, massacres, kings and the like unpleas-
ant invasions of human dignity and welfare, and
he will know more of explorers, discoverers and
stout outspoken men than our contemporary citi-
zen.

While he is still a little boy, he will have the
great outlines of the human adventure brought
home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods of
presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck
schools of our own time cannot dream of
employing.

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 91

And on this broad foundation he will build up
his knowledge of his own particular state and
nation and people, learning not tales of ancient
grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what
his particular race and countryside have given
and what it gives and may be expected to give to
the common welfare of the world. On such foun-
dations his social consciousness will be built.

He will learn an outline of all that mankind
knows and of the fascinating realms of half knowl-
edge in which man is still struggling to know*
His curiosity and his imagination will be roused
and developed.

He will probably be educated continuously at
least until he is eighteen or nineteen, and perhaps
until he is two or three and twenty. For a world
that wastes none of its resources upon armaments
or soldiering, and which produces whatever it
wants in the regions best adapted to that pro-
duction, and delivers them to the consumer by
the directest route, will be rich enough not only
to spare the first quarter of everybody's life for
education entirely, but to keep on with some edu-
cation throughout the whole lifetime.

Of course the school to which our young citizen
of the world will go will be very different from
the rough and tumble schools of to-day, under-
staffed with underpaid assistants, and having bare
walls. It will have benefited by some of the in-
telligence and wealth we lavish to-day on range-
finders and submarines.

Even a village school will be in a beautiful little

92 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

building costing as much perhaps as a big naval
srun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I know
tills will sound like shocking extravagance to many
contemporary hearers, but in the World State the
standards will be different.

I don't know whether any of us really grasp
what we are saying when we talk of greater educa-
tional efficiency in the future. That means if it
means anything teaching more with much less
trouble. It will mean, for instance, that most
people will have three or four languages properly
learnt; that they will think about things mathe-
matical with a quickness and clearness that puz-
zles us ; that about all sorts of things their minds
will move in daylight where ours move in a haze
of ignorance or in an emotional fog.

This clear-headed, broad-thinking young citizen
of the World State will not be given up after his
educational years to a life of toil there will be
very little toil left in the world. Mankind will have
machines and power enough to do most of the toil
for it. Why, between 1914 and 1918 we blew away
enough energy and destroyed enough machinery
and turned enough good grey matter into stinking
filth to release hundreds of millions of toilers from
toil for ever I

Our young citizen will choose some sort of
interesting work perhaps creative work. And
he will be free to travel about the whole world
without a passport or visa > without a change of
money; everywhere will be his country; he will
find people everywhere who will be endlessly dif-

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 93

ferent, but none suspicions or hostile. Every-
where he will find beautiful and distinctive cities,
freely expressive of the spirit of the land in
which they have arisen. Strange and yet friendly
cities.

The world will be a far healthier place than it
is now for mankind as a whole will still carry on
organized wars no longer wars of men against
men, but of men against malarias and diseases and
infections. Probably he will never know what a
cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go
through the great forests of the tropics without
shivering with fever and without saturating him-
self with preventive drugs. He will go freely
among great mountains ; he will fly to the Poles of
the earth if he chooses, and dive into the cold,
now hidden, deep places of the sea.

But it is very difficult to fill in the picture of
his adult life so that it will seem real to our ex-
perience. It is hard to conceive and still more
difficult to convey. "We live in this congested,
bickering, elbowing, shoving world, and it has
soaked into our natures and made us a part of
itself. Hardly any of us know what it is to be
properly educated, and hardly any what it is to be
in constant general good health.

To talk of what the world may be to most of
us is like talking of baths and leisure and happy
things to some poor hopeless, gin-soaked drudge in
a slum. The creature is so devitalized; the dirt is
so ingrained, so much a second nature, that a bath
really isn't attractive. Clean and beautiful

94 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

clothes sound lite a mockery or priggishness. To
talk of spacious and beautiful places only arouses
a violent desire in the poor thing to get away
somewhere and hide. In squalor and misery, quar-
relling and fighting make a sort of nervous relief.
To multitudes of slum-bred people the prospect of
no more fighting is a disagreeable prospect, a dull
outlook.

Well, all this world of ours may seem a slum to
the people of a happier age. They will feel about
our world just as we feel about the ninth or tenth
century, when we read of its brigands and its
insecurities, its pestilences, its miserable housing,
its abstinence from ablutions.

But our young citizen will not have been
inured to our base world. He will have little of
our ingrained dirt in his mind and heart. He
will love. He will love beautifully. As most of us
once hoped to do in our more romantic moments.
He will have ambitions for the World State will
give great scope to ambition. He will work skil-
fully and brilliantly, or he will administer public
services, or he will be an able teacher, or a mental
or physical physician, or he will be an interpre-
tative or creative artist; he may be a writer or a
scientific investigator, lie may be a statesman in
his state, or even a world statesman. If he is a
statesman he may be going up perhaps to the
federal world congress. In the year 2020 there
will still be politics, but they will be great politics.
Instead of the world's affairs being managed in a
score of foreign offices, all scheming meanly and

THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM 95

cunningly against each other, all plajming to
thwart and injure each other, they will be managed
under the direction of an educated and organized
common intelligence intent only upon the common
good.

Dear! Dear! Dear! Does it sound like rubbish
to you? I suppose it does. You think I am
talking of a dreamland, of an unattainable Utopia?
Perhaps I am! This dear, jolly old world of dirt,
war, bankruptcy, murder and malice, thwarted
lives, wasted lives, tormented lives, general ill
health and a social decadence that spreads and
deepens towards a universal smash how can we
hope to turn it back from its course? How prig-
gish and impracticable! How impertinent! How
preposterous! I seem to hear a distant hoot-
ing. . , .

Sometimes it seems to me that the barriers that
separate man and man are nearly insurmount-
able and invincible, that we who talk of a World
State now are only the pioneers of a vast uphill
struggle in the minds and hearts of men that may
need to be waged for centuries that may fail in
the end.

Sometimes again, in other moods, It seems to
me that these barriers and nationalities and sep-
arations are so illogical, so much a matter of tra-
dition, so plainly mischievous and cruel, that at
any time we may find the common sense of our
race dissolving them away. . . .

Who can see into that darkest of all mysteries,
the hearts and wills of mankind f It may be that

96 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

It Is well for TIS not to know of the many genera-
tions who will have to sustain this conflict.

Yes ? that is one mood, and there is the other.
Perhaps we fear too much. Even hefore our lives
run out -we may feel the dawn of a greater age
perceptible among the black shadows and artificial
glares of these unhappy years.

IV

TEE BEBUB OS 1 CIVILIZATION
PART

IN- my next two papers I am going- to discuss and
what shall I say I experiment with an old but
neglected idea, an idea that was first broached I
believe about the time when the State of Con-
necticut was coming into existence and while New
York was still the Dutch City of New Amsterdam.

The man who propounded this idea was a certain
great Bohemian, Komensky, who is perhaps better
known in our western world by his Latinized name
Comenius. He professed himself the pupil of
Bacon. He was the friend of Milton. He travelled
from one European country to another with his
political and educational ideas. For a time he
thought of coming to America. It is a great pity
that he never came. And his idea, the particular
idea of his we are going to discuss, was the idea of
a common book, a book of history, science and
wisdom, which should form the basis and frame-
work for the thoughts and imaginations of every
citizen in the world.

97

98 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

In many ways the thinkers and writers of the
early seventeenth century seem more akin to us
and more sympathetic with the world of to-day,
than any intervening group of literary figures.
They strike us as having a longer vision than the
men of the eighteenth century, and as being bolder
and, how shall I put it? more desperate in their
thinking than the nineteenth century minds. And
this closer affinity to our own time arises, I should
think, directly and naturally, out of the closer re-
semblance of their circumstances. Between 1640
and 1650, just as in our present age, the world was
tremendously unsettled and distressed. A century
and more of expansion and prosperity had given
place to a phase of conflict, exhaustion, and entire
political unsettlement. Britain was involved in
the bitter political struggle that culminated in the
execution of King Charles I. Ireland was a land
of massacre and counter-massacre. The Thirty
Years' War in Central Europe was in its closing,
most dreadful stages of famine and plunder. In
France the crown and the nobles were striving
desperately for ascendancy in the War of the
Fronde. The Turk threatened Vienna. Nowhere
in Western Europe did there remain any secure
and settled political arrangements. Everywhere
there was disorder, everywhere it seemed that
anything might happen, and it is just those dis-
ordered and indeterminate times that are most
fruitful of bold religious and social and political
and educational speculations and initiatives.

This was the period that produced the Quakers

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 99

and a number of the most vigorous developments
of Puritanism, in which the foundations of modern
republicanism were laid, and in which the project
of a world league of nations or rather of a world
state received wide attention. And the student
of Comenius will find in him an active and sensitive
mind responding with a most interesting similar-
ity to our own responses, to the similar conditions
of his time. He has been distressed and dismayed
as most of us have been distressed and dismayed
by a rapid development of violence, by a great
release of cruelty and suffering in human affairs.
He felt none of the security that was felt in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the cer-
tainty of progress. He realized as we do that the
outlook for humanity is a very dark and uncer-
tain one unless human effort is stimulated and
organized. He traced the evils of his time to
human discords and divisions, to our political di-
visions, and the mutual misconceptions due to our
diversity of languages and leading ideas. In all
that he might be writing and thinking in 1921.
And his proposed remedies find an echo in a
number of our contemporary movements. He
wanted to bring all nations to form one single
state. He wanted to have a universal language
as the common medium of instruction and discus-
sion, and he wanted to create a common Book of
Necessary Knowledge, a sort of common basis of
wisdom, for all educated men in the world.

Now this last is the idea I would like to de-
velop now. I would like to discuss whether our

100 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

education which nowadays in our modern states
reaches everyone whether our education can in-
clude and ought to include such a Book of Neces-
sary Knowledge and "Wisdom; and (having
attempted to answer that enquiry in the affirma-
tive) I shall then attempt a sketch of such a book.

But to begin with perhaps I may meet an ob-
jection that is likely to arise. I have called this
hypothetical book of ours the Bible of Civilization,
and it may be that someone will say: Yes, but
you have a sufficient book of that sort already;
you have the Bible itself and that is all you need.
Well, I am taking the Bible as my model. I am
taking it because twice in history first as the Old
Testament and then again as the Old and New
Testament together it has formed a culture, and
unified and kept together through many genera-
tions great masses of people. It has been the
basis of the Jewish and Christian civilizations
alike. And even in, the New World the State of
Connecticut did, I believe, in its earliest begin-
nings take the Bible as its only law. Nevertheless,
1 hope I shall not offend any reader, if I point
out that the Bible is not all that we need
to-day, and that also in some respects it is re-
dundant. Its very virtues created its liTni.tatJ.ong.
It served men so well that they made a Canon
of it and refused to alter it further. Throughout
the most vital phases of Hebrew history, through-
out the most living years of Christian development
the Bible changed and grew. Then its growth
ceased and its text became fixed. But the world

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 101

went on growing and discovering new needs and
new necessities.

Let me deal first with its redundancy. So far
as redundancy goes, a great deal of the Book of
Leviticus, for example, seems not vitally necessary
for the ordinary citizen of to-day; there are long
explicit directions for temple worship and sacri-
ficial procedure. There is again, so far as the
latter day citizen is concerned, an excess of in-
formation about the minor Kings of Israel and
Judah. And there is more light than most of us
feel we require nowadays upon the foreign policies
of Assyria and Egypt. It stirs our pulses feebly,
it helps us only very indirectly to learn that Attai
begat Nathan and Nathan begat Zabad, or that
Obed begat Jehu and Jehu begat Azariah, and
so on for two or three hundred verses.

And so far as deficiencies go, there is a great
multitude of modern problems problems that
enter intimately into the moral life of all of us,
with which the Bible does not deal, the establish-
ment of American Independence, for example, and
the age-long feud of Russia and Poland that has
gone on with varying fortunes for four centuries.
That is much more important to our modern world
than the ancient conflict of Assyria and Egypt
which plays so large a part in the old Bible record.
And there are all sorts of moral problems arising
out of modern conditions on which the Bible sheds
little or no direct light; the duties of a citizen at
an election, or the duties of a shareholder to the
labour employed by his company, for example.

102 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

For these things we need at least a supplement, if
we are still to keep our community upon one gen-
eral basis of understanding, upon one unifying
standard of thought and behaviour.

"We are so brought up upon the Bible, we are so
used to it long before we begin to think hard about
it, that all sorts of things that are really very
striking about it, the facts that the history of
Judah and Israel is told twice over and that the
gospel narrative is repeated four times over for
example, do not seem at all odd to us. How else,
we ask, eould you have it! Yet these are very odd
features if we are to regard the Bible as the
cpmpactest and most perfect statement of essen-
tial truth and wisdom.

And still more remarkable, it seems to me,
is it that the Bible breaks off. One could under-
stand very well if the Bible broke off with the
foundation of Christianity. Now this event has
happened, it might say, nothing else matters. It
is the culmination. But the Bible does not do
that. It goes on to a fairly detailed account of
the beginnings and early politics of the Christian
Church. It gives the opening literature of theo-
logical exposition. And then, with that strange
and doubtful book, the Bevelation of St. John the
Divine, it comes to an end. As I say, it leaves off.
It leaves off in the middle of Eoman imperial and
social conflicts. But the world has gone on and
goes on elaborating its problems, encountering
fresh problems until now there is a gulf of up-
wards of eighteen hundred years between us and

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 103

the concluding expression of the thought of that
ancient time.

I make these observations in no spirit of de-
traction. If anything, these peculiarities of the
Bible add to the wonder of its influence over the
lives and minds of men. It has been The Book
that has held together the fabric of western civili-
zation.^ It has been the handbook of life to count-
less millions of men and women. The civilization
we possess could not have eome into existence and
could not have been sustained without it. It has
explained the world to the mass of our people, and
it has given them moral standards and a form
into which their consciences could work. But does
it do that to-day? Frankly, I do not think it does.
I think that during the last century the Bible has
lost much of its former hold. It no longer grips
the community. And I think it has lost hold be-
cause of those sundering eighteen centuries, ~to
which every fresh year adds itself, because of
profound changes in the methods and mechanisms
of life, and because of the vast extension of our
ideas by the development of science in the last
century or so.

It has lost hold, but nothing has arisen to take
its place. That is the gravest aspect of this mat-
ter. It was the cement with which our western
communities were built and by which they were
held together. And the weathering of these cen-
turies and the adds of these later years have eaten
into its social and personal influence. It is no
longer a sufficient cement. And this is the es-

104 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

sence of what I am driving at our modern com-
munities are no longer cemented, they lack organ-
ized solidarity, they are not prepared to stand
shocks and strains, they have become dangerously
loose mentally and morally. That, I believe, is
the clue to a great proportion of the present social
and political troubles of the world. We need to
get back to a cement. We want a Bible. We want
a Bible so badly that we cannot ^afford toput the
old Bible on a pinnacle out of daily use. We want
it re-adapted for use. If it is true that the old
Bible falls short in its history and does not apply
closely to many modern problems, then we need
a revised and enlarged Bible in our schools and
homes to restore a common ground of ideas and
interpretations if our civilization is to hold to-
gether.

