Mankind in the Making Part 7

"thro," and "catalog" catch at my attention as it travels along the lane of meaning, like trailing briars. But I have to admit this habit of the old spelling, which I am sure most people over four-and-twenty share with me, will trouble neither me nor any one else who reads books now, in the year 1990. I have to admit that the thing is an accident of my circ.u.mstances. I have learnt to read and write in a certain way, and I am concerned with the thing said and not with the vehicle, and so it is that it distresses me when the medium behaves in an unusual way and distracts my attention from the thing it conveys. But if it is true--and I think it must be true--that the extremely arbitrary spelling of English--and more especially of the more familiar English words--greatly increases the trouble of learning to read and write, I do not think the mental comfort of one or two generations of grown-up people must be allowed to stand in the way of a permanent economy in the educational process. I believe even that such a reader as I might come to be very easy in the new way. But whatever is done must be done widely, simultaneously, all over the English-speaking community, and after the fullest consideration. The local "spelling reform" of a few half-educated faddists here and there, helps not at all, is a mere nuisance. This is a thing to be worked out in a scientific way by the students of phonetics; they must have a complete alphabet settled for good, a dictionary ready, reading-books well tested, the whole system polished and near perfection before the thing pa.s.ses out of the specialists' hands. The really practical spelling-reformer will devote his guineas to endowing chairs of phonetics and supporting publication in phonetic science, and his time to study and open-minded discussion.

Such organisations as the _a.s.sociation Phonetique Internationale_, may be instanced. Systems concocted in a hurry, in a half-commercial or wholly commercial and in a wholly presumptuous manner, pushed like religious panaceas and advertised like soap--Pitman's System, Barnum's System, Quackbosh the Gifted Postman's System, and all that sort of thing--do nothing but vulgarize, discredit, and r.e.t.a.r.d this work.

Before a system of phonetic spelling can be established, it is advisable that a standard p.r.o.nunciation of English should exist. With that question also these papers have already dealt. But for the sake of emphasis I would repeat here the astonishment that has grown upon me as I have given my mind to these things, that, save for local exceptions, there should be no pressure even upon those who desire to become teachers in our schools or preachers in our pulpits, to attain a qualifying minimum of correct p.r.o.nunciation.

Now directly we pa.s.s beyond these first three elementary matters, reading, writing, and p.r.o.nunciation, and come to the fourth and fifth items of our scheme, to the complete mastery of English that is, we come upon a difficulty that is all too completely disregarded in educational discussions--always by those who have had no real scholastic experience, and often by those who ought to know better. It is extremely easy for a political speaker or a city magnate or a military reformer or an irresponsible writer, to proclaim that the schoolmaster must mend his ways forthwith, give up this pointless Latin of his, and teach his pupils the English language "_thoroughly_"--with much emphasis on the "thoroughly," but it is quite another thing for the schoolmaster to obey our magnificent directions. For the plain, simple, insurmountable fact is this, that no one knows how to teach English as in our vague way we critics imagine it taught; that no working schoolmaster alive can possibly give the thing the concentrated attention, the experimental years necessary for its development, that it is worth n.o.body's while, and that (except in a vein of exalted self-sacrifice) it will probably not be worth any one's while to do so for many years unless some New Republicans conspire to make it so. The teaching of English requires its Sturm, its energetic modern renascence schoolmasters, its set of school books, its branches and grades, before it can become a discipline, even to compare with the only subject taught with any shadow of orderly progressive thoroughness in secondary schools, namely, Latin. At present our method in English is a foolish caricature of the Latin method; we spend a certain amount of time teaching children cla.s.sificatory bosh about the eight sorts of Nominative Case, a certain amount of time teaching them the "derivation" of words they do not understand, glance shyly at Anglo-Saxon and at Grimm's Law, indulge in a specific reminiscence of the Latin method called parsing, supplement with a more modern development called the a.n.a.lysis of sentences, give a course of exercises in paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good English into bad), and wind up with lessons in "Composition" that must be seen to be believed. Essays are produced, and the teacher noses blindly through the product for false concords, prepositions at the end of sentences, and, if a person of peculiarly fine literary quality, for the word "reliable" and the split infinitive. These various exercises are so little parts of an articulate whole that they may be taken in almost any order and any relative quant.i.ty. And in the result, if some pupil should, by a happy knack of apprehension, win through this confusion to a sense of literary quality, to the enterprise of even trying to write, the thing is so rare and wonderful that almost inevitably he or she, in a fine outburst of discovered genius, takes to the literary life. For the rest, they will understand nothing but the flattest prose; they will be deaf to everything but the crudest meanings; they will be the easy victims of the boom, and terribly shy of a pen. They will revere the dead Great and respect the new Academic, read the living quack, miss and neglect the living promise, and become just a fresh volume of that atmosphere of _azote_, in which our literature stifles.

Now the schoolmaster is not to blame for this any more than he is to blame for sticking to Latin. It is no more possible for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, whose lives are enc.u.mbered with a voluminous ma.s.s of low-grade mental toil and worries and reasonable and unreasonable responsibilities, to find the energy and mental freedom necessary to make any vital changes in the methods that text-books, traditions, and examinations force upon them, than it is for a general medical pract.i.tioner to invent and make out of the native ore the steel implements some operation of frequent occurrence in his practice may demand. If they are made, and accessible by purchase and not too expensive, he will get them; if they are not he will have to fumble along with the next best thing; and if nothing that is any good can be got, then there is nothing for it, though he be the n.o.blest character, the finest intelligence that ever lived behind a bra.s.s plate, but either to shirk that operation altogether or to run the chance of making a disastrous mess of it.

Scolding the schoolmaster, gibing at the schoolmaster, guying, afflicting and exasperating the schoolmaster in every conceivable way, is an amus.e.m.e.nt so entirely congenial to my temperament that I do not for one moment propose to abandon it. It is a devil I have, and I admit it. He insults schoolmasters and bishops in particular, and I do not cast him out, but at the same time I would most earnestly insist that all that sort of thing does nothing whatever to advance education, that it is a mere outbreak of personal grace-notes so far as this discussion goes. The real practical needs in the matter are a properly worked-out method, a proper set of school books, and then a progressive alteration of examinations in English, to render that method and that set of school books imperative. These are needs the schoolmaster and schoolmistress can do amazingly little to satisfy. Of course, when these things are ready and the pressure to enforce them begins to tell on the schools, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, having that almost instinctive dread of any sort of change that all hard-worked and rather worried people acquire, will obstruct and have to be reckoned with, but that is a detail in the struggle and not a question of general objective. And to satisfy those real practical needs, what is wanted is in the first place an organizer, a reasonable sum of money, say ten thousand pounds for ten years, and access for experimental purposes to a variety of schools.

This organizer would set himself to secure the whole time and energy and interest of a dozen or so of good men; they would include several expert teachers, a clear-headed pedagogic expert or so, a keen psychologist perhaps with a penetrating mind--for example, one might try and kidnap Professor William James in his next Sabbatical year--one or two industrious young students, a literary critic perhaps, a philologist, a grammarian, and set them all, according to their several gifts and faculties, towards this end. At the end of the first year this organizer would print and publish for the derision of the world in general and the bitter attacks of the men he had omitted from the enterprise in particular, for review in the newspapers and for trial in enterprising schools, a "course" in the English language and composition. His team of collaborators, revised perhaps, probably weeded by a quarrel or so and supplemented by the ablest of the hostile critics, would then, working with all their time and energy, revise the course for the second year.

And you would repeat the process for ten years. In the end at the cost of 100,000--really a quite trivial sum for the object in view--there would exist the scheme, the method, the primers and text-books, the School Dictionary, the examination syllabus, and all that is now needed for the proper teaching of English. You would have, moreover, in the copyrights of the course an a.s.set that might go far to recoup those who financed the enterprise.

It is precisely this difficulty about text-books and a general scheme that is the real obstacle to any material improvement in our mathematical teaching. Professor Perry, in his opening address to the Engineering Section of the British a.s.sociation at Belfast, expressed an opinion that the average boy of fifteen might be got to the infinitesimal calculus. As a matter of fact the average English boy of fifteen has only just looked at elementary algebra. But every one who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind-sickening and complex rubbish about money and weights and measures, practice, interest, "rule of three," and all the rest of the solemn clap-trap invented by the masters of the old Academy for Young Gentlemen to fool the foolish predecessors of those who clamour for commercial education to-day, and by setting aside the pretence in teaching geometry, that algebraic formulae and the decimal notation are not yet invented, little boys of nine may be got to apply quadratic equations to problems, plot endless problems upon squared paper, and master and apply the geometry covered by the earlier books of Euclid with the utmost ease. But to do this with a cla.s.s of boys at present demands so much special thought, so much private planning, so much sheer toil on the part of the teacher, that it becomes practically impossible. The teacher must arrange the whole course himself, invent his examples, or hunt them laboriously through a dozen books; he must be not only teacher, but text-book. I know of no School Arithmetic which does not groan under a weight of sham practical work, and that does not, with an absurd priggishness, exclude the use of algebraic symbols. Except for one little volume, I know of no sane book which deals with arithmetic and elementary algebra under one cover or gives any helpful exercises or examples in squared paper calculations. Such books, I am told, exist in the seclusion of publishers' stock-rooms, but if I, enjoying as I do much more leisure and opportunity of inquiry than the average mathematical master, cannot get at them, how can we expect him to do so? And the thing to do now is obviously to discover or create these books, and force them kindly but firmly into the teachers' hands.

The problem is much simpler in the case of mathematical teaching than in the case of English, because the educational theory and method have been more thoroughly discussed. There is no need for the ten years of experiment and trial I have suggested for the organization of English teaching. The mathematical reformer may begin now at a point the English language reformer will not reach for some years. Suppose now a suitably authenticated committee were to work out--on the basis of Professor Perry's syllabus perhaps--a syllabus of school mathematics, and then make a thorough review of all the mathematical textbooks on sale throughout the English-speaking world, admitting some perhaps as of real permanent value for teaching of the new type, provisionally recognizing others as endurable, but with clear recommendations for their revision and improvement, and condemning the others specifically _by name_. Let them make it clear that this syllabus and report will be respected by all public examining bodies; let them spend a hundred pounds or so in the intelligent distribution of their report, and the scholastic profession will not be long before it is equipped with the recommended books. Meanwhile, the English and American scholastic publishers will become extremely active, the warned books will be revised, and new books will be written in compet.i.tion for the enormous prize of the committee's final approval, an activity that a second review, after an interval of five or six years, will recognize and reward.

Such measures as these will be worth reams of essays in educational papers and Parents' Reviews, worth thousands of inspiring and suggestive lectures at pedagogic conferences. If, indeed, such essays and such lectures do any good at all. The more one looks into scholastic affairs the more one is struck not only by the futility but the positive mischievousness of much of what pa.s.ses for educational liberalism. The schoolmaster is criticised vehemently for teaching the one or two poor useless subjects he can in a sort of way teach, and practically nothing is done to help or equip him to teach anything else. By reason of this uproar, the world is full now of anxious muddled parents, their poor brains buzzing with echoes of Froebel, Tolstoy, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, Herbart, Colonel Parker, Mr. Harris, Matthew Arnold, and the _Morning Post_, trying to find something better. They know nothing of what is right, they only know very, very clearly that the ordinary school is extremely wrong. They are quite clear they don't want "cram" (though they haven't the remotest idea what cram is), and they have a pretty general persuasion that failure at examination is a good test of a sound education. And in response to their bleating demand there grows a fine crop of Quack Schools; schools organized on lines of fantastic extravagance, in which bee-keeping takes the place of Latin, and gardening supersedes mathematics, in which boys play tennis naked to be cured of False Shame, and the numerical exercises called bookkeeping and commercial correspondence are taught to the sons of parents (who can pay a hundred guineas a year), as Commercial Science. The subjects of study in these schools come and go like the ravings of a disordered mind; "Greek History" (in an hour or so a week for a term) is followed by "Italian Literature," and this gives place to the production of a Shakesperian play that ultimately overpowers and disorganizes the whole curriculum. Ethical lessons and the school pulpit flourish, of course.

