The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners

under ordinary conditions of vision. To deny such evidence merely because it is unusual is something stupid. It is a piece of popular doubt, just as stupid as is the corresponding popular credulity. The next time the Great Sea Serpent comes within two cables of one of His Majesty’s ships, and is familiarly seen by scores of men, I strongly advise the leader and more educated of them, whoever he may be, not to say that he and his men did, under such and such circumstances, clearly see the Great Sea Serpent. For if they do that, they are done. He had far better say that the weather being thick, and under conditions when they may have easily been deceived, he and one companion thought that they saw something like such and such an apparition; and he would do well to sketch it in a brumous fashion. Let him make it as like as possible to things with which his readers are familiar; then many idiots will write to the paper saying that it was sea-weed, or a flight of birds, or what not, but a few will believe. If he tells the plumb truth, no one will believe. For, just as it is important to mix truth with falsity, if falsity is to be accepted, so it is important to mix falsity with truth, if truth is to be accepted. All lawyers know this. Indeed, it may be called one of our Rules of Law. But the lawyers can say this for themselves, at least, that their trade is advocacy, and that they do not so much as pretend to truth. There is no concealment. We are not deceived. But the practice of advocacy in all those parts of the nation’s life where we used to have information and direct statement, is a very dangerous as well as an exasperating ill. It was an evil growing before the war, but the war has increased it hugely; men have fallen into a habit of what was called during the war propaganda. They both give it and receive it. Upon every side what you hear (or what is concealed from you) is put forward or concealed with an object of advocacy, and, therefore, of distortion. It was, perhaps, during the war necessary; or, at least, necessary in those societies, such as our own, which had no national tradition of such a conflict. Men were made to swallow the most enormous camels. The unfortunate flabby German, with his silly dream of universal superiority, became a horrid fiend quite out of nature, and even those foreigners who are most hated instinctively and traditionally by the mass of the populace became gallant allies. The most comic part of the affair was the attitude towards America. We dared not insult America, for we were naturally as keen on getting American help as is a drowning man on catching a deck chair (and, by the way, if by any chance, you of the rich want to save a drowning man from shipboard, don’t throw a life-buoy, throw a deck chair; it is always loose and always handy, and very apparent, and if it hits it stuns). In their ignorance many people came to believe that it was the duty of the Americans to come over and help, and, what was more astonishing still, it was represented to them as a matter of life and death, not to us, but to themselves. The Americans were told (Heaven knows whether any of them believed it!) that if the Germans, Austrians, Bohemians, Slovenes, Croats, Bulgarians, Turks, etc., won in their push against the English, French, and Italians, that if the half-baked won against the baked, the next thing would be a sailing of the conquerors over the sea for the rude domination of Scranton, Pa. Fiddlesticks-ends! But people did really talk like that. They shook their fingers at the United States, and said: ‘It will be your turn next!’ Now at sea there is no advocacy. We are free from that most noisome form of falsehood, which corrupts the very inward of the soul. Truth is one of the great gifts of the sea. You cannot persuade yourself nor listen to the persuasion of another that the wind is not blowing when it is, or that a cabin with half a foot of water in it is dry, or that a dragging anchor holds. Everywhere the sea is a teacher of truth. I am not sure that the best thing I find in sailing is not this salt of reality. Turning to the statement of any reality after a dose of advocacy is like getting out into the fresh air from an intolerable froust. It would be a boon beyond expression to all of us if some rich man would found a little weekly newspaper (he would have to be prepared to lose three thousand a year), in which sheet the reader should be told things that had happened in Europe and at home, instead of being given a version designed to provoke from him a verdict, or to throw him into a particular mood desired by the writer’s master. The most dangerous form of this advocacy to-day in England—and it is universal—the most dangerous gaps in the field of statement, are the advocacy put forward for a capitalist control of lives and the suppression of facts inimical to that control. They are dangerous because they provoke passions which lead to social decline, and add enormously to the sense of injustice under which the proletariat of the modern capitalist state increasingly suffers. I cannot call to mind a single strike or lockout during the last twenty years, of all those strikes and lockouts which have become for us in England a sort of daily food—a permanent disturbance of the English world, and a threat to the English future—I cannot recollect one, I say, in which our millionaire newspaper-owners did so much as state the plain facts of the case in time; let alone present the elements on either side dispassionately