99 99 99 99 99 ---------------------------------------- ------------------- ,transcriber's ,note3 ,inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved4 ,obvious typographical errors have been corrected4 ,for a complete list1 please see the end of this document4 ---------------------------------------- ------------------- 99 99 99 99 99 ,,eugenics ,,and ,,other ,,evils ,eugenics and ,other ,evils ,by ,g4,k4 ,chesterton ,cassell and ,company1 ,limited ,london1 ,new ,york1 ,toronto ,melbourne #aibb ,,to ,,the ,,reader ,i publish these essays at the present time for a particular reason connected with the present situation2 a reason which ,i should like briefly to emphasise and make clear4 ,though most of the conclusions1 especially towards the end1 are conceived with reference to recent events1 the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of ,eugenics were written before the war4 ,it was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour2 when eugenic babies 7not visibly very distinguishable from other babies7 sprawled all over the illustrated papers2 when the evolutionary fancy of ,nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals2 and when ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation1 of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight1 which may be found in cart-horses4 ,it may therefore appear that ,i took the opinion too controversially1 and it seems to me that ,i sometimes took it too seriously4 ,but the criticism of ,eugenics soon expanded of itself into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organisation4 ,and then the hour came when ,i felt1 not without relief1 that ,i might well fling all my notes into the fire4 ,the fire was a very big one1 and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries4 ,and1 anyhow1 the issue itself was being settled in a very different style4 ,scientific officialism and organisation in the ,state which had specialised in them1 had gone to war with the older culture of ,christendom4 ,either ,prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless1 or ,prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless4 ,as the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals1 it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organised ,state was not increasing in popularity4 ,whatever happened1 no ,englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory4 ,so ,i thought all ,i had written irrelevant1 and put it out of my mind4 ,i am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant4 ,it has gradually grown apparent1 to my astounded gaze1 that the ruling classes in ,england are still proceeding on the assumption that ,prussia is a pattern for the whole world4 ,if parts of my book are nearly nine years old1 most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal older4 ,they can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science1 the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the ,german ,empire to its recent conspicuous triumph4 ,for that reason1 three years after the war with ,prussia1 ,i collect and publish these papers4 ,g4,k4,c4 ,,contents ,,part ,i ,the ,false ,theory ,,chapter ,,page #a4 ,,what ,,is ,,eugenics8 #c #b4 ,,the ,,first ,,obstacles #ab #c4 ,,the ,,anarchy ,,from ,,above #bb #d4 ,,the ,,lunatic ,,and ,,the ,,law #ca #e4 ,,the ,,flying ,,authority #df #f4 ,,the ,,unanswered ,,challenge #fa #g4 ,,the ,,established ,,church ,,of ,,doubt #gc #h4 ,a ,,summary ,,of ,a ,,false ,,theory #hb ,,part ,,ii ,the ,real ,aim #a4 ,,the ,,impotence ,,of ,,impenitence #ia #b4 ,,true ,,history ,,of ,a ,,tramp #aja #c4 ,,true ,,history ,,of ,a ,,eugenist #aad #d4 ,,the ,,vengeance ,,of ,,the ,,flesh #abf #e4 ,,the ,,meanness ,,of ,,the ,,motive #acf #f4 ,,the ,,eclipse ,,of ,,liberty #adh #g4 ,,the ,,transformation ,,of ,,socialism #aei #h4 ,,the ,,end ,,of ,,the ,,household ,,gods #afi #i4 ,a ,,short ,,chapter #ahj ,part ,i ,,the ,,false ,,theory ,eugenics and ,other ,evils ,,chapter ,i ,,what ,,is ,,eugenics8 ,the wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt4 ,it is no good to cry out after you are hurt2 especially after you are mortally hurt4 ,people talk about the impatience of the populace2 but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late4 ,it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists4 ,it is no answer to say1 with a distant optimism1 that the scheme is only in the air4 ,a blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air4 ,there exists to-day a scheme of action1 a school of thought1 as collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we can make any outline of history4 ,it is as firm a fact as the ,oxford ,movement1 or the ,puritans of the ,long ,parliament2 or the ,jansenists2 or the ,jesuits4 ,it is a thing that can be pointed out2 it is a thing that can be discussed2 and it is a thing that can still be destroyed4 ,it is called for convenience ,eugenics2 and that it ought to be destroyed ,i propose to prove in the pages that follow4 ,i know that it means very different things to different people2 but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity4 ,i know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence2 with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity4 ,but that is only because evil is always flattered1 as the ,furies were called ,the ,gracious ,ones4 ,i know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane2 and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as ,i do4 ,but that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes2 and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin4 ,of these who are deceived ,i shall speak of course as we all do of such instruments2 judging them by the good they think they are doing1 and not by the evil which they really do4 ,but ,eugenics itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas exist2 and ,eugenics itself1 in large quantities or small1 coming quickly or coming slowly1 urged from good motives or bad1 applied to a thousand people or applied to three1 ,eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning4 ,it is not really difficult to sum up the essence of ,eugenics3 though some of the ,eugenists seem to be rather vague about it4 ,the movement consists of two parts3 a moral basis1 which is common to all1 and a scheme of social application which varies a good deal4 ,for the moral basis1 it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences4 ,if ,i were in charge of a baby 7like ,dr4 ,johnson in that tower of vision71 and if the baby was ill through having eaten the soap1 ,i might possibly send for a doctor4 ,i might be calling him away from much more serious cases1 from the bedsides of babies whose diet had been far more deadly2 but ,i should be justified4 ,i could not be expected to know enough about his other patients to be obliged 7or even entitled7 to sacrifice to them the baby for whom ,i was primarily and directly responsible4 ,now the ,eugenic moral basis is this2 that the baby for whom we are primarily and directly responsible is the babe unborn4 ,that is1 that we know 7or may come to know7 enough of certain inevitable tendencies in biology to consider the fruit of some contemplated union in that direct and clear light of conscience which we can now only fix on the other partner in that union4 ,the one duty can conceivably be as definite as or more definite than the other4 ,the baby that does not exist can be considered even before the wife who does4 ,now it is essential to grasp that this is a comparatively new note in morality4 ,of course sane people always thought the aim of marriage was the procreation of children to the glory of ,god or according to the plan of ,nature2 but whether they counted such children as ,god's reward for service or ,nature's premium on sanity1 they always left the reward to ,god or the premium to ,nature1 as a less definable thing4 ,the only person 7and this is the point7 towards whom one could have precise duties was the partner in the process4 ,directly considering the partner's claims was the nearest one could get to indirectly considering the claims of posterity4 ,if the women of the harem sang praises of the hero as the ,moslem mounted his horse1 it was because this was the due of a man2 if the ,christian knight helped his wife off her horse1 it was because this was the due of a woman4 ,definite and detailed dues of this kind they did not predicate of the babe unborn2 regarding him in that agnostic and opportunist light in which ,mr4 ,browdie regarded the hypothetical child of ,miss ,squeers4 ,thinking these sex relations healthy1 they naturally hoped they would produce healthy children2 but that was all4 ,the ,moslem woman doubtless expected ,allah to send beautiful sons to an obedient wife2 but she would not have allowed any direct vision of such sons to alter the obedience itself4 ,she would not have said1 ,i will now be a disobedient wife2 as the learned leech informs me that great prophets are often the children of disobedient wives4 ,the knight doubtless hoped that the saints would help him to strong children1 if he did all the duties of his station1 one of which might be helping his wife off her horse2 but he would not have refrained from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling off horses often resulted in the birth of a genius4 ,both ,moslem and ,christian would have thought such speculations not only impious but utterly unpractical4 ,i quite agree with them2 but that is not the point here4 ,the point here is that a new school believes ,eugenics against ,ethics4 ,and it is proved by one familiar fact3 that the heroisms of history are actually the crimes of ,eugenics4 ,the ,eugenists' books and articles are full of suggestions that non-eugenic unions should and may come to be regarded as we regard sins2 that we should really feel that marrying an invalid is a kind of cruelty to children4 ,but history is full of the praises of people who have held sacred such ties to invalids2 of cases like those of ,colonel ,hutchinson and ,sir ,william ,temple1 who remained faithful to betrothals when beauty and health had been apparently blasted4 ,and though the illnesses of ,dorothy ,osborne and ,mrs4 ,hutchinson may not fall under the ,eugenic speculations 7,i do not know71 it is obvious that they might have done so2 and certainly it would not have made any difference to men's moral opinion of the act4 ,i do not discuss here which morality ,i favour2 but ,i insist that they are opposite4 ,the ,eugenist really sets up as saints the very men whom hundreds of families have called sneaks4 ,to be consistent1 they ought to put up statues to the men who deserted their loves because of bodily misfortune2 with inscriptions celebrating the good ,eugenist who1 on his fiancee falling off a bicycle1 nobly refused to marry her2 or to the young hero who1 on hearing of an uncle with erysipelas1 magnanimously broke his word4 ,what is perfectly plain is this3 that mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred1 and the effect of it on the children so incalculable1 that they have always admired the maintenance of honour more than the maintenance of safety4 ,doubtless they thought that even the children might be none the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers2 but this was not the first thought1 the first commandment4 ,briefly1 we may say that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as severe as any ,eugenist could set1 they have almost always had the character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other1 and leaving the rest to ,god4 ,to introduce an ethic which makes that fidelity or infidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is that rarest of all things1 a revolution that has not happened before4 ,it is only right to say here1 though the matter should only be touched on1 that many ,eugenists would contradict this1 in so far as to claim that there was a consciously ,eugenic reason for the horror of those unions which begin with the celebrated denial to man of the privilege of marrying his grandmother4 ,dr4 ,s4,r4 ,steinmetz1 with that creepy simplicity of mind with which the ,eugenists chill the blood1 remarks that we do not yet know quite certainly what were the motives for the horror of that horrible thing which is the agony of ,oedipus4 ,with entirely amiable intention1 ,i ask ,dr4 ,s4,r4 ,steinmetz to speak for himself4 ,i know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as separate from other women2 nor have ,i reached them by any curious researches4 ,i found them where ,i found an analogous aversion to eating a baby for breakfast4 ,i found them in a rooted detestation in the human soul to liking a thing in one way1 when you already like it in another quite incompatible way4 ,now it is perfectly true that this aversion may have acted eugenically2 and so had a certain ultimate confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation4 ,but there really cannot be any ,eugenist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a defence of ,eugenics but a direct denial of ,eugenics4 ,if something which has been discovered at last by the lamp of learning is something which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature1 this 7so far as it goes7 is plainly not an argument for pestering people1 but an argument for letting them alone4 ,if men did not marry their grandmothers when it was1 for all they knew1 a most hygienic habit2 if we know now that they instinctly avoided scientific peril2 that1 so far as it goes1 is a point in favour of letting people marry anyone they like4 ,it is simply the statement that sexual selection1 or what ,christians call falling in love1 is a part of man which in the rough and in the long run can be trusted4 ,and that is the destruction of the whole of this science at a blow4 ,the second part of the definition1 the persuasive or coercive methods to be employed1 ,i shall deal with more fully in the second part of this book4 ,but some such summary as the following may here be useful4 ,far into the unfathomable past of our race we find the assumption that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man4 ,before slavery sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of ,christianity1 it may or may not be true that slaves were in some sense bred like cattle1 valued as a promising stock for labour4 ,if it was so it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the ,eugenists2 and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern4 ,it may be1 however1 that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the ,eugenist's care4 ,it is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have killed the first man that suggested it4 ,i mean suggested it seriously2 for ,plato was only a ,bernard ,shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in ,greek4 ,among free men1 the law1 more often the creed1 most commonly of all the custom1 have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this reason or that4 ,but law and creed and custom have never concentrated heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had been made4 ,the act of founding the family1 ,i repeat1 was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the ,state4 ,our first forgotten ancestors left this tradition behind them2 and our own latest fathers and mothers a few years ago would have thought us lunatics to be discussing it4 ,the shortest general definition of ,eugenics on its practical side is that it does1 in a more or less degree1 propose to control some families at least as if they were families of pagan slaves4 ,i shall discuss later the question of the people to whom this pressure may be applied2 and the much more puzzling question of what people will apply it4 ,but it is to be applied at the very least by somebody to somebody1 and that on certain calculations about breeding which are affirmed to be demonstrable4 ,so much for the subject itself4 ,i say that this thing exists4 ,i define it as closely as matters involving moral evidence can be defined2 ,i call it ,eugenics4 ,if after that anyone chooses to say that ,eugenics is not the ,greek for this--,i am content to answer that chivalrous is not the ,french for horsy2 and that such controversial games are more horsy than chivalrous4 ,,chapter ,,ii ,,the ,,first ,,obstacles ,now before ,i set about arguing these things1 there is a cloud of skirmishers1 of harmless and confused modern sceptics1 who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy4 ,if ,i sum up my statement thus3 ,eugenics1 as discussed1 evidently means the control of some men over the marriage and unmarriage of others2 and probably means the control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many1 ,i shall first of all receive the sort of answers that float like skim on the surface of teacups and talk4 ,i may very roughly and rapidly divide these preliminary objectors into five sects2 whom ,i will call the ,euphemists1 the ,casuists1 the ,autocrats1 the ,precedenters1 and the ,endeavourers4 ,when we have answered the immediate protestation of all these good1 shouting1 short-sighted people1 we can begin to do justice to those intelligences that are really behind the idea4 ,most ,eugenists are ,euphemists4 ,i mean merely that short words startle them1 while long words soothe them4 ,and they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other1 however obviously they mean the same thing4 ,say to them ,the persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable1 especially to the females2 say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles4 ,say to them ,murder your mother1 and they sit up quite suddenly4 ,yet the two sentences1 in cold logic1 are exactly the same4 ,say to them ,it is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals1 which has been modified on so many moral points1 may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet2 say this to them1 and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face4 ,but say to them1 in a simple1 manly1 hearty way ,let's eat a man6 and their surprise is quite surprising4 ,yet the sentences say just the same thing4 ,now1 if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant1 ,i will refer to two actual cases from the ,eugenic discussions4 ,when ,sir ,oliver ,lodge spoke of the methods of the stud-farm many ,eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion4 ,yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written ,what nonsense this education is6 ,who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound8 ,which most certainly either means nothing1 or the human stud-farm4 ,or again1 when ,i spoke of people being married forcibly by the police1 another distinguished ,eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads4 ,yet a few days after ,i saw a ,eugenist pronouncement1 to the effect that the ,state ought to extend its powers in this area4 ,the ,state can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion2 and this area can only be the area of sexual selection4 ,i mean somewhat more than an idle jest when ,i say that the policeman will generally be found in that area4 ,but ,i willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents4 ,he will be in plain clothes4 ,i do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar4 ,i do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near the church4 ,sir ,oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables and scrubbed down by grooms4 ,he meant that they would undergo a less of liberty which to men is even more infamous4 ,he meant that the only formula important to ,eugenists would be by ,smith out of ,jones4 ,such a formula is one of the shortest in the world2 and is certainly the shortest way with the ,euphemists4 ,the next sect of superficial objectors is even more irritating4 ,i have called them1 for immediate purposes1 the ,casuists4 ,suppose ,i say ,i dislike this spread of ,cannibalism in the ,west ,end restaurants4 ,somebody is sure to say ,well1 after all1 ,queen ,eleanor when she sucked blood from her husband's arm was a cannibal4 ,what is one to say to such people8 ,one can only say ,confine yourself to sucking poisoned blood from people's arms1 and ,i permit you to call yourself by the glorious title of ,cannibal4 ,in this sense people say of ,eugenics1 ,after all1 whenever we discourage a schoolboy from marrying a mad negress with a hump back1 we are really ,eugenists4 ,again one can only answer1 ,confine yourselves strictly to such schoolboys as are naturally attracted to hump-backed negresses2 and you may exult in the title of ,eugenist1 all the more proudly because that distinction will be rare4 ,but surely anyone's common-sense must tell him that if ,eugenics dealt only with such extravagant cases1 it would be called common-sense--and not ,eugenics4 ,the human race has excluded such absurdities for unknown ages2 and has never yet called it ,eugenics4 ,you may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back2 you may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire2 but if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among living men4 ,if nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved1 there would be no such thing as a ,eugenic ,congress1 and certainly no such thing as this book4 ,i had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the ,idealists2 but ,i think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show2 so ,i call them the ,autocrats4 ,they are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will work all right1 because they will be there to see4 ,where they will be1 and for how long1 they do not explain very clearly4 ,i do not mind their looking forward to numberless lives in succession2 for that is the shadow of a human or divine hope4 ,but even a theosophist does not expect to be a vast number of people at once4 ,and these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands4 ,each man promises to be about a thousand policemen4 ,if you ask them how this or that will work1 they will answer1 ,oh1 ,i would certainly insist on this2 or ,i would never go so far as that2 as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully--force men to forsake their sins4 ,of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog4 ,if you let loose a law1 it will do as a dog does4 ,it will obey its own nature1 not yours4 ,such sense as you have put into the law 7or the dog7 will be fulfilled4 ,but you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it4 ,along with such idealists should go the strange people who seem to think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates had in mind4 ,these people will say ,so far from aiming at slavery1 the ,eugenists are seeking true liberty2 liberty from disease and degeneracy1 etc4 ,or they will say ,we can assure ,mr4 ,chesterton that the ,eugenists have no intention of segregating the harmless2 justice and mercy are the very motto of---- etc4 ,to this kind of thing perhaps the shortest answer is this4 ,many of those who speak thus are agnostic or generally unsympathetic to official religion4 ,suppose one of them said ,the ,church of ,england is full of hypocrisy4 ,what would he think of me if ,i answered1 ,i assure you that hypocrisy is condemned by every form of ,christianity2 and is particularly repudiated in the ,prayer ,book8 ,suppose he said that the ,church of ,rome had been guilty of great cruelties4 ,what would he think of me if ,i answered1 ,the ,church is expressly bound to meekness and charity2 and therefore cannot be cruel8 ,this kind of people need not detain us long4 ,then there are others whom ,i may call the ,precedenters2 who flourish particularly in ,parliament4 ,they are best represented by the solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand the clamour against the ,feeble-,minded ,bill1 as it only extended the principles of the old ,lunacy ,laws4 ,to which again one can only answer ,quite so4 ,it only extends the principles of the ,lunacy ,laws to persons without a trace of lunacy4 ,this lucid politician finds an old law1 let us say1 about keeping lepers in quarantine4 ,he simply alters the word lepers to long-nosed people1 and says blandly that the principle is the same4 ,perhaps the weakest of all are those helpless persons whom ,i have called the ,endeavourers4 ,the prize specimen of them was another ,m4,p4 who defended the same ,bill as an honest attempt to deal with a great evil3 as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment2 in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it4 ,but with this fatuous notion that one can deliberately establish the ,inquisition or the ,terror1 and then faintly trust the larger hope1 ,i shall have to deal more seriously in a subsequent chapter4 ,it is enough to say here that the best thing the honest ,endeavourer could do would be to make an honest attempt to know what he is doing4 ,and not to do anything else until he has found out4 ,lastly1 there is a class of controversialists so hopeless and futile that ,i have really failed to find a name for them4 ,but whenever anyone attempts to argue rationally for or against any existent and recognisable thing1 such as the ,eugenic class of legislation1 there are always people who begin to chop hay about ,socialism and ,individualism2 and say ,you object to all ,state interference2 ,i am in favour of ,state interference4 ,you are an ,individualist2 ,i1 on the other hand1 etc4 ,to which ,i can only answer1 with heart-broken patience1 that ,i am not an ,individualist1 but a poor fallen but baptised journalist who is trying to write a book about ,eugenists1 several of whom he has met2 whereas he never met an ,individualist1 and is by no means certain he would recognise him if he did4 ,in short1 ,i do not deny1 but strongly affirm1 the right of the ,state to interfere to cure a great evil4 ,i say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil2 and ,i am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about ,socialism and ,individualism1 or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left4 ,and for the rest1 there is undoubtedly an enormous mass of sensible1 rather thoughtless people1 whose rooted sentiment it is that any deep change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant4 ,they cannot believe that men in hats and coats like themselves can be preparing a revolution2 all their ,victorian philosophy has taught them that such transformations are always slow4 ,therefore1 when ,i speak of ,eugenic legislation1 or the coming of the ,eugenic ,state1 they think of it as something like ,the ,time ,machine or ,looking ,backward3 a thing that1 good or bad1 will have to fit itself to their great-great-great-grandchild1 who may be very different and may like it2 and who in any case is rather a distant relative4 ,to all this ,i have1 to begin with1 a very short and simple answer4 ,the ,eugenic ,state has begun4 ,the first of the ,eugenic ,laws has already been adopted by the ,government of this country2 and passed with the applause of both parties through the dominant ,house of ,parliament4 ,this first ,eugenic ,law clears the ground and may be said to proclaim negative ,eugenics2 but it cannot be defended1 and nobody has attempted to defend it1 except on the ,eugenic theory4 ,i will call it the ,feeble-,minded ,bill both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate4 ,it is1 quite simply and literally1 a ,bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call mad4 ,it is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded4 ,since there is scarcely any human being to whom this term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and relatives on some occasion or other 7unless his friends and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit71 it can be clearly seen that this law1 like the early ,christian ,church 7to which1 however1 it presents points of dissimilarity71 is a net drawing in of all kinds4 ,it must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition incorporated in the ,bill4 ,indeed1 the first definition of feeble-minded in the ,bill was much looser and vaguer than the phrase feeble-minded itself4 ,it is a piece of yawning idiocy about persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable circumstances 7as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances were directly unfavourable to his doing so71 are nevertheless incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence2 which is exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their neighbours all over this planet4 ,but as an incapacity for any kind of thought is now regarded as statesmanship1 there is nothing so very novel about such slovenly drafting4 ,what is novel and what is vital is this3 that the defence of this crazy ,coercion ,act is a ,eugenic defence4 ,it is not only openly said1 it is eagerly urged1 that the aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children4 ,every tramp who is sulky1 every labourer who is shy1 every rustic who is eccentric1 can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs4 ,that is the situation2 and that is the point4 ,england has forgotten the ,feudal ,state2 it is in the last anarchy of the ,industrial ,state2 there is much in ,mr4 ,belloc's theory that it is approaching the ,servile ,state2 it cannot at present get at the ,distributive ,state2 it has almost certainly missed the ,socialist ,state4 ,but we are already under the ,eugenist ,state2 and nothing remains to us but rebellion4 ,,chapter ,,iii ,,the ,,anarchy ,,from ,,above ,a silent anarchy is eating out our society4 ,i must pause upon the expression2 because the true nature of anarchy is mostly misapprehended4 ,it is not in the least necessary that anarchy should be violent2 nor is it necessary that it should come from below4 ,a government may grow anarchic as much as a people4 ,the more sentimental sort of ,tory uses the word anarchy as a mere term of abuse for rebellion2 but he misses a most important intellectual distinction4 ,rebellion may be wrong and disastrous2 but even when rebellion is wrong1 it is never anarchy4 ,when it is not self-defence1 it is usurpation4 ,it aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule4 ,and while it cannot be anarchic in essence 7because it has an aim71 it certainly cannot be anarchic in method2 for men must be organised when they fight2 and the discipline in a rebel army has to be as good as the discipline in the royal army4 ,this deep principle of distinction must be clearly kept in mind4 ,take for the sake of symbolism those two great spiritual stories which1 whether we count them myths or mysteries1 have so long been the two hinges of all ,european morals4 ,the ,christian who is inclined to sympathise generally with constituted authority will think of rebellion under the image of ,satan1 the rebel against ,god4 ,but ,satan1 though a traitor1 was not an anarchist4 ,he claimed the crown of the cosmos2 and had he prevailed1 would have expected his rebel angels to give up rebelling4 ,on the other hand1 the ,christian whose sympathies are more generally with just self-defence among the oppressed will think rather of ,christ ,himself defying the ,high ,priests and scourging the rich traders4 ,but whether or no ,christ was 7as some say7 a ,socialist1 ,he most certainly was not an ,anarchist4 ,christ1 like ,satan1 claimed the throne4 ,he set up a new authority against an old authority2 but ,he set it up with positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme4 ,in this light all mediaeval people--indeed1 all people until a little while ago--would have judged questions involving revolt4 ,john ,ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government1 not because it was a government4 ,richard ,,ii4 would have blamed ,bolingbroke not as a disturber of the peace1 but as a usurper4 ,anarchy1 then1 in the useful sense of the word1 is a thing utterly distinct from any rebellion1 right or wrong4 ,it is not necessarily angry2 it is not1 in its first stages1 at least1 even necessarily painful4 ,and1 as ,i said before1 it is often entirely silent4 ,anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop yourself4 ,it is the loss of that self-control which can return to the normal4 ,it is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar1 extravagance1 experiment1 peril4 ,it is anarchy when people cannot end these things4 ,it is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on ,new ,year's ,eve4 ,it is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards4 ,it was not anarchy in the ,roman villa when1 during the ,saturnalia1 the slaves turned masters or the masters slaves4 ,it was 7from the slave-owners' point of view7 anarchy if1 after the ,saturnalia1 the slaves continued to behave in a ,saturnalian manner2 but it is historically evident that they did not4 ,it is not anarchy to have a picnic2 but it is anarchy to lose all memory of mealtimes4 ,it would1 ,i think1 be anarchy if 7as is the disgusting