I
N the days of the military clan, men were more or less free
and equal. An ordeal was necessary for the attainment of manhood; a regular ceremony which was far from a joke. Only the
strong and clever could hope to attain the privileges of manhood. There was no specialization of labor. A man had to be
able to hunt and fight; a woman to cook and to do the work of
agriculture. There was hardly room for anyone but what might
be called the normal human being. One particularly lazy fellow,
well skilled in flattery, might get a job as tribal bard; but otherwise he would have to work like the rest. As a man got old,
beyond the period when skill and experience failed to compen-
sate for lack of strength, he might become an elder by virtue of
his wisdom; and, of course, the best all-round man had a good
chance of becoming King. But there really was something like
equality of opportunity.
T
O-DAY all this is absolutely changed. Every important
branch of work is so specialized that a man must give his
whole life to his particular job for 40 years or more before he is
capable of holding his own in it. Such a man must obviously be
chosen from the start on the ground of inclination and capacity.
He must be allowed ample leisure. He must be secured freedom from all worries and anxiety, or he will never arrive at
competence. A university education is not nearly enough. It is
only a general ground-work. When a man leaves a university he
wants at least 10 years uninterrupted work in his particular line
before he even begins to succeed in it. In other words, the complexity of civilization demands an elaborate caste system. For
one thing, the habit of authority is absolutely necessary to any
one who is to fill a position of responsibility. Put a man who has
done menial work all his life into an important position. He
inevitably becomes a “Jack in office,” harsh, overbearing and
tyrannical. On the other hand, if you take a boy and give him
well trained servants, he will, when he becomes a man, get
things done with perfect suavity and good feeling and absence
of friction. That is why you can take a boy from Eton or Winchester and send him out to rule a province in India. The “Competition-wallah,” the boy of no birth or breeding who obtains a
position in the Indian Civil Service by intellectual merit, is a
disastrous failure.
T
HERE must however, be an end to all this talk of equality
of opportunity. It will always be necessary to have a great
majority of the population engaged in mechanical tasks. It is
evidently quite impossible to give every man and woman even
a university education. Most people have to earn their living by
the time they are sixteen. Even if this experiment were pos-
sible, it would be absurd, because the university education would
unfit the average individual for the necessary work of life. It is
no good to teach a man political economy and Greek, and then
set him to make rivets in a boiler factory for the rest of his life.
H
OW then are we to make an intelligent selection? The answer is perfectly obvious. Men are not by any means born
equal in the matter of intellectual capacity. Take the extreme
case of the Hottentot. No amount of teaching will get him tocount beyond the number five, owing to the limitations imposed
upon him by nature in the matter of fingers. The same holds
true to a limited extent even with Caucasians. It is quite true
that occasionally nature, in her merry mood, produces a genius
from very unlikely material. It may sometimes happen, for example, that a stock which has never exhibited any intellectual
distinction at all may get tangled up matrimonially with a lunatic, and by some lucky combination produce a genius.
B
UT we do not know enough about genius to take any practical steps along these lines. We are bound to deal with
averages; and there is nothing more certain than this, that ordinary talent, as opposed to genius, is to a very large extent inher-
ited. The main objection to the hereditary principle is that families, after a long series of generations of distinguished men,
take to producing degenerates and imbeciles. It is the ordinary
biological curve. Now undoubtedly much mischief is wrought
by having a caste which is hereditary and nothing more, because the said degenerates and imbeciles interfere with the
working of the social machine. Our business is to get the right
man in the right place; and the hard and fast rule of primogeniture has in many cases worked badly. One may concede that
ultimately it is bound to work badly in all cases.
I
T seems to me that it would be easy enough to guard against
this difficulty. We must have a leisured class, we must have a
privileged class, or we can never get good men at all. The most
likely candidates are those whose fathers and mothers have
achieved distinction. This principle has been recognized in England by the practice of raising distinguished men to the peer-
age. The idea has been greatly abused by confirming nobility
upon the mere plutocrat. Yet when particularly undesirable
people have bought these titles, care has taken to make the seat
in the House of Lords end with the life of the ennobled bag of
money.
B
UT how are we to prevent degenerates and imbeciles from
sitting in the highest councils of the nation? By the simple
process of clearing them out. It would be easy to arrange for a
test of manhood, a public test subject to public criticism, so that
no man could assume hereditary privileges without proving by
ordeal his right to it. These tests could and should be both physical and mental. These ideas are not opposed to democracy in its
true sense. We want the normal man to govern, and the normal
man means a man very far above the average, almost the ideal
man, just as normal eyesight is the kind of eyesight that only a
very few very lucky people possess.
T
HE socialistic idea that every man is as good as every other
man is comic. A great deal of rubbish has been written
lately about “secret diplomacy.” How can the ordinary man expect to give a sound opinion on the affairs of foreign countries,
when the very best men, specially trained for all their lives, are
constantly making the most stupid mistakes? “Popular control”
is out of the question, even in the smallest business house. How
then can we apply it with any common sense to the affairs of a {307}
great nation? If the people were free to vote, what would they
vote for? Free lodging, free movies and free beer. I myself would
vote for free beer. Could you expect the lower East Side to vote
money for the encouragement of art or even of science? Of any
of the higher branches of human activity? Yet, the whole structure of society depends upon the cultivation of these higher
branches. Go and ask the ordinary working man whether he
would rather apply the national income to the reduction of rent
or to the study of histology! We should never have a cent for
anything pertaining to the most fundamental and necessary activities, if the choice were left to the people.
