What's Wrong with the World
not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them is
the original ideal question, “Do you want to keep the family at all?” If
Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the
natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family.
He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a
preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must
manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does
not mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very
humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who
shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of
independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information
and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more
in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur;
and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the
family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing
up all children as the children of the state--like Oliver Twist. But if
these stern words must be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape
a somewhat severe admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty
sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain,
if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our
essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and
try to equalize property. The overwhelming mass of the English people at
this particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They are
as domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic than the
governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally
meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough
money. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfully
expressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstances
he can only do it by throwing the week’s food away, then he is not
magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom
which is well expressed in valuing things rightly and guarding money
sensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard?
The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and
poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains,
is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and
functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman
is out working and the man isn’t; and the child is forced by law to
think his schoolmaster’s requirements more important than his mother’s?
No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club
must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If
they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill,
decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old
game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let
them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists
who will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must
“shell out,” as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any
Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens
much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death
duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the
distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now
only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save
property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly
as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must
revolutionize the nation.
*****
IV. A LAST INSTANCE
And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the
reader’s ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the
suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the
quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that
the way in which they perpetually play into each other’s hands is not
an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic
industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of
anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls
the woman’s work “freedom to live her own life.” Gudge wants steady
and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism--to workmen, not to
Gudge--Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms
against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take
arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed
gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge’s washing
to people who can’t practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and
cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally
inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy
it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a
prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall
soon gloriously outgrow.
I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious
or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common
man homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in
the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red
goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his
because he has never been in it.
*****
V. CONCLUSION
Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have
said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly
or slowly be broken up, if even the idea of property is to remain
among Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, a
cold administration by quite detached officials, which is called
Collectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is
called Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter solution the finer and
more fully human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebody
for saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turf
tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than
is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this
vista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed
to prove the case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case
against modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this
book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical
fact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still some
who do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plain
parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact.
A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern
law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that
all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course,
all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are
common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors
interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular
interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into
such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people
must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean
lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It
never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could
be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing
is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man
(that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to
a cabman’s daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet
Minister’s daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter
of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not
ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the
excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use,
for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument
would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor
people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced
(against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes)
to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of
public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there
may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the
great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has
to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after
the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the
workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting
(literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on
his head, the workingman must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be
neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly,
to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s
hair. But he does not count.
Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the
dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear.
It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants;
it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if
it should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache,
disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to
pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly
dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently
blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler
fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done
with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a
doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter’s hair may
be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never
seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the
wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least
of it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental
armies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it
is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing
institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man’s
head off when he enters it, it is built wrong.
The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to
have conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought
in all our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom
would not be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the
clean, popular customs from which they came. The insult that brought
down the hammer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medical examination.
That which Virginius loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be
praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon, “Let them eat grass,”
might now be represented as the dying cry of an idealistic vegetarian.
Those great scissors of science that would snip off the curls of the
poor little school children are ceaselessly snapping closer and closer
to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts and honors of the
poor. Soon they will be twisting necks to suit clean collars, and
hacking feet to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them that the
body is more than raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man; that all
institutions shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted the