WHITHERWARD? HELL OR EUTOPIA

;ity of California hern Regional rary Facility

BY

VICTOR BRANFORD

LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

14 Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W.C. 2. 1921

Papers for the Present.

The following, except those marked as out of print, can be had price i/- post free on application to the Secretary, Cities Committee, Leplay House, 65 Belgrave Road, West- minster, S.W. i.

1. The Modern Midas.

2. The Banker's Part in Reconstruction.

3. Spirit Creative.

4. The Re-education of the Adult.

5. A Citizen Soldier : his education for Peace and War.

6. Public Health in the Industrial Age — out of print.

7. Business and Philanthropy: The Insurance of Wealth. 7a. Towards the Third Alternative — out of print.

8. A Rustic View of War and Peace.

9. The Drift to Revolution.

10. A Gardener of Paradise.

11. Sir Ronald Ross' Story.

12. The War-mind, the Business-mind and a Third

Alternative.

13. Theology, Civics and Poetry.

14. A New Year's Message: Earth, Hell and the Third

Alternative.

WHITHERWARD?

HELL OR EUTOPIA

BY

VICTOR (J3RANFORD

LpNDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE '&>'

14 Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W.C. 2. 1921

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Preface ... ... ... ... ... ... ... "i-

The Appeal, by Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor ... ... xi.

What to do ... ... ... xiv.

1. The Drift to Revolution ... ... ... ... i

2. The War-Mind, the Business-Mind and a Third

Alternative ... ... ... 53

3. A New Year's Message ... ... ... ... 77

4. Every Man his own Sociologist ... ... ... 101

Note on the Double Personality of Herbert Spencer ... 115

CORRIGENDA.

p. 5, for Stewart read Stuart.

n ./i 8. line 8 from bottom, for very substitute being.

p. 61, 2nd line from top, for

rejunivenescence read rejuvenescence. p. ioo, 5th line from bottom, for sea read set.

PREFACE.

•

ASSUREDLY the relevance of this volume to current issues should be fairly obvious. There are two aspects which the writer would especially desire to stress. One is the need to make diagnosis precede treatment in social ills no less than in bodily diseases. The other is that the suggested project of a Sabbatical Year for the Money-Power be calmly weighed and seriously considered. By most readers of a practical turn this notion will doubtless be dismissed as fantastic. But let such critics search their mind — and not less their heart — with two very definite questions. How otherwise than by exercise in a form of sacrifice fitting to the circumstances can be acquired that spirit of impassioned goodwill, clear thinking, and right action, which, always necessary to a sound view and

a wise handling of public affairs, is surely more needed than

ever in the present situation ? How otherwise than by some gesture of renunciation appropriate to the occasion can— t-he^ ' directive classes evoke from other classes a manifestation of public spirit adequate to present needs?

It will be asked what foundations of verifiable science support the diagnosis of social ills here made, and the sugges- tion of treatment put forward. By way of general answer to that question a chapter (Every Man his own Sociologist] has been added, which endeavours to outline those main traditions of sociological science about which there is general concur- rence among students of the history of sociology. But leaving this terra firma of fact and appreciation for the quick- sands of interpretative reference and practical guidance in respect of current issues, partisanship can hardly be avoided. It seems best, under these circumstances, to set out with complete frankness and sufficient fulness the standpoint and the aims of one's group. The group label happens in this case to be Civic Sociology. How then describe for the purpose in hand the standpoint of Civic Sociology and define its aims and mode of working?

We live at the confused juncture of an era that is passing, and one in the throes of birth. The old era is falling under a burden of historic evils aggravated by disorders peculiar to

iii.

IV. PREFACE

our Industrial Age. Our Towns and Cities have been sub- mitted to a deterioration of environment, thoroughgoing, prolonged, pervasive. Their depressed populations are driven to seek relief and enhancement in devious courses. Inevitably there goes on all the time an encouragement of agencies which stimulate the lower manifestations of life and repress or pervert the higher. And from the repressed inner life insidious ills break loose.

In the search for a cure of communitary diseases, a notable shift of tendency may be discerned. It is a turning away from separate modes of treatment for particular ills, and a concentration on the fostering of means towards life more abundant. The newer scientific treatment of evils as defects of life, thus comes to reinforce the older claims of religion to transmute the defects into the qualities of life.

Even the religious doctrine of redemption from sin through sacrifice begins to be understood by sociologists. Towards this illumination they are driven by a more penetra- ting observation of the facts of life as they lie around us. On all sides, amongst the individuals of every class and com- munity, are seen failures to develop spiritual latencies and not infrequently their perversion. It is manifestly not enough to protect the mind against the allurements of a debased environment and safeguard the soul from temptations of evil. The positive need towards life ablmdant is a vision quick to evoke the passion of a militant worship. But this worship fulfils its office only when the object of devotion is resonant with a supreme and creative harmony. Does the worship draw out and enlarge the spirit of personality and bring about its rapturous union with the spirit of community? That is the test question of redemption. For only when thus awakened does the spirit of man make those sacrifices of lower to higher things, which are at once purgative of evil and evocatory of the dedicated life. So does sacrifice become fulfilment, and life attains. Sacrifice does its proper work of making persons, communities and things sacred, in the measure that it liberates the energies of spiritual life to seek the heart's desire, the mind's purpose, the soul's quest. These surely are the human ends of economic activity, which, without them, is devoid of freedom ; and nowhere perhaps approaches nearer to slavery than when obedient to the " laws " of economic " science " and the dictates of a merely economic interpretation of history.

It is the aim of Civic Sociology to seek out, gather together, and, as far as may be, harmonize, the resources of

PREFACE V.

science and of religion available to these ends. Yet the merest beginnings have so far 'been made, either by civic sociology or other means, towards an authentic body of verified knowledge and tested practice bearing on social evils as science at its clearest sees them, and religion at its purest transmutes them.

In the absence of such guidance, the tendencies of thought and action are apt to be dispersive, even when not subversive. Now, the public mind is paralyzed by the multiform strifes of sectarianism ; again it is embittered by a massing into rival camps of Reaction and Revolution. Against the peril of corroding separatisms, there are to be sure, countering move- ments. Science is working towards synthesis of knowledge; philosophy towards unity of thought; religion towards unison of feeling ; yet harmonious action is apt to wait upon the slow and fitful coming together of all these three approaches to concord.

From the deadlock of Reaction and Revolution, the way of escape is less clear but more urgent; for, in Government and Industry, action is imperative whatever the state of thought and feeling. Happily there increasingly emerges from the side of common sense a Policy of the Third Alter- native. And the more the intuitive commonsense of everyday life is reinforced by the ratified commonsense of science, and inspired by the sanctified commonsense of religion, the less does this Third Alternative appear as a mere compromise between Convention and Insurgence. Rather does it come as a healing vision, at once purging from evil and kindling to joint adventure in the attainment of common aspirations.

Taken at their best the Parties of Reaction appeal to the Achievements of History, and the Parties of Insurgence to the Latencies of Life. Even so, there is apt to result a Politics biassed by an optimism of the Past, contending against a Politics of too fixed outlook upon an uncertain Future. Yet the remedy for both shortcomings is ever being more clearly discerned by those who seek to unite the tradition of science and the impulse of religion. That fixation of the backward look, and this of the forward look may be at once corrected by a careful looking around in the present. For in the life of the present (as sociology increasingly shows) may be discovered the best and the worst of the past ; and likewise the actual beginnings of the future, for good and ill. Hence the Policy of the Third Alternative is both retrospective and prospective, because in a thoroughgoing way it is circumspec- tive. In other words, it is based on a keen and critical survey

VI. PREFACE

of Town and Country, the Place and the People, as they are to-day and might become to-morrow, if the conditions of fulfilment be given. Goodwill and knowledge there must be and in abundance, but alone they cannot do the work required. The needed knowledge must be assembled in orderly fashion and presented simply, vividly, clearly in relation to the local life and its requirements. A group (however small) of the regional community must be impassioned by a vision of the local people, their work and their place as they might be if the available knowledge were freely, vigorously, fully applied to the bettering of environment and the enhancement of communitary life. Here, in the dedicated militancy of two or three gathered together in the name of the ideal is the providential leaven of spiritual life. And it may perhaps be taken as an article of faith and a principle of action, as valid in religion and morals as in nature, that leaven, when its fermentation has once fairly started, may safely be left to do its regenerative work, at its own time in its own way. That maybe was the core of truth, which gave a touch of the practical-mystical (and consequent vogue) to the old-fashioned politics of laissez-faire.

In his interpretation of history the civic sociologist, like the plain man that he is, sticks to the facts and rates them on a commonsense valuation; but without losing sight of our dreams, visions, hopes, faiths, and loves, for in these life- impulses are the springs of a militant worship fitted for creative deed in the here and now. Thus between the recent past and the incipient future we see and interpret the Present as a Transition. The impending change thus discerned is away from a destructive age of urban, mechanical and mone- tary doctrines with resulting nature-exhaustion and wars : it is towards a constructive age, inspired by a doctrine more vital and also spiritual, because moving from inner to outer. The passing age has been largely under leadership of the lower sciences, mainly those of mechanics and chemistry, but also of crude biology and of racial anthropology. The coming age will be one of personal and class harmony at home, and peace abroad, to the extent that the higher sciences, psycho- logical, social and civic, can combine towards leadership and inspiration with religion and the fine arts.

In economics the civic sociologist like the housewife stands for Economy. He demonstrates the higher economy of making and maintaining a human environment designed to evoke the finer latencies of spirit, mind and body, and planned to exercise their skilled application. " These impulses were more

PREFACE Vll.

repressed and perverted than drawn out and cultivated by the mean towns and desolate villages of the cruder industrial age. In the utilitarian " economy " of this passing phaser incredible wastes and extravagances were masked by lavish returns in money to favoured individuals and groups. Under a more vital doctrine, wealth will be measured by attainments and by economies in life, in energies and in materials.

In fine it should be clear that in practical things the civic sociologist is intensely practical. He seeks out the vital tendencies and tries to make them parts of a truly vital organization of society. This means mitigating the strifes of individuals, groups, classes, nations, all struggling in the toils of a money and machine economy, itself subject to the machinations of a politics pretentious when not predaceous. It means cultivating regional and civic polities, infinitely diversified yet richly harmonious, because everywhere bent on quickening the local life by evocation of the powers and graces of human personality without distinction of wealth, rank, class, sex, creed or race.

Return now to the more purely scientific standpoint. It has to be remembered that a sound tradition has very deliberately raised a barrier between the indicative mood of pure science and the imperative of applied science. The Sociological Society, being an organization concerned to build up a body of pure science in its own field, remains and must remain on the indicative side of that barrier. But within the widening circle of the Society there was formed, more than a dozen years ago, a group bent on applying to current affairs such sociological data as might be available, alike for theoretical interpretation and for practical guidance. This group — -the Cities Committee — during the later stages of the War launched a series of Papers for the Present; and these continue to be issued from time to time. They are devoted to two purposes; first to an interpretation of current events in terms of social evolution ; and next to exposition and advocacy of a policy of the Third Alternative. It will be understood that the Sociological Society bears no responsibility either for the interpretations set forth, or for the practical suggestions made therein.

From the fourteen Papers so far issued, three of those contributed by the present writer have been selected for inclusion in the present volume. These three make a sequence in the development of a theme which claims a very direct bearing on current issues. Each Paper is reproduced

Vlll. PREFACE

here as originally issued, the first (The Drift to Revolution] in the early spring of 1919, the second (The War-Mind, the .Business -Mind, and a Third Alternative] in the summer of 1920, and the third (A New Year's Message] in January, 1921. The first of these three Papers attempts to give an account, as detached and objective as maybe, of the conditions which led up to the war; and which even now after the relief of explosive activity are seen to be working again towards disastrous ends. The War-Mind, the Business-Mind, and A Third Alternative shows how the pre-war politics and economics continue their old courses, because our inner life is insufficiently awakened to vital issues. The New Year's Message demonstrates, in the spirit and mode of science, a way out of our present deadlock and confusion, through that gateway of sacrifice which is the traditional portal of religion. And here emerges a definitive contribution from the secular side. A scheme of renunciation is presented to the possess- ing classes as their way to a general reconciliation and a fresh communitary start.

Thus within the larger field of Civic Sociology, the three Papers here given present their own theme. They look back for a moment on that Victorian Society which to its contem- poraries smiled with the graces of a peace deep and lasting. But on closer scrutiny of its texture that society is seen to be shot with the red and purple threads of latent war and simmer- ing revolution. It was therefore but a natural denouement when through the explosive force of circumstance there burst into manifest design, the dim pattern of war unconsciously woven by the Victorians and their predecessors. But the flaming actuality of- war revealed unsuspected latencies of good as well as of evil in the fashioning of the human fabric. Life-enhancements were evoked as well as life-debasements imposed and manias of ravage aroused. In short, the war initiated and kept going experiments in Redemption as well as in Reversion. It was almost as though in every village, town and city throughout the land sociological laboratories had been set up for these experimental purposes. How to read, interpret and evaluate these manifold experiments that their resultant experiences may be available in the making of a better design for the social web in the coming times ? That perhaps is the supreme problem confronting the sociologist of the next half generation. Meantime many are assiduous in efforts to reweave the old pre-war pattern, while others are all for starting brand new ones. But to neglect in the

PREFACE IX.

immediate present the great experiment of the war in social and economic re-orientation is surely equally foolish and wrong, whether the motive be ignorance, antipathy or caution. Anyhow, it is a main purpose of the Papers here brought together to draw upon that source for light in finding a way of peaceful readjustment through the darkness of the present Transition.

Throughout the full scale of science there is or should be continuity from mathematics, physics, and chemistry up to psychology, ethics and sociology. But the lower notes of the scale resound with an appeal very different in human rank from the upper notes. Prospect of money gain from inven- tions is no small part of the incentive that promotes the practical applications of the lower sciences to industry and commerce. But in the higher sciences (those of mind, morals and society) the advance from specialized knowledge to its practical applications, as in progress of education, or ennoble- ment of citizenship, the pioneer sooner or later finds himself confronted by an order of problem to him strangely unfamiliar. He is called upon to present his discovery in the form of a new and compelling vision of life. And to do this is a work of art for whose composition he is almost invariably un- equipped. Happy the man of science who in this difficulty can call in aid a poet ready with the relevant imagery ! The present writer is doubly fortunate. The presentation of his theme made in the cold manner of science is kindled at its close by a touch of fire, he has ventured to steal from the poems of Mr. G. K. Chesterton. A more daring plunder from the splendours of imagery which glow and flash from the impassioned pages of Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor, opens this volume with a prelude of song that stirs to vision of cities renewed and art reborn to gladden the joyless folk.

The reader, touched by the Appeal of Mrs. Taylor, may find it a saddening descent to be asked in immediate sequel to grapple with the prosaic ethic of " What to do " in the here and now of everyday life and circumstance. But in calling for action, ere the fount of emotion aroused by the poet has run dry, the man of science is surely seizing his best, perhaps his only, chance of executive direction. And since ideas of class dictature are in fashion, the remark may be permitted, that Government by the small and modest groups who culti- vate the psychological and social sciences on a little oatmeal, might possibly follow, it could not conceivably precede the enthronement of poet, singer, musician, novelist, artist,

PREFACE

sculptor, architect ! Anyhow, it is in expectation of a momentary response to sociological counsel that a whole catalogue of imperatives is thrust upon the reader in the wake of Mrs. Taylor's poem. The subsequent diagnosis of ills and suggestions for treatment which make up the body of this book, do not profess to cover but in merest outline, the whole ground of ethic traversed in the scheme of What to Do. For further development there are other Papers than those here given. In particular the three more economic and financial Papers (No. I. The Modern Midas; No. II. The Bankers' Part in Reconstruction; and No. VII. Business and Philan- thropy, and the Insurance of Wealth] should be consulted for the basis of action recommended in regard to money matters. And again, for fuller exposition of this same line of thought and conduct, reference may be made to the several volumes of the Making of the Future series of Books (Williams and Norgate). Therein will be found a sustained endeavour to

O /

direct upon the making of the future the light of science focussed through the lens of religion.

LEPLAY HOUSE,

65, BELGRAVE ROAD,

WESTMINSTER, 1921.

XI.

THE APPEAL TO THE ARTIST.*

By Mrs. RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR

O ye that -walk in secret places

Adoring Beauty, Who is God, Turn, turn your pale enchanted faces,

Uplift the burning incense-rod. Down in the darkness of the Valley

The pack is out of pains and sins : Harken the furious hallali,

For now the Hunt of Death begins \ O ye that up in sun-veiled spaces

The Wounds of Ecstasy endure With Muses, Lores and heavenly Graces

Come down and pass among the Poor. These are your kindred, and these only.

Before the blue-winged Mercy-Seat They bring as ye bring (and these only)

The pierced hands, the pierced feet.

II.

All the long day upon the Wheel of Labour

Their bones are ground, That with the flute, the timbrel and the tabor

Your dreams may sound. Their limbs the clinging curse of Adam harries

That yours be free : Bright souls, regard their souls the death-sleep marries.

Yea, verily, Upon the Body's sullen rood the Spirit

Drinks Myrrh and dies. These cannot see the Earth that they inherit

With such tired eyes. A little bread to eat, a little raiment,

A hiding-place, — This the World's ransom, this the princely payment*.

O grey disgrace, Of days all emptied of the masques and roses !

A dream of fire They buy, the dream that suddenly discloses

Gates of desire. The dream that brings the soul, a Power, a Splendour^

To some great feast One moment ere she make the black surrender,

Wake like a beast. —

* By kind permission of Mrs. Taylor and her publisher, Mr. Elkin Mathews, this poem is here reprinted from the book Rose and Vine (1910).

Xll. THE APPEAL

Ah] lead them in some simple sweet translation

Out of this Night. For Life begins with beauty, adoration,

Wonder, delight.

III.

To the help of the Other Toilers, the drugged and the broken of heart,

Come, O ye kindred in love, ye beautiful Children of Art.

Mitred and girdled with rubies like dreaming Chaldean Kings,

Bearing delectable spoil of exquisite useless things —

Even as the Magians brought to the Stable of Bethlehem,

The rosy and emerald crowns, fair palace-flowers for them,

Their delicate wasteful odours cloistered in ivory,

Bring ye again your rarest to our Lady of Poverty.

Mitred and girdled with rubies like solemn Chaldean Kings,

Bring music and verses and spices, and carven and painted things.

IV.

Cities like sunsets and sunrises

Poets must build you burningly, O river-broidered Paradises,

Great lovers must your freemen be \ Sing gardens, delicately, slowly,

Stepping to find the lilied lakes, Sing iris, amaranth and moly

Hid where the nightingale awakes. Sing the vast squares, tall-towered arcaded,

Where the rejoicing fountains glow; Sing colours, sculptures, pomps unfaded

Where Life and Death augustly go, Where through rich ways like wrought romances

Wreathed Hymen with antiphonies High Hera, Hermes, lord of trances,

Lead to their diverse ecstasies Faint lovely souls. Sing gracious Mummers

For rainbow Masques and Miracles Of Springs and Autumns and Midsummers,

Thrilled through with viols, flutes and bells, — The Passion-play year long prevailing

That hails the Easter, mourns the Dead, The great High Mass that lifts unfailing

The sad mysterious Wine and Bread.

V.

Cast not, like alms, of Beauty's worst

Before the joyless folk. Do as the saintly rider durst

Who cleft his knightly cloak All glorious. Gemmy flowers and gold Wrapt his bedes brother from the cold.

THE APPEAL Xlll.

O Dreamers, breathe upon their eyes

That they may see again, And breathe as Love in loving sighs

Lest all the prayers be -vain. Though time and faith be faded, still Love works his own miraculous will.

Pity, forgive, if ye will save :

Forgive and pity long. Souls born and bred within the Cave

Must do the sun god wrong, Dreading his chariots, fain to flee The pangs of his bright archery.

The lucid wells they shall defile

(But keep the fountains pure) ; And rend the vines and roses while

Ye labour. — Yet endure, And plant again the fragrant closes : Their children's children shall love roses.

In gilded graven mtizers bring

The crystal pool of Joy; And if they spill the splendid spring,

The cunning cups destroy, In great peach-blossom bowls once more Bring rapture to the Darksome Door.

VI.

Go up to the Hills of God Go up, go up together Through the new Golden Weather, 'Toiler that bearest the hod, • Toiler that bearest spices In ivory slumbering Like a dreamy Magian King. Go up with your sacrifices. Fair in the eyes of God Rich thurible, patient hod. "°eace to you, brother and brother f ie have need of one another.

XIV.

WHAT TO DO.

