The Project Gutenberg eBook, Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook, by Laurence Housman

PLOUGHSHARE AND PRUNING-HOOK

PLOUGHSHARE

AND

PRUNING-HOOK

Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

BY

LAURENCE HOUSMAN

THE SWARTHMORE PRESS LTD.
(formerly trading as Headley Bros. Publishers Ltd.)
72 OXFORD STREET, LONDON, W1

FIRST PRINTED SEPTEMBER, 1919

PREFACE

These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the solution of the social or political problems with which they are concerned. They indicate rather a certain standpoint or attitude of mind from which these and like questions may be viewed, one which may find acceptance with only a few of my readers. Even those who are friendly may consider it too idealistic; those who are adverse will employ other and harder terms.

With regard to that standpoint, while not wishing to avert criticism, I would like to secure understanding; and if a few words of general application can make that more possible it may be well to offer them here.

Whether these lectures were primarily intended for the pulpit or the platform it would be hard to say. Most of them have been given in both places: and their drawback to some who heard them in the former was (I have been told) their occasional tendency to make the congregation laugh. That in itself is no special recommendation; it takes so much less to make a congregation laugh than an audience. Between the pulpit and the platform there is bound to be a difference; even the fact that the preacher is normally immune from interjection or debate tends to give to his statements a complacency which is not always intellectually justified. And I remember well that two of these lectures, after having been accepted in a church with only momentary breaches of decorum, aroused elsewhere a storm of criticism and rebuke which taught me, if I did not know it before, that a preacher occupies a very privileged position, and can turn a church, if he chooses, into a place of licence which elsewhere will not be accorded him.

But there is one point of difference between the pulpit and the platform, between the exposition of religion and politics, which I have never been able to understand. After all, in both cases, you are dealing with and making your appeal to human nature; you may be inciting it to virtue, you may be exposing its imperfections and its faults. Why is it, then, that in the religious appeal “conversion”—change of heart—stands for almost everything, whilst on the political platform it is hardly reckoned with? It is so much easier and safer to tell a congregation that they are “miserable sinners,” and even to get them (perhaps conventionally) to say it of themselves, than to tell it, or to extract a like confession from a political audience. In a church we allow ourselves to be taken to task for “hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments”; at a political meeting it is only our opponents whom we so take to task, while of ourselves and our party we have nothing but praise. It is on these lines that a general election is run—revivalist meetings are held throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results?

Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel—or without making the application very direct and personal. There is no institution in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools, prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies—all those things on which we most pride ourselves—are just as liable, perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right over conscience—that if it has established order it has established virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary—not virtue but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our hearts into a State-regulation, there we have vice enthroned; and the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has become identified with law and authority.

A very good (or bad) example of this was provided by the conduct of the Bishops in the House of Lords a few years ago, when, to provide the Government with a short cut out of its difficulties in dealing with political prisoners (mainly caused by its refusal to treat them as political prisoners) they allowed the rules of the House to be suspended for the passing through all its stages in twenty-four hours of the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Before long its operations horrified them, and they signed (or some of them did) letters and memorials of protest to the Government, asking for those operations to be stopped. But not one of them would make a motion in the House of Lords for the suspension or repeal of that Act for which, in so special a way, they had made themselves responsible. By allowing it to become law they had passed on the responsibility to others; and being thus quit of it, the last thing probably that occurred to any of them was that they themselves needed “a change of heart” in order to recover moral integrity, or even political honesty.

And so, in these pages, law and authority are just as much questioned as any other of our social features, on the direct assumption that like produces like, and that a form of society which establishes, encourages, or condones as “necessary” such defilements of human nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings, vengeful and unreformative punishment—having its heart so hardened as to tolerate these—is not likely in its institutions and government departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution of the social problem.

The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not think worth while—because its heart was not in them. It has had the heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely controlled, on the lines of love.

In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive, jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong, or consent to think that a change of its own heart was necessary. And as the very crown and apex to that mountain of self-deception, stood the ministerial bench in Parliament. When blunders had been perpetrated and became too obvious for concealment, we might occasionally be told that to make mistakes was human, and that government did not claim immunity from the operation of that law; but ministers would dodge, and shuffle, and lie—suppress, or even falsify information to which only they had access, rather than admit that they had “done wrong,” or open their eyes to the fact that what they mainly needed was a change of heart.

And as with ministers as a whole, so as a whole with people. Those elements of our national and international relations which were leading steadily on to the great conflagration wherein we were all presently to be involved, were those in which (our pride being implicated) we stubbornly denied that any change of heart was necessary. The State would not admit that its exaltation of the Will to Power over the Will to Love was morally wrong; it would not admit that the alternative came within the scope of practical politics; such teaching it left to the advocacy of the Churches; and how half-hearted that advocacy had become under pressure of the surrounding atmosphere of national self-sufficiency was revealed when the war came upon us. Christianity became almost mute; the one form of prayer, special to the occasion, which the Church could not or would not use was that which alone is truly Christian—prayer in identical terms both for ourselves and our enemies. To pray that spiritual strength and moral virtue might be given equally to us and them was beyond us—though in the granting of it war would have ceased. We were not content to pray merely that right should prevail—right, that most difficult of all outcomes to secure when once, even for a just cause, nations embark on war—we insisted on praying that we should prevail: and so (praying for things materially established) not that we should prevail by a clean adherence to the principles of democracy, but by the instrumentality of a corrupt and secret diplomacy. And so before long—knowingly or unknowingly—we were praying for the success of the secret treaties, for the successful repudiation of the very principles for which we had set out to fight, for the suppression of Ireland’s right to self-determination, for the downfall of the Russian Revolution, which was insisting so inconveniently on a belated return to first principles, and for other doubtful advantages not at all synonymous with the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. And we were praying for these things—just as really, though we did not mention them by name—because our hearts were not set on praying for the well-being of all nations and all governments alike. Had we been capable of so praying, it would have meant that a real change of heart had come to us, and that we were offering that changed heart to all the world alike for the establishment of the new International.

But to such change of heart we could not attain—could not even consent; for it would have implied that there was something morally wrong in our national institutions, in our government and our whole social structure, which we would not admit. We would not admit that the chemic elements of our own national life had conduced to war in common with the chemic elements of the nation whose flagrant violation of treaties had given us the immediate materials for a good conscience. We fattened our hearts for war on the immediate material thus provided us, ignoring those other materials which lay behind, and which we and all other nations shared alike—though not necessarily in equal degrees.

And here we have the essential and fundamental difference between the genuine profession of Christianity and the profession of Cæsarism. For the follower of Christ to confess that he has done wrong, that he needs a change of heart, redounds to his honour—he goes down to his house justified. But when a nation has given itself to Cæsar, its main idea of “honour” is to refuse to admit it has done wrong, or to accept punishment; it may be beaten, crushed, but you cannot extract from it a confession of moral wrong-doing; a sense of sin is the negation not only of the German State system, but of all. A “proud nation” will not own that it has been in the wrong, least of all when it embarks on war; if it did it would go down to its house in dust.

Now that being, as I see it, the moral product of Cæsarism, in all its degrees and kinds—whether autocratic or democratic Cæsarism—of the setting up of the Will to Power over the Will to Love—it follows that the change of heart which I predicate in these pages for the solution of our social and international problems, is almost a Tolstoian negation of the principle upon which the modern state system stands. As such, it will be very unwelcome to many of my readers; but I hope that, as here set down, I have made my standpoint plain. The ploughshare and the pruning-hook are not mine to wield; I only point in the direction where I think they are to be found.

L. H.

CONTENTS

GREAT POSSESSIONS

(1913)

“You never know yourself,” says Thomas Traherne, “till you know more than your own body. The Image of God was not seated in the features of your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly consisteth.... The world is but a little centre in comparison of you ... like a gentleman’s house to one that is travelling, it is a long time before you come unto it—you pass it in an instant—and you leave it for ever. The omnipresence and eternity of God are your fellows and companions. Your understanding comprehends the world like the dust of a balance, measures Heaven with a span, and esteems a thousand years but as one day.”

To this statement of man’s comprehensive powers, a further one might legitimately be added: You shall never know delight, till you delight in more than your own body.

Man’s body being the crucible wherein such vast things come to be tested, “Eternal Delights are,” says Traherne, in a further passage, “its only fit enjoyment.”

His doctrine is remarkable in this, that while he tends to see in everything a spiritual significance, and almost refuses to find beauty in externals alone, he insists, nevertheless, that man was sent into the world to enjoy himself, to stretch out for new acquisitions with all his faculties, and take to himself great possessions. He regards even the base and material form of conquest, expressed in endless covetousness and fierce desire for possession, rather as a lower type of what man should do and be, than of what he should not. Man’s faculties were given him so that he might be divinely unsatisfied, ever seeking more, ever assimilating more—regarding this earth not as a vale of misery or a source of temptation, but as a very Paradise and the true gate by which Heaven is to be attained and entered. “It is, indeed,” he writes, “the beautiful frontispiece of Eternity, the Temple of God, and the Palace of His Children.”