A triennial walk to a chalk-pit is Field Geology, and vague half-holiday wanderings are Botany Rambles. "Art" of the copper punching variety replaces any decent attempt to draw, and an extreme expressiveness in music compensates for an almost deliberate slovenliness of technique.

Even the ladies' seminaries of the Georgian days could scarcely have produced a parallel to the miscellaneous incapacity of the victim of these "modern" schools, and it becomes daily more necessary for those who have the interests of education at heart to disavow with the most unmistakable emphasis these catch-parent impostures.

With the other subjects under the headings of _A_ and _B_, it is not necessary to deal at any length here. Drawing begins at home, and a child should have begun to sketch freely before the formal schooling commences. It is the business of the school to teach drawing and not to teach "art," which, indeed, is always an individual and spontaneous thing, and it need only concern itself directly with those aspects of drawing that require direction. Of course, an hour set aside from the school time in which boys or girls may do whatever they please with paper, ink, pens, pencils, compa.s.ses, and water-colour would be a most excellent and profitable thing, but that scarcely counts (except in the Quack Schools) as teaching. As a matter of fact, teaching absolutely spoils all that sort of thing. A course in model drawing and in perspective, however, is really a training in seeing things, it demands rigorous instruction and it must be the backbone of school drawing, and, in addition, studies may be made from flowers that would not be made without direction: topography (and much else) may be learnt by copying good explicit maps; chronology (to supplement the child's private reading of history) by the construction of time charts; and much history also by drawing and colouring historical maps. With geometrical drawing one pa.s.ses insensibly into mathematics. And so much has been done not only to revolutionize the teaching of modern languages, but also to popularize the results, that I may content myself with a mere mention of the names of Rippmann, S. Alge, Holzel, and Gouin as typical of the new ways.

There remains the question of _C_, the amount of Information that is to take a place in schooling. Now there is one "subject" that it would be convenient to include, were it only for the sake of the ma.s.s of exercise and ill.u.s.tration it supplies to the mathematical course, and that is the science of Physics. In addition, the science of physics, since it culminates in a clear understanding and use of the terminology of the aspects of energy and a clear sense of adequate causation, is fundamentally necessary to modern thought. Practical work is, no doubt, required for the proper understanding of physical science, and so far it must enter into schooling, but it may be pointed out here that in many cases the educational faddist is overdoing the manual side of science study to a ridiculous extent. Things have altered very much at the Royal College of Science, no doubt, since my student days, but fifteen years ago the courses in elementary physics and in elementary geology were quite childishly silly in this respect. Both these courses seemed to have been inspired by that eminent educationist, Mr. Squeers, and the sequel to spelling "window" was always to "go and clean one." The science in each course in those days could have been acquired just as well in a fortnight as in half a year. One muddled away three or four days etching a millimetre scale with hydrofluoric acid on gla.s.s--to no earthly end that I could discover--and a week or so in making a needless barometer. In the course in geology, days and days were spent in drawing ideal crystalline forms and colouring them in water-colours, apparently in order to get a totally false idea of a crystal, and weeks in the patient copying of microscopic rock sections in water-colours. Effectual measures of police were taken to prevent the flight of the intelligent student from these tiresome duties. The mischief done in this way is very great. It deadens the average students and exasperates and maddens the eager ones. I am inclined to think that a very considerable proportion of what pa.s.ses as "practical" science work, for which costly laboratories are built and expensive benches fitted, consists of very similar solemnities, and it cannot be too strongly urged that "practical" work that does not illuminate is mere waste of the student's time.

This physics course would cover an experimental quant.i.tative treatment of the electric current, it would glance in an explanatory way at many of the phenomena of physical geography, and it would be correlated with a study of the general principles of chemistry. A detailed knowledge of chemical compounds is not a part of general education, it keeps better in reference books than in the non-specialized head, and it is only the broad conceptions of a.n.a.lysis and combination, and of the relation of energy to chemical changes, that have to be attained. Beyond this, and the application of map drawing to give accurate ideas and to awaken interest in geography and history, it is open to discussion whether any Fact subject need be taught as schooling at all. Ensure the full development of a man's mental capacity, and he will get his Fact as he needs it. And if his mind is undeveloped he can make no use of any fact he has. The subject called "Human Physiology" may be at once dismissed as absurdly unsuitable for school use. One is always meeting worthy people who "don't see why children should not know something about their own bodies," and who are not apparently aware that the medical profession after some generations of fairly systematic inquiry knows remarkably little. Save for some general anatomy, it is impossible to teach school-children anything true about the human body, because the explanation of almost any physiological process demands a knowledge of physical and chemical laws much sounder and subtler than the average child can possibly attain. And as for botany, geology, history, and geography (beyond the range already specified), these are far better relegated to the school library and the initiative of each child.

Every child has its specific range of interest, and its specific way of regarding things. In geology, for example, one boy may be fascinated by the fossil hunting, another will find his interest in the effects of structure in scenery, and a third, with more imagination, will give his whole mind to the reconstruction of the past, and will pore over maps of Pleistocene Europe and pictures of Silurian landscape with the keenest appreciation. Each will be bored, or at least not greatly interested, by what attracts the others. Let the children have an easily accessible library--that is the crying need of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand schools to-day, a need every school-seeking parent may do something to remedy--and in that library let there be one or two good densely ill.u.s.trated histories, ill.u.s.trated travels, bound volumes of such a publication as Newnes' _Wide World Magazine_ (I name these publications haphazard--there are probably others as good or better), Hutchinson and Co.'s _Living Animals of the World_, the Rev. H. N.