HAVE faith in moral Renewal, next in Re-education, and therewith Reconstruction. For fulfilment, there must be a Resorption of Government into the body of the community. How ? By cultiva- ting the habit of directly constructive action instead of merely waiting upon representative agencies. Hence these social imperatives :

ECONOMICS (Agriculture, Industry, etc.).

i. — Cease to feel Labour personally as a 'f burden," or see it socially as a " problem " ; practise it as a primary function of life.

2. — Raise the life-standard of the people, and the thought-standard of schools and universities : so may the -workman and his fatnily receive due meed of real wages; the leisure of all become dignified; and for our money-economy be substituted a life-economy.

POLITICS (Resorption of Government).

3. — Eschew the despotic habit of regimentation, whether by Govern- ments, Trusts, Companies, tyrants, pedants or police; try the better and older way of co-ordination expanding from local centres through city, region, nation, and beyond; so may the spirit of fellowship express itself, instead of being sterilized by fear, crushed by adminis- trative machinery, or perverted by repression.

4. — Resist the political temptation to centralize all things in one metropolitan city; seek to renew the ancient tradition of Federation between free cities, regions, dominions.

5. — Encourage the linkages of labour, and of studious and profes- sional associations across international frontiers; it is tiiese that can quicken the unity of western civilization and bring forth its fruits of concord. Further, let our imperial bureaucrats abate their superior habit of instructing the orientals and try to learn from them.

CIVICS (Regions and Cities, their Survey and Service).

6. — Let cities, towns, villages, groups, associations, work out their own regional salvation; for that they must have freedom, ideas, vision to plan, and means to carry out, (a) betterments of environment (such as housing fit for family life, and land for a renewed peasantry), (b) -enlargements of mental horizon (such as forelooking universities, colleges and schools quick with local life and interests), (c) com- munitary festivals and other enrichments of life. All these must become parts of one ever-growing design for the coming years to realize.

7. — Stimulate sympathetic understanding between all sections of the community by co-operation in local initiative : so may European statesmen be no longer driven to avoid revolution by making war.

XV.

FINANCE (Money Interests towards Social Uses).

8. — Make free use of the public credit for sound social investments. Let this credit be issiied against these new social assets; charge it with an insurance rate and a redemption rate; and pay the bankers a moderate commission to administer it through their system of inter- locking banks and clearing-houses. The present unacknowledged use of the public credit by bankers must be recognized and regulated; and this, being for private profit, must yield precedence to communi- tary iises.

g.—Fill the public purse from a steeply gradated income-tax (pro- ceeds being shared by the local with the central authority) ; dis- criminate in favour of investments that improve the environment and develop the individual. Let tax-gatherers take heavy toll of " un- earned, increments," such as the "bonus" to shareholders, the appre- ciation of speculative securities, the rise in land values from growth of population. Cease to exploit new resources and advances predomin- antly for private gain, and use them increasingly in service of region and city.

EDUCATION, SCIENCE, ART.

10. — In general, aim at making individuals more socialized and communities more individualized. To that end, let schools subordi- nate books to out-door observation and handicrafts; let teachers draw the matter and the method of education from the life and tradition of their pupils' own region, as well as from the history and culture of mankind at large. Let universities seek first for synthesis in the civic life around them; and only thereafter in the pages of philosophy. Above all let governing bodies learn, if not from the Churches, at least from the psychological and social sciences, the distinction be- tween temporal and spiritual powers, and cease to play the double role of Pope and Ccesar. As for the chemical and mechanical sciences le.t them repent of making hell-upon-earth under war-lord and money- lord, and take service in the kingdom of heaven on earth. Then may the machine industry learn from artist-craftsman and town-planner the social significance of Design in all human things, including the city itself : that way lies the guild ideal, and its hope of expressing the civic spirit. Let civic statesmen, culturally as well as materially, link up the village with the city, and the city with the country : that way lies the regional ideal; and some day men will enter through this portal into paradise regained.

Along all these lines there is movement ; but lacking in volume . and unit}*. A crusade of constructive action has long been afoot ; but with man}' halts, and in sparse, and isolated companies. The Spirit Creative is liberated and in flight; but too timidly, and on dis- severed quests. It is time for clearer understanding, closer co-opera- tion, deeper unison, between all men and women of goodwill and high endeavour. So may be prepared definitely planned campaigns for the making and maintenance of worthy homes, smiling villages, noble cities. To engage the militant energies of the race in these adventures of constructive peace, and heroically to salve the perennial wreckages of humanity, would be the moral equivalent of war. Along this road lies the way towards Eutopia.

The Drift to Revolution

BEING No. 9 OF PAPERS FOR THE PRESENT

FOEEWOED.

An explanatory word as to the aims and method of this Paper, and of the series to which it belongs. A question is sometimes heard " what is the modern point of view?" And on the heels of that query may come another, " What is its civilization value ?" The professed philosopher answers by a cheque on the Bank of Abstrac- tions, which more often than not, holds insufficient assets to meet it. The plain man answers more concretely ; but gives one answer to-day, another to-morrow, and a third the next. In the end his mind is thrown into confusion by the diversity of replies. Happily there are ways of answering which avoid the pitfalls of the professed philosopher and also of the plain man. One such way it is claimed is exhibited throughout this Paper ; intimately concerned with the two questions above, since its main theme is an analysis of the current political situation. But this is not treated in isolation. On the contrary, the political issue is handled as something unintelligible except in relation, on one side to industry, trade and finance, and on the other to education, science, art and even religion.

As to the whole series of Papers, they may be described as studies in contem- porary social evolution. Their aim is to be both graphic and interpretative. The numbers in brackets throughout the text refer to illustrative lantern slides, detailed in an appendix to the Paper. The purpose of these slides is to present by visual imagery of significant buildings, persons, situations, the social process which is described and interpreted in the text. The slides are offered on loan to societies, clubs, circles concerned to study current events in the light of such sociological principles as can be brought to bear. As to the standpoint adopted in the Papers, it will of course be understood that every effort is made to maintain the objectivity and detachment of science ; but it should be explicitly stated that responsibility alike for facts and principles rests solely on the Cities Committee and not on the Sociological Society.

The method recommended for use of the slides is to pass them over the screen with as brief intervals as may be needed for the reading of a minimum of explanatory text. For that purpose a shortened version in typescript of the relevant Paper is available for loan with the slides. The discussion, it is suggested, should take place at a subsequent meeting : and in preparation for this members of the circle can study the full printed text of the Paper at leisure. Some insistance is placed on the value of an antecedent display of the slides. Since these aim at selecting, portraying and re-combining significant things and events, with something of the continuity and vividness of drama, it is hoped their prior presentation may impart to the discussion a certain quality of mind. The mode manifestly desirable is that combination of concreteness and generality which differentiates scientific treatment from, on the one hand, the vagaries of popular debate, and, on the other, the dialectical abstractions and archaic presuppositions common in more " philo- sophical " circles.

THE SPIRIT OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA.

EACH age has its everyday working philosophy by which it lives, and as things usually turn out, by which it dies. The " practical man " of the departed Victorian peace had such a philosophy in Utilitarianism. It was first formulated by Jeremy Bentham. Him

4 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

we may depict and explain on the principle of opposites by setting his portrait face to face with Robert Burns (i). The latter was a practical man in the sense that he was accustomed to plough and sow, reap and thresh. But it was integral to Burns' philosophy that poetry was the stuff of life; while, in the avowed opinion of Bentham, poetry was just a clumsy form of prose. The utili- tarian philosophy was popularised by innumerable advocates and exponents of whom the most famous was perhaps Mr. Samuel Smiles, who preached to a generation ready to give hearty and unqualified assent to the doctrine that God helps those who help themselves. (2). A rotund and polished form of utilitarianism was elaborated by Herbert Spencer, who, being an engineer, naturally conceived the useful in terms of the fit, and, being unoccupied, reflected on the survival of the fittest. (3). The many volumes of his Philosophy collected and pieced together a thousand fragments of thought secreted by a mechanical age in odd moments spared from the practical business of money-making. The Spencerian version of utilitarianism was therefore called a synthetic philosophy ; as though postage-stamp collecting were termed a synthetic art. The misfortune was that its author and his generation mistook it for a theory of life and a doctrine of evolution.

Though the age that produced it has died, the utilitarian philosophy survives, as do all past systems of thought in the folk- lore of the popular press, as well as in the classrooms of university professors. The person who says " no theories for me, I'm a practical man," is talking utilitarian philosophy, though doubtless he is no more aware of what he is doing than was M. Jourdain. This particular flower of utilitarianism is to be sure a hardy perennial. The individual who openly scorns the theoretical on the ground that it is certainly useless and probably mischievous is no rara avis. Snapshot the first man of business you meet and the chances are you have photographed a utilitarian philosopher. Again, by way of contrast, you might put this picture of the " practical man" of to-day side by side with that of a citizen of ancient Athens, for whom theory meant the utmost clarity of vision (3a).

The juristic reflections of Jeremy Bentham, the moralizing maxims of Samuel Smiles, the recondite speculations of Herbert Spencer all went to the shaping of utilitarianism into a Spiritual Power for the Industrial Era. But beyond these instruments of thought and emotion, another discipline of the mind contributed to that end even more. It was above all Political Economy that gave utilitarianism its establishment in the universities, and put an edge on it for the use of politicians, journalists and others con- cerned in the formation and guidance of public opinion. These, it was supposed, spoke with the authority of " science" when they invoked the " Laws" of Political Economy.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 5

For some century and a half, the political economists have been having their say in the name of science. From Adam Smith through David Ricardo to John Stewart Mill and Henry Fawcett there is an imposing- procession of "classical" economists. Of their critics there is an array hardly less impressive than that of the economists. The redoubtable figure of Karl Marx is central to a host of predecessors and continuators. From all this galaxy of " scientific" investigators, the economists and their critics together, one may surely gain a clear undestanding and true interpretation of our age. And not a little light should thereby be shed on the course which our contemporary civilisation must steer in order to escape the shipwreck that threatens it, as some fear.

AN ANCIENT THEORIST AND A MODERN UTILITARIAN (After

Ruskin) (3*).

Now an investigator usually says truly what he sees clearly. And what, from the nature of things, he sees most clearly is the character of the milieu in which he lives vividly and himself plays a part, and on which he reflects dispassionately. So let us enquire what it was that the representative economists and their critics saw, each in his own generation. (4).

THE ROMANCE OF MACHINE PRODUCTION.

To begin with there is that other Adam, the Eveless man of Kirkcaldy, yet father of this new " science," and so progenitor of a hardy race of philosophers who conquered the world of thought with amazing rapidity. First remark about Adam Smith, that he was a patron of James Watt, the modern Prometheus, who brought down fire from Heaven and harnessed it to the chariots of men. (5). No statue is more entitled to its place in Westminster Abbey than Watt's. By helping him to start in that business which 2

6 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

resulted in the making good of the steam engine, Adam Smith became one of the temporal founders of our industrial system ; and so supplemented in a unique way that share in the spiritual parentage of our age which is his by authorship of the " Wealth of Nations." Further he was contemporary with Arkwright and Hargreaves. The organising genius of the former and the mechanical genius of the latter made these two the essential founders of the Factory System (5 a). And the Factory system only awaited the steam engine of Watt to become the master force destined to re-shape the face of the world and re-orient the course of history. (6). A new age of romance had dawned. And like all true romance it arose from humble beginnings. (7). In this case from the cotton spinner. (8) The spinning of fibre for cloth had from the earliest civilisation to the i8th century, been by the same simple contrivances to which the human hand, supplying a feeble and uncompounded driving power, spun a single thread. (9). Then, like a bolt from the blue, came a series of inventions of which Hargreaves' spinning jenny was the type. A child, by turning a handle could spin sixteen threads at once, and so do with ease the work of sixteen adults. (10). But soon, by further improve- ments, one person could spin a thousand threads. (11). Arkwright was the man, urged by dreams of wealth, to fullest exploitation of this new power. His part was to add machine to machine, operative to operative, building to building, all to make one immense thing whose articulations worked like a single machine of incredible productivity. (12). This thing was the Factory. And proud was the nation to see these gigantic genii of power arising on all sides. Through their unleashed energy a man could pro- duce more yarn in a day than previously in a year. A historian of the early nineteenth century claimed that it was not so much the genius of Nelson and Wellington that had won the war against France, but rather the 150,000 " Hands" in the spinning mills of Lancashire, producing goods which would have required 40,000,000 men working with the old one-thread wheel. And indeed, it could credibly be maintained that in the prolonged strife of the Napoleonic wars, the national Argosy of Britain finally floated to victory on the mighty stream of exports that issued from the textile mills of Lancashire.

There assuredly is an unsung epic. But it is a saga not with- out monuments. The Factory is the most frequent, but not the only one. Beside the Factory there arose, in course of time, another architectural type. An early specimen of the latter was the Manchester Cotton Exchange. (13). Its designers gave to this building certain structural proportions, a shapeliness, a touch of stylistic adornment, all of which were denied to the Factory. Some sense of symbolic fitness, some divining perhaps of future

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 7

venerability, inspired the erection (to be sure on a modest scale) of a temple-like structure for this Cotton Exchange. Indeed, is it not to be regarded, in sympathetic retrospect, as a hallowed progenitor of those Financiering Institutions into which the Indus- trial Era and its Utilitarian Philosophy finally flowered with lavish exuberance in the generation immediately preceding the war ? As the manufacture of goods by machinery dominated the first phase of our Industrial Era, so its final phase was marked by an absorbing quest of new markets and an impassioned effort of financiers to " control "existing ones. Thus we note the shifting of emphasis, first from making to selling, and then from trade to finance. Beginning with a glorification of the Factory and the Warehouse, that era closed in a cult of the Exchange and the Bank. This century-long evolution from goods economy to money economy, from fierce rivalry of individuals to fiercer emula- tion of groups, from business competition to financial monopoly, was, we may say, implicit in the building of that first Cotton Exchange. Pieans of Progress, accompanied by ecstasies of statistics expressed the pride with which each succeeding genera- tion contemplated the earlier phases of this development. Glad- stone's phrase, " progress by leaps and bounds," won instant popularity and maintained it, because perfectly adapted to the general mood. There was generated a volume of emotion suffi- cient to furnish the substance of a veritable religion. And assuredly its multitudinous adherents in press and Parliament, on popular platform and academic rostrum, found a living faith in the doctrine which the Germans call Manchesterismus. That old Cotton Exchange is venerable as the primitive temple of this still living faith.

Adam Smith was the observant philosopher who lived during the early stage of this re-birth of romance through manufactures and commerce. He analysed this new "wealth of nations," and drew certain deductions. The grand conclusion he came to was that the pathway of the growing giant should be cleared of every impeding obstacle. The kind of hampering restriction which survived from past social dispensations he had himself experienced in the case of Watt, whose Guild tried to stop the business on which Adam Smith and his friends in Glasgow launched the young mechanic. Political Economy generalised this experience of its founder. Freedom for the manufacturer, freedom for the mer- chant, freedom for the worker. That was its triple imperative. Laissez-faire was the corresponding ideal of national policy. The political idealists of this dispensation were the founders of the Liberal Party. But that is to anticipate.

To return to the economic situation. At first the working

8 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

classes shared in the prosperity of the machine era. Where previously the breadwinner of a family brought home ten shillings a week, now in the textile areas the whole domestic circle from young child to aged grandfather became wage-earners, and the family budget might mount to 100 shillings a week or even more. Money circulated freely. Rents rose many times, and the land- lords enjoyed in times of peace a prosperity otherwise associated by them with a "good war." As for the operatives, a contem- porary observer quaintly remarked, " there are thousands of spinners who eat meat every day, wear broadcloth on the Sunday, and dress their wives and children well, furnish their houses with mahogany and carpets, subscribe to publications, and pass through life with much of humble respectability."

The coarse cottons and shirtings of the earlier factories were soon supplemented by cambrics, muslins, and silk-like stuffs that rivalled in texture the finest fabrics of oriental looms. (14^ — i4a). Choice garments previously the privilege of grand ladies and rich merchants' wives were now at the disposal of servant girls, with corresponding enhancement of life and intenser sense of wellbeing. No wonder poets sang the praises of the new " nymph Gossypia " — a phrase invented by Erasmus Darwin in a paper commemorating Arkwright's first water mill in Derbyshire. Orators became eloquent on the dawning of the millenium.

At first the universities held aloof, it is true. But they made amends by giving sanctuary to orthodox Political Economy when, some half a century later, its hold was being weakened by the assaults of heterodox votaries.

ENTER, THE LIBERALS AND RADICALS.

Broadly speaking, all classes joined in bringing to birth the political ideals of the Liberalizing Faith and in accepting its doctrine. A great scheme of Liberation from the fetters of the past was called for. Adam Smith's book voiced this demand, and the science of Political Economy expounded its theory. States- men gave themselves to its study, and were proud to be called disciples of the author of the " Wealth of Nations." Pitt, the young Prime Minister, a student of the new revelation, became the political hope of the nation. (15). In a famous picture he was idealized by Blake as the tamer and pilot of Behemoth. At a dinner party Pitt refused to be seated before Adam Smith, remark- ing with obeisance to the philosopher, " We are all your followers."

A thoroughgoing adaptation of Parliament to liberationist legislation was well begun before the outbreak of the French Revo- lution. That untoward event did for a moment stimulate the Liberal movement, but soon checked, then reversed it. After the Reaction there was to be sure a return movement of Liberal idealism

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 9

which looked to Parliament as a fount of legislative justice. And once in each succeeding generation this returning wave has risen to a crest marked by a Reform Act endowing some new section of the nation with the franchise. The latest of these Acts (1918) has, it is true, coincided with a deep depression of the Liberal Party. But that only proves to what extent their antagonists have absorbed the parliamentary doctrine of Liberalism. There is no need there- fore to despair of the Liberal faith.

Across the millenial dream which ushered the dawn of the Industrial Age darkening shadows were thus cast by the social reactions of the French Revolution and their sequel in the Napoleonic wars as well as by other unforeseen events. Yet great fortunes continued to be made by manufacturers and merchants. (16). From these newly-enriched classes had risen political families like the Pitts, and later on came the Peels and the, Glad- stones. The territorial aristocracy was swelled by an incredible number of recruits. You may reckon a full ten thousand in the list of " county families" enumerated in the " Road Books," those Bradshaws and A. B.C. Guides of the spacious coaching days. But unprecedented poverty, hardship and degradation became the lot of the working classes. And it seemed, as a radical critic remarked, Adam Smith's book of revelation should have been called " The Poverty of Nations and the Wealth of Individuals." Yet the working classes clung pathetically to the ideals of the liberationist era. Liberty, however, was now demanded by them for a different purpose. What they wanted was freedom to combine for higher wages. For that purpose they needed and demanded the use of the Strike. (i6a). The theory and practice of the Strike in relation to money wages absorbed the intellectual energies of Labour Leaders. Both the Strike and the wages it acquired or failed to acquire were regarded in what might be called the Parliamentary sense, so deeply had this habit of mind taken root, even in the working classes. The Trade Unionists as they won their " Rights" increasingly used them according to the Parliamentary method. An assembly of delegates elected on the Representative Principle and with a working procedure of Resolutions, Votes, and the eloquence of advocacy, the Trade Union became a Parliament in little. It was linked with the Great Parliament by the doctrine of Radicalism. Thus the Rights of the People countered the Rights of the manufacturing and middle classes. The political warfare between Liberalism and Radicalism exhibited the intensity of strife between sects of the same general doctrine. This inter-group struggle of Liberals and Radicals was, of course, frequently sus- pended for combination against parties and interests that stood in the way of both. It was, for instance, their joint effort that won the Free Trade victory under Cobden and Bright. (i6b).

IO THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

That culminating triumph of economic freedom was doubtless aided not a little by the simultaneous coming of the Railway Age, for this was a veritable re-birth of the mechanical idealism of the i8th century. (17). Hence a double commemoration found expres- sion in architecture and town-planning. In the temple-like Palace of Crystal, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, pride in goods of mechanical production not only expressed itself, but stimulated that vogue of plate-glass for shopfronts which soon became a dominant feature of urban architecture throughout western civilisation. It has even been asserted with some appear- ance of truth, that the two most representative products of our later industrial age have been plate-glass and soot ; the one element of progress being clearly relative to the other. But putting oneself back in imagination with the idealists of the early railway age, one recognises the renewed enthusiasm of power and re- awakening to dramatic issues. These impulses signalised them- selves in the Cyclopean buildings of terminal stations, enhanced it might be by monumental gateways like that at Euston. (18). Frith's painting of the Great Western Terminus at Paddington has become a historic picture which we regard with languid cynicism or even with disgust as the predecessor of our abominable " Smoke Halls." (i8a) But in the mind of its contem- poraries Frith's painting excited a storm of interest and a passion of admiration.