In this respect Traherne’s teaching is remarkably like the teaching of William Blake, who regarded the mere outwardness of things as nothing in comparison with their real inwardness, and yet was insistent that here and now the spirit of delight and energy and enjoyment was the true and undefiled way of life.

But this revolt against the monastic asceticism of the middle ages stands far removed from any implication of sensual indulgence.

“My mind to me a kingdom is,” wrote one of our poets. “The kingdom of Heaven is within you” gives in more scriptural phrase precisely the same truth; and for its application to the conduct of life we have this further scripture: “Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasure in Heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal.”

And if it be a true boast that man’s mind is his real and legitimate kingdom, then he must make that kingdom his Heaven, and within that kingdom his treasure must be stored. It is there, by the power of his mind more than by the power of his hands, that he must gather and hold together his great possessions. We are accustomed to speak in one single connection (with book-knowledge, namely, and with the use of words)—of “learning things by heart.” It is only “by heart” that we can ever really learn anything; only when our heart is in it do we know and value a thing so as to understand it. The man whose heart is not in his work is not a complete craftsman; he has not yet learned the “mystery” of his trade. When men’s hearts were in their work they called their trades “mysteries,” and did, as a consequence, more excellently than we do now, when we make rather for the price of a thing than for the joy of it.

Until we have joy in our labour, all labour is a form of waste—for it wastes the bodies and souls which are put to it, and is destructive of the most wonderful and valuable commodity which this planet has yet produced—human nature. Labour without joy causes it to deteriorate; and if a man is put to work wherein it is impossible to find joy, then it were better for the wealth of the nation, as well as for the wealth of his own individual soul, that he should be free from it.

And if that is impossible then let us not boast ourselves about our “national wealth” or our great possessions. Nations whose wealth and industries are built up out of the hard and grinding mechanical labour of millions are not capable in any true sense of holding great possessions, for at their very root is an enormous mass of poverty—impoverished blood, impoverished brain, and impoverished spirit.

If you would examine into the wealth of this or any other nation, look not first at its temples or its arts, but into the bodies and minds and characters—and the faculty for joy—of its men and women. And if these, in the majority of cases, are below par, then the nation’s wealth is below par also; its great possessions are overshadowed by the greater dispossession which stands imposed upon the lives of its people.

The word possession itself has, in our use of it, a double significance. When we speak of a man “having a possession,” we may mean two things—either that he possesses, or else that he is possessed. A man with a possession of jealousy, or hatred, lust or covetousness, has no real possession or control of those things, but is himself possessed or controlled by them, and so is rendered not stronger but weaker—subject to a master other than himself.

Yet the man who is thus possessed is not conscious of any diminution of his individuality, any reduction of personal power or prowess: he does not discern from it any closing in of that round horizon to which first his spirit was heir. For that by which he is possessed fills him with such a pressure of emotion—its dynamic forces within him are so strong, that he may actually imagine his personality to be thereby not diminished but enlarged, and may (by reason of the violence with which this distemper discharges itself on others) be cheated into the belief that thus he secures for himself a broader base, raising his life to a higher level of consciousness, instead of what actually is the truth, turning it to consumption and waste—not opening his senses to new joys but shutting them in; sharpening them indeed like teeth, but closing them together with springs made not for expansion but for contraction, so that they act like a trap destructive of the very life they would control. And as with individual men, so with nations.

“Would you know a man,” said the Greek oracle, “give him power.” But that, though sure as a test of others, is no sure means for enabling a man to know himself. Power all down the ages has been the arch-deceiver of mankind. Power which has set itself on great possessions has brought disinheritance to the human race. We do not know what humanity might be—how fair, how lovely, and of what good report—that great beatific vision is still hidden from our eyes—mainly because we have interpreted power in terms of possession; and, forcing others to go without, in order that we ourselves may possess, we stand to-day immeasurably poorer and weaker than we should have been had we interpreted our power and our possessions differently.

For centuries of time (so long, indeed, as history records anything) the leading nations of the world have gone out to conquer other nations and to possess them. And how have they done so?—mainly by depriving them of their liberty, by reducing their power of initiative, by undermining and warping their racial characteristics. How much has not that impoverished the history of the world and the real wealth of nations? For people living in subservience or subjection, accepting and not rebelling against it, breed less nobly as a consequence—they fail, then, to produce great minds or to express themselves greatly in the arts. Their life-potency is diminished; and we, holding them upon those terms, are owners of a property which we squander by our very mode of possessing it.

Quite as much of the art, the literature and the philosophy of the greatest periods of civilisation has been wiped out and destroyed beyond recovery by these possessive struggles of the past as has been hazardously preserved and passed down to us through interludes of peace; nor have we any cause to think that in the future we shall be any wiser while our views as to possession show so little change. And that loss in beautiful production is but the symbol, the outward and visible sign of a loss immensely more great in flesh and blood and spirit, which has gone on—not only while wars were waged, but when (war being ended) dominance over the conquered was imposed as a condition of peace. Every nation that has made itself materially great on these terms, has done so on a débris of perished loveliness which does not reach its full amount in the hour of the victors’ triumph; but goes on accumulating till that also which caused it is brought to the dust.

It is many years, for instance, since we conquered India; and in so far as our dominion has saved it from other conquests and wars of native State against State, and creed against creed, our rule may have been beneficial—though I do not think that we ought to take our own word for it, or indeed anyone’s word except that of the native communities themselves and a native press, free and unfettered for the giving or the withholding of its testimonial. But one thing we assuredly have done: we have gone on steadily destroying the native arts and “mysteries,” and substituting for them our own baser code of commercialism and capitalised industry. And in so far as we have done this we have not possessed ourselves, but have dispossessed ourselves of the real beauties and values of Indian civilization; and, for the sake of trade-profit to our merchants and manufacturers, we hold in our hand a poorer India in consequence, and are the poorer possessors of it.

All that poverty—poverty of invention, poverty of craft—is the product of a false ideal of possession, false to human nature, because quite obviously a cause of deterioration to those visible proofs of man’s well-being—the joyous labour of his hand and brain.

Set against the witness of all that misguidance of the past that wise and lovely saying of Christ, so unlikely in its first seeming: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.” At first it sounds so improbable—so contrary to all we know of man’s long struggle for existence up to date. And yet, (however much we must still qualify the possession of the meek upon earth) still more must we qualify the possession of the overbearing and the proud, when we realise what true possession should be. A modern writer has described war as “the great illusion,” and has set himself to show that all those advantages at which the State aims when it turns to military operations, become as dust in the balance if compared to the real cost in treasure which war entails even for those who are nominally the victors. And war is only one form or aspect of that great strife for possession which has afflicted every race in its progress from the cradle to the grave—merely a larger and more apparent version of the conflict between folly and wisdom which goes on in every human breast. Possession is the great illusion through which man physically or intellectually strong seeks to secure power, and succeeds only in securing weakness—not only for himself but for others.

For you cannot test strength truthfully without relation to its surroundings. A tower built upon foundations that shift and give way under its weight is not strong, however formidably it has been reared, or however closely its windows are grated and barred. Its very bulk and weight may help to bring about its fall. Similarly any strength of despotism or government which is reared up and depends for its stay upon the weakness of others is a mere apparition of power. Here to-day, it is gone to-morrow when those upon whose subjection it rested have discovered a strength of their own—or, because of their weakness, have failed in its support.

True possession can only be had in relation and in proportion to the self-possession of others; the man who reduces the self-possession of others never adds to his own; and where self-possession is absent, no real or strength-giving possession remains possible.

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul,” is one of those profound messages of wisdom which have been obscured by the theological gloss laid upon them. Instead of the immediate and practical condemnation of here and now, the hypothetical condemnation to loss in a future life has been substituted, and our spiritual preceptors have not concentrated upon making clear to us how, here and now, possession of the whole world (in any material sense) does actually tend to destroy soul.

The possessive outlook, in its very inception, sets a limit to the springs of spiritual growth or action, and to that “perfect freedom” the basis of which is service. But if “service is perfect freedom,” then “domination is perfect bondage,” as much for those who impose as for those who suffer it. For the man who domineers over his fellows receives in his own soul the reflex or complementary part of that evil effect which he has on others. There is no act done by man to man which is not sacramental in its operation for good or ill; in all his deeds to his neighbours he both gives and receives, either for his own help or hindrance. Whosoever gives a blow receives one; and that blow may be the heavier that is not returned in kind. He who does unkindness to others is unkind to his own soul; he who diminishes the self-possession of others diminishes his own.