suggestion of some7 we all took what we liked off the sideboard4 ,that is the way swine would eat if swine had sideboards2 they have no immovable feasts2 they are uncommonly progressive1 are swine4 ,it is this inability to return within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the really dangerous disorder4 ,the modern world is like ,niagara4 ,it is magnificent1 but it is not strong4 ,it is as weak as water--like ,niagara4 ,the objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or dangerous or even destructive2 it is that it cannot stop4 ,now it is plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a society as easily as the society so ruled4 ,and in modern ,england it is the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it--who are truly possessed by devils4 ,the phrase1 in its sound old psychological sense1 is not too strong4 ,the ,state has suddenly and quietly gone mad4 ,it is talking nonsense2 and it can't stop4 ,now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have1 and must have1 the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all night on ,new ,year's ,eve4 ,the ,state1 like the householder1 is sane if it can treat such exceptions as exceptions4 ,such desperate remedies may not even be right2 but such remedies are endurable as long as they are admittedly desperate4 ,such cases1 of course1 are the communism of food in a besieged city2 the official disavowal of an arrested spy2 the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law2 the cutting of communication in a plague2 or that deepest degradation of the commonwealth1 the use of national soldiers not against foreign soldiers1 but against their own brethren in revolt4 ,of these exceptions some are right and some wrong2 but all are right in so far as they are taken as exceptions4 ,the modern world is insane1 not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal4 ,we see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment2 often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people propose to reform them by a little more of it4 ,we see it in panic legislation like that after the ,white ,slave scare1 when the torture of flogging was revived for all sorts of ill defined and vague and variegated types of men4 ,our fathers were never so mad1 even when they were torturers4 ,they stretched the man out on the rack4 ,they did not stretch the rack out1 as we are doing4 ,when men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere--because their minds were fixed on witchcraft4 ,but they did not see things to burn everywhere1 because their minds were unfixed4 ,while tying some very unpopular witch to the stake1 with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence1 they did not say to each other1 ,a little burning is what my ,aunt ,susan wants1 to cure her of back-biting1 or ,some of these faggots would do your ,cousin ,james good1 and teach him to play with poor girls' affections4 ,now the name of all this is ,anarchy4 ,it not only does not know what it wants1 but it does not even know what it hates4 ,it multiplies excessively in the more ,american sort of ,english newspapers4 ,when this new sort of ,new ,englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches fire4 ,these people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages4 ,they cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is monstrous4 ,wherever they make a stride they make a rut4 ,they cannot stop their own thoughts1 though their thoughts are pouring into the pit4 ,a final instance1 which can be sketched much more briefly1 can be found in this general fact3 that the definition of almost every crime has become more and more indefinite1 and spreads like a flattening and thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes4 ,cruelty to children1 one would have thought1 was a thing about as unmistakable1 unusual and appalling as parricide4 ,in its application it has come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household4 ,the only distinction is1 of course1 that these negligences are punished in the poor1 who generally can't help them1 and not in the rich1 who generally can4 ,but that is not the point ,i am arguing just now4 ,the point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with ,herod on the bloody night of ,innocents has come precious near being attributable to ,mary and ,joseph when they lost their child in the ,temple4 ,in the light of a fairly recent case 7the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in7 no one1 ,i think1 will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration4 ,now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment1 attached in the simplest tribes to parricide1 could now be used against any son who had done any act that could colourably be supposed to have worried his father1 and so affected his health4 ,few of us would be safe4 ,another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of libel4 ,libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger against the man who bore false witness against his neighbour than cruelty cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that hated their own flesh4 ,a libel case has become one of the sports of the less athletic rich--a variation on baccarat1 a game of chance4 ,a music-hall actress got damages for a song that was called vulgar1 which is as if ,i could fine or imprison my neighbour for calling my handwriting rococo4 ,a politician got huge damages because he was said to have spoken to children about ,tariff ,reform2 as if that seductive topic would corrupt their virtue1 like an indecent story4 ,sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his business2 in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer slanders the grocer opposite4 ,all this1 ,i say1 is ,anarchy2 for it is clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction1 or sense of proportion1 by which they can draw the line between calling a woman a popular singer and calling her a bad lot2 or between charging a man with leading infants to ,protection and leading them to sin and shame4 ,but the vital point to which to return is this4 ,that it is not necessarily1 nor even specially1 an anarchy in the populace4 ,it is an anarchy in the organ of government4 ,it is the magistrates--voices of the governing class--who cannot distinguish between cruelty and carelessness4 ,it is the judges 7and their very submissive special juries7 who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander4 ,and it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in the first ,eugenic ,law1 the ,feeble-,minded ,bill--thus showing that they can see no difference between a mad and a sane man4 ,that1 to begin with1 is the historic atmosphere in which this thing was born4 ,it is a peculiar atmosphere1 and luckily not likely to last4 ,real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing bears to an hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing4 ,but ,i have described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in which such a thing as the ,eugenist legislation could be proposed among men4 ,all other ages would have called it to some kind of logical account1 however academic or narrow4 ,the lowest sophist in the ,greek schools would remember enough of ,socrates to force the ,eugenist to tell him 7at least7 whether ,midias was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable4 ,the meanest ,thomist of the mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man4 ,the most owlish ,calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the ,eugenist to reconcile such ,bible texts as derided fools with the other ,bible texts that praised them4 ,the dullest shopkeeper in ,paris in #agij would have asked what were the ,rights of ,man1 if they did not include the rights of the lover1 the husband1 and the father4 ,it is only in our own ,london ,particular 7as ,mr4 ,guppy said of the fog7 that small figures can loom so large in the vapour1 and even mingle with quite different figures1 and have the appearance of a mob4 ,but1 above all1 ,i have dwelt on the telescopic quality in these twilight avenues1 because unless the reader realises how elastic and unlimited they are1 he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat4 ,one of those wise old fairy tales1 that come from nowhere and flourish everywhere1 tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a coffee-mill1 which would grind anything he wanted when he said one word and stop when he said another4 ,after performing marvels 7which ,i wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding7 the mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officers' mess on board ship2 for salt is the type everywhere of small luxury and exaggeration1 and sailors' tales should be taken with a grain of it4 ,the man remembered the word that started the salt mill1 and then1 touching the word that stopped it1 suddenly remembered that he forgot4 ,the tall ship sank1 laden and sparkling to the topmasts with salt like ,arctic snows2 but the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom1 where all the men lay drowned4 ,and that 7so says this fairy tale7 is why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste4 ,for the fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don't--that one should not let loose either the supernatural or the natural4 ,,chapter ,,iv ,,the ,,lunatic ,,and ,,the ,,law ,the modern evil1 we have said1 greatly turns on this3 that people do not see that the exception proves the rule4 ,thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer2 but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man4 ,if the hangman1 having got his hand in1 proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste and fancy1 he would 7intellectually7 unhang the first man1 though the first man might not think so4 ,or thus again1 if you say an insane man is irresponsible1 you imply that a sane man is responsible4 ,he is responsible for the insane man4 ,and the attempt of the ,eugenists and other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and flattest folly in philosophy4 ,the ,eugenist has to treat everybody1 including himself1 as an exception to a rule that isn't there4 ,the ,eugenists1 as a first move1 have extended the frontiers of the lunatic asylum3 let us take this as our definite starting point1 and ask ourselves what lunacy is1 and what is its fundamental relation to human society4 ,now that raw juvenile scepticism that clogs all thought with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the minority1 the sane only the majority4 ,there is a neat exactitude about such people's nonsense2 they seem to miss the point by magic4 ,the mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body2 and that is what their madness means4 ,the sane are not a majority2 they are mankind4 ,and mankind 7as its name would seem to imply7 is a kind1 not a degree4 ,in so far as the lunatic differs1 he differs from all minorities and majorities in kind4 ,the madman who thinks he is a knife cannot go into partnership with the other who thinks he is a fork4 ,there is no trysting place outside reason2 there is no inn on those wild roads that are beyond the world4 ,the madman is not he that defies the world4 ,the saint1 the criminal1 the martyr1 the cynic1 the nihilist may all defy the world quite sanely4 ,and even if such fanatics would destroy the world1 the world owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law4 ,but the madman is not the man who defies the world2 he is the man who denies it4 ,suppose we are all standing round a field and looking at a tree in the middle of it4 ,it is perfectly true that we all see it 7as the decadents say7 in infinitely different aspects3 that is not the point2 the point is that we all say it is a tree4 ,suppose1 if you will1 that we are all poets1 which seems improbable2 so that each of us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree4 ,suppose one says it looks like a green cloud and another like a green fountain1 and a third like a green dragon and the fourth like a green cheese4 ,the fact remains3 that they all say it looks like these things4 ,it is a tree4 ,nor are any of the poets in the least mad because of any opinions they may form1 however frenzied1 about the functions or future of the tree4 ,a conservative poet may wish to clip the tree2 a revolutionary poet may wish to burn it4 ,an optimist poet may want to make it a ,christmas tree and hang candles on it4 ,a pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it4 ,none of these are mad1 because they are all talking about the same thing4 ,but there is another man who is talking horribly about something else4 ,there is a monstrous exception to mankind4 ,why he is so we know not2 a new theory says it is heredity2 an older theory says it is devils4 ,but in any case1 the spirit of it is the spirit that denies1 the spirit that really denies realities4 ,this is the man who looks at the tree and does not say it looks like a lion1 but says that it is a lamp-post4 ,i do not mean that all mad delusions are as concrete as this1 though some are more concrete4 ,believing your own body is glass is a more daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the top of a pole4 ,but all true delusions have in them this unalterable assertion--that what is not is4 ,the difference between us and the maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look1 but about what they self-evidently are4 ,the lunatic does not say that he ought to be ,king2 ,perkin ,warbeck might say that4 ,he says he is ,king4 ,the lunatic does not say he is as wise as ,shakespeare2 ,bernard ,shaw might say that4 ,the lunatic says he is ,shakespeare4 ,the lunatic does not say he is divine in the same sense as ,christ2 ,mr4 ,r4,j4 ,campbell would say that4 ,the lunatic says he is ,christ4 ,in all cases the difference is a difference about what is there2 not a difference touching what should be done about it4 ,for this reason1 and for this alone1 the lunatic is outside public law4 ,this is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal4 ,the criminal admits the facts1 and therefore permits us to appeal to the facts4 ,we can so arrange the facts around him that he may really understand that agreement is in his own interests4 ,we can say to him1 ,do not steal apples from this tree1 or we will hang you on that tree4 ,but if the man really thinks one tree is a lamp-post and the other tree a ,trafalgar ,square fountain1 we simply cannot treat with him at all4 ,it is obviously useless to say1 ,do not steal apples from this lamp-post1 or ,i will hang you on that fountain4 ,if a man denies the facts1 there is no answer but to lock him up4 ,he cannot speak our language3 not that varying verbal language which often misses fire even with us1 but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet1 and by which alone we can signal to each other4 ,that unique man of genius1 ,george ,macdonald1 described in one of his weird stories two systems of space co-incident2 so that where ,i knew there was a piano standing in a drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden4 ,something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with the madman4 ,he cannot have a vote1 because he is the citizen of another country4 ,he is a foreigner4 ,nay1 he is an invader and an enemy2 for the city he lives in has been super-imposed on ours4 ,now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case4 ,first1 that we can only condemn him to a general doom1 because we only know his general nature4 ,all criminals1 who do particular things for particular reasons 7things and reasons which1 however criminal1 are always comprehensible71 have been more and more tried for such separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since ,europe began to become a civilisation--and until the rare and recent re-incursions of barbarism in such things as the ,indeterminate ,sentence4 ,of that ,i shall speak later2 it is enough for this argument to point out the plain facts4 ,it is the plain fact that every savage1 every sultan1 every outlawed baron1 every brigand-chief has always used this instrument of the ,indeterminate ,sentence1 which has been recently offered us as something highly scientific and humane4 ,all these people1 in short1 being barbarians1 have always kept their captives captive until they 7the barbarians7 chose to think the captives were in a fit frame of mind to come out4 ,it is also the plain fact that all that has been called civilisation or progress1 justice or liberty1 for nearly three thousand years1 has had the general direction of treating even the captive as a free man1 in so far as some clear case of some defined crime had to be shown against him4 ,all law has meant allowing the criminal1 within some limits or other1 to argue with the law3 as ,job was allowed1 or rather challenged1 to argue with ,god4 ,but the criminal is1 among civilised men1 tried by one law for one crime for a perfectly simple reason3 that the motive of the crime1 like the meaning of the law1 is conceivable to the common intelligence4 ,a man is punished specially as a burglar1 and not generally as a bad man1 because a man may be a burglar and in many other respects not be a bad man4 ,the act of burglary is punishable because it is intelligible4 ,but when acts are unintelligible1 we can only refer them to a general untrustworthiness1 and guard against them by a general restraint4 ,if a man breaks into a house to get a piece of bread1 we can appeal to his reason in various ways4 ,we can hang him for housebreaking2 or again 7as has occurred to some daring thinkers7 we can give him a piece of bread4 ,but if he breaks in1 let us say1 to steal the parings of other people's finger nails1 then we are in a difficulty3 we cannot imagine what he is going to do with them1 and therefore cannot easily imagine what we are going to do with him4 ,if a villain comes in1 in cloak and mask1 and puts a little arsenic in the soup1 we can collar him and say to him distinctly1 ,you are guilty of ,murder2 and ,i will now consult the code of tribal law1 under which we live1 to see if this practice is not forbidden4 ,but if a man in the same cloak and mask is found at midnight putting a little soda-water in the soup1 what can we say8 ,our charge necessarily becomes a more general one4 ,we can only observe1 with a moderation almost amounting to weakness1 ,you seem to be the sort of person who will do this sort of thing4 ,and then we can lock him up4 ,the principle of the indeterminate sentence is the creation of the indeterminate mind4 ,it does apply to the incomprehensible creature1 the lunatic4 ,and it applies to nobody else4 ,the second thing to be noted is this3 that it is only by the unanimity of sane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate4 ,if he says a tree is a lamp-post he is mad2 but only because all other men say it is a tree4 ,if some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it1 and others thought it was a lamp-post wreathed with branches and vegetation1 then it would be a matter of opinion and degree2 and he would not be mad1 but merely extreme4 ,certainly he would not be mad if nobody but a botanist could see it was a tree4 ,certainly his enemies might be madder than he1 if nobody but a lamplighter could see it was not a lamp-post4 ,and similarly a man is not imbecile if only a ,eugenist thinks so4 ,the question then raised would not be his sanity1 but the sanity of one botanist or one lamplighter or one ,eugenist4 ,that which can condemn the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally clever1 which is obviously a matter in dispute4 ,that which can condemn the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish4 ,it is when he begins to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do1 that we have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule4 ,it is only because we none of us profess to be anything more than man that we have authority to treat him as something less4 ,now the first principle behind ,eugenics becomes plain enough4 ,it is the proposal that somebody or something should criticise men with the same superiority with which men criticise madmen4 ,it might exercise this right with great moderation2 but ,i am not here talking about the exercise1 but about the right4 ,its claim certainly is to bring all human life under the ,lunacy ,laws4 ,now this is the first weakness in the case of the ,eugenists3 that they cannot define who is to control whom2 they cannot say by what authority they do these things4 ,they cannot see the exception is different from the rule--even when it is misrule1 even when it is an unruly rule4 ,the sound sense in the old ,lunacy ,law was this3 that you cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared to deny that he is a man4 ,men1 and only men1 can be the judges of whether he is a man4 ,but any private club of prigs can be judges of whether he ought to be a citizen4 ,when once we step down from that tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland where one man is not so widely different from another4 ,outside the exception1 what we find is the average4 ,and the practical1 legal shape of the quarrel is this3 that unless the normal men have the right to expel the abnormal1 what particular sort of abnormal men have the right to expel the normal men8 ,if sanity is not good enough1 what is there that is saner than sanity8 ,without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception1 the general idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless4 ,for this reason3 that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity1 the judgment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also4 ,let it judge not that it be not judged4 ,eugenists1 strange to say1 have fathers and mothers like other people2 and our opinion about their fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about ours4 ,none of the parents were lunatics1 and the rest is mere likes and dislikes4 ,suppose ,dr4 ,saleeby had gone up to ,byron and said1 ,my lord1 ,i perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions3 such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a hot-tempered woman4 ,the poet might logically reply 7with characteristic lucidity and impropriety71 ,sir1 ,i perceive you have a confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love affairs4 ,such are the hereditary delusions bred by a ,syrian doctor marrying a ,quaker lady from ,york4 ,suppose ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson had said to ,shelley1 ,from what ,i see of your temperament1 you are running great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and eccentric like ,godwin4 ,shelley would be employing the strict rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers1 if he answered1 ,from what ,i observe of your mind1 you are rushing on destruction in marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and dilettante like ,samuel ,rogers4 ,it is only opinion for opinion4 ,nobody can pretend that either ,mary ,godwin or ,samuel ,rogers was mad2 and the general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do marry for love or liking4 ,there is no reason to suppose that ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of a bride4 ,an objection may be anticipated here1 but it is very easily answered4 ,it may be said that we do1 in fact1 call in medical specialists to settle whether a man is mad2 and that these specialists go by technical and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of men4 ,it is obvious that this is true2 it is equally obvious that it does not affect our argument4 ,when we ask the doctor whether our grandfather is going mad1 we still mean mad by our own common human definition4 ,we mean1 is he going to be a certain sort of person whom all men recognise when once he exists4 ,that certain specialists can detect the approach of him1 before he exists1 does not alter the fact that it is of the practical and popular madman that we are talking1 and of him alone4 ,the doctor merely sees a certain fact potentially in the future1 while we1 with less information1 can only see it in the present2 but his fact is our fact and everybody's fact1 or we should not bother about it at all4 ,here is no question of the doctor bringing an entirely new sort of person under coercion1 as in the ,feeble-,minded ,bill4 ,the doctor can say1 ,tobacco is death to you1 because the dislike of death can be taken for granted1 being a highly democratic institution2 and it is the same with the dislike of the indubitable exception called madness4 ,the doctor can say1 ,jones has that twitch in the nerves1 and he may burn down the house4 ,but it is not the medical detail we fear1 but the moral upshot4 ,we should say1 ,let him twitch1 as long as he doesn't burn down the house4 ,the doctor may say1 ,he has that look in the eyes1 and he may take the hatchet and brain you all4 ,but we do not object to the look in the eyes as such2 we object to consequences which1 once come1 we should all call insane if there were no doctors in the world4 ,we should say1 ,let him look how he likes2 as long as he does not look for the hatchet4 ,now1 that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical purpose1 of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human calamities1 nobody but a fool would deny4 ,but that does not bring us one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a calamity2 or to call things calamities which common sense does not call calamities4 ,we call in the doctor to save us from death2 and1 death being admittedly an evil1 he has the right to administer the queerest and most recondite pill which he may think is a cure for all such menaces of death4 ,he has not the right to administer death1 as the cure for all human ills4 ,and as he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of happiness1 so he has no moral authority to enforce a new conception of sanity4 ,he may know ,i am going mad2 for madness is an isolated thing like leprosy2 and ,i know nothing about leprosy4 ,but if he merely thinks my mind is weak1 ,i may happen to think the same of his4 ,i often do4 ,in short1 unless pilots are to be permitted to ram ships on to the rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbour2 unless judges are to be allowed to let murderers loose1 and explain afterwards that the murder had done good on the whole2 unless soldiers are to be allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be found in the valley of humiliation2 unless cashiers are to rob a bank in order to give it an advertisement2 or dentists to torture people to give them a contrast to their comforts2 unless we are prepared to let loose all these private fancies against the public and accepted meaning of life or safety or prosperity or pleasure--then it is as plain as ,punch's nose that no scientific man must be allowed to meddle with the public definition of madness4 ,we call him in to tell us where it is or when it is4 ,we could not do so1 if we had not ourselves settled what it is4 ,as ,i wish to confine myself in this chapter to the primary point of the plain existence of sanity and insanity1 ,i will not be led along any of the attractive paths that open here4 ,i shall endeavour to deal with them in the next chapter4 ,here ,i confine myself to a sort of summary4 ,suppose a man's throat has been cut1 quite swiftly and suddenly1 with a table knife1 at a small table where we sit4 ,the whole of civil law rests on the supposition that we are witnesses2 that we saw it2 and if we do not know about it1 who does8 ,now suppose all the witnesses fall into a quarrel about degrees of eyesight4 ,suppose one says he had brought his reading-glasses instead of his usual glasses2 and therefore did not see the man fall across the table and cover it with blood4 ,suppose another says he could not be certain it was blood1 because a slight colour-blindness was hereditary in his family4 ,suppose a third says he cannot swear to the uplifted knife1 because his oculist tells him he is astigmatic1 and vertical lines do not affect him as do horizontal lines4 ,suppose another says that dots have often danced before his eyes in very fantastic combinations1 many of which were very like one gentleman cutting another gentleman's throat at dinner4 ,all these things refer to real experiences4 ,there is such a thing as myopia2 there is such a thing as colour-blindness2 there is such a thing as astigmatism2 there is such a thing as shifting shapes swimming before the eyes4 ,but what should we think of a whole dinner party that could give nothing except these highly scientific explanations when found in company with a corpse8 ,i imagine there are only two things we could think3 either that they were all drunk1 or they were all murderers4 ,and yet there is an exception4 ,if there were one man at table who was admittedly blind1 should we not give him the benefit of the doubt8 ,should we not honestly feel that he was the exception that proved the rule8 ,the very fact that he could not have seen would remind us that the other men must have seen4 ,the very fact that he had no eyes must remind us of eyes4 ,a man can be blind2 a man can be dead2 a man can be mad4 ,but the comparison is necessarily weak1 after all4 ,for it is the essence of madness to be unlike anything else in the world3 which is perhaps why so many men wiser than we have traced it to another4 ,lastly1 the literal maniac is different from all other persons in dispute in this vital respect3 that he is the only person whom we can1 with a final lucidity1 declare that we do not want4 ,he is almost always miserable himself1 and he always makes others miserable4 ,but this is not so with the mere invalid4 ,the ,eugenists would probably answer all my examples by taking the case of marrying into a family with consumption 7or some such disease which they are fairly sure is hereditary7 and asking whether such cases at least are not clear cases for a ,eugenic intervention4 ,permit me to point out to them that they once more make a confusion of thought4 ,the sickness or soundness of a consumptive may be a clear and calculable matter4 ,the happiness or unhappiness of a consumptive is quite another matter1 and is not calculable at all4 ,what is the good of telling people that if they marry for love1 they may be punished by being the parents of ,keats or the parents of ,stevenson8 ,keats died young2 but he had more pleasure in a minute than a ,eugenist gets in a month4 ,stevenson had lung-trouble2 and it may1 for all ,i know1 have been perceptible to the ,eugenic eye even a generation before4 ,but who would perform that illegal operation3 the stopping of ,stevenson8 ,intercepting a letter bursting with good news1 confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes1 pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea1 all this is a faint approximation for the ,eugenic inaction of the ancestors of ,stevenson4 ,this1 however1 is not the essential point2 with ,stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get1 but of the pleasure he got4 ,if he had died without writing a line1 he would have had more red-hot joy than is given to most men4 ,shall ,i say of him1 to whom ,i owe so much1 let the day perish wherein he was born8 ,shall ,i pray that the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of the year1 because it shut not up the doors of his mother's womb8 ,i respectfully decline2 like ,job1 ,i will put my hand upon my mouth4 ,,chapter ,v ,,the ,,flying ,,authority ,it happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together on a doorstep2 and the atheist said1 ,it is raining4 ,to which the man replied1 ,what is raining83 which question was the beginning of a violent quarrel and a lasting friendship4 ,i will not touch upon any heads of the dispute1 which doubtless included ,jupiter ,pluvius1 the ,neuter ,gender1 ,pantheism1 ,noah's ,ark1 ,mackintoshes1 and the ,passive ,mood2 but ,i will record the one point upon which the two persons emerged in some agreement4 ,it was that there is such a thing as an atheistic literary style2 that materialism may appear in the mere diction of a man1 though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything quite remote from theology4 ,the mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things2 that things have no souls4 ,thus they will not speak of waging war1 which means willing it2 they speak of the outbreak of war1 as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them4 ,thus those ,socialists that are atheist will not call their international sympathy1 sympathy2 they will call it solidarity1 as if the poor men of ,france and ,germany were physically stuck together like dates in a grocer's shop4 ,the same ,marxian ,socialists are accused of cursing the ,capitalists inordinately2 but the truth is that they let the ,capitalists off much too easily4 ,for instead of saying that employers pay