Thus to the first Industrial Revolution succeeded a second hardly less fervid and far-reaching, for the reaction of the railway on civilisation has been comparable in its magnitude to that of the Factory. But this one has been observed and interpreted, not so much by the utilitarian as by other types of philosopher, of whom Mr. H. G. Wells is a notable example.

THE MONEYSPINNERS AND THEIR DEITY.

Amongst the private fortunes made out of the public mis- fortunes of the Napoleonic wars, was that of an amiable London stockbroker, one David Ricardo, son of a Dutch Jew. (19). In the economic record he comes next in apostolic succession to Adam Smith. Slight as are his writings, modest his thought, narrow the range of his knowledge, yet it is probable that Ricardo contributed more than any other single individual to the final shaping of utilitarianism into a Spiritual Power for the Industrial Era. To understand so unusual a conjuncture two things must be borne in mind. One is that in the evolution of the industrial era there was, as we have said, a progressive shifting of emphasis from manufac- ture to trading and from trading to finance. The other is as to the peculiar nature of the stockbroker's part in the community. The first of these considerations if not self-evident, rests upon

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 1 1

testimony of which some part is embodied in the substance of this Paper. As to the second consideration, a little reflection on the well-known activities of the stockbroker will suffice. Dealinp in the most abstract items of the economic process, he soon learns to contemplate money with a certain detach- ment and intensity of thought. The nature of money, the ways of money, the forms of money, are what engross his mind all the time. And since his is a business of the most rudimentary organisation, and practically without physical exer- tion, his occupation comes to be, in effect, that of the contemplative life. In other words, the city offices of stockbrokers are a veritable nest of hermits' cells. (20). Given a man of the generalizing habit of mind, and with the inspiration of appropriate contacts, it is clear that from one of these cells of the moneyspinners will issue a philosophy of money. David Ricardo was that philosopher. During an enforced holiday at Bath the young man chanced to come upon the " Wealth of Nations." This book seized on his imagination like an apocalyse. Its problems became a main interest of his life. His own contribution to the new " science" was naturally in terms of his personal milieu and occupation. He switched the line of discussion from the manufactures and com- merce of Adam Smith into an abstract field of Capital and Labour. With fine finish he carved and set up in the market place a grand and imposing idol named CAPITAL, avid of costly ritual and entitled to copious first fruits and rich sacrifices, in return for in- estimable benefactions in the founding of industries and the promoting of Wealth. In its open palm he put a form named LABOUR, an insignificant wooden figure, roughly chiselled, a mere symbol of service ancillary to Capital, and therefore needing nothing more than an occasional coat of paint and other trifling attention embraced in " costs of maintenance." The market place where Ricardo imaged the rise of his statuary should rather be called a Forum, so spacious is the place ; so replete with monu- mental buildings. One of them is an immense grey temple of classical model. (2oa). It was built by Soane, a notable architect, contemporary of Ricardo, for the Bank of England. But clearly the design of Sir John Soane is incomplete without the Ricardian conception of a colossal Jupiter Capitalinus, seated on a throne of bullion, supporting in his right hand, not a winged Victory, but a lame Vulcan, in his left a sceptre topped by the golden calf, and on his brow a wreath of laurel, the homage of " city" editors an^1 literary bankers. l

1. The picture of Jupiter Capitalinus and his Temple in the Forum which should here reinforce the argument cannot be given ; and for a reason which is perhaps more of the nature of symptom than accident. The artist engaged on this series of cartoons was before their conclusion subjected to a form of taboo which temporarily debars his pencil from social criticism. This inhibition, needless to say, was not the ostensible ground of the taboo. This process of elimination works otherwise.

12 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

The Ricardian economics, if it was not in form a doctrine of money, yet soon became one in practical use and popular exposi- tion. It therefore ignored the Labourer when it did not openly be- little him. It rapidly won adherents in the higher circles of the political, social and industrial world. It appealed to the manufac- turer because for him, Capital was his plant, buildings and stock. And this capital enabled him to draw Profits from the bountiful cor- nucopia of nature. It appealed to the owners of bonds, mortgages, stocks and shares, because for them Capital was invested money, which, on Ricardo's theory, stood to earn, in addition to the cus- tomary "interest " an unlimited increment in the expanding pro- gress of industry. It even appealed to landlords, because, at a time when the bowels of the earth were being ransacked for coal and metals, every estate owner lived in the expectation of finding himself the possessor of underground Capital. Thus the landlords were doubly indebted to Ricardo ; for his glorification of capital as well as for his famous theory of rent. Under such social patronage political economy continued its triumphant march in the world of the well-to-do classes, and in its mellowing phase, as we have seen, penetrated the universities and was there endowed in perpetuity. From academic chairs the facts and outlook of Adam Smith were interpreted by the doctrine of Ricardo, and developed by successive commentators, continuators and renovators into a system of instruction for budding leaders in politics, industry, law and journalism.

THE PROPHET OF SOCIALISM.

It is time to turn to the critics of political economy. By way of contrasting this heterodoxy with that orthodoxy, let us recall two divergent Jewish traditions. (21). One is of Him who expelled the money changers from the Temple, the other is of the money changers. The Ricardian economics emanated, as we saw, from the Stock Exchange and the Bank. (22). Of those august institu- tions it cannot, of course, be said that they are money changers' stalls in the Temple. But can it be denied that for the six working days of the week in " the city " as recent times have known it, this Bank and its Stock Exchange are the Temple? (23).

A generation or so after Ricardo there appeared in London another Jew, and not of the financial tradition, but rather of that other one. (24). In all respects, except a studious interest in the "science" of Political Economy the careers of Karl Marx and David Ricardo are sharply opposed. Marx encamped, not in the city of golden dreams, but in a mean street of Soho, that miniature east end, encircled in the west end. Marx made no fortune, and founded no territorial family, but saw his children die of want in a penurious garret. True, the gratitude of a later generation of ad- herents has expressed itself in a magnificent gesture ; for it was

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 1 3

announced from Petrograd early in the Bolshevik regime that by way of homage to its German prophet, the Soviet Government had voted a round million roubles for a statue to Marx and an endow- ment for his descendants.

Let us pause to examine what it was that Marx saw as he walked the streets of London, struggling bread-winner of an impoverished family; student of life, interpreter of labour. From what observed data, for instance, did he derive those two concepts the Class War and the Proletarian Dictature, whose glow has lighted the path of his disciples and turned them into bands of crusaders, now swollen to multitudes, even to whole populations ? (25). In the eastend he watched the stream of immigrants flowing into the metropolitan vortex, not only aliens from the continent, but labourers and their families from the shires of the Home Counties and beyond. Occupation of a sort awaited each family; the sweating dens for men and women, and for the children the career of street gamin, or Thames-side mud-lark. But the pleasures and the gaieties of life are by no means absent from the east end. (26). In the Saturnalia of the young men the Dionysiac spirit awakes to the call of the concertina. A never-failing break in the diurnal monotony is supplied by the perennial drama of the police court and the resulting demonology of the evening newspaper. The women and children have their great summer festival and rural exodus for hop-picking. Every Sunday forenoon is a Jews market which has grown to be a veritable fair on a vast scale, filling whole streets with wares of oriental splendour. But these vicarious delights perchance weary the adult males of the Christian com- munity, so for them the tedium of Sabbath morn is relieved by an expectant sojourn outside the public-house, pending its statutory hour of opening. Finally, when everything else palls, there is that last resource against boredom, the mild excitement of a flitting. Such are the leisure equivalents of the breadwinning occupations which their sordid milieu forces on the Eastenders.

From the factories, workshops, warehouses and docks of the Eastend flows all day a stream of loaded lorries, vans, carts. (27). This stream passes through " the city " to its predestined purpose in the Westend. Here, then, in the vivid concrete, was daily presented to the inquisitive eyes of Karl Marx a sample of the economists' " Production," " Distribution," " Consumption." The part of the east end and of the west end in the process is manifest. The artisans, labourers, sailors, dockers, watermen, carters, vanmen of the east produce or distribute the goods ; the ladies and gentlemen of the west, with their associated and dependent train consume the goods. Where then, and what is the part of " Capital" for which " the city " stands ? At first sight it looks as if " the city's " part were a mystical one, extracting, by some invisible hand, toll and

14 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

tribute as the goods pass in their transi* from east to west. But on closer inspection the manner of the operation is discoverable and the service rendered by capital is disclosed.

When your tailor sends you a new suit of clothes it is accom- panied or followed by a bill. In the language of the accountant (which is a useful aid to thinking, because it is in general terms), the tailor's bill is a debit note. You send back to the tailor your cheque which similarly is a credit note. The debit and credit notes thus exchanged are private documents. They are the con- cern of you and your tailor alone. But in the course of twenty- four hours or so your cheque passes through one of the bankers' Clearing Houses and thereupon its amount is duly credited to the tailor in the ledger of his bankers. (28).

Now it is of the first importance to understand what this " clearing" of cheques means. It means, in effect, that there have been transferred from one person to another a certain call on the output of the community at large. Reflect for a moment on what it means to have a credit balance at your bank. That balance is a sum which at pleasure you can draw out in legal tender cur- rency. And legal tender currency is nothing but credit tokens to which custom backed by law, gives the standing of public credit, i.e.y a call on the output of the community. Now what is the banker's part in this traffic ? It is manifold. But there is one element in it of central significance. (29) The banker makes it his business to buy certain kinds of private debit notes and sell tokens which are public credit notes, called for short money. It is this which Marx saw. He saw the banker as a particular kind of merchant and consequently employing " capital" in a particular way.

The banker, like other merchants, has a stock of goods. His stock or capital is a multifarious assortment of public credit notes, and private debit notes. For his craft skill, in dealing on the basis of his stock of goods and the credit of his group, the banker gets his remuneration in the -form of " discount," " interest," or " com- mission." But his stock as capital is like other forms of capital, in that it calls for vigilance in the maintenance of its quantity and its value. The attendant risks are virtually insurable, and so the cost of maintaining this capital is a definite and calculable rate. Perhaps one-tenth of one per cent, would cover the risk. Thus we see, that so far the toll taken by the " city" from the passage of goods in transit, whether from eastend to westend, or elsewhere, is made up of two elements. First there is the payment to the Banker for his craft skill, which certainly ought not to be less than what is earned bv a first-rate workshop foreman or by the manager of a co-operative store. . Next there is the insurance rate for maintain- ing his stock of goods. But the total of those two items is only a small fraction of the banker's gross tribute. How account for

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 15

the balance ? If it is true, as Ricardo taught, that capital plays an initiating part in the economic cycle, then something is payable to the banker on that score. But is it true ?

In some such way we can imagine Marx teasing out the problem of " Capital " as he saw it in " the city " and the Eastend. There grew up in his mind a view of the situation which was the reverse of Ricardo's. In effect he replied to Ricardo : " You have mis- placed the labels on your deities of the marketplace. The real name of your colossal figure is not Capital but Labour. And if the natural order of things took its course, the mannikin in the hand of Labour would be Capital." Thus the upshot of the Marxian economics is to turn Ricardo's argument inside out as in pulling off a stocking. Labour and Capital are factors in production, and must therefore be maintained out of production. The surplus goes, or should go, to that which initiated the cycle, and this, argued Marx, is not Capital, but Labour. Since, how- ever, the surplus does, in point of fact, go to Capital, how account for this reversal of the natural process ? And further, how restore to Labour the rightful reward of which it has been, and is being robbed ? The answer to these two questions became his life quest. His great work, begun as "A Criticism of Political Economy," turned as it went on into " Das Kapital," that Bible of countless men and women of advanced politics Everywhere. He sought answers to his problems from two main sources. One was historic investigation carried on through long and patient years in the British Museum. The other, we may imagine, to have been the observations of his walks in London. Of the things and people as he saw them in the eastend, and in the city we have taken a glimpse. How did the westend appear to him ? Doubtless as the paradise of the "consumer," in sharpest contrast to the limbo of the producer in the eastend. Now the consumer, par excellence, is the " lady." This bird of bright pilgrimage, during her " season in town" has a daily round marked by "the performance of leisure," as that clear-sighted economist, Mr. Thorstein Veblen, calls it. To take a few illustrative scenes, as they might be wit- nessed in the last years of Marx, during the '8o's of the iQth cen- tury. It was then he was struggling with the latter volumes of " Das Kapital," those which were edited and published by his friend, Engels, after Marx's death.

(30). Before a mansion in one of the fashionable squares stands an equipage which society journalists call " smart." That implies, amongst other meritorious qualities, that horses, harness, wood- work, and metal all shine with a polish necessitating muscular exertion capable, perhaps, of cultivating a smallholding. The front door of the mansion swings open, and one of the ladies of the household descends. She is attended by two footmen, resplendent

l6 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

in archaic attire ; a third in a soberer livery opens the carriage door. The function of these three servitors in the social scheme is to exhibit and make manifest to the world at large the lady's status by a display of "conspicuous waste," as Mr. Veblen calls it. The first stoppage, perhaps, is at a modiste of Bond Street, there to inspect and try on a thing of beauty designed by an artist evidently to crown an Olympian goddess, which, to be sure, is precisely what the lady is. And so from place to place we might follow her daily "performance of leisure," now in the hands of the manicurist, again at a party, fete or wedding, now at a club lunch, again at Hurlingham or at the opera, and finally refreshing exhausted nature by the fifth or sixth meal of the day at a midnight supper in the Savoy Hotel.

The male of this species is sometimes more and sometimes less strenuous than the female in the "performance of leisure." An example of the former is the " sportsman." That is a type as well known as it is highly appreciated. The London crowd places it at the very topmost pinnacle of popularity. (31). An example of the less strenuous type is the clubman. As he was in the days of Marx, he remained till 1914, and is still in the older and more venerable specimens. But to recall him in his prime, as the contemporary counterpart of the " lady " of the '8o's of the last century. About noon you might see him, groomed to a pitch of perfection, descend- ing from a hansom : a massive servitor solemnly opens the club doors; a clerkly servitor takes silent and respectful note of the member's name and entry ; an alert page boy hastens to relieve him of his hat and stick. In the older clubs of high repute an adult male replaces the page boy in aiding the other servitors to display "conspicuous waste" in the "vicarious performance of leisure." Our clubman saunters into the reading room. There the tedium of waiting for lunch is relieved by a luxuriously- upholstered armchair and a newspaper impartially devoted to sport, politics, finance, scandal, and war. Luncheon is a feast for the mind no less than the mouth. It is prepared with all the resource and art of a chef paid at the rate of a headmaster, and served in silence with an exquisite finish of courtly gesture. It is followed by a choice alcoholic aid to digestion, brewed in a far- away monastery, from a recipe of long-guarded secrets. The repast terminates with a gentle stimulus to the torpid soul con- cocted from Arabian berries. In the afternoon there is polo or similar resource of muscular fitness for the younger clubman, and the game supplies a mild excitement to seniors and lady friends as spectators. A long-protracted dinner-party in a westend mansion occupies the earlier part of the clubman's evening, and over the later part decency draws her veil.

(32). In a walk from Trafalgar Square through Pall Mall, St,

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION IJ

James' Street, and Piccadilly to Hyde Park, you see not one, two or three, but dozens of these palaces of Olympus, in which the plebeian " pub " is transformed into the patrician club.

(33)- The House of Commons has been called the " finest club in London." But that is to treat ironically the very Ark of the British Covenant, its CONSTITUTION. Yet assuredly there is little excuse for withholding veneration from this sublime growth of the ages, since historians disclosed its ancient pedigree, and jurists revealed the true theory of its working. The former have, with infinite industry of research, traced its roots back into the dim past until these are discerned even penetrating the soil of the primeval German Forests, hallowed ground to our leading race- theorists, and their recently innumerable following. The jurists, on their side, have shown by ingenious analysis how the adequate working of the Constitution is dependent on the instincts and habits of our Governing and Administrative Classes. To say nothing more of that immemorial Home of Freedom, the German Forests, we must nevertheless pause upon the constitutional significance of the Governing and Administrative Classes. For, accepting the maintenance of the Constitution as an ideal of national policy, one begins to see in the association of these classes with Parliament and its executive offices, a justification of that otherwise inexplicably large consumption of goods and services by the Westend of the Metropolis. How natural, therefore, that the element of ceremony, so little marked in other clubs, should be conspicuous in the Houses of Parliament. Consider, for instance, the experiences of a "provincial" constituent in making a call on his M.P. at Westminister. (34). After running the gauntlet of a double row of columnar police- men he finds himself in an outer hall called " The Lobby." That is the modest designation of a vast central cham- ber with many corridors, the whole displaying the splendour of a mosque and the proportions of cathedral aisles. (35). Here the constituent is left for a while to ruminate on the dignity and splen- dour of parliamentary life ; for if these be the outer courts what must be the inner sanctuaries ! (36). The reflections of the con- stituent are disturbed by a cry, "hats off; the Speaker comes." There enters a stately procession of figures made majestic by the insignia of authority and the habiliments of archaic ritual. That is how the august and pontifical Speaker is conducted to his dais in the Lower Chamber. By these and other well-devised ceremonies is made manifest to constituents and to the world at large the potent mystery called Legislation.

All these things doubtless were well observed by Karl Marx. Nor would other aspects of the legislative mystery, less in evidence, escape his attention. Its mode of working, for instance. (37).

1 8 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

Wearied by their legislative labours, M.P.'s retire for rest and refreshment to the smoking room or other less strenuous parts of the many-chambered house. But their repose is disturbed by the imperative summons of the "division bell." Instantly follows a scene of bustling activity. Cigars are extinguished and put aside ; teacups are hurriedly emptied ; there is a rush to the door , each member eager to enter the division lobby and so contribute his share to the decision of the legislature on a national question.

The particular question is (to take an average sample), shall the Grand Track Railway Company be allowed to drive its line into the town of Mudford, already served by two other railways ? Now the working of the Parliamentary system is such that, summoned by the division bell from smoking room, dining hall and lobbies, members often do not know what the particular question is until after they have recorded their vote. But this does not preclude a wise decision by Parliament as to whether Mudford shall be blessed or cursed by a third railway terminus. So potent for penetrating to the heart of things are the inherent qualities of the Party System and the Representative Principle. These two mystical entities are respectively the active and the passive elements of parliamentary life. They are the male and female elements which combine to sustain and renew the vitality of parliamentary institutions. But to maintain with vigour the warfare of parties by hurling rhetorical thunderbolts across the floor of the house all the time is a fatiguing business. Hence the need for relaxation after the close of the sitting. Then the party champions put aside their weapons, and may be seen departing from the arena in friendly groups, Liberals, Tories and Radicals united in pleasing fraternity.

An institution displaying such an array of qualities was bound to spread through the modernized world. (38). So the " Mother of Parliaments" bred a family of daughters handsomely installed in the national capitals from Washington to Buda-Pesth. (39).

All these things Marx saw, and saw through. But not with complete understanding. His mind was too severely handicapped. The embitterment of poverty does not conduce to clarity of insight, and still less perhaps does the logic of Hegel. Make a marriage between the abstractions of Ricardo and the metaphysics of Hegel, rear their offspring in that sepulchre of dessicated erudition, the British Museum Library; and you ensure a progeny of fallacies. Give a further education in the international school of revolu- tionary intrigue, and you create a forcing bed of subversive politics. Those who grow up in such a milieu of mind and body, can hardly fail to generalize the contrast of Eastend and Westend into the shattering ethic of a Class War a outrancc. They can hardly fail of an impassioned desire to substitute for the Dictator- ship of Capital implicit in the Ricardian economics, a Dictator- ship of Labour.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 1 9

THE IMPERIALISTS AND THEIR KULTUR.

Karl Marx lived long enough to see the waning of Parliaments and the rise into foremost prominence of another type of govern- mental organisation. In Westminster he saw the new palaces of bueaucracy rise and spread along Whitehall. Each of these was lor Marx a Ministry of Government in no mere formal sense. And if the officials ministered less to the needs of the " People" than to the desires of a class, that was no fault of the system. It was an aspect of the class war capable of reversion in the final victory of the People. And indeed, it does seem, on the face of things, as though these busy hives of trained and conscientious officials completed and crowned the edifice of State Government.