Now let us see what the Bible gave a man in
the days when it could really grip and hold and
contain him; and let us ask if it is impossible to
restore and reconstruct a Bible for the needs of
these great and dangerous days in which we are
living. Can we re-cement our increasingly tin-
stable civilization? I will not ask now whether
there is still time left for us to do anything of
the sort.

The first thing the Bible gave a man was a Cos-
mogony. It gave him an account of the world in
which he found himself and of his place in it. And
then it went on to a general history of mankind. It
did not tell him that history as a string of facts
and dates, but as a moving and interesting story

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 105

into which he himself finally came, a story of
promises made and destinies to be fulfilled. It
gave him a dramatic relationship to the schemes
of things. It linked him to all mankind with a
conception of relationships and duties- It gave
him a place in the world and put a meaning into
his life. It explained him to himself and to other
people, and it explained other people to him. In
other words, out of the individual it made a citizen
with a code of duties and expectations.

Now I take it that both from the point of
view of individual happiness and from the point
of view of the general welfare, this development
of the citizenship of a man, this placing of a man
in his own world, is of primary importance. It is
the necessary basis of all right education; it is
the fundamental purpose of the school, and I do
not believe an individual can be happy or a com-
munity be prosperous without it. The Bible and
the religions based on it, gave that idea of a place
in the world to the people it taught. But do we
provide that idea of a place in the world for our
people to-day! I suggest that we do not. We
do not give them a clear vision of the universe
in which they live, and we do not give them a
history that invests their lives with meaning and
dignity.

The cosmogony of the Bible has lost grip and
conviction upon men's minds, and the ever-widen-
ing gulf of years makes its history and its political
teaching more and more remote and unhelpful
amidst the great needs of to-day. Nothing has

106 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

been done to fill up these widening gaps. We
have so great a respect for tlie letter of the Bible
that we ignore its spirit and its proper use. We
do not rewrite and retell Genesis in the light and
language of modern knowledge, and we do not
revise and bring its history up to date and so apply
it to the problems of our own. time. So we have
allowed the Bible to become antiquated and re-
mote, venerable and unhelpful.

There has been a great extension of what we call
education in the past hundred years, but while we
have spread education widely, there has been a
sort of shrinkage and enfeeblement of its aims.
Education in the past set out to make a Christian
and a citizen and afterwards a gentleman out of
the crude, vulgar, self-seeking individual. Does
education even pretend to do as much to-day? It
does nothing of the sort. Our young people are
taught to read and write. They are taught book-
keeping and languages that are likely to be useful
to, them. They are given a certain measure of
technical education, and they are taught to shove.
And then we turn them out into the world to get
on. Our test of a college education is Does it
make a successful business man?

Well, this, I take it, is the absolute degradation
of education. It is a modern error that education
exists for the individual. Education exists for
the community and the race ; it exists to subdue the
individual for the good of the world and his own
ultimate happiness.

But we have been letting the essentials of educa-

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 107

tiqn slip back into a secondary place in onr pur-
suit of mere equipment, and we see the results
to-day throughout all the modern states of the
world, in a loss of cohesion, discipline and co-
operation. Men will not co-operate except to raise
prices on the consumer or wages on the employer,
and everyone scrambles for a front place and a
good time. And they do so, partly no doubt by
virtue of an ineradicable factor in them known as
Original Sin, but also very largely because the
vision of life that was built up in their minds at
school and in their homes was fragmentary and
uninspiring; it had no commanding appeal for
their imaginations, and no imperatives for their
lives.

So I put it, that for the opening books of our
Bible of Civilization, our Bible translated into
terms of modern knowledge, and as the basis of
all our culture, we shall follow the old Bible pre-
cedent exactly. We shall tell to every citizen of
our community, as plainly, simply and beautifully
as we can, the New Story of Genesis, the tremen-
dous spectacle of the Universe that science has
opened to us, the flaming beginnings of our world,
the vast ages of its making and the astounding
unfolding, age after a v e, of Life. We shall tell of
the changing climates of this spinning globe and
the coming and going of great floras and faunas,
mighty races of living things, until out of the
vast, slow process our own kind emerged. And
we shall tell the story of our race. How through
hundreds of thousands of years it won power

108 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped.
How it learnt the secrets of the metals, mastered
the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas.
That story of our common inheritance and of our
slow upward struggle has to be taught throughout
our entire community, in the city slums and in the
out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teach-
ing it, we restore again to our people the lost basis
of a community, a common idea of their place in
space and time.

Then, still following the Bible precedent, we
must tell a universal history of man. And though
on the surface it may seem to be a very different
history from the Bible story, in substance it will
really be very* much the same history, only robbed
of ancient trappings and symbols, and made real
and fresh again for our present ideas. It will still
be a story of conditional promises, the promises of
human possibility, a record of sins and blunders
and lost opportunities, of men who walked not in
the ways of righteousness, of stiff-necked genera-
tions, and of merciful renewals of hope. It will
still point our lives to a common future which will
be the reward and judgment of our present lives.

You may say that no such book exists which is
perfectly true and that no such book could be
written. But there I think you underrate the
capacity of our English-speaking people. It would
be quite possible to get together a committee that
would give us the compact and clear cosmogony
of history that is needed. Some of the greatest,
most inspiring books and documents in the world

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 109

have been produced by Committees: Magna Carta,
the Declaration of Independence, the English.
Translation of the Bible, and the Prayer Book of
the English Church are all the productions of com-
mittees, and they are all fine and inspiring com-
pilations. For the last three years I have been ex-
perimenting with this particular task, and, with
the help of six other people, I have sketched out
and published an outline of our world's origins
and history to show the sort of thing I mean.
That Outline is, of course, a corrupting mass of
faults and minor inaccuracies, but it does demon-
strate the possibility of doing what is required.
And its reception both in America and England
has shown how ready, how greedy many people
are, on account of themselves and on account of
their children, for an ordered general account of
the existing knowledge of our place in space and
time. For want of anything better they have
taken my Outline very eagerly. Far more eagerly
would they have taken a finer, sounder and more
authoritative work

Tn England this Outline was almost the first
experiment of the kind that has been made the
only other I know of in England, was a very
compact General History of the World by Mr.
Oscar Browning published in 1913. But there are
several educationists in America who have been
at work on the same task. In this matter of a
more generalized history teaching, the New World
is decidedly leading the Old. The particular prob-

110 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

lems of a population of "mixed origins have forced
it upon teachers in the United States.

My friend I am very happy to be able to call
my friend Professor Breasted, in conjunc-
tion with that very able teacher Professor
Epbinson, has produced two books, "Ancient
Times " and " Mediaeval and Modern Times, "
which together make a very complete history of
civilized man. They do not, however, give a his-
tory of life before man, nor very much of human
pre-history. Another admirable American sum-
mary of history is Doctor Hutton Webster's "His-
tory of the Ancient World " together with his
"Mediaeval and Modern History. " This again is
very sparing of the story of primitive man.

But the work of these gentlemen confirms my
own. experience that it is quite possible to tell in
a comprehensible and inspiring outline the whole
history of life and mankind in the compass of a
couple of manageable volumes. Neither Browning
nor Breasted and Robinson, nor Hutton Webster,
nor my own effort are very much longer than
twice the length of Dickens' novel of "Bleak
House. " So there you have it. There is the thing
shown to be possible. If it is possible for us
isolated workers to do as much, then why should
not the thing be done in a big and authoritative
manner? "Why should we not nave a great educa-
tional conference of teachers, scientific men and
historians from all the civilized peoples of the
world, and why should they not draft out a stand-
ard World History for general use in the world's

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 111

schools ? Why should that draft not be revised by
scores of specialists? Discussed and re-discussed f
Polished and finished, and made the opening part
of a new Bible of Civilization, a new common
basis for a world culture?

At intervals it would need to be revised,, and it
could be revised and brought up to date in the
same manner.

Now such a book and such a book alone would
put the people of the world upon an absolutely new
footing with regard to social and international
affairs. They would be told a history coming
right up to the Daily Newspaper. They would
see themselves and the news of to-day as part of
one great development. It would give their lives
significance and dignity. It would give the events
of the current day significance and dignity. It
would lift their imaginations up to a new level.
I say lift, but I mean restore their imaginations
to a former level. Because if you look back into
the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers, let us say, or into
those of the great soldiers and statesmen of Crom-
wellian England, you will find that these men
had a sense of personal significance, a sense of
destiny, such as no one in politics or literature
seems to possess to-day. They were still in touch
with the old Bible. To-day if life seems adventur-
ous and fragmentary and generally aimless it is
largely because of this one thing. We have lost
touch with history. We have ceased to see human
affairs as one great epic unfolding. And only by

112 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

the universal teaching of Universal History can
that epic quality be restored.

You see then the first part of my project for a
Bible of Civilization, a rewriting of Genesis and
Exodus and Judges and Chronicles in terms of
World History, It would be a quite possible thing
to do. ...

Is it worth doing?

And let me add here that when we do get our
New Genesis and our new historical books, they
will have a great number of illustrations as a liv-
ing and necessary part of them. For nowadays
we can not only have a canonical text, but canon-
ical maps and illustrations. The old Hebrew Bible
was merely the written word. Indeed it was not
even that, for it was written without vowels. That
was not a merit, nor a precedent for us ; it was
an unavoidable limitation in those days; but under
modern conditions there is no reason whatever
why we should confine our Bible to words when
a drawing or a map can better express the thing
we wish to convey. It is one of the great ad-
vantages of the modern book over the ancient
book that because of printing it can use pictures as
well as words. When books had to be reproduced
by copyists the use of pictures was impossible.
They would have varied with each copying until
they became hopelessly distorted. , . .

2

But the cosmological and historical part of the
old Bible was merely the opening, the ground-
work upon which the rest was built. Let us now,
consider what else the Bible gave a man and a
community, and what would be the modern form
of the things it gave.

The next thing in order that the Bible gave a
man and the community to which he belonged, was
the Law. Rules of Life. Rules of Health. Pre-
scriptions often very detailed and intimate of
permissible and unpermissible conduct. This also
the modern citizen needs and should have : he and
she need a book of personal wisdom.

First as to Health. One of the first duties of
a citizen is to keep himself in mental and bodily
health in order to be fit for the rest of his duties.
Now the real Bible, our model, is extremely ex-
plicit upon a number of points, upon what con-
stitutes cleanness or uncleanness, upon ablutions,
upon what a man or woman may eat and what may
not be eaten, upon a number of such points. It
was for its times and circumstances a directory of
healthy practice. Well, I do not see why the
Bible of a Modern Civilization should not contain
a book of similarly clear injunctions and warnings

113

114 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

why we should not tell every one of our people
what Is to be known about self -care.

And closely connected with the care of one's
mental and bodily health is sexual morality, upon
which, again Deuteronomy and Leviticus are most
explicit, leaving very little to the imagination. I
am all for imitating the wholesome frankness of
the ancient book. Where there are no dark cor-
ners there is very little fermentation, there is very
little foulness or infection. But in nearly every
detail and in method and manner, the Bible of
our Civilization needs to be fuller and different
from its prototype upon these matters. The real
Bible dealt with an oriental population living
under much cruder conditions than our own, en-
gaged mainly in agriculture, and with a far less
varied dietary than ours. They had fermented
but not distilled liquors; they had no preserved
nor refrigerated foods; they married at adoles-
cence; many grave diseases that prevail to-day
were unknown to them, and their sanitary prob-
lems were entirely different. Generally our New
Leviticus will have to be much fuller. It must
deal with exercise which came naturally to those
Hebrew shepherds. It must deal with the preser-
vation of energy under conditions of enervation of
which the prophets knew nothing. On the other
hand our New Leviticus can afford to give much
less attention to leprosy which almost dominates
the health instructions of the ancient law-giver.

I do not know anything very much about the
movements in America that aim at the improve-

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 115

ment of the public health and at the removal of
public ignorance upon vital things. In Britain
we have a number of powerful organizations ac-
tive in disseminating knowledge to counteract the
spread of this or that infectious or contagious dis-
ease. The War has made us in Europe much more
outspoken and fearless in dealing with lurking
hideous evils. We believe much more than we did
in the curative value of light and knowledge. And
we have a very considerable literature of books on
what shall I call it? on Sex Wisdom, which aim
to prevent some of that great volume of misery,
deprivation and nervous disease due to the pre-
vailing ignorance and secrecy in these matters.
For in these matters great multitudes of modern
people still live in an ignorance that would have
been inconceivable to an ancient Hebrew. In Eng-
land now the books of such a writer as Dr. Marie
Stopes are enormously read, and though they are
by no means perfect works dp much to mitigate
the hidden disappointments, discontents, stresses
and cruelties of married life. Now I believe that
it would be possible to compile a modern Leviticus
and Deuteronomy to tell our whole modern com-
munity decently and plainly just as plainly as the
old Hebrew Bible instructed its Hebrew popula-
tion what was to be known and what had to be
done, and what had not to be done in these inti-
mate matters.

But Health and Sex do not exhaust the prob-
lems of conduct. There are also the problems of
Property and Trade and Labour. Upon these

116 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

also the old Bible did not hesitate to be explicit.
For example, it insisted meticulously upon the
right of labour to glean and upon the seller giving
a "full measure brimming over," and it prohibited
usury. But here again the Bible is extraordinarily
unhelpful when we come to modern issues, because
its rules and regulations were framed for a com-
munity and for an economic system altogether
cruder, more limited and less complicated than our
own. Much of the Old Testament we have to
remember was already in existence before the free
use of coined metal. The vast credit system of
our days, joint-stock company enterprise and the
like, were beyond the imagination of that time. So
too was any anticipation of modern industrialism.
And accordingly we live to-day in a world in which
neither property nor employment have ever been
properly moralized. The bulk of our present
social and economic troubles is due very largely
to that.

In no matter is this muddled civilization of ours
more hopelessly at sixes and sevens than in this
matter of the rights and duties of property. Mani-
festly property is a trust for the community vary-
ing in its responsibilities with the nature of the
property. The property one has in one's tooth-
brush is different from the property one has in ten
thousand acres of land ; the property one has in a
photograph of a friend is different from the prop-
erty one has in some irreplaceable masterpiece of
portraiture. The former one may destroy with

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 117

a good conscience, "but not the latter. At least
so it seems to me.