W
HAT then is the ideal form of government? The greatest
of all the political lessons of history is that society is
founded on the family, and the family on the land. A strong
agrarian class is the best defense against invasion, physical or
moral. “A bold peasantry, its country’s pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied.” There is something in the contact with earth and air and water and sun which makes men
vigorous. All strong and stable states have had Cincinnatus for
a unit. The power of England has always lain in the landed
nobility and gentry. Each great estate has been the nucleus of a
peasantry with “soul” — with a peculiar pride in itself. The
lords of the land, great or little, were also the fathers of the
people. Each took a particular and individual interest in each of
his tenants.
W
HEN this system began to break up, owing to the growth
of industrialism and of the power of money, the virility of
England broke with it. Fifty years ago the smallest squire had
more social consideration than the most wealthy merchant;
rightly so, for he was actually a part of the land itself. A rich
man could not become a squire by buying land; he became a
joke.
B
UT your plutocrat has no anchor in the soil; he calculates
coldly that it is cheaper to work a man to death than to look
after him. He does not know or care what becomes of those
dependent upon him. The idea of solidity of structure is gone
from the social system. America dwells in tents like the Arabs,
and may as silently fade away. Who in this colony feels in his
bones an attachment to ancestral Topeka? We go where the economic tide drifts us; and we do not go back because there is no
“back” to go to. Socialism (as most people seem to conceive it)
would make matters a thousands times worse — if there’s that
amount of room for further bedevilment; for Socialism ignores
all but the economic factor. Economics appeal only to the shell
of men, never to his soul. And it is the soul which determines
the action of a true man. A nation swayed wholly by economic
considerations is a nation lost alike to God and to man. “Ill
fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”
T
HE first business of government is to guard the hardihood
of the race. So we must see to it that every child is healthy
and well-fed, inured to sport, to hardship within certain bounds.
The spirit must be free, the passions strong and well regulated,
the intellect unhampered by old wives’ fables. We must assure
to every one the first necessaries of life, shelter, food, warmth
and the easy exercise of the power of reproduction, without
shame or sentimentality.
W
E must make a firm, almost a paternal bond, between the
“lord” and his dependents. If an employer were soundly
whipped whenever one of his men or women had a preventable
sickness, it would change things considerably! The happiest,
the most healthy, the most prosperous class in recent history
were the slaves in the South before the Civil War, wherever the
owner was a decent Southern Gentleman, and not a Yankee
nigger-driver, with no interest in the slaves beyond dollars. If
America is to survive, nay, to become a nation, it must be by the
development of an enlightened feudalism.
L
ET us not be frightened by a name! Reginald Front-de-Boeuf was not the only type of Norman Baron. And the
world is a very different place to-day. We have a wretched habit
of being scared by words like “royalty,” “Socialism,” so that we
do not trouble to ask what such terms really mean. This is because we mix up our rational thoughts with our sentimental
emotions. There was never a moment in the world’s history
when it was more vitally important to think and to feel as if
with two separate organs. “God gave the land to the people,” as
the little hymn says; but He did not give them brains, or moral
courage, or the power of self-analysis. There is not one man in
ten thousand who knows whether his consciousness is colored
by reason or by passion.
I
PERSONALLY have found this power extremely awkward.
Just at present, for example, my heart clings to the great court
of Trinity closer than its immemorial ivy. All my imagination is
with the England of Harry the Fifth, and with the France of
Joan of Arc, and with the Russia of wild and mystic orgies. But
my intellect refuses to give assent to some of the propositions
made by the Allies. I am ready, with Drake, to singe the King of
Spain’s beard; or to tear the Kaiser from his gory throne, in a
moment of patriotic passion. But I am not prepared to sit down
and argue calmly that such actions are ethically right. All hail
to the vehemence and fury of war and of love! But not in these
trousers. I must first gird my loins with the saffron philabeg of
a dhuine-wassail! As a lover, it gives me extreme satisfaction to
riot amid the wine-stained and blood-bedabbled tresses of a
Messalina or a Catherine; but, as a philosopher, I seem to myself to have acted with brutish unreason. I maintain, briefly,
that Philip drunk is as good as Philip sober; but I cannot fall
into line with the man who asserts that Philip drunk is Philip
sober. And alas! that man is everywhere. You rightly enough
drop nine hundred and sixty-eight million tons of trinitrotoluene upon the head of a Saxon peasant whose only idea of you,
till then, has been vague and ill-etched. Perhaps he thought of
you as one of the people among whom his Uncle Fritz went to
live in 1849. You are right to drop that trinitrotoluene; it is a
splendid gesture. But — the morning after? Even Antient Pistol
proved amenable. “I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him;
discourse the same in French unto him!” is followed by the mild
acceptance of a modest ransom.
N
OW this war is not to be settled by appeals to passion and
to sentiment. We have got to reconstruct the world on such
lines as may be best for all. We must use one quality only —
common sense. We have got to be friends with Germany before {308}
we sheathe the sword against her. The campaign of hate on both
sides is utter wickedness or complete insanity — you pay your
money and you take your choice. We are not going to listen to
the drunken journalist who sneered the other day at the Friends
of Irish Freedom as “bartenders and servant girls.” His animus
was evident, for he attributed the ruin of his mind to the one,
and that of his body to the other, class. But, on the other hand,
we must shut our ears to the sentimental wails of the Irish
irreconcilables about “Saxon tyrants.” This historic injustice
business is plain vendetta, and as out-of-date as furbelows,
whatever they were.
W
E must attend to the genuine needs of each nation, and
heed not their cries of hysteria. Then, if there be indeed
incompatible needs — (though, in the name of God who made
earth so wide and fair, how can there be?) — if there be no way
of reconciling England’s need of a navy with Germany’s need
of a place in the sun, then we can go on and fight it out some
more. But we shall never begin to talk peace till we begin to
think peace; and we shall never begin to think peace till we
have got ourselves into thinking, instead of feeling. And we
shall never do that until we realize that the two things are different.
A. C.