In the evolution of the modern State a stage was marked by the rise of Parliament. It stood for the transition from the feudal age. But this transition has fallen short of full attainment. The Parliamentary System has consequently remained imperfect be- cause marred by mediaeval survivals. (40). Hence the symbolism of the vista presented to the gaze as you contemplate the " Mother of Parliaments" in all the majesty of its spacious architecture. There is a blot in the background of the picture, for there the towers of the mediaeval abbey intrude. To eliminate all such intrusive survivals has been an inspiring quest of the Liberal tradi- tion. Now the modernized Ministry, though not to be credited directly to Liberalism, has nevertheless developed in logical post- Liberal sequence. (41). If a date be wanted for the historic advent of the Ministry as we understand that term to-day, one may per- haps point to the substitution, about mid-nineteenth century, of the India Office for the city company which was the parent of our Oriental Empire. (42). Of the East India Company itself the real representative is the old trading fort. From that half military half mercantile origin, the distance is not immeasurable to the Colonial and Foreign Offices, which are part of the same vast edifice that houses the India Office. (43). But its immensity is outranged by the adjacent block which accommodates the Local Government Board and the Education Department, with a southern frontage of some seven hundred feet. (44).

The architecture of all these offices of our centralised administra- tion is appropriately free from trace of Gothic influence. It is, on the contrary, if not entirely classical, yet certainly middle classical. How remote from the thoughts of their busy occupants the pointed arch and the habit of mind that went with it let a veracious anecdote tell. (45). An artist, on the look out for civic vistas, sketched a turret of the Local Government Board as seen through the pointed arch of the drinking fountain in Parliament Square. He happened to show this picture to an official, who during many years' service had passed daily through Parliament Square to and from his office.

2O THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

" Charming picture," said the official, " quite a happy thought to have invented the arch of the drinking fountain to frame the Tower." " But, replied the astonished artist, " don't you recog- nise that it's a drawing of the actual fountain and arch ?" There-

BEYOND THE BUREAUCRAT'S PURVIEW (45).

upon ensued a little discussion which elicited from the official the fact that he had, in the course of his Government service passed by this fountain over ten thousand times without noticing that it was there ! To describe this kind of unseeing mind generated by the

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

21

life of bureaucracy, the epithet " empapered" has been invented.

(46). In summary of the growth of State Bureaucracy, regard the profile of Whitehall towards St. James' Park. The original bureacratic mouth that took the first bite out of the Park was the

THE PROFILE OF BUREAUCRACY (46).

Horse Guards building. The two jaws of this mouth have, it will be observed, grown outwards and forwards, stage by stage, until they threaten to engulf the whole Park. Prior to the outbreak of

22 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

war in 1914, the upper or naval jaw had failed to keep pace with the lower or civil jaw. By throwing out in the war a front tooth of several hundred feet in length the naval jaw has penetrated the body of the Park far beyond the civilian. Added to the diagram and represented on the same scale, this naval incisor would run well into the next page.

(47). These great Departmental Offices exhibit in the unde- signed symbolism of architecture, the spirit of their characteristic activities. The War Office, for instance, has its turrets crowned with Prussian-like helmets (not the flattened kind, but those of the Prussian Guard) ; while the Admiralty Building across the way is crowned by a wireless installation which might at a distance be mistaken for a ship's masts and rigging. (48). This wireless instal- lation is the central nerve ganglion of our vast maritime empire, and when you map out the provinces of this as organs directed from that ganglion, you produce the very diagram of Imperial Bureaucracy. (49). You have before you a literally world-wide organisation, expanding from and contracting into a metropolitan bureau. Insufficiently recognising the services to humanity of this particular organisation, some of our foreign critics have, under the title of navalism even compared it to continental militarism.

Empires are won otherwise ; but they are maintained by bureaucracies. The founder of modern bureaucracy was Napoleon. Having conquered an empire, he was faced with the task of con- solidating and organising, in a word, maintaining it. The question was, how make permanent the temporary centralisation created by war? The answer was found in bringing into being a hierarchy of officials, inspectors, examiners, instructors, drill ser- geants, tax collectors, and other varieties of Functionary. Subse- quent imitators and organisers of Empire have been the followers and continuators of Napoleon, whether like Bismarck, Crispi and Tisza in European statecraft, like Rhodes or Strathcona, in coloniza- tion, like Rockefeller or Carnegie in world commerce. Portraits of Napoleon adorn the office walls of business magnates in America and England with a frequency of unmistakable significance. These Napoleons of " big business" develop in a regime of scheming and fighting for " control" which differs from the strategy and tactics of war essentially in one respect. The soldier uses open force to win glory; booty being incidental. The man of "big business" is not above having recourse to masked fraud for the making of profit, prestige being incidental. Hence the pursuit of " world dominion" in the steel market or in the oil market may be described as a Napoleonic ambition whose fulfilment calls for some of the military virtues and more of the military vices.

(50). The long personal duel of Pitt and Napoleon ended in the death of the former, who succumbed, we may say, to the crush-

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 23

ing news of Austerlitz. With Pitt died the greatness of Parlia- ment. But another two or three generations of ferment were needed to adapt the type of government which had by war and trade won a world-wide empire to its maintenance and administration. In this progressive development of political institutions names like Gladstone and Campbell-Bannerman stand for the maintenance of Liberalism in its pristine purity. Rosebery, Asquith, Grey and Haldane are intermediate types, correctly calling themselves Liberal- Imperialists. Amongst the fully-developed personalities of this political series, the names of Disraeli, Chamberlain, Curzon and Milner are landmarks. (51). And of these the greatest has his festival on Primrose Day. Others who have contributed in their kind are Seely, our leading historian of Empire, and Kipling its bard. (52). Again, beyond all these are imperial statesmen differentiated towards the financial type. An early specimen was the first Lord Goschen. As internationalist financier he won fame by modernizing the part of Joseph in Egypt. Adding politics to finance, he made the advance from Liberalism to Imperialism at a time when that political progress still had its detractors. For this pioneering he suffered the mild impeachment of being stigma- tized as " Jingoschen." These intermediate types who link Empire and Finance would perhaps be found more numerous than is commonly realized, if one studied not only the Directory of Directors, but also the file of investors at Somerset House, and particularly if the real names were always filed instead (frequently) of substitutes. True a common concern in the expansion of markets and their control is far from implying a concurrence of the imperialist and the financier, since their methods are different and even opposed. But there are those who, like the late Lord Cromer, develop each method to that high level where the two meet and blend. (53). And from his portrait one may gain a clue to the qualities required for harmonizing the divergent ideals of unhampered private " control" of markets by financial co- ordination on the one hand, and on the other their public ordering by State Administration. As you contemplate the strong but unimaginative face of Lord Cromer, you are not inclined to doubt the word of his biographer, who remarks that in his administration of Orientals Lord Cromer was not biassed by pre-occupation with the mysticism of the East.

To satisfy the spiritual needs of the imperial era, the resources of culture require adaptation rather than enlargement. Compare for instance, the Imperialist Press with that of the antecedent Liberal era. The latter was characterized by the sobriety of its reporting, and, in its editorial columns, by the interpretative essay of solemn and prescribed form. But a generation which pur- chased, read, memorized and absorbed about 200,000 copies of

24

" Barrack Room Ballads" called for something more enlivening than correctitude in news and its daily interpretation by the dim light of utilitarian philosophy. So news caterers imported from America, what twenty years ago was called " yellow journalism," and to-day " the stunt press." The daily and weekly examples of the latter vie with each other in the selection and presentation of " live" topics. (54). Assuredly scant justice is done to the selec- tive skill of the " stunt" journalist in a recent couplet : —

' The matutinal rumour and the vespertinal lie Which adorn the lucubrations of the press."

The real advance made by this newer journalist is clear. He forms and directs public opinion less by the argument of the lead- ing article than by the emotion of the news column. His principles are two. First that one man who throws his chair out of the window is of more interest to the public than thousands who use it in the ordinary way. Secondly that herd instincts respond most promptly to the primal impulses of fear and hunger. But these are driving forces of Empire, perhaps the main ones. So the imperial journalist manages to serve his God and also Mammon ; since there is more profit and quicker return in selling the warm stuff of emotion than in bartering the cold logic of intellect.

A similar adaptation may be observed in the theatre. The drama of the Liberal era was less dull than its leading articles, but just as mechanical. (55). Approach from the rear certain of the larger and more ambitious theatres built at that time, and you would undoubtedly mistake them for factories. Entering by the back door one would receive instant confirmation of that impression. (56). For on all sides there is a complexity of machinery like that of a cotton mill, and presumably requiring almost as much engine power to work it. Contrast with this scene behind the scenes, one of those re-constructed pictures of the Greek Theatre, and a clue is furnished for an understanding of the difference between Sophocles and the composers of revues. It is these latter who have adapted the apparatus of the older playhouse to contemporary tastes. Broadly the adjustment has been made by transforming the theatre into a Music Hall. Choose a few at random from cur- rent titles of theatrical plays, and put them side by side with the names of Music Hall revues. (57). What, for instance, is to inform you which piece is running at a theatre and which at a Music Hall as between (say) "Tails Up" and "A Box of Tricks" ! ? (58). The probable inference that the former was a Music Hall performance and the latter a theatrical one would be incorrect.

A ( snatch of song from the latter of these two dramatic com- positions is worth citing, because the London crowd chose it, by

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 25

some instinct of fitness, as an ode of victory to celebrate the armistice : —

" I love her, yes I love her, yes I love

her, yes I do. I love her, yes I love her, when I've

had one or two. When I've had three or fow-er, I love her mow-er and mow-er, Ireland is the place for Irish Stew."

From noblest dance to shrillest shriek, infinitely varied are the forms which have throughout history given expression to the maenadic instincts of woman and their answering echo in the soul of man. But new modes, it is apparent, remained for invention by the imperial psychosis of the modern metropolis.

THE PEOPLE : THEIR HOUSING AND EDUCATION.

From their Ministries at home and their Pro-consulates in the Crown Dominions the Governing and Administrative Classes order the lives of the People with an ever-increasing efficiency. To take a familiar example which illustrates this and other tendencies. There may be a certain restriction in amplitude of houseroom when the worker and his family move from the old-fashioned self-con- tained house into a flat of the latest model in tenements. (59). But admirable codes of bye-laws for the administration of these tene- ments make amends. Amongst the many economies thus effected not the least is a decrease in the number of beer and spirit licences, since a single public-house, well placed at a street corner facing the tenements, serves a greatly increased number of customers. From those who tread the path of Empire many sacrifices are called for. Be they on never so modest a peace-footing, yet armies and navies are a drain on the common larder. (60). Statisticians thus some- times show us pictorially by streams of laden waggons, lorries and carts what the provisioning of a Dreadnought means. When he contemplates such pictures, the patriotic tenement dweller is thrilled by that touch of ecstasy which the sense of his sacrifice arouses in the true devotee. Another moving spectacle is furnished by the barracks which multiply with the march of Empire. But this par- ticular appeal speaks perhaps rather to the daughters of the tene- ments. It belongs more to the analytical mind of man to observe and interpret the strange similarity in structural type that seems to unite the tenements and barracks as the respective civil and mili- tary halves of the same social whole.

To perfect the working of the imperial system, educational adjustments are, of course, necessary. The educational problem of bureaucracy is not difficult to state. Given a self-renewing body

26

of conscientious functionaries, find the type of general education through which the system may be administered with least friction. Two conditions are essential. There must be a certain uniformity of mental pattern throughout the governed. Secondly their discip- lined docility must be ensured. Hence the development of compul- sory schooling directed to these ends. The knowledge taught must be standardized in reference to official codes, and it must be

THE LEARNING OF THE SCHOOLS (64).

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 2J

memorized in such wise as to obliterate spontaneous tendencies to critical thought and substitute therefor a fixed habit of acceptance towards official suggestion. An associated method of physical drill and prolonged daily confinement in an unstimulating milieu are manifest further scholastic requirements. A very considerable measure of success rewards the efforts of our imperial bureaucrats to attain these educational ideals. (61). Observe, in illustration, the playgrounds attached to our elementary schools. The children are protected against the disturbing influences of the outside world by a high wall, reinforced often by a cheveaux de frise of barbed wire. Within two kinds of games are played. One is drill and the other a kind of melee, which travesties the football field, and is, as one might say, a shoving match. They are complementary exercises, imparting in the one case Discipline and in the other Character, — those twin divinities of the English Public School tra- dition. Again, note how the system pushes its discipline into the home. The mother of Jimmie, aged five and a half, decides to let the child run wild for a term. An inspector calls and demands the child for the schoolmaster. The mother refuses. She is summoned to court and fined, but still refuses, whereupon the in- quisitorial process is repeated till discipline is re-established and Jimmie reinterned.

This direction of the child mind by the bureaucracy does not, of course, pass without challenge from other groups with traditional rights in the matter. (62). The clerical groups, for instance, whose rival aims were depicted in a famous cartoon of Punch. They contend for the child's soul with a vigour so threatening to its body as to call for the protecting arm of Mr. Punch. Again, there is the Manufacturing Interest and the Landed Interest, whose respective attitude to child life largely determines the educa- tional policy of the Liberal and the Conservative parties. (63). Using, again, the insight of the caricaturist, — this time that of the American Punch, the New York Life,— we discover the distinction between Liberty and Privilege from the standpoint of the child. The silver-buckled shoe of the Tory Landlord presses a shade less heavily on the child's neck than does the broad-soled boot of the Liberal Capitalist.

In the swirl of all these mighty currents of educational interests the old school of pre-industrial type has naturally gone under. (63a). What it was like we can gather from the paintings of Richard West, who drew its last lingering remnants in mid-nineteenth century. His two pictures, " The Frown," and " The Dame's School," show an institution, which with all its faults was very human. The personality, the temperament, the mood of the dominie was the active educational force for good and ill. To it the child mind responded like the camera plate to light. Contrast with this old-

28 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

fashioned dominie the teacher of to-day. The latter's points of superiority are many. But who would dare deny that something- vital has been lost? The modern teacher is trained by the State and even touched by the learning of the Schools. But has there not been some weakening of that inspirational contact between youth and age which is the essence of education ? To be sure this enfeeblement of the spiritual nexus that binds the generations is far from confined to the elementary teacher. It is hardly less marked in higher education. If we could make a composite por- trait of the contemporary teacher from university, secondary school and elementary school what would it be like ? Well, has not the modern teacher long suffered a triple agony of academic pedantry, compulsory games, and official codes ? (64). Switch, mortar board and gown remain, ink abounds, books multiply, but flesh and blood cannot stand the strain. It is to be feared that the composite figure would be but a skeleton among the cultural ruins of a world made abstract by wiping off the face of our globe both its geo- graphical and its human realities. Perched on a pile of dead erudition, the bird of Pallas stands by, disconsolate, unnourished. The accompanying sketch we owe to the pencil of Mr. Mairet.

THAT GREAT LEVIATHAN.

If it was the master mind of Napoleon that laid the foundations of modern bureaucracy, it was the genius of Bismarck that built the model superstructure. (65). Now it is no mere coincidence, but a symbolic event that in seeking for a portrait of Bismarck the first to be found should have been attached to one of Karl Marx. They were more than contemporaries and compatriots. They also had a common faith in the cult of the State. Junker-Politics and Social Democratic Politics are alike to the detached eye of the out- side observer in being sects of one great Faith. In a still wider horizon one sees both individualist and socialist forms of the cult drawing their doctrinal inspiration from the same philosophical sources. For the nineteenth century this was the toxic thought of Hegel, taken neat or diluted with the muddy waters of Isis. But its original fount is the philosophy of Hobbes. (66). In these times it is unnecessary to draw directly on this semi-sacred origin. For the ideals of Hobbes penetrate all our minds continuously through the daily press. But look for a moment at the pictorial illustration which Hobbes designed for his title-page. (67). Towering over a fair city and its countryside stands a crowned man-monster, the Leviathan. Ranged on his right are the representative instruments and resources of the Temporal Power — soldiers, cannon, fortresses, the battlefield. To show that all these are at his disposal, the sword of Temporal Authority is put into his right hand. On his

29

left are ranged the apparatus and influences of Spiritual Authority — churches, universities, schools, and the forked lightning of logic. To show that these also are at his disposal the sceptre of Spiritual Power is put into the left hand of the monster. This Leviathan, all powerful and all wise, is the State, absolute over the individual, body, mind and soul. He is the modern Csesar Augustus, to whom should be rendered the things that are Caesar's and likewise the things that are God's.

To retrace our steps along the speculative road that leads from the Industrial Revolution to the Great War. (67a). We have seen the original philosophy of " the useful " enlarged by the mechanics of "the fit," interpreted by the economics of Mammon, enriched by the sophistries of Moloch. (6yb). Thus in our era of civilization great bodies of men have lived and worked, made war and peace, being mainly guided and inspired thereto by a conglomerate doctrine compounded in various proportions of Benthamite Utili- tarianism, Herbert Spencerism and its better known variety Darwinism, Ricardian Political Economy and the common mixtures of Hobbes and Hegel. We may have been ignorant of the very names of these " isms " and philosophies, nevertheless they are the cardinal points to which the mind of each of us claiming to be modern has been the magnetic needle. There is the compass by which we have been wont to steer on six days of the week whatever pole star of another heaven drew us on the seventh. In other words, the effective Spiritual Power of the Modern Age has been mainly built out of these doctrinal components. (67°). Carried along on the Car of State, this spiritual power has advanced with a movement that seemed to some a triumph of political progress; to others a passage of Juggernaut.

To return to the achievement of Prussia. Given the State as a form of the Absolute, the resulting doctrine was bound to realize itself in deed. The main credit for this creative phase belongs to the Prussian Government under Bismarck. Consequently, it is in Berlin that the outstanding monuments of the State cult occur. There in' the pantheon of The Leviathan a central place is rightly given to the colossal statue of Bismarck with all its wealth of allegory and embellishment. How appropriate that a background should be furnished for the Bismarck statue by the facade of that Reichstag which he devised to be his creature. (68). The prophet who prepared the way for Bismarck is doubly commemorated in the 'Hegel Platz, with its central statue of the great dialectician. (69). And the demi-gods of the system are preserved in marble all along that Assyrioid Way, the Sieges Allee. (70). Correspondingly for the People of Berlin there have been provided an equipment of barrack-like tenements and tenement-like barracks far outrivalling

3O THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

those of Westminster-London, at least so far as these latter had developed up to 1914. (70% 7ob).

But there is no reason in the inherent theory of the State why the detail of organisation should follow precisely the Junker model. Substitute for Junker minister an "expert" administra- tor and for the conscript army an industrial army. Substitute for the history of Empire and songs of the barracks and music- hall, the history of the People and Songs of Labour. Make these adaptations, and you have a State organisation of popularized type. In short, the ideal of socialism is for the Marxians to take over the organised bureaux of the Imperial State and run them in the interests of the People. The rapidity of certain changes in Berlin, which transformed Imperial Germany into a Democratic State, all, so to speak, within twenty-four hours, is thus in a measure explained. The example of Bolshevik Russia illustrates a more rigid adherence to the theory of the Class War, and conse- quently the more thoroughgoing substitution of a Proletarian Dictature for one of mingled patrician and bureaucratic elements.

THE DUEL OF ANARCHIST AND FINANCIER.

Thanks to the prestige of the Prussian Government, of Bismarck its protagonist, of Hegel its thinker, and Marx its popularizer and adapter, State Socialism became established as the orthodox faith inspiring progressive politics throughout Western Europe. The anti-state socialists were, so to speak, driven into dissent. But like all nonconformist bodies in active opposition, they throve and multiplied. (71). Thus it has come about that the vague term Anarchism is a covering cloak for dis- senting groups and types, so far apart as bomb throwers and dynamitards at one end and, at the other, Franciscan humanists like Reclus and Kropotkin. (72). French syndicalism is to be understood as a vigorous central group within the wide and varied anarchist fold. For those interested in the historical develop- ment of these groups it may be noted that the contemporary opposition of state-socialists and anti-state syndicalists repeats and continues the original struggle of German versus French influence for control of the old " International."

(73). Between the two hostile camps of advanced labour there is happily a middle party of adjustment and possible reconcilia- tion. This is the party of Guild Socialism which, we may sup- pose, owes its being to the British tradition of compromise.

But anarchism is more than an offshoot from pristine socialism. It has in it also an element of more spontaneous origin. For anarchism is also a repercussion from that phase of modern life which in the terse language of America is called " big business." As socialism is the people's complement and counterpart to state bureaucracy, so anarchism is the people's rejoinder to " big

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 31

business." Against that Goliath this anarchist David is out with his sledge hammer of Direct Action. (73a). But it will be recalled that in a recent encounter with the hosts of the Philistines, the anarchist David did effective execution with the delicate instruments of the electrical craft. (73b). It was the occasion of the "light that failed" at the Albert Hall.