Yet possession—in the sense of realising each one for himself the wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer—is so deep an instinct, is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which the higher human consciousness is built—that it is useless to turn on man and say to him: “Possess nothing—rid yourself of all joys, of all the delights of the senses and the understanding—so only shall you attain to the heavenly stature.” That doctrine has been preached in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness, and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog’s tail the more they ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners against the life which God had given them was brought by his own gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain to. “Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee,” said St. Francis, turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that lovely saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of Christ—the death instead of the life.

That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint’s was a reaction, violent and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human society.

Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural possessive element in its age of innocence.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six year darling of a pigmy size!

See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,

With light upon him from his father’s eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;

A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral;

And this hath now his heart,

And unto this he frames his song.

With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which too often man aims.

Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young; or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to tell of—discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of flies’ legs. He will not treasure—to benefit by them—the legs that he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will it be with everything on which he experiments destructively. His knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum. Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves, how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life, his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds, how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window, rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals, how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial ways—exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only impose upon it a mask of concealment—anthropomorphic, full of conceit and self-flattery—the same fond thing which he did when he began making God also in his own image to worship it.

There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful, deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine; in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own eyes—surely there more than in any other department of life has man by his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of wealth, a curse instead of a blessing.

That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just a heap of rubble on which to gaze—only that, or perhaps less—perhaps only desert sand.

That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive—stamped on these lifeless things—

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:—

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away!”

That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave.

It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children, imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining, robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called Niggard Truth, of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran” him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life, she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and her heart filled with a Magnificat of self-applause. She was the “Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!”

I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in theory at least, recognised and admitted.

The duty—surely the obvious duty—of parents to their children is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually. Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children; they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste, or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social, racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you have not first made free. Gratitude—even filial gratitude—has no moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute, by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.

That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.

Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the liberty of its fellows. Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point—spiritual in its working—is anarchy to the soul.

From time immemorial man has claimed it as his natural right to possess woman. And it is in consequence in relation to woman, and in matters of sex, that he has most obviously lost self-possession. And just as he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in regard to woman is natural also—and a certain degree of licence the male prerogative. The two things go together—claim to possess others and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and mind become self-possessed. For that is true possession which, while it brings you a sense of enlargement and joy, takes nothing from the freedom and the joy of others.

Of that kind of possession you may be prodigal, but of that which takes anything from others, or demands any condition of service from others, have a care! And look well what the conditions may be. Ask yourself constantly what is this or that demand for service or labour doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may boast that you have simplified your life—rid yourself, for instance, of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it. You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further remove—out of sight and out of mind—so that it is much easier (but not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives of others—and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking where you go fed.

Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return—equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty for reception.

Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting—each of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at all—they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies (seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who (receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts of themselves—more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the less men of soul and understanding—not more, but less the possessors of their human birthright.

If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one has more of it, another must needs have less)—if we gather about us, in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and theft—liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of those very appetites to which we seek to minister—and, eventually, deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.

And as with individuals so with nations; there is no greatness of possession in holding that which involves the deprivation of others, the diminution of their freedom, their happiness, their power of self-development. That is not true kingdom. It is the manufacture of slaves. But if we lay up treasure in the kingdom of the mind, in the development of our sense of beauty, our faculty for joy, we have something here on earth which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves steal. Our possessions then are things that can arouse no base covetousness, we need not hold them under lock and key, or make laws for their protection, for none can deprive us of them. And while you so hold them on such free and noble conditions, you do not fail to dispense something of their beauty and worth to those with whom you associate.

These possessions, with which you have enriched your lives, make no man poorer, rob no fellow creature of his right, conflict not with the law of charity to all.

Seeking possession upon those lines, you shall find that noble things do tend to make possible a form of possession in which all alike may share; that architecture, music, literature and painting do offer themselves to the service of a far nobler and more communal interpretation of wealth than that which would keep it for separate and individual enjoyment. A thousand may look upon the beauty of one picture, and detract nothing, in the enjoyment of each, from the enjoyment of all; nor has virtue or value gone out of it because so many have looked on it; and so it is (or so it may be) with all beauty whether we find it in nature or in art.

If I were asked to name the man who in the last hundred years had the greatest possessions, I think I would name Wordsworth. Read his poetry with this thought in your mind, of how day by day he gathered possessions of an imperishable kind, which needed no guardianship beyond the purity of his mind, and excited in others no envy. Nay, how much of those wonderful possessions was he not able to give to others? Some of his loveliest lines of poetry are a record of possession rightly attained. I give here only one of his poems—one of his simplest in inspiration—to show what I mean:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd—

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay.

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

“Only daffodils” you say? But he made them for himself and others an eternal possession of beauty and delight.

Those who have great possessions on these terms need never turn sorrowfully away when the command comes: “Sell all thou hast and give to the poor.” For these are the inexhaustible treasures of the soul, and are in their nature communal; and happy is the man or nation that finds them.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

(1918)

The two words Crime and Punishment have come to us in a conjunction which it is very difficult to separate. Our fathers have told us, and our teachers and theologians have strenuously insisted that the one necessarily entails the other.

The whole of our social order is based upon the idea that if a man commits crime—an offence, that is to say, against the written law of the community—he must be punished for it. If he were not, social order would go to pieces.

But our social order does not lay equal stress upon the idea that if a man lives virtuously he must be rewarded. If a man lives virtuously his reward is in Heaven—that is to say, he takes his chance. His virtue may assist or may hinder his worldly advancement; but we have not yet committed ourselves to the conviction that social order will necessarily go to pieces if virtue is not rewarded. It will only go to pieces if crime is not punished. Society can reconcile itself to the one omission; but it cannot reconcile itself to the other.

This inequality of interest in retribution and reward is based perhaps upon the calculation that while you look after the crimes, the virtues will look after themselves; and that the virtues will not—for lack of Birthday Honours—rebel against the society in which they find themselves.

And really, there is something in it. Virtue is already self-governing; vice is not. The virtuous and humane part of a man—his will to unite and co-operate with others for social development and service—inclines him to accept and make the best of the conditions of life, to take the rough with the smooth, the hindrances with the aids, the good with the evil: not, indeed, passively, or without some effort to get rid of bad smells, bad tastes, bad laws, bad governments—but with a definite consciousness that in operating against these he is operating not for his own single benefit, but for the benefit of the community. And that being so, he can be left, unrecompensed and unrewarded, to face a very considerable amount of discomfort, adversity, and even injustice, without becoming either a rebel or a criminal. Although if governed unintelligently enough, or wickedly enough, he may be turned into both.

But with the criminal it is not so. His social sense is more rudimentary; and when he finds himself up against adverse and perhaps unjust conditions, he seeks a solution satisfactory to himself alone. And I suppose the main idea of the use of punishment (apart from the vengeful pleasure it gives to those who inflict it) is that it takes the satisfaction out of him again, making him feel that, in a highly organised community, the individual solution has uncomfortable results. And Society’s calculation, in thus punishing him, is (or has been hitherto) that it is a less troublesome and expensive way of making him cease to be a nuisance, than educating him, or employing him, or reforming the social conditions which have produced him.

So long as we believe that Society is right in that calculation, so long, I suppose, shall we continue to advocate punishment; but when we come to believe that Society is wrong, we shall begin to advocate education, employment, social reform, and, above all, human sympathy and understanding as a substitute; with the idea that they may gradually do away with the necessity for punishment.

But pending that consummation so devoutly to be wished, most of us will probably continue to believe that punishment is just and right; and will find it very difficult to think of Society, and of ourselves—as all equally criminal along with the individual whom our social contempt and neglect have de-socialised and made a fit recipient for punitive treatment.

The temptation to think that punishment is just and right has been with us from time immemorial; it is probably arboreal, certainly neolithic; and therefore, to our atavistic instincts, it is supremely sacred. We have got it firmly into our heads that punishment is a superior ordering of consequences. And as the law of cause and effect which we see operating in nature is the basis of our moral sense, we have fallen to the confused notion that punishment is the same. But as a matter of fact the two are entirely different. The law of cause and effect stands for natural consequences; the law of punishment substitutes artificial consequences; and we fly to punishment largely as an escape from the results of our age-long indifference to natural consequences. Having produced the criminal we set to work to destroy his self-respect, as a short cut to the preservation of our own.