less wages1 which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility1 they insist on talking about the rise and fall of wages2 as if a vast silver sea of sixpences and shillings was always going up and down automatically like the real sea at ,margate4 ,thus they will not speak of reform1 but of development2 and they spoil their one honest and virile phrase1 the class war1 by talking of it as no one in his wits can talk of a war1 predicting its finish and final result as one calculates the coming of ,christmas ,day or the taxes4 ,thus1 lastly 7as we shall see touching our special subject-matter here7 the atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust1 which are things alive1 and calls marriage or concubinage the relations of the sexes2 as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other1 like a table and a chair4 ,now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase1 il pleut1 clings round the phrase1 il faut4 ,in ,english it is generally represented by the passive mood in grammar1 and the ,eugenists and their like deal especially in it2 they are as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments4 ,their sentences always enter tail first1 and have no subject1 like animals without heads4 ,it is never the doctor should cut off this leg or the policeman should collar that man4 ,it is always ,such limbs should be amputated1 or ,such men should be under restraint4 ,hamlet said1 ,i should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's offal4 ,the ,eugenist would say1 ,the region kites should1 if possible1 be fattened2 and the offal of this slave is available for the dietetic experiment4 ,lady ,macbeth said1 ,give me the daggers2 ,i'll let his bowels out4 ,the ,eugenist would say1 ,in such cases the bowels should1 etc4 ,do not blame me for the repulsiveness of the comparisons4 ,i have searched ,english literature for the most decent parallels to ,eugenist language4 ,the formless god that broods over the ,east is called ,om4 ,the formless god who has begun to brood over the ,west is called ,on4 ,but here we must make a distinction4 ,the impersonal word on is ,french1 and the ,french have a right to use it1 because they are a democracy4 ,and when a ,frenchman says one he does not mean himself1 but the normal citizen4 ,he does not mean merely one1 but one and all4 ,on n'a que sa parole does not mean ,noblesse oblige1 or ,i am the ,duke of ,billingsgate and must keep my word4 ,it means3 ,one has a sense of honour as one has a backbone3 every man1 rich or poor1 should feel honourable2 and this1 whether possible or no1 is the purest ambition of the republic4 ,but when the ,eugenists say1 ,conditions must be altered or ,ancestry should be investigated1 or what not1 it seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it1 whatever else they may mean4 ,they do not mean that any man not evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and re-arrangements1 as the ,french democratic system trusts such a man with a vote or a farm or the control of a family4 ,that would mean that ,jones and ,brown1 being both ordinary men1 would set about arranging each other's marriages4 ,and this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate1 and it might occur even to the ,eugenic mind that if ,jones and ,brown are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages1 it is just possible that they might be capable of arranging their own4 ,this dilemma1 which applies in so simple a case1 applies equally to any wide and sweeping system of ,eugenist voting2 for though it is true that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge in his own case1 this particular question of the choice of a wife is so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case1 that it is surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing out of the sphere of voting1 as they would any proposal of police interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names4 ,i should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular instance of ,eugenics to be voted on by the ,french people4 ,democracy dismissed1 it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models4 ,modern scientists will not say that ,george ,,iii41 in his lucid intervals1 should settle who is mad2 or that the aristocracy that introduced gout shall supervise diet4 ,i hold it clear1 therefore1 if anything is clear about the business1 that the ,eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men should settle each other's marriages between them2 the question remains1 therefore1 whom they do instinctively trust when they say that this or that ought to be done4 ,what is this flying and evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it8 ,who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the ,eugenist's verb8 ,in a large number of cases ,i think we can simply say that the individual ,eugenist means himself1 and nobody else4 ,indeed one ,eugenist1 ,mr4 ,a4,h4 ,huth1 actually had a sense of humour1 and admitted this4 ,he thinks a great deal of good could be done with a surgical knife1 if we would only turn him loose with one4 ,and this may be true4 ,a great deal of good could be done with a loaded revolver1 in the hands of a judicious student of human nature4 ,but it is imperative that the ,eugenist should perceive that on that principle we can never get beyond a perfect balance of different sympathies and antipathies4 ,i mean that ,i should differ from ,dr4 ,saleeby or ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson not only in a vast majority of individual cases1 but in a vast majority of cases in which they would be bound to admit that such a difference was natural and reasonable4 ,the chief victim of these famous doctors would be a yet more famous doctor3 that eminent though unpopular practitioner1 ,dr4 ,fell4 ,to show that such rational and serious differences do exist1 ,i will take one instance from that ,bill which proposed to protect families and the public generally from the burden of feeble-minded persons4 ,now1 even if ,i could share the ,eugenic contempt for human rights1 even if ,i could start gaily on the ,eugenic campaign1 ,i should not begin by removing feeble-minded persons4 ,i have known as many families in as many classes as most men2 and ,i cannot remember meeting any very monstrous human suffering arising out of the presence of such insufficient and negative types4 ,there seem to be comparatively few of them2 and those few by no means the worst burdens upon domestic happiness4 ,i do not hear of them often2 ,i do not hear of them doing much more harm than good2 and in the few cases ,i know well they are not only regarded with human affection1 but can be put to certain limited forms of human use4 ,even if ,i were a ,eugenist1 then ,i should not personally elect to waste my time locking up the feeble-minded4 ,the people ,i should lock up would be the strong-minded4 ,i have known hardly any cases of mere mental weakness making a family a failure2 ,i have known eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated force of character making a family a hell4 ,if the strong-minded could be segregated it would quite certainly be better for their friends and families4 ,and if there is really anything in heredity1 it would be better for posterity too4 ,for the kind of egoist ,i mean is a madman in a much more plausible sense than the mere harmless deficient2 and to hand on the horrors of his anarchic and insatiable temperament is a much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of childishness4 ,i would not arrest such tyrants1 because ,i think that even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny turning the state into a madhouse4 ,i would not segregate them1 because ,i respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be tried by his peers4 ,but since free-will is believed by ,eugenists no more than by ,calvinists1 since front-doors are respected by ,eugenists no more than by house-breakers1 and since the ,habeas ,corpus is about as sacred to ,eugenists as it would be to ,king ,john1 why do not they bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac from each of them8 ,why do not the promoters of the ,feeble-,minded ,bill call at the many grand houses in town or country where such nightmares notoriously are8 ,why do they not knock at the door and take the bad squire away8 ,why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac prize-fighter8 ,i do not know2 and there is only one reason ,i can think of1 which must remain a matter of speculation4 ,when ,i was at school1 the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies4 ,that1 however it may be1 does not concern my argument4 ,i mention the case of the strong-minded variety of the monstrous merely to give one out of the hundred cases of the instant divergence of individual opinions the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit to propagate4 ,if ,dr4 ,saleeby and ,i were setting out on a segregating trip together1 we should separate at the very door2 and if he had a thousand doctors with him1 they would all go different ways4 ,everyone who has known as many kind and capable doctors as ,i have1 knows that the ablest and sanest of them have a tendency to possess some little hobby or half-discovery of their own1 as that oranges are bad for children1 or that trees are dangerous in gardens1 or that many more people ought to wear spectacles4 ,it is asking too much of human nature to expect them not to cherish such scraps of originality in a hard1 dull1 and often heroic trade4 ,but the inevitable result of it1 as exercised by the individual ,saleebys1 would be that each man would have his favourite kind of idiot4 ,each doctor would be mad on his own madman4 ,one would have his eye on devotional curates2 another would wander about collecting obstreperous majors2 a third would be the terror of animal-loving spinsters1 who would flee with all their cats and dogs before him4 ,short of sheer literal anarchy1 therefore1 it seems plain that the ,eugenist must find some authority other than his own implied personality4 ,he must1 once and for all1 learn the lesson which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race--the fact that he is only himself4 ,we now pass from mere individual men who obviously cannot be trusted1 even if they are individual medical men1 with such despotism over their neighbours2 and we come to consider whether the ,eugenists have at all clearly traced any more imaginable public authority1 any apparatus of great experts or great examinations to which such risks of tyranny could be trusted4 ,they are not very precise about this either2 indeed1 the great difficulty ,i have throughout in considering what are the ,eugenist's proposals is that they do not seem to know themselves4 ,some philosophic attitude which ,i cannot myself connect with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans4 ,the ,eugenic optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and confused confidence1 so common in private theatricals1 that it will be all right on the night4 ,they have all the ancient despotism1 but none of the ancient dogmatism4 ,if they are ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the ,inquisition1 at least we cannot accuse them of offending us with any of that close and complicated thought1 that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the ,middle ,ages2 they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head4 ,nevertheless1 there is one large1 though vague1 idea of the ,eugenists1 which is an idea1 and which we reach when we reach this problem of a more general supervision4 ,it was best presented perhaps by the distinguished doctor who wrote the article on these matters in that composite book which ,mr4 ,wells edited1 and called ,the ,great ,state4 ,he said the doctor should no longer be a mere plasterer of paltry maladies1 but should be1 in his own words1 the health adviser of the community4 ,the same can be expressed with even more point and simplicity in the proverb that prevention is better than cure4 ,commenting on this1 ,i said that it amounted to treating all people who are well as if they were ill4 ,this the writer admitted to be true1 only adding that everyone is ill4 ,to which ,i rejoin that if everyone is ill the health adviser is ill too1 and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness4 ,this is the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine4 ,prevention is not better than cure4 ,cutting off a man's head is not better than curing his headache2 it is not even better than failing to cure it4 ,and it is the same if a man is in revolt1 even a morbid revolt4 ,taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than leaving the heart in him1 even if you leave it a broken heart4 ,prevention is not only not better than cure2 prevention is even worse than disease4 ,prevention means being an invalid for life1 with the extra exasperation of being quite well4 ,i will ask ,god1 but certainly not man1 to prevent me in all my doings4 ,but the decisive and discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about the health adviser of society4 ,i am sure that those who speak thus have something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other two propositions we have considered4 ,they do not mean that all citizens should decide1 which would mean merely the present vague and dubious balance4 ,they do not mean that all medical men should decide1 which would mean a much more unbalanced balance4 ,they mean that a few men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy nation1 as ,napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army4 ,it is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's marriages4 ,it is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and segregate anyone he likes4 ,but it is not anarchy to say that a few great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens1 as nurses do with a family of children4 ,it is not anarchy1 it is tyranny2 but tyranny is a workable thing4 ,when we ask by what process such men could be certainly chosen1 we are back again on the old dilemma of despotism1 which means a man1 or democracy which means men1 or aristocracy which means favouritism4 ,but as a vision the thing is plausible and even rational4 ,it is rational1 and it is wrong4 ,it is wrong1 quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health cannot be chosen4 ,it is wrong because an expert on health cannot exist4 ,an expert on disease can exist1 for the very reason we have already considered in the case of madness1 because experts can only arise out of exceptional things4 ,a parallel with any of the other learned professions will make the point plain4 ,if ,i am prosecuted for trespass1 ,i will ask my solicitor which of the local lanes ,i am forbidden to walk in4 ,but if my solicitor1 having gained my case1 were so elated that he insisted on settling what lanes ,i should walk in2 if he asked me to let him map out all my country walks1 because he was the perambulatory adviser of the community--then that solicitor would solicit in vain4 ,if he will insist on walking behind me through woodland ways1 pointing out with his walking-stick likely avenues and attractive short-cuts1 ,i shall turn on him with passion1 saying3 ,sir1 ,i pay you to know one particular puzzle in ,latin and ,norman-,french1 which they call the law of ,england2 and you do know the law of ,england4 ,i have never had any earthly reason to suppose that you know ,england4 ,if you did1 you would leave a man alone when he was looking at it4 ,as are the limits of the lawyer's special knowledge about walking1 so are the limits of the doctor's4 ,if ,i fall over the stump of a tree and break my leg1 as is likely enough1 ,i shall say to the lawyer1 ,please go and fetch the doctor4 ,i shall do it because the doctor really has a larger knowledge of a narrower area4 ,there are only a certain number of ways in which a leg can be broken2 ,i know none of them1 and he knows all of them4 ,there is such a thing as being a specialist in broken legs4 ,there is no such thing as being a specialist in legs4 ,when unbroken1 legs are a matter of taste4 ,if the doctor has really mended my leg1 he may merit a colossal equestrian statue on the top of an eternal tower of brass4 ,but if the doctor has really mended my leg he has no more rights over it4 ,he must not come and teach me how to walk2 because he and ,i learnt that in the same school1 the nursery4 ,and there is no more abstract likelihood of the doctor walking more elegantly than ,i do than there is of the barber or the bishop or the burglar walking more elegantly than ,i do4 ,there cannot be a general specialist2 the specialist can have no kind of authority1 unless he has avowedly limited his range4 ,there cannot be such a thing as the health adviser of the community1 because there cannot be such a thing as one who specialises in the universe4 ,thus when ,dr4 ,saleeby says that a young man about to be married should be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book1 the expression is neat2 but it does not convey the real respects in which the two things agree1 and in which they differ4 ,to begin with1 of course1 there is a great deal too much of the bank-book for the sanity of our commonwealth2 and it is highly probable that the health-book1 as conducted in modern conditions1 would rapidly become as timid1 as snobbish1 and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become4 ,in the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health-books as they do when we fight with bank-books4 ,but that is a more general matter2 the real point is in the difference between the two4 ,the difference is in this vital fact3 that a monied man generally thinks about money1 whereas a healthy man does not think about health4 ,if the strong young man cannot produce his health-book1 it is for the perfectly simple reason that he has not got one4 ,he can mention some extraordinary malady he has2 but every man of honour is expected to do that now1 whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge4 ,health is simply ,nature1 and no naturalist ought to have the impudence to understand it4 ,health1 one may say1 is ,god2 and no agnostic has any right to claim ,his acquaintance4 ,for ,god must mean1 among other things1 that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things1 by which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure2 and any scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate sanity1 ,i will call the lowest of religious fanatics4 ,i will allow him to understand the madman1 for the madman is an exception4 ,but if he says he understands the sane man1 then he says he has the secret of the ,creator4 ,for whenever you and ,i feel fully sane1 we are quite incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious simplicity4 ,we can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which1 out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices1 ,he has hanged the world upon nothing4 ,we conclude1 therefore1 that unless ,eugenic activity be restricted to monstrous things like mania1 there is no constituted or constitutable authority that can really over-rule men in a matter in which they are so largely on a level4 ,in the matter of fundamental human rights1 nothing can be above ,man1 except ,god4 ,an institution claiming to come from ,god might have such authority2 but this is the last claim the ,eugenists are likely to make4 ,one caste or one profession seeking to rule men in such matters is like a man's right eye claiming to rule him1 or his left leg to run away with him4 ,it is madness4 ,we now pass on to consider whether there is really anything in the way of ,eugenics to be done1 with such cheerfulness as we may possess after discovering that there is nobody to do it4 ,,chapter ,,vi ,,the ,,unanswered ,,challenge ,dr4 ,saleeby did me the honour of referring to me in one of his addresses on this subject1 and said that even ,i cannot produce any but a feeble-minded child from a feeble-minded ancestry4 ,to which ,i reply1 first of all1 that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child4 ,the whole point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and outside opinion4 ,there is such a thing as mania1 which has always been segregated2 there is such a thing as idiotcy1 which has always been segregated2 but feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you might segregate anybody4 ,it is essential that this fundamental fallacy in the use of statistics should be got somehow into the modern mind4 ,such people must be made to see the point1 which is surely plain enough1 that it is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase4 ,if ,i say1 ,there are five fools in ,acton1 it is surely quite clear that1 though no mathematician can make five the same as four or six1 that will not stop you or anyone else from finding a few more fools in ,acton4 ,now weak-mindedness1 like folly1 is a term divided from madness in this vital manner--that in one sense it applies to all men1 in another to most men1 in another to very many men1 and so on4 ,it is as if ,dr4 ,saleeby were to say1 ,vanity1 ,i find1 is undoubtedly hereditary4 ,here is ,mrs4 ,jones1 who was very sensitive about her sonnets being criticised1 and ,i found her little daughter in a new frock looking in the glass4 ,the experiment is conclusive1 the demonstration is complete2 there in the first generation is the artistic temperament--that is vanity2 and there in the second generation is dress--and that is vanity4 ,we should answer1 ,my friend1 all is vanity1 vanity and vexation of spirit--especially when one has to listen to logic of your favourite kind4 ,obviously all human beings must value themselves2 and obviously there is in all such valuation an element of weakness1 since it is not the valuation of eternal justice4 ,what is the use of your finding by experiment in some people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them8 ,here it will be as well to pause a moment and avert one possible misunderstanding4 ,i do not mean that you and ,i cannot and do not practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or intermediate type1 for which the word feeble-minded might be a very convenient word1 and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable fact of experience4 ,in the same way we might speak1 and do speak1 of such and such a person being mad with vanity without wanting two keepers to walk in and take the person off4 ,but ,i ask the reader to remember always that ,i am talking of words1 not as they are used in talk or novels1 but as they will be used1 and have been used1 in warrants and certificates1 and ,acts of ,parliament4 ,the distinction between the two is perfectly clear and practical4 ,the difference is that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark2 it is all to his glory that the cap should fit1 that the type should be recognised2 that he should1 in a literary sense1 hang the right man4 ,but it is by no means always to the interests of governments or officials to hang the right man4 ,the fact that they often do stretch words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any fixed laws or free institutions at all4 ,my point is not that ,i have never met anyone whom ,i should call feeble-minded1 rather than mad or imbecile4 ,my point is that if ,i want to dispossess a nephew1 oust a rival1 silence a blackmailer1 or get rid of an importunate widow1 there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded too4 ,and the vaguer the charge is the less they will be able to disprove it4 ,one does not1 as ,i have said1 need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation1 any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning4 ,i admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness2 ,i believe there is such a thing as witchcraft4 ,believing that there are spirits1 ,i am bound in mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits2 believing that there are evil spirits1 ,i am bound in mere reason to suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them4 ,all that is mere rationalism2 the superstition 7that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror7 is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies there can be devils4 ,the superstition is in the person who admits there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists4 ,yet ,i should certainly resist any effort to search for witches1 for a perfectly simple reason1 which is the key of the whole of this controversy4 ,the reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches1 and quite another to believe in witch-smellers4 ,i have more respect for the old witch-finders than for the ,eugenists1 who go about persecuting the fool of the family2 because the witch-finders1 according to their own conviction1 ran a risk4 ,witches were not the feeble-minded1 but the strong-minded--the evil mesmerists1 the rulers of the elements4 ,many a raid on a witch1 right or wrong1 seemed to the villagers who did it a righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny1 a papacy of sin4 ,yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old4 ,it ended by being a war upon the weak4 ,it ended by being what ,eugenics begins by being4 ,when ,i said above that ,i believed in witches1 but not in witch-smellers1 ,i stated my full position about that conception of heredity1 that half-formed philosophy of fears and omens2 of curses and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood1 which1 as preached to humanity to-day1 is often more inhuman than witchcraft itself4 ,i do not deny that this dark element exists2 ,i only affirm that it is dark2 or1 in other words1 that its most strenuous students are evidently in the dark about it4 ,i would no more trust ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt4 ,i am perfectly ready to give my reasons for thinking this2 and ,i believe any well-balanced person1 if he reflects on them1 will think as ,i do4 ,there are two senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject4 ,i know the subject of arithmetic1 for instance2 that is1 ,i am not good at it1 but ,i know what it is4 ,i am sufficiently familiar with its use to see the absurdity of anyone who says1 ,so vulgar a fraction cannot be mentioned before ladies1 or ,this unit is ,unionist1 ,i hope4 ,considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician1 ,i may say that ,i know next to nothing about my subject3 but ,i know my subject4 ,i know it in the street4 ,there is the other kind of man1 like ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson1 who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject2 who undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and inheritance4 ,but it is not1 by any means1 the same thing to have searched the forests and to have recognised the frontiers4 ,indeed1 the two things generally belong to two very different types of mind4 ,i gravely doubt whether the ,astronomer-,royal would write the best essay on the relations between astronomy and astrology4 ,i doubt whether the ,president of the ,geographical ,society could give the best definition and history of the words geography and geology4 ,now the students of heredity1 especially1 understand all of their subject except their subject4 ,they were1 ,i suppose1 bred and born in that brier-patch1 and have really explored it without coming to the end of it4 ,that is1 they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying4 ,now ,i do not propose to rely merely on myself to tell them what they are studying4 ,i propose1 as will be seen in a moment1 to call the testimony of a great man who has himself studied it4 ,but to begin with1 the domain of heredity 7for those who see its frontiers7 is a sort of triangle1 enclosed on its three sides by three facts4 ,the first is that heredity undoubtedly exists1 or there would be no such thing as a family likeness1 and every marriage might suddenly produce a small negro4 ,the second is that even simple heredity can never be simple2 its complexity must be literally unfathomable1 for in that field fight unthinkable millions4 ,but yet again it never is simple heredity3 for the instant anyone is1 he experiences4 ,the third is that these innumerable ancient influences1 these instant inundations of experiences1 come together according to a combination that is unlike anything else on this earth4 ,it is a combination that does combine4 ,it cannot be sorted out again1 even on the ,day of ,judgment4 ,two totally different people have become in the sense most sacred1 frightful1 and unanswerable1 one flesh4 ,if a golden-haired ,scandinavian girl has married a very swarthy ,jew1 the ,scandinavian side of the family may say till they are blue in the face that the baby has his mother's nose or his mother's eyes4 ,they can never be certain the black-haired ,bedouin is not present in every feature1 in every inch4 ,in the person of the baby he may have gently pulled his wife's nose4 ,in the person of the baby he may have partly blacked his wife's eyes4 ,those are the three first facts of heredity4 ,that it exists2 that it is subtle and made of a million elements2 that it is simple1 and cannot be unmade into those elements4 ,to summarise3 you know there is wine in the soup4 ,you do not know how many wines there are in the soup1 because you do not know how many wines there are in the world4 ,and you never will know1 because all chemists1 all cooks1 and all common-sense people tell you that the soup is of such a sort that it can never be chemically analysed4 ,that is a perfectly fair parallel to the hereditary element in the human soul4 ,there are many ways in which one can feel that there is wine in the soup1 as in suddenly tasting a wine specially favoured2 that corresponds to seeing suddenly flash on a young face the image of some ancestor you have known4 ,but even then the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting one familiar wine among many unfamiliar ones--or seeing one known ancestor among a million unknown ancestors4 ,another way is to get drunk on the soup1 which corresponds to the case of those who say they are driven to sin and death by hereditary doom4 ,but even then the drunkard cannot be certain it was the soup1 any more than the traditional drunkard who is certain it was the salmon4 ,those are the facts about heredity which anyone can see4 ,the upshot of them is not only that a miss is as good as a mile1 but a miss is as good as a win4 ,if the child has his parents' nose 7or noses7 that may be heredity4 ,but if he has not1 that may be heredity too4 ,and as we need not take heredity lightly because two generations differ--so we need not take heredity a scrap more seriously because two generations are similar4 ,the thing is there1 in what cases we know not1 in what proportion we know not1 and we cannot know4 ,now it is just here that the decent difference of function between ,dr4 ,saleeby's trade and mine comes in4 ,it is his business to study human health and sickness as a whole1 in a spirit of more or less enlightened guesswork2 and it is perfectly natural that he should allow for heredity here1 there1 and everywhere1 as a man climbing a mountain or sailing a boat will allow for weather without even explaining it to himself4 ,an utterly different attitude is incumbent on any conscientious man writing about what laws should be enforced or about how commonwealths should be governed4 ,and when we consider how plain a fact is murder1 and yet how hesitant and even hazy we all grow about the guilt of a murderer1 when we consider how simple an act is stealing1 and yet how hard it is to convict and punish those rich commercial pirates who steal the most1 when we consider how cruel and clumsy the law can be even about things as old and plain as the ,ten ,commandments--,i simply cannot conceive any responsible person proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless ignorance of heredity4 ,but though ,i have to consider this dull matter in its due logical order1 it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled1 and settled in a most masterly way1 by somebody who has infinitely more right to speak on it than ,i have4 ,our press seems to have a perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit2 and affixing the wrong terms of eulogy and even the wrong terms of abuse4 ,and just as people will talk of ,bernard ,shaw as a naughty winking ,pierrot1 when he is the last great ,puritan and really believes in respectability2 just as 7si parva licet etc47 they will talk of my own paradoxes1 when ,i pass my life in preaching that the truisms are true2 so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed firmly in their heads that ,mr4 ,h4,g4 ,wells is a harsh and horrible ,eugenist in great goblin spectacles1 who wants to put us all into metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools4 ,as a matter of fact1 