Hutchinson's _Extinct Monsters_, the Badminton volumes on big game shooting, mountaineering, and yachting, Kerner's "Botany," collections of "The Hundred Best Pictures" sort, collections of views of towns and of scenery in different parts of the world, and the like. Then let the schoolmaster set aside five hours a week as the minimum for reading, and let the pupils read during that time just whatever they like, provided only that they keep silence and read. If the schoolmaster or schoolmistress comes in at all here, it should be to stimulate systematic reading occasionally by setting a group of five or six pupils to "get up" some particular subject--a report on "animals that might still be domesticated," for example--and by showing them conversationally how to read with a slip of paper at hand, gathering facts. This sort of thing it is impossible to reduce to method and system, and, consequently, it is the proper field for the teacher's initiative. It is largely in order to leave time and energy for this that I am anxious to reduce the more rigorous elements in schooling to standard and text-book.

Now all this schooling need not take more than twenty hours a week for its backbone or hard-work portion, its English, mathematics, science, and exact drawing, and twelve hours a week for its easier, more individual employments of sketching, painting, and reading, and this leaves a large margin of time for military drill and for physical exercises. If we are to get the best result from the child's individuality, we must leave a large portion of that margin at the child's own disposal, it must be free to go for walks, to "muck about,"

as schoolboys say, to play games, and (within limits) to consort with companions of its own choosing--to follow its interests in short. It is in this direction that British middle-cla.s.s education fails most signally at the present time. The English schoolboy and schoolgirl are positively hunted through their days. They do not play--using the word to indicate a spontaneous employment into which imagination enters--at all. They have games, but they are so regulated that the imagination is eliminated; they have exercises of various stereotyped sorts. They are taken to and fro to these things in the care of persons one would call ushers unhesitatingly were it not that they also pretended to teach.

The rest of their waking time is preparation or supervised reading or walking under supervision. Their friendships are watched. They are never, never left alone. The avowed ideal of many boarding schoolmasters is to "send them to bed tired out." Largely this is due to a natural dread of accidents and sc.r.a.pes, that will make trouble for the school, but there is also another cause. If I may speak frankly and entirely as an unauthoritative observer, I would say it is a regrettable thing that so large a proportion of British secondary schoolmasters and mistresses are unmarried. The normal condition of a healthy adult is marriage, and for all those who are not defective upon this side (and that means an incapacity to understand many things) celibacy is a state of unstable equilibrium and too often a quite unwholesome condition. Wherever there are celibate teachers I am inclined to suspect a fussiness, an unreasonable watchfulness, a disposition to pry, an exaggeration of what are called "Dangers," a painful idealization of "Purity." It is a part of the normal development of the human being to observe with some particularity certain phenomena, to entertain certain curiosities, to talk of them to trusted equals--_never_, be it noted, except by perversion to parents or teachers--and there is not the slightest harm in these quite natural things, unless they are forced back into an abashed solitude or a.s.sociated by suggestion with conceptions of shame and disgust. That is what happens in too many of our girls' schools and preparatory schools to-day, and it is to that end mainly that youthful intimacies are discouraged, youthful freedom is restricted, and imagination and individuality warped and crippled. It is astonishing how much of their adolescence grown-up people will contrive to forget.

So much for schooling and what may be done to better it in this New Republican scheme of things. The upward continuation of it into a general College course is an integral part of a larger question that we shall discuss at a later stage, the larger question of the general progressive thought of the community as a whole.

VII. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL INFLUENCES

There can be few people alive who have not remarked on occasion that men are the creatures of circ.u.mstances. But it is one thing to state a belief of this sort in some incidental application, and quite another to realize it completely. Towards such a completer realization we have been working in these papers, in disentangling the share of inheritance and of deliberate schooling and training, in the production of the civilized man. The rest we have to ascribe to his world in general, of which his home is simply the first and most intimate aspect. In every developing citizen we have a.s.serted there is a great ma.s.s of fluid and indeterminate possibility, and this sets and is shaped by the world about him as wax is shaped by a mould. It is rarely, of course, an absolutely exact and submissive cast that ensues; few men and women are without some capacity for question and criticism, but it is only very rare and obdurate material--only, as one says, a very original personality--that does not finally take its general form and direction in this way. And it is proposed in this paper to keep this statement persistently in focus, instead of dismissing it as a plat.i.tude and thinking no more about it at all after the usual fashion, while we examine certain broad social and political facts and conventions which const.i.tute the general framework of the world in which the developing citizen is placed. I would submit that at the present time with regard to such things as church and kingdom, const.i.tution and nationality, we are altogether too much enslaved by the idea of "policy," and altogether too blind to the remoter, deeper, and more lasting consequences of our public acts and inst.i.tutions in moulding the next generation. It will not, I think, be amiss to pa.s.s beyond policy for a s.p.a.ce, and to insist--even with heaviness--that however convenient an inst.i.tution may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a "natural growth," and however much the "product of a long evolution," yet, if it does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed.

We "save the state" for the sake of our children, that, at least, is the New Republican view of the matter, and if in our intentness to save the state we injure or sacrifice our children, we destroy our ultimate for our proximate aim.

Already it has been pointed out, with certain concrete instances, how the thing that is, a.s.serts itself over the thing that is to be; already a general indication has been made of the trend of the argument we are now about to develop and define. That argument, briefly, is this, that to attain the ends of the New Republic, that is to say the best results from our birth possibilities, we must continually make political forms, social, political and religious formulae, and all the rules and regulations of _life the clearest, simplest, and sincerest expression possible of what we believe about life and hope about life;_ that whatever momentary advantage a generation may gain by accepting what is known to be a sham and a convention, by keeping in use the detected imposture and the flawed apparatus, is probably much more than made up for by the reaction of this acquiescence upon the future. As the typical instance of a convenient convention that I am inclined to think is now reacting very badly upon our future, the Crown of the British Empire, considered as the symbolical figurehead of a system of hereditary privilege and rule, serves extremely well. One may deal with this typical instance with no special application to the easy, kindly, amiable personality this crown adorns at the present time. It is a question that may be dealt with in general terms. What, we would ask, are the natural, inseparable concomitants of a system of hereditary rulers in a state, looking at the thing entirely with an eye to the making of a greater mankind in the world? How does it compare with the American conception of democratic equality, and how do both stand with regard to the essential truth and purpose in things? . . .