and as news. I went in great detail into the conditions of one of the worst of our railway strikes some years ago. I discovered that the points of contention had been under debate for months. I further discovered that the definite conclusion not to accept such and such terms, but to stand out for such and such other terms under threat of a universal stoppage of the railways, had been made weeks before the catastrophe fell. The public had had no inkling of this. When the allotted term expired, and what all those rich men knew was bound to be the result of the quarrel came about, the public was at once deluged with advocacy which still concealed the elements of the debate, and which calmly took it for granted that the men possessed of the instruments of production had a natural right to the labour of the men not possessed of them. Every conceivable piece of pleading was put forward, even such as would appeal to intelligent men, let alone the flood of stuff designed for their more numerous inferiors. We were told, for instance, that the number of holders of railway stock was greater than the number of workers upon the railway, which was perfectly true, but had about as much to do with the issue as the great love song of Mozart. We were _not_ told in what proportions the stock was held. We were told, all of us until we were tired, that the men, by refusing their labour, had thrown out a great public service, which was perfectly true. What was omitted was the counterpart of the same truth; that the owners of capital, by refusing to pay the sum demanded by those with whom they had to enter into contract, were equally throwing out a great public service. What advantage it would be to the Commonwealth if some one paper would simply state, not only the obvious broad lines of the quarrel between concentrated capitalism and the proletarian majority to-day, but give us rapidly, in detail, and with the facts, the elements in each case. I myself know very well how it should be done, for I have presented it over and over again, and never been able to get these rich men to put it into print. For instance, in the case of a particular dispute one might say truthfully this: ‘It must be clearly understood that the inconvenience we are suffering from the stoppage of work in the air supply to the underground flats of which a modern city is composed, is a lockout and not a strike. The chief shareholders in the Imperial Air Company, whose names are Such-and-Such, whose holdings are of such-and-such an extent, and of whom the directing spirit is So-and-So, propose to cut down the men’s wages by a tenth. The men refuse to sell their labour for less than the old price. The better-paid grades, who receive such-and-such an average wage, are contented with the terms of the new proposed contract, but they are acting in solid support of the lower-paid grades, whose duties are such-and-such, and whose average pay is so much. The plea of the directors is that unless the wages are cut, their dividend, which is at present of such-and-such a value, will have to be lowered to such-and-such. It must be remembered that the stock is heavily watered. The real capital is only such-and-such a fraction of the nominal. The men object to negotiations with the permanent officials of the National Union, because the general secretary is well known to have betrayed the cause of his class for money on a previous occasion, and is generally mistrusted; but, as is common in the caucus of a large trades union, it is impossible to dislodge him.’ Such a statement as that cannot be printed, though every word be true and valuable for public information. Such things, valuable to the public, cannot be printed, partly because the machinery of printing is in the hands of our highly centralised capitalist controls, and partly because the courts of justice, which are also nowadays virtually under capitalist control, would heavily punish not only the writer, but the printer and publisher of the truth. It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil. This subservience to concentrated wealth, which is appearing in the courts of justice, and is universal in the writers of our day, is like the accumulation of debt, the process cannot continue forever; it is building up a higher and higher, and more and more unstable, tower of resentment and secret protest. The chances are that when the evil has wrought its own elimination by excess, it will be followed, not by the publication of the truth we need, still less by the enfranchisement of the proletariat, but rather by the publication of a new set of falsehoods under new controls. And so much for that. We sailed along that well-known coast, which is turning into a sort of town; we aimed to get into the home water of Shoreham just on the last quarter of the flood before dark. We were disappointed. The wind fell with the approaching evening, and though a westerly stream was with us so late in the inshore tide, by the time we were outside the well-known twin piers, the wooden stanchions of the Nona’s home, the ebb was rushing out of that river, and there was no making port, though we were just outside. There were others in the same plight under the warm summer sky of that evening: a London barge, a Norwegian ship with timber, and a little snorting steamer, which let go her anchor with a rush somewhat further out just at the moment when we also dropped anchor in that very shallow water, in not five fathoms deep. A great full moon rose up out of the east, out of the seas of England, and the night was warm. There was a