There was frequently witnessed during the war the phenomenon of the Disappearing Commodity. On Monday rabbits are plentiful at, say, 2S. 6d. On Tuesday the Government ordains is. 6d. as the maximum price. On Wednesday there is not a rabbit to be seen in the shops. But this is merely a dramatic instance of a general custom. The manufacturer speeds up his factory when prices are high, slackens it when they are low. " Big business " is the organisation of the small supply at the high price. To this machinery of the Darwinian ideal, the Americans have contributed most, but all the other nations of the western civilization in degree and kind. For it is the natural and inevitable tendency under our system of production for profit rather than for use. Success in business under this system turns upon skill in limiting the supply to the point where competition of the buyer is keenest. In other words, success depends on steady and continuous application of what Mr. Thorstein Veblen calls "judicious sabotage." And "big business" is the art of combining manufacturers and merchants for the better practise of judicious sabotage.

Increasingly is recognised, in this regime, the value of an apprenticeship to the bank and the stock exchange. These being the generalised markets that touch all others, it is through them that the Combine becomes the monopolist Trust. Big business is, therefore, in effect, a form of Finance. Now the financier is a skilled psychologist. He studies the working of the human mind. It is his business to play upon human weakness. Simultaneously with the limitation of Supply he organises the stimulation of Demand, and so creates a public mind attuned to his blandish- ments. Hence appear all those modern developments, which its cultivators call the science of Advertisement. As advertiser the man of Big Business hires the pen of the writer and the pencil of the artist. (74). But it is to tell, not the writer's story, nor show the artist's vision, but to serve the salesman. The picture of a handsome athlete, repeated in all your favourite journals, along with the legend that facile princeps cigarettes are at once a tonic and a sedative, persuades you almost that cigarettes and health are interchangeable terms. It is less easy to believe that the abound- ing vitality of a young queen among women is derived from Messrs. Bolus' purple pills.

In such ways does the advertiser appeal to the athlete and the

32 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

sesthete, actual or dormant in each of us. Let the advertiser com- bine these two grounds of appeal, reinforce them by the academic, salt the mixture with imperialist fervour, and he becomes one of the real spiritual powers of these days. Perhaps that ideal was not absent from the scheming brain of Cecil Rhodes, when he ordained that part of his munificent legacy to Oxford should go towards extending his old College to the main thoroughfare of the city and there providing it with an imposing fa9ade. For Mr. Rhodes was more than an imperialist financier. He was representative of his times in amazingly complete fashion. Cosmopolitan in finance, imperialist in foreign policy, Home Ruler and therefore of the Liberal tradition in domestic policy, he combined in himself the three great temporalities of his age. And the greatest of these is finance, because the financier has achieved the highest per- fection of finish in the corresponding spirituality, which is the science of advertisement, and its application in art. Contem- plating in admiration the new Oriel facade, the sociologist when next he observes, by way of contrast, one of the many house fronts given over to the billsticker will not fail to classify this latter as an archaic survival from the early days of pre-scientific advertising.

In commemoration of his unprecedented benefaction to the University and to his old College, the pious donor, carved in stone, is pedestalled and canopied at the focal point of the new Orie4 facade. (74a). By the undesigned symbolism of the time-spirit his statue squarely faces the porch of St. Mary's, the church which for centuries enshrined the soul of the University and kindled the imagination of a long line of prophets and preachers from Wcyliffe to Newman. Above the porch of St. Mary's stands the sacred statue of Her whom the University once honoured as Queen of Heaven and Mistress of Science. But the student of to-day as he perambulates "the High " will be reminded that the modern point of view looks rather to the King of the Market and the Master of Finance.

(75). Another simple mode in that art of the hoardings which constitutes the characteristic public art of our times, is to tell a story in deshabille. For an example of this you need not walk many yards in any up-to-date town. (76). Intermediate between unhandy beginnings and the finished products of advertising science are the somewhat facile triumphs won by the advertiser in the realm of clothing — especially underclothing. In the domestic field he also reaps a rich harvest from the homing instincts that play around furniture, and the subsequent demand for baby food.

(77). A final illustration of the subtle effects got by masked advertisement. You see on the walls of the Academy, hung on the line, a portrait of Sir Tono Bungay. It is an admirable speci-

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 33

men of modern portraiture by an artist who has achieved the rare distinction of being at once fashionable and a master. A figure, Jife-sized, august, almost pontifical, looms from a dark back- ground, delicately suggestive of the mystic aura that surrounds the millionaire. A reproduction of this masterpiece naturally appears in all the illustrated papers, those cheap and popular, as well as the expensive ones. No motive, venal or servile, can reasonably be imputed to these editors, even though their journals draw a large revenue from giving publicity to the many wares (which range from mouth-wash and insect powder to motor cars and aeroplanes) " controlled" by Sir Tonp, nor even if (as is not unlikely), he is a large shareholder in the various companies or syndicates that own the respective journals. No, on the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that the editor of each newspaper genuinely shares the common veneration for millionaires. And if so, what more natural than to publish the great man's portrait as a spontaneous act of editorial homage ?

It is this financial Goliath whom the anarchist David con- fronts. But the latter — if one may change the metaphor a little abruptly — has his own row to hoe. The crop he cultivates bears a natural resemblance to that of his opponents. Its first fruits are observable in the trade union policy of ca' canny. The brick- layer says " If I lay 500 bricks instead of 1,000 and prevent my mates from laying the other 500 then I can double my wages or halve my work at a stroke. Perhaps I can even do better, because the diminished supply will involve a more intense demand, and so I may actually double my wage for half the work." That is the leaf he takes from the manufacturer's book of judicious sabot- age. And having discerned this key to success under the price system, the workman logically goes on to its grand scale applica- tion in the General Strike. There he parallels as well as may be with his clumsy technique the Trusts' policy of wholesale restric- tion of output in a falling market. But, it will be asked, what of the syndicalist sabotage which actually destroys property ? The aggressive syndicalist may well reply, " what of the dismantling and closing down of productive plants which attend the birth of the great combines? What of the incredible waste through advertisement ? What of habitual purchase and suppression of new patents and improved processes by monopolistic Trusts with a vested interest in antiquated processes and machinery ?"

The anarchist ideal has been expressed and embodied in an ominous phrase. To " incinerate the documents " is this anarchist exhortation. The documents which it is proposed to put to the stake are those " securities" or legal claims on the national output which crowd the strong boxes of the leisure-class. The large- scale manufacture and sale of these securities is the business on

34 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

which the ablest financiers specialize. It is a business in which success often turns on skill in depreciating the value of rival securities. Hence there has developed a sabotage of the Stock Exchange with an elaborate technique. Its characteristic opera- tion is appropriately termed "bearing," or in America "selling short." A certain refinement practised by the master broker is to depreciate not the securities of rival groups, but those of his own. Turning like a wolf on his own pack, he stampedes (often through a press campaign), the mass of security-holders (both professional and private), by a skilful "bearing" operation. He then buys up the deflated paper at, a rubbish price. True that price may not be far from the real value of the article. But next follows the " bull" operation. Prices are again sent soaring, often by a press campaign of disguised advertisement termed " boosting " in America The bated hook is swallowed by the public. The financier lands another big fish. Then the "bearing" begins anew, and the round of fortune-making continues by skilful alter- nation of sabotage and advertisement.

Human nature is prone to extremes. That weakness explains, without excusing the demand sometimes heard from a hardened anarchist that his party should pass from an incineration of docu- ments to a combustion of the financier. This evil disposition has been voiced by vindictive oratory even in this land of mild ani- mosities where the use of the stake for composing spiritual differences has long been discontinued. (78). The occasion was a mass meeting on Tower Hill, where impassioned men were proclaiming a flight to the new Eden on the wings of the General Strike.

Assuredly in the matter of sabotage, latent or patent, judicious or aggressive, the business man and the working man are in the same galley. And for companions they had recently the whole body of " militant" suffragettes, who in a society saturated with ideas of sabotage naturally used that weapon to get what was refused them. The truth, to be sure, is that " big business" men, scheming financiers, syndicalist workmen and militant feminists are alike victims of the same impulse and habit. Its tap root is nourished by that profiteering which since the war we have been learning to recognize as an inevitable characteristic of the price system. It is the impulse and habit of getting for oneself and one's group, much for little or even something for nothing, at no matter what cost to the community at large. (79). With the aid of Mr. Punch's discerning eye we recently saw Government Departments infected by the same disease.

(80). The saying of Goethe that one rich man makes many poor ones becomes more vivid when rendered in terms of housing. The millionaires have their palaces ; the dis-millioned their doss-

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 35

houses. And for the nightly overflow of the dosshouses there are the seats on the Thames Embankment, if the policeman permits, being moved to relax the rigour of his instructions to protect what is provided for the repose of the respectable by day from defile- ment by the outcast at night.

There are many, to be sure, who break under the strain of poverty. Their sufferings touch the heart of the rich, and so these contribute generously to hospitals and asylums. Mental illness, it will be noted, excites less compassion than bodily. It therefore happens that asylums for the most part fall to the charge of the public purse. (81). But the hospitals maintained by private charity are conspicuous features of every great city. But be they never so many and so vast, the cry is always for more. And the heart of the millionaire responds. After all, is he not a human being with a craving for emotional outlets? True, he endows modern art on the hoardings and lavishly spends on archaic art for the adornment of his many mansions. Yet these outlets are far from exhausting his reservoirs of feeling. There remains ample material for a cult of philanthropy. And so Hospitals are added to Banks, Stock Exchanges, and Doss- houses as the characteristic buildings of the Financial Age.

Sabotage and Advertisement are the twin stars of the financial firmament. But the millionaire is merely their most manifest emanation. Their subtle influence has penetrated the structure of contemporary civilization ; it pervades our habits of thought and deflects our outlook often when we are least aware of its in- sidious bias.

Practised covertly by men of business, advocated openly by the extremists of Labour, applied deliberately to political purpose by sensitive women, sabotage was one of the major forces that made for war. Like-minded allies were at hand in the " frightfulness" of Prussia, the " conspicuous waste" of the leisure class, and the cult of emulation in all classes, moral reflex of the rapacity that triumphs in competitive business. Here was a quadruple alliance, well calculated to eventuate in a world-wide War of Attrition, waged to the verge of famine, plague and collapse.1 But how reconcile this mania of waste and carnage with the dictates of common-sense, the instincts of frugality, the sanctities of life, the

1. It will be observed that the analysis here given applies not to the outbreak of hostilities but to the pre-war state of so-called peace in which war was all the time latent. As to the proximate causes of the actual combat, evidence continues to accumulate in overwhelming mass confirming the popular verdict of the Central Empires' guilt. The facts as far as we know them point to a conspiracy of three plotters. Berlin, by long and sedulous care, prepared the torch of war; then in a moment of ambition and desperation, Vienna and Buda-Pesth lighted the torch and flung it into the European powder magazine.

36 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

traditions of Christendom ? Assuredly a hard question awaiting the dispassionate thinking and chilled feeling of a later generation. But reflect that instantly on the outbreak of war the Advertiser cast his spell over the belligerent Governments. Under the enchantment of the billsticker they rushed to the hoardings. The paste-pot polluted, without protest from the public, even the semi-sacred walls of Whitehall. The art of the hoardings and the wiles of the advertisement column were adopted by Governments as fit instruments wherewith to persuade the minds and stir the emotions of their peoples. And this tuning of feelings and imagination, this stimulation of energies and ideas, was maintained at concert pitch during month after month, year after year. How natural therefore that one of these Governments should develop this situa- tion to its logical issue. In the climax were three notable events. In the first place it happened that when a Minister was needed as Director of Information, the Government selected for that intel- lectual effort a millionaire-financier. Again, to the almost priestly office of Enemy Propaganda was appointed a merchant in the traffic of advertisement. (82). And finally, that no dubiety might remain as to the sources of official inspiration, the Govern- ment distributed through the press a lengthily reasoned advertise- ment of which the central exhortation was to

FOLLOW THE LEAD OF THE MEN WITH THE MILLIONS.

These things would be incredible if they were not facts. But they constitute a remarkable example of consistency. Perhaps it was necessary, in order to reduce completely to absurdity that fundamental tenet of modern politics, in which practically all parties concur, viz., the assumption by the State of Spiritual Authority as well as Temporal Sovereignty. Down that broad road of the descent to Avernus went all schools of "power politics" to their doom in the crash of 1914. And what precisely is this illusion of power politics? It is the temptation to Caesarist rule that perenially besets now the patrician now the plebeian arm of the Temporal Power, or again their com- bination, parliamentary, bureaucratic or what not. The inevitable catastrophe that sooner or later befalls all such " Dictatures" is the scourge of the thwarted spirit. All who set up an Absolute State, as also those who accept it in any of its protean forms, repudiate the need for an independent Spiritual Power, and so violate the supreme condition of political advancement. Thus these modern politicians have been playing the part of the fool who said in his heart there is no God. Hence they have led their peoples into the slough of Militarism, from which these latter scramble out with grave risk of falling into a like bog of their own making which is Bolshevism.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 37

WAR, REVOLUTION — OR EUTOPIA.

The hell's broth on which the world has lately been supping had many cooks to prepare it. But the compounding of the in- gredients was mainly in the hands of three groups. To designate them in cold formality like a naturalist labelling his species may savour of offence since it brings into juxtaposition unaccustomed bedfellows. But the sociologist must not shrink from his duties of nomenclature. Undeterred by susceptibilities, he will boldly name the political authors of the world crisis as disclosed by analysis impartially applied to all modernized States. The culprits thus arraigned are the conventional parties and their insurgent counter-parties. These are the Liberals paralleled yet opposed by the Radicals, the Imperialists similarly countered by the Socialists, and the Financials by the Anarchists.

But these same cooks have now become physicians prescribing remedies for the ills that have issued from their own concoctions. And the remedies that they offer to the patient, what are these ? To the outside observer the cure smacks of homeopathy. The prescription looks uncommonly like " a hair of the dog that bit you." Our world of Western civilisation is thus threatened with schemes of " Re-construction," compounded of more Liberalism and Radicalism, more Imperialism and Socialism, more Financier- ing and Anarchism. The disease and its proffered remedies should be set out in clear and unmistakable terms. For that pur- pose let us use the fourfold analysis of the sociologist. Every social system has its "Chiefs" and its "People," or executive head and working body. It has also its " Intellectuals" and ' Emotionals," who supply respectively the rationale of the sys- tem and its inspiring impulses. (83). In the Liberal order the Chiefs are the capitalists, the manufacturers, the M.P.s. These three roles are, to be sure, often combined in the same person. The corresponding " People" are, from the standpoint of the fac- tory " hands," and from that of Parliament " voters." The Intellectuals who explain the working of the system are on the commercial side the political economists; on its political side the constitutional lawyers. The Emotionals are clearly those Orators of Progress whose eloquence implants faith in the past of this dispensation, and inspires to like effort in the future.

The strength and persistence of the Liberal movement are thus analysed, and in a measure explained. Diagram 83 shows Liberalism equipped with the instruments both intellectual and emotional of a spiritual power adapted to its purpose. This spiritual power was so well fitted for its work as to make the Liberal Chiefs and their People for long the foremost Temporal couple in the State. But as the economic centre of gravity shifted from

38 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

factory to market there came corresponding political changes. So there rose into prominence the Imperial Order with a temporal and spiritual equipment adapted to a double purpose. On the one side was the expansionist ideal and on the other the need for

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THE3 DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 39

a regulative system of government to correct the abuses of laissez- faire. But below these great secular movements we call Liberalism and Imperialism, there was all the time fermenting out a new social regime of portentous significance. Standing professedly aloof from politics, the Financial Order nevertheless had its political reaction, and far-reaching it proved. It polluted the springs of Liberalism. It debased the coinage of Imperialism. Thus was provided a platform of political chicane on which deteriorate Liberals and Imperialists could combine with one another and with outworn groups surviving from past dispensations, like intran- sigent Tories from the XVIIIth Century, and religious fanatics from the Reformation. Deceiving themselves, as well as their victims, by a masque of patriotism, all these lower political types were united by a common impulse and a uniform purpose in the financial exploitation of the masses at home and " foreigners" or " natives" abroad. This whole system, Liberal-Imperial-Finan- cial, consecutive yet concurrent, is analysed systematically, and presented as a grouping of inter-related persons and institutions in Diagram 83. In the following Diagram, No. 84, is also set out what might be called the proletarian twin of each social order within the Liberal-Imperial-Financial system. The Radical, Socialist and Anarchist groups are each seen to be equipped with a temporal and spiritual outfit corresponding to that of its "class" antagonist but adapted of course to the supposed interests of the masses.

The two foregoing diagrams together present systematically what has been said in the text with a certain discursiveness inci- dental to a multiplicity of illustrative examples. Consider the situation as we know it. On the right of the stage stand the two conventional parties of modernized politics, the Liberals and the Imperialists. Ready to support them at call are drawn up at the back of the stage, the cohorts of Finance. On the left are arranged the three insurgent groups, eyeing each other furtively, and not less ready to contend amongst themselves than to combine against " the classes." The boast from which not one of the six parties, conven- tional or insurgent, shrinks is that it and its working philosophy embody the modern point of view. The outsider must grant the claim of all or none. On the former supposition, the modern point of view can be clearly defined and thus vividly pourtrayed as by a six-rayed star whose illumination guides the ship of State on its pre- destined course. But for judging the civilization value of this modern point of view the outsider demands, of course, criteria from beyond the six-fold system. Two sources would seem to be open to him. There are survivals from past dispensations. And amongst these the civilization value of what descends to us from the best of the renaissance, the mediaeval, the classical and the Hebraic

40 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

orders ranks high. There are also certain newer growths (finer and more social arts, subtler and more vital sciences) which have little appeal for Liberalism, Imperialism and Finance, and hardly more for Radicalism, Socialism and Anarchism. But all that falls beyond the scope of this Paper ; it will be the theme of other Paper*.

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THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 4!

As to the conventions of the diagrams a word. Each of the six social orders (three conventional and three insurgent) within the larger system is represented by a pair of brackets. A larger bracket stands for the Chiefs and the Intellectuals of each order, and a smaller one for the People and the Emotionals of the same order. The Temporal couple (Chiefs and People) are indicated by a thickening of the arms of their respective brackets, and simi- larly the Emotionals and Intellectuals of the corresponding Spiritual Power are indicated by slender arms. Ordinarily the temporal half of each pair of brackets stands uppermost, the spiritual power being shown below like an image reflected in a mirror. But this convention is reversed for a special reason in Diagram No. 84. There the intention is to show the opposition of Radicalism to Liberalism, of Socialism to Imperialism, of Anarchism to Finance as essentially one of ideas and emotions. Hence the respective spiritual powers of these social orders are brought together in the diagram, and the arrows in each case emphasize the clash of moral and intellectual interests. The sug- gestion is that from this conflict of mind and heart issues a revelation which sharpens and defines the antagonism of other and more material interests. Accepting an economic interpretation of history, one may still claim a certain initiating impulse for the more human and psychic aspects of life.

The pre-war system proved increasingly unable to adapt itself to the pressures of a rapidly changing situation. That was per- haps the nemesis of pride in modernity and satisfaction in the sufficiency of "the modern point of view." Many are the strains and stresses to which the system was subjected. There was the external pressure of rival "Great Powers" competing- for world trade. There was the internal pressure of class interests and the predatory ambitions of groups and persons. Under these major forces a rift cuts the whole system from top to bottom. There develops a cleavage into two rival camps; and more or less explicitly appears the party of Order and the Party of Progress. The Liberals, Imperialists and Finan- cials loosely coalesce to constitute the party of Order. The Radicals, Socialists and Anarchists unite to form a party of Progress. Ranged in hostility, expressed or implied, the one party contends with the other in a thousand ways. But broadly, the contest tends towards a Policy of Repression and a counter Policy of Reprisals. The logical issue of this clash is seen in a tendency to Despotism on the one side, answered by Nihilism on the other. To infinite force there is the necessary response of infinite reaction. Towards the resulting alternation of deadlock and overturn the whole system tends to drift. On the face of things there seem to be two ways of escape open. On one side the Party of Order

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

sees a way of escape through a " good" war, capable of uniting the whole nation against a common foe. From the standpoint of the Party of Progress the escape is through Revolution. This alternative was plainly put by the labour member of the war cabinet. It was Mr. Barnes who said : — " If we had gone on for a

LIBERAL4-IMPERIAL -tFINANCIAL

PARTYoFQRDER

NIHILISMV

PARTY °'PROCRI:S

RADICALS+SOCIALISTS+ANARCHISTS

THE POLITICAL DEADLOCK (85).

few years more without a war with Germany, we should have had a war with one another in this country, because the average man felt the sense of injustice as he had never felt before."

As things turned out, the respective Parties of Order in the Central Empires got the war for which they planned and worked.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 43

The unforseen sequel vas that the Parties of Progress in both of the Central Empires and in Russia also got the Revolution they had long hoped for and intermittently prepared. Are the Allies to follow the lead of their recent antagonists into the stormy sea of revolution ? Surely the logic of the situation is otherwise.