of course1 ,mr4 ,wells1 so far from being too definite1 is generally not definite enough4 ,he is an absolute wizard in the appreciation of atmospheres and the opening of vistas2 but his answers are more agnostic than his questions4 ,his books will do everything except shut4 ,and so far from being the sort of man who would stop a man from propagating1 he cannot even stop a full stop4 ,he is not ,eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from breeding a line of little dots4 ,but this is not the clear-cut blunder of which ,i spoke4 ,the real blunder is this4 ,mr4 ,wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of medals for all kinds of reasons4 ,but if ,i were restricted1 on grounds of public economy1 to giving ,mr4 ,wells only one medal ob cives servatos1 ,i would give him a medal as the ,eugenist who destroyed ,eugenics4 ,for everyone spoke of him1 rightly or wrongly1 as a ,eugenist2 and he certainly had1 as ,i have not1 the training and type of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and not in a generally moral sense4 ,the result was that in that fine book1 ,mankind in the ,making1 where he inevitably came to grips with the problem1 he threw down to the ,eugenists an intellectual challenge which seems to me unanswerable1 but which1 at any rate1 is unanswered4 ,i do not mean that no remote ,eugenist wrote upon the subject2 for it is impossible to read all writings1 especially ,eugenist writings4 ,i do mean that the leading ,eugenists write as if this challenge had never been offered4 ,the gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground4 ,having given honour for the idea where it is due1 ,i may be permitted to summarise it myself for the sake of brevity4 ,mr4 ,wells' point was this4 ,that we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health1 because health is not a quality4 ,it is not a thing like darkness in the hair or length in the limbs4 ,it is a relation1 a balance4 ,you have a tall1 strong man2 but his very strength depends on his not being too tall for his strength4 ,you catch a healthy1 full-blooded fellow2 but his very health depends on his being not too full of blood4 ,a heart that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant2 a nervous system that would kill a man with a trace of a certain illness will sustain him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness4 ,nay1 the same nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other comparatively healthy thing4 ,seeing1 therefore1 that there are apparently healthy people of all types1 it is obvious that if you mate two of them1 you may even then produce a discord out of two inconsistent harmonies4 ,it is obvious that you can no more be certain of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play two fine airs at once on the same piano4 ,you can be even less certain of it in the more delicate case of beauty1 of which the ,eugenists talk a great deal4 ,marry two handsome people whose noses tend to the aquiline1 and their baby 7for all you know7 may be a goblin with a nose like an enormous parrot's4 ,indeed1 ,i actually know a case of this kind4 ,the ,eugenist has to settle1 not the result of fixing one steady thing to a second steady thing2 but what will happen when one toppling and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another4 ,this is the interesting conclusion4 ,it is on this degree of knowledge that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind4 ,when we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he loves1 when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom he does not love in the least1 even then we have no logical evidence that the result may not be as horrid and dangerous as if he had behaved like a man of honour4 ,,chapter ,,vii ,,the ,,established ,,church ,,of ,,doubt ,let us now finally consider what the honest ,eugenists do mean1 since it has become increasingly evident that they cannot mean what they say4 ,unfortunately1 the obstacles to any explanation of this are such as to insist on a circuitous approach4 ,the tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be1 in the only true sense1 behind the times4 ,it is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late4 ,give an ordinary man a day to write an article1 and he will remember the things he has really heard latest2 and may even1 in the last glory of the sunset1 begin to think of what he thinks himself4 ,give him an hour to write it1 and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic1 and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities4 ,give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs1 or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics4 ,the quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts4 ,the result is the newspaper of our time1 which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier1 and which1 every day1 is less worth delivering at all4 ,the poor panting critic falls farther and farther behind the motor-car of modern fact4 ,fifty years ago he was barely fifteen years behind the times4 ,fifteen years ago he was not more than fifty years behind the times4 ,just now he is rather more than a hundred years behind the times3 and the proof of it is that the things he says1 though manifest nonsense about our society to-day1 really were true about our society some hundred and thirty years ago4 ,the best instance of his belated state is his perpetual assertion that the supernatural is less and less believed4 ,it is a perfectly true and realistic account--of the eighteenth century4 ,it is the worst possible account of this age of psychics and spirit-healers and fakirs and fashionable fortune-tellers4 ,in fact1 ,i generally reply in eighteenth century language to this eighteenth century illusion4 ,if somebody says to me1 ,the creeds are crumbling1 ,i reply1 ,and the ,king of ,prussia1 who is himself a ,freethinker1 is certainly capturing ,silesia from the ,catholic ,empress4 ,if somebody says1 ,miracles must be reconsidered in the light of rational experience1 ,i answer affably1 ,but ,i hope that our enlightened leader1 ,hebert1 will not insist on guillotining that poor ,french queen4 ,if somebody says1 ,we must watch for the rise of some new religion which can commend itself to reason1 ,i reply1 ,but how much more necessary is it to watch for the rise of some military adventurer who may destroy the ,republic3 and1 to my mind1 that young ,major ,bonaparte has rather a restless air4 ,it is only in such language from the ,age of ,reason that we can answer such things4 ,the age we live in is something more than an age of superstition--it is an age of innumerable superstitions4 ,but it is only with one example of this that ,i am concerned here4 ,i mean the error that still sends men marching about disestablishing churches and talking of the tyranny of compulsory church teaching or compulsory church tithes4 ,i do not wish for an irrelevant misunderstanding here2 ,i would myself certainly disestablish any church that had a numerical minority1 like the ,irish or the ,welsh2 and ,i think it would do a great deal of good to genuine churches that have a partly conventional majority1 like the ,english1 or even the ,russian4 ,but ,i should only do this if ,i had nothing else to do2 and just now there is very much else to do4 ,for religion1 orthodox or unorthodox1 is not just now relying on the weapon of ,state establishment at all4 ,the ,pope practically made no attempt to preserve the ,concordat2 but seemed rather relieved at the independence his ,church gained by the destruction of it3 and it is common talk among the ,french clericalists that the ,church has gained by the change4 ,in ,russia the one real charge brought by religious people 7especially ,roman ,catholics7 against the ,orthodox ,church is not its orthodoxy or heterodoxy1 but its abject dependence on the ,state4 ,in ,england we can almost measure an ,anglican's fervour for his ,church by his comparative coolness about its establishment--that is1 its control by a ,parliament of ,scotch ,presbyterians like ,balfour1 or ,welsh ,congregationalists like ,lloyd ,george4 ,in ,scotland the powerful combination of the two great sects outside the establishment have left it in a position in which it feels no disposition to boast of being called by mere lawyers the ,church of ,scotland4 ,i am not here arguing that ,churches should not depend on the ,state2 nor that they do not depend upon much worse things4 ,it may be reasonably maintained that the strength of ,romanism1 though it be not in any national police1 is in a moral police more rigid and vigilant4 ,it may be reasonably maintained that the strength of ,anglicanism1 though it be not in establishment1 is in aristocracy1 and its shadow1 which is called snobbishness4 ,all ,i assert here is that the ,churches are not now leaning heavily on their political establishment2 they are not using heavily the secular arm4 ,almost everywhere their legal tithes have been modified1 their legal boards of control have been mixed4 ,they may still employ tyranny1 and worse tyranny3 ,i am not considering that4 ,they are not specially using that special tyranny which consists in using the government4 ,the thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is ,science4 ,the thing that really does use the secular arm is ,science4 ,and the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools1 the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment1 the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes1 and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen--that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with ,evolution and has ended in ,eugenics4 ,materialism is really our established ,church2 for the ,government will really help it to persecute its heretics4 ,vaccination1 in its hundred years of experiment1 has been disputed almost as much as baptism in its approximate two thousand4 ,but it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination2 and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism4 ,i am not frightened of the word persecution when it is attributed to the churches2 nor is it in the least as a term of reproach that ,i attribute it to the men of science4 ,it is as a term of legal fact4 ,if it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory1 incapable of final proof--then our priests are not now persecuting1 but our doctors are4 ,the imposition of such dogmas constitutes a ,state ,church--in an older and stronger sense than any that can be applied to any supernatural ,church to-day4 ,there are still places where the religious minority is forbidden to assemble or to teach in this way or that2 and yet more where it is excluded from this or that public post4 ,but ,i cannot now recall any place where it is compelled by the criminal law to go through the rite of the official religion4 ,even the ,young ,turks did not insist on all ,macedonians being circumcised4 ,now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact4 ,when1 in the past1 opinions so arguable have been enforced by ,state violence1 it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them for fixed and flaming certainties4 ,if truths could not be evaded by their enemies1 neither could they be altered even by their friends4 ,but what are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to enforce8 ,why1 they are that very mass of bottomless questions and bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last chapters--questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and mysterious2 answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and new4 ,the devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith2 and therefore he persecuted for the faith4 ,but the doctor of science actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis2 and yet he persecutes for the hypothesis4 ,the ,inquisitor violently enforced his creed1 because it was unchangeable4 ,the savant enforces it violently because he may change it the next day4 ,now this is a new sort of persecution2 and one may be permitted to ask if it is an improvement on the old4 ,the difference1 so far as one can see at first1 seems rather favourable to the old4 ,if we are to be at the merciless mercy of man1 most of us would rather be racked for a creed that existed intensely in somebody's head1 rather than vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head1 and possibly never would4 ,a man would rather be tortured with a thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason4 ,yet that is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement4 ,if ,i gave in to the ,inquisitors1 ,i should at least know what creed to profess4 ,but even if ,i yelled out a credo when the ,eugenists had me on the rack1 ,i should not know what creed to yell4 ,i might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed quite a week ago4 ,now let no light-minded person say that ,i am here taking extravagant parallels2 for the parallel is not only perfect1 but plain4 ,for this reason3 that the difference between torture and vivisection is not in any way affected by the fierceness or mildness of either4 ,whether they gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred1 they were1 by hypothesis1 dealing with a truth which they knew to be there4 ,whether they vivisect painfully or painlessly1 they are trying to find out whether the truth is there or not4 ,the old ,inquisitors tortured to put their own opinions into somebody4 ,but the new ,inquisitors torture to get their own opinions out of him4 ,they do not know what their own opinions are1 until the victim of vivisection tells them4 ,the division of thought is a complete chasm for anyone who cares about thinking4 ,the old persecutor was trying to teach the citizen1 with fire and sword4 ,the new persecutor is trying to learn from the citizen1 with scalpel and germ-injector4 ,the master was meeker than the pupil will be4 ,i could prove by many practical instances that even my illustrations are not exaggerated1 by many placid proposals ,i have heard for the vivisection of criminals1 or by the filthy incident of ,dr4 ,neisser4 ,but ,i prefer here to stick to a strictly logical line of distinction1 and insist that whereas in all previous persecutions the violence was used to end our indecision1 the whole point here is that the violence is used to end the indecision of the persecutors4 ,this is what the honest ,eugenists really mean1 so far as they mean anything4 ,they mean that the public is to be given up1 not as a heathen land for conversion1 but simply as a pabulum for experiment4 ,that is the real1 rude1 barbaric sense behind this ,eugenic legislation4 ,the ,eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any logical inquiry about what they want4 ,they do not know what they want1 except that they want your soul and body and mine in order to find out4 ,they are quite seriously1 as they themselves might say1 the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal4 ,all other established ,churches have been based on somebody having found the truth4 ,this is the first ,church that was ever based on not having found it4 ,there is in them a perfectly sincere hope and enthusiasm2 but it is not for us1 but for what they might learn from us1 if they could rule us as they can rabbits4 ,they cannot tell us anything about heredity1 because they do not know anything about it4 ,but they do quite honestly believe that they would know something about it1 when they had married and mismarried us for a few hundred years4 ,they cannot tell us who is fit to wield such authority1 for they know that nobody is2 but they do quite honestly believe that when that authority has been abused for a very long time1 somebody somehow will be evolved who is fit for the job4 ,i am no ,puritan1 and no one who knows my opinions will consider it a mere criminal charge if ,i say that they are simply gambling4 ,the reckless gambler has no money in his pockets2 he has only the ideas in his head4 ,these gamblers have no ideas in their heads2 they have only the money in their pockets4 ,but they think that if they could use the money to buy a big society to experiment on1 something like an idea might come to them at last4 ,that is ,eugenics4 ,i confine myself here to remarking that ,i do not like it4 ,i may be very stingy1 but ,i am willing to pay the scientist for what he does know2 ,i draw the line at paying him for everything he doesn't know4 ,i may be very cowardly1 but ,i am willing to be hurt for what ,i think or what he thinks--,i am not willing to be hurt1 or even inconvenienced1 for whatever he might happen to think after he had hurt me4 ,the ordinary citizen may easily be more magnanimous than ,i1 and take the whole thing on trust2 in which case his career may be happier in the next world1 but 7,i think7 sadder in this4 ,at least1 ,i wish to point out to him that he will not be giving his glorious body as soldiers give it1 to the glory of a fixed flag1 or martyrs to the glory of a deathless ,god4 ,he will be1 in the strict sense of the ,latin phrase1 giving his vile body for an experiment--an experiment of which even the experimentalist knows neither the significance nor the end4 ,,chapter ,,viii ,a ,,summary ,,of ,a ,,false ,,theory ,i have up to this point treated the ,eugenists1 ,i hope1 as seriously as they treat themselves4 ,i have attempted an analysis of their theory as if it were an utterly abstract and disinterested theory2 and so considered1 there seems to be very little left of it4 ,but before ,i go on1 in the second part of this book1 to talk of the ugly things that really are left1 ,i wish to recapitulate the essential points in their essential order1 lest any personal irrelevance or over-emphasis 7to which ,i know myself to be prone7 should have confused the course of what ,i believe to be a perfectly fair and consistent argument4 ,to make it yet clearer1 ,i will summarise the thing under chapters1 and in quite short paragraphs4 ,in the first chapter ,i attempted to define the essential point in which ,eugenics can claim1 and does claim1 to be a new morality4 ,that point is that it is possible to consider the baby in considering the bride4 ,i do not adopt the ideal irresponsibility of the man who said1 ,what has posterity done for us8 ,but ,i do say1 to start with1 ,what can we do for posterity1 except deal fairly with our contemporaries8 ,unless a man love his wife whom he has seen1 how shall he love his child whom he has not seen8 ,in the second chapter ,i point out that this division in the conscience cannot be met by mere mental confusions1 which would make any woman refusing any man a ,eugenist4 ,there will always be something in the world which tends to keep outrageous unions exceptional2 that influence is not ,eugenics1 but laughter4 ,in the third chapter ,i seek to describe the quite extraordinary atmosphere in which such things have become possible4 ,i call that atmosphere anarchy2 but insist that it is an anarchy in the centres where there should be authority4 ,government has become ungovernable2 that is1 it cannot leave off governing4 ,law has become lawless2 that is1 it cannot see where laws should stop4 ,the chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government4 ,in this atmosphere it is natural enough that medical experts1 being authorities1 should go mad1 and attempt so crude and random and immature a dream as this of petting and patting 7and rather spoiling7 the babe unborn4 ,in chapter four ,i point out how this impatience has burst through the narrow channel of the ,lunacy ,laws1 and has obliterated them by extending them4 ,the whole point of the madman is that he is the exception that proves the rule4 ,but ,eugenics seeks to treat the whole rule as a series of exceptions--to make all men mad4 ,and on that ground there is hope for nobody2 for all opinions have an author1 and all authors have a heredity4 ,the mentality of the ,eugenist makes him believe in ,eugenics as much as the mentality of the reckless lover makes him violate ,eugenics2 and both mentalities are1 on the materialist hypothesis1 equally the irresponsible product of more or less unknown physical causes4 ,the real security of man against any logical ,eugenics is like the false security of ,macbeth4 ,the only ,eugenist that could rationally attack him must be a man of no woman born4 ,in the chapter following this1 which is called ,the ,flying ,authority1 ,i try in vain to locate and fix any authority that could rationally rule men in so rooted and universal a matter2 little would be gained by ordinary men doing it to each other2 and if ordinary practitioners did it they would very soon show1 by a thousand whims and quarrels1 that they were ordinary men4 ,i then discussed the enlightened despotism of a few general professors of hygiene1 and found it unworkable1 for an essential reason3 that while we can always get men intelligent enough to know more than the rest of us about this or that accident or pain or pest1 we cannot count on the appearance of great cosmic philosophers2 and only such men can be even supposed to know more than we do about normal conduct and common sanity4 ,every sort of man1 in short1 would shirk such a responsibility1 except the worst sort of man1 who would accept it4 ,i pass on1 in the next chapter1 to consider whether we know enough about heredity to act decisively1 even if we were certain who ought to act4 ,here ,i refer the ,eugenists to the reply of ,mr4 ,wells1 which they have never dealt with to my knowledge or satisfaction--the important and primary objection that health is not a quality but a proportion of qualities2 so that even health married to health might produce the exaggeration called disease4 ,it should be noted here1 of course1 that an individual biologist may quite honestly believe that he has found a fixed principle with the help of ,weissmann or ,mendel4 ,but we are not discussing whether he knows enough to be justified in thinking 7as is somewhat the habit of the anthropoid ,homo7 that he is right4 ,we are discussing whether we know enough1 as responsible citizens1 to put such powers into the hands of men who may be deceived or who may be deceivers4 ,i conclude that we do not4 ,in the last chapter of the first half of the book ,i give what is1 ,i believe1 the real secret of this confusion1 the secret of what the ,eugenists really want4 ,they want to be allowed to find out what they want4 ,not content with the endowment of research1 they desire the establishment of research2 that is the making of it a thing official and compulsory1 like education or state insurance2 but still it is only research and not discovery4 ,in short1 they want a new kind of ,state ,church1 which shall be an ,established ,church of ,doubt--instead of ,faith4 ,they have no ,science of ,eugenics at all1 but they do really mean that if we will give ourselves up to be vivisected they may very probably have one some day4 ,i point out1 in more dignified diction1 that this is a bit thick4 ,and now1 in the second half of this book1 we will proceed to the consideration of things that really exist4 ,it is1 ,i deeply regret to say1 necessary to return to realities1 as they are in your daily life and mine4 ,our happy holiday in the land of nonsense is over2 we shall see no more its beautiful city1 with the almost ,biblical name of ,bosh1 nor the forests full of mares' nests1 nor the fields of tares that are ripened only by moonshine4 ,we shall meet no longer those delicious monsters that might have talked in the same wild club with the ,snark and the ,jabberwock or the ,pobble or the ,dong with the ,luminous ,nose2 the father who can't make head or tail of the mother1 but thoroughly understands the child she will some day bear2 the lawyer who has to run after his own laws almost as fast as the criminals run away from them2 the two mad doctors who might discuss for a million years which of them has the right to lock up the other2 the grammarian who clings convulsively to the ,passive ,mood1 and says it is the duty of something to get itself done without any human assistance2 the man who would marry giants to giants until the back breaks1 as children pile brick upon brick for the pleasure of seeing the staggering tower tumble down2 and1 above all1 the superb man of science who wants you to pay him and crown him because he has so far found out nothing4 ,these fairy-tale comrades must leave us4 ,they exist1 but they have no influence in what is really going on4 ,they are honest dupes and tools1 as you and ,i were very nearly being honest dupes and tools4 ,if we come to think coolly of the world we live in1 if we consider how very practical is the practical politician1 at least where cash is concerned1 how very dull and earthy are most of the men who own the millions and manage the newspaper trusts1 how very cautious and averse from idealist upheaval are those that control this capitalist society--when we consider all this1 it is frankly incredible that ,eugenics should be a front bench fashionable topic and almost an ,act of ,parliament1 if it were in practice only the unfinished fantasy which it is1 as ,i have shown1 in pure reason4 ,even if it were a just revolution1 it would be much too revolutionary a revolution for modern statesmen1 if there were not something else behind4 ,even if it were a true ideal1 it would be much too idealistic an ideal for our practical men1 if there were not something real as well4 ,well1 there is something real as well4 ,there is no reason in ,eugenics1 but there is plenty of motive4 ,its supporters are highly vague about its theory1 but they will be painfully practical about its practice4 ,and while ,i reiterate that many of its more eloquent agents are probably quite innocent instruments1 there are some1 even among ,eugenists1 who by this time know what they are doing4 ,to them we shall not say1 ,what is ,eugenics8 or ,where on earth are you going8 but only ,woe unto you1 hypocrites1 that devour widows' houses and for a pretence use long words4 ,part ,,ii ,,the ,,real ,,aim ,,chapter ,i ,,the ,,impotence ,,of ,,impenitence ,the root formula of an epoch is always an unwritten law1 just as the law that is the first of all laws1 that which protects life from the murderer1 is written nowhere in the ,statute ,book4 ,nevertheless there is all the difference between having and not having a notion of this basic assumption in an epoch4 ,for instance1 the ,middle ,ages will simply puzzle us with their charities and cruelties1 their asceticism and bright colours1 unless we catch their general eagerness for building and planning1 dividing this from that by walls and fences--the spirit that made architecture their most successful art4 ,thus even a slave seemed sacred2 the divinity that did hedge a king1 did also1 in one sense1 hedge a serf1 for he could not be driven out from behind his hedges4 ,thus even liberty became a positive thing like a privilege2 and even1 when most men had it1 it was not opened like the freedom of a wilderness1 but bestowed1 like the freedom of a city4 ,or again1 the seventeenth century may seem a chaos of contradictions1 with its almost priggish praise of parliaments and its quite barbaric massacre of prisoners1 until we realise that1 if the ,middle ,ages was a house half built1 the seventeenth century was a house on fire4 ,panic was the note of it1 and that fierce fastidiousness and exclusiveness that comes from fear4 ,calvinism was its characteristic religion1 even in the ,catholic ,church1 the insistence on the narrowness of the way and the fewness of the chosen4 ,suspicion was the note of its politics--put not your trust in princes4 ,it tried to thrash everything out by learned1 virulent1 and ceaseless controversy2 and it weeded its population by witch-burning4 ,or yet again3 the eighteenth century will present pictures that seem utterly opposite1 and yet seem singularly typical of the time3 the sack of ,versailles and the ,vicar of ,wakefield2 the pastorals of ,watteau and the dynamite speeches of ,danton4 ,but we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight of the idea of tidying up which ran through the whole period1 the quietest people being prouder of their tidiness1 civilisation1 and sound taste than of any of their virtues2 and the wildest people having 7and this is the most important point7 no love of wildness for its own sake1 like ,nietzsche or the anarchic poets1 but only a readiness to employ it to get rid of unreason or disorder4 ,with these epochs it is not altogether impossible to say that some such form of words is a key4 ,the epoch for which it is almost impossible to find a form of words is our own4 ,nevertheless1 ,i think that with us the keyword is inevitability1 or1 as ,i should be inclined to call it1 impenitence4 ,we are subconsciously dominated in all departments by the notion that there is no turning back1 and it is rooted in materialism and the denial of free-will4 ,take any handful of modern facts and compare them with the corresponding facts a few hundred years ago4 ,compare the modern ,party ,system with the political factions of the seventeenth century4 ,the difference is that in the older time the party leaders not only really cut off each other's heads1 but 7what is much more alarming7 really repealed each other's laws4 ,with us it has become traditional for one party to inherit and leave untouched the acts of the other when made1 however bitterly they were attacked in the making4 ,james ,,ii4 and his nephew ,william were neither of them very gay specimens2 but they would both have laughed at the idea of a continuous foreign policy4 ,the ,tories were not ,conservatives2 they were1 in the literal sense1 reactionaries4 ,they did not merely want to keep the ,stuarts2 they wanted to bring them back4 ,or again1 consider how obstinately the ,english mediaeval monarchy returned again and again to its vision of ,french possessions1 trying to reverse the decision of fate2 how ,edward ,,iii4 returned to the charge after the defeats of ,john and ,henry ,,iii41 and ,henry ,v4 after the failure of ,edward ,,iii42 and how even ,mary had that written on her heart which was neither her husband nor her religion4 ,and then consider this3 that we have comparatively lately known a universal orgy of the thing called ,imperialism1 the unity of the ,empire the only topic1 colonies counted like crown jewels1 and the ,union ,jack waved across the world4 ,and yet no one so much as dreamed1 ,i will not say of recovering1 the ,american colonies for the ,imperial unity 7which would have been too dangerous a task for modern empire-builders71 but even of re-telling the story from an ,imperial standpoint4 ,henry ,v4 justified the claims of ,edward ,,iii4 ,joseph ,chamberlain would not have dreamed of justifying the claims of ,george ,,iii4 ,nay1 ,shakespeare justifies the ,french ,war1 and sticks to ,talbot and defies the legend of ,joan of ,arc4 ,mr4 ,kipling would not dare to justify the ,american ,war1 stick to ,burgoyne1 and defy the legend of ,washington4 ,yet there really was much more to be said for ,george ,,iii4 than there ever was for ,henry ,v4 ,it was not said1 much less acted upon1 by the modern ,imperialists2 because of this basic modern sense1 that as the future is inevitable1 so is the past irrevocable4 ,any fact so complete as the ,american exodus from the ,empire must be considered as final for aeons1 though it hardly happened more than a hundred years ago4 ,merely because it has managed to occur it must be called first1 a necessary evil1 and then an indispensable good4 ,i need not add that ,i do not want to reconquer ,america2 but then ,i am not an ,imperialist4 ,then there is another way of testing it3 ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable1 and how many who attacked it as curable8 ,how many people we have heard abuse the ,british elementary schools1 as they would abuse the ,british climate8 ,how few have we met who realised that ,british education can be altered1 but ,british weather cannot8 ,how few there were that knew that the clouds were more immortal and more solid than the schools8 ,for a thousand that regret compulsory education1 where is the hundred1 or the ten1 or the one1 who would repeal compulsory education8 ,indeed1 the very word proves my case by its unpromising and unfamiliar sound4 ,at the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about ,reform and ,repeal4 ,now everybody talks about reform2 but nobody talks about repeal4 ,our fathers did not talk of ,free ,trade1 but of the ,repeal of the ,corn ,laws4 ,they did not talk of ,home ,rule1 but of the ,repeal of the ,union4 ,in those days people talked of a ,repealer as the most practical of all politicians1 the kind of politician that carries a club4 ,now the ,repealer is flung far into the province of an impossible idealism3 and the leader of one of our great parties1 having said1 in a heat of temporary sincerity1 that he would repeal an ,act1 actually had