That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the difference between the criminal and ourselves—the more, superficially, are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility. And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour and degraded housing conditions—neatly and efficaciously driving the prostitute into the hands of the male “bully”—whom they then flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the “bully” the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes patent; just as in war the degrading brutality of our peace system finally emerges. Then we point to it with horror and cry that we are peace-lovers! So we are; we have loved peace at a price which we would not exceed—we ran it on sweated conditions; and we pay for it in war. For there exist, in every nation, sources of wealth, sufficient—if equitably distributed and constructively applied for the good of all—to allay that economic unrest which is the main incentive by which modern nations are led into war. But in every country alike there are interests which refuse to pay that price, and which will, if threatened, precipitate their country into war rather than be held at a ransom which would merely readjust wealth more equitably to the true sources of its production.

War has come to us—not as a punishment divinely imposed—(a splendid old lady of ninety told me the other day that the war was God’s visitation upon us for our divorces and for having given votes to women)—war has come upon us, not as a punishment for these offences against Taboo, but as a natural consequence of our social peace conditions. And at present, in the mentality of nations, punishment (not of the system, but of the criminal act which has finally emerged from it to horrify us) is the only remedy.

And so punishment still appears to us as the very bed of justice—the foundation stone of morality. If you do not insist on it, social order will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal reform without punishment—and none till the day before yesterday—the contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it.

The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted “moral code” is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment—of that kind of parent who says: “I have to flog my boy because he is so untruthful.” And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.

But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation—of a God whose method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary punishments of an arbitrary kind—generally of a miraculous character.

When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr. Busby—one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom; and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the operations of Nature—the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous and vengeful intervention and a belief in “exemplary” legal punishment go together; and will, I believe, die together.

A great deal of Old Testament teaching is merely an elaborate extension of Punch’s picture of the British workman holding a brick’s end over an unfortunate batrachian, and saying, “I’ll l’arn ye to be a toad!” And all he succeeds in doing is producing a dead toad instead of a live one; the species itself remaining entirely unaltered.

That is a parable of the doings of our theologians, since theology was invented for the Fall of Man. And if humans came to the conclusion that that was the mind of God, it is no wonder that they imitated Him, and do so to this day.

We must believe in punishment as the proper reward of crime—we must even believe in unreformative punishment as the proper reward of crime, if we believe in a Hell to which lost souls are relegated against their will, and there kept with no hope whatever of cure or betterment from the process. And that is what the whole of Christendom believed about Hell when Christians really did believe in it.

Unreformative punishment upon earth was a necessary consequence of that belief; and, therefore, belief in punishment for the sake of punishment became universal.

And over against it—quite unregarded—stood the new gospel of humanity—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” And then the reason, the key to it all:—“That ye may be children of your Father which is in Heaven, for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”

The Sermon on the Mount, which threw over the doctrine of punishment on earth, threw over with equal emphasis the doctrine of punishment in Heaven—of any arbitrary or miraculous intervention for the betterment (to moral ends) of the law of natural consequences.

“Be ye the children of Creation!” is the real human solution—not by harking back (as opponents would pretend) to the savagery of a lower species, but by accepting the spiritualising impulse of evolutionary forces—which have brought us to this great development from the mentality of the lower animal world—the knowledge that we are all part of one whole.

And it is on that recognition of an underlying unity (from which we are inseparable) that the great natural revolution of our ideas about crime and punishment must be brought about. If we cling to the violent and the arbitrary, and the separative solution (of which miraculous retribution is the corollary) we are in the Dark Ages still.

It must have been the experience of many whose work has taken them not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society, but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding will ever solve. There Society is in its trenches fighting against the human nature which it first violates and then fears.

We, law-makers and law-abiders, are in league with—and are dependent for our material prosperity and protection upon—a system which is very nearly as bad as the crimes we denounce. And until we have made our system very much more beautiful, very much better, and more convincing to the criminal and the revolutionarist—it is only by fear and a punitive code that we can keep it going.

It is not possible to maintain such adjuncts to our social system as profiteering, exploitation, class privilege, wage-slavery, race-subjection, international jealousy, without a penal code and its logical outcome, war. If we want to get rid of the one we must have a whole mind to get rid of the others too. Do not let us pretend to separate them, for we cannot. Not only does the attempt produce weak practical results—it produces also a false mind.

The attempt to separate one thing from another, one human being from another, is at the root of our belief in punishment. Punishment helps to separate, helps to make us feel separate; it does not unite. An English judge declared quite recently that the main object of punishment was not to reform the criminal but to protect society. And so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children.

For is it not true that wherever a local or group interest comes to be established, there the members of that group cease to believe that punishment from any outside power or authority is good for them?

Take the family—those of you who believe in punishment—those who profess to be law-abiding; one of its members commits a theft. Is he handed over to the police to be dealt with according to law? Not at all. On the contrary, everything is done to enable him to escape the punishment. We don’t believe in legal punishment when it comes to our own circle. And we only believe in legal punishment for others, because, loving and understanding them less, we are unwilling to take as much trouble about them.

And that same vicious principle of belief in punishment only for others mounts up and up through every communal interest that has established itself in our midst on a unity of feeling closer than that which obtains generally. Every class-interest, every trade-interest, every party-interest that stands combined for its own benefit does all it can to evade the punishment of its members by the larger and more impersonal authority of the State. Scandals are hushed up in the police; scandals are hushed up in the Army; scandals are hushed up in the Cabinet; everything possible is done to prevent our penal code from acting equally on the vested interests in which we specially are concerned.

And yet we say that we believe in punishment!

But if we do honestly believe in punishment, ought we not then to insist not merely that the administration of our law-courts should be impartial and judicial, but that the source and promotion of our State-prosecutions should be impartial also? Probably most unreflecting people think that they are. But again and again the Government, when it chooses or refuses to put the law into motion and prosecute, though nominally the accuser, is really the accused, using its powers for the saving of its own skin, to keep the case out of court—sometimes even in spite of the protests of the magistracy itself. Again and again the judicial scales have been fraudulently weighted—not in court but out of it by the interests of party government.

Let us take a rather notorious instance where this was done.

Within quite recent times, two men have conspired—the one to raise an army of rebellion if Home Rule were imposed on Ulster; the other to raise an army of rebellion if conscription were imposed on Ireland. The crime in each case was precisely the same; but the punishment was different. The one—the more recent—was sent to prison for it without trial. The other, equally without trial, was elevated to Cabinet rank.

Now, each of these men, in conspiring to break the law, did probably what he conscientiously thought to be right under the circumstances. That we can believe. But it is very difficult to believe that the Government (when, with the connivance of Parliament, it punished the same offence so differently) thought that it was doing right—the equal and the just thing in each case. It was only doing the convenient thing to cover its own blunders. And the question is, therefore, whether—morally—the Government was not the real criminal.

But if we ask whether it is going to be punished for it, the answer is—probably not.

It is not my point to urge that the Government should be punished, but only to show how—as administered to-day—punishment is an arbitrary and artificial device, partially applied or not, according to the prosecutor’s political convenience.

The consequence—the logical consequence of this corrupt inequality of State-prosecution, is that a Government which does such things is misliked and distrusted by men of honest character—and so weakens its hold on the more judicious minds of the community—and eventually, one may hope, its power over the country’s policy.

One might point further to another instance. The Society of Friends, by its official committee, recently published, without submitting it to the Censor, a pamphlet called A Challenge to Militarism. For that corporate act of a committee of twenty—all equally guilty—the Government (to avoid too great a scandal) selected two members for prosecution, and got them sent to prison for six and for three months.

About a fortnight later another challenge to militarism, a pamphlet entitled A League of Nations, was published, without being submitted to the Censor, by Lord Grey of Falloden; and he has not been sent to prison for it.

Now if we believed in punishment, we should want the Government punished for these acts of corrupt favouritism in State-prosecution. But if we believe in natural consequences—those which I have already indicated—we shall confidently anticipate that in the end (the real end) divine justice will be done; and that these ephemeral misdoings will eventually help the spirit of man to a better and larger understanding of the follies which are committed when men substitute the Will to Power for the Will to Love.

And if we can—as we are going to—if we can leave injustice when done in conspicuous high places to the natural and logical consequences, without applying the penal code, why cannot we trust natural consequences a very great deal more, where smaller and more humble misdemeanours are concerned, and give to those natural consequences a greater unity of effect by irradiating them with the true spirit of man—love, joy, gentleness, peace, against which there is no law?

One of the reasons why we dare not be humane and curative instead of punitive to our criminals lies in the fact that the standard of life in which we have allowed honest and hard-working millions to subsist outside our prisons, has been so inhuman and degraded that if we made our prisons really humane, really curative, they would be a reward instead of a punishment.

We dare not offer so beautiful a temptation.

And so it is separation again—the separation of class from class, of rich from poor, which makes impossible the standardising of our prisons from living tombs into genuine reformatories and sanatoria. If we had not separated ourselves in our national life from a sense of responsibility for the poverty and misery around us, we should not be driven into so separate a treatment of our criminals. We cannot afford to humanise our prisons, while we will not afford to humanise our slums. Again and again, when you appeal for real prison reform, the obstructive argument arises: “Why should we take so much trouble for the criminal, when hundreds of thousands of the honest struggling poor are so much worse off?”