But opinions vary enormously on these matters
because we have never really worked them out.
On the one hand, in this matter of property, we
have the extreme individualist who declares that a
man has an unlimited right to do what he likes
with Ms own so that a man who owns a coal mine
may just burn it out to please himself or spite the
world, or raise the price of coal generally and on
the other hand we have the extreme communist
who denies all property and in practice so far as
I can understand ^his practice goes on the prin-
ciple that everything belongs to somebody else or
that one is entitled to exercise proprietary rights
over everything that does not "belong to oneself.
(I confess that communistic practice is a little
difficult to formulate.) Between these extremists
you can find every variety of idea about what one
may do and about what one may not do with money
and credit and property generally. Is it an offence
to gamble? Is it an offence to speculate! Is it an
offence to hold fertile fields and not cultivate
them? Is it an offence to hold fertile fields and
undereultivate them? Is it an offence to use your
invested money merely to live pleasantly without
working? Is it an offence to spend your money
on yourself and refuse your wife more than bare
necessities? Is it an offence to spend exorbitant
sums that might otherwise go in reproductive in-
vestments, to gratify the whims and vanities of
your wife ? You will find different people answer-

118 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

ing any of these questions -with Yes and No. But
it cannot be both Yes and No. There must be a
definable Eight or Wrong upon all these issnes.

Almost all the labour trouble in the world
springs directly from our lack of an effective de-
tailed moral code about property. The freedom
that is claimed for all sorts of property and exer-
cised by all sorts of property to waste or with-
hold is the clue to that savage resentment which
flares out nowadays in every great labour conflict.
Labour is a rebel because property is a libertine.

Now this untilled field of conduct, this moral
wilderness of the rights and duties and limitations
of property, the Books of the Law in a modern
Bible could clear up in the most lucid and satisfy-
ing way. I want to get those parts of Deuteron-
omy and Leviticus written again, more urgently
than any other part of the modern Bible. I want
to see it at work in the schools and in the law-
courts. I admit that it would be a most difficult
book to write and that we should raise controver-
sial storms over every verse. But what an excel-
lent thing to have it out, once for all, with some of
these rankling problems ! "What an excellent thing
if we could get together a choice group of repre-
sentative men strictly rationed as to paper and
get them to set down clearly and exactly just what
classes of property they recognized and what limi-
tations the community was entitled to impose upon
-each sort.

Every country In the world does impose limita-
tions, la Italy you may not export an ancient

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 119

work of art, although it is your own. In England
you may not maltreat your own dog or cat. In
the United States, I am told, you may not use
your dollars to buy alcohol. Why should we not
make all this classification of property and the
restraints upon each class of property, systematic
and world-wide? If we could so moralize the use
of property, if we could arrive at a clear idea of
just what use an owner could make of his machin-
ery, or a financier could make of his credit, -would
there be much left of the incessant labour conflicts
of the present time? For if you will look into it,
you will find there is hardly ever a labour conflict
into which some unsettled question of principle,
some unsettled question of the permissible use ^of
property, does not enter as the final and essential
dispute.

THE BIBLE OF

PART Two

1

ILN the preceding sections we have discussed
Genesis and the Historical Books generally as
they would appear in a modernized Bible, and
we have dealt with the Law. But these are only
the foundations and openings of the Bible as we
know it. We come now to the Psalms and Prov-
erbs, the Song of Songs, the Book of Job and
the Prophets. What are the modern equivalents
of these books?

Well, what were they?

They were the entire Hebrew literature down to
about the time of Ezra ; they include sacred songs,
love songs, a dramatic dialogue, a sort of novel
in the Books of Ruth and Esther, and so forth.
What would be our equivalent of this part of the
Bible to-day f What would be the equivalent for
the Bible of a World Civilization?

I suppose that it would be the whole world liter-
ature.

120

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 121

That, I admit, is a rather tremendous prop-
osition. Are we to contemplate the prospect of
a modern Bible in twenty or thirty thousand vol-
ames? Such a vast Bible would defeat its own
end. We want a Bible that everyone will know,
which will be grasped by the mind of everyone.
That is essential to our idea of a Bible as a social
cement.

Fortunately, our model Bible, as we have it
to-day, gives us a lead in this matter. Its contents
are classified. "We have first of all the canonical
books, which are treated as the vitally important
books;, they are the books, to quote the phrase
used in the English prayer book, which are
"necessary to salvation. " And then we have a
collection of other books, the Apocrypha, the
books set aside, books often admirable and beauti-
ful, but not essential, good to be read for "ex-
ample of life and instruction of manners," yet
books that everyone need not read and know. Let
us take this lead and let us ask whether we can
with the whole accumulated literature of the world
as our material select a bookful or so of matter,
of such exceptional value that it would be well for
all mankind to read it and know it. This will be
our equivalent for the canonical books. I will
return to that in a moment.

And outside this canonical book or books,
shall we leave all the rest of literature in a limit-
less Apocrypha? I am doubtful about that. I
would suggest that we make a second intermediate
class between the canonical books that everyone

122 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

in our civilization ought to read and the outer
Apocrypha that you may read or not as you
choose. This intermediate class I would call the
Great Books of the World. It would not be a part
of our Bible, but it would come next to our Bible.
It would not be what one must read but only what
it is desirable the people should read.

Now this canonical literature we are discussing
is to be the third vital part of our modern Bible.
I conceive of it as something that would go into the
hands of every man and woman in that coming
great civilization which is the dream of our race.
Together with the Book of World History and the
Book of Law and Eighteousness and Wisdom that
I have sketched out to you, and another Book of
which I shall have something to say later, this
Canonical Literature will constitute the intellec-
tual and moral cement of the World Society, that
intellectual and moral cement for the want of
which our world falls into political and social con-
fusion and disaster to-day. Upon such a basis,
upon a common body of ideas, a common moral
teaching and the world-wide assimilation of the
same emotional and aesthetic material, it may still
be possible to build up humanity into one co-opera-
tive various and understanding community.

Now if we bear this idea of a cementing func-
tion firmly in -mind, we shall have a criterion by
which to judge what shall be omitted from and
what shall be included in the Books of Literature
in this modern Bible of ours. We shall begin, of
course, by levying toll upon the Old and New

THE BIBLE OP CIVILIZATION 123

Testaments. I do not think I need justify that
step. I snppose that there mil be no doubt v of the
inclusion of many of the Psalms but I question if
we should include them all and of a number of
splendid passages from the Prophets. Should we
include the Song of Songs f I am inclined to think
that the compilers of a new Bible would hesitate at
that. Should we include the Book of Job ? That I
think would be a very difficult question indeed for
our compilers. The Book of Job is a very wonder-
ful and beautiful discussion of the profound prob-
lem of evil in the world. It is a tremendous exer-
cise to read and understand, but is it universally
necessary? I am disposed to tHnk that the Book
of Job, possibly with the illustrations of Blake,
would not make a part of our Canon but would
rank among our Great Books. It is a part of a
very large Sterature of discussion, of which I shall
have more to say in a moment. So too I question
if we should make the story of Euth or the story
of Esther fundamental teaching for our world
civilization. Daniel, again, I imagine relegated to
the Apocrypha. But to this I will return later.

The story of the Gospels would, of course, have
been incorporated in our Historical Book, but in
addition as part of our first canon, each of the
four gospels with, the possible omission of the
genealogies would have a place, for the sake of
their matchless directness, simplicity and beauty.
They give a picture, they convey an atmosphere of
supreme value to us all, incommunicable in any
other form or language. Again there is a great

124 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

wealth of material in the Epistles. It is, for
example, inconceivable that such a passage as that
of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians "Though
I speak with the tongues of men and angels and
have not charity I am become as sonnding brass or
a tinkling cymbal 77 the whole of that wonderfnl
chapter should ever pass out of the common heri-
tage of mankind.

So mnch from the Ancient Bible for our modern
Bible, all its inspiration and beauty and fire. And
now what else!

Speaking in English to an English-speaking
audience one name comes close upon the Bible,
Shakespeare. What are we going to do about
Shakespeare? If you were to waylay almost any
Englishman or American and put this project of
a modern Bible before him, and then begin your
list of ingredients with the Bible and the whole of
Shakespeare, he would almost certainly say, " Yes,
yes."

But would he be right?

On reflection he might perhaps recede and say,
"Not the whole of Shakespeare, " but well, "Ham-
let/' "The Tempest," "Borneo and Juliet," "The
Midsummer Night's Dream." But even these!
Are they * 'generally necessary to salvation ' ' ? We
run our minds through the treasures of Shakes-
peare as we might run our fingers through the
contents of a box of very precious and "beautiful
jewels before equipping a youth for battle.

No. These things are for ornament and joy.
I doubt if we could have a single play a single

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 125

scene of Shakespeare's in our Canon. He goes
altogether into the Great Books, all of him; he
joins the aristocracy of the Apocrypha, And, I be-
lieve, nearly all the great plays of the world would
have to join him there. Euripides and Sophocles,
Schiller and Ibsen. Perhaps some speeches and
snch-like passages might be quoted in the Canon,
but that is all.

Our Canon, remember, is to be the essential
cementing stuff of our community and nothing
more. If once we admit merely beautiful and de-
lightful things, then I see an overwhelming inrush
of jewels and flowers. If we admit, ^The Midsum-
mer Night's Dream, " then I must insist that we
also admit such lovely nonsense as

In Xanadu did Knbla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree
"Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. . . .

Our Canon I am afraid cannot take in such
things, and with the plays we must banish also all
the novels; the greater books of such writers as
Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi,
Hardy, Hainsun, that great succession of writers
they are all good for "example of life and in-
struction of manner s," and to the Apocrypha
they must go. And so it is that since I would
banish " Borneo and Juliet," I would also banish
the Song of Songs, and since I must put away
"Vanity Fair" and the "Shabby Genteel Story,' '

126 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

I would also put away Esther and Evtih. And I find
myself most reluctant to exclude not any novels
written in English, but one or two great sweeping
books by non-English writers. It seems to me that
Tolstoi's "War and Peace" and Hamsun's
"Growth of the Soil" are books on an almost
Biblical scale, that they deal with life so greatly as
to come nearest to the idea of a universally in-
spiring and illuminating literature which under-
lies the idea of our Canon. If we put any whole
novels into the Canon I would plead for these.
But I will not plead now even for these. I do not
think any novels at all can go into our modern
Bible, as whole works. The possibility of long pas-
sages going in is, of course, quite a different
matter.

And passing now from great plays and great
novels and romances, we come to the still more
difficult problem of great philosophical and critical
works. Take "Gulliver's Travels," an intense,
dark, stirring criticism of life and social order
and the "Dialogues of Plato/' full of light and in-
spiration. In these latter we might quarry for
beautiful passages for our Canon, but I do not
think we could take them in as wholes, and if we
do not take them in as complete books, then I think
that Semitic parallel to these Greek dialogues,
The Book of Job, must stand not in our Canon, but
in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha.

And next we have to consider all the great Epics
in the world. There again I am for exclusion. This
Bible we are considering must be universally

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 127

available. If it is too bulky for universal nse it
loses its primary function of a moral cement. "We
cannot include the "Iliad," the Norse Sagas, the
"^Eneid," or "Paradise Lost" in our Canon. Let
them swell the great sack of our Apocrypha, and
let the children read them if they will

"When one glances in this fasHon over the ac-
cumulated literary resources of mankind it be-
comes plain that our canonical books of literature
in this modern Bible of ours can be little more than
an Anthology or a group of Anthologies. Per-
haps they might be gathered under separate heads,
as the "Book of Freedom," the "Book of Jus-
tice," the "Book of Charity." And now having
done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to ac-
cept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of
thing that I imagine would best serve the purpose
of our Bible and that should certainly be included.

Here are words that every American knows
by heart already I would like every man in the
world to know them by heart and to repeat them.
It is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and I will not
spare you a word of it :

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, con-
ceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposi-
tion that all men are created equal. Now we are
engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedi-
cated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedi-

128 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

cate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place
for those "who here gave their lives that that nation
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that
we should do this. But in a larger sense, we can-
not dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and
dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far
above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did
here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedi-
cated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
task remaining before us that from these hon-
ored dead we take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full measure of de-
votion. That we here highly resolve that these
dead shall not have died in vain that this nation,
under G-od, shall have a new birth of freedom
and that Government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth/'

And here is something that might perhaps make
another short chapter in the same Book of Free-
dombut it deals with Freedom of a different
sort:

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 129

I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of Chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this Place of wrath and tears,

Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the Menace of the years

Finds and shall find me Unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the Master of my Fate,

I am the Captain of my Soul.

That, as you know was Henley's, and as I
turned up Ms volume of poems to copy out that
poem I came again on these familiar lines:

The ways of Death are soothing? and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet,
From camp and church, the fireside and the street,

She beckons forth and strife and song have been.

A summer's night descending cool and green,
And dark on daytime's dust and stress and heat,

The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet

There seems something in that also which I
could spare only very reluctantly from a new Bible
in the world. Yet I tender those lines very doubt-
fully. Tor I am not a very cultivated and well-
read person, and note only the things that have
struck upon my mind ; but I quite understand that
there must be many things of the same sort, but
better, that I have never encountered, or that I

130 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

have not heard or read under circumstances that
were favourable to their proper appreciation. I
would rather say about what I am quoting- in this
section, not positively "this thing/ 7 but merely
"this sort of thing. 7 '

And in the vein of "this sort of thing' 7 let me
quote you again for the Book of Freedom a
passage from Milton, defending the ancient Eng-
lish tradition of free speech and free decision and
praising London and England. This London and
England of which he boasts have broadened out
as the idea of Jerusalem has broadened out, to
world-wide comprehensions. Let no false modesty
blind us to our great tradition; you and I are still
thinking in Milton's city; we continue, however
unworthily, the great inheritance of ;the world-
wide responsibility and service, of His English-
men. Here is my passage :

"Now once again by all concurrence of signs,
and by the general instinct of holy and devout
men, as they daily and solemnly express their
thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and
great period in His Church, even to the reforming
of reformation itself; what does He then but reveal
Himself to His servants, and as His manner is,
first to His Englishmen? I say, as His manner
is, first to us, though we mark not the method of
His counsels, and are unworthy. Behold now this
vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion-house of
liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 131

protection; the slop of war liatli not there more
anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the
plates and instruments of armed justice in defence
of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and he,ads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing,
searching, revolving new notions and ideas where-
with to present, as with their homage and their
fealty, the approaching reformation: others as
fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the
force of reason and convincement.

"What could a man require more from a na-
tion so pliant and so prone to seek after know-
ledge? What wants there to such a towardly and
pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to
make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of
sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than five
months yet to harvest; there need not be five
weeks, had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are
white already. Where there is much desire to
learn, there of necessity will be much arguing,
much writing, many opinions ; for opinion in good
men is but knowledge in the making. Under these
fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and
understanding, which God hath stirred up in this
city. What some lament of, we rather should re-
joice at, should rather praise this pious forward-
ness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care
of their religion into their own hands again. A
little generous prudence, a little forbearance of
one another, and some grain of charity might win

132 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

all these diligencies to join and unite into one gen-
eral and brotherly search after truth ; could we but
forego this prelatieal tradition of crowding free
consciences and Christian liberties into canons and
precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and
worthy stranger should come among us, wise to
discern the mould and temper of a people, and
how to govern it, observing the high hopes and
aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended
thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth
and freedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus
did, admiring the Eoman docility and courage : 'If
such were my Epirots, I would not despair the
greatest design that could be attempted to make a
church or kingdom happy.'

