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51 chapters
THE COMING OF BLÉRIOT
THE COMING OF BLÉRIOT
The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks a trunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message comes through: “Blériot has crossed the Channel.... An article ... about what it means.” I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my fri
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MY FIRST FLIGHT
MY FIRST FLIGHT
Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination, but this morning I flew. I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we went out to sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed steeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I had had only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspected pleasures. At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higher and further. This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest
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OFF THE CHAIN
OFF THE CHAIN
I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year , and noting how much the world can change in seventy years. I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in that ex-sheriff’s coach he bought in Long Acre—where now the motor-cars are sold—when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr. Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion. He had left London last Saturday week midday; he hoped to be back by Thursday; and he had tal
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OF THE NEW REIGN
OF THE NEW REIGN
The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vast army of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created set themselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that converges upon Central London will be choked again with great loads of timber—but this time going outward—as our capital emerges from this unprecedented inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately of all recorded British Coronations is past. What new phase in the life of o
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WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?
WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?
What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxly scattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formed countries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies? What will enable it to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable external pressures and attacks to which it must be subjected? This is the primary question for British Imperialism; everything else is secondary or subordinated to that. There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose most of them
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§ 1
§ 1
Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance. The discontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep and increasing. It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real and irreparable class war. Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assurance of extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreading disorganisation. It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labour troubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment. No ad
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§ 2
§ 2
The essential trouble in our growing labour disorder is the profound distrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation of workers of either the ability or the good faith of the property-owning, ruling and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or not of this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the striking and essential factors in the contemporary labour situation. This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes that now follow each
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§ 3
§ 3
In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present Labour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in this discussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of the workers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely too forensic method of treating their claims. I want now to point out a still more powerful set of influences which is steadily turning our labour struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages into movements that
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§ 4
§ 4
Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are likely to spring out of the present labour situation. It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is not development but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side and sufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible to restore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate into a wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility is the worst and perhaps the le
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§ 5
§ 5
It is almost a national boast that we “muddle through” our troubles, and I suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certain kindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things, and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures and extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people, only a little chipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment that
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§ 6
§ 6
I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation. I have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem to be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class as such and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and the production of an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of chronic social conflict and possibly even of frankly revolutio
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SOCIAL PANACEAS
SOCIAL PANACEAS
To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in the Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular thought. And among other things I see now much better than I did why patent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we are far too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch to simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation to quacks. Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solution neatly done up i
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SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP?
SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP?
“Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or is he a man first and incidentally a railway porter?” That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism which is called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that great commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisation tend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly upon a vast social rec
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§ 1
§ 1
For many years now I have taken a part in the discussion of Socialism. During that time Socialism has become a more and more ambiguous term. It has seemed to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social progress and the public side of my life by restating them, and this I have attempted in this essay. In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to employ them with a certain defined intention. They are firstly: The Normal Social Life, and secondly: The Great State. Th
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§ 2
§ 2
The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture, traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have been of such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god. Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period do we f
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§ 3
§ 3
Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regard contemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the inevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, in Progress, in a future for our species differing continually more from its past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they look for new ways of living and new methods of human association with a certain adventurou
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§ 4
§ 4
Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the socialist movement at least hopeful and attractive and sympathetic, this would be an almost tragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was anything more than the first experiment in planning—and one almost inevitably shallow and presumptuous—of the long series that may be necessary before a clear light breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to be forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the laissez faire of the
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§ 1—Conscription
§ 1—Conscription
I want to say as compactly as possible why I do not believe that conscription would increase the military efficiency of this country, and why I think it might be a disastrous step for this country to take. By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment for a term of service in the Army of the whole manhood of the country. And I am writing now from the point of view merely of military effectiveness. The educational value of a universal national service, the idea which as a Socialist I support v
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§ 2
§ 2
In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument of naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and super-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our national resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least £160 for every £100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by the German Gove
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§ 3
§ 3
In the present armament competition there are certain considerations that appear to be almost universally overlooked, and which tend to modify our views profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they will affect our entire expenditure upon war preparation. Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes; there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and ammunition, and ex
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THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be; and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. I have been writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twenty years. It seems only yesterday that I wrote a review—the first long and appreciative review he had—of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly in the Saturday Review . When a man has focussed so much of his life upon the no
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THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUBLIC LIBRARY
THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUBLIC LIBRARY
Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend—though this is not in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible—and suppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the British public ought to read much more and better books than they do, and that founding public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sort of public libraries would he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topic for a disinterested speculator. He would, I suppose, being a philosopher,
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ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC
ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC
It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars or tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear an easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate of those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds varies greatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if not always a very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G. K. C
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ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE
ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE
There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and some whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token; and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by this time ha
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TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING
TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING
The London traffic problem is just one of those questions that appeal very strongly to the more prevalent and less charitable types of English mind. It has a practical and constructive air, it deals with impressively enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with a comforting effect of solidity upon assumptions that are at once doubtful and desirable. It seems free from metaphysical considerations, and it has none of those disconcerting personal applications, those penetrations towards int
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THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY
THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY
It has long been generally recognised that there are two quite divergent ways of attacking sociological and economic questions, one that is called scientific and one that is not, and I claim no particular virtue in the recognition of that; but I do claim a certain freshness in my analysis of this difference, and it is to that analysis that your attention is now called. When I claim freshness I do not make, you understand, any claim to original discovery. What I have to say, and have been saying
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DIVORCE
DIVORCE
The time is fast approaching when it will be necessary for the general citizen to form definite opinions upon proposals for probably quite extensive alterations of our present divorce laws, arising out of the recommendations of the recent Royal Commission on the subject. It may not be out of place, therefore, to run through some of the chief points that are likely to be raised, and to set out the main considerations affecting these issues. Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and
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§ 1
§ 1
If Youth but Knew , is the title of a book published some years ago, but still with a quite living interest, by “Kappa.” It is the bitter complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in one typical specimen. He is—if one might hazard a guess—an uncle bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other distressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and inadequate forms of exp
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§ 2
§ 2
But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, now no longer living, called the Independent Review , there appeared some years ago a very curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich, which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits which seem inseparably associated with modern scholastic work. It is called “English Ideas on Education,” and it begins—trite, imitative, undistinguished—thus: “The most important question in a country is that of education, and
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§ 3
§ 3
I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed upon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe, could I put the thing directly to the profession—“Do you not yourselves feel needlessly limited and dull?”—I should receive a majority of affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a schoolmaster
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THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in keeping English Socialism to the lines of “artfulness and the ’eighties,” refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of Motherhood. Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic pamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. These Fabian Socialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they are supposed to be, are really in man
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DOCTORS
DOCTORS
In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live in delightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, and everyone will have a chance of being happy—in that impossible world all doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health, with all or most of their income guaranteed to them: I doubt if there will be any private doctors at all. Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are. Daily I marvel at the wonders the
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AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION
AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION
There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there seems to be little else but gramophone. These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note. And why should they do that if they are really individuals? There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities that underlie life, some trade in records for these disting
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IS THERE A PEOPLE?