to write to all the papers to assure them that he would only amend it4 ,i need not multiply instances1 though they might be multiplied almost to a million4 ,the note of the age is to suggest that the past may just as well be praised1 since it cannot be mended4 ,men actually in that past have toiled like ants and died like locusts to undo some previous settlement that seemed secure2 but we cannot do so much as repeal an ,act of ,parliament4 ,we entertain the weak-minded notion that what is done can't be undone4 ,our view was well summarised in a typical ,victorian song with the refrain3 ,the mill will never grind again the water that is past4 ,there are many answers to this4 ,one 7which would involve a disquisition on the phenomena of ,evaporation and ,dew7 we will here avoid4 ,another is1 that to the minds of simple country folk1 the object of a mill is not to grind water1 but to grind corn1 and that 7strange as it may seem7 there really have been societies sufficiently vigilant and valiant to prevent their corn perpetually flowing away from them1 to the tune of a sentimental song4 ,now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault2 it is a moral fault also4 ,it is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made4 ,it is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake4 ,it was mere vanity in ,mr4 ,brummell when he sent away trays full of imperfectly knotted neck-cloths1 lightly remarking1 ,these are our failures4 ,it is a good instance of the nearness of vanity to humility1 for at least he had to admit that they were failures4 ,but it would have been spiritual pride in ,mr4 ,brummell if he had tied on all the cravats1 one on top of the other1 lest his valet should discover that he had ever tied one badly4 ,for in spiritual pride there is always an element of secrecy and solitude4 ,mr4 ,brummell would be satanic2 also 7which ,i fear would affect him more7 he would be badly dressed4 ,but he would be a perfect presentation of the modern publicist1 who cannot do anything right1 because he must not admit that he ever did anything wrong4 ,this strange1 weak obstinacy1 this persistence in the wrong path of progress1 grows weaker and worse1 as do all such weak things4 ,and by the time in which ,i write its moral attitude has taken on something of the sinister and even the horrible4 ,our mistakes have become our secrets4 ,editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air all that reminds them of the party promises unfulfilled1 or the party ideals reproaching them4 ,it is true of our statesmen 7much more than of our bishops1 of whom ,mr4 ,wells said it71 that socially in evidence they are intellectually in hiding4 ,the society is heavy with unconfessed sins2 its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects2 it has a constipation of conscience4 ,there are many things it has done and allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about2 it calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a false past1 as men make up the things they would have said in a quarrel4 ,of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome1 and though it is stifled1 stinks3 the true story of the relations of the rich man and the poor in ,england4 ,the half-starved ,english proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard4 ,it may be said1 in some surprise1 that surely we hear to-day on every side the same story of the destitute proletariat and the social problem1 of the sweating in the unskilled trades or the overcrowding in the slums4 ,it is granted2 but ,i said the true story4 ,untrue stories there are in plenty1 on all sides of the discussion4 ,there is the interesting story of the ,class ,conscious ,proletarian of ,all ,lands1 the chap who has solidarity1 and is always just going to abolish war4 ,the ,marxian ,socialists will tell you all about him2 only he isn't there4 ,a common ,english workman is just as incapable of thinking of a ,german as anything but a ,german as he is of thinking of himself as anything but an ,englishman4 ,then there is the opposite story2 the story of the horrid man who is an atheist and wants to destroy the home1 but who1 for some private reason1 prefers to call this ,socialism4 ,he isn't there either4 ,the prosperous ,socialists have homes exactly like yours and mine2 and the poor ,socialists are not allowed by the ,individualists to have any at all4 ,there is the story of the ,two ,workmen1 which is a very nice and exciting story1 about how one passed all the public houses in ,cheapside and was made ,lord ,mayor on arriving at the ,guildhall1 while the other went into all the public houses and emerged quite ineligible for such a dignity4 ,alas6 for this also is vanity4 ,a thief might become ,lord ,mayor1 but an honest workman certainly couldn't4 ,then there is the story of ,the ,relentless ,doom1 by which rich men were1 by economic laws1 forced to go on taking away money from poor men1 although they simply longed to leave off3 this is an unendurable thought to a free and ,christian man1 and the reader will be relieved to hear that it never happened4 ,the rich could have left off stealing whenever they wanted to leave off1 only this never happened either4 ,then there is the story of the cunning ,fabian who sat on six committees at once and so coaxed the rich man to become quite poor4 ,by simply repeating1 in a whisper1 that there are wheels within wheels1 this talented man managed to take away the millionaire's motor car1 one wheel at a time1 till the millionaire had quite forgotten that he ever had one4 ,it was very clever of him to do this1 only he has not done it4 ,there is not a screw loose in the millionaire's motor1 which is capable of running over the ,fabian and leaving him a flat corpse in the road at a moment's notice4 ,all these stories are very fascinating stories to be told by the ,individualist and ,socialist in turn to the great ,sultan of ,capitalism1 because if they left off amusing him for an instant he would cut off their heads4 ,but if they once began to tell the true story of the ,sultan to the ,sultan1 he would boil them in oil2 and this they wish to avoid4 ,the true story of the sin of the ,sultan he is always trying1 by listening to these stories1 to forget4 ,as we have said before in this chapter1 he would prefer not to remember1 because he has made up his mind not to repent4 ,it is a curious story1 and ,i shall try to tell it truly in the two chapters that follow4 ,in all ages the tyrant is hard because he is soft4 ,if his car crashes over bleeding and accusing crowds1 it is because he has chosen the path of least resistance4 ,it is because it is much easier to ride down a human race than ride up a moderately steep hill4 ,the fight of the oppressor is always a pillow-fight2 commonly a war with cushions--always a war for cushions4 ,saladin1 the great ,sultan1 if ,i remember rightly1 accounted it the greatest feat of swordsmanship to cut a cushion4 ,and so indeed it is1 as all of us can attest who have been for years past trying to cut into the swollen and windy corpulence of the modern compromise1 that is at once cosy and cruel4 ,for there is really in our world to-day the colour and silence of the cushioned divan2 and that sense of palace within palace and garden within garden which makes the rich irresponsibility of the ,east4 ,have we not already the wordless dance1 the wineless banquet1 and all that strange unchristian conception of luxury without laughter8 ,are we not already in an evil ,arabian ,nights1 and walking the nightmare cities of an invisible despot8 ,does not our hangman strangle secretly1 the bearer of the bow string8 ,are we not already eugenists--that is1 eunuch-makers8 ,do we not see the bright eyes1 the motionless faces1 and all that presence of something that is dead and yet sleepless8 ,it is the presence of the sin that is sealed with pride and impenitence2 the story of how the ,sultan got his throne4 ,but it is not the story he is listening to just now1 but another story which has been invented to cover it--the story called ,eugenius3 or the ,adventures of ,one ,not ,born1 a most varied and entrancing tale1 which never fails to send him to sleep4 ,,chapter ,,ii ,,true ,,history ,,of ,a ,,tramp ,he awoke in the ,dark ,ages and smelt dawn in the dark1 and knew he was not wholly a slave4 ,it was as if1 in some tale of ,hans ,andersen1 a stick or a stool had been left in the garden all night and had grown alive and struck root like a tree4 ,for this is the truth behind the old legal fiction of the servile countries1 that the slave is a chattel1 that is a piece of furniture like a stick or a stool4 ,in the spiritual sense1 ,i am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy as the spawn of ,nietzsche suppose to-day4 ,no human being1 pagan or ,christian1 ,i am certain1 ever thought of another human being as a chair or a table4 ,the mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet is a cabbage2 nor can it on the idea that a man is a stool4 ,no man was ever unconscious of another's presence--or even indifferent to another's opinion4 ,the lady who is said to have boasted her indifference to being naked before male slaves was showing off--or she meant something different4 ,the lord who fed fishes by killing a slave was indulging in what most cannibals indulge in--a satanist affectation4 ,the lady was consciously shameless and the lord was consciously cruel4 ,but it simply is not in the human reason to carve men like wood or examine women like ivory1 just as it is not in the human reason to think that two and two make five4 ,but there was this truth in the legal simile of furniture3 that the slave1 though certainly a man1 was in one sense a dead man2 in the sense that he was moveable4 ,his locomotion was not his own3 his master moved his arms and legs for him as if he were a marionette4 ,now it is important in the first degree to realise here what would be involved in such a fable as ,i have imagined1 of a stool rooting itself like a shrub4 ,for the general modern notion certainly is that life and liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty and not standing still4 ,but it is just because the stool is lifeless that it moves about4 ,it is just because the tree is alive that it does stand still4 ,that was the main difference between the pagan slave and the ,christian serf4 ,the serf still belonged to the lord1 as the stick that struck root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the garden2 but it would have become a live possession4 ,therefore the owner is forced1 by the laws of nature1 to treat it with some respect2 something becomes due from him4 ,he cannot pull it up without killing it2 it has gained a place in the garden--or the society4 ,but the moderns are quite wrong in supposing that mere change and holiday and variety have necessarily any element of this life that is the only seed of liberty4 ,you may say if you like that an employer1 taking all his workpeople to a new factory in a ,garden ,city1 is giving them the greater freedom of forest landscapes and smokeless skies4 ,if it comes to that1 you can say that the slave-traders took negroes from their narrow and brutish ,african hamlets1 and gave them the polish of foreign travel and medicinal breezes of a sea-voyage4 ,but the tiny seed of citizenship and independence there already was in the serfdom of the ,dark ,ages1 had nothing to do with what nice things the lord might do to the serf4 ,it lay in the fact that there were some nasty things he could not do to the serf--there were not many1 but there were some1 and one of them was eviction4 ,he could not make the serf utterly landless and desperate1 utterly without access to the means of production1 though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the serf1 than the serf that owned the field4 ,but even if you call the serf a beast of the field1 he was not what we have tried to make the town workman--a beast with no field4 ,foulon said of the ,french peasants1 ,let them eat grass4 ,if he had said it of the modern ,london proletariat1 they might well reply1 ,you have not left us even grass to eat4 ,there was1 therefore1 both in theory and practice1 some security for the serf1 because he had come to life and rooted4 ,the seigneur could not wait in the field in all weathers with a battle-axe to prevent the serf scratching any living out of the ground1 any more than the man in my fairy-tale could sit out in the garden all night with an umbrella to prevent the shrub getting any rain4 ,the relation of lord and serf1 therefore1 involves a combination of two things3 inequality and security4 ,i know there are people who will at once point wildly to all sorts of examples1 true and false1 of insecurity of life in the ,middle ,ages2 but these are people who do not grasp what we mean by the characteristic institutions of a society4 ,for the matter of that1 there are plenty of examples of equality in the ,middle ,ages1 as the craftsmen in their guild or the monks electing their abbot4 ,but just as modern ,england is not a feudal country1 though there is a quaint survival called ,heralds' ,college--or ,ireland is not a commercial country1 though there is a quaint survival called ,belfast--it is true of the bulk and shape of that society that came out of the ,dark ,ages and ended at the ,reformation1 that it did not care about giving everybody an equal position1 but did care about giving everybody a position4 ,so that by the very beginning of that time even the slave had become a slave one could not get rid of1 like the ,scotch servant who stubbornly asserted that if his master didn't know a good servant he knew a good master4 ,the free peasant1 in ancient or modern times1 is free to go or stay4 ,the slave1 in ancient times1 was free neither to go nor stay4 ,the serf was not free to go2 but he was free to stay4 ,now what have we done with this man8 ,it is quite simple4 ,there is no historical complexity about it in that respect4 ,we have taken away his freedom to stay4 ,we have turned him out of his field1 and whether it was injustice1 like turning a free farmer out of his field1 or only cruelty to animals1 like turning a cow out of its field1 the fact remains that he is out in the road4 ,first and last1 we have simply destroyed the security4 ,we have not in the least destroyed the inequality4 ,all classes1 all creatures1 kind or cruel1 still see this lowest stratum of society as separate from the upper strata and even the middle strata2 he is as separate as the serf4 ,a monster fallen from ,mars1 ignorant of our simplest word1 would know the tramp was at the bottom of the ladder1 as well as he would have known it of the serf4 ,the walls of mud are no longer round his boundaries1 but only round his boots4 ,the coarse1 bristling hedge is at the end of his chin1 and not of his garden4 ,but mud and bristles still stand out round him like a horrific halo1 and separate him from his kind4 ,the ,martian would have no difficulty in seeing he was the poorest person in the nation4 ,it is just as impossible that he should marry an heiress1 or fight a duel with a duke1 or contest a seat at ,westminster1 or enter a club in ,pall ,mall1 or take a scholarship at ,balliol1 or take a seat at an opera1 or propose a good law1 or protest against a bad one1 as it was impossible to the serf4 ,where he differs is in something very different4 ,he has lost what was possible to the serf4 ,he can no longer scratch the bare earth by day or sleep on the bare earth by night1 without being collared by a policeman4 ,now when ,i say that this man has been oppressed as hardly any other man on this earth has been oppressed1 ,i am not using rhetoric3 ,i have a clear meaning which ,i am confident of explaining to any honest reader4 ,i do not say he has been treated worse3 ,i say he has been treated differently from the unfortunate in all ages4 ,and the difference is this3 that all the others were told to do something1 and killed or tortured if they did anything else4 ,this man is not told to do something3 he is merely forbidden to do anything4 ,when he was a slave1 they said to him1 ,sleep in this shed2 ,i will beat you if you sleep anywhere else4 ,when he was a serf1 they said to him1 ,let me find you in this field3 ,i will hang you if ,i find you in anyone else's field4 ,but now he is a tramp they say to him1 ,you shall be jailed if ,i find you in anyone else's field3 but ,i will not give you a field4 ,they say1 ,you shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed3 but there is no shed4 ,if you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions1 ,i answer with entire certainty that they do say them4 ,a little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate1 charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep4 ,but this is not the full fun of the incident4 ,the real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence1 to prove that they could have got a bed1 but deliberately didn't4 ,to which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed3 that they could not possibly have got a bed3 and therefore 7argued that thoughtful officer7 they ought to be punished for not getting one4 ,the intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument3 and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do4 ,but he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness1 they would have left the court without a stain on their characters2 but as they could not avoid it1 they were very much to blame4 ,these things are being done in every part of ,england every day4 ,they have their parallels even in every daily paper2 but they have no parallel in any other earthly people or period2 except in that insane command to make bricks without straw which brought down all the plagues of ,egypt4 ,for the common historical joke about ,henry ,,viii4 hanging a man for being ,catholic and burning him for being ,protestant is a symbolic joke only4 ,the sceptic in the ,tudor time could do something3 he could always agree with ,henry ,,viii4 ,the desperate man to-day can do nothing4 ,for you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says1 ,procure threepence from nowhere and ,i will give you leave to do without it4 ,if it be answered that he can go to the workhouse1 ,i reply that such an answer is founded on confused thinking4 ,it is true that he is free to go to the workhouse1 but only in the same sense in which he is free to go to jail1 only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet was free to find peace in the grave4 ,many of the poor greatly prefer the grave to the workhouse1 but that is not at all my argument here4 ,the point is this3 that it could not have been the general policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps4 ,it could not have been his standing ,advice to ,serfs to say1 ,get hanged4 ,it cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to prison4 ,and1 precisely as plainly1 it cannot be the standing advice of rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses4 ,for that would mean the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and expensive establishment of slaves4 ,now it may come to this1 as ,mr4 ,belloc maintains1 but it is not the theory on which what we call the workhouse does in fact rest4 ,the very shape 7and even the very size7 of a workhouse express the fact that it was founded for certain quite exceptional human failures--like the lunatic asylum4 ,say to a man1 ,go to the madhouse1 and he will say1 ,wherein am ,i mad8 ,say to a tramp under a hedge1 ,go to the house of exceptional failures1 and he will say with equal reason1 ,i travel because ,i have no house2 ,i walk because ,i have no horse2 ,i sleep out because ,i have no bed4 ,wherein have ,i failed8 ,and he may have the intelligence to add1 ,indeed1 your worship1 if somebody has failed1 ,i think it is not ,i4 ,i concede1 with all due haste1 that he might perhaps say me4 ,the speciality then of this man's wrong is that it is the only historic wrong that has in it the quality of nonsense4 ,it could only happen in a nightmare2 not in a clear and rational hell4 ,it is the top point of that anarchy in the governing mind which1 as ,i said at the beginning1 is the main trait of modernity1 especially in ,england4 ,but if the first note in our policy is madness1 the next note is certainly meanness4 ,there are two peculiarly mean and unmanly legal mantraps in which this wretched man is tripped up4 ,the first is that which prevents him from doing what any ordinary savage or nomad would do--take his chance of an uneven subsistence on the rude bounty of nature4 ,there is something very abject about forbidding this2 because it is precisely this adventurous and vagabond spirit which the educated classes praise most in their books1 poems and speeches4 ,to feel the drag of the roads1 to hunt in nameless hills and fish in secret streams1 to have no address save ,over the ,hills and ,far ,away1 to be ready to breakfast on berries and the daybreak and sup on the sunset and a sodden crust1 to feed on wild things and be a boy again1 all this is the heartiest and sincerest impulse in recent culture1 in the songs and tales of ,stevenson1 in the cult of ,george ,borrow and in the delightful little books published by ,mr4 ,e4,v4 ,lucas4 ,it is the one true excuse in the core of ,imperialism2 and it faintly softens the squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the ,self-,made ,man who came up to ,london with twopence in his pocket4 ,but when a poorer but braver man with less than twopence in his pocket does the very thing we are always praising1 makes the blue heavens his house1 we send him to a house built for infamy and flogging4 ,we take poverty itself and only permit it with a property qualification2 we only allow a man to be poor if he is rich4 ,and we do this most savagely if he has sought to snatch his life by that particular thing of which our boyish adventure stories are fullest--hunting and fishing4 ,the extremely severe ,english game laws hit most heavily what the highly reckless ,english romances praise most irresponsibly4 ,all our literature is full of praise of the chase--especially of the wild goose chase4 ,but if a poor man followed1 as ,tennyson says1 far as the wild swan wings to where the world dips down to sea and sands1 ,tennyson would scarcely allow him to catch it4 ,if he found the wildest goose in the wildest fenland in the wildest regions of the sunset1 he would very probably discover that the rich never sleep2 and that there are no wild things in ,england4 ,in short1 the ,english ruler is always appealing to a nation of sportsmen and concentrating all his efforts on preventing them from having any sport4 ,the ,imperialist is always pointing out with exultation that the common ,englishman can live by adventure anywhere on the globe1 but if the common ,englishman tries to live by adventure in ,england1 he is treated as harshly as a thief1 and almost as harshly as an honest journalist4 ,this is hypocrisy3 the magistrate who gives his son ,treasure ,island and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite2 the squire who is proud of ,english colonists and indulgent to ,english schoolboys1 but cruel to ,english poachers1 is drawing near that deep place wherein all liars have their part4 ,but our point here is that the baseness is in the idea of bewildering the tramp2 of leaving him no place for repentance4 ,it is quite true1 of course1 that in the days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich4 ,but in the older case there were two very important differences1 the second of which is our main subject in this chapter4 ,the first is that in a comparatively wild society1 however fond of hunting1 it seems impossible that enclosing and game-keeping can have been so omnipresent and efficient as in a society full of maps and policemen4 ,the second difference is the one already noted3 that if the slave or semi-slave was forbidden to get his food in the greenwood1 he was told to get it somewhere else4 ,the note of unreason was absent4 ,this is the first meanness2 and the second is like unto it4 ,if there is one thing of which cultivated modern letters is full besides adventure it is altruism4 ,we are always being told to help others1 to regard our wealth as theirs1 to do what good we can1 for we shall not pass this way again4 ,we are everywhere urged by humanitarians to help lame dogs over stiles--though some humanitarians1 it is true1 seem to feel a colder interest in the case of lame men and women4 ,still1 the chief fact of our literature1 among all historic literatures1 is human charity4 ,but what is the chief fact of our legislation8 ,the great outstanding fact of modern legislation1 among all historic legislations1 is the forbidding of human charity4 ,it is this astonishing paradox1 a thing in the teeth of all logic and conscience1 that a man that takes another man's money with his leave can be punished as if he had taken it without his leave4 ,all through those dark or dim ages behind us1 through times of servile stagnation1 of feudal insolence1 of pestilence and civil strife and all else that can war down the weak1 for the weak to ask for charity was counted lawful1 and to give that charity1 admirable4 ,in all other centuries1 in short1 the casual bad deeds of bad men could be partly patched and mended by the casual good deeds of good men4 ,but this is now forbidden2 for it would leave the tramp a last chance if he could beg4 ,now it will be evident by this time that the interesting scientific experiment on the tramp entirely depends on leaving him no chance1 and not 7like the slave7 one chance4 ,of the economic excuses offered for the persecution of beggars it will be more natural to speak in the next chapter4 ,it will suffice here to say that they are mere excuses1 for a policy that has been persistent while probably largely unconscious1 with a selfish and atheistic unconsciousness4 ,that policy was directed towards something--or it could never have cut so cleanly and cruelly across the sentimental but sincere modern trends to adventure and altruism4 ,its object is soon stated4 ,it was directed towards making the very poor man work for the capitalist1 for any wages or none4 ,but all this1 which ,i shall also deal with in the next chapter1 is here only important as introducing the last truth touching the man of despair4 ,the game laws have taken from him his human command of ,nature4 ,the mendicancy laws have taken from him his human demand on ,man4 ,there is one human thing left it is much harder to take from him4 ,debased by him and his betters1 it is still something brought out of ,eden1 where ,god made him a demigod3 it does not depend on money and but little on time4 ,he can create in his own image4 ,the terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries4 ,as ,jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring ,time1 as the ,christ ,child could be hidden from ,herod--so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor4 ,he who lives not yet1 he and he alone is left2 and they seek his life to take it away4 ,,chapter ,,iii ,,true ,,history ,,of ,a ,,eugenist ,he does not live in a dark lonely tower by the sea1 from which are heard the screams of vivisected men and women4 ,on the contrary1 he lives in ,mayfair4 ,he does not wear great goblin spectacles that magnify his eyes to moons or diminish his neighbours to beetles4 ,when he is more dignified he wears a single eyeglass2 when more intelligent1 a wink4 ,he is not indeed wholly without interest in heredity and ,eugenical biology2 but his studies and experiments in this science have specialised almost exclusively in equus celer1 the rapid or running horse4 ,he is not a doctor2 though he employs doctors to work up a case for ,eugenics1 just as he employs doctors to correct the errors of his dinner4 ,he is not a lawyer1 though unfortunately often a magistrate4 ,he is not an author or a journalist2 though he not infrequently owns a newspaper4 ,he is not a soldier1 though he may have a commission in the yeomanry2 nor is he generally a gentleman1 though often a nobleman4 ,his wealth now commonly comes from a large staff of employed persons who scurry about in big buildings while he is playing golf4 ,but he very often laid the foundations of his fortune in a very curious and poetical way1 the nature of which ,i have never fully understood4 ,it consisted in his walking about the street without a hat and going up to another man and saying1 ,suppose ,i have two hundred whales out of the ,north ,sea4 ,to which the other man replied1 ,and let us imagine that ,i am in possession of two thousand elephants' tusks4 ,they then exchange1 and the first man goes up to a third man and says1 ,supposing me to have lately come into the possession of two thousand elephants' tusks1 would you1 etc48 ,if you play this game well1 you become very rich2 if you play it badly you have to kill yourself or try your luck at the ,bar4 ,the man ,i am speaking about must have played it well1 or at any rate successfully4 ,he was born about #ahfj2 and has been a member of ,parliament since about #ahij4 ,for the first half of his life he was a ,liberal2 for the second half he has been a ,conservative2 but his actual policy in ,parliament has remained largely unchanged and consistent4 ,his policy in ,parliament is as follows3 he takes a seat in a room downstairs at ,westminster1 and takes from his breast pocket an excellent cigar-case1 from which in turn he takes an excellent cigar4 ,this he lights1 and converses with other owners of such cigars on equus celer or such matters as may afford him entertainment4 ,two or three times in the afternoon a bell rings2 whereupon he deposits the cigar in an ashtray with great particularity1 taking care not to break the ash1 and proceeds to an upstairs room1 flanked with two passages4 ,he then walks into whichever of the two passages shall be indicated to him by a young man of the upper classes1 holding a slip of paper4 ,having gone into this passage he comes out of it again1 is counted by the young man and proceeds downstairs again2 where he takes up the cigar once more1 being careful not to break the ash4 ,this process1 which is known as ,representative ,government1 has never called for any great variety in the manner of his life4 ,nevertheless1 while his ,parliamentary policy is unchanged1 his change from one side of the ,house to the other did correspond with a certain change in his general policy in commerce and social life4 ,the change of the party label is by this time quite a trifling matter2 but there was in his case a change of philosophy or at least a change of project2 though it was not so much becoming a ,tory1 as becoming rather the wrong kind of ,socialist4 ,he is a man with a history4 ,it is a sad history1 for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started4 ,that is why he is the man who is really behind ,eugenics4 ,it is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of ,degeneration4 ,in his ,radical days 7to quote from one who corresponded in some ways to this type7 he was a much better man1 because he was a much less enlightened one4 ,the hard impudence of his first ,manchester ,individualism was softened by two relatively humane qualities2 the first was a much greater manliness in his pride2 the second was a much greater sincerity in his optimism4 ,for the first point1 the modern capitalist is merely industrial2 but this man was also industrious4 ,he was proud of hard work2 nay1 he was even proud of low work--if he could speak of it in the past and not the present4 ,in fact1 he invented a new kind of ,victorian snobbishness1 an inverted snobbishness4 ,while the snobs of ,thackeray turned ,muggins into ,de ,mogyns1 while the snobs of ,dickens wrote letters describing themselves as officers' daughters accustomed to every luxury--except spelling1 the ,individualist spent his life in hiding his prosperous parents4 ,he was more like an ,american plutocrat when he began2 but he has since lost the ,american simplicity4 ,the ,frenchman works until he can play4 ,the ,american works until he can't play2 and then thanks the devil1 his master1 that he is donkey enough to die in harness4 ,but the ,englishman1 as he has since become1 works until he can pretend that he never worked at all4 ,he becomes as far as possible another person--a country gentleman who has never heard of his shop2 one whose left hand holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger4 ,he uses a peerage as an alias1 and a large estate as a sort of alibi4 ,a stern ,scotch minister remarked concerning the game of golf1 with a terrible solemnity of manner1 the man who plays golf--he neglects his business1 he forsakes his wife1 he forgets his ,god4 ,he did not seem to realise that it is the chief aim of many a modern capitalist's life to forget all three4 ,this abandonment of a boyish vanity in work1 this substitution of a senile vanity in indolence1 this is