Is it not now for the Allies to complete their victory in the field by a corresponding triumph in the Forum ? Their temporal power having prevailed, it remains for their spiritual power to make mani- fest its superiority and to rise beyond the standpoint of any or all the clashing groups. May not the historic idealism of France, the common sense of England, the juristic spirit of Italy look for their reward in the discovery of the third alternative to war and revolution ?

Assuredly there was and is a third alternative. Even before the war not a few discerned it with varying degrees of clearness. And in the light of the war its way should become plain to all ; for in four years of Homeric strife, there has been woven on the weft of politics a revealing pattern. It shows with clearness not merely the defects of our age, but also its qualities; and so we may read therefrom the good that is in Liberalism, in Imperialism and even in Finance. It also shows how these qualities may be turned to account in the shaping of the future.

We have already recalled in a brief historic sketch the main inspirational element in English Liberalism. It was demiurgic joy in the creative energies of machine production. All that has been renewed by the war, and moreover with the enhancement of devotion to a vital and moving cause. Now it is the Imperialist, who taking him at his best, picks up, emphasises, develops the his- toric, the human, the collective factor, naturally a little overlooked by the Liberal manufacturer. To organise energies for communi- tary purpose is the prime concern of the good Imperialist. The watchword of his method is Organisation. He tries to shape the mechanical energies released by Liberalism into a worthy instrument of political power; and that at its best means the humanizing of the machine. Seen in this light, the Imperial ideal has the force of an epic. Add thereto the lyric of the Liberal ideal and there is generated an impulse of high intensity and noble purpose, as the war has abundantly shown.

In this play of heroic drama what has been the part of the financier? Well, he, taking him also at his best, is a co- ordinator of dispersive activities. He, too, is a comolementary type to the Liberal. The latter demands a free stage for that sub- division of labour and specialisation of function which are the breath of the machine industry. On this free stage the financier appears as a specialist in the return movement of co-ordination. He has built up a co-ordinating mechanism of marvellous power

44 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

and delicacy. It is called the Credit System. By its working the whole resources of the Allies and to a considerable extent of friendly neutrals, were focussed on the objects of the war with a wonder-working effect.

The lesson of the war is therefore that, given opportunity of high public endeavour, and the conditions of honorific service, Liberal, Imperialist and Financier, compose into a workmanlike trio of real political efficiency. How then in the coming recon- struction to contrive from the experience of war a situation in which Liberal Manufacturer, Imperialist Administrator and Financial Magnate will stand on their best behaviour, and display their finer gestures ? In the previous era of so-called peace there was some malign influence at work which seemed to evoke the defects and repress the qualities of Liberals, Imperialists and Financials alike. To the invidious task of exposing that devil's advocacy the bulk of this Paper has been devoted. A complementary analysis of re- demptive and constructive elements in the war, as also of similar tendencies in the pre-war era, and a forecast and demonstration of their possible synthesis, will be the subject of two succeeding papers, entitled " Masters of our Fate," and " Eutopia or Hell." Meantime we close this Paper by sharply contrasting in a chal- lenging fashion the parts respectively played in the Great War and in the Victorian Peace by our trio of political chiefs.

In the war the Financier, without ceasing altogether to be the Gain Chief operating on a Pawned People, was transmuted for the time being into something akin to an Accountant Chief doing service for a Credited People. The Imperialistic Chief, without altogether ceasing to be a bureaucrat arbitrarily regulating a Ser- vile People, became an Organising Chief planning for an Organ- ised People. The Manufacturer, without ceasing altogether to be a Profiteering Chief exploiting a Worked People, became also an Industrial Chief labouring for an Equipped People. It is true the equipment of the People was mainly with the instruments of death and destruction, but far from only so. It is true the credit- ing of the People was in terms of a depreciated paper currency, but still their pocket-books bulged with "John Bradburys," and there were many and excellent things to be purchased, from pianos to jewellery that made for the quickening of life. It is true the organising was for war, but still a war of noble purpose.

The problem of the third alternative is to escape alike the Scylla of War and the Charybdis of Revolution by boldly steering for a peace which contains within itself the " moral equivalents of war." We have to find the formula of a peace that is not the negative thing, the mere War-Peace of the Victorian era, but is something positive, charged to complete the process of conversion begun in war, by carrying the ferment of idealism on into a

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 45

peace- war, a " holy " war, constructive, evocatory, militant, yet also campaigning ruthlessly against diseases, poverties, ignorances, follies, vices, crimes. How, in other words, organise a society of such high-power intensity as to effect the transmutation of Gain Chiefs and a Pawned People into Accountant Chiefs and a Credited People, of War Chiefs and a Warred People, into Organising Chiefs and an Organised People, of Profiteering Chiefs and an Exploited People into Industrial Chiefs and an Equipped People. All this, it may be said, is just what the Radicals, Socialists and Anarchists, taking them at their best, are and were "out for." Granted. But our contention is that this sort of social transmutation, being essentially psychic, i.e., religious, it follows that a spiritual power of wider resource, deeper reach and loftier appeal, is needed than fell within the ken of Radicals, Socialists and Anarchists in their pre-war phase. That they also, like the countering trio, have moved onwards and up- wards through the experience of the war is doubtless to be assumed and hopefully reckoned on. In any case one must recognise the valid element in the revolutionary ideal, as also in the appeal of war. The two are strangely alike, being in each case an enhancement of life by drama that runs on the edge of tragedy. It is the absence of any such inspiration that condemns to futility the piecemeal procedure called Social Reform. Because it is piecemeal and consequently lacking in vision of the whole, this stodgy method leaves the masses of the people cold, however tragic the fate of the reformer. The third alternative to War and Revolution is not Reform. It is something nearer akin to what the religious call Conversion. That holds vision of life more abundant and also promise of heroic drama. The new heaven calls for attainment by strenuous action ; the old hell has to be resolutely escaped from. Now the peoples of Europe have been through the old hell ; they are eager to be shown the new heaven. It must be no facile Utopia of outworn doctrine; it must be vision of a City of God that can be built with human hands. And the design of its plans we may call Eutopia,1 which is the opposite of Utopia, since the latter refers to no place and the former to every place that can be made good to live and work in, beautiful to see, and all in the here and now.

The quest of this third alternative, if it is to be successful at home must be pursued also and simultaneously abroad. In the paradise below as in the heaven above many mansions are needed if all ranks and classes are to be moved to attainment and all nations, creeds and races drawn to it as to a goal. The oneness in manifoldness of western civilisation implies fullest and widest

1. See the " Coming Polity," Part I, Introduction, and Part III, Chaps, i and iii. 2nd edition. (Williams and Norgate). Also Papers for the Present, No. 8. "A Rustic View of War and Peace." (Headley Bros.).

46 THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

co-operation. The diversity of Europe ensured by geography and the unity of Europe ensured by history cannot be cast out by the respective pitchforks of levelling internationalism and di- shevelling nationalism. There is needed for the full orchestration of occidental resources on the problem of a militant peace the tradi- tional compromise of England, the logic and imagination of France, the genius of Italy, the fervour of Russia, the initiative of the small nations, and also the militancy of America. Nor can we dispense with the organizing power of a penitent Germany. And similarly, no solution is possible, no way through the impasse will be found, unless the other co-operants also undergo purgation. We need for a real Society of Nations an awakened England, a purified France, a forelooking Italy, a reasonable Russia, and also a sobered America.

War as we now know it by actual sample is no mystical monster that descends upon us out of the unknown. Modern war has been unveiled as a state of mental stress that overtakes industrial societies intent on pitiless competition. In the rebound there ensues a mood of exaltation, with its crop of magnanimities, generosities, heroisms. Amongst the more unconventional audacities thus liberated is an impulse to place the energies of the warring societies at the disposal of their chemists, physicists, engineers, chartered accountants. Suppose now these chemists, physicists, engineers, chartered accountants having come into the public service be persuaded to remain there, or at least to re-enter it, but under other direction than that either of military bureaucrat or utilitarian politician. There are available for this higher statesman- ship Rural Planners like Horace Plunkett, and Educationists like Baden Powell and Margaret Macmillan. There is also, in John Burns, even a personage of Cabinet rank who has taken the pains to acquire the art of Town-Planning. These are but exemplary names chosen from the seniors. Amongst juniors of both sexes there is a growing body, but half used or unused, of first-rate competence in Rural Economy, in Civic Economy and in the Life Economies we call Health, Education, Public Art. Here are real economies of Home, Village, City, returning each with its sheaf of high utilities to replace the phantoms of the Market, and all their foul brood idolized bv the bastard science, Political Economy, and the spurious philosophy, Utilitarianism. The possible co-ordina- tion of these high utilities and vital economies may safely be assumed with religion on one side and domestic economy on the other. For the churches, if true to their primary and essential purpose, evoke a spiritual activity which is the highest utility of life, and therefore its truest economy. While as for domestic economy, it remains com- mitted to an expanding vision of life so long as motherhood lasts in the world.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 47

By an edict of poetic justice the Victorian society of low utilities has been shattered in a thunderclap of high explosives. Is it extravagant beyond hope to suppose a day will come when these men and women of the post-utilitarian school will share to the full in the guidance and inspiration of public life and so help to determine the course of business and the modes of private life ? When that day comes a peace will break out that leads towards Eutopia. Like other conquests, Eutopia must of course be won by definitely planned campaigns, that proceed region by region, city by city. For the tactics and strategy of this campaigning, it is true the General Staff has yet to be created. But let us not forget that there are those who can, if they will, set men's hearts ablaze with passion for these enhance- ments of life and betterments of environment, that will signalize real peace. These are our singers, painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, story-tellers, dramatists.

What career was open to all these ministrants of the Muses in a utilitarian society animated by ruthless competition at home and predatory rivalry abroad ? It was the ill fate of such a society to drive its Parnassians, with few exceptions, into unemployment or revolt, unless they cultivated their muse within the confinement of a coterie, hired themselves out to the profiteer, or gilded the book of life for the rich. No wonder then that in the Victorian " Peace " men were allured to the discovery that drink was the shortest way out of Manchester. But with the quickening of war came the revelation that poetry was the shortest way out of the Trenches, and so a real utility of life, and accordingly a true economy also.

The social implication of these two cardinal truths is plain. There are nine muses and they do not all of them prompt us to flee from the repulsive. On the contrary, they far more often inspire us to transmute it into what the heart desireth. And in this alchemy lies a main secret of the higher economy. So the journey to Eutopia may start wherever there is beauty to be won from ashes, truth from ignorances and falsities, ideals from temptations and debasements. Thus in the financial city its points of departure would naturally be the Dosshouse and the Hospital ; in the Imperial city, the Tenement and the Barrack, the School and the Tavern ; in the Liberal-mechanical city, the Factory and the Slum, the Caucus and the Bar. Similarly, in the homes of Philistia the Eutopian itinerary might becomingly commence in the basement kitchen. Let the Lady of the house restore to their rightful and original place the decorative furnishings of the kitchen looted by her ancestress to adorn the drawing-room. But would such restitu- tions be sufficient to reinvoke the fairy godmother of the kitchen- maid ? Hardly. The Muses must attend all the way ; but other guidances, inspirations, and encouragements are also requisite, for

4$ THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

a pilgrimage planned to go right through from our modern infern* into a purgatory of transition and onwards to the fair cities of the earthly paradise.

Man being what he is, a creature swaying between dull habits of animal fixity and curious dreams that shape strange deeds, there is one, and only one, possible source whence can issue the plenary inspiration, the flaming ideal, the sustaining impulse for changing from the Victorian Peace to a militant one. This must spring from the concerted activity of our poets, painters, sculptors, architects, singers, musicians, dramatists, novelists. If through this, its natural channel, the Eutopian vision were to touch the life of the People, then would these be moved to work for its realization, and with a quickening of energies undreamed by philistine profiteers and dismal trade-unionists. In the great days of its past unity the Christian Church tried to organize this inspiring co-partnership of Emotionals and People ; and in no small degree succeeded. Whether or not that historic mission can be renewed, assuredly there will arise, later or sooner, a Spiritual Power adapted to this creative purpose. In the resulting social transformation, the economic movement would run harmoniously with the political, and both together would make the framework of a drama-action, or Peace-game (friedenspiel) retaining the qualities and avoiding the defects of the War-game (kriegspiel). The central and abiding motive of the play would be the ineluctable effort to identify personal career that is income-yielding with public service that is honorific. The " governing classes " having practi- cally attained that end, does not the postulate of evolution compel a working faith in its extension to other classes ? As soon as dignity and security were assured to all willing and competent workers, then real wages would rise without any necessary increase in money wages. Similarly, remuneration for management and direction being partly in terms of honour, the money charges for these costly services could be reduced. A still greater economy could be effected by a well-devised national insurance to cover the risks of enterprise, for then the return to capital would naturally be adjusted to that fine point at which " the reward of thrift " just overbalances the impulse to spend. By bold but judicious experiment along these lines, there would grow up a society in which the industrial system, with its whole outfit of national resources was increasingly treated as a Great Game played between Man and Nature ; politics very similarly viewed, partly as a system of stage regulations for the technic drama, partly as an adventure in the corresponding social ethic. Is it not a fact of observation that so long as the driving force of war lasted, we were actually and visibly moving towards such a social goal ? Well then, given a national community, definitely and continuously during a full generation, animated by these aims and oriented to this outlook, many major adjustments would emerge without undue friction. Thus, for instance, there

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION 49

could readily be provided for the Chiefs of the Financial, Imperial and Liberal-mechanical Orders, the more honourable and abstemious parts for which, not unwillingly, they underwent a certain rehearsal during the war. And the Intellectuals, what of their part? Theirs would be the humble role of investigating ways and means; estimating resources, physical, vital, social, and studying their economy ; but also it would fall to them to create the Staff Office, and train the Chiefs, perhaps even to organize their selection from the community at large.

The problem before us is nothing less than this : given the debris of spiritual powers surviving from the past ; given a certain capacity to renew the original fertility of these past systems ; given also the budding growths of nascent spiritual powers; how from this opulent tangle of wheat and tares distil a doctrine and fashion an oriflamme for the new times ? There is, of course, a corresponding task simultaneously to be undertaken by judicious experimentation. It is the renewal of life individual, domestic, civic, national, international, and all under impulse and direction of the Spirit Creative. Here, in the achievement of this task and the solution of that problem, is the grand adventure that awaits the coming generation. As it invests in this enterprise the enthusiasms of its youth, the energies of its manhood and woman- hood, the thought of its aged, so will the coming generation advance along the road to Eutopia.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

APPENDIX.

LANTERN

1 . Jeremy Bentham and Robert Burns.

2. Samuel Smiles.

3. Herbert Spencer.

3a. A modern utilitarian and an ancient theorist.

4. Adam Smith.

5. Statue of James Watt in West-

minster Abbey. 5a. A typical Factory.

6. Watt's engine and Bolton's Factory

where the first workable engine was made.

7. Spinning woman.

8. Spinster of 18th century.

9. Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny.

10. Spinning Factory.

11. Arkwright.

12. His steam Factory.

13. The Manchester Cotton Exchange.

14. Weaving Factory and Calico

printing. 14a. Fine fabrics.

15. Blake's " Pitt guiding Behemoth."

16. The first Sir Robert Peel and

W. E. Gladstone.

16a. A Japanese view of the strike. 16b. Cobden and Bright.

17. The Crystal Palace.

18. Gateway, Euston Station.

18a. (a) Frith's " Paddington Station." (b) Cannon Street Station, as " Smoke Hall."

19. David Ricardo.

20. Stock Broker's Offices.

20a. Jupiter Capitalinus and his Temple.

21. Rembrandt's " Jesus expelling the

Money Changers from the Temple."

22. The Stock Exchange : interior.

23. Interior : St. Paul's.

24. Karl Marx.

25. Scenes in the East End of London.

26. Scenes of gaiety in the East End.

27. The transit of goods through "the

City."

28. London Clearing House.

SLIDES.

29. The Banker and his capital.

30. " The lady's " performance of

Leisure.

31. The Clubman and his daily round.

32. West End Clubs and Map of Club-

land.

33. House of Commons.

34. Parliamentary Lobby.

36. Interior Scenes, House of Com-

mons.

37. (a) Effect of Division Bell in the

Smoking Room. (b) M.P.'s going home.

38. The Capitol, Washington.

39. Houses of Parliament, Berlin,

Vienna, Buda Pesth.

40. Houses of Parliament, with

Westminster Abbey in the background.

41. India Office.

42. (a) Sale Room of East India

Company. (b) Trading Fort.

43. Colonial Office.

44. Local Government Board.

45. Turret of Local Government Board

Office, seen through the arch of fountain.

46. Profile of Whitehall towards St.

James' Park

47. War Office.

48. Wireless Installation of Admiralty.

49. Maritime Provinces of the British

Empire.

50. Pitt and Napoleon.

51. Disraeli's Statue on Primrose Day.

52. Seeley and Kipling.

53. Lord Cromer.

54. "John Bull."

55. R«ar View of a Modern Theatre.

56. Theatrical Machinery with inset

of Greek Theatre.

57. Theatrical Poster.

58. Music Hall Poster.

59. Tenements in Westminster, with

Public House at street corner.

THE DRIFT TO REVOLUTION

60. (a) Provisioning of a Dread-

nought. (b) Barracks in Westminster.

61. (a) Scenes in school playgrounds. (b) Mother of absentee child in

Magistrates' Court.

62. Mr. Punch on struggle of the

Clerical Groups for the School Child.

63. " Liberty and Privilege," from

" New York Life." 63a. Richard West's " The Frown " and " The Dame's School."

64. The Learning of the Schools.

65. Karl Marx and Bismarck.

66. Hobbes.

67. Title Page of the "Leviathan." 67a. Watts' Mammon.

67b. Moloch.

67c. The Car of State.

68. Bismarck's statue before the

Reichstag.

69. Hegel's statue in Hegel Platz.

70. Statues from Sieges Allee. 70a. Tenements in Berlin. 70b. Barracks in Berlin.

71. Kropotkin.

72. Syndicalist postcard.

73. Placard of Guild Socialism.

73a. The Goliath of Big Business and

the Anarchist David. 73b. The light that failed.

74. Advertisements : —

(a) Facile Princeps cigarettes.

(b) Messrs. Bolus' Purple Pills.

(c) New Fa$ade of Oriel College,

Oxford.

(d) House front used for adver-

tisement.

74a. Statues on St. Mary's Porch, Oxford, and on Oriel front.

75. A Story in Deshabille.

76. Sundry advertisements.

77. Sir Tono Bungay.

78. Syndicalist meeting on Tower Hill.

79. " Punch " Cartoon on Government

Profiteering.

80. (a) Interior of Doss House.

(b) Outcasts on Thames Embank-

ment.

(c) Lunatic Asylum.

81. Two London Hospitals.

82. War Bonds advertisement.

83. The Liberal — Imperial — Financial

Order.

84. The Conventional Parties and their

Insurgent Counter-parties.

85. War or Revolution.

53

THE WAR-MIND, THE BUSINESS-MIND AND A THIRD

ALTERNATIVE.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

IN the study of what has been popularly called " war-mind " we seek to observe facts and still more we try to discover situations in which impulse and expression are both discernible. What, to begin with, it may be asked, are the types of emotional and intellectual reaction manifested, in a society absorbed by the anxieties, efforts, hopes, fears of an internecine struggle for existence ? In short, the primary problem may be stated as the psychology of marginal survival. In so far as characteristic, traits, generated in a society thrown for a moment sheer on to the margin of survival, get fixed as mental habits, presumably " the war-mind " develops. Subse- quent persistence, modification or loss of these mental habits in after-war time, have also to be investigated

Important doubtless, both as to impulses and habits, is the distinction between combatants and non-combatants ; and, further, between the more or less loose coherence of non-combatant groups on the one hand, and on the other the intimate incorporation of combatants into organized bodies (i.e. companies, regiments and armies), of long-established tradition and definite orientation towards the tasks, risks, opportunities of war.

It is to be remarked that some observers of "the war-mind" (notably e.g. Remain Holland in his book, Liluli) emphasize its defects as the most impulsive of illusions ; while others have discovered in its qualities the basis of a transcendent coming- together of all classes in a " sacred union." Hence two schools of thought tend to appear. One of them observes and analyses the reversions to barbarism and savagery through recrudescence of the animalism of " herd instincts," and through perversion of the moral sentiments by habitual recourse to violence, theft, lying, deceit, chicane. The other school emphasizes the traits which evoke co-operant enthusiasm, heroism, self-sacrifice and the energizing of groups or individuals to higher potential than is customary in ordinary times of peace. The former school, in a word, sees war as degrading and repressing life ; the latter sees it as enhancing Hfe and raising its voltage by introducing on a grand scale certain elements of psychic arousal which in ordinary situations (social, economic and political) are inconspicuous, absent or latent.