"Yet these are the men cried put against for
schismatics and sectaries, as if, while the temple of
the Lord was building, some cutting, some squar-
ing the marble, others hewing the cedars, there
should be a sort of irrational men, who could not
consider there must be many schisms and many
dissections made in the quarry and in the timber
ere the house of God can be built. And when every
stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united
into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this
world: neither can ev^ry piece of the bu : lding be
of one form ; nay, rather the perfection consists in
this, that out of many moderate varieties and
brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly dis-
proportions!, arises the goodly and the graceful
symmetry that commends the whole pile and struc-
ture.''

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 133

But I will not go on turning over the pages of
books and reciting prose and poetry to yon. I
cannot even begin to remind yon of the immense
treasure of noble and ennobling prose and verse
that this world has accumulated in the past three
thousand years. Not one soul in ten thousand thaj;
is born into this world even tastes from that
store. For most of mankind now that treasure is
as if it had never been. Is it too much to sug-
gest that we should make some organized attempt
to gather up the quintessence of literature now,
and make it accessible to the masses of our race f
Why should we not on a large scale with a certain
breadth and dignity set about compiling the Poetic
Books, the Books of Inspiration for a renewed
Bible, for a Bible of Civilization! It seems to
me that such a Book made universally accessible,
made a basis of teaching everywhere, could set
the key of the whole world's thought.

There remains one other element if we are to
complete the parallelism of the old Bible and the
new. The Christian Bible ends with a forecast,
the Book of ^Revelation ; the Hebrew Bible ended
also with forecasts, the Prophets. To that the old
Bibte owed much of its magic power over men's
imaginations and the inspiration it gave them. It
was not a dead record, not an accumulation of
things finished and of songs sung. It pointed
steadily and plainly to the Days to Come as the
end and explanation of all that went before. So,
too, our modern Bible, if it is to hold and rule the
imagination of men, must close, I think, with a
Book of Forecasts.

We want to make our world think more than it
does about the consequences of the lives it leads
and the political deeds that it does and that it
permits to be done. We want to turn the human
imagination round again towards the future which
our lives create. We want a collection and digest
of forecasts and warnings to complete this modern
Bible of ours. Now here I think you will say and
I admit with perfect reason that I am floating
away from any reasonable possibility at all. How
can we have forecasts and prophecies of things
that are happening now! Well, I will make a clean

134

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 135

breast of it, and admit that I am asking for some-
thing that may be impossible. Nevertheless it is
something that is very necessary if men axe to
remain indeed intelligent co-operating communi-
ties. In the past you will find where there have
been orderly and successful communities the men
in them had an idea of a Destiny, of some object,
something that would amount to a criterion and
judgment upon their collective conduct. Well, I
believe that we have to get back to something of
that sort.

We have statesmen and politicians who profess
to guide our destinies. Whither are they guiding
our destinies?

Surely they have some idea. The great Ameri-
can statesmen and the great European statesmen
are making To-morrow. What is the To-morrow
they are making?

They must have some idea of it. Otherwise they
must be imposters. I am loth to believe them
imposters, mere adventurers who have blundered
into positions of power and honour with no idea of
what they are doing to the world. But if they
have an idea of what they are doing to the world,
they foresee and intend a Future. That, I take
it, is sound reasoning and the inference is plain.

They ought to write down their ideas of this
Future before us. It would be helpful to all of
us. It might be a very helpful exercise for them.
It is, I think, reasonable for Americans to ask the
great political personages of America, the presi-
dent and so forth, for example : whether they think

136 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

the United States will stand alone in twenty-five
years 7 time as they stand alone now? Or whether
they think that there will be a greater United
States of all America or of all the world!
They must Imow their own will about that. And
it is equally reasonable to ask the great political
personages of the British Empire : what will Ire-
land be in twenty-five years' time? What will
India be? There mnst be a plan, an intended
thing. Otherwise these men have no intentions ;
otherwise they must be, in two words, dangerous
fools. The sooner we substitute a type of man
with a sufficient foresight and capable of articu-
late speech in the matter, the better for our race.

And again every statesman and every politician
throughout the world says that the relations of
industrial enterprise to the labour it employs are
unsatisfactory. Yes. But how are those relations
going to develop? How do they mean them to de-
velop?

Are we just drifting into an unknown darkness
in all these matters with blind leaders of our blind-
ness? Or cannot a lot of these things be figured
out by able and intelligent people ? I put it to you
that they can. That it is a reasonable and proper
thing to ask our statesmen and politicaans : what
is going to happen to the world! What sort of
better social order are you making for? What
sort of world order are you creating? Let them
open their minds to us, let them put upon per-
manent record the significance of all their in-
trigues and manoeuvres. Then as they go on we

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 137

can check their capacity and good faith. We can
establish a control at last that will rnle presidents
and kings.

Now the answer to these questions for states-
men is what I mean by a Boole of Forecasts. Such
a book I believe is urgently needed to help our
civilization. It is a book we ought all to pos-
sess and read. I know you will say that such a
Book of Forecasts will be at first a preposterously
insufficient book that every year will show it up
and make it more absurd. I quite agree. The
first Boole of Forecasts will be a poor thing. Mis-
erably poor. So poor that people will presently
clamour to have it thoroughly revised.

The revised Book of Forecasts will not be quite
so bad. It will have been tested against realities.
It will form the basis of a vast amount of criticism
and discussion.

"When again it conies to be revised, it will be
much nearer possible realities.

I put it to you that the psychology, the men-
tality of a community that has a Book of Forecasts
in hand and under watchful revision will be alto-
gether steadier and stronger and clearer than
that of a community which lives as we do to-day,
mere adventurers, without foresight, in a world
of catastrophes and accidents and unexpected
things. We shall be living again in a plan. Our
lives will be shaped to certain defined ends. We
shall fall into place in a great scheme of activities.
We shall recover again some or all of the stead-
fastness and dignity of the old religious life.

5

Let me with this Book of Forecasts round off
my fantasy, I would picture to you this modern
Bible, perhaps two or three times as bulky as the
old Bible, and consisting first of

The Historical Books with maps and the like;

The Books of Conduct and Wisdom;,

The Anthologies of Poetry and Literature;
and finally, the

Book of Forecasts, taking the place of the
Prophets and Bevelations.

I would picture this revivified Bible to yon as
most carefully done and printed and made ac-
cessible to all, the basis of education in every
school, the common platform of all discussion
just as in the past the old Bible used to be. I
would ask you to imagine it translated into every
language, a common material of understanding
throughout all the world.

And furthermore, I imagine something else
about this quite unlike the old Bible I imagine
all of it periodically revised. The historical books
would need to be revised and brought up to date,
there would be new lights on health and conduct,
there would be fresh additions to the anthologies,
and there would be Forecasts that would have to
be struck out because they were realized or

138

THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION 139

because they were shown to be hopeless or un-
desirable, and fresh Forecasts would be added to
replace them. It would be a Bible moving for-
ward and changing and gaining with human ex-
perience and human destiny. . . .
^ Well, that is my dream of a Bible of Civiliza-
tion. Have I in any way carried my vision out
to you of this little row of four or five volumes in
every house, in every life, throughout the world,
holding the lives and ideas and imaginations of
men together in a net of common familiar phrases
and common established hopes?

And is this a mere fantastic talk, or is this a
thing that could be done and that ought to be done?

I do not know how it will appear to you, but
to me it seems that this book I have been talking
about, the Bible of to-day's civilization, is not
simply a conceivable possibility, it is a great and
urgent need. Our education is, I think, pointless
without it, a shell without a core. Our social life
is aimless without it, we are a crowd without a
common understanding. Only by means of some
such unifying instrument, I believe, can we hope
to lift human life out of its present dangerous drift
towards confusion and disaster.

It is, I think therefore, an urgently desirable
undertaking.

It is also a very practicable one. The creation
of such a Bible, its printing and its translation,
and a propaganda that would carry it into the
homes and schools of most of the world, could I
all be achieved by a few hundred resolute

140 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

and capable people at a cost of thirty or forty mil-
lion dollars. That is a less sum than that the
United States in a time when they have no enemy
to fear in all the world are prepared to spend
upon the building of what is for them p-n entirely
superfluous and extravagant toy, a great navy.

You may, you probably will, differ very widely
upon, much that I have here put before you. Let
me ask you not to let any of the details of my
sketching set you against the fundamental idea,
that old creative idea of the Bohemian education-
ist who was the pupil of Bacon and the friend of
Milton, the idea of Komensky, the idea of creating
and using a common book, a book of knowledge
and wisdom, as the necessary foundation for any
enduring toman unanimity.

VI

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WOBLD

now I am going on to a review of the broad
facts of the educational organization of our pres-
ent world.

I am myself a very undereducated person. It
is a constant trouble to me. Like seeks like in
this world. I propose to ask the question whether
the whole world is not underedueated, and I warn
yon in advance that I am going to answer in the
affirmative.

I am going to discuss the possibility of raising
the general educational level very considerably,
and I am going to consider what such a raising of
the educational level would mean in human life.

I propose to adopt rather a vulgar, businesslike
tone about all this. I am going to apply to the
human community much the same s*ort of tests
that a manufacturer applies to his factory. His
factory has some distinctive product, and when he
looks into his affairs he tries to find out whether
he gets the best possible quality of _ the product,
whether he gets it as efficiently and inexpensively
as possible, and constantly how he can improve his
factory and his processes in all these matters.

Now the human community may be regarded as

141

142 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

a concern engaged in the production of human
life. And it may be judged very largely by the
question whether the human life it produces is
abundant and full and intense and beautiful.

Most of the tests that we apply to a state or
a city or a period or a nation resolve themselves,
you will find, into these questions :

What was the life it produced?

What is the life it produces!

Now I will further assume that as yet the com-
munity has little or no control over the raw prod-
uct, over the life, that is to say, that comes into
it. I admit that from at least the time of Plato
onward the possibility has been discussed of
breeding human beings as we do horses and dogs.
There is an enormous amount of what is called
eugenic literature and discussion to-day. But I
wifl set all that sort of thing aside from our pres-
ent discussion because I do not think anything of
the kind is practicable at the present time.

Quite apart from any other considerations, one
has to remember one entire difference between the
possible breeding of human beings and the actual
breeding of dogs and horses. We breed dogs and
horses for uniformity, for certain very limited
specified points speed, scent and the like. But
human beings we should have to breed for variety :
we cannot specify any particular points^ we want.
We want statesmen and poets and musicians and
philosophers and swift men and strong men and
delicate men and brave men. The qualities of
one would be the weaknesses of another.

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 143

It is really a false analogy, that between the
breeding of men and the breeding of horses and
dogs. In the case of human beings we want much
more subtle and delicate combinations of qualities.
For any practical purposes we do not know what
we want nor do we know how to get it. So let us
rule that theme out of our present discussion
altogether.

And I also propose to rule out another set of
topics from this discussion simply because if we
don't do so we shall have more matter than we
can handle conveniently in the time at our disposal.
I propose to leave out all questions of health and
physical welfare. There is, as you know, a vast
literature now in existence, concerned with the
health and welfare of children before and after
birth, concerned with infantile life, with social
conditions and social work directed to the produc-
tion of a vigorous population. I am going to as-
sume here_that all that sort of thing is seen to
that it is all right, that somebody is doing that,
that we need not trouble for the present about any
of those things.

This leaves us with the mental life only of our
community and its individuals to consider. On
that I propose to concentrate this discussion.

Now the human ;mind in its opening stages in
a civilized community passes through a process
which may best be named as schooling. And under
schooling I would include not only the sort of
things that we do to a prospective citizen in the
school and the infant school but also anything in

144 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

the nature of a school-like lesson that is done by
the mother or nurse or tutor at home, or by play-
mates and companions anywhere. Out of this
schooling arises the general mental life. It is the
structural ground-stuff of all education and
thought

Now what is this schooling to do what is it
doing to the new human being?

Let us recall what our own schooling was.

It fell into two pretty clearly defined parts.
We learnt reading and writing, we made a certain
study of grammar, the method of language, per-
haps we learnt the beginnings of some other lan-
guage than our own; we learnt some arithmetic
and perhaps a little geometry and algebra ; we did
some drawing. All these things were ways of ex-
pression, means of expressing ourselves, means of
comprehending our thoughts in terms of other peo-
ple's minds, and of understanding the expressions
of others. That was the basis and substance of
our schooling; a training in mental elucidation
and in communication with other minds. But also
as our schooling went on there was something
more ; we learnt a little history, some geography,
the beginnings of science. This second part of
education was not so much expression as wisdom.
We learnt what was generally known of the world
about us and of its past. We entered into the com-
mon knowledge, and common ideas of the world.

Now, obviously, this sdhoolmg is merely a spe-
cialization and expansion of a parental function.

In the primitive ages of onr race the parent,

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 145

and particularly the mother, out of an instinctive
impulse and practical necessity, restrained and
showed and taught, and the child, with an instinc-
tive imitativeness and docility, obeyed and learnt.
And as the primitive family grew into a tribe, as
functions specialized and the range of knowledge
widened, this primitive schooling by the mother
was supplemented and extended by the showing
of things by companions and by the maxims and
initiations of old men.

It was only with the development of early civili-
zations, as the mysteries of writing and reading
began to be important in life, that the school, qua
school, became a thing in itself. And as the com-
munity expanded, the scope of instruction ex-
panded with it. Schooling is, in fact, and always
has been, the expansion and development of the
primitive savage mind ? which is still all that we
inherit, to adapt it to the needs of a larger com-
munity. It makes out of the savage raw material
which is our basal mental stuff, a citizen. It is a
necessary process of fusion if a civilized commu-
nity is to keep in being. Without at least a net-
work of schooled persons, able to communicate its
common ideas and act in intelligent co-operation,
no community beyond a mere family group can
ever hold together.

As the human community expands, therefore,
the range of schooling must expand to keep pace
with it.

I want to base my enquiry upon that proposi-

146 THE SALVAGING OP CIVILIZATION

tion. If it is sound, certain very interesting con-
clusions follow.

I have already shown in the preceding discus-
sions that the range of the modern state has in-
creased at least ten times in the past century, and
that the scale of our community of intercourse has
increased correspondingly. I want now to ask if
there has been any corresponding enlargement of
the scope of the schooling either of the commu-
nity as a whole or of any special governing classes
in the community to keep pace with this tremen-
dous extension of range. I am going to argue
that there has not been such an enlargement, and
that a large factor in our present troubles is the
failure of education and educational method to
keep pace with the new demands made upon them.

Now I will first ask what would one like one's
son or daughter to get at school to make him or
her a full living citizen of this modern world. And
at first I will not take into consideration the ques-
tion of expense or any such practical difficulties.
I will suppose that for the education of this for-
tunate young citizen whose case we are consider-
ing we have limitless means, the best possible
tutors, the best apparatus and absolutely the most
favourable conditions. The only limits to the
teaching of this young citizen are his or her own
limitations. We suppose a pupil of fair average
intelligence only.

Now first we shall want our pupil to under-
stand, speak, read and write the mother tongue
well. To do this thoroughly in English involves

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 147

a fairly sound knowledge of Latin grammar and
at least some slight knowledge of the elements of
Greek. Latin and Greek, which are disappearing
as distinct and separate subjects from many
school curricula, are returning as necessary parts
of the English course.