But we have to take trouble anyhow; and the more unintelligently we take trouble the greater is likely to be the cost of our criminals per head to the State. In New York State, America, where Mr. Mott Osborne has been trying to establish the principle of self-government among the prisoners of Sing-Sing, there was actually a danger that (under an extension of the system) the prisons might become self-supporting. And at once trade interests did everything they could to get it condemned; the contractors were afraid of losing their State contracts.

That is just one little glimpse of what we are up against where vested interests are concerned—interests so strongly represented in the legislatures even of “free nations.” But we are up against something much bigger than that. We are up against a moral reluctance of the whole community to pronounce the word “Brother.” For if the State is going to show a really understanding mind toward the criminal, it has got to show it just as much to the whole social problem of poverty and disease. And that is going to cost the State more money than it is prepared to spend on anything—except on War.

Crime is sometimes a very shameful thing. But is not the record of the way powerful States have dealt with crime in the past more uniformly shameful even than crime itself? Has not that record stood out as a ghastly blind spot in the conscience of Christian Society?

People of conservative mind are so extraordinarily ready to make excuses for organised Society which they will not make for the individual. “That was a cruel age,” they will say, when you recall the judicial horrors perpetrated against human nature three hundred, two hundred, one hundred years ago; it was tradition, it was custom. But there were nations, professing Christianity—a doctrine having exactly the same basis then as now—the same creed, the same gospel, the same divine life of compassion and mercy exemplary of what Heaven required in the conduct of man to man; and there were rulers and administrators with minds and power of reason just as capable as our own—giants of intellect some of them—who, with all their profession of Christianity—interpreting it to the supposed needs of the State—have left to us this ghastly record of a penal code worse than the crimes it was set to remedy. That penal code—the obsequious servant of State-authority—stood hundreds of years behind the average individual conscience of the community. And yet in moral authority we exalt it above the individual! In age after age the conscience, the living conscience of this country went to prison and to execution to bring it just a little more up-to-date. Revolting juries refused to convict because of its savageries; and still it moved slowly and reluctantly, cruel in its fear of the human nature it did not understand.

Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sentenced to death for breaking a pane of glass and stealing two pence. The sentences were not carried out, but they were pronounced. I suppose it was still considered “exemplary” to remind the criminal classes of what powers the law had over them.

Now let us imagine that some individual caught a boy indulging in petty theft; and to punish him—in hot blood perhaps—took him and hung him up by the neck till he was dead. Should we not be inclined to say that so rabid a wild beast must be exterminated from the face of the earth, lest he should have descendants like himself?

Yet that is what our own Courts of Justice—the authorised instrument of the people of England—were doing in cold blood to young boys in the time of Charles Lamb. They had not the excuse of national danger, or war; yet we don’t think that our ancestors ought to have been abolished off the face of the earth for doing it, or for allowing it. We manage to forgive them, because after all they were—our ancestors. When it comes to a State-act, the individual shares the responsibility with so many that he is able to shift it from his conscience.

But in that process what had the State done to itself? In so dealing with the criminal—it had become a criminal, making of itself a moral monstrosity—all the more foul because in the perpetration of such acts it declared that it was doing no wrong!

How, one may ask, was it possible for such penalties as these, and others even more savage than these, to become embedded in the penal code of a civilised and a Christian State?

Mainly for two reasons I believe: first the fact (referred to before) that the doctrine of unreformative punishment, as expressive of the Justice of God, was part of its religion; and secondly, that the State based itself then, as now, on the Will to Power, and not on the Will to Love. And seeking its safety in terms of power it perpetrated these atrocities. From those two premises the results were only natural.

Are we going to salve our consciences to-day by mere degrees of comparison, by saying: “We are not so bad as that now”? Perhaps we are not so bad; but the basis on which we continue to act has not altered. The Will to Power (for which the State still stands) must always lag behind the Will to Love in its understanding of human nature. And while it lags behind the penal code of the State will always be a drag upon the social conscience.

Now so far we have been considering this doctrine of punishment in relation to the criminal section of society—force and punitive treatment being necessary, we say, for the discipline and control of the waste products of our civilisation. But in the whole body politic what does it all come to? What type of mind is finally evolved by the State which so deals with its human material? What is the final moral aspect of the State itself?

Examine that question from the international point of view. Why is every State armed? Because every State, when all is said and done, is a potential criminal whom other States cannot trust. And though these States look down upon their criminals, they are proud of themselves.

We are grouped to-day, many States together, in armed alliance for what (when we took up arms) we believed to be a great and a just cause; and while we are so grouped we speak well of our Allies. But the groupings of to-day are not the groupings of yesterday; and the international spectacle which we have presented age after age has been simply this: that no nation could trust any other nation to behave morally, justly, humanely, and for the good of the whole, where single self-interest was concerned.

So like to its own criminals did each nation remain, that all the others had ever to keep their instruments of punishment ready to hand in case of need.

Is not that an extraordinary commentary on the law of punishment; that not merely does it fail to do away with the criminal within its own jurisdiction, but reproduces his likeness in all the high places of the world—giving him his justification by showing him that, where community of interest ends, States are no other and no better than he?

We all agree that war is a very horrible thing. But at one point it has a moral value which is not shared so obviously by other penal codes; a value which people are coming more and more to recognise to-day, and which will—more than anything else perhaps—help to put an end to war.

For when you seek to punish wrong by going to war, then you yourself have to share the punishment. Innocent and guilty alike must agonise and suffer and die. To inflict that punishment you must choose out your bravest and your best, and send them to share equally with those you would punish the sentence of suffering and death.

All punishment, inflicted by penal codes, really comes back to the community; but only in war do we see it shared: actively and voluntarily by some, passively and unavoidably by others. And perhaps it is that more than anything else which will eventually persuade civilised man that war is intolerable—that he cannot punish without sharing the punishment.

It may sound fantastic to suggest that a like condition should be definitely attached to our civil and penal system, in order to bring home to us that all punishment is shared, that what we manufacture in our prisons becomes a staple commodity.

But I can think of no device that would so quickly and effectively get rid of that separation of interest which punishment seems to establish. Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration of society’s failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons, called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to wait a month—a week—to have our prisons transformed into places where human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off from sane employment and development? Would it not bring home to us—as perhaps nothing else would—the mill-stone weight on the life of the nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative? Would it not very soon put an end to punishment in the old sense altogether?

You may look upon this suggestion as a fantastic parable; but spiritually it is what we shall have to do.

“There is only one sin,” said the unknown writer of one of the most beautiful and famous books of devotion produced during the middle-ages—the Theologia Germanica. “The only sin is separation.”

We shall never get rid of the criminal till we cease to separate ourselves from him, till we make his interest our interest, till we share, willingly and consciously, the responsibility of the society which has produced him.

CHRISTIANITY A DANGER TO THE STATE

(1916)

The State, which accepts the proposition that force is a remedy, has logical ground for employing force to secure its ends, until worsted by the forces opposed to it, or by some other power.

Such a State, naturally and logically, claims the assistance of its subjects in pursuing a course for which, in time of peace, and with their apparent consent, it has made great preparation, entailing a vast expenditure of the nation’s wealth and energy.

This claim of the State for the personal service of its citizens is always latent even in peace-time; but in peace-time the great majority of the services it requires are rendered upon a voluntary basis, and generally in exchange for a monetary equivalent.

Only, therefore, when the State is pressed by necessity to make an extreme assertion of its claims for personal service does it find itself actively opposed by citizens who have never in their own lives and consciences accepted the proposition that force is a remedy for evil.

It is true that many of these objectors have paid taxes without resistance for the upkeep of Army and Navy. If they have done so conscientiously and not merely negligently, it has probably been upon the lines of “rendering to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,” and from a recognition that all the devices of barter and exchange (including a coin-currency) are a material convenience devised by the State, which may legitimately be given to or withdrawn from the control of the individual without affecting his personal integrity. Men so minded may say quite plausibly: “My worldly goods you can take or leave; my pockets you may fill or empty; but my body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and if I am called upon to give personal service for the infliction of legal penalties, for the suppression of civil commotion, or for the prosecution of war, then I am asked for service in a form which I can only render if my conscience approves.”