IS THERE A PEOPLE?
Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man, the greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the most incredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which the world has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundred years. It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached its grand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it is destined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for many year
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§ 1
§ 1
There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the world. There has always been discord between governments and governed since States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a matter of course that under all absolutisms and narrow oligarchies the community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it attaine
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§ 2
§ 2
Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, and have we, therefore, to get along as well as we can with it, just as a tainted and incurable invalid diets and is careful and gets along through life? Or is it possible that some entirely more representative and effective collective control of our common affairs can be devised? The answer to that must determine our attitude to a great number of fundamental questions. If no better governing body is possible than the stupid, dilatory and fore
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§ 1
§ 1
The social conditions and social future of America constitute a system of problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of any other part of the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions, and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the British colonies and in the newly settled parts of Siberia. For while in nearly every other part of the world the population of to-day is more or less completely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region, a
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§ 2
§ 2
If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once certain broad differences. The former, in comparison with the latter, is evolved and organised; the latter, in comparison with the former, is aggregated and chaotic. In nearly every European country there is a social system often quite elaborately classed and defined; each class with a sense of function, with an idea of what is due to it and what is expected of it. Nearly everywhere you find a governing class, aristocratic
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§ 3
§ 3
It is well to note how these eighty millions of people whose social future we are discussing are distributed. This huge development of human appliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of East Side, extraordinarily scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country across which the latest developments of civilisation are rushing. We are dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leavi
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§ 4
§ 4
When I speak of this vast multitude, these eighty millions of the United States of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-ised and common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not intend to convey that the American community is as a whole traditionless. There is in America a very distinctive tradition indeed, which animates the entire nation, gives a unique idiom to its press and all its public utterances, and is manifestly the starting point from which the adjust
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§ 5
§ 5
It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the tradition of one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up of peoples. This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenth-century Puritanism and eighteenth-century mercantile radicalism and rationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of which the American tradition is made. It is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflated to an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and unanticipated material p
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§ 6
§ 6
The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through its adoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis are not likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely to simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. It is with the detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear. But there are other forces of modification at work upon the American t
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§ 7
§ 7
I have hinted in the last section that there is a possibility that the new wave of constructive ideas in American thought may speedily develop a cant of its own. But even then, a constructive cant is better than a destructive one. Even the conscious hypocrite has to do something to justify his pretences, and the mere disappearance from current thought of the persuasion that organisation is a mistake and discipline needless, clears the ground of one huge obstacle even if it guarantees nothing abo
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§ 8
§ 8
The American universities are closely connected in their development with the appearance and growing class-consciousness of this aristocracy of wealth. The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of universities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands to furnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses a university, though in many instances these institutions are in the last degree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation of gove
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§ 9
§ 9
A third influence that may also contribute very materially to the reconstruction of the American tradition is the Socialist movement. It is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an Anarchistic form, has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionary movement of the wages-earning class against the property owner. It has already been pointed out that it derives not from contemporary English Socialism, but from the Marxist social democracy of the continent of Europe, and has n
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§ 10
§ 10
What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the people of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modify this profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of feminine education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in women. They are entering into the collective thought to a degree unprecedented
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§ 11
§ 11
It may be doubted if the increasing collective organisation of society to which the United States of America, in common with all the rest of the world, seem to be tending will be to any very large extent a national organisation. The constitution is an immense and complicated barrier to effectual centralisation. There are many reasons for supposing the national government will always remain a little ineffectual and detached from the full flow of American life, and this notwithstanding the very gr
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THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION
THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION
The Editor of the New York World has asked me to guess the general trend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial reference to the outlook for the State and City of New York. I like and rarely refuse such cheerful invitations to prophesy. I have already made a sort of forecast (in my Anticipations ) of what may happen if the social and economic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown a New York relieved from its present congestion by the development of the mean
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THE IDEAL CITIZEN
THE IDEAL CITIZEN
Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole range of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may do,
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SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES
SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES
The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The happy speculator in future sits on the piled-up wain, singing “I told you so,” with the submarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole successfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapes attention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keeping pace with the crop of consummations. The present trend of scientific development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; its
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THE HUMAN ADVENTURE
THE HUMAN ADVENTURE
Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with destiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; and when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to extinction. Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates the exhaustion of Nature’s kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself. Last of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He dispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps the scep
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