But nowadays a full life is not to be lived with
a single language. The world becomes polyglot.
Even if we do not want to live among foreigners,
we want to read their books and newspapers and
understand and follow their thought. Few of us
there are how would not gladly read and speak
several more languages if we had the chance of
doing so. I would therefore set down as a desir-
able part of this ideal education we are planning,
two or three other languages in addition to the
mother tongue learnt early and thoroughly. These
additional languages can be acquired easily if
they are learnt in the right way. The easiest
way to learn a language is to learn it when you are
quite young. Many prosperous people in Europe
nowadays contrive to bring up their children with
two or three foreign languages, by employing for-
eign nurses and nursery governesses who never
speak to the children except in the foreign lan-
guages. In many cases what is known as the alter-
nate week system prevails. The governess is
Swiss and for one week she talks nothing but
French and for another nothing but German. In
this way the children at the age of eight or nine
can be made to talk all three languages with a
perfect accent and an easy idiom.

148 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

Now if this can be done for some children it
could be done for all children provided we could
find the nurses and governesses or some equiva-
lent for the nurses and governesses, and if we can
organize the business efficiently. That point I
will defer. I note here simply that the thing is
possible, if not practicable.

Children, however, who have made this much
start with languages are unable in England and
America, at least, to go on properly with the
learning of languages when they pass into a
school. Our schools are so badly organized that
it is rare to find even French well taught, and
there is rarely any teaching at all of modern lan-
guages other than French or German. Often the
two foreign languages are taught by different
teachers employing different methods, and both
employing a different grammatical nomenclature
from that used in studying the mother tongue.
The classes are encumbered with belated begin-
ners. The child who has got languages from its
governess therefore marks time that is to say,
wastes time in these subjects at school. The child
well grounded in some foreign tongue is often a
source of irritation to the teacher, and gets into
trouble because it uses idiomatic expressions with
which the teacher is unfamiliar, or seems to reflect
upon the teacher's accent. These are the limita-
tions of the school and not the limitations of the
pupil. Given facilities, there is no reason why
there should not be a rapid expansion of the
language syllabus at thirteen or f ourteen, and why

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 149

language generally should not be studied. Some
Slavonic language could be taken up Russian or
Czech and a beginning made with some non-
Aryan tongue Arabic, for example.

The object of language teaching in a civilized
state is twofold: to give a thorough, intimate,
usable knowledge of the mother tongue and of
certain key languages. But if teaching were sys-
tematic and no time were wasted, if schooling
joined on and were continuous instead of being
catastrophieally disconnected, there is another
side of language teaching altogether now en-
tirely disregarded and that is the acquisition in
skeleton of quite a number of languages clustering
round the key languages. If at the end of his
schooling a boy knows English, French and Ger-
man very well and nothing more, he is still a help-
less foreigner in relation to large parts of the
world. But if, in addition, he has an outline
knowledge of Eussian and Arabic or Turkish or
Hindustani it need only be a quite bare outline
and if he has had a term or so of Spanish in
relation to his French, or Swedish in relation to
his German, then he has the key in his hands for
almost any language he may want. If he has not
the language in his head, he has it very conven-
iently on call he needs but a sensible conversa-
tion dictionary and in a little while he can possess
himself of it.

You may think this a large order; you may
think I am demanding linguistic prodigies; but
remember that I am upon my own ground here; I

150 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

am a trained teacher and a student of pedagogic
science, and I am a watehf ul parent ; I know how
time and opportunity are wasted in school, and
particularly in language teaching. Languages are
not things that exist in isolated subjects; each
one illuminates the other and unless it is
taught with stupefying stupidity leads on to
others. A child can acquire the polyglot habit
almost unawares. This widening grasp of lan-
guages is or was within the capacity of nearly
everyone born into the world given the facilities.

I ask you to note that qualification ** given the
facilities."

And now let us turn from the language side to
the rest of schooling. A second main division of
our schooling was mathematical instruction of a
sort. It fell into the three more or less watertight
compartments of arithmetic, algebra and Euclid.
We carried on in these closed cells what was, I
now perceive, a needlessly laborious and need-
lessly muddled struggle to comprehend quantity,
series and form.

In all these matters, looking back upon what I
was taught, comparing it with what I now know,
and comparing my -mind with the minds of more
fortunate individuals, I cannot resist the persua-
sion that I was very badly done indeed in this sec-
tion. And. it is small consolation to me to note
that most people's minds seem to be no better
done than mine.

My arithmetic, for instance, is mediocre. It is
pervaded by inaccuracy. You may say that this

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 151

is probably want of aptitude. Partly, no doubt,
but not altogether. "What is want of aptitude!
Bad as my arithmetic is now it is not so bad as it
was when I left school. When I was about twenty
I held a sort of inquest upon it and found out a
number of things. I found that I had been allowed
to acquire certain bad habits and besetting sins
most people do. For instance, when I ran up a
column of figures to add them I would pass from
nine to seven quite surely and say sixteen ; but if
I went from seven to nine I had a vicious disposi-
tion to make it eighteen. Endless additions went
wrong through that one error. I had fumbled into
this vice and this is my point my school had
no apparatus, and no system of checks, to discover
that this had occurred. I used to get my addi-
tion wrong and I used to be punished stupidly
by keeping me in from exercise. Time after time
this happened; there was no investigation and no
improvement. Nobody ever put me through a
series of test sums that would have analyzed my
errors and discovered these besetting sins of
mine that led to my inaccurate arithmetic.

And another thing that made my arithmetic
wrong was a defect in eyesight. My two eyes
haven't quite the same focal length and this often
puts me out of the straight with a column of
figures. Bnt there was nothing in my school to
discover that, and my school never did discover it.

My geometrical faculties are also very poor and
undeveloped. Euclid's elements, indeed, I have
always found simple and straightforward, but

152 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

when it comes to anything in solid geometry the
intersection of a sphere by a cone, let us say, or
something of that sort I am hopelessly at sea.
Deep-seated habits of faulting and fogging, which
were actually developed by my schooling, prevent
my forming any conception of the surfaces
involved.

Here again, just as with the language teaching,
hardly any of us are really fully educated. We
suffer, nearly all of us, from a lack of quantitative
grasp and from an imperfect grasp of form. Few
of us have acquired such a grasp. Few of us ever
made a proper use of models, and nearly all of
us have miserably trained hands. Given proper
facilities and here again I ask you to note that
proviso given proper educational facilities
most of us would not only be able to talk with
most people in the world but we should also have
a conception of form and quantity far more subtle
than that possessed by any but a few mathema-
tici^ns and mechanical geniuses to-day.

Let me now come to a third main division of
what we call schooling. In our schooling there
was an attempt to give us a view of the world
about us and a view of our place in it, under the
headings of History and Geography.

It would be impossible to imagine a feebler
attempt. The History and Geography I had was
perhaps, in one respect, the next best thing to a
good course. It was so thoroughly and hopelessly
bad that it left me with a vivid sense of ignorance.

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 153

I read, therefore, with great avidity during my
adolescence.

In English schools now I doubt if the teaching
of history is much better than it was in my time,
but geography has grown and improved largely
through the vigorous initiative of Professor Hux-
ley, who replaced the old dreary topography by a
vivid description of the world and mingled with it
a sort of general elementary science under the
name of Physiography. This subject, with the
addition of some elementary Biology and Physiol-
ogy does now serve to give many young people in
Great Britain something like a general view of
the world as a whole. We need now to make a
parallel push with the teaching of history. Upon
this matter of the teaching of history I am a
fanatic. I cannot think of an education as even
half done until there has been a fairly sound re-
view of the whole of the known past, from the
beginnings of the geological record up to our own
time. Until that is done, the pupil has not been
placed in the world. He is incapable of under-
standing his relationship to and his role in the
scheme of things. He is, whatever else he may
have learnt, essentially an ignorant person.

And now let me recapitulate these demands I
have made upon the process of schooling this
process of teaching that begins in the nursery and
ends about the age of sixteen or seventeen. I
have asked that it should involve a practical mas-
tery of three or four languages, including the
mother tongue, and that perhaps four or five

154 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

other additional languages shall have been
studied, so to speak, in skeleton. I have added
mathematics carried much higher and farther than
most of our schools do to-day. I have demanded
a sound knowledge of universal history, a knowl-
edge of general physical and general biological
science, and I have thrown in, with scarcely a word
of apology, a good training of the eyes and hands
in drawing and manual work.

So far as the pupil goes, I submit this is an
entirely practicable proposal. It can be done, I
am convinced, with any ordinary pupil of average
all-round ability, given what is now almost uni-
versally wanting the proper educational facili-
ties. And now I will go on. to examine the ques-
tion, of why these facilities are wanting. I want
to ask why a large class, if not the whole of our
population, is not educated up to the level of wicle
understanding and fully developed capacity such
a schooling as I have sketched out implies.

"Well, the first fact obvious to every parent who
has ever enquired closely into the educational out-
look of his offspring, the first fact we have to f $ce
is this: there are not enough properly equipped
schools and, still more, not enough good teachers,
to do the job. It is proclaiming no very profound
secret to declare that there is hardly such a thing
in the world to-day as a fully equipped school,
that is to say a school having all the possible ma-
terial and apparatus and staffed sufficiently with
a bright and able teacher, a really live and alert
educationist, in every necessary subject, such as

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 155

would be needed to give this ideal education. That
is the great primary obstacle, that is the core of
our present problem. "We cannot get our modern
community educated to anything like its full possi-
bilities as yet because we have neither the teachers
nor the schools.

Now is this a final limitation?

For a moment I will leave the question of the
possibilities of more and better equipped schools
on one side. I will deal with the supply of teach-
ers. At present we do not even attempt to get
good teachers ; we do not offer any approach to a
tolerable life for an ordinary teacher; we compel
them to lead mean and restricted lives ; we under-
pay them shockingly; we do not deserve nearly
such good teachers as we get. But even supposing
we were to offer reasonable wages for teachers ; an
average all-round wage of 1000 a year or so, and
respect and dignity; it does not follow that we
should get as many as we should need using the
methods that are in use to-day to provide this
ideal schooling for most of our population, or,
indeed, for any large section of our population.

You will note a new proviso creeping in at this
point "using the methods that are used to-day. "

Because you must remember it is not simply a
matter of payment that makes the teacher.
Teachers are born and not made. Good teaching
requires a peculiar temperament and distinctive
aptitudes. I doubt very much, even if you could
secure the services of every human being who had
the natural gifts needed in a good teacher, if you

156 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

could disregard every question of cost and pay-
ment, I doubt whether even then you would com-
mand the services of more than one passable
teacher for a hundred children and of more than
one really inspired and inspiring teacher for five
hundred children. No doubt you could get a sort
of teacher for every score or even for every dozen
children, a commonplace person who could be
trained to do a few simple educational things, but
I am speaking now of good teachers who have the
mental subtlety, the sympathy and the devotion
necessary for efficient teaching by the individualis-
tic methods in use to-day. And since, using the
methods that are used to-day, you can only hope
to secure fully satisfactory results with one
teacher to every score of pupils, or fewer, and
since it is unlikely we shall ever be able to com-
mand the services of more than a tithe of the peo-
ple who could teach well, it seems that we come
np here against an insurmountable obstacle to an
educated population.

Now I want to press home the idea of that diffi-
culty. I am an old and seasoned educationist;
most of my earliest writings are concealed in the
anonymity of the London educational papers of a
quarter of a century ago, and my knowledge of
educational literature is fairly extensive. I know
in particular the literature of educational reform.
And I do not recall that I have ever encountered
any recognition of this fundamental difficulty w
the way of educational development. The litera-
ture of educational reform is always assuming

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 157

parents of limitless intelligence, sympathy and
means, employing teachers of limitless energy and
capacity. And that to an extreme degree is what
we haven't got and what we can never hope to
have.

Educational reformers seem always to be look-
ing at education from the point of view of the
individual scholastic enterprise and of the indi-
vidual pupil, and hardly ever from the point of
view of a public task dealing with the community
as a whole. For all practical purposes this makes
waste paper of a considerable proportion of edu-
cational literature. This literature, the reader
will find, is pervaded by certain fixed ideas. There
is a sort of standing objection to any machining of
education. There is, we are constantly told, to be
no syllabus of instruction, no examinations and no
controls, no prescribed text-books or diagrams be-
cause these things limit the genius of the teacher.
And this goes on with a blissful invincible disre-
gard of the fact that in nine hundred and ninety-
nine cases out of the thousand the genius of the
teacher isn't and can't be there. And also of the
fact that this affair of elementary education has
in its essentials been done over and over and over
again for thousands of millions of times. There
ought to be as much scope left for genius and
originality in ordinary teaching as there is for
genius a,nd originality in a hen laying an ordinary

These educational idealists are always disre-
garding the fundamental problem of educational

158 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

organization altogether, the problem of economy,
economy of the most precious thing of all, teaching
power. It is the problem of stretching the com-
petent teacher over the maximum number of
pupils, and that can be done only by the same
methods^ of economy that are practised in every
other large-scale production by the standardiza-
tion of everything that can be standardized, and
by the use of every possible time and labour-sav-
ing device and every possible replacement of hu-
man effort, not in order to dispense with original-
ity and initiative but in order to conserve them
for application at their points of maximum
efficiency.

I have said that a disregard of the possibilities
of wide organization and its associated economy
of effort is characteristic of most "advanced 77
educational literature. You will, if you will exam-
ine them, find that disregard working out to its
natural consequences in what are called the " ad-
vanced " schools that appeal to educationally anx-
ious parents nowadays. You will find that these
places, often very picturesque and pleasing-look-
ing places, are rarely prosperous enough to main-
tain more than one or two good teachers. The
rest of the staff shrinks from scrutiny. You will
find these schools adorned with attractive dia-
grams drawn by the teachers, and strikingly origi-
nal models and apparatus made by the teachers,
and if you look closely into the matter or consult
an intelligent pupil, you will find there are never
enough diagrams and apparatus to see a course

THE SCHOOLING OP THE WORLD 15S

through. If yon press that matter you will find
that they haven't had time to make them so far,
And they will never get so far. No school, how-
ever rich and prosperous and however enthusias-
tically run, can hope to make for itself all the
plant and diagrams and apparatus needed for a
fully efficient modern education such as we have
sketched out. As well might a busy man hope
to array himself, by his own efforts, with hats,
suits and boots made by himself out of wool and
raw hides.

But now I think you will begin to see what I
am driving at. It is this : that if the general level
of education is to be raised in our modern com-
munity, and if that better education is to be
spread over most of our community, it is necessary
to reorganize education in the world upon entirely
bolder, more efficient, and more economical lines.
We are inexorably limited as to the number of
good teachers we can get into the educational
organization, and we are limited as inexorably as
to the quality of the rank and file of our teaching
profession; but we are not limited in the equip-
ment and systematic organization of teaching
methods and apparatus. That is what I want par-
ticularly to enlarge upon now.