To state these questions is like opening the door of a room that has long been locked and deserted. One has a lonely feeling. There are quite remarkably no other voices here, and the rusty hinges echo down empty pa.s.sages that were quite threateningly full of men seventy or eighty years ago. But I am only one very insignificant member of a cla.s.s of inquirers in England who started upon the question "why are we becoming inefficient?" a year or two ago, and from that starting point it is I came to this. . . . I do not believe therefore that upon this dusty threshold I shall stand long alone. We take most calmly the most miraculous of things, and it is only quite recently that I have come to see as amazing this fact, that while the greater ma.s.s of our English-speaking people is living under the profession of democratic Republicanism, there is no party, no sect, no periodical, no teacher either in Great Britain or America or the Colonies, to hint at a proposal to abolish the aristocratic and monarchical elements in the British system. There is no revolutionary spirit over here, and very little missionary spirit over there. The great ma.s.s of the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic takes hardly any interest in this issue at all. It is as if the question was an impossible one, outside the range of thinkable things. Or, as if the last word in this controversy was said before our grandfathers died.

But is that really so? It is permissible to suggest that for a time the last word had been said, and still to reopen the discussion now. All these papers, the very conception of New Republicanism, rests on the a.s.sumption--presumptuous and offensive though it must needs seem to many--that new matter for thought altogether, new apparatus and methods of inquiry, and new ends, have come into view since the early seventies, when the last Republican voices in England died away. We are enormously more aware of the Future. That, we have already defined as the essential difference of our new outlook. Our fathers thought of the Kingdom as it was to them, they contrasted with that the immediate alternative, and within these limits they were, no doubt, right in rejecting the latter.

So, to them at any rate, the thing seemed judged. But nowadays when we have said the Kingdom is so and so, and when we have decided that we do not wish to convert it into a Republic upon the American or any other existing pattern before Christmas, 1904, we consider we have only begun to look at the thing. We have then to ask what is the future of the Kingdom; is it to be a permanent thing, or is it to develop into and give place to some other condition? We have to ask precisely the same question about the American democracy and the American const.i.tution.

Is that latter arrangement going to last for ever? We cannot help being contributory to these developments, and if we have any pretensions to wisdom at all, we must have some theory of what we intend with regard to these things; political action can surely be nothing but folly, unless it has a clear purpose in the future. If these things are not sempiternal, then are we merely to patch the fabric as it gives way, or are we going to set about rebuilding--piecemeal, of course, and without closing the premises or stopping the business, but, nevertheless, on some clear and comprehensive plan? If so, what is the plan to be? Does it permit us to retain in a more or less modified form, or does it urge us to get rid of, the British Crown? Does it permit us to retain or does it urge us to modify the American const.i.tution? That is the form, it seems to me, in which the question of Republicanism as an alternative to existing inst.i.tutions, must presently return into the field of public discussion in Great Britain; not as a question of political stability nor of individual rights this time, but as an aspect of our general scheme, our scheme to make the world more free and more stimulating and strengthening for our children and our children's children; for the children both of our bodies and of our thoughts.

It is interesting to recall the a.s.sumptions under which the last vestiges of militant Republicanism died out in Great Britain. As late as the middle years of the reign of Queen Victoria, there were many in England who were, and who openly professed themselves to be, Republicans, and there was a widely felt persuasion that the country was drifting slowly towards the const.i.tution of a democratic republic. In those days it was that there came into being a theory, strengthened by the withdrawal of the Monarch from affairs, which one still hears repeated, that Great Britain was a "crowned republic," that the crown was no more than a symbol retained by the "innate good sense" of the British people, and that in some automatic way not clearly explained, such old-time vestiges of privilege as the House of Lords would presently disappear. One finds this confident belief in Progress towards political equality--Progress that required no human effort, but was inherent in the scheme of things--very strong in d.i.c.kens, for example, who spoke for the average Englishman as no later writer can be said to have done. This belief fell in very happily with that disposition to funk a crisis, that vulgar dread of vulgar action which one must regretfully admit was all too often a characteristic of the nineteenth century English. There was an idea among Englishmen that to do anything whatever of a positive sort to bring about a Republic was not only totally unnecessary but inevitably mischievous, since it evidently meant street fighting and provisional government by bold, bad, blood-stained, vulgar men, in shirt sleeves as the essential features of the process.

And under the enervating influence of this great automatic theory--this theory that no one need bother because the thing was bound to come, was indeed already arriving for all who had eyes to see--Republicanism did not so much die as fall asleep. It was all right, Liberalism told us--the Crown was a legal fiction, the House of Lords was an interesting anachronism, and in that faith it was, no doubt, that the last of the Republicans, Mr. Bright and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, "kissed hands."

Then, presently, the frantic politics of Mr. Gladstone effected what probably no other human agency could have contrived, and restored the prestige of the House of Lords.

Practically the Crown has now gone unchallenged by press, pulpit, or platform speaker for thirty years, and as a natural consequence there is just now a smaller proportion of men under forty who call themselves Republicans even in private than there ever was since Plutarch entered the circle of English reading. To-day the Aristocratic Monarchy is an almost universally accepted fact in the British Empire, and it has so complete an air of unshakable permanence to contrast with its condition in the early nineteenth century that even the fact that it is the only really concrete obstacle to a political reunion of the English-speaking peoples at the present time, seems merely a fact to avoid.