the first respect in which the rich ,englishman has fallen4 ,he was more of a man when he was at least a master-workman and not merely a master4 ,and the second important respect in which he was better at the beginning is this3 that he did then1 in some hazy way1 half believe that he was enriching other people as well as himself4 ,the optimism of the early ,victorian ,individualists was not wholly hypocritical4 ,some of the clearest-headed and blackest-hearted of them1 such as ,malthus1 saw where things were going1 and boldly based their ,manchester city on pessimism instead of optimism4 ,but this was not the general case2 most of the decent rich of the ,bright and ,cobden sort did have a kind of confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long run for everybody4 ,they thought the troubles of the poor were incurable by ,state action 7they thought that of all troubles71 but they did not cold-bloodedly contemplate the prospect of those troubles growing worse and worse4 ,by one of those tricks or illusions of the brain to which the luxurious are subject in all ages1 they sometimes seemed to feel as if the populace had triumphed symbolically in their own persons4 ,they blasphemously thought about their thrones of gold what can only be said about a cross--that they1 being lifted up1 would draw all men after them4 ,they were so full of the romance that anybody could be ,lord ,mayor1 that they seemed to have slipped into thinking that everybody could4 ,it seemed as if a hundred ,dick ,whittingtons1 accompanied by a hundred cats1 could all be accommodated at the ,mansion ,house4 ,it was all nonsense2 but it was not 7until later7 all humbug4 ,step by step1 however1 with a horrid and increasing clearness1 this man discovered what he was doing4 ,it is generally one of the worst discoveries a man can make4 ,at the beginning1 the ,british plutocrat was probably quite as honest in suggesting that every tramp carried a magic cat like ,dick ,whittington1 as the ,bonapartist patriot was in saying that every ,french soldier carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack4 ,but it is exactly here that the difference and the danger appears4 ,there is no comparison between a well-managed thing like ,napoleon's army and an unmanageable thing like modern competition4 ,logically1 doubtless1 it was impossible that every soldier should carry a marshal's baton2 they could not all be marshals any more than they could all be mayors4 ,but if the ,french soldier did not always have a baton in his knapsack1 he always had a knapsack4 ,but when that ,self-,helper who bore the adorable name of ,smiles told the ,english tramp that he carried a coronet in his bundle1 the ,english tramp had an unanswerable answer4 ,he pointed out that he had no bundle4 ,the powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack1 any more than they had fitted him with a future--or even a present4 ,the destitute ,englishman1 so far from hoping to become anything1 had never been allowed even to be anything4 ,the ,french soldier's ambition may have been in practice not only a short1 but even a deliberately shortened ladder1 in which the top rungs were knocked out4 ,but for the ,english it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out1 so that they could not even begin to climb4 ,and sooner or later1 in exact proportion to his intelligence1 the ,english plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent1 but that their impotence had been his only power4 ,the truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor2 it was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich4 ,it is this paradox1 as we shall see1 that creates the curious difference between him and every other kind of robber4 ,i think it is no more than justice to him to say that the knowledge1 where it has come to him1 has come to him slowly2 and ,i think it came 7as most things of common sense come7 rather vaguely and as in a vision--that is1 by the mere look of things4 ,the old ,cobdenite employer was quite within his rights in arguing that earth is not heaven1 that the best obtainable arrangement might contain many necessary evils2 and that ,liverpool and ,belfast might be growing more prosperous as a whole in spite of pathetic things that might be seen there4 ,but ,i simply do not believe he has been able to look at ,liverpool and ,belfast and continue to think this3 that is why he has turned himself into a sham country gentleman4 ,earth is not heaven1 but the nearest we can get to heaven ought not to look like hell2 and ,liverpool and ,belfast look like hell1 whether they are or not4 ,such cities might be growing prosperous as a whole1 though a few citizens were more miserable4 ,but it was more and more broadly apparent that it was exactly and precisely as a whole that they were not growing more prosperous1 but only the few citizens who were growing more prosperous by their increasing misery4 ,you could not say a country was becoming a white man's country when there were more and more black men in it every day4 ,you could not say a community was more and more masculine when it was producing more and more women4 ,nor can you say that a city is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are very poor men4 ,there might be a false agitation founded on the pathos of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk4 ,but the fact is that no one can take a cab across ,liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of individual cases1 but a pathos in bulk4 ,people talk of the ,celtic sadness2 but there are very few things in ,ireland that look so sad as the ,irishman in ,liverpool4 ,the desolation of ,tara is cheery compared with the desolation of ,belfast4 ,i recommend ,mr4 ,yeats and his mournful friends to turn their attention to the pathos of ,belfast4 ,i think if they hung up the harp that once in ,lord ,furness's factory1 there would be a chance of another string breaking4 ,broadly1 and as things bulk to the eye1 towns like ,leeds1 if placed beside towns like ,rouen or ,florence1 or ,chartres1 or ,cologne1 do actually look like beggars walking among burghers4 ,after that overpowering and unpleasant impression it is really useless to argue that they are richer because a few of their parasites get rich enough to live somewhere else4 ,the point may be put another way1 thus3 that it is not so much that these more modern cities have this or that monopoly of good or evil2 it is that they have every good in its fourth-rate form and every evil in its worst form4 ,for instance1 that interesting weekly paper ,the ,nation amiably rebuked ,mr4 ,belloc and myself for suggesting that revelry and the praise of fermented liquor were more characteristic of ,continental and ,catholic communities than of communities with the religion and civilisation of ,belfast4 ,it said that if we would cross the border into ,scotland1 we should find out our mistake4 ,now1 not only have ,i crossed the border1 but ,i have had considerable difficulty in crossing the road in a ,scotch town on a festive evening4 ,men were literally lying like piled-up corpses in the gutters1 and from broken bottles whisky was pouring down the drains4 ,i am not likely1 therefore1 to attribute a total and arid abstinence to the whole of industrial ,scotland4 ,but ,i never said that drinking was a mark rather of the ,catholic countries4 ,i said that moderate drinking was a mark rather of the ,catholic countries4 ,in other words1 ,i say of the common type of ,continental citizen1 not that he is the only person who is drinking1 but that he is the only person who knows how to drink4 ,doubtless gin is as much a feature of ,hoxton as beer is a feature of ,munich4 ,but who is the connoisseur who prefers the gin of ,hoxton to the beer of ,munich8 ,doubtless the ,protestant ,scotch ask for ,scotch1 as the men of ,burgundy ask for ,burgundy4 ,but do we find them lying in heaps on each side of the road when we walk through a ,burgundian village8 ,do we find the ,french peasant ready to let ,burgundy escape down a drain-pipe8 ,now this one point1 on which ,i accept ,the ,nation's challenge1 can be exactly paralleled on almost every point by which we test a civilisation4 ,it does not matter whether we are for alcohol or against it4 ,on either argument ,glasgow is more objectionable than ,rouen4 ,the ,french abstainer makes less fuss2 the ,french drinker gives less offence4 ,it is so with property1 with war1 with everything4 ,i can understand a teetotaler being horrified1 on his principles1 at ,italian wine-drinking4 ,i simply cannot believe he could be more horrified at it than at ,hoxton gin-drinking4 ,i can understand a ,pacifist1 with his special scruples1 disliking the militarism of ,belfort4 ,i flatly deny that he can dislike it more than the militarism of ,berlin4 ,i can understand a good ,socialist hating the petty cares of the distributed peasant property4 ,i deny that any good ,socialist can hate them more than he hates the large cares of ,rockefeller4 ,that is the unique tragedy of the plutocratic state to-day2 it has no successes to hold up against the failures it alleges to exist in ,latin or other methods4 ,you can 7if you are well out of his reach7 call the ,irish rustic debased and superstitious4 ,i defy you to contrast his debasement and superstition with the citizenship and enlightenment of the ,english rustic4 ,to-day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an organ of the ,state4 ,he differs from all other thieves or parasites for this reason3 that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to be rich4 ,but he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them to be poor4 ,rob ,roy in a cavern1 hearing a company approaching1 will hope 7or if in a pious mood1 pray7 that they may come laden with gold or goods4 ,but ,mr4 ,rockefeller1 in his factory1 knows that if those who pass are laden with goods they will pass on4 ,he will therefore 7if in a pious mood7 pray that they may be destitute1 and so be forced to work his factory for him for a starvation wage4 ,it is said 7and also1 ,i believe1 disputed7 that ,bluecher riding through the richer parts of ,london exclaimed1 ,what a city to sack6 ,but ,bluecher was a soldier if he was a bandit4 ,the true sweater feels quite otherwise4 ,it is when he drives through the poorest parts of ,london that he finds the streets paved with gold1 being paved with prostrate servants2 it is when he sees the grey lean leagues of ,bow and ,poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure4 ,this is not rhetoric1 but economics4 ,i repeat that up to a point the profiteer was innocent because he was ignorant2 he had been lured on by easy and accommodating events4 ,he was innocent as the new ,thane of ,glamis was innocent1 as the new ,thane of ,cawdor was innocent2 but the ,king---- ,the modern manufacturer1 like ,macbeth1 decided to march on1 under the mute menace of the heavens4 ,he knew that the spoil of the poor was in his houses2 but he could not1 after careful calculation1 think of any way in which they could get it out of his houses without being arrested for housebreaking4 ,he faced the future with a face flinty with pride and impenitence4 ,this period can be dated practically by the period when the old and genuine ,protestant religion of ,england began to fail2 and the average business man began to be agnostic1 not so much because he did not know where he was1 as because he wanted to forget4 ,many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink2 because it was a way out4 ,but in any case1 the man who had made a mistake not only refused to unmake it1 but decided to go on making it4 ,but in this he made yet another most amusing mistake1 which was the beginning of all ,eugenics4 ,,chapter ,,iv ,,the ,,vengeance ,,of ,,the ,,flesh ,by a quaint paradox1 we generally miss the meaning of simple stories because we are not subtle enough to understand their simplicity4 ,as long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other romance of things in general1 they saw the thing solid and swallowed it whole1 knowing that it could not disagree with them4 ,but the moment men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it1 they have to be very subtle in order to understand it4 ,we can find1 for instance1 a very good working case in those old puritanical nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins2 about how ,tommy was drowned for fishing on the ,sabbath1 or ,sammy struck by lightning for going out after dark4 ,now these moral stories are immoral1 because ,calvinism is immoral4 ,they are wrong1 because ,puritanism is wrong4 ,but they are not quite so wrong1 they are not a quarter so wrong1 as many superficial sages have supposed4 ,the truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a human meaning2 and not one of the fixed fools of history was such a fool as he looks4 ,and when our great-uncles or great-grandmothers told a child he might be drowned by breaking the ,sabbath1 their souls 7though undoubtedly1 as ,touchstone said1 in a parlous state7 were not in quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their god was a devil who dropped babies into the ,thames for a trifle4 ,this form of religious literature is a morbid form if taken by itself2 but it did correspond to a certain reality in psychology which most people of any religion1 or even of none1 have felt a touch of at some time or other4 ,leaving out theological terms as far as possible1 it is the subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with ,nature as well as right with ,nature2 that the point of wrongness may be a detail 7in the superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality72 but that if one is really wrong with ,nature1 there is no particular reason why all her rivers should not drown or all her storm-bolts strike one who is1 by this vague yet vivid hypothesis1 her enemy4 ,this may be a mental sickness1 but it is too human or too mortal a sickness to be called solely a superstition4 ,it is not solely a superstition2 it is not simply superimposed upon human nature by something that has got on top of it4 ,it flourishes without check among non-,christian systems1 and it flourishes especially in ,calvinism1 because ,calvinism is the most non-,christian of ,christian systems4 ,but like everything else that inheres in the natural senses and spirit of man1 it has something in it2 it is not stark unreason4 ,if it is an ill 7and it generally is71 it is one of the ills that flesh is heir to1 but he is the lawful heir4 ,and like many other dubious or dangerous human instincts or appetites1 it is sometimes useful as a warning against worse things4 ,now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the loss of this2 the loss of what we may call the natural and heathen mysticism4 ,when modern critics say that ,julius ,caesar did not believe in ,jupiter1 or that ,pope ,leo did not believe in ,catholicism1 they overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours4 ,perhaps ,julius did not believe in ,jupiter2 but he did not disbelieve in ,jupiter4 ,there was nothing in his philosophy1 or the philosophy of that age1 that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit personal and predominant in the world4 ,but the modern materialists are not permitted to doubt2 they are forbidden to believe4 ,hence1 while the heathen might avail himself of accidental omens1 queer coincidences or casual dreams1 without knowing for certain whether they were really hints from heaven or premonitory movements in his own brain1 the modern ,christian turned heathen must not entertain such notions at all1 but must reject the oracle as the altar4 ,the modern sceptic was drugged against all that was natural in the supernatural4 ,and this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom1 as a tyrant literally pagan might possibly not have done4 ,there is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales 7those1 for instance1 on which ,shakespeare is so often based7--an idea that is profoundly moral even if the tales are immoral4 ,it is what may be called the flaw in the deed3 the idea that1 if ,i take my advantage to the full1 ,i shall hear of something to my disadvantage4 ,thus ,midas fell into a fallacy about the currency2 and soon had reason to become something more than a ,bimetallist4 ,thus ,macbeth had a fallacy about forestry2 he could not see the trees for the wood4 ,he forgot that1 though a place cannot be moved1 the trees that grow on it can4 ,thus ,shylock had a fallacy of physiology2 he forgot that1 if you break into the house of life1 you find it a bloody house in the most emphatic sense4 ,but the modern capitalist did not read fairy-tales1 and never looked for the little omens at the turnings of the road4 ,he 7or the most intelligent section of him7 had by now realised his position1 and knew in his heart it was a false position4 ,he thought a margin of men out of work was good for his business2 he could no longer really think it was good for his country4 ,he could no longer be the old hard-headed man who simply did not understand things2 he could only be the hard-hearted man who faced them4 ,but he still marched on2 he was sure he had made no mistake4 ,however1 he had made a mistake--as definite as a mistake in multiplication4 ,it may be summarised thus3 that the same inequality and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour1 and at last no labour at all4 ,it was as if a man who wanted something from an enemy1 should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in the despair of winter1 should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen the bargain2 and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorstep4 ,he had discovered the divine boomerang2 his sin had found him out4 ,the experiment of ,individualism--the keeping of the worker half in and half out of work--was far too ingenious not to contain a flaw4 ,it was too delicate a balance to work entirely with the strength of the starved and the vigilance of the benighted4 ,it was too desperate a course to rely wholly on desperation4 ,and as time went on the terrible truth slowly declared itself2 the degraded class was really degenerating4 ,it was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool2 but the tool1 ceaselessly used1 was being used up4 ,it was quite reasonable and respectable1 of course1 to fling a man away like a tool2 but when it was flung away in the rain the tool rusted4 ,but the comparison to a tool was insufficient for an awful reason that had already begun to dawn upon the master's mind4 ,if you pick up a hammer1 you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it4 ,if you fling away a chisel by the roadside1 it does not litter and leave a lot of little chisels4 ,but the meanest of the tools1 ,man1 had still this strange privilege which ,god had given him1 doubtless by mistake4 ,despite all improvements in machinery1 the most important part of the machinery 7the fittings technically described in the trade as hands7 were apparently growing worse4 ,the firm was not only encumbered with one useless servant1 but he immediately turned himself into five useless servants4 ,the poor should not be emancipated1 the old reactionaries used to say1 until they are fit for freedom4 ,but if this downrush went on1 it looked as if the poor would not stand high enough to be fit for slavery4 ,so at least it seemed1 doubtless in a great degree subconsciously1 to the man who had wagered all his wealth on the usefulness of the poor to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor4 ,the time came at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply1 and began to be something like a wastage2 ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds1 and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes4 ,the situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain1 and were1 therefore1 disproportionately pursued1 and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal4 ,the consequences began to appear4 ,to a much less extent than the ,eugenists assert1 but still to a notable extent1 in a much looser sense than the ,eugenists assume1 but still in some sort of sense1 the types that were inadequate or incalculable or uncontrollable began to increase4 ,under the hedges of the country1 on the seats of the parks1 loafing under the bridges or leaning over the ,embankment1 began to appear a new race of men--men who are certainly not mad1 whom we shall gain no scientific light by calling feeble-minded1 but who are1 in varying individual degrees1 dazed or drink-sodden1 or lazy or tricky or tired in body and spirit4 ,in a far less degree than the teetotallers tell us1 but still in a large degree1 the traffic in gin and bad beer 7itself a capitalist enterprise7 fostered the evil1 though it had not begun it4 ,men who had no human bond with the instructed man1 men who seemed to him monsters and creatures without mind1 became an eyesore in the market-place and a terror on the empty roads4 ,the rich were afraid4 ,moreover1 as ,i have hinted before1 the act of keeping the destitute out of public life1 and crushing them under confused laws1 had an effect on their intelligences which paralyses them even as a proletariat4 ,modern people talk of ,reason versus ,authority2 but authority itself involves reason1 or its orders would not even be understood4 ,if you say to your valet1 ,look after the buttons on my waistcoat1 he may do it1 even if you throw a boot at his head4 ,but if you say to him1 ,look after the buttons on my top-hat1 he will not do it1 though you empty a boot-shop over him4 ,if you say to a schoolboy1 ,write out that ,ode of ,horace from memory in the original ,latin1 he may do it without a flogging4 ,if you say1 ,write out that ,ode of ,horace in the original ,german1 he will not do it with a thousand floggings4 ,if you will not learn logic1 he certainly will not learn ,latin4 ,and the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subject 7such as that which punishes the homeless for not going home7 have really1 ,i think1 a great deal to do with a certain increase in their sheepishness and short-wittedness1 and1 therefore1 in their industrial inefficiency4 ,by one of the monstrosities of the feeble-minded theory1 a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could then be examined by doctors as to the state of his mind--presumably in order to discover by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime4 ,in other words1 when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent of doing something1 they jail him for being too innocent to do anything4 ,i do not suppose the man is an idiot at all1 but ,i can believe he feels more like one after the legal process than before4 ,thus all the factors--the bodily exhaustion1 the harassing fear of hunger1 the reckless refuge in sexuality1 and the black botheration of bad laws--combined to make the employee more unemployable4 ,now1 it is very important to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay4 ,first1 he might have reversed his machine1 so to speak1 and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet4 ,in other words1 he might have seen that the workmen had more money1 more leisure1 more luxuries1 more status in the community1 and then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings to produce a generation better born1 bred and cared for than these tortured types that were less and less use to him4 ,it might still not be too late to rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan that poverty might fly out of the window1 with the reasonable prospect of love coming in at the door4 ,in short1 he might have let the ,english poor1 the mass of whom were not weak-minded1 though more of them were growing weaker1 a reasonable chance1 in the form of more money1 of achieving their eugenical resurrection themselves4 ,it has never been shown1 and it cannot be shown1 that the method would have failed4 ,but it can be shown1 and it must be closely and clearly noted1 that the method had very strict limitations from the employers' own point of view4 ,if they made the worker too comfortable1 he would not work to increase another's comforts2 if they made him too independent1 he would not work like a dependent4 ,if1 for instance1 his wages were so good that he could save out of them1 he might cease to be a wage-earner4 ,if his house or garden were his own1 he might stand an economic siege in it4 ,the whole capitalist experiment had been built on his dependence2 but now it was getting out of hand1 not in the direction of freedom1 but of frank helplessness4 ,one might say that his dependence had got independent of control4 ,but there was another way4 ,and towards this the employer's ideas began1 first darkly and unconsciously1 but now more and more clearly1 to drift4 ,giving property1 giving leisure1 giving status costs money4 ,but there is one human force that costs nothing4 ,as it does not cost the beggar a penny to indulge1 so it would not cost the employer a penny to employ4 ,he could not alter or improve the tables or the chairs on the cheap4 ,but there were two pieces of furniture 7labelled respectively the husband and the wife7 whose relations were much cheaper4 ,he could alter the marriage in the house in such a way as to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children he did want1 with the smallest possible number of the kind he did not4 ,he could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds4 ,and he could harness to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of the blood of a man in his youth1 as he has already harnessed to them all the wild waste rivers of the world4 ,,chapter ,v ,,the ,,meanness ,,of ,,the ,,motive ,now1 if any ask whether it be imaginable that an ordinary man of the wealthier type should analyse the problem or conceive the plan1 the inhumanly far-seeing plan1 as ,i have set it forth1 the answer is3 ,certainly not4 ,many rich employers are too generous to do such a thing2 many are too stupid to know what they are doing4 ,the eugenical opportunity ,i have described is but an ultimate analysis of a whole drift of thoughts in the type of man who does not analyse his thoughts4 ,he sees a slouching tramp1 with a sick wife and a string of rickety children1 and honestly wonders what he can do with them4 ,but prosperity does not favour self-examination2 and he does not even ask himself whether he means ,how can ,i help them8 or ,how can ,i use them8--what he can still do for them1 or what they could still do for him4 ,probably he sincerely means both1 but the latter much more than the former2 he laments the breaking of the tools of ,mammon much more than the breaking of the images of ,god4 ,it would be almost impossible to grope in the limbo of what he does think2 but we can assert that there is one thing he doesn't think4 ,he doesn't think1 ,this man might be as jolly as ,i am1 if he need not come to me for work or wages4 ,that this is so1 that at root the ,eugenist is the ,employer1 there are multitudinous proofs on every side1 but they are of necessity miscellaneous1 and in many cases negative4 ,the most enormous is in a sense the most negative3 that no one seems able to imagine capitalist industrialism being sacrificed to any other object4 ,by a curious recurrent slip in the mind1 as irritating as a catch in a clock1 people miss the main thing and concentrate on the mean thing4 ,modern conditions are treated as fixed1 though the very word modern implies that they are fugitive4 ,old ideas are treated as impossible1 though their very antiquity often proves their permanence4 ,some years ago some ladies petitioned that the platforms of our big railway stations should be raised1 as it was more convenient for the hobble skirt4 ,it never occurred to them to change to a sensible skirt4 ,still less did it occur to them that1 compared with all the female fashions that have fluttered about on it1 by this time ,st4 ,pancras is as historic as ,st4 ,peter's4 ,i could fill this book with examples of the universal1 unconscious assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of business or industrialism1 and not vice versa2 examples from all the magazines1 novels1 and newspapers4 ,in order to make it brief and typical1 ,i take one case of a more or less ,eugenist sort from a paper that lies open in front of me--a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt4 ,to this a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation4 ,the man had the horrible playfulness to sign his letter ,hopeful4 ,well1 there are certainly many methods by which people in the upper classes prevent procreation2 one of them is what used to be called platonic friendship1 till they found another name for it at the ,old ,bailey4 ,i do not suppose the hopeful gentleman hopes for this2 but some of us find the abortion he does hope for almost as abominable4 ,that1 however1 is not the curious point4 ,the curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying1 ,when people have large families and small wages1 not only is there a high infantile death-rate1 but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early4 ,there would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children4 ,you will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income1 desperately shared1 are the fixed points1 like day and night1 the conditions of human life4 ,compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries1 things to be modified to suit the wage-market4 ,there are unwanted children2 but unwanted by whom8 ,this man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them4 ,he means that the employers do not want to pay them properly4 ,doubtless1 if you said to him directly1 ,are you in favour of low wages8 he would say1 ,no4 ,but ,i am not1 in this chapter1 talking about the effect on such modern minds of a cross-examination to which they do not subject themselves4 ,i am talking about the way their minds work1 the instinctive trick and turn of their thoughts1 the things they assume before argument1 and the way they faintly feel that the world is going4 ,and1 frankly1 the turn of their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted1 as the turn of my mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted4 ,motherhood1 they feel1 and a full childhood1 and the beauty of brothers and sisters1 are good things in their way1 but not so good as a bad wage4 ,about the mutilation of womanhood1 and the massacre of men unborn1 he signs himself ,hopeful4 ,he is hopeful of female indignity1 hopeful of human annihilation4 ,but about improving the small bad wage he signs himself ,hopeless4 ,this is the first evidence of motive3 the ubiquitous assumption that life and love must fit into a fixed framework of employment1 even 7as in this case7 of bad employment4 ,the second evidence is the tacit and total neglect of the scientific question in all the departments in which it is not an employment question2 as1 for instance1 the marriages of the princely1 patrician1 or merely plutocratic houses4 ,i do not mean1 of course1 that no scientific men have rigidly tackled these1 though ,i do not recall any cases4 ,but ,i am not talking of the merits of individual men of science1 but of the push and power behind this movement1 the thing that is able to make it fashionable and politically important4 ,i say1 if this power were an interest in truth1 or even in humanity1 the first field in which to study would be in the weddings of the wealthy4 ,not only would the records be more lucid1 and the examples more in evidence1 but the cases would be more interesting and more decisive4 ,for the grand marriages have presented both extremes of the problem of pedigree--first the breeding in and in1 and later the most incongruous cosmopolitan blends4 ,it would really be interesting to note which worked the best1 or what point of compromise was safest4 ,for the poor 7about whom the newspaper ,eugenists are always talking7 cannot offer any test cases so complete4 ,waiters never had to marry waitresses1 as princes had to marry princesses4 ,and 7for the other extreme7 housemaids seldom marry ,red ,indians4 ,it may be because there are none to marry4 ,but to the millionaires the continents are flying railway stations1 and the most remote races can be rapidly linked together4 ,a marriage in ,london or ,paris may chain ,ravenna to ,chicago1 or ,ben ,cruachan to ,bagdad4 ,many ,european aristocrats marry ,americans1 notoriously the most mixed stock in the world2 so that the disinterested ,eugenist1 with a little trouble1 might reveal rich stores of negro or ,asiatic blood to his delighted employer4 ,instead of which he dulls our ears and distresses our refinement by tedious denunciations of the monochrome marriages of the poor4 ,for there is something really pathetic about the ,eugenist's neglect of the aristocrat and his family affairs4 ,people still talk about the pride of pedigree2 but it strikes me as the one point