Think of the ordinary school-house a mere
empty brick building with a few hat-pegs, a stale
map or so, half a dozen plaster casts, a few hun-
dred tattered books, a blackboard, and some
broken chemical apparatus: think of it as the
dingy insufficiency it is ! In such a place the best

160 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

teacher must needs waste three-fourths of his en-
ergies- In such a place staff and pupils meet
chiefly to -waste each other's time. This is the first
and principal point at which we can stanch the
wastage of teaching energy that now goes on.
Everywhere ahout the world nowadays, the school-
house is set up and equipped by a private person
or a local authority in more or less complete igno-
rance of educational possibilities, in more or less
complete disconnectedness, without any of the
help or any of the economy that comes from a cen-
tralized mass production. Let us now consider
what we might have in the place of this typical
schoolhouse of to-day.

Let me first suggest that every school should
have a -complete library of very full and explicit
lesson notes, properly sorted and classified. All
the ordinary subjects in schools have been taught
over and over again millions and millions of times.
Few people, I think, realize that, and fewer still
realize the reasonable consequences of that. Hu-
man minds are very much the same everywhere,
and the best way of teaching every ordinary school
subject, the best possible lesson and the best pos-
sible succession of lessons, ought to have been
worked out to the last point, and the courses ought
to have been stereotyped long ago. Tet if you go
into any school to-day, in ninety-nine cases out of
the hundred you will find an inexpert and ill-pre-
pared young teacher giving a clumsy, vamped-up
lesson as though it had never been given before.
He or she will have no proper notes and no proper

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 161

diagrams, and a halting and faulty discourse will
be eked out by feeble scratcMngs with, chalk on a
blackboard, by querulous questioning of the
pupils, and irrelevancies. The thing is prepos-
terous.

And linked up with this complete equipment of
proper lesson notes upon which the teacher will
give the lessons, there should be a thing which
does not exist at present in any school and which
ought to exist in every school, a collection of some
hundreds of thousands of pictures and diagrams,
properly and compactly filed ; a copious supply of
maps, views of scenery, pictures of towns, and so
forth for teaching geography, diagrams and tables
for scientific subjects, and so on and so on. You
must remember that if the schools of the world
were thought of as a whole and dealt with as a
whole, these things could be produced wholesale at
a cost out of comparison cheaper than they are
made to-day. There is no reason whatever why
school equipment should not be a world market.
A lesson upon the geography of Sweden needs pre-
cisely the same maps, the same pictures of scenery,
types of people, animals, cities, and so forth,
whether that lesson is given in China or Peru or
Morocco or London. There is no reason why these
pictures and maps should not be printed from the
same blocks and distributed from the same centre
for the schools of all mankind. If the government
of any large country had the vigour and intelli-
gence to go right ahead and manufacture a proper
equipment of notes and diagrams for its own use

162 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

in all its own schools, it would probably be able
to recoup itself for most of the outlay by domi-
nating the map and diagram markets of the rest
of the world.

And next to this full and manageable collection
of pictures and diagrams, which the teacher would
whip out, with the appropriate notes, five minutes
before his lesson began, the modern school would
have quite a considerable number of gramophones.
These would be used not only to supply music for
drill and so forth, and for the analytical study of
music, but for the language teaching. Instead of
the teacher having to pretend, as he usually pre-
tends now, to a complete knowledge of the foreign
language he can really only smatter, he would
become the honest assistant of the real teaching
instrument the gramophone. Here, again, it is
a case for big methods or none a case for mass
production. A mass production of gramophone
records for language teaching throughout the
world would so reduce the cost that every school
could quite easily be equipped with a big repertory
of language records. For the first year of any
language study, at any rate, the work would go
always to the accompaniment of the proper accent
and intonation. And all over the world each lan-
guage would be taught with the same accent and
quantities and idioms a very desirable thing in-
deed.

And now let me pass on to another requirement
for an efficient school that our educational organ-
ization has still to discover the method of using

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 163

the cinematograph. I ask for half a dozen pro-
jectors or so in every school, and for a well-stocked
store-house of films. The possibilities of certain
branches of teaching have been altogether revolu-
tionized by the cinematograph. In nearly every
school nowadays yon will find a lot of more or less
worn and damaged scientific apparatus which is
supposed to be used for demonstrating the ele-
mentary facts of chemistry, physics and the like.
There is a belief that the science teachers and
they do their best with the time and skill and
material at their disposal rig up experimental
displays of the more illuminating experimental
facts with this damaged litter. Many of us can
recall the realities of the sort of demonstration I
mean. The performance took two or three hours
to prepare, an hour to deliver and an hour or so to
clear away; it was difficult to follow, impossible
to repeat, it usually went wrong, and almost in-
variably the teacher lost his temper. These prac-
tical demonstrations occurred usually in the open-
ing enthusiasm of the term. As the weeks wore
on, the pretence of practical teaching wag quietly
dropped, and we era-mined our science out of the
text-book.

Now that is the sort of thing that still goes on.
But it ought to be entirely out of date. All that
scientific bjric-a-brac in the cupboard had far bet-
ter be thrown away. All the demonstration ex-
periments that science teachers will require in the
future can be performed once for all before a
cinematograph. They can be done finally; they

164 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

need never be done again. You can get the best
and most dexterous teacher in the world he can
do what has to be done with the best apparatus, in
the best light; anything that is very minute or
subtle you can magnify or repeat from another
point of view; anything that is intricate you can
record with extreme slowness; you can show the
facts a mile off or six inches off, and all that your
actual class teacher need do now is to spend five
minutes on getting out the films he wants, ten
minutes in reading over the corresponding lecture
notes, and then he can run the film, give the les-
son, question his class upon it, note what they miss
and how they take it, run the film again for a sec-
ond scrutiny, and get out for the subsequent study
of the class the ample supply of diagrams and pic-
tures needed to fix the lesson. Can there be any
comparison between the educational efficiency of
the two methods?

So I put it to you, that it is possible now to
make and that the world needs badly that we
should make a new sort of school, a standardized
school, a school richly equipped with modern ap-
paratus and economizing the labour of teaching
to an extent at present undreamt of, in which, all
over the world, the same stereotyped lessons, lead-
ing the youth of the whole world through a paral-
lel course of schooling, can be delivered.

I know that in putting this before you I chal-
lenge some of the most popular affectations of cul-
tivated people. I know that many people will be
already writhing with a genteel horror at the idea

THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 165

of the same lesson being given in identical terms
to everybody in turn throughout the world. It
sounds monotonous. It will rob the world of
variety and so on and so on. But indeed it will
not be monotonous at all. That lesson will be new
and fresh and good to every pupil who receives it.
And remember it is by our hypothesis the best
possible form and arrangement of that lesson. It
is to take the place of a sham lesson or no lesson
at all. There is an eternal freshness in learning
as in all the other main things in life. It will be
no more monotonous than having one's seventh
birthday or falling in love for the first time.

And as for variety, I for one do not care how
soon every possible variety of ignorance and mis-
conception is banished from the world. The sun
shines on the whole world and it is the same sun.
I have still to be persuaded that our planet would
be more various and interesting if it were lit by
two or three thousand uncertain, spasmodic and
differently coloured searchlights directed upon it
from every direction. I am pleading for a clear
white light of education that shall go like the sun
round the whole world.

Yon see that in all this I am driving at what
shall I call it? syndicated schools, syndicated les-
son notes, and, so far as equipment goes, mass pro-
duction. I want to see the sort of thing happen-
ing to schools that has already happened to many
sorts of retail shops. In the place of little ill-
equipped schools, each run by its own teacher and
buying its own books and diagrams and material

166 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

and so forth in small quantities at high prices, I
want to see a great central organization, employ-
ing teachers of genius, working in consultation and
co-operation and producing lesson notes, dia-
grams, films, phonograph records, cheaply, abun-
dantly, on a big scale for a nation, or a group of
nations, or, if you like, for all the world, just as
America produces watches and alarum clocks and
cheap automobiles for all the world. And I want
to see the schools of the world being run, so far as
the intellectual training goes, not by local com-
mittees but by that central organization.

It is only by this reorganization of schooling
upon, the lines of big production that we can hope
to get a civilized community in the world at an
educational level very markedly higher than, the
existing educational level.

But if we could so economize teaching energy
if we made our really great teachers, by the use
of modern appliances, teachers not of handfuls but
of millions ; if we insisted upon a universal appli-
cation of the best and most effective methods of
teaching, just as we insist upon the best and most
effective methods of street traction and town
lighting then I believe it would be possible to
build the civilization of the years to come on a
foundation of mental preparation incomparably
sounder and higher than anything we know of
to-day.

VII

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER A35TD BOOK

now let us go on to the next stages of
education.

The schooling process Is a natural phase in
human development it is our elaboration of the
natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of
adolescence. There was schooling before schools ;
there "was schooling before humanity. I have
watched a cat schooling her Mttens. Schooling is
a part of being young. And we grow up. So
there comes a time when schooling is over, when
the process of equipment gives place to an increas-
ing share in the activities and decisions of adult
life.

Nevertheless for us education must still go on.

I suppose that the savage or the barbarian or
the peasant in any part of the world or the unedu-
cated man anywhere "would laugh if you told him
that the adult must still learn. 33ut in our mod-
ern world I mean the more or less civilized world
of the last twenty-five centuries or so there has
grown up a new idea new, I mean, in the sense
that it runs counter to the life scheme of primi-
tive humanity and of most other living things
and that is the idea that one can go on learning

167

168 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

right up to the end of life. It marks off modern
man from all animals, that in Ms adult life lie can
display a sense that there remains something still
to be investigated and wisdom still to be acquired.

I do not know enough history to tell yon with
any confidence when adult men, instead of just
going about the business of life after they had
grown up, continued to devote themselves to learn-
ing, to a deliberate prolongation of what is for all
other animals an adolescent phase. But by the
time of Buddha in India and Confucius in China
and the schools of the philosophers in the Greek
world the thing was in full progress. That was
twenty-six centuries ago or more.

Something of the sort may have been going on
in the temples of Egypt or Samaria a score of
centuries before. I do not know. You must ask
some such great authority as Professor Breasted
about that. It may be fifty or a hundred centuries
since men, although they were fully grown up,
still went on trying to learn.

The idea of adult learning has spread ever
since. To-day I suppose most educated people
would agree that so long as we live we learn and
ought to learn that we ought to develop our ideas
and enlarge, correct and change our ideas.

But even to-day you will find people who have
not yet acquired this view. You will find even
teachers and* doctors and business men who are
persuaded that they had learnt all that there was
to learn by twenty-five or thirty. It is only quite
recently that this idea has passed beyond a special

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 169

class and pervaded the world generally the Idea
of everyone being a life-long student and of the
whole world becoming, as it were, a university for
those who have passed beyond the schooling stage.

It has spread recently because in recent years
the world has changed so rapidly that the idea of
settling down for life has passed out of our minds,
has given place to a new realization of the need
of continuous adaptation to the very end of our
days. It is no good settling down in a world that,
on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort.

But hitherto, before these new ideas began to
spread in our community, the mass of men and
women definitely settled down. At twelve, or fif-
teen, or sixteen, or twenty it was decided that they
should stop learning. It has only been a rare
and exceptional class hitherto that has gone on
learning throughout life. The scene and field of
that learning hitherto has been in our "Western
communities the University. Essentially the Uni-
versity is and has been an organization of adult
learning as distinguished from preparatory and
adolescent learning.

But between the phase of schooling and the
phase of adult learning there is an intermediate
stage.

In Scotland and America that is distinguished
and thought of clearly as the college stage. But in
England, where we do not think so clearly, this
college stage is mixed up with and done partly at
school and partly in the University. It is not
marked off so definitely from the stage of general

170 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

preparation that precedes it or from the stagg of
free intellectual enterprise that follows it.

Now what should college give the young citi-
zen, male or f emale, upon the foundation of schopl-
ing we have already sketched out f In practice we
find a good deal of technical study comes into the
college stage. The budding lawyer begins to read
law, the doctor starts his professional studies, the
future engineer becomes technical, and the young
merchant sets to work, or should do, to study the
great movements of commerce and business
method and organization.

As the college stage of those who don't, as a
matter of fact, go to college, we have new in
every civilized country the evening continuation
school, the evening technical school and the works
school.

But important as these things are from the
point of view of service, they are not the soul not
the real meaning of the college stage.

The soul of the college stage, the most impor-
tant value about it, is that in it is a sort of pre-
paratory pause and inspection of the whole arena
of life. It is the educational concomitant of the
stage of adolescence.

The young man and the young woman begin
to think for themselves, and the college education
is essentially the supply of stimulus and material
for that process.

It was in the college stage that most of us made
out our religion and made it real for ourselves.
It was then we really took hold of social and politi-

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 171

cal ideas, when we became alive to literature and
art, when we began the delightful and distressful
enterprise of finding ourselves.

And I think most of ns will agree when we look
back that the most real thing in onr college life
was not the lecturing and the lessons very much
of that stuff could very well have been done in the
schooling stage but the arguments of the debat-
ing society, the discussions that broke out in the
class-room or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms
about Grod and religion, about the state and free-
'dpm, about art, about every possible and impos-
sible social relationship.

Now in addition to that I had something else
in my own college course something of the same
sort of thing but better.

I have spoken of myself as underedueated. My
schooling was shocking but, as a blessed compen-
sation, my college stage was rather exceptionally
good. My schooling ended when I was thirteen.
My father, who was a professional cricketer, was
smashed up by an accident and I had three horri-
ble years in employment in shops. Then my luck
changed and I found myself under one of the very
i greatest teachers of his time, Professor ^xley.
I worked at the Eoyal College of Science in Lon-
don for one year under him in his great course
in zoology, and for a year and a half under a
very good but rather uninspiring teacher, Profes-
sor Judd, the geologist. I did also physics and
astronomy. Altogether I had three full years of
science study. And the teaching of biology at that

172 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

time, as Huxley had planned it, was a continuing,
systematic, illuminating study of life, of the forms
and appearances of Me, of the way of life, of
the interplay of life, of the past of life and the
present prospect of life. It was a tremendous
training in the sifting of evidence and the exami-
nation of appearances.

Every man is likely to be biassed, I suppose, in
favour of his own educational course. Yet it
seems to me that those three years of work were
educational that they gave ^ a vision of the
universe as a whole and a discipline and a power
such as no other course, no classical or mathemati-
cal course I have ever had a chance of testing,
could do.

I am so far a believer in a biological backbone
for the college phase of education that I have
secured it for my sons and I have done all I can
to extend it in England. Nevertheless, important
as that formal college work was to me, it still
seems to me that the informal part of our college
life the talk, the debates, the discussion, the
scampering about London to attend great political
meetings, to hear William Morris on Socialism,
Auberon Herbert on Individualism, Gladstone on
Home Eule, or Bradlaugh on Atheism, for those
were the lights of my remote student days was
about equally important.

If ^schooling is a training in expression and com-
munication, college is essentially the establish-
ment of broad convictions. And in order that they
may be established firmly and clearly, it is neces-

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 173

sary that the developing young man or woman
should hear all possible views and see the medal
of truth not only from the obverse but from the
reverse side.