There are certain consequences that must follow from the unchallenged acceptation of an aristocratic monarchy, consequences that do not seem to be sufficiently recognized in this connection, and it is to these that the reader's attention is now particularly drawn. There are a great number of British people who are more or less sincerely seeking the secret of national efficiency at present, and I cannot help thinking that sooner or later, in spite of their evident aversion, they will be forced to look into this dusty chamber of thought for the clue to the thing they need. The corner they will have to turn is the admission that no state and no people can be at its maximum efficiency until every public function is discharged by the man best able to perform it, and that no Commonweal can be near efficiency until it is endeavouring very earnestly to bring that ideal condition of affairs about. And when they have got round that corner they will have to face the fact that an Hereditary Monarchy is a state in which this principle is repudiated at a cardinal point, a state in which one position, which no amount of sophistication will prevent common men and women regarding as the most honourable, powerful, and responsible one of all, which is indeed by that very fact alone a great and responsible one, is filled on purely genealogical grounds. In a state that has also an aristocratic const.i.tution this repudiation of special personal qualities is carried very much further. Reluctantly but certainly the seeker after national efficiency will come to the point that the aristocracy and their friends and connections _must_ necessarily form a caste about the King, that their gradations _must_ set the tone of the whole social body, and that their political position must enable them to demand and obtain a predominating share in any administration that may be formed. So long, therefore, as your const.i.tution remains aristocratic you must expect to see men of quite ordinary ability, quite ordinary energy, and no exceptional force of character, men frequently less clever and influential than their wives and lady friends, controlling the public services, a Duke of Norfolk managing so vital a business as the Post Office and succeeded by a Marquis of Londonderry, and a Marquis of Lansdowne organizing military affairs, and nothing short of a change in your political const.i.tution can prevent this sort of thing. No one believes these excellent gentlemen hold these positions by merit or capacity, and no one believes that from them we are getting anything like the best imaginable services in these positions. These positions are held by the mere accident of birth, and it is by the mere accident of birth the great ma.s.s of Englishmen are shut out from the remotest hope of serving their country in such positions.

And this evil of reserved places is not restricted by any means to public control. You cannot both have a system and not have a system, and the British have a system of hereditary aristocracy that infects the whole atmosphere of English thought with the persuasion that what a man may attempt is determined by his caste. It is here, and nowhere else, that the clue to so much inefficiency as one finds it in contemporary British activity lies. The officers of the British Army instead of being sedulously picked from the whole population are drawn from a really quite small group of families, and, except for those who are called "gentleman rankers," to enlist is the very last way in the world to become a British officer. As a very natural corollary only broken men and unambitious men of the lowest cla.s.s will consent to become ordinary private soldiers, except during periods of extreme patriotic excitement.

The men who enter the Civil Service also, know perfectly well that though they may possess the most brilliant administrative powers and develop and use themselves with relentless energy, they will never win for themselves or their wives one t.i.the of the public honour that comes by right to the heir to a dukedom. A dockyard hand who uses his brains and makes a suggestion that may save the country thousands of pounds will get--a gratuity.

Throughout all English affairs the suggestion of this political system has spread. The employer is of a different caste from his workmen, the captain is of a different caste from his crew, even the Teachers'

Register is specially cla.s.sified to prevent "young gentlemen" being taught by the only men who, as a cla.s.s, know how to teach in England, namely, the elementary teachers; everywhere the same thing is to be found. And while it is, it is absurd to expect a few plat.i.tudes about Freedom, and sn.o.bbishness, and a few pious hopes about efficiency, to counteract the system's universal, incessant teaching, its lesson of limited effort within defined possibilities. Only under one condition may such a system rise towards anything that may be called national vigour, and that is when there exists a vigorous Court which sets the fashion of hard work. A keen King, indifferent to feminine influence, may, for a time, make a keen nation, but that is an exceptional state of affairs, and the whole shape of the fabric gravitates towards relapse.

Even under such an influence the social stratification will still, in the majority of cases, prevent powers and posts falling to the best possible man. In the majority of cases the best that can be hoped for, even then, will be to see the best man in the cla.s.s privileged in relation to any particular service, discharging that service. The most efficient nation in the world to-day is believed to be Germany, which is--roughly speaking--an aristocratic monarchy, it is dominated by a man of most unkingly force of character, and by a n.o.ble tradition of educational thoroughness that arose out of the shames of utter defeat, and, as a consequence, a great number of people contrive to forget that the most dazzling display of national efficiency the world has ever seen followed the sloughing of hereditary inst.i.tutions by France. One credits Napoleon too often with the vigour of his opportunity, with the force and strength it was his privilege to misdirect and destroy. And one forgets that this present German efficiency was paralleled in the eighteenth century by Prussia, whose aristocratic system first winded Republicans at Valmy, and showed at Jena fourteen years after how much it had learnt from that encounter.

Now our main argument lies in this: that the great ma.s.s of a generation of children born into a country, all those children who have no more than average intelligence and average moral qualities, will accept the ostensible inst.i.tutions of that country at their face value, and will be almost entirely shaped and determined by that acceptance. Only a sustained undertone of revolutionary protest can prevent that happening.

They will believe that precedences represent real superiority, and they will honour what they see honoured, and ignore what they see treated as of no account. Pious sentiment about Equality and Freedom will enter into the reality of their minds as little as a drop of water into a greasy plate. They will act as little in general intercourse upon the proposition that "the man's the gowd for a' that," as they will upon the proposition that "man is a spirit" when it comes to the alternative of jumping over a cliff or going down by a ladder.

If, however, your children are not average children, if you are so happy as to have begotten children of exceptional intelligence, it does not follow that this fact will save them from conclusions quite parallel to those of the common child. Suppose they do penetrate the pretence that there is no intrinsic difference between the Royal Family and the members of the peerage on the one hand, and the average person in any other cla.s.s on the other; suppose they discover that the whole scale of precedence and honour in their land is a stupendous sham;--what then? Suppose they see quite clearly that all these pretensions of an inviolate superiority of birth and breeding vanish at the touch of a Whitaker Wright, soften to a glowing cordiality before the sunny promises of a Hooley. Suppose they perceive that neither King nor lords really believe in their own lordliness, and that at any point in the system one may find men with hands for any man's tip, provided it is only sufficiently large! Even then!--How is that going to react upon our children's social conduct?

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they will accept the system still, they will accept it with mental reservations. They will see that to repudiate the system by more than a chance word or deed is to become isolated, to become a discontented alien, to lose even the qualified permission to do something in the world. In most cases they will take the oaths that come in their way and kiss the hands--just as the British elementary teachers bow unbelieving heads to receive the episcopal pat, and just as the British sceptic in orders will achieve triumphs of ambiguity to secure the episcopal see. And their reason for submission will not be absolutely despicable; they will know there is no employment worth speaking of without it. After all, one has only one life, and it is not pleasant to pa.s.s through it in a state of futile abstinence from the general scheme. Life, unfortunately, does not end with heroic moments of repudiation; there comes a morrow to the Everlasting Nay.