To the first school the war-mind is passive in the grip of circumstances that inhibit the higher manifestations of human life or pervert them, simultaneously re-awakening and stimulating the lower manifestations. To the second school the war-mind is active and effervescent in response to opportunities afforded by those dramatic manifestations of life which evoke its high latencies. Given this scope for creative effort (argues this school), the mind is not only released from customary inhibitions and habits of routine ; but further impassioned to high purpose and demiurgic activity.

May not both schools find common ground in searching out and studying situations of peace-time which call for the elements of the war-mind, both as to qualities and defects ? Obvious instances of both are not far to seek. If lifeboat rescue and fire brigade salvage be counted as espisodal examples, yet may not the ordinary

54 THE WAR-MIND

combating of disease by doctors and nurses, and of moral evils by priests and reformers be reckoned as illustrations which are in the run of custom ? Is not the boy scout movement an endeavour to devise an education which combines and normalises into abiding habit, both the heroism of courage and the altruism of conscience? And if so, how far may the prodigious growth of this movement and its admitted successes be cited in evidence by the meliorist interpreters of the war-mind ?

Again, take the defects of the war-mind as exemplified in peace-time. Are not these defects copiously illustrated in the records of crime and vice, the chronicles of folly, the accounts of insanity, and, above all, in the accumulating data of Freudian analysis ? And if all such reversions and perversions be exceptional in fact, are they not, frorn the very nature of the case, symptomatic of the communities in which they germinate? Whatever else these evils be, are they not the flotsam and jetsam of communities embarked on a sea that is in process of being more thoroughly charted ? The course of such communities being mapped, do we not see them, since the Industrial Revolution, committed whole-heartedly to a regime of competitive industry, and, since the Renaissance, given unreservedly to emulative social practice, in short to a kind of war.

For deeper truths the burden is on the shoulders of Sociology in so far as true that mind is a social phenomenon. Has not the central movement amongst psychologists themselves long been running in this direction ? Do not their advanced workers find themselves to-day well within the sociological field ? Their most recent school describes and explains mind in terms of " collective representations." But that, it may be said, is a way of speaking which raises more questions than it answers. Doubtless ;• but may not the chief use of introducing phrasing that is epecifically social be its implicit invitation to a wider co-operation in the investigation and research of mental problems. Does it not help, for instance, to bring into the discussion much needed aid from the resources of literature and religion hitherto so little tapped for modern science? Is it not indeed the fact that the practitioners of literature, poetry, drama are the real and essential vitalists of the psychological and social field ? While, as for the theologians, does not their ancient formulation about the individual mind as an emanation of the divine mind bear a certain genetic resemblance to the "collective representations " of the newest social-psychologists?

If the above assumptions are verifiable, then how far may we draw certain deductions ? First, that the war-mind exhibits with the vivid outline of a diagram- matic object lesson, the tendencies and habits of the modern mind as it works in current western civilization. Second, that such a mind displays a twofold mode of interaction with its milieu ; now passively recipient to environment and tradition, now impelled to mastery by the springs of vision. Is it not this tendency to an alternating sequence of negative and positive phases (as it were, the night and day of our inner world) which supplies the vital data of literature and religion ? Do not the practitioners of these arts and disciplines of life see such mental phases crystallizing into habits, which in turn dissolve in a ferment of change and again recrystallize into new habits ?

For that cycle of periodic movement, a phrasing is needed in correspondence with the terminology of current psychology. May we not follow the practice, growing since the days of Hume, of describing the working of the mind in terms of habit ; and declare that the normal tendency of the mind is towards Habituation, Dehabituation, Rehabituation ? Yet, for the psychologist to say that, is little more than to affirm that the mind ties, unties, and reties knots in the reins of life. It tells us nothing intimate about the rider and his steed, and their origin and destination.

THE WAR-MIND 55

Yet this at any rate may be affirmed, that in studying the social process by means of "collective representations " no great difficulty need be experienced in discriminat- ing between the objective and subjective aspects of a situation. And that is all to the good in a field where confusion between objective and subjective is a common error, leading to premature abstractions and then the mistaking of these for concrete reality. That is a danger into which the student may the more easily .fall in using phrases like the war-mind, the social-mind, the group-mind, since these carry the burden of a highly abstract tradition. They are lineal descendants of still more abstract conceptions such as " the collective will " which survive in the books of political philosophy. Without letting go anything useful to be gleaned in this field, we may yet ask whether a more hopeful approach does not lie through the school of " collective representations." That phrase will, to many, sound little attractive and still less hopeful of objective result. But in this paper we propose to give it a trial.

I.— THE WAR-MIND.

For a convenient point of origin and departure of the war-mind let us select the "collective representations" of a music-hall 'poster'1 that spoke to us from the hoardings .for a whole year or more during the war (i). It exhibited a scantily-draped young woman suddenly released as a Jack-in-the-box and demonstrating her liberation from captivity by kicking at large. For this sort of thing, the word " exhalation " (rising from our social milieu like fetid air from bog and swamp) might be preferred by those who dislike the phrase " collective representations " ! However that may be, it is a fact that a theatrical poster offers a sample of goods known by trade experience to be attractive to the pleasure-seeking public. This specimen then, like others, has to be interpreted as a symbol of deep-seated tendencies in the public mind. What tendencies ? Well, suppose the kicking elf to be herself the very spirit of revolt against the repressions imposed on human life by the dreariness, ugliness, inhibitions of the Industrial Age. To whole masses of the people existing uneasily under that drab dispensation the war came as the opening of its door to a caged animal. Repressed instincts of life and curbed energies of purpose found vent in many strange gestures of suddenly released vitality. They took form now in a cult of naughtiness and rebellion; again in dignified, heroic service. Remarkable transformations resulted. The frowsy flower-girl of Piccadilly Ci/cus gave place, for instance, to the bright daughter of Demeter depicted in that poster which announced a French ' flag-day ' in London in 1917 (2). Again,

1. For list of these posters and pictures see Appendix to this paper. The numbers in the text refer to corresponding numbers in the Appendix list. The whole set of posters and pictures have been put together in a portfolio of moderate size which can be borrowed for temporary use by study groups and discussion circles.

56 THE WAR-MIND

note how Hodge and his conjugal drudge were transmuted into the hero-in-khaki and the neo-matriarch, as a recruiting poster for the land-girl army truly set forth (3). But all these and others awakened to high ministry by the call of war, needed also their hours of relaxation. And so, a poster of the Underground Railway reminds us that the pleasure-booths of Vanity Fair were crowded as never before (4). How otherwise indeed, than by following the leisure-class habits of the Victorian Peace could be expended the high wages and the excess profits of that Titanic manufacture and discharge of munitions which proved to be an amazingly lucrative national industry ?

Observe next the aesthetic reactions of the war-mind. In general you see that the Art modes of the Industrial Age were repeated and continued, but in intensified and exaggerated ways. As before, the bulk of art patrons preferred the more sentimental forms; but during the war these patrons became legion in number. Witness the story-magazines and books of cheap fiction whose pictorial covers made the bookstalls into a blaze of amatory romance (43). Amongst posters doubtless not the least successful in extracting war-savings was the triplet of chubby faces, excellently reproduced from a popular Italian painting (5). From the art of the senti- mental you may pass to the Baby-week poster of vulgar inanities (6), or of crude symbolism (7); or you may descend to those early recruiting posters which called upon youths " to be in at the final," or bade young women to despatch to the front " their best boy.." Or again you may ascend to the great art exhibited on the hoard- ings in tens of thousands in the admirably executed Whistler's " Portrait of his Mother " (8). The popularisation of this master- piece first as a poster and next as a cheap reproduction (which happily omitted the impertinent phrase added to the poster) was surely an evidence that war intensifies at least some of the higher no less than the lower potencies of the mind. It is not difficult to discover other examples of " collective representation " which expressed this revealing and exalting quality of War. The "Soldiers' and Sailors' Map of London" is perhaps as remarkable a specimen as any (9). Where else will you find so clear, vivid, simple and withal beautifully executed a presentation of essentials extracted from the foggy labyrinth of the metropolis and put together again to form a map which is also a picture? And forget not that this feat of combined art and science was thought out and wrought under no impulse of opulent patronage but in the service of the common-folk turned soldiers and sailors.

How now sum up this analysis of the war-mind as disclosed in our selection of pictorial presentations and representations ? War we observe awakens the spirit and intensifies existence, so that

THE WAR-MIND 57

people act with less restraint in response both to lower and higher impulses. For evil and for good, war suspends alike the Freudian censorship and the Philistine code of inhibitions. Liberated by war, the human psyche makes a flight, in which pre-war habits and dispositions rise to their natural zenith or fall to their proper nadir. By this revealing quality war exposes with merciless clarity, and shows with diagrammatic precision, just what was the character of the preceding age, its type of civilization, its real nature and latent purpose, its qualities and defects. The competitive society of the Industrial Age came to its full flowering in the world war. Two generations almost to a day after Queen Victoria had per- formed an opening ritual for the National Palace of Industrial Arts, that was to be also an International Temple of Peace, her grandson dedicated the very same edifice to the show-cases of the Military Arts and the symbols of International Rivalry (ga). The Crystal Palace, being now transformed into a War Muesum, has thus become a comprehensive monument of the Industrial Age because so fully symbolizing its spirit.

II. — THE AFTER- WAR MIND TOWARDS " BUSINESS AS USUAL."

If then the war-mind be but the logical issue of the pre-war mind, what of the after-war mind ? For answer let us again apply the objective method and try to interpret the meaning and purport of some pictorial samples of current " collective representations." Advertisements of goods for sale remind us that the strong arm of labour returns, after the war, to its work in the forges and factories, the fields and the mines (10). The muscles perhaps are a trifle weary and the nerves a little shaken after the efforts and excitements of battle. Somewhat less than habitual, therefore, is the labourers* response to the call of the " directing classes " for greater output. Now these latter happen to be also the " leisure classes." And how they have returned with added zest to their customary assiduity in the " performance of leisure " we have ample evidence from the illustrated papers as well as from posters and advertisements (n).

Of that social couple known to sociologists as the " People and the Chiefs of the Temporal Power " we thus see the former return- ing with some reluctance to pre-war ways and the latter with eagerness. Examine now the other elements of this social situa- tion. The corresponding pair of the congruent " Spiritual Power'" have their sociological titles in the somewhat ambiguous words " Intellectuals " and " Emotionals." Of the former, many as in pre-war days meditate in well-upholstered armchairs (12); and amongst the latter not a few contrive to seek " life abundant " by frolicking with Pan (13). The inference would appear to be that the post-war mind, like a dog returning to its vomit, resumes the

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habits which were modified and in some cases abandoned or even reversed under the stress of danger. But recurrence to pre-war habits is made impossible for many by the sequel of misfortune. In the ruined areas, for instance, men and still more, perhaps, women continue to wander in the Hades of war's devastation (i3a). Against this winter of desolation, which threatened all the belli- gerent nations while the fighting lasted, there is a natural rebound amongst all classes into the gaieties of " Summer in Arcady" (i3b). Released from fear, life calls for personal adornments ; and so the mills of Lancashire boom, through demand for variety of woman's garments if not for their individual abundance. A prodigious pictorial advertisement of the daily press, doubtless with an eye to finance, proclaims the industrial vigour of Lancashire by a soot pall whose density suggests continuous working shifts throughout the twenty-four hours. This advertisement proudly bore the title, "Master Creations of Cotton Land" (i3c). The makers and the salesmen, and still more the financiers of these and other " master creations," crowd the pleasure resorts at home and abroad (i3d). They, with their women-folk, constitute a host of new converts to the eighteenth century doctrine that war is good for trade.

Is more subtle evidence needed of the swing back to 1914 and moreover along a larger arc ? If so, observe the thoughts and the doings of the ladies of Paris, for what these leaders of fashion think and do to-day the women of the world at large are apt to think and do to-morrow. Nowhere perhaps is there a more influential source of " collective representations " than the ateliers of French modistes. Regard then a picture from that journal which it is said more than all others captivated the minds of English officers in our armies on the continent (14). You see two ladies of 1920 loaded with the trophies, in fur and feather, of the hunter's squaw. Poised uncertainly on the highest of heels in the tiniest of shoes, they stand before an exhibition case in the Museum of Historic Costumes contemplating the vagaries of fashion in times past; says the lady of 1920: " How silly, to bedizen one's self in that, sort of way " ! to which remark the manikins in their cases, stirred from their slumbers of centuries by the quaint spectacle of the two living dolls, reply " How true, indeed."

The crop of English versions of La Vie Parisienne which repeat the dubious innuendos of the original without its satire, is perhaps to be interpreted not only as manifesting the follies of the post-war mind, but also its instinctive search for a more vital way of life than that of the Victorian Peace (i4a). Filled again are the old avenues of escape from the outer dreariness of industrial towns and the inner repressions of their educations, philosophies, religions. And, since the war, more eager than ever the quest of what is imagined

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to be life abundant. More crowded are the racecourses, football grounds, boxing rings, golf courses, more in vogue the chambers of the mystery-mongers and the dancing saloons, busier the stock- brokers and turf accountants, more audacious the cult of the fleshly." Hut it is only yesterday that Death lurked at every corner, so escape has imparted to well nigh everyone something of the zest of youth for life's sweet fruits, yet with a lingering taste of the bitter (i4-b). A community emerging from war enjoys the stimulus of release from fear. But it also suffers the loss of moral momentum given by a common end uniting the whole nation. Under that depriva- tion, groups and individuals lapse into the pre-war state of loose ends and cross purposes that accompany the individual struggle for existence. And though " Imperial policy " be more potent than ever, so also is its antagonist and complement, proletarian socialism. And in any event both these ends even at their strongest are to war but as burnt thread to steel wire for general binding power. Thus the return of peace opens the floodgates of reversions and even perversions. Is it too much to say that in the two years following the war we have witnessed a renewal of the old scramble for gain, but inflamed by post-war extravagance ; the old commerce of sordid impulse but coarsened by war's brutalities ; the old politics of chicane but emboldened by war's frauds and falsities? Previously there was a host of movements organised and spon- taneous, directed to the replacing of these lower separatisms by higher unisons. What has become of these meliorist endeavours? Some have failed to survive the war ; yet others have been strengthened and new ones are emerging. Over against English imitations of La Vie Parisienne we may place the new journals devoted to the making and adornment of Homes (15). Over against the advertisement of Cotton-Land's master creations put the announcement of the exhibition called " Beautiful Richmond, Past, Present and Possible " ; for this was but a sample and manifesting of forces fermenting everywhere (i5a). It was an endeavour, very largely by women, to maintain the moral awakening of the war and direct it to the common end of civic ennoblement and local better- ment. The makers of this " Beautiful Richmond " Exhibition launched a campaign for introducing into the mind of the local community a well-planned set of " collective representations " of a very different kind from those of the post-war business mind. They offered for civic application not the ambitions of the hunter and the cravings of his squaw, but the modes and ideals of town- planner, gardener and housewife, in all of whom the sociologist discovers something of the soil-rooted peasant. Yet the Exhibition itself was but a display of resources and a rehearsal of groupings in that sequence of larger and smaller moves which soldiers call

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strategy and tactics. The general objective might be defined as a Civic Economy based on the traditional domestic economy of order and beauty. And similar campaigns being actual or incipient in many places, does there not come into view a national end or common objective of high intensity which as it grows conscious of its purpose may acquire the character of a moral equivalent of war? Here then are efforts, however modest and sporadic, to replace the abstractions of political economy by the realities of civic economy, and to substitute for the politics of centralised power a comity of militant city-regions. Yet it would obviously be rash to assume the conscious beginning of an ordered march towards a polity charged with the qualities of war but free of its defects. The current spectacle of public life even suggests something more resembling a gaderene flight in the opposite direction. Openly in the places of business, obscurely behind the scenes of politics, vividly in the pages of "Punch," may be seen the Profiteer, swollen and exalted by the gains of war (16). With his accumulators refilled and his voltage raised in potential he is engaged (through the press and other vendible sources of "collective representations") in charging the batteries, if not of the war-mind, yet of the war-ward mind. Between this master of cunning and his sworn foe the Bolshevik (taking the latter as his critics see him) gloomy indeed would seem to be the prospect of the western world (16).

III. — A THIRD ALTERNATIVE.

It is announced (July, 1920) by the Carpenters' Union that over 50,000 of their men are engaged on aerodromes, cinemas, hotels, factories, garages, banks, castles and great shops — most of the latter doubtless for display and sale of sex adornments. Upon the simultaneous building of workmen's houses and all other construc- tion the number of carpenters at work is declared to be something less than 10,000. Now. counting as within the cult of Business and Super-business, not only those who have arrived, but also those on the way, and the timid who fear to start, it is probably fair to reckon the power of this Great Interest, as against all minor ones (i.e. religion, art, literature, science, education, domestic economy) at the ratio gauged by the carpenters, i.e. of 5 to i. On the other side of the balance the thunders of political socialism and the wails of socialistic bureaucracy are loud but light in weight. Yet on closer inspection cannot there be found a Third Alternative to Super- business and Socialism ?

Where then must we look for more hopeful initiatives? Search has to be made not only amongst the tender shoots of new cultures, but also through the dried seeds of old faiths and even their

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decomposing fruits ; for let us remember alike the possibilities of rejunivenescence and the prospects of cross-fertilization. Amidst all this fermentation of after-war minds, surely there are discover- able at least the beginnings of a social order capable of amending to finer proportions the present rating- of Business as against the Housing of the People, combined with the totality of moral, mental and aesthetic interests. But in this paper, exploration must needs be limited, and though partisanship be avoided, yet partiality is less easily escaped.

Think for instance of the profiteer's children. Conceive the sort of " collective representations " which, during the coming generation, will go to the making of their minds. How many of these children, but for the war, would have grown up in the purlieus of Whitechapel ! Thanks, however, to the cunning with which their fathers handled the world crisis, they reside to-day, not unlikely, in a spacious mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath. Now the posters of the Hampstead Tube show us vividly what it means for children to taste the joys of life under a canopy of blue sky, amid the heath, bracken and pines of wild nature (17). True the well-devised curricula of schools and colleges endowed by former profiteers and financiers, or supported by present ones, will do their best to correct childhood's early impressions of blue heaven and wild nature. In order to clean the slate of childhood's mind for the right kind of " collective representations " do not the schools keep their pupils caged and imprisoned during the long days of summer, and release them only during the waning days of an oncoming autumn? Into the chambers of the child-mind thus swept if not garnished, the industrious schoolmaster introduces the worn furniture of archaic learning, thus making ready for the ghostly visitors who convey "literature and history" to the adult mind (lya). But the dessicating practises 'of the higher educational institutions are now, since the war, and in the light thereof, being challenged even by trading corporations, supposed to be without soul. The Managers of the Great Western Railway, for instance, speaking from the hoardings, recall to us the eternal verity that the glorious days of June are the occasion provided by nature for filling our minds with the splendour and the pageantry of sea and sky (18).

Think next of the press, itself not the least, perhaps even the most powerful, of all the batteries that charge our minds with collective representations. A French phrase pays half ironic homage to the great dailies which are the chief guides of our inner life, denominating them the " Grand Press." Their mode of working is alternatively that of the electrician and the gardener. In the former role they stir us now with the mild thrills of an inter- mittent current, again by the terrific shocks of high voltage. In

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the gentle role of the gardener they implant daily in our minds the choice seeds of suggestion. In subtle ways do they not hint that all will go well with the world if only we re-enthrone those gods of the Manchester Pantheon, Demand and Supply ? But is it not to be read in the current working of the post-war mind as manifested in the daily price lists of necessaries that these gods too easily change into the demons of profiteering and chicane ? But even the " grand press " is open to suggestions of a better way of life, if not in its news pages and its leading articles, yet in its adver- tising columns. And so, by the picture and argument of advertise- ment, are conveyed to us the collective representations of a small group of tender' women appealing for succour to the children of devastated or impoverished lands (19).

A similar contest for the fashioning of post-war minds proceeds on all sides. In further evidence note that against the Goliath of the Illustrated Press directing the skilled artistry of Vanity Fair (20, 21) in an endeavour to make us forget the dead, is pitted the David of the League of Nations Union, using the hoardings to recall to us the message of fallen heroes (22).