Now here again I want to put the same sort of
questions I have put about schooling.

Is the college stage of our present educational
system anywhere near its maximum possible effi-
ciency? And could it not be extended from its
present limited range until it reached practically
the whole adolescent community?

Let me deal with the first of these questions
first.

Could we not do much more than we do to make
the broad issues of various current questions plain
and accessible to our students in the college stage?

For example, there is a vast discussion afoot
upon the questions that centre upon Property, its
rights and its limitations. There is a great liter-
ature of Collectivist Socialism and Guild Social-
ism and Communism. About these things our
young people must know. They are very urgent
questions; our sons and daughters will have to
begin to deal with them from the moment they
leave college. Upon them they must form working
opinions, and they must know not only what they
themselves believe but, if our public affairs are
not to degenerate into the squalid, obstinate, hope-
less conflicts of prejudiced adherents, they must
know also what is believed by other people whose
convictions are different from theirs.

174 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

You may want to hush, these matters up. Many
elderly people do. You will fail.

All our intelligent students will insist upon
learning what they can of these discussions and
forming opinions for themselves. And if the Col-
lege wiU not give them the representative books,
a fair statement of the facts and views, and some
guidance through the maze of these questions, it
means merely that they will get a few books in
a defiant or underhand way and form one-sided
and impassioned opinions.

Another great set of questions upon which the
adolescent want to judge for theinselves, and
ought to judge for themselves, are the religious
questions.

And a third group are those that determine the
principles of sexual conduct

I know that in all these matters, on both sides
of the Atlantic, a great battle rages between
dogma and concealment on the one hand and open
ventilation on the other.

Upon the issue I have no doubt. I find it hard
even to imagine the case for the former side.

So long as schooling goes on, the youngster is
immature, needs to be protected, is not called upon
for judgments and initiatives, and may well be
kept under mental limitations. I do not care very
much how you censor or select the reading and
talking and thinking of the schoolboy or schoolgirl.
But it seems to me that with adolescence comes the
right to knowledge and the right of judgment.
And that it is the task and duty of the college to

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 175

give matters of opinion in the solid to let the
student walk round and see them from every side.

Now how is this to be done?

I suggest that to begin with we open wide our
colleges to propaganda of every sort. There is
still a general tendency in universities on both
sides of the Atlantic to treat propaganda as infec-
tion. For the adolescent it is not> it is a stimulat-
ing drug.

Let me instance my own case. I am a man of
'Protestant origins and with a Protestant habit of
mind. But it is a matter of great regret to me that
there is no good Eoman Catholic propaganda
available for my sons in their college life. I
would like to have the old Mother Church giving
my boys an account of herself and of the part she
has played in the history of the world, telling
them what she stands for and claims to be, giving
her own account of the Mass. These things are
interwoven with our past ; they are part of us. I
do not like them to go into a church and stare like
foreigners and strangers at the altar.

And side by side with that Catholic propaganda
I would like them to hear an interpretation of
religious origins and church history by some non-
catholic or sceptical ethnologist. He, too, should
be free to tell his story and drive Ms conclusions
home.

But you will find most colleges and most college
societies bar religious instruction and discussion.
What do they think they are training? gome sort
of genteel recluse or men and women?

176 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

So, too, with the discussion of Bolshevism. I
do not know how things are in America but in
England there has been a ridiculous attempt to
suppress Bolshevik propaganda. I have seen a
lot of Bolshevik propaganda and it is not very con-
vincing stuff. But by suppressing it, by police
seizures of books and papers and the like, it has
been invested with a quality of romantic mystery
and enormous significance. Our boys and girls,
especially the brighter and more imaginative, nat-
urally enough think it must be tremendous stuff
to agitate the authorities in this fashion.

At our universities, moreover, the more loutish
types of student have been incited to attack and
smash up the youths suspected of such reading.
This gives it the glamour of high intellectual
quality.

The result is that every youngster in the British
colleges with a spark of mental enterprise and
self-respect is anxious to be convinced of Bolshe-
vik doctrine. He believes in Lenin because he
has been prevented from reading him. Sober col-
lectivists like myself haven't a chance with him.

But you see my conception of the college course?
Its backbone should be the study of biology and its
substance should be the threshing out of the burn-
ing questions of our day.

You may object to this that I am proposing the
final rejection of that discipline in classical phi-
losophy which is still claimed as the highest form
of college education in the world the sort of
course that the men take in what is called Greats

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 177

at Oxford. You will accuse me of wanting to bury
and forget Aristotle and P]ato, Heracfitus and
Lucretius, and so forth and so on.

But I don't want to do that so far as their
thought is still alive. So far as their thought is
still alive, these men will come into the discussion
of living questions now. If they are Ancients and
dead then let them be buried and left to the ar-
chaeological excavator. If they are still Moderns
and alive I defy you to bury them if you are (Jis-
cussing living questions in a full and honest way.
But don't go hunting after them, if they are still
modern Immortals in the darkness of a forgotten
language. Don't make a superstition of them.
Let them come hunting after you. Either they are
unavoidable if your living questions are fully dis-
cussed, or they are irrelevant and they do not
matter. That there is a wisdom and beauty in
the classics which is incommunicable in any mod-
ern language, which obviously neither ennobles
nor empowers, but which is nevertheless su-
premely precious, is a kind of nonsense dear to the
second-rate classical don, but it has nothing en-
dearing about it for any other human beings. I
will not bother you further with that sort of affec-
tation here.

And this college course I have sketched should,
in the modern state, pass insensibly into adult
mental activities.

Concurrently with it there will be going on, as
I have said, a man's special technical training.
He will be preparing himself for a life of Indus-

178 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

trialism, commerce, engineering, agriculture, med-
icine, administration, education or what not. And
as with, the man, so with the woman. That, too, is
a process which in this changing new world of ours
can never be completed. Neither of these college
activities will ever really leave off. All through
his life a man or woman should be confirming, fix-
ing or modifying his or her general opinions ; and
all the time his or her technical knowledge and
power should be consciously increased.

And now let me come to the second problem we
opened up in connection with college education.
the problem of its extension.

Can we extend it over most or all of a modern
population?

I don't think we can, if we are to see it in terms
of college buildings, class rooms, tutors, profes-
sors and the like. Here again, just as in the case
of schooling, we have to raise the neglected prob-
lem neglected so far as education goes of econ-
omy of effort and we have to look once more 'at
the new facilities that our educational institutions
have so far refused to utilize. Our European col-
leges and universities have a long and honourable
tradition that again owes much to the educational
methods of the Roman Empire and the Hellenic
world. This tradition was already highly devel-
oped before the days of printing from movable
type, and long before the days when maps or Illus-
trations were printed. The higher education,
therefore, was still, as it was in the Stone Age,
largely vocal. And the absence of paper and so

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 179

forth, rendering note-books costly and rare, made
a large amount of memorizing necessary. For that
reason the mediaeval university teacher was al-
ways dividing his subject into firstly and secondly
and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so that the stu-
dent could afterwards tick off and reproduce the
points on his fingers a sort of thumb and finger
method of thought still to be found in perfection
in the discourses of that eminent Catholic apolo-
gist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that de-
stroys all sense of proportion between the head-
ings; main considerations and secondary 'and ter-
tiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent
numbers, but it was a mnemonic necessity of those
vanished days.

And they have by no means completely van-
ished. We still use the lecture as the normal basis
of instruction in our colleges, we still hear dis-
courses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form,
and we still prefer even a second-rate professor
on the spot to the printed word of the ablest
teacher at a distance. Most of us who have been
through college courses can recall the distress of
hearing a dull and inadequate view of a subject
being laboriously unfolded in a long series of
tedious lectures, in spite of the existence of full
and competent text-books. And here again it
would seem that the time has come to centralize
our best teaching, to create a new sort of wide
teaching professor who will teach not in one col-
lege but in many, and to direct the local professor
to the more suitable task of ensuring by a com-

180 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

mentary, by organized critical work, and so forth,
that the text-book is duly read, discussed and com-
pared with the kindred books in the college

This means that the great teaching professors
will not lecture, or that they will lecture only to
try over their treatment of a subject before an
intelligent audience as a prelude to publication.
They may perhaps visit the colleges under their
influence, but their basic instrument of instruction
will be not a course of lectures but a book. They
will carry out the dictum of Carlyle that the mod-
ern university is a university of books.

Now the frank recognition of the book and not
the lecture as the substantial basis of instruction
opens up a large and interesting range of possi-
bilities. It releases the process of learning from
its old servitude to place and to time. It is.no
longer necessary for the student to go to a particu-
lar room, at a particular hour, to hear the golden
words drop from the lips of a particular teacher.
The young man who reads at eleven o 'clock in the
morning in luxurious rooms in Trinity College,
Cambridge, will have no very marked advantage
over another young man, employed during the
day, who reads at eleven o 'clock at night in a bed-
sitting-room in Glasgow. The former, you will
say, may get commentary and discussion, but there
is no particular reason why the latter should not
form some sort of reading society with his fellows,
and discuss the question with them in the dinner
hour and on the way to the works. Nor is there

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 181

any reason why lie should not get tutorial help as a
university extension from the general educational
organization, as good in quality as any other
tutorial help.

And this release of the essentials of a college
education from limitations of locality and: time
brought about by modern conditions, not only
makes it unnecessary for a man to come "upV to
college to be educated, but abolishes the idea that
his educational effort comes to an end when he
goes "down." Attendance at college no longer
justifies a claim to education ; inability to enter a
college is no longer an excuse far illiteracy.

I do not think that our educational and uni-
versity authorities realize how far the college
stage of education has already escaped from the
loeal limitations of colleges; they do not under-
stand what a great and growing volume of adoles-
cent learning and thought, of college education in
the highest and best sense of the word, goes on
outside the walls of colleges altogether; and on
the other they do not grasp the significant fact
that, thanks to the high organization of sports and
amusements and social life in our more prosperous
universities, a great proportion of the youngsters
who come in to their colleges never get the reali-
ties of a college education at all, and go out into
the world again as shallow and uneducated as they
came in. And this failure to grasp the great
change in educational conditions brought about,
for the most part, in the last half century, accounts
for the fact that when we think of any extension of

182 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

higher education in the modern community we are
all too apt to think of it as a great proliferation of
expensive, pretentious college buildings and a
great multiplication of little teaching professor-
ships, and a further segregation of so many hun-
dreds or thousands of our adolescents from the
general community, when as a matter of fact the
reality of education has ceased to lie in that direc-
tion at all. The modern task is not to multiply
teachers but to exalt and intensify exceptionally
good te'achers, to recognize their close relation-
ship with the work of university research which
it is their business to digest and interpret and to
secure the production and wide distribution of
books throughout the community.

I am inclined to think that the type of adoles-
cent education, very much segregated in out-of-
the-way colleges and aristocratic in spirit, such
as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale,, Hol-
loway, "Wellesley and the like, has probably
reached and passed its maximum development. I
doubt if the modern community can afford to con-
tinue it ; it certainly cannot afford to extend it very
widely.

But as I have pointed out, there has always
been a second strand to college education the
technical side, the professional .training or appren-
ticeship. Here there are sound reasons that the
student should go to a particular place, to the
special museums and laboratories, to the institutes
of research, to the hospitals, factories, works,
ports, industrial centres and the like where the

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 183

realities lie studies are to be found, or to the stu-
dios or workshops or theatres where they practise
the art to which he aspires. Here it seems we
have natural centres of aggregation in relation to
which the college stage of a civilized community,
the general adolescent education, the vision of the
world as a whole and the realization of the indi-
vidual place in it, can be organized most con-
veniently.

You see that what I am suggesting here is in
effect that we should take our colleges, so far as
they are segregations of young people for general
adolescent education, and break them as a cook
breaks eggs and stir them up again into the gen-
eral intellectual life of the community.

Coupled with that there should, of course, be a
proposal to restrict the hours of industrial work or
specialized technical study up to the age of twenty,
at least, in order to leave time for this college
stage in the general education of every citizen of
the world.

The idea has already been broached that men
and women in the modern community are no
longer inclined to consider themselves as ever
completely adult and finished ; there is a growing
disposition and a growing necessity to keep on
learning throughout life. In the worlds of re^
search, of literature and art and economic enter-
prise, that adult learning tates highly specialized
forms which I will not discuss now; but in the gen-
eral modern community the process of continuing
education after the college stage is still evidently

184 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

only at a primitive level of development. There
are a certain number of literary societies and soci-
eties for the study of particular subjects; the pul-
pit still performs an educational function; there
are public lectures and in America there are the
hopeful germs of what may become later on a very
considerable organization of adult study in the
Lyceum Chautauqua system ; but for the general-
ity of people the daily newspaper, the Sunday
newspaper, the magazine and the book constitute
the only methods of mental revision and enlarge-
ment after the school or college stage is past.

Now we have to remember that the bulk of this
great organization of newspapers and periodicals
and all the wide distribution of books that goes on
to-day are extremely recent things. This new
nexus of print has grownup in the lifetime of four
or five generations, and it is undergoing constant
changes. We are apt to forget its extreme new-
ness in history and to disregard the profound dif-
ference in mental conditions it makes between pur
own times and any former period. It is impossible
to believe that thus far it is anything but a sketch
and intimation of what it will presently be. It
has grown. No man foresaw it ; no one planned
it. We of this generation have grown up with
it and are in the habit of behaving as though this
nexus haft always been with us and as though it
would certainly remain with us. The latter
conclusion is almost wilder than the f ormier.

By what we can only consider a series of for-
tunate accidents, the press and the book world

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 185

have provided and do provide a necessary organ
in the modern world state, an organ for swift gen-
eral information upon matters of fact and for the
rapid promulgation and diffusion of ideas and in-
terpretations. The newspaper grew, as we know,
out of the news letter which in a manuscript form
existed before the Eoman Empire ; it owes its later
developments largely to the advertisement possi-
bilities that came with the expansion of the range
of trading as the railways and suchlike means of
communication developed. Modern newspapers
have been described, not altogether inaptly, as
sheets of advertisements with news and discus-
sions printed on the back. The extension of book
reading from a small class, chiefly of men, to^the
whole community has also been largely a response
to new facilities ; though it owes something also to
the religious disputes of the last three centuries.
The population of Europe, one may say with a cer-
tain truth, first learnt to read the Bible, and only
afterwards to read books in general. A large pro-
portion of the book publishing in the English lan-
guage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
still consisted of sermons and controversial theo-
logical works.

Both newspaper and book production began in
a small way as the enterprise of free individuals,
^without anyone realizing the dimensions to which
the thing would grow. Our modern press aiid
book trade, in spite of many efforts to centralize
and control it, in spite of Defence of the Eealm
Acts and the like, is still the production of an

186 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

unorganized multitude of persons. It isr not cen-
tralized; it is not controlled. To this fact the
nexus of print owes what is still its most valuable
quality. Thoughts and ideas of the most varied
and conflicting sort arise and are developed and
worked out and fought out in this nexus, just as
they do in a freely thin king vigorous mind.