Faced by this contention, the State has often thought wise to admit, or to make allowance for, a claim which nevertheless it will not recognise by law. People who object to jury-service for the enforcement of a penal code which is against their conscience, are frequently excused without fine or penalty. The same allowance would probably be made to excuse any one opposed to capital punishment from assuming the office of hangman. Yet capital punishment only exists because a majority in the State believes it to be essential to public safety; and if there were a dearth of hands ready to undertake the task, it would then become a test of good citizenship for all to offer themselves; and the conscientious objector, whose argument was tolerated and respectfully listened to the day before, would suddenly become a disreputable object to all law-abiding men, unless the State were weak enough, or wise enough, to provide him with the right of exemption. If it did so he would immediately cease to be disreputable in the eyes of the law, his right to a conscience being granted.

That concession has frequently been made in the past to people who, calling themselves Christians, have held tenets subversive of State-authority. When religious conformity was considered necessary to the spiritual security of the State, Nonconformists resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the taking of an oath was considered necessary for the security of truth in the witness-box, Quakers resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the coercion of Ulster was considered necessary for the well-being of Ireland, men who had taken the oath of military obedience threatened a conscientious strike, and the State made allowance for them. Incidentally they became the heroes of that party which is to-day most strenuous in its detestation of those later conscientious objectors who refuse to take the oath of military obedience; but nobody was sent to prison for uttering propaganda in their praise!

Now the reason why the State could tolerate them was not a moral reason; it was simply upon the calculation that, while still pursuing its policy of physical force, it could afford to do without them. It could allow non-conformity based upon Christian teaching, or upon conscientious scruples, to streak the current of its policy, without thereby suffering any deflection of its course.

But it is quite different when the State, driven by its belief in the rightness and the remedial value of physical force, comes to commit the whole of its resources to the prosecution of war. The existence of the conscientious objector then becomes a more inconvenient factor in the situation; it may even, from the State’s point of view, become a dangerous one. Then those insidious Christian idiosyncrasies, which have so often been allowed to withstand authority, must have all possible ground cut from under them, lest it should afford standing to a new social ideal. We have it on the authority of the public prosecutor himself that, if all men became conscientious objectors, war would no longer be possible; and from such a catastrophe the State must, of course, be saved by all possible means.

It is at this point, therefore, that the latent claim (which in peace-time is often more honoured in the breach than in the observance) becomes insistent and active. The State must have—if it can get it—the personal service of all its able-bodied citizens. And thus, practically for the first time, the rival claims of law and conscience upon a man’s allegiance come to be fought out in public on a large scale; and if the Nation is engaged in a popular war, or in one where the vast majority believes that it has righteousness upon its side, then there will inevitably be much prejudice in the public mind against the conscientious objector; whereas there might be much sympathy for him (though not really on the principle for which he contended) if he were refusing to fight in a war which happened to be unpopular, or which a great number of people regarded as unjust.

But if we want to get to the true basis of the principle against which the conscientious objector is contending (a principle which cannot logically be separated from any form of government built up on force) we must not colour our view with the rightness or wrongness (in our own estimation) of the war in which we are engaged, since we obscure thereby that quality of allegiance which is claimed by the State.

The State’s claim—latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever war or crisis shall arise—is not that its citizens should fight for it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world; in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to give their souls into similar keeping—to accept, that is to say, the over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity. It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs; the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era, not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies, only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit subject for persecution.

But the primitive Christian standpoint is always liable to emerge; and when it does, then we get the opposing principles of two incompatible schools. And we must keep these principles in mind—the principle of conduct based upon a personal example rejecting force, and the principle of conduct based upon a social edifice relying upon force for its well-being and advancement; otherwise we confuse the issue, and weaken our appreciation of the moral position which each side assumes. It is surely quite evident that the State, while based upon force, cannot (except as an indulgence) countenance the claim of any individual to make the morality of its action the test for personal allegiance and service. And so this State-claim must be unequivocably defined, otherwise we do not really know where we are.

Now many fervent supporters of the doctrine that State-necessity must stand supreme above individual conscience, confuse matters by importing the moral equation, and by arguing for the compelling principle from particular instances where moral considerations seem to favour it: “Our Cause is just; therefore, etc.,” is the line on which they contend. But the State’s claim stands independent of the justice of its cause; and “My Country right or wrong!” is the real motto which the objector to conscientious liberty is called to fight under.

All that the State-backers say as to the obligation for Englishmen to fight Germany to-day, applies equally to the obligation for Germans to fight England. So while we continue to assert that a man must fight here with us for the cause of liberty, honour, righteousness—in a word, for God—we assert equally that in another country he must subject his conscience to the claims of the State, and fight for oppression, dishonour, unrighteousness—in a word, for the Devil (and that in spite of the baptismal vows which oblige him to “fight manfully under Christ’s banner,” not merely against sin, as he individually is concerned, but sin spiritually combined in its symbolic representative, and defended by the temporalities of the world). From which we must argue that, if Christ were here on earth to-day, born of German parents, he would be called upon to fight in the ranks of Germany; that if he were born of English parents he would be called to fight for England; while, if again, born of Jewish parents, he might be accorded the alternative privilege of fighting for England which was not his country, or of being deported to Russia to fight for the persecutors of his race.

The conscientious objector, on the other hand, feels bound to take the moral equation of all such particular instances as a guide to his diagnosis of the evils of war; and he comes thus to regard the expedient of war as altogether so bad a remedy for evil that he dares to doubt whether Christ would be seen bearing arms on either side; and he is probably strengthened in that conviction by the fact that modern conditions of war tend more and more to involve the weak, the innocent, and the helpless in the ruin and suffering wrought by industrial and financial exhaustion, invasion and blockade, and that “arms of precision” are so unprecise and blind in action that they are quite as likely, when directed against towns, to destroy the non-fighters as the fighters. And the conscientious objector finds a difficulty in seeing Christ serving a gun for the artillery of either side (however righteous the cause) which may have for immediate result the disembowelling of a mother while in the pains of child-birth, or the dismembering of young children.

He holds further (and it is a tenable argument addressed to any Power which maintains despotic sway over an alien race, declaring such sway to be acceptable to the people concerned, while treating as “seditious” any reluctance to regard it as acceptable), he holds that, if the worst comes to the worst, submission to force, or mere passive resistance thereto, is more lifesaving, both morally and physically, than the setting of force against force even for the defence of “liberty.” He holds, probably, that Finland, in her policy of passive resistance to Tsarist domination, has better conditions and prospects to-day than Serbia; that the present fate of India, as the result of submission to a stronger Power is preferable to the present fate of Belgium; even though the Government forced upon it be more alien to the genius of its races than is the German to the Flemish. He may believe that in the long run India is more likely to escape from being Britainised by bowing to the subjugating Power, than Britain is likely to escape from being Prussianised by a hurried adoption of a similar system to that which she has set out to destroy. He may even think (for there is no limit to the contrariety of his views) that if England wins handsomely in this war by adopting the Prussian system of militarism, she is more likely to retain it than if she gets beaten. In a word he thinks war the most hazardous of all remedies for the evils it sets out to cure.

The State, on the other side, sees the very gravest danger to that edifice of worldly power which is summed up in the word “imperial,” if once it allows the individual conscience to pick and choose the moral terms of its allegiance. And the better the argument the conscientious objector can present from political parallels in other countries, or from the failures and blunders of past history, the more dangerous becomes his propaganda and the more rigorously must it be suppressed.

The State’s claim to our duty to-day is precisely the same, neither more nor less, than it would be if it required our services for the prosecution of a second Boer War, a second Opium-trade war against China, or a second war against the Independence of America. The causes of the war might be no more reputable than in these cases, but the State’s claim on our allegiance would remain the same. “It is not for you,” the State says, in effect, “to judge whether I am right or wrong, if I come to claim your services for war.”

Now nobody, I presume, is so convinced of the perennial purity of his country’s motives, or that its foreign policy has in the past been so safe-guarded by democratic control, as to claim that it has never waged foolish or unjust wars. Most reasonable people will admit that the State is, in matters of morals, a fallible authority. The claim is, therefore, that of a fallible authority for the unquestioning obedience of its citizens in a course of action which may involve the ruin, torture, and death of an innocent people, or the subjugation of a liberty-loving race. That claim by a State which stands based on the doctrine that Might is a surer remedy and defence than Right, is a perfectly logical one. I have not a word to say against it.

But when that claim is made for the State by followers of Christianity on Christian grounds, then I am anxious to relieve the State of the entanglement they would thrust upon it. I am sure that a State which bases its authority on Might is weakened and not strengthened by any attempt to sanction its claim as being compatible with the Christianity taught by Christ. The less Christianity a State pretends to when it goes to war, the more is it likely to conduct its war effectively, and to find no mental hindrance in its way as it advances to its true end—the destruction of its enemies.