IV. — THE REAWAKENING OF THE MODERN MIND.

From a modest collection of posters and pictures, chosen almost at random and therefore all the more significant as evidence of prevailing sentiments and ideas, we have deciphered some of the formative elements of the war-mind and the after-war mind. Amongst the factors that go to the composing of our inner life and so to the determining of conduct and the directing of action in these times, we have discerned some half-dozen major sources of collec- tive representation. They are the memory of the dead, the tender- ness of woman, the joy of children, the cunning of man, and behind, above and below these human impulses, the cosmic forces inherent in the pageantry of nature and the wonder of the world. But are not these the very things which in the long evolution of man have, more than aught else, gone to the making of mind itself ? That is assumed as a fair epitome of what science has to say about the genesis of mind. The resulting thesis is twofold. First that through the experience of war, its horrors and heroisms, its suffer- ings and illuminations, its sacrifices and inventions, our minds have been awakened as perhaps never since the dawn of the Renaissance. And next, given this arousal to the issues of life and death, given this awakening to the human significance of nature, given the existing resources of knowledge and their practical applications, a certain conclusion follows. It follows that the natural and the human factors that have made our minds in the past will in the

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coming generation continue their work, for good and ill, with an acceleration of speed, an augmented energy, an intensified aware- ness of purpose.

It \vas natural, if not inevitable, that the tension of the war should be followed in immediate sequel by a phase of relaxing and reaction in mind, body and soul with return to pre-war habits, or worse. This reactionary phase, with all its reversions and perver- sions, no doubt may persist as the dominant mood throughout the coming half generation or longer. Its upshot to the detached spectator of these times may seem more suggestive of a new "thirty- years' war " than the dawning renascence of a creative era. But on the evidence of our analysis, may it not be affirmed that all the time there will be gathering from the deeps a great tide of awakened life? In the cemeteries of the battle zones lie the tokens of a vicarious sacrifice beyond the imagining of priestly ritual (23). From the multitude of pilgrims who will visit these shrines some will return impassioned by the sense and meaning of this sacra- ment. Under this religious impulse what will the returning pilgrims do? In the forms of conduct they adopt, the lines of action they pursue, will come to fruition the collective representa- tions that have gone to the fashioning of their minds in the past and those that energise their heart in the present. Formidable no doubt are the suggestions of evil and the impulses to indifference, yet for some at least of the returning pilgrims, the imagination will be fired by words which should have been graven on the monument of Xurse Cavell (24). Her dying message surely expresses some- thing of wrhat prompted to voluntary war service the multitudes of our common-folk stirred to heroism by the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 : " Patriotism is not enough."

Those youths of the people who in the autumn of 1914 sprang to the rescue of a distressed Nation were touched with an awakening- of the soul which is akin to genius. And is it not supremely on such arousals of dormant personality that the progress of the world depends ? The contention then is that, reversions and perversions notwithstanding, there have been brought into existence by the war the pre-requisites for an exceptional florescence of genius. Have not immense latencies of mind amongst the common-folk been brought nearer to realization ? To millions formerly un- travelled and unobservant have been revealed the evocatory powers of nature; untold opportunities have opened to the contrivances of man's cunning; unprecedented occasions have arisen for the public, exercise of woman's tenderness; incredibly dramatic contrasts in the joy and suffering of children have emerged; and through all these strands in the warp of our mental fabric, the hand of the dead is busy as perhaps never before in throwing. the shuttle of memory.

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V. — FROM WARDOM TO PEACEDOM.

Whatever be the pattern that is weaving on the loom of time, will not the consciousness of design, the intention of workmanship and the resolve of execution become increasingly pervasive in doing battle throughout the community with the regiments of reaction ? Nevertheless it would be a profound error to affirm a clear-cut line between " Reaction " and " Progress." Sheer may seem the division between vociferating partisans of both sides ; deep the cleavage between " Bolshies " and " Birkies M1 — if the latter-title may be pardoned in punning allusion to their eighteenth century ancestor who championed the English reaction against the Revolutionary Movement of those times. But progress and reaction are terms ill to define. The soldiers for the most part range themselves in the camp of "reaction." Yet the warrior tradition has its high qualities ; the soldier sees clearly a definite goal to be reached by mastery of resources in detail and in mass ; he is animated by a vision of unity in which one is for all, and all for one ; his appeal is to honour and self-sacrifice with their exaltation of spirit. Peril the soldier seeks instead of shunning and so wins the steadfast courage that comes from persistent look into the " bright eyes of danger." The Victorian Peace, because it boasted of " progress " and yet was lamentably deficient in all these imperative needs of the soul, failed to survive.

Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to imagine, plan and create a peace that corrects its own defects by the qualities of war. The Victorian Peace, being but latent war, went far in combining the defects of both. Its competitive commerce, social emulations, political contests, religious rivalries, were a preparation for war ; and moreover not of the right sort. Against the Victorian repres- sions of life and refusal of opportunities, war was the natural rebound of ardent men. To describe the state of a society externally at peace but intrinsically moving towards war, the word Wardom has been invented. Now, there is to be sure, serious risk that after 'rising into War, such a society should sink back into the slough of Wardom. To the prevalence of such tendencies on all sides is due the pessimism of the post-war mind. But manifestations of the countering tendencies are also discernible. Some of these have already been cited ; let us consider a few others of like significance. Note, to begin with, how the ceremonial instincts and habits that go with war's arousal, sought and found other outlets immediately war ceased. Several organisations to this end came into being within a few months of the armistice (25). The Arts League for National Ceremony was one of them; and in the designing and making of the great River Pageant on the Thames, the spirit of

1. "Ye see yon birkie ca'd a lord." (Robert Burns.)

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the older Arts' and Crafts' movement came to fruition and made visible to the public that a true successor to William Morris exists in Henry Wilson (25a). A corresponding movement of the younger men was organised and presented in the Arts League of Service (26). This body not only adds to the "Arts and Crafts" of the past generation, those of Dancing, the Drama and Music, but puts these in the very forefront of its policy and programme. Hence, for instance, its converted motor war-lorry, a veritable theatre on wheels touring the villages of England with young players of that vigorous school which springs at one or more removes from the Abbey Theatre of Dublin.

These young dancers, players, singers, musicians of the Arts League of Service, banded for the heartening of the public, are, may we not say, the " Emotionals " of an incipient " Spiritual Power " ? How the corresponding " People " to whose vitalizing service they are pledged, are themselves spontaneously awakening to the issues of life, the chanticleer of the Daily Herald proclaims (27). Where next are we to look for the " Chiefs " or executive leaders of the awakening " People "? Though the answer to this query be hardly as yet visible upon the hoardings, there is at least a hint of it on the bookstalls. The mercantile firm which issues " Bibby's Annual " professes to foresee the advent of an employer type that treats his office not so much as one of profit-making as of Trusteeship (28). Many such undoubtedly exist ; the more they become the dominant type, the more active and resolute the "Direct- ing Classes" will be in seeking out and installing in power those who amongst the workers themselves are gifted with the qualities and aptitudes of leadership. But in order that the functional may replace the financial or the fungoid in leadership, a corresponding change of ideas in education is needed. In other words the "Spiritual Power" affirmed as incipient, must h'ave its "Intel- lectuals " of like order. Amongst many testimonies to the coming of a synthetic and human science fitted for this sort of guidance, note the poster of the "Civics Education League" announcing their Summer School (29). Viewing the world through a portico of the old " abbey " at High Wy combe (the venue of the school) the designer of this poster sees again, like the " Regular " of old the reality of neighbouring buildings in terms of actual living homes, along with the factories and workshops that maintain them. From the widening co-operation of such endeavours among many orders of " Intellectuals," the functional " cloister " of the incipient "Spiritual Power" is doubtless preparing : its coming will help to replace urban illusions by rustic realities, and so bring about what has been called a green revolution in place of a red one. A further step to this end is the long delayed reunion in direct association of

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artists, musicians, poets, dramatists, sculptors, with the common folk. A sign and symptom of this coming together of People and Emotionals is the full quota of working-class representatives on the Council of the Arts League of Service. For final illustration take the poster of this League announcing Lectures and Demonstrations at the Central Hall, Westminster (30). Says the explanatory leaflet accompanying this poster : —

' The public has few occasions of contact with any authority on Art; they get their opinions frequently from ill-informed criticisms and from biassed quarters of the huge camp of com- mercial art. The Arts League of Service, therefore, in organis- ing these lectures, has chosen a painter, a poet, a dancer, and a musician, each of whom is an artist in his special work." And what more appropriate place for this direct appeal of Art to the People than the Central Hall at Westminster ? By its recent construction and emplacement in the sacred centre of national tradition and by the ingenious adaptations of its internal design to the purposes of public art, does not this significant building mark a real advance towards a living Cathedral for the incipient Spiritual Power? At any rate, if hardly yet a cathedral nave, it is assuredly a music-hall to which the Muses need not be ashamed of returning. All these initiatives and a thousand others could be cited as the discernible harbingers of a creative era. Yet their practitioners, exponents, advocates, organisers, preachers and singers, assuredly need a clear and moving consciousness of common purpose, before they can hope to coalesce into that party of the Third Alternative which would also be the Party of a vital and constructive Peace. To constitute such a party and make its marching regiments movf forward, as it were, en echelon, three pre-requisites are superlatively needed. They -are, a richer vision of the social goal, a clearer knowledge of the social process, a viable plan of campaign. In the present confusion of social thought, dimness of social vision, dis- persiveness of social action, these conditions of fulfilment may seem remote. The backwardness of social science is to be sure a severe hindrance to the growth and formation of a Party of Constructive Peace. But it is possible that the experience of the war may yet awaken even the academic sociologist to serious study of contem- porary phenomena and so liberate him from obsession with the abstractions of past cultures, or the primitive simplicities of current barbarisms. In any case, there is testimony to the determination of the older Institutions, both lay and religious, not to wait upon the sociologist, but to fare forth themselves in pursuit of a know- ledge of the social process. From this source, maybe, will issue the- Friars of the coming cloister through whom understanding and sympathy will be once more united as a practising wisdom.

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Their preaching will rouse us to a vision of life realizable here and now, region by region, city by city, on the supposition that we give our minds and apply our hands with the will and the energies of war. They will announce the conditions for a grand-scale campaigning of concerted activity amongst all the Institutions and Movements, old and new, that make for a Vital Economy in town and country. These ministrants of the coming cloister will blend into one moving picture of the might-be, those elements of reality that gave life to the paradises, heavens, Utopias of former dispensa- tions. Through drama, story, song, dance, picture, will the People be thus awakened to demand the skilled direction of a General Staff equipped and endowed on the scale of a great war.

Assuredly wre need a word to describe the peace-mind of a society aroused to these issues. It must be a word that brings out the contrast with that illusory peace of recent centuries which was but disguised and latent war. The statesmen who, at Versailles, tried to join together the fragments of our broken world, are blamed for not giving us this higher kind of peace. But if you cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, neither can you by merely breaking eggs. Having grown up in a peace that was wardom, our elder statesmen faithfully reflected in their treaty-making the .minds of their peoples in lacking the vision still more the formula of a constructive peace. How, under these conditions, could the armistice be ought but the gateway of a return to wardom ? But there are many who refuse this passage into a renewing Hades. It is for them to beat out the tracks towards Peacedom, a term invented to describe the state of mind manifested by a society resolute to wage a Holy War. The energies of Peacedom would be directed to the doing of two things, which are spiritual and temporal aspects of one and the same thing. First an alliance of Churches, Reform Societies, Recreative Associations, Learned Societies, Universities, Schools, to liberate the community from its burden of diseases, poverties, follies, ignorancies, apathies, vices, crimes. Next an alliance of Arts, Crafts, Industries, Trades, to re-make our urban environment, so that from being what it is for most, little better than a lethal chamber, it becomes for all a garden of life.

In a community attuned to a militant peace many problems which at present baffle the wisest statesmen bv their complexity would become reduced to a manageable simplicity. For single instance of these secondary reactions (as they might be called) under a state of Peacedom, take the vexed question of increased output. Instead of the customary indirect appeal to workers suspiciously watching for the darkening shadows of unemployment, there could be substituted the direct drive of personal and family impulse. For there would spontaneously arise, under the conditions assumed, a

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pervasive implilse towards super-production, which is a very different thing from super-business. And this productive impulse would become operative and prevail just in proportion as there dawned in the mind of every worker a belief that his energies were contributing to a plan for the betterment of his own region and the enhancement of its population. How to generate this revealing- faith and bring it home not only to every worker, but to all the members of each community concerned ? That is the constructive task awaiting a renovated spiritual power ; it is the positive aspect of that problem whose negative lies in the purging of our civiliza- tion from its dominant evils. For achievement in this field there is needed a vision of life so compelling and a corresponding doctrine of life so clear as to bring about a working unison of feeling and unity of thought throughout the peoples and the nations of our western civilization. Here surely are the spiritual pre-requisites to the energy of action essential to a safe passage through the present transition. The argument then is that along this path we must advance if, instead of sinking back from war into the putrid mire of wardom, the People with their Chiefs, Intellectuals and Emotionals are together to rise on the wings of embattled memories into the brightening realms of Peacedom.

VI. SOCIALIST IDEALS : THEIR ORIGINS AND OUTCOME. IT may contribute towards grasping more clearly the idea of Peacedom, to contrast with it the socialist ideal which is at present dominant. Rooted in a not dissimilar soil, the two ideals are nevertheless very different kinds of plant ; for they grow from unlike seeds.

Not a few socialist critics of the Victorian Peace have long treated it as but masked and latent war. Having now come and gone, the war, that was logically due, is being submitted to analysis by these same writers. Their argument, when not purely econo- mic, runs for the most part on lines that are more or less adminis- trative, constitutional, almost legal. The war transferred, they point out, some five million able-bodied men of the British Nation from industrial to military service. And this immense army was kept in the field for several years ; it was not only supplied with complicated munitions in incredible quantities, but was itself maintained at an individual level of life, in food, clothing, and recreation beyond the customary peace standards. And all the time the home population was fed, clothed and amused, up to a pitch of efficiency and energy evidenced by an admitted increase of output and heightening of vitality. How then was performed this seeming miracle of production, this acknowledged feat of distri- bution ?

True there was a ceaselessly flowing stream of imports, pur-

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chased from foreigners on long-term credit or by sale of accumu- lated securities ; true that our roads, railways and machinery were allowed to fall into some disrepair, and our stocks for home con- sumption were similarly permitted to run down and the building of houses all but ceased. Yet make allowances on all these counts, and it still remains that in gross output the nation touched a level of performance undreamed in pre-war times. This miracle of production was wrought, say these socialist writers, by a social transformation in which may be discerned as its central process the substitution of State for private control and direction in industry. In short, they maintain that the exigencies of war brought about a first approximation to the socialist ideal. And since the Socialist State has thus demonstrated its capacity in war, why should it not prove equally efficient, indeed even more so, in peace?

But now, instead of stopping the enquiry at this point and thereupon passing with the socialist into dogma, let us with the sociologist push on a little further with the analysis of war- economy and war-politics. Recall that the burst of impassioned energy evoked by the war was directed mainly towards two material ends. One was the making of munitions, food and clothing, for the army; the other was the using up of these things in fighting. At first, it will be remembered, production barely kept pace- with consumption. But in the later stages of the war, production ran magnificently ahead ; and colossal stocks were heaped up. Then when a certain level of accumulation had been reached, a big battle was fought ; and the hoarded wealth was dissipated in one heroic rite of sacrificial destruction, continued till the "dumps " were used up or reduced to moderate proportions. If the battle was lost, stocks were perhaps still more depleted than if won, with conse- quent heightening of impulse to fresh production. But win or lose, it became evident that war, by its very nature, supplied that ultimate desideratum of traders and manufacturers, an organised and unfailing means of keeping Demand ahead of Supply. Prices, consequently, \vere ever on the up-grade ; and wages following suit, Labour enjoyed a similar prosperity to Capital. In short, war- economy turned out to be the very paradise that had been fore- shadowed, hoped and* prayed for in the pre-war cults of Goods- economy and Money-economy.

Examining next the kind of goods produced in this output of titanic energies, one sees them conforming to a few well-defined types. They were for the most part either simple rustic products like corn and wool, or rustic-urban compounds of established uniformity, like bully-beef, bread and margarine for feeding the armies; or well standardized manufactures like military clothing and accoutrements; or finally they \vere things like shells and

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machine guns, which though highly complex yet become mass products of uniform manufacture as soon as there are ascertained and given the mathematical types of their mechanism and the chemical formulas of their composition.

Thus operating within the limits of the Lower Sciences and the Cruder Arts war-economy rises to the heights of mass-output of standardized products, vendible at ever-rising prices in an indefi- nitely expansible market. 'After this fashion does war-economy reconcile the goods-economy of the early Manchester school with the price-economy of later financial schools, metropolitan and imperial.

Next observe that the assembling and distribution of this relatively uniform mass of standardized goods calls for a corres- ponding uniformity in clerical service, and so to the trading and manufacturing paradise, war-economy adds the administrative paradise of Monopolist Trusts and also that of Bureaucratic Government. Nor does this compounding of many ideals exhaust the attainment of economic harmonies through war. There are other types and classes to whom it brings a foretaste of their particular heaven. For does not military service afford to the workers and the humbler professions a representative sample of that leisure-class scheme of things to which they most of them aspire ? Picture for instance the conditions of military service as recently demonstrated. Protracted phases of comparative freedom and irresponsible inactivity are spiced and garnished by intervals of excitement, varying in intensity from the mild joys of Y.M.C.A. games up to the ecstasies of that supreme sport, man-hunting ; the distractions of foreign travel are punctuated by periodic opportu- nities to participate in metropolitan gaieties; food, clothing and all the materials of sustenance flow as into the lap of gods careless of costs and indifferent to source. Thus by furnishing those human contacts and recreational elements conspicuously lacking in mass- production of standardized goods, does war-economy complete its triumphs of organization. In short, the revealing discovery is made that war provides the populace with a certain semblance to those conditions of "complete material well-being" which con- stituted the leisure-class ideal of the Victorian era.1

On enquiry next into the political forms associated with this economic dispensation, it is easy to see that centralization of authority must go with maximum output of low-grade standardized products. The nation embattled, therefore, naturally places its political destinies in the hands of leaders most skilled by tradition

1. Trading on these leisure-class ideals, the alluring posters which invite young men to join the new volunteer army " and see the world for nothing " doubtless do their work efficiently.

THE WAR-MIND Jl

and experience in the manifold forms incidental to the centraliza- tion of power. And where are such leaders to be found ? Assuredly, there is one occupation and one alone which inherits an immemorial tradition and an incomparable skill in the practice of centralization. It is, of course, the occupation of the warrior. But what, it will be asked, is the connection between political and military forms of centralization ? The answer is becoming- increas-

* O

ingly plain to students of historical sociology ; for they perceive modern theories of the State to be little more than rationalizations made from the military or quasi-military practices of ruling castes.

In entire sincerity do academic theorists of the State impute the origins of their philosophy to the political thinkers of ancient Greece. But that merely relegates the general question, and in any case does not preclude the sociological interpretation of these modern theorists of the State as unconscious political sophists of a masked militarism.

How then in this view should be rated and where placed the "practical politician" in the modern State? Whether in power as a conventional statesman, or seeking power by advocacy of an insurgent statesmanship, the politician would, from the given standpoint, be seen as arrested midway in reversion to the military type. Two further stages towards completing their reversion were well exemplified bv our leading statesmen during the war. 'What were these? Well, recall that to his supremacy in centralizing skill the warrior adds other unique occupational distinctions. He excels beyond question in the mystical power of combining destruction of lives and property with enhancement in the life of the destroyers. And because this order of thaumaturgy evokes a quick response in the deep instincts and unavowed passions of men, the warrior exercises a spell that can bind his community into devoted singleness of purpose. With but little equivocation, therefore, did politicians of all schools, not excluding those of Liberal and even Radical tradition, plunge with ardour into the study of these finer developments, mental, moral, and spiritual, of the military tradition in its application to the art of Government. After a brief apprenticeship, they were to be seen vigorously leading, accompanying, or following their respective bodies of adherents in the corresponding practices. They rapidly became adepts at extending centralization, both political and economic, to its furthest limits. They quickly acquired a fine skill in stirring the nation to feats of labour, exploits of peril and marvels o. endurance ; in rousing the sense of solidarity, and quickening tlu- pulses of national animus.

Thus, by compounding for economic application and social usage the four ingredients of militarism, viz., centralization 01

72 THE WAR-MIND

authority, wholesale destruction, enhancement of life, impassioned unanimity, did the politics of war push to their denoument those deep and hidden tendencies which sanction the title of Wardom in application to the antecedent "peace." And that politic? and economics were throughout in accord, if not evident from the above analysis, will at least not be denied by students of socialism, since their philosophy is based on an economic interpretation of history. But to see more clearly the linkage between war-economy and war- politics one may turn to the psychologist, and perchance learn also from him at the same time, something of the inner drive from nineteenth century peace to twentieth century war.