on which the aristocrats are almost morbidly modest4 ,we should be learned ,eugenists if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are of their hairdressing4 ,we see the modern aristocrat in the most human poses in the illustrated papers1 playing with his dog or parrot--nay1 we see him playing with his child1 or with his grandchild4 ,but there is something heartrending in his refusal to play with his grandfather4 ,there is often something vague and even fantastic about the antecedents of our most established families1 which would afford the ,eugenist admirable scope not only for investigation but for experiment4 ,certainly1 if he could obtain the necessary powers1 the ,eugenist might bring off some startling effects with the mixed materials of the governing class4 ,suppose1 to take wild and hypothetical examples1 he were to marry a ,scotch earl1 say1 to the daughter of a ,jewish banker1 or an ,english duke to an ,american parvenu of semi-,jewish extraction8 ,what would happen8 ,we have here an unexplored field4 ,it remains unexplored not merely through snobbery and cowardice1 but because the ,eugenist 7at least the influential ,eugenist7 half-consciously knows it is no part of his job2 what he is really wanted for is to get the grip of the governing classes on to the unmanageable output of poor people4 ,it would not matter in the least if all ,lord ,cowdray's descendants grew up too weak to hold a tool or turn a wheel4 ,it would matter very much1 especially to ,lord ,cowdray1 if all his employees grew up like that4 ,the oligarch can be unemployable1 because he will not be employed4 ,thus the practical and popular exponent of ,eugenics has his face always turned towards the slums1 and instinctively thinks in terms of them4 ,if he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort1 he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes4 ,he is not thinking of a millionaire like ,white1 the victim of ,thaw4 ,if he speaks of the hopelessness of feeble-mindedness1 he is thinking of some stunted creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school4 ,he is not thinking of a millionaire like ,thaw1 the slayer of ,white4 ,and this not because he is such a brute as to like people like ,white or ,thaw any more than we do1 but because he knows that his problem is the degeneration of the useful classes2 because he knows that ,white would never have been a millionaire if all his workers had spent themselves on women as ,white did1 that ,thaw would never have been a millionaire if all his servants had been ,thaws4 ,the ornaments may be allowed to decay1 but the machinery must be mended4 ,that is the second proof of the plutocratic impulse behind all ,eugenics3 that no one thinks of applying it to the prominent classes4 ,no one thinks of applying it where it could most easily be applied4 ,a third proof is the strange new disposition to regard the poor as a race2 as if they were a colony of ,japs or ,chinese coolies4 ,it can be most clearly seen by comparing it with the old1 more individual1 charitable1 and 7as the ,eugenists might say7 sentimental view of poverty4 ,in ,goldsmith or ,dickens or ,hood there is a basic idea that the particular poor person ought not to be so poor3 it is some accident or some wrong4 ,oliver ,twist or ,tiny ,tim are fairy princes waiting for their fairy godmother4 ,they are held as slaves1 but rather as the hero and heroine of a ,spanish or ,italian romance were held as slaves by the ,moors4 ,the modern poor are getting to be regarded as slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the negroes in the plantations4 ,the bondage of the white hero to the black master was regarded as abnormal2 the bondage of the black to the white master as normal4 ,the ,eugenist1 for all ,i know1 would regard the mere existence of ,tiny ,tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of ,cratchit2 but1 as a matter of fact1 we have here a very good instance of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism4 ,the poor are not a race or even a type4 ,it is senseless to talk about breeding them2 for they are not a breed4 ,they are1 in cold fact1 what ,dickens describes3 a dustbin of individual accidents1 of damaged dignity1 and often of damaged gentility4 ,the class very largely consists of perfectly promising children1 lost like ,oliver ,twist1 or crippled like ,tiny ,tim4 ,it contains very valuable things1 like most dustbins4 ,but the ,eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit them4 ,it seems to affect not only their minds1 but their very eyesight4 ,thus1 for instance1 ,mrs4 ,alec ,tweedie almost scornfully asks1 ,when we go through the slums1 do we see beautiful children8 ,the answer is1 ,yes1 very often indeed4 ,i have seen children in the slums quite pretty enough to be ,little ,nell or the outcast whom ,hood called young and so fair4 ,nor has the beauty anything necessarily to do with health2 there are beautiful healthy children1 beautiful dying children1 ugly dying children1 ugly uproarious children in ,petticoat ,lane or ,park ,lane4 ,there are people of every physical and mental type1 of every sort of health and breeding1 in a single back street4 ,they have nothing in common but the wrong we do them4 ,the important point is1 however1 that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes and long-lost daughters than there is in this ,eugenist attempt to make the poor all of a piece--a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly increasing in a chasm4 ,there is a cheap sneer at poor landladies3 that they always say they have seen better days4 ,nine times out of ten they say it because it is true4 ,what can be said of the great mass of ,englishmen1 by anyone who knows any history1 except that they have seen better days8 ,and the landlady's claim is not snobbish1 but rather spirited2 it is her testimony to the truth in the old tales of which ,i spoke3 that she ought not to be so poor or so servile in status2 that a normal person ought to have more property and more power in the ,state than that4 ,such dreams of lost dignity are perhaps the only things that stand between us and the cattle-breeding paradise now promised4 ,nor are such dreams by any means impotent4 ,i remember ,mr4 ,t4,p4 ,o',connor wrote an interesting article about ,madame ,humbert1 in the course of which he said that ,irish peasants1 and probably most peasants1 tended to have a half-fictitious family legend about an estate to which they were entitled4 ,this was written in the time when ,irish peasants were landless in their land2 and the delusion doubtless seemed all the more entertaining to the landlords who ruled them and the money-lenders who ruled the landlords4 ,but the dream has conquered the realities4 ,the phantom farms have materialised4 ,merely by tenaciously affirming the kind of pride that comes after a fall1 by remembering the old civilisation and refusing the new1 by recurring to an old claim that seemed to most ,englishmen like the lie of a broken-down lodging-house keeper at ,margate--by all this the ,irish have got what they want1 in solid mud and turf4 ,that imaginary estate has conquered the ,three ,estates of the ,realm4 ,but the homeless ,englishman must not even remember a home4 ,so far from his house being his castle1 he must not have even a castle in the air4 ,he must have no memories2 that is why he is taught no history4 ,why is he told none of the truth about the mediaeval civilisation except a few cruelties and mistakes in chemistry8 ,why does a mediaeval burgher never appear till he can appear in a shirt and a halter8 ,why does a mediaeval monastery never appear till it is corrupt enough to shock the innocence of ,henry ,,viii48 ,why do we hear of one charter--that of the barons--and not a word of the charters of the carpenters1 smiths1 shipwrights and all the rest8 ,the reason is that the ,english peasant is not only not allowed to have an estate1 he is not even allowed to have lost one4 ,the past has to be painted pitch black1 that it may be worse than the present4 ,there is one strong1 startling1 outstanding thing about ,eugenics1 and that is its meanness4 ,wealth1 and the social science supported by wealth1 had tried an inhuman experiment4 ,the experiment had entirely failed4 ,they sought to make wealth accumulate--and they made men decay4 ,then1 instead of confessing the error1 and trying to restore the wealth1 or attempting to repair the decay1 they are trying to cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment4 ,they put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound4 ,vilest of all1 they actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again4 ,they are apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad1 merely because the system was maddening4 ,suppose a captain had collected volunteers in a hot1 waste country by the assurance that he could lead them to water1 and knew where to meet the rest of his regiment4 ,suppose he led them wrong1 to a place where the regiment could not be for days1 and there was no water4 ,and suppose sunstroke struck them down on the sand man after man1 and they kicked and danced and raved4 ,and1 when at last the regiment came1 suppose the captain successfully concealed his mistake1 because all his men had suffered too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred4 ,what would you think of the gallant captain8 ,it is pretty much what ,i think of this particular captain of industry4 ,of course1 nobody supposes that all ,capitalists1 or most ,capitalists1 are conscious of any such intellectual trick4 ,most of them are as much bewildered as the battered proletariat2 but there are some who are less well-meaning and more mean4 ,and these are leading their more generous colleagues towards the fulfilment of this ungenerous evasion1 if not towards the comprehension of it4 ,now a ruler of the ,capitalist civilisation1 who has come to consider the idea of ultimately herding and breeding the workers like cattle1 has certain contemporary problems to review4 ,he has to consider what forces still exist in the modern world for the frustration of his design4 ,the first question is how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty4 ,the second question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian ideas as may be implied in ,socialism4 ,the third is whether there is any power of resistance in the tradition of the populace itself4 ,these three questions for the future ,i shall consider in their order in the final chapters that follow4 ,it is enough to say here that ,i think the progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where they will fail to prevent the experiment4 ,briefly1 the progress will have deprived the ,capitalist of his old ,individualist scruples1 without committing him to his new ,collectivist obligations4 ,he is in a very perilous position2 for he has ceased to be a ,liberal without becoming a ,socialist1 and the bridge by which he was crossing has broken above an abyss of ,anarchy4 ,,chapter ,,vi ,,the ,,eclipse ,,of ,,liberty ,if such a thing as the ,eugenic sociology had been suggested in the period from ,fox to ,gladstone1 it would have been far more fiercely repudiated by the reformers than by the ,conservatives4 ,if ,tories had regarded it as an insult to marriage1 ,radicals would have far more resolutely regarded it as an insult to citizenship4 ,but in the interval we have suffered from a process resembling a sort of mystical parricide1 such as is told of so many gods1 and is true of so many great ideas4 ,liberty has produced scepticism1 and scepticism has destroyed liberty4 ,the lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited1 when they were only leaving it undefined4 ,they thought they were only leaving it undefined1 when they were really leaving it undefended4 ,men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom4 ,but the important point to seize about this reactionary scepticism is that as it is bound to be unlimited in theory1 so it is bound to be unlimited in practice4 ,in other words1 the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable it to advance1 not only towards ,eugenic legislation1 but towards any conceivable or inconceivable extravagances of ,eugenics4 ,those who reply to any plea for freedom invariably fall into a certain trap4 ,i have debated with numberless different people on these matters1 and ,i confess ,i find it amusing to see them tumbling into it one after another4 ,i remember discussing it before a club of very active and intelligent ,suffragists1 and ,i cast it here for convenience in the form which it there assumed4 ,suppose1 for the sake of argument1 that ,i say that to take away a poor man's pot of beer is to take away a poor man's personal liberty1 it is very vital to note what is the usual or almost universal reply4 ,people hardly ever do reply1 for some reason or other1 by saying that a man's liberty consists of such and such things1 but that beer is an exception that cannot be classed among them1 for such and such reasons4 ,what they almost invariably do say is something like this3 ,after all1 what is liberty8 ,man must live as a member of a society1 and must obey those laws which1 etc41 etc4 ,in other words1 they collapse into a complete confession that they are attacking all liberty and any liberty2 that they do deny the very existence or the very possibility of liberty4 ,in the very form of the answer they admit the full scope of the accusation against them4 ,in trying to rebut the smaller accusation1 they plead guilty to the larger one4 ,this distinction is very important1 as can be seen from any practical parallel4 ,suppose we wake up in the middle of the night and find that a neighbour has entered the house not by the front-door but by the skylight2 we may suspect that he has come after the fine old family jewellery4 ,we may be reassured if he can refer it to a really exceptional event2 as that he fell on to the roof out of an aeroplane1 or climbed on to the roof to escape from a mad dog4 ,short of the incredible1 the stranger the story the better the excuse2 for an extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse4 ,but we shall hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful fashion and says1 ,after all1 what is property8 ,why should material objects be thus artificially attached1 etc41 etc48 ,we shall merely realise that his attitude allows of his taking the jewellery and everything else4 ,or if the neighbour approaches us carrying a large knife dripping with blood1 we may be convinced by his story that he killed another neighbour in self-defence1 that the quiet gentleman next door was really a homicidal maniac4 ,we shall know that homicidal mania is exceptional and that we ourselves are so happy as not to suffer from it2 and being free from the disease may be free from the danger4 ,but it will not soothe us for the man with the gory knife to say softly and pensively ,after all1 what is human life8 ,why should we cling to it8 ,brief at the best1 sad at the brightest1 it is itself but a disease from which1 etc41 etc4 ,we shall perceive that the sceptic is in a mood not only to murder us but to massacre everybody in the street4 ,exactly the same effect which would be produced by the questions of ,what is property8 and ,what is life8 is produced by the question of ,what is liberty8 ,it leaves the questioner free to disregard any liberty1 or in other words to take any liberties4 ,the very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may choose to do4 ,if he gags a man to prevent him from indulging in profane swearing1 or locks him in the coal cellar to guard against his going on the spree1 he can still be satisfied with saying1 ,after all1 what is liberty8 ,man is a member of1 etc41 etc4 ,that is the problem1 and that is why there is now no protection against ,eugenic or any other experiments4 ,if the men who took away beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the lawful pleasures1 there might be a different situation4 ,if the men who had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other liberties1 there might be some defence for them4 ,but it never occurs to them to admit any liberties at all4 ,it never so much as crosses their minds4 ,hence the excuse for the last oppression will always serve as well for the next oppression2 and to that tyranny there can be no end4 ,hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom1 where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it2 and especially the sanctuary of sex4 ,it is as easy to take away a man's wife or baby as to take away his beer when you can say ,what is liberty82 just as it is as easy to cut off his head as to cut off his hair if you are free to say ,what is life8 ,there is no rational philosophy of human rights generally disseminated among the populace1 to which we can appeal in defence even of the most intimate or individual things that anybody can imagine4 ,for so far as there was a vague principle in these things1 that principle has been wholly changed4 ,it used to be said that a man could have liberty1 so long as it did not interfere with the liberty of others4 ,this did afford some rough justification for the ordinary legal view of the man with the pot of beer4 ,for instance1 it was logical to allow some degree of distinction between beer and tea1 on the ground that a man may be moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head4 ,and it may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to throw the tea-pot at anybody's head4 ,but the whole ground of argument is now changed4 ,for people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot1 but what he does to himself by drinking the beer4 ,the argument is based on health2 and it is said that the ,government must safeguard the health of the community4 ,and the moment that is said1 there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea4 ,people can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things4 ,and there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all4 ,if he is to control the health of the community1 he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens1 and among the rest their habits in the matter of sex4 ,but there is more than this4 ,it is not only true that it is the last liberties of man that are being taken away2 and not merely his first or most superficial liberties4 ,it is also inevitable that the last liberties should be taken first4 ,it is inevitable that the most private matters should be most under public coercion4 ,this inverse variation is very important1 though very little realised4 ,if a man's personal health is a public concern1 his most private acts are more public than his most public acts4 ,the official must deal more directly with his cleaning his teeth in the morning than with his using his tongue in the market-place4 ,the inspector must interfere more with how he sleeps in the middle of the night than with how he works in the course of the day4 ,the private citizen must have much less to say about his bath or his bedroom window than about his vote or his banking account4 ,the policeman must be in a new sense a private detective2 and shadow him in private affairs rather than in public affairs4 ,a policeman must shut doors behind him for fear he should sneeze1 or shove pillows under him for fear he should snore4 ,all this and things far more fantastic follow from the simple formula that the ,state must make itself responsible for the health of the citizen4 ,but the point is that the policeman must deal primarily and promptly with the citizen in his relation to his home1 and only indirectly and more doubtfully with the citizen in his relation to his city4 ,by the whole logic of this test1 the king must hear what is said in the inner chamber and hardly notice what is proclaimed from the house-tops4 ,we have heard of a revolution that turns everything upside down4 ,but this is almost literally a revolution that turns everything inside out4 ,if a wary reactionary of the tradition of ,metternich had wished in the nineteenth century to reverse the democratic tendency1 he would naturally have begun by depriving the democracy of its margin of more dubious powers over more distant things4 ,he might well begin1 for instance1 by removing the control of foreign affairs from popular assemblies2 and there is a case for saying that a people may understand its own affairs1 without knowing anything whatever about foreign affairs4 ,then he might centralise great national questions1 leaving a great deal of local government in local questions4 ,this would proceed so for a long time before it occurred to the blackest terrorist of the despotic ages to interfere with a man's own habits in his own house4 ,but the new sociologists and legislators are1 by the nature of their theory1 bound to begin where the despots leave off1 even if they leave off where the despots begin4 ,for them1 as they would put it1 the first things must be the very fountains of life1 love and birth and babyhood2 and these are always covered fountains1 flowing in the quiet courts of the home4 ,for them1 as ,mr4 ,h4,g4 ,wells put it1 life itself may be regarded merely as a tissue of births4 ,thus they are coerced by their own rational principle to begin all coercion at the other end2 at the inside end4 ,what happens to the outside end1 the external and remote powers of the citizen1 they do not very much care2 and it is probable that the democratic institutions of recent centuries will be allowed to decay in undisturbed dignity for a century or two more4 ,thus our civilisation will find itself in an interesting situation1 not without humour2 in which the citizen is still supposed to wield imperial powers over the ends of the earth1 but has admittedly no power over his own body and soul at all4 ,he will still be consulted by politicians about whether opium is good for ,china-men1 but not about whether ale is good for him4 ,he will be cross-examined for his opinions about the danger of allowing ,kamskatka to have a war-fleet1 but not about allowing his own child to have a wooden sword4 ,about all1 he will be consulted about the delicate diplomatic crisis created by the proposed marriage of the ,emperor of ,china1 and not allowed to marry as he pleases4 ,part of this prophecy or probability has already been accomplished2 the rest of it1 in the absence of any protest1 is in process of accomplishment4 ,it would be easy to give an almost endless catalogue of examples1 to show how1 in dealing with the poorer classes at least1 coercion has already come near to a direct control of the relations of the sexes4 ,but ,i am much more concerned in this chapter to point out that all these things have been adopted in principle1 even where they have not been adopted in practice4 ,it is much more vital to realise that the reformers have possessed themselves of a principle1 which will cover all such things if it be granted1 and which is not sufficiently comprehended to be contradicted4 ,it is a principle whereby the deepest things of flesh and spirit must have the most direct relation with the dictatorship of the ,state4 ,they must have it1 by the whole reason and rationale upon which the thing depends4 ,it is a system that might be symbolised by the telephone from headquarters standing by a man's bed4 ,he must have a relation to ,government like his relation to ,god4 ,that is1 the more he goes into the inner chambers1 and the more he closes the doors1 the more he is alone with the law4 ,the social machinery which makes such a ,state uniform and submissive will be worked outwards from the household as from a handle1 or a single mechanical knob or button4 ,in a horrible sense1 loaded with fear and shame and every detail of dishonour1 it will be true to say that charity begins at home4 ,charity will begin at home in the sense that all home children will be like charity children4 ,philanthropy will begin at home1 for all householders will be like paupers4 ,police administration will begin at home1 for all citizens will be like convicts4 ,and when health and the humours of daily life have passed into the domain of this social discipline1 when it is admitted that the community must primarily control the primary habits1 when all law begins1 so to speak1 next to the skin or nearest the vitals--then indeed it will appear absurd that marriage and maternity should not be similarly ordered4 ,then indeed it will seem to be illogical1 and it will be illogical1 that love should be free when life has lost its freedom4 ,so passed1 to all appearance1 from the minds of men the strange dream and fantasy called freedom4 ,whatever be the future of these evolutionary experiments and their effect on civilisation1 there is one land at least that has something to mourn4 ,for us in ,england something will have perished which our fathers valued all the more because they hardly troubled to name it2 and whatever be the stars of a more universal destiny1 the great star of our night has set4 ,the ,english had missed many other things that men of the same origins had achieved or retained4 ,not to them was given1 like the ,french1 to establish eternal communes and clear codes of equality2 not to them1 like the ,south ,germans1 to keep the popular culture of their songs2 not to them1 like the ,irish1 was it given to die daily for a great religion4 ,but a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced1 with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions1 the way of a man who wished to walk nameless and alone4 ,it was not for nothing that they forgot all their laws to remember the name of an outlaw1 and filled the green heart of ,england with the figure of ,robin ,hood4 ,it was not for nothing that even their princes of art and letters had about them something of kings incognito1 undiscovered by formal or academic fame2 so that no eye can follow the young ,shakespeare as he came up the green lanes from ,stratford1 or the young ,dickens when he first lost himself among the lights of ,london4 ,it is not for nothing that the very roads are crooked and capricious1 so that a man looking down on a map like a snaky labyrinth1 could tell that he was looking on the home of a wandering people4 ,a spirit at once wild and familiar rested upon its wood-lands like a wind at rest4 ,if that spirit be indeed departed1 it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions it had itself permitted1 by monsters it had idly let loose4 ,industrialism and ,capitalism and the rage for physical science were ,english experiments in the sense that the ,english lent themselves to their encouragement2 but there was something else behind them and within them that was not they--its name was liberty1 and it was our life4 ,it may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last evaporated4 ,if so1 it matters little what becomes of the external experiments of our nation in later time4 ,that at which we look will be a dead thing alive with its own parasites4 ,the ,english will have destroyed ,england4 ,,chapter ,,vii ,,the ,,transformation ,,of ,,socialism ,socialism is one of the simplest ideas in the world4 ,it has always puzzled me how there came to be so much bewilderment and misunderstanding and miserable mutual slander about it4 ,at one time ,i agreed with ,socialism1 because it was simple4 ,now ,i disagree with ,socialism1 because it is too simple4 ,yet most of its opponents still seem to treat it1 not merely as an iniquity but as a mystery of iniquity1 which seems to mystify them even more than it maddens them4 ,it may not seem strange that its antagonists should be puzzled about what it is4 ,it may appear more curious and interesting that its admirers are equally puzzled4 ,its foes used to denounce ,socialism as ,anarchy1 which is its opposite4 ,its friends seemed to suppose that it is a sort of optimism1 which is almost as much of an opposite4 ,friends and foes alike talked as if it involved a sort of faith in ideal human nature2 why ,i could never imagine4 ,the ,socialist system1 in a more special sense than any other1 is founded not on optimism but on original sin4 ,it proposes that the ,state1 as the conscience of the community1 should possess all primary forms of property2 and that obviously on the ground that men cannot be trusted to own or barter or combine or compete without injury to themselves4 ,just as a ,state might own all the guns lest people should shoot each other1 so this ,state would own all the gold and land lest they should cheat or rackrent or exploit each other4 ,it seems extraordinarily simple and even obvious2 and so it is4 ,it is too obvious to be true4 ,but while it is obvious1 it seems almost incredible that anybody ever thought it optimistic4 ,i am myself primarily opposed to ,socialism1 or ,collectivism or ,bolshevism or whatever we call it1 for a primary reason not immediately involved here3 the ideal of property4 ,i say the ideal and not merely the idea2 and this alone disposes of the moral mistake in the matter4 ,it disposes of all the dreary doubts of the ,anti-,socialists about men not yet being angels1 and all the yet drearier hopes of the ,socialists about men soon being supermen4 ,i do not admit that private property is a concession to baseness and selfishness2 ,i think it is a point of honour4 ,i think it is the most truly popular of all points of honour4 ,but this1 though it has everything to do with my plea for a domestic dignity1 has nothing to do with this passing summary of the situation of ,socialism4 ,i only remark in passing that it is vain for the more vulgar sort of ,capitalist1 sneering at ideals1 to say to me that in order to have ,socialism ,you must alter human nature4 ,i answer ,yes4 ,you must alter it for the worse4 ,the clouds were considerably cleared away from the meaning of ,socialism by the ,fabians of the 'nineties2 by ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw1 a sort of anti-romantic ,quixote1 who charged chivalry as chivalry charged windmills1 with ,sidney ,webb for his ,sancho ,panza4 ,in so far as these paladins had a castle to defend1 we may say that their castle was the ,post ,office4 ,the red pillar-box was the immovable post against which the irresistible force of ,capitalist individualism was arrested4 ,business men who said that nothing could be managed by the ,state were forced to admit that they trusted all their business letters and business telegrams to the ,state4 ,after all1 it was not found necessary to have an office competing with another office1 trying to send out pinker postage-stamps or more picturesque postmen4 ,it was not necessary to efficiency that the postmistress should buy a penny stamp for a halfpenny and sell it for twopence2 or that she should haggle and beat customers down about the price of a postal order2 or that she should always take tenders for telegrams4 ,there was obviously nothing actually impossible about the ,state management of national needs2 and the ,post ,office was at least tolerably managed4 ,though it was not always a model employer1 by any means1 it might be made so by similar methods4 ,it was not impossible that equitable pay1 and even equal pay1 could be given to the ,postmaster-,general and the postman4 ,we had only to extend this rule of public responsibility1 and we should escape from all the terror of insecurity and torture of compassion1 which hag-rides humanity in the insane extremes of economic inequality and injustice4 ,as ,mr4 ,shaw put it1 ,a man must save ,society's honour before he can save his own4 ,that was one side of the argument3 that the change would remove inequality2 and there was an answer on the other side4 ,it can be stated most truly by putting another model institution and edifice side by side with the ,post ,office4 ,it is even more of an ideal republic1 or commonwealth without competition or private profit4 ,it supplies its citizens not only with the stamps but with clothes and food and lodging1 and all they require4 ,it observes considerable level of equality in these things2 notably in the clothes4 ,it not only supervises the letters but all the other human communications2 notably the sort of evil communications that corrupt good manners4 ,this twin model to the ,post ,office is called the ,prison4 ,and much of the scheme for a model ,state was regarded by its opponents as a scheme for a model prison2 good because it fed men equally1 but less acceptable since it imprisoned them equally4 ,it is better to be in a bad prison than in a good one4 ,from the standpoint of the prisoner this is not at all a paradox2 if only because in a bad prison he is more likely to escape4 ,but apart from that1 a man was in many ways better off in the old dirty and corrupt prison1 where he could bribe turnkeys to bring him drink and meet fellow-prisoners to drink with4 ,now that is exactly the difference between the present system and the proposed system4 ,nobody worth talking about respects the present system4 ,capitalism is a