Because our counsels were mixed with a certain modicum of Christianity, we had a reluctance early in the war to use asphyxiating gas, exploding bullets, and certain other improved devices for adding to the frightful effectiveness of war. We still hesitate to smear phosphorus on our shells so as to make wounds incurable, or to starve our prisoners because we hear that our fellow countrymen are being starved in Germany. In some instances with the help of the Daily Mail the doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has carried the day for us; but it is not a Christian doctrine, and elsewhere Christianity, or its shadow, still holds us by the leg. The Morning Post, seeing the national danger we were in from these divided counsels, rightly demanded a Government that would “stick at nothing,” but has only partially succeeded in securing what it wants.

Now the conscientious objectors have been trying to do us the service, which we have ignored, of pointing out from the very beginning that war is not and cannot be Christian, and so showing us that when a nation goes to war Christianity is the real danger. The bigger the bulk of genuine and practical Christianity in any country, the more impossible is it for that country to adopt effective methods of war. The reluctance which we feel to shell out phosphorus, or to starve civilians, will in the genuinely Christian State make itself felt at a much earlier stage of warlike practice, long before those particular devices have been applied or even thought of; and it will arise (to the discrediting of all power which places Might above Right) from the assertion that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is not Christian doctrine, and is, in result, no remedy for the evil it sets itself to avenge.

This is the real parting of the ways; it is fundamental. Christianity, based upon the personal example and teaching of Christ, is too individualist to be in accordance with Society as at present constituted. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, has obviously transferred its allegiance in certain matters of moral guidance from Christ to Cæsar; and claims that those matters have been left for Cæsar to decide. I heard it argued, for instance, quite recently, by a Roman Catholic, that as Christendom in all ages had tolerated war, all question of conscientious objection thereto by a Catholic falls to the ground. The answer of the Christian individualist, I conceive, would be, that Christendom also tolerated torture for the extraction of truth, and slavery for the extraction of labour; and that, nevertheless, the conscientious objection of resistant minorities succeeded, in spite of the supineness of Christendom, in placing those monstrosities outside the pale of civilized convention. No doubt while those devices flourished under the countenance of Mother Church, Christians opposed to their abolition would have cried then, as they cry now about war, “How are you to do without them? How can you extract truth from an unwilling witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and force?” The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands written in history—a history which has not eliminated untruth from the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard to these: “I cannot do without.” There, in their last real stronghold, unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand.

But we have to remember that the State’s claim, if we accept it as a binding principle, comes much closer home to us than it would do if it arose only in time of war. Military service, once we are in it, involves us in such things as the firing at Peterloo on defenceless citizens, in the murder under superior orders of Sheehy Skeffington; in the shooting, if we are ordered to shoot them, of conscientious objectors—men who are themselves sworn not to take life. Military service, loyally rendered in Tsarist Russia, involved the riding down, the sabring to death, and the drowning of those meek crowds who stood before the Winter Palace in January, 1905, asking for their “Little Father” to come and speak to them words of comfort.

These are things unfortunately which Christians cannot do with a good conscience, but which the State for its safety may say that it requires. Let those of us who agree with the State’s claim to our personal service, irrespective of conscience, do our utmost to separate it from the weakening effects which true and genuine Christianity is bound to have on it.

THE SALT OF THE EARTH

(1918)

It is a curious commentary upon the confusion of tongues which has descended upon us in our efforts to build towers reaching to Heaven, that you would have been misled had I given this address its true title. Had I called it “the Value of Purity” most of you would have imagined that I was going to speak of what is usually called—with such strange one-sidedness—the “social evil”; just as we call the liquor traffic “the Trade.” You would have thought, probably, that I was going to speak about Regulation 40 D, or some other aspect of the sex problem with which the word “purity” has become conventionally allied. It would, indeed, be one-sided in the other direction, to exclude such considerations from the scope of so embracing a theme; but my intention is rather to disencumber the word “purity” from the narrow and puritanical meaning to which it has become limited; and the “Salt of the Earth” does bring us nearer by its salutary implication to what purity should really mean.

For if purity is not a good sanitary principle of fundamental application to all ethical problems alike, it is merely a pious fad which may easily become a pious fraud—a religious tenet pigeon-holed by crabbed age for the affliction of youth. To departmentalise it in a particular direction leads to impurity of thought; for we destroy the balance of life and degrade its standards if we do not use our moral weights and measures consistently in all relations alike. And if you allow a particular implication of purity to impose its claim in a society whose impurity in other directions makes it entirely impracticable, then you are reducing your social ethics to mere pretence and mockery; and honest youth will find you out, and will turn away from your religions and your ethical codes with the contempt which they deserve.

Is not that what is actually happening—more apparently to-day, perhaps, than ever before? Has not that departmental code to which I refer broken down and become foolish in the eyes of honest men and women, largely because purity is nowhere established in the surrounding conditions of our social life?

What is the true aim of social life and social organisation in regard to the individual? What claim has it upon his allegiance if it does not offer the means of self-realisation and self-fulfilment equally to all? And suppose, instead of doing this in a large majority of cases, it does the reverse: starves his imagination, reduces his initiative, cripples his development, makes practically impossible (at the time when desire awakes and becomes strong) the fulfilment of his nature instinct for mating; how does the claim stand then? If you can only offer him marriage conditions which are themselves impure, unequal laws which are themselves a temptation, houses incompatible with health or decency, wages insufficient for the healthy support of home, and wife, and children; if that, broadly speaking, has been the marriage condition which society offers to wage-earning youth, what right has it to babble about “purity” in that narrower and more individual relation, while careless to provide it in its own larger domain?

If you have employments—such as that of bank-clerk or shop-assistant—which demand of those engaged a certain gentility of dress and appearance, but offer only a wage upon which (till a man is over thirty) domestic establishment at the required standard of respectability is quite impossible—if that is the social condition imposed in a great branch of middle-class industry—if you tolerate that condition and draw bigger profits from your business, and bigger dividends from your investments upon the strength of it—what right have you to demand of your victims an abstinence which is in itself unnatural and penurious, and therefore impure?

Yet what proportion of sermons, think you, have been preached during the last hundred years in churches and chapels against that great social impurity of underpaid labour, and underfed life which have between them done so far more to create prostitution than any indwelling depravity in the heart of youth? Thwarted life, and sweated labour, those have been the makings of the “social evil,” so called; and they lie at the door of an impure system which has made its money savings at the cost of a great waste of life.

That particular instance, which I refer to merely in passing, has to do with our ordinary application of the word purity. But I want to show how all social purity really hangs together, and how, unless you have a great fundamental social principle pure throughout, corruption will carry infection from one department to the other, making useless or impracticable any ideal of purity which you try to set up in one particular direction. If you do—to put it plainly and colloquially—the doctrine won’t wash; honest minds will find out that the part is inconsistent with the whole.

What, then, is the whole social ideal which lies at the root of the modern State? Is it pure, or is it impure? Is it the true “Salt of the Earth” which, if equally applied, will benefit all nations and all peoples alike: those to whom, in President Wilson’s phrase, we wish to be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just? Does any modern State really present within its own borders, and in its treatment of all classes and interests, an example which, if extended, would make the world safe for Internationalism—an end which I am inclined to think is more important than making it safe for Democracy?

The phrase “Salt of the Earth,” which I have taken to illustrate the meaning and value of social purity, has come to us from that wonderful compendium of ethical teaching known to Christians as the “Sermon on the Mount”; that body of coherent, consistent, and constructive doctrine from which Christianity—so soon as it had allied itself with Cæsar and the things of Cæsar—made such haste to depart. And the whole process of that departure was (from the pure ethical standard of the Sermon on the Mount) a process of adulteration—of impurity—an adaptation of a spiritual ideal to a secular practice of mixed motives. But the process really began earlier. It began in the attempt to identify the God of the Sermon on the Mount with Jahveh, the tribal God of Hebrew history. And in that attempted identification (incompatible ethics having to be reconciled) ethics became confounded.

The Rabbinical training of St. Paul, the Hebraistic tendencies of the early Christian Church (whose first device was to proselytize the Jews on the old nationalistic assumption that they were the Chosen People), all combined to give an impure vision of God to the followers of the new faith. The nationalism of Judaism corrupted the internationalism of the Day of Pentecost; and the primitive Mosaic code uttered from Sinai, and adapted to the mission of racial conquest there enjoined, stultified the teaching of Calvary.

The two were incompatible; yet, somehow or another, the Christian Church had to evolve an ethic which embraced both. And it did so through allegiance to the State, and the setting-up of a compromise between things secular and things spiritual which has existed ever since.

You can see for yourselves which of the two is to-day the more recognised and observed among nations which call themselves Christian. The old tenets of Judaism—based on the Mosaic law and summed up in the saying, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”—can be observed by any one to-day in practical entirety with the full approval of the State. A strict observance of the Sermon on the Mount, and a practical belief in the teaching of Calvary land a man in prison or may even render him liable to be shot.