One may begin with heroic renunciations and end in undignified envy and dyspeptic comments outside the door one has slammed on one's self. In such reflections your children of the exceptional sort, it may be after a youthful fling or two, a "ransom" speech or so, will find excellent reasons for making their peace with things as they are, just as if they were utterly commonplace. They know that if they can boast a knighthood or a baronetcy or a Privy Councillorship, they will taste day by day and every day that respect, that confidence from all about them that no one but a trained recluse despises. And life will abound in opportunities.

"Oh, well!" they will say. Such things give them influence, consideration, power to do things.

The beginning of concessions is so entirely reasonable and easy! But the concessions go on. Each step upward in the British system finds that system more persistently about them. When one has started out under a King one may find amiable but whom one may not respect, admitted a system one does not believe in, when one has rubbed the first bloom off one's honour, it is infinitely easier to begin peeling the skin. Many a man whose youth was a dream of n.o.ble things, who was all for splendid achievements and the service of mankind, peers to-day, by virtue of such acquiescences, from between preposterous lawn sleeves or under a tilted coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour as a spider sucks a fly.

But this is going too far, the reader will object! There must be concessions, there must be conformities, just as there must be some impurity in the water we drink and flaws in the beauty we give our hearts to, and that, no doubt, is true. It is no reason why we should drink sewage and kneel to grossness and base stupidity. To endure the worst because we cannot have the best is surely the last word of folly.

Our business as New Republicans is not to waste our lives in the pursuit of an unattainable chemical purity, but to clear the air as much as possible. Practical ethics is, after all, a quant.i.tative science. In the reality of life there are few absolute cases, and it is foolish to forego a great end for a small concession. But to suffer so much Royalty and Privilege as an Englishman has to do before he may make any effectual figure in public life is not a small concession. By the time you have purchased power you may find you have given up everything that made power worth having. It would be a small concession, I admit, a mere personal self-sacrifice, to pretend loyalty, kneel and kiss hands, a.s.sist at Coronation mummeries, and all the rest of it, in order, let us say, to accomplish some great improvement in the schools of the country, were it not for the fact that all these things must be done in the sight of the young, that you cannot kneel to the King without presenting a kneeling example to the people, without becoming as good a teacher of servility as though you were servile to the marrow. There lies the trouble. By virtue of this reaction it is that the shams and ceremonies we may fancy mere curious survivals, mere kinks and tortuosities, cloaks and accessories to-day, will, if we are silent and acquiescent, be halfway to reality again in the course of a generation. To our children they are not evidently shams; they are powerful working suggestions.

Human inst.i.tutions are things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies still rooted in the ground has the promise and potency of growth. It will tend perpetually, according to its nature, to recover its old influence over the imagination, the thoughts, and acts of our children.

Even when the whole trend of economic and social development sets against the real survival of such a social and political system as the British, its pretensions, its shape and implications may survive, survive all the more disastrously because they are increasingly insincere. Indeed, in a sense, the British system, the pyramid of King, land-owning and land-ruling aristocracy, yeomen and trading middle-cla.s.s and labourers, is dead--it died in the nineteenth century under the wheels of mechanism [Footnote: I have discussed this fully in _Antic.i.p.ations_, Chapter III., Developing Social Elements.]--and the crude beginnings of a new system are clothed in its raiment, and greatly enc.u.mbered by that clothing. Our greatest peers are shareholders, are equipped by marriage with the wealth of Jews and Americans, are exploiters of colonial resources and urban building enterprises; their territorial t.i.tles are a mask and a lie. They hamper the development of the new order, but they cannot altogether prevent the emergence of new men. The new men come up to power one by one, from different enterprises, with various traditions, and one by one, before they can develop a sense of cla.s.s distinction and collective responsibility, the old system with its organized "Society" captures them. If it finds the man obdurate, it takes his wife and daughters, and it waylays his sons.

[Footnote: It is not only British subjects that are a.s.similated in this way, the infection of the British system, the annexation of certain social strata in the Republic by the British crown, is a question for every thoughtful American. America is less and less separate from Europe, and the social development of the United States cannot be a distinct process--it is inevitably bound up in the general social development of the English-speaking community. The taint has touched the American Navy, for example, and there are those who discourage promotion from the ranks--the essential virtue of the democratic state--because men so promoted would be at a disadvantage when they met the officers of foreign navies, who were by birth and training "gentlemen." When they met them socially no doubt was meant; in war the disadvantage might prove the other way about.] Because the hereditary kingdom and aristocracy of Great Britain is less and less representative of economic reality, more and more false to the real needs of the world, it does not follow that it will disappear, any more than malarial fever will disappear from a man's blood because it is irrelevant to the general purpose of his being. These things will only go when a sufficient number of sufficiently capable and powerful people are determined they shall go. Until that time they will remain with us, influencing things about them for evil, as it lies in their nature to do.

Before, however, any sufficiently great and capable body of men can be found to abolish these shams, these shams that must necessarily hamper and limit the development of our children, it is necessary that they should have some clear idea of the thing that is to follow, and the real security of these obsolete inst.i.tutions lies very largely in the fact that at present the thing that is to follow does not define itself.

It is too commonly a.s.sumed that the alternative to a more or less hereditary government is democratic republicanism of the American type, and the defence of the former consists usually in an indictment of the latter, complicated in very illogical cases by the a.s.sertion (drawn from the French instance) that Republics are unstable. But it does not follow that because one condemns the obvious shams of the British system that one must accept the shams of the United States. While in Great Britain we have a system that masks and hampers the best of our race under a series of artificial inequalities, the United States theory of the essential equality of all men is equally not in accordance with the reality of life. In America, just as in England, the intelligent child grows up to discover that the pretensions of public life are not justified, and quite equally to be flawed in thought and action by that discovery.