I am not, you will n,ote, saying that this free-
dom is perfect or that the thought process of the
print nexus could not go very much better than it
does, but I am saying that it -has a very consider-
able freedom and^vigour and that s-o far as it has
these qualities it is a very fine thing indeed.

Now many people think that we are moving in
the direction of world socialism to-day. Collec-
tivism is perhaps & better, more definite word than
socialism, and, so far as keeping the peace- gx>es,
and in matters of transport and communication,
trade, currency, elementary education, the produc-
tion and distribution of staples and the conserva-
tion of the natural resources of the world go,, I
believe that the world and the common sense of
mankind move steadily towards a world collec-
tivism. But the more co-operation we have in our
common interests, the more necessary is it to
guard very jealously the freedom of the mind, that
is to say, the liberty of discussion and suggestion.

It is here that the Communist regime in Russia
has encountered its most fatal difficulty. A catas-
trophic unqualified abolition of private property
has necessarily resulted in all the paper, all the
printing machinery, all the libraries, all the news-

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 187

stalls and "book shops, becoming Government prop-
erty. It is impossible to print anything -without
the consent of the Government. One cannot buy
a book or newspaper; one must take what the Gov-
ernment distributes. Free discussion never a
very free thing in Eussia has now on any gen-
eral scale become quite impossible. It was a dif-
ficulty foreseen long ago in Socialist discussions,
but never completely met by the thorough paced
Communist. At one blow the active mental life
of Eussia has been ended, and so long as Eussia
remains completely and consistently communist it
cannot be resumed. It can only be resumed by
some surrender of paper, printing and book dis-
tribution from absolute Government ownership, to
free individual control. That can only be done by
an abandonment of the full rigours of communist
theory.

In our western communities the dangers to the
intellectual nexus lie rather on the other side. The
war period produced considerable -efforts at Gov-
ernment control and as a consequence considerable
annoyance to writers, much concealment and some
interference with* the expression of opinion; but
on the whole both newspapers and books held their
own. There is to-day probably as much freedom
of publishing as ever there was. It is not from
the western governments that mischief is likely to
come to free intellectual activity in the western
communities but from the undisciplined individ-
ual, and from the incitements to mob violence by

188 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

various propagandist religions and cults against
free discussion.

About the American press I know and can say
little. I will speak only of things with which I am
familiar. I anr inclined to think that there has
been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in
the British press since 1914, and a marked loss of
journalistic self-respect. Particular interests have
secured control of large groups of papers and
pushed their particular schemes in entire disre-
gard of the general mental well-being. For in-
istaiice, there has recently been a remarkable boy-
cott in the London press of a very able collectiyist
book, Sir Leo Money's " Triumph of Nationaliza-
tion" because it would have interfered with, the
operation of very large groups which were con-
cerned in getting back public property into private
hands on terms advantageous to the latter. It is
a book not only important as a statement of a
peculiar economic view, but because of the states-
manlike gravity and clearness of its exposition. I
do not think it would haver been possible to stand
between the public and a writer in this way in the
years before 1914. A considerable proportion of
the industrial and commercial news is now written
to an end. The British press has also suffered
greatly from the outbreak of social and nationalist
rancour arising out of the great war, the inability
of the European mind to grasp the Bolshevik
issue, and the clumsy blunderings of the Versailles
settlement. Quite half the news from Eastern
Europe that appears in the London press is now

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 189

deliberate fabrication, and a considerable propor-
tion of the rest is rephrased and mutilated to give
a misleading impression to the reader.

But people cannot be continuously deceived in
this way, and the consequence of this press de-
moralization has been a great loss of influence for
the daily paper. A diminishing number of people
now believe the news as it is given them, and fewer
still take the unsigned portions of the newspaper
as written in good faith. And there has been a
consequent enhancement of the importance of
signed journalism. Men of manifest honesty, men
with names to keep clean, have built up reputa-
tions and influence upon the ruins of editorial
prestige. The exploitation of newspapers by the
adventurers of "private enterprise " in business,
has carried with it this immense depreciation in
the power and honour of the newspaper.

I am inclined to think that this swamping of a
large part of the world's press by calculated false-
hood and partizan propaganda is a temporary
phase in the development of the print nexus:
nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and
danger to the world. It stands very much in the
way of that universal adult education which is our
present concern. Eeality is horribly distorted.
Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot,
therefore, begin to think about it rightly.

We need a much "better and more trustworthy
press than we possess. We cannot get on to a,
new and better world without it. The remedy is
to be found not, I believe, in any sort of Govern-

190 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

ment control, but in a legal campaign against the
one thing harmful the lie. It would be in the
interests of most big advertisers for most big
advertisement is honest ; it would be, in the long-
run, in the interests of the press, and it would
mean an enormous step forward in the general
mental clarity of the world if a deliberate lie,
whether in an advertisement or in the news or
other columns of the press, was punishable pun-
ishable whether it did or did not involve anything
that is now an actionable damage. And it would
still further strengthen the print nexus and clear
the mind of the world if it were compulsory to
correct untrue statements in the periodical press,
whether they had been made in good faith or'not,
at least as conspicuously and lengthily as the
original statement. I can see no impossibility in
the realization of either of these proposals, and
no objection that a really honest newspaper pro-
prietor or advertiser could offer to them. It would
make everyone careful, of course, but I fail to see
any grievance in that. The sanitary effect upon
the festering disputes of our time would be incal-
culably great. It would be like opening the win-
dows upon a stuffy, overcrowded and unventilated
room of disputing people.

Given adequate laws to prevent the cornering
of paper or the partisan control of the means of
distribution of books and printed matter, I believe
that the present freedoms and the unhampered
individualism of the world of thought, discussion
and literary expression are and must remain con-

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 191

ditions essential to the proper growth and activity
of a common world mind. On the basis of that
sounder education I have sketched in a preceding
paper, there is possible such an extension of un-
derstanding, such an increase of intelligent co-op-
erations and such a clarification of wills as to dis-
solve away half the difficulties and conflicts of the
present time and to provide for the other half
such a power of solution as we, in the heats, entan-
glements and limitations of our present igno-
rance, doubt and misinformation can scarcely be-
gin to imagine.

I do not know how far I have conveyed to you
in the last two papers nay underlying idea of an
education not merely intensive but extensive,
planned so economically and so ably as to reach
every man and woman in the world.

It is a dream not of individuals educated we
have thought too much of the individual educated
for the individual but of a world educated to a
pitch of understanding and co-operation far be-
yond anything we know of to-day, for the sake of
all mankind.

I have tried to show that, given organization,
given the will for it, such a world-wide education
is possible.

I wish I had the gift of eloquence so that I
could touch, your wills in this matter. I do not
know how this world of to-day strikes upon you.
I am not ungrateful for the gift of life, While
there is life and a human mind, it seems to me
there must always be excitements and beauty, even

192 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

if tlie excitements are fierce and the beauty terri-
ble and tragic. Nevertheless, this world of man-
kind to-day seems to me to be a very sinister and
dreadful world. It has come to this that I open
my newspaper every morning with a sinking heart,
and usually I find little to console me. Every day
there is a new tale of silly bloodshed. Every day I
read of anger and hate, oppression and misery
and want stupid anger and oppression, needless
misery and want the insults and suspicions * of
ignorant men, and the inane and horrible self-sat-
isfaction of the well-to-do. It is a vile world be-
cause it is an uiidereducated world, unreasonable,
suspicious, base and ferocious. The air of our
lives is a close and wrathful air; it has the close-
ness of a prison the indescribable offence of
crowded and restricted humanity.

And yet I know that there is a way out.

Up certain steps there is a door to this dark
prison of ignorance, prejudice and passion in
which we live and that door is only locked on the
inside. It is within our power, given the will for
it, given the courage for it it is within our power
to go out. The key to all our human disorder is
organized education, comprehensive and univer-
sal. The watchword of conduct that will clear up
all our difficulties is the plain truth. Rely upon
that watchword, use that key with courage ana we
can go out of the prison in which we live ; we can
go right out of the conditions of war, shortage,
angry scrambling, mutual thwarting and malaise
and disease in which we live ; we and our kind can

COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 193

go out into sunlight, into a sweet air of under-
standing, into confident freedoms and a full crea-
tive life for ever.

I do not know I do not dare to believe that
I shall live to hear that key grating in the lock,
It may be our children and our children's children
will still be living in this jail. But a day will
surely come when that door will open wide and all
our race will pass out from this magic prisoA. of
ignorance, suspicion and indiscipline in which we
now all suffer together.

vin

THE ESTVOY

IK the preceding papers I have, with some repe-
tition and much stumbling, set out a fairly com-
plete theory of what men and women have to do
at the present time if human life is to go on hope-
fully to any great happiness and achievement in
the days to come. Much of this material was first
prepared to be delivered to a lecture audience, and
I regret that ill-health has prevented a complete
re-writing of these portions. There is more of the
uplifted forefinger and the reiterated point than
I should have allowed myself in an essay. But
this is a loss of grace rather than of clearness.
And since I am stating a case and not offering the
reader anything professing to be a literary work,
I shall not apologize for finally summing up and
underlining the chief points of this book.

They are, firstly : that a great change in human
coijditions has been brought about during the past
century, and secondly that a vast task of adapta-
tion, which must be, initially and fundamentally,
mental adaptation, has to be undertaken by our
race. It is a task which politicians, who live from
day to day, and statesmen, who live from event to
event, may hinder or aid very greatly, but which

194

THE ENVOY 195

they ^cannot be expected to conduct or control.
Politicians and statesmen perforce live and work
in the scheme of ideas they find about them; the
conditions of their activities are made for them.
They can be compelled by the weight of public
opinion to help it, but the driving force for this
great task must come not from official sources but
from the steadfast educational pressure of a great
and growing multitude of convinced people. In
times of fluctuation and dissolving landmarks^ the
importance of the teacher using the word in its
widest sense rises with the progressive dissolu-
tion of the established order.

The creative responsibility for the world to-daj;
passes steadily into the hands of writers and
school teachers, students of social and economic
science, professors and poets, editors and jour-
nalists, publishers and newspaper proprietors,
preachers, every sort of propagandist and every
sort of disinterested person who can give time and
energy to the reconstruction of the social idea.
Human life will continue to be more and more
dangerously chaotic until a world social idea crys-
tallizes out. That and no existing institution
and no current issue is the primary concern of
the present age.

We need, therefore, before all other sorts of
organization, educational organizations ; we need,
before any other sort of work, work of education
and enlightenment; we need everywhere active
societies pressing for a better, more efficient con-
duct of public schooling, for a wider, more enlight-

196 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

ening school curriculum, for a world- wide linking
up of educational systems, for a ruthless subordi-
nation of naval, military and court expenditure
to educational needs, and for a systematic dis-
couragement of mischief -making between nation
and nation and race and race and class and class,
I could wish to see Educational Societies, organ-
ized as such, springing up everywhere, watching
local bodies in order to divert economies from the
educational starvation of a district to other less
harmful saving; watching for obscurantism and
reaction and mischievous nationalist teaching in,
the local schools and colleges and in the local
press ; watching members of parliament and con-
gressmen for evidences of educational good-will
or malignity; watching and getting control of the
administration of public libraries ; assisting, when
necessary, in the supply of sound literature in
their districts ; raising funds for invigorating edu-
cational propaganda in poor countries like China
and in atrociously educated countries like Ireland,
and corresponding with kindred societies through-
out the world. I believe such societies would
speedily become much more influential than the
ordinary political party clubs and associations
that now use up so much human energy in the
western communities. Subordinating all vulgar
political considerations to educational develop-
ment as the supreme need in the world's affairs,
even quite small societies could exercise a power-
ful decisive voice in a great number of political
contests. And an educational movement is more

THE ENVOY 197

tenacious than any other sort of social or political
movement whatever. It trains its adherents.
What it wins it holds.

I know that in thus putting all the importance
upon educational needs at the present time I shall
seem to many readers to be ignoring quite ex-
cessively the profound racial, social and economic
conflicts that are in progress. I do. I believe we
shall never get on with human affairs until we do
ignore them. I offer no suggestion whatever as to
what sides people should take in such an issue as
that between France and Germany or between
Sinn Fein and the British Government, or in the
class war. I offer no such suggestion because I
believe that all these conflicts and all such current
conflicts are so irrational and destructive that it
is impossible for a sane man who wishes to serve
the world to identify himself with either side in
any of them. These conflicts are mere aspects of
the gross and passionate stupidity and ignorance
and sectionalism of our present world. The class
war, the push for and the resistance to some vague
reorganization called the Social Eevolution such
things are the natural inevitable result of the sor-
did moral and intellectual muddle of our common
ideas about property. The capitalist, the em-
ployer, the property-owning class, as a class, have
neither the intelligence nor the conscience to com-
prehend any moral limitations, any limitations
whatever but the strong arm of the law, upon what
they do with their property. Their black and ob-
stinate ignorance, the clumsy adventurousness

198 THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION

they call private enterprise, their unconscious in-
solence to poor people, their stupidly conspicuous
self-indulgence, produce as a, necessary result the
black hatred of the employed and the expropri-
ated. On one side we have greed, insensibility and
incapacity, on the other envy and suffering stung
to vindictive revolt ; on neither side light nor gen-
erosity nor creative will. Neither side has any
power to give us any reality we need. Neither
side is more than a hate and an aggression. How
can one take sides between them?

The present system, unless it can develop a "bet-
ter intelligence and a better heart, is manifestly
destined to foster fresh wars and to continue wast-
ing what is left of the substance of mankind, until
absolute social disaster overtakes us all. And
manifestly the revolutionary communist, at Jiis
present level of education, has neither the plans
nor the capacity to substitute any more efficient
system for this crazy edifice of ill-disciplined pri-
vate enterprise that is now blundering to destruc-
tion. But at a higher level of intelligence, at a
level at which it is possible to define the limitations
of private property clearly and to ensure a really
loyal and effectual co-operation between individual
and state, this issue this wholly destructive con-
flict between the property manipulator and the
communist fanatic which is now rapidly wreck-
ing our world disappears. It disappears as
completely as the causes of a murderous conflict
between two drunken men will disappear when

THE ENVOY 199

they are separated and put under a stream of clear
cold water.

So it is that, in spite of their apparent urgency,
I ask the reader to detach himself from these pres-
ent conflicts of national politics, of political par-
ties and of the class war as completely as he can;,
or, if he cannot detach himself completely, then
to play such a part in them, regardless of any
other consideration, as may he most conducive to
a wide-thinking, wide-ranging education upon
which we can base a new world order. A resolute
push for quite a short period now might recon-
struct the entire basis of our collective human
life.

In this book I have tried to show what form
that push should take, to show that it has a reason-
able hope of an ultimate success, and that unless
it is made, the outlook for mankind is likely to
become an entirely dismal prospect. I put these
theses before the reader for his consideration.
They are not discursive criticisms of life, not hap-
hazard grumblings at our present discontents,
they are offered as the fundamental propositions
of an ordered constructive project in which he can
easily find a part to play commensurate with his
ability and opportunities.