Rightly or wrongly he is regarded as a danger or a weakness to the modern State. Personally, I think that he is rightly regarded so; for I do not see how the modern State could exist if everyone were a sincere believer in that great peace-offensive, the Sermon on the Mount, and in its great practical exposition, the Death on Calvary. The only thing I am in doubt about is whether the modern State is the better alternative.

Christianity, sincerely and whole-heartedly practised, might have strange social results; it might, on the other hand, be unexpectedly pleasant and workable. But of one thing I feel quite sure; it would not—as humanity is at present constituted—be practised by any but a very small minority; and it would have to work entirely without State aid. But that minority would fulfil, for the purposes of demonstration, the condition which, I think, is necessary for all great ethical adventures: it would be pure and unadulterated. It would succeed or it would fail standing upon its own feet and not upon Cæsar’s, not relying on mixed motives or compromise, but on a single principle—the principle of loving your neighbour as yourself, and converting him from evil ways by a process of peaceful penetration. And being—and remaining, a decisive minority in the world’s affairs, its part therein would resemble the part played by salt in the chemical sanitation of the soil out of which grow the clean or the unclean things of earth which feed or which poison us.

And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human race of minorities holding extremist opinions—so extreme that they do not seem at the present day to be practical politics—and yet having a chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities.

For the Salt of the Earth is only one single constituent, which enables a better standard of life to become established where the virtue of its presence is felt. Salt is not, and cannot be, the general constituent of life; its essence always remains a minor quantity, and yet quite definitely it affects the generality of things around it. But in itself it is an extreme, an uncompromising element; its most striking characteristic is its saltness.

It would be foolish, therefore, to blame it for not being sweet, or for not being acid, or for not being capable of taking the place of beef or mutton in the dietary of the human race, or for not making the whole human race in its own image. (The only person I ever heard of who was turned into an image of salt was Lot’s wife; and as a human being it made her entirely useless). And yet, as, quite literally, the substance salt has helped the earth to become habitable, and the human race to become human, so has that symbolic salt of the earth, helped the human race to become humane, and to envisage (though not to obey) a new ethic of conduct based upon an ideal conception of the brotherhood of man.

It was the extreme expression of a new and higher moral plane to which evolution is only gradually bringing us. Had it started upon compromise it would have been useless. Its special value was, and still is, in its uncompromising enunciation of a principle which we still regard as impracticable.

But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of practicability—it appealed to men’s minds; and it has gone on appealing to them ever since.

Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy with which man—the crude struggling biped—stood up against the larger and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance toward civilisation—just as previously, the salting of the earth (the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle.

And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means of establishing God’s elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us in our churches—for our approving acceptance—a proposition made by the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation, has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the earth.

It is not without significance that the Christian Church all down the ages has allowed that sort of teaching to enter the minds of the common people. It is not without significance that the common people five years ago rose superior to their Bible-teaching, and regarded its reproduction in the world of to-day as a moral outrage.

And yet if the world’s affairs, and its racial problems are to be solved by physical force, it was a perfectly consistent thing to do; and the inconsistency lies in our moral revolt against it.

The truth is, of course, that we are in a period of transition. We are indignant with people who regard successful force as a justification for wrong; but we are almost equally indignant with those who will not regard it as a remedy for wrong. And we are slow to see that while the school of justification by force remains rampant in the world, there may be some chemic value for the spiritual development of the human race in the school which denies the efficacy of remedy by force. Yet is it not possible that as the past belongs to the one, so the future may belong to the other?

When we started upon this war we declared that it was a war to end war; and it was quite a popular thing to say that if it did not result in the ending of war, then the cause of the Allies would stand defeated. But that was only another way of saying that we should suffer defeat if in the near future the whole world were not converted to the point of view of the conscientious objector. But that would have been a very unpopular way of putting it, so it was not said.

Surely this sort of contradiction in which war lands us is only another proof that we are in an age of transition. Transition makes consistency difficult.

But the inconsistency, which conditions of war bring into prominent reality, lies embedded in our social system (which is itself a compromise between two incompatible principles)—the Will to Love and the Will to Power; and there will always be that inconsistency till the world has definitely decided whether Love or Power is to form the basis of our moral order. It has not decided it yet. In our own country (leaving out all question of foreign relations) we have not decided it yet.

It is the condition of impurity resulting from that indecision—and permeating more or less the whole of our social organisation—which I ask you now to consider.

How it came about is really not difficult to explain. When primitive man began to develop the rudiments of society (the group, or the herd) he did so mainly for self-preservation. In the struggle for existence coordinated numbers gave him a better chance; and giving him a better chance of life, they gave him also a better chance of self-development and self-enjoyment. But into that early society man brought not only his social instincts but his predatory instincts as well. And while the group helped him to prey more effectively on those left outside, it did not prevent him from preying in a certain measure on those within. The exceptionally strong man had an exceptional value in his own tribe; and he exacted an exceptional price for it—in wives, or in slaves captured in war, or in the division of the spoil. It was the same, as society developed, with the exceptionally resourceful leader; brain began to count above muscle; and the men of exceptional ability acquired the wealth. And you know perfectly well, without my going further into detail, that out of the price exacted within the community (whose broad interests were in common) separate and conflicting interests arose; the interest which secured political control exacted from all the dependent interests an unfair price for its services; and wherever slavery was an established part of social development, man did not love his neighbour as himself, he only loved him as his chattel.

You may take a big jump through history, from primitive to feudal, from feudal to modern times; and you will still find the same interests strong in every state, using their inherited control of wealth, of organisation, and of law, to extract advantage to themselves from the weaker, and the less educated members of the community; and always doing it in the name of the commonwealth—the strength and stability of the State. Only the other day (in a State as advanced as any in its democratic faith and its doctrine of equality for all—the United States of America) the moment there was a temporary breakdown in the legal safeguards against child-labour—there was a great organised rush in certain States of conscripted child-labour into industry—conscripted not by the State but by capital, exploiting the increased need of the wage-earning classes brought about by the raised prices of war.

The men who do that kind of thing (and they are men of great power and influence in the State) still only love their neighbours as their chattels, and still take advantage of all forms of law, or absence of law, to keep established as far as they can the conditions of social slavery. You may say that a thing like that lies outside the law, or that it is an abuse which legislation has not yet overtaken and put an end to; but what is more important and more significant is that it is an abuse which public opinion in those States where it was done had not overtaken and put an end to, or not merely put an end to, but made impossible. It makes it impossible for a black man over there to marry a white woman; and if it can do the one it can do the other.

But what are those people doing? They are merely reflecting in their own personal affairs an ideal which lies engrained in every State which puts self-interest above the interest of the whole human race. And that, in our present transitional stage, is the standpoint of every country to-day. In our heart of hearts we still hold Nationalism more important than Internationalism. And “my country right or wrong” is still for some people the last word in morality; rather than admit their country to be in the wrong they will let morality go.

In that matter, indeed, the world to-day seems to be divided into two schools. There is one school which so exalts the idea of the State as to say that the State can do no wrong: that if morality and State-interest conflict morality must go under, or rather that morals only exist to subserve State-interests,—and being a State-product, the State has the right to limit their application. We are fighting to-day against a race which is charged with having taken up that attitude; and the pronouncements of some of its most distinguished writers, as well as certain methods which it has employed in war, seem to bear out the charge. But when it comes to war, that particular school of State-ethics gives itself away by protesting that the other States which are in hostile alliance against it are behaving very wrongly indeed—though by its own doctrine (States being above morals) they are incapable of wrong. It cannot stick to its own thesis.

But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States, when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad, and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say—looking back in history—that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.

Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during the American War of Independence—very loud that we were in the wrong; but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that, in the long run (not immediately—not perhaps for a generation or two) the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day—not yet, for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any white race you can name—but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see, incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet—permitting, namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came, however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its medical needs for 140 years!)

Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies—reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst—the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home. It was because we wanted—or because our ruling classes wanted—to give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy, you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions, and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.

Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging example to others.

Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem; and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish to see applied in like case to those of our own family.

Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved; because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually—only very gradually—getting the better of it.

It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely based on dominance and power—the power of the teacher to punish. The new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest, and upon trust in youth’s natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology, and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole profession is really—to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill—a lack of mutual confidence.

In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by competition—manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the other’s detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient as a nation.

But in a family you don’t need competition; where there is goodwill, co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock are enough.

To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.

And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our politics are pure; or that the system on which we run them is anything but a vast system of adulteration?—which may perhaps be thus expressed:—Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand each other and trying to make the general public share in their misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.

When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding—mental co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries and run a general election?

We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the words and thoughts and motives of their opponents—and very often men will be misrepresenting their own motives—because their end is really power—power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!