The American atmosphere has one great and indisputable superiority over the British: it insists upon the right of every citizen, it almost presents it as a duty, to do all that he possibly can do; it holds out to him even the highest position in the state as a possible reward for endeavour. Up to the point of its equality of opportunity surely no sane Englishman can do anything but envy the American state. In America "presumption" is not a sin. All the vigorous enterprise that differentiates the American from the Englishman in business flows quite naturally from that; all the patriotic force and loyalty of the common American, which glows beside the English equivalent as the sun beside the moon, glows even oppressively. But apart from these inestimable advantages I do not see that the American has much that an Englishman need envy. There are certainly points of inferiority in the American atmosphere, influences in development that are bad, not only in comparison with what is ideally possible, but even in comparison with English parallels.

For example, the theory that every man is as good as his neighbour, and possibly a little better, has no check for fools, and instead of the respectful silences of England there seems--to the ordinary English mind--an extraordinary quant.i.ty of crude and unsound judgments in America. One gets an impression that the sort of mind that is pa.s.sively stupid in England is often actively silly in America, and, as a consequence, American newspapers, American discussions, American social affairs are pervaded by a din that in England we do not hear and do not want to hear. The real and steady development of American scientific men is masked to the European observer, and it must be greatly hampered by the copious silliness of the amateur discoverer, and the American crop of new religions and new enthusiasms is a horror and a warning to the common British intelligence. Many people whose judgments are not absolutely despicable hold a theory that unhampered personal freedom for a hundred years has made out of the British type, a type less deliberate and thorough in execution and more noisy and pushful in conduct, restless rather than indefatigable, and smart rather than wise. If ninety-nine people out of the hundred in our race are vulgar and unwise, it does seem to be a fact that while the English fool is generally a shy and negative fool anxious to hide the fact, the American fool is a loud and positive fool, who swamps much of the greatness of his country to many a casual observer from Europe altogether. American books, American papers, American manners and customs seem all for the ninety and nine.

Deeper and graver than the superficial defects of manner and execution and outlook to which these charges point, there are, one gathers, other things that are traceable to the same source. There is a report of profounder troubles in the American social body, of a disease of corruption that renders American legislatures feeble or powerless against the great business corporations, and of an extreme demoralization of the police force. The relation of the local political organization to the police is fatally direct, and that sense of ordered subordination to defined duties which distinguishes the best police forces of Europe fails. Men go into the police force, we are told, with the full intention of making it pay, of acquiring a saleable power.

There is probably enough soundness in these impressions, and enough truth in these reports and criticisms, to justify our saying that all is not ideally right with the American atmosphere, and that it is not to present American conditions we must turn in repudiating our British hereditary monarchy. We have to seek some better thing upon which British and American inst.i.tutions may converge. The American personal and social character, just like the English personal and social character, displays very grave defects, defects that must now be reflected upon, and must be in course of acquisition by the children who are growing up in the American state. And since the American is still predominantly of British descent, and since he has not been separated long enough from the British to develop distinct inherited racial characteristics, and, moreover, since his salient characteristics are in sharp contrast with those of the British, it follows that the difference in his character and atmosphere must be due mainly to his different social and political circ.u.mstances. Just as the relative defects of the common British, their apathy, their unreasoning conservatism, and their sordid scorn of intellectual things is bound up with their politico-social scheme, so, I believe, the noisiness, the mean practicalness, and the dyspeptic-driving restlessness that are the shadows of American life, are bound up with the politico-social condition of America. The Englishman sticks in the mud, and the American, with a sort of violent meanness, cuts corners, and in both cases it is quite conceivable that the failure to follow the perfect way is really no symptom of a divergence of blood and race, but the natural and necessary outcome of the ma.s.s of suggestion about them that const.i.tutes their respective worlds.

The young American grows up into a world pervaded by the theory of democracy, by the theory that all men must have an equal chance of happiness, possessions, and power, and in which that theory is expressed by a uniform equal suffrage. No man shall have any power or authority save by the free consent and delegation of his fellows--that is the idea--and to the originators of this theory it seemed as obvious as anything could be that these suffrages would only be given to those who did really serve the happiness and welfare of the greatest number. The idea was reflected in the world of business by a conception of free compet.i.tion; no man should grow rich except by the free preference of a great following of customers. Such is still the American theory, and directly the intelligent young American grows up to hard facts he finds almost as much disillusionment as the intelligent young Englishman. He finds that in practice the free choice of a const.i.tuency reduces to two candidates, and no more, selected by party organizations, and the free choice of the customer to the goods proffered by a diminishing number of elaborately advertised businesses; he finds political instruments and business corporations interlocking altogether beyond his power of control, and that the two ways to opportunity, honour, and reward are either to appeal coa.r.s.ely to the commonest thoughts and feelings of the vulgar as a political agitator or advertising trader, or else to make his peace with those who do. And so he, too, makes his concessions. They are different concessions from those of the young Englishman, but they have this common element of gravity, that he has to submit to conditions in which he does not believe, he has to trim his course to a conception of living that is perpetually bending him from the splendid and righteous way. The Englishman grows up into a world of barriers and locked doors, the American into an unorganized, struggling crowd. There is an enormous premium in the American's world upon force and dexterity, and force in the case of common men too often degenerates into brutality, and dexterity into downright trickery and cheating. He has got to be forcible and dexterous within his self-respect if he can.

There is an enormous discount on any work that does not make money or give a tangible result, and except in the case of those whose lot has fallen within certain prescribed circles, certain oases of organized culture and work, he must advertise himself even in science or literature or art as if he were a pill. There is no recognition for him at all in the world, except the recognition of--everybody. There will be neither comfort nor the barest respect for him, however fine his achievement, unless he makes his achievement known, unless he can make enough din about it, to pay. He has got to shout down ninety-nine shouting fellow-citizens. That is the cardinal fact in life for the great majority of Americans who respond to the stirrings of ambition.

If in Britain capacity is discouraged because honours and power go by prescription, in America it is misdirected because honours do not exist and power goes by popular election and advertis.e.m.e.nt. In certain directions--not by any means in all--un.o.btrusive merit, soundness of quality that has neither gift nor disposition for "push," has a better chance in Great Britain than in America. A sort