corrupt prison4 ,that is the best that can be said for ,capitalism4 ,but it is something to be said for it2 for a man is a little freer in that corrupt prison than he would be in a complete prison4 ,as a man can find one jailer more lax than another1 so he could find one employer more kind than another2 he has at least a choice of tyrants4 ,in the other case he finds the same tyrant at every turn4 ,mr4 ,shaw and other rational ,socialists have agreed that the ,state would be in practice government by a small group4 ,any independent man who disliked that group would find his foe waiting for him at the end of every road4 ,it may be said of ,socialism1 therefore1 very briefly1 that its friends recommended it as increasing equality1 while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty4 ,on the one hand it was said that the ,state could provide homes and meals for all2 on the other it was answered that this could only be done by ,state officials who would inspect houses and regulate meals4 ,the compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history4 ,it was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in ,socialism1 and nothing that had ever been desired in it4 ,since it was supposed to gain equality at the sacrifice of liberty1 we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality4 ,indeed1 there was not the faintest attempt to gain equality1 least of all economic equality4 ,but there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate liberty1 by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and interferences4 ,but it was not the ,socialist ,state regulating those whom it fed1 like children or even like convicts4 ,it was the ,capitalist ,state raiding those whom it had trampled and deserted in every sort of den1 like outlaws or broken men4 ,it occurred to the wiser sociologists that1 after all1 it would be easy to proceed more promptly to the main business of bullying men1 without having gone through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them4 ,after all1 it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build it2 it was even possible1 with luck1 to inspect the house in time to prevent it being built4 ,all that is described in the documents of the ,housing ,problem2 for the people of this age loved problems and hated solutions4 ,it was easy to restrict the diet without providing the dinner4 ,all that can be found in the documents of what is called ,temperance ,reform4 ,in short1 people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of ,socialism1 but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad4 ,all that official discipline1 about which the ,socialists themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive1 was taken over bodily by the ,capitalists4 ,they have now added all the bureaucratic tyrannies of a ,socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a ,capitalist ,state4 ,for the vital point is that it did not in the smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a ,capitalist ,state4 ,it simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its victims4 ,it did not enable any man to build a better house2 it only limited the houses he might live in--or how he might manage to live there2 forbidding him to keep pigs or poultry or to sell beer or cider4 ,it did not even add anything to a man's wages2 it only took away something from a man's wages and locked it up1 whether he liked it or not1 in a sort of money-box which was regarded as a medicine-chest4 ,it does not send food into the house to feed the children2 it only sends an inspector into the house to punish the parents for having no food to feed them4 ,it does not see that they have got a fire2 it only punishes them for not having a fireguard4 ,it does not even occur to it to provide the fireguard4 ,now this anomalous situation will probably ultimately evolve into the ,servile ,state of ,mr4 ,belloc's thesis4 ,the poor will sink into slavery2 it might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery4 ,that is to say1 sooner or later1 it is very probable that the rich will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the bargain2 and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like outlaws4 ,but for the purpose of my own argument it is not necessary to carry the process so far as this1 or indeed any farther than it has already gone4 ,the purely negative stage of interference1 at which we have stuck for the present1 is in itself quite favourable to all these eugenical experiments4 ,the capitalist whose half-conscious thought and course of action ,i have simplified into a story in the preceding chapters1 finds this insufficient solution quite sufficient for his purposes4 ,what he has felt for a long time is that he must check or improve the reckless and random breeding of the submerged race1 which is at once outstripping his requirements and failing to fulfil his needs4 ,now the anomalous situation has already accustomed him to stopping things4 ,the first interferences with sex need only be negative2 and there are already negative interferences without number4 ,so that the study of this stage of ,socialism brings us to the same conclusion as that of the ideal of liberty as formally professed by ,liberalism4 ,the ideal of liberty is lost1 and the ideal of ,socialism is changed1 till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor4 ,the first movements for intervention in the deepest domestic concerns of the poor all had this note of negative interference4 ,official papers were sent round to the mothers in poor streets2 papers in which a total stranger asked these respectable women questions which a man would be killed for asking1 in the class of what were called gentlemen or in the countries of what were called free men4 ,they were questions supposed to refer to the conditions of maternity2 but the point is here that the reformers did not begin by building up those economic or material conditions4 ,they did not attempt to pay money or establish property to create those conditions4 ,they never give anything--except orders4 ,another form of the intervention1 and one already mentioned1 is the kidnapping of children upon the most fantastic excuses of sham psychology4 ,some people established an apparatus of tests and trick questions2 which might make an amusing game of riddles for the family fireside1 but seems an insufficient reason for mutilating and dismembering the family4 ,others became interested in the hopeless moral condition of children born in the economic condition which they did not attempt to improve4 ,they were great on the fact that crime was a disease2 and carried on their criminological studies so successfully as to open the reformatory for little boys who played truant2 there was no reformatory for reformers4 ,i need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease4 ,it is criminology that is a disease4 ,finally one thing may be added which is at least clear4 ,whether or no the organisation of industry will issue positively in a eugenical reconstruction of the family1 it has already issued negatively1 as in the negations already noted1 in a partial destruction of it4 ,it took the form of a propaganda of popular divorce1 calculated at least to accustom the masses to a new notion of the shifting and re-grouping of families4 ,i do not discuss the question of divorce here1 as ,i have done elsewhere1 in its intrinsic character2 ,i merely note it as one of these negative reforms which have been substituted for positive economic equality4 ,it was preached with a weird hilarity1 as if the suicide of love were something not only humane but happy4 ,but it need not be explained1 and certainly it need not be denied1 that the harassed poor of a diseased industrialism were indeed maintaining marriage under every disadvantage1 and often found individual relief in divorce4 ,industrialism does produce many unhappy marriages1 for the same reason that it produces so many unhappy men4 ,but all the reforms were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness4 ,poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided4 ,through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses4 ,when the tares are found in the wheat1 the greatest promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and gathering the tares into the barn4 ,and since the serpent coiled about the chalice had dropped his poison in the wine of ,cana1 analysts were instantly active in the effort to preserve the poison and to pour away the wine4 ,,chapter ,,viii ,,the ,,end ,,of ,,the ,,household ,,gods ,the only place where it is possible to find an echo of the mind of the ,english masses is either in conversation or in comic songs4 ,the latter are obviously the more dubious2 but they are the only things recorded and quotable that come anywhere near it4 ,we talk about the popular ,press2 but in truth there is no popular ,press4 ,it may be a good thing2 but1 anyhow1 most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper leading article were written in the language of a navvy4 ,sometimes the ,press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely interested2 such as horse-racing4 ,sometimes the ,press is about as popular as the ,press ,gang4 ,we talk of ,labour leaders in ,parliament2 but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked like labourers4 ,the ,bolshevists1 ,i believe1 profess to promote something that they call proletarian art1 which only shows that the word ,bolshevism can sometimes be abbreviated into bosh4 ,that sort of ,bolshevist is not a proletarian1 but rather the very thing he accuses everybody else of being4 ,the ,bolshevist is above all a bourgeois2 a ,jewish intellectual of the town4 ,and the real case against industrial intellectualism could hardly be put better than in this very comparison4 ,there has never been such a thing as proletarian art2 but there has emphatically been such a thing as peasant art4 ,and the only literature which even reminds us of the real tone and talk of the ,english working classes is to be found in the comic song of the ,english music-hall4 ,i first heard one of them on my voyage to ,america1 in the midst of the sea within sight of the ,new ,world1 with the ,statue of ,liberty beginning to loom up on the horizon4 ,from the lips of a young ,scotch engineer1 of all people in the world1 ,i heard for the first time these immortal words from a ,london music-hall song3-- ,father's got the sack from the water-works ,for smoking of his old cherry-briar2 ,father's got the sack from the water-works ',cos he might set the water-works on fire4 ,as ,i told my friends in ,america1 ,i think it no part of a patriot to boast2 and boasting itself is certainly not a thing to boast of4 ,i doubt the persuasive power of ,english as exemplified in ,kipling1 and one can easily force it on foreigners too much1 even as exemplified in ,dickens4 ,i am no ,imperialist1 and only on rare and proper occasions a ,jingo4 ,but when ,i hear those words about ,father and the water-works1 when ,i hear under far-off foreign skies anything so gloriously ,english as that1 then indeed 7,i said to them71 then indeed3-- ,i thank the goodness and the grace ,that on my birth have smiled1 ,and made me1 as you see me here1 ,a little ,english child4 ,but that noble stanza about the water-works has other elements of nobility besides nationality4 ,it provides a compact and almost perfect summary of the whole social problem in industrial countries like ,england and ,america4 ,if ,i wished to set forth systematically the elements of the ethical and economic problem in ,pittsburg or ,sheffield1 ,i could not do better than take these few words as a text1 and divide them up like the heads of a sermon4 ,let me note the points in some rough fashion here4 #a4--;,father4 ,this word is still in use among the more ignorant and ill-paid of the industrial community2 and is the badge of an old convention or unit called the family4 ,a man and woman having vowed to be faithful to each other1 the man makes himself responsible for all the children of the woman1 and is thus generically called ,father4 ,it must not be supposed that the poet or singer is necessarily one of the children4 ,it may be the wife1 called by the same ritual ,mother4 ,poor ,english wives say ,father as poor ,irish wives say ,himself1 meaning the titular head of the house4 ,the point to seize is that among the ignorant this convention or custom still exists4 ,father and the family are the foundations of thought2 the natural authority still comes natural to the poet2 but it is overlaid and thwarted with more artificial authorities2 the official1 the schoolmaster1 the policeman1 the employer1 and so on4 ,what these forces fighting the family are we shall see1 my dear brethren1 when we pass to our second heading2 which is3-- #b4--;,got the ,sack4 ,this idiom marks a later stage of the history of the language than the comparatively primitive word ,father4 ,it is needless to discuss whether the term comes from ,turkey or some other servile society4 ,in ,america they say that ,father has been fired4 ,but it involves the whole of the unique economic system under which ,father has now to live4 ,though assumed by family tradition to be a master1 he can now1 by industrial tradition1 only be a particular kind of servant2 a servant who has not the security of a slave4 ,if he owned his own shop and tools1 he could not get the sack4 ,if his master owned him1 he could not get the sack4 ,the slave and the guildsman know where they will sleep every night2 it was only the proletarian of individualist industrialism who could get the sack1 if not in the style of the ,bosphorus1 at least in the sense of the ,embankment4 ,we pass to the third heading4 #c4--;,from the ,water-works4 ,this detail of ,father's life is very important2 for this is the reply to most of the ,socialists1 as the last section is to so many of the ,capitalists4 ,the water-works which employed ,father is a very large1 official and impersonal institution4 ,whether it is technically a bureaucratic department or a big business makes little or no change in the feelings of ,father in connection with it4 ,the water-works might or might not be nationalised2 and it would make no necessary difference to ,father being fired1 and no difference at all to his being accused of playing with fire4 ,in fact1 if the ,capitalists are more likely to give him the sack1 the ,socialists are even more likely to forbid him the smoke4 ,there is no freedom for ,father except in some sort of private ownership of things like water and fire4 ,if he owned his own well his water could never be cut off1 and while he sits by his own fire his pipe can never be put out4 ,that is the real meaning of property1 and the real argument against ,socialism2 probably the only argument against ,socialism4 #d4--;,for ,smoking4 ,nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of industrialism more strangely than the fact that1 while employers still claim the right to sack him like a stranger1 they are already beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son4 ,economically he can go and starve on the ,embankment2 but ethically and hygienically he must be controlled and coddled in the nursery4 ,government repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets bread4 ,but it anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get beer4 ,it passes an ,insurance ,act to force him to provide himself with medicine2 but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to provide himself with meals4 ,thus while the sack is inconsistent with the family1 the supervision is really inconsistent with the sack4 ,the whole thing is a tangled chain of contradictions4 ,it is true that in the special and sacred text of scripture we are here considering1 the smoking is forbidden on a general and public and not on a medicinal and private ground4 ,but it is none the less relevant to remember that1 as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison1 they may soon prove that nicotine is a poison4 ,and it is most significant of all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new democracy of ,america than in what is called the old oligarchy of ,england4 ,when ,i was in ,america1 people were already defending tobacco4 ,people who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that daylight is defensible1 or that it is not really sinful to sneeze4 ,in other words1 they are quietly going mad4 #e4--,of his old ,cherry-briar4 ,here we have the intermediate and anomalous position of the institution of ,property4 ,the sentiment still exists1 even among the poor1 or perhaps especially among the poor4 ,but it is attached to toys rather than tools2 to the minor products rather than to the means of production4 ,but something of the sanity of ownership is still to be observed2 for instance1 the element of custom and continuity4 ,it was an old cherry-briar2 systematically smoked by ,father in spite of all wiles and temptations to ,woodbines and gaspers2 an old companion possibly connected with various romantic or diverting events in ,father's life4 ,it is perhaps a relic as well as a trinket4 ,but because it is not a true tool1 because it gives the man no grip on the creative energies of society1 it is1 with all the rest of his self-respect1 at the mercy of the thing called the sack4 ,when he gets the sack from the water-works1 it is only too probable that he will have to pawn his old cherry-briar4 #f4--';,cos he might set the water-works on fire4 ,and that single line1 like the lovely single lines of the great poets1 is so full1 so final1 so perfect a picture of all the laws we pass and all the reasons we give for them1 so exact an analysis of the logic of all our precautions at the present time1 that the pen falls even from the hands of the commentator2 and the masterpiece is left to speak for itself4 ,some such analysis as the above gives a better account than most of the anomalous attitude and situation of the ,english proletarian to-day4 ,it is the more appropriate because it is expressed in the words he actually uses2 which certainly do not include the word proletarian4 ,it will be noted that everything that goes to make up that complexity is in an unfinished state4 ,property has not quite vanished2 slavery has not quite arrived2 marriage exists under difficulties2 social regimentation exists under restraints1 or rather under subterfuges4 ,the question which remains is which force is gaining on the other1 and whether the old forces are capable of resisting the new4 ,i hope they are2 but ,i recognise that they resist under more than one heavy handicap4 ,the chief of these is that the family feeling of the workmen is by this time rather an instinct than an ideal4 ,the obvious thing to protect an ideal is a religion4 ,the obvious thing to protect the ideal of marriage is the ,christian religion4 ,and for various reasons1 which only a history of ,england could explain 7though it hardly ever does71 the working classes of this country have been very much cut off from ,christianity4 ,i do not dream of denying1 indeed ,i should take every opportunity of affirming1 that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on rational apart from religious grounds4 ,but a religion is the practical protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to be pugnacious4 ,and our ideal1 if it is to survive1 will have to be both4 ,those who make merry over the landlady who has seen better days1 of whom something has been said already1 commonly speak1 in the same jovial journalese1 about her household goods as her household gods4 ,they would be much startled if they discovered how right they are4 ,exactly what is lacking to the modern materialist is something that can be what the household gods were to the ancient heathen4 ,the household gods of the heathen were not only wood and stone2 at least there is always more than that in the stone of the hearth-stone and the wood of the roof-tree4 ,so long as ,christianity continued the tradition of patron saints and portable relics1 this idea of a blessing on the household could continue4 ,if men had not domestic divinities1 at least they had divine domesticities4 ,when ,christianity was chilled with ,puritanism and rationalism1 this inner warmth or secret fire in the house faded on the hearth4 ,but some of the embers still glow or at least glimmer2 and there is still a memory among the poor that their material possessions are something sacred4 ,i know poor men for whom it is the romance of their lives to refuse big sums of money for an old copper warming-pan4 ,they do not want it1 in any sense of base utility4 ,they do not use it as a warming-pan2 but it warms them for all that4 ,it is indeed1 as ,sergeant ,buzfuz humorously observed1 a cover for hidden fire4 ,and the fire is that which burned before the strange and uncouth wooden gods1 like giant dolls1 in the huts of ancient ,italy4 ,it is a household god4 ,and ,i can imagine some such neglected and unlucky ,english man dying with his eyes on the red gleam of that piece of copper1 as happier men have died with their eyes on the golden gleam of a chalice or a cross4 ,it will thus be noted that there has always been some connection between a mystical belief and the materials of domesticity2 that they generally go together2 and that now1 in a more mournful sense1 they are gone together4 ,the working classes have no reserves of property with which to defend their relics of religion4 ,they have no religion with which to sanctify and dignify their property4 ,above all1 they are under the enormous disadvantage of being right without knowing it4 ,they hold their sound principles as if they were sullen prejudices4 ,they almost secrete their small property as if it were stolen property4 ,often a poor woman will tell a magistrate that she sticks to her husband1 with the defiant and desperate air of a wanton resolved to run away from her husband4 ,often she will cry as hopelessly1 and as it were helplessly1 when deprived of her child as if she were a child deprived of her doll4 ,indeed1 a child in the street1 crying for her lost doll1 would probably receive more sympathy than she does4 ,meanwhile the fun goes on2 and many such conflicts are recorded1 even in the newspapers1 between heart-broken parents and house-breaking philanthropists2 always with one issue1 of course4 ,there are any number of them that never get into the newspapers4 ,and we have to be flippant about these things as the only alternative to being rather fierce2 and ,i have no desire to end on a note of universal ferocity4 ,i know that many who set such machinery in motion do so from motives of sincere but confused compassion1 and many more from a dull but not dishonourable medical or legal habit4 ,but if ,i and those who agree with me tend to some harshness and abruptness of condemnation1 these worthy people need not be altogether impatient with our impatience4 ,it is surely beneath them1 in the scope of their great schemes1 to complain of protests so ineffectual about wrongs so individual4 ,i have considered in this chapter the chances of general democratic defence of domestic honour1 and have been compelled to the conclusion that they are not at present hopeful2 and it is at least clear that we cannot be founding on them any personal hopes4 ,if this conclusion leaves us defeated1 we submit that it leaves us disinterested4 ,ours is not the sort of protest1 at least1 that promises anything even to the demagogue1 let alone the sycophant4 ,those we serve will never rule1 and those we pity will never rise4 ,parliament will never be surrounded by a mob of submerged grandmothers brandishing pawn-tickets4 ,there is no trade union of defective children4 ,it is not very probable that modern government will be overturned by a few poor dingy devils who are sent to prison by mistake1 or rather by ordinary accident4 ,surely it is not for those magnificent ,socialists1 or those great reformers and reconstructors of ,capitalism1 sweeping onward to their scientific triumphs and caring for none of these things1 to murmur at our vain indignation4 ,at least if it is vain it is the less venal2 and in so far as it is hopeless it is also thankless4 ,they have their great campaigns and cosmopolitan systems for the regimentation of millions1 and the records of science and progress4 ,they need not be angry with us1 who plead for those who will never read our words or reward our effort1 even with gratitude4 ,they need surely have no worse mood towards us than mystification1 seeing that in recalling these small things of broken hearts or homes1 we are but recording what cannot be recorded2 trivial tragedies that will fade faster and faster in the flux of time1 cries that fail in a furious and infinite wind1 wild words of despair that are written only upon running water2 unless1 indeed1 as some so stubbornly and strangely say1 they are somewhere cut deep into a rock1 in the red granite of the wrath of ,god4 ,,chapter ,,ix ,a ,,short ,,chapter ,round about the year #aiac ,eugenics was turned from a fad to a fashion4 ,then1 if ,i may so summarise the situation1 the joke began in earnest4 ,the organising mind which we have seen considering the problem of slum population1 the popular material and the possibility of protests1 felt that the time had come to open the campaign4 ,eugenics began to appear in big headlines in the daily ,press1 and big pictures in the illustrated papers4 ,a foreign gentleman named ,bolce1 living at ,hampstead1 was advertised on a huge scale as having every intention of being the father of the ,superman4 ,it turned out to be a ,superwoman1 and was called ,eugenette4 ,the parents were described as devoting themselves to the production of perfect pre-natal conditions4 ,they eliminated everything from their lives which did not tend towards complete happiness4 ,many might indeed be ready to do this2 but in the voluminous contemporary journalism on the subject ,i can find no detailed notes about how it is done4 ,communications were opened with ,mr4 ,h4,g4 ,wells1 with ,dr4 ,saleeby1 and apparently with ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson4 ,every quality desired in the ideal baby was carefully cultivated in the parents4 ,the problem of a sense of humour was felt to be a matter of great gravity4 ,the ,eugenist couple1 naturally fearing they might be deficient on this side1 were so truly scientific as to have resort to specialists4 ,to cultivate a sense of fun1 they visited ,harry ,lauder1 and then ,wilkie ,bard1 and afterwards ,george ,robey2 but all1 it would appear1 in vain4 ,to the newspaper reader1 however1 it looked as if the names of ,metchnikoff and ,steinmetz and ,karl ,pearson would soon be quite as familiar as those of ,robey and ,lauder and ,bard4 ,arguments about these ,eugenic authorities1 reports of the controversies at the ,eugenic ,congress1 filled countless columns4 ,the fact that ,mr4 ,bolce1 the creator of perfect pre-natal conditions1 was afterwards sued in a law-court for keeping his own flat in conditions of filth and neglect1 cast but a slight and momentary shadow upon the splendid dawn of the science4 ,it would be vain to record any of the thousand testimonies to its triumph4 ,in the nature of things1 this should be the longest chapter in the book1 or rather the beginning of another book4 ,it should record1 in numberless examples1 the triumphant popularisation of ,eugenics in ,england4 ,but as a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last4 ,and this must be a very short chapter1 because the whole of this story was cut short4 ,a very curious thing happened4 ,england went to war4 ,this would in itself have been a sufficiently irritating interruption in the early life of ,eugenette1 and in the early establishment of ,eugenics4 ,but a far more dreadful and disconcerting fact must be noted4 ,with whom1 alas1 did ,england go to war8 ,england went to war with the ,superman in his native home4 ,she went to war with that very land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a ,superman had come4 ,she went to war with the whole of ,dr4 ,steinmetz1 and presumably with at least half of ,dr4 ,karl ,pearson4 ,she gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity4 ,in a few weeks the very name of a professor was a matter for hissing and low plebeian mirth4 ,the very name of ,nietzsche1 who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity1 was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy4 ,a new mood came upon the whole people2 a mood of marching1 of spontaneous soldierly vigilance and democratic discipline1 moving to the faint tune of bugles far away4 ,men began to talk strangely of old and common things1 of the counties of ,england1 of its quiet landscapes1 of motherhood and the half-buried religion of the race4 ,death shone on the land like a new daylight1 making all things vivid and visibly dear4 ,and in the presence of this awful actuality it seemed1 somehow or other1 as if even ,mr4 ,bolce and the ,eugenic baby were things unaccountably far-away and almost1 if one may say so1 funny4 ,such a revulsion requires explanation1 and it may be briefly given4 ,there was a province of ,europe which had carried nearer to perfection than any other the type of order and foresight that are the subject of this book4 ,it had long been the model ,state of all those more rational moralists who saw in science the ordered salvation of society4 ,it was admittedly ahead of all other ,states in social reform4 ,all the systematic social reforms were professedly and proudly borrowed from it4 ,therefore when this province of ,prussia found it convenient to extend its imperial system to the neighbouring and neutral ,state of ,belgium1 all these scientific enthusiasts had a privilege not always granted to mere theorists4 ,they had the gratification of seeing their great ,utopia at work1 on a grand scale and very close at hand4 ,they had not to wait1 like other evolutionary idealists1 for the slow approach of something nearer to their dreams2 or to leave it merely as a promise to posterity4 ,they had not to wait for it as for a distant thing like the vision of a future state2 but in the flesh they had seen their ,paradise4 ,and they were very silent for five years4 ,the thing died at last1 and the stench of it stank to the sky4 ,it might be thought that so terrible a savour would never altogether leave the memories of men2 but men's memories are unstable things4 ,it may be that gradually these dazed dupes will gather again together1 and attempt again to believe their dreams and disbelieve their eyes4 ,there may be some whose love of slavery is so ideal and disinterested that they are loyal to it even in its defeat4 ,wherever a fragment of that broken chain is found1 they will be found hugging it4 ,but there are limits set in the everlasting mercy to him who has been once deceived and a second time deceives himself4 ,they have seen their paragons of science and organisation playing their part on land and sea2 showing their love of learning at ,louvain and their love of humanity at ,lille4 ,for a time at least they have believed the testimony of their senses4 ,and if they do not believe now1 neither would they believe though one rose from the dead2 though all the millions who died to destroy ,prussianism stood up and testified against it4 ,,index ,abnormal innocence and abnormal sin1 alliance between1 #d ,abortion1 open advocacy of1 #ach ,affinity as a bar to marriage1 #h ,altruism1 remarks on1 #aaa ,anarchy1 definition of1 #bb1 #bc the opposite of ,socialism1 #aei ,anglican ,church1 the1 and question of disestablishment1 #ge ,aristocratic marriages1 ,eugenists and1 #aci et seq4 ,atheistic literary style1 the1 #df ,authority versus ,reason1 #acb ,autocrats1 ,eugenists as1 #ae ,belloc1 ,mr41 and the ,servile ,state1 #ba1 #afe rebuked by ,the ,nation1 #abb ,bluecher1 ,marshal1 an alleged saying of1 #abd ,bolce1 ,mr41 the super-,eugenist1 #ahj1 #aha ,bolshevists1 and proletarian art1 #afi ,brummell1 ,mr41 vanity of1 #if ,burglary1 punishment for1 #cf ,calvinism1 immorality of1 #abf1 #abg in the ,middle ,ages1 #ib ,calvinists and the doctrine of free-will1 #eb ,capitalists1 and workmen1 #acc ,socialists and1 #dg ,casuists1 ,eugenists as1 #ad ,catholic countries1 and the drink traffic1 #abb ,celtic sadness1 and the desolation of ,belfast1 #aba ,chesterton1 ,g4,k41 and ,socialism1 #aei et seq4 on ,h4,g4 ,wells1 #fi rebuked by ,the ,nation1 #abb ,children1 and non-eugenic unions1 #g cruelty to3 punishment for1 #bf-g ,christian conception of rebellion1 the1 #bb1 #bc ,christian religion as protector of the ideal of marriage1 #age ,christian serf1 how he differed from a pagan slave1 #ajb ,christianity1 and freedom1 #aj ,church teaching1 compulsory1 #ge ,church1 the1 and question of disestablishment1 #ge ,class ,war1 the1 and ,socialists1 #dg ,coercion1 and control of sex-relationship1 #aee ,comic songs1 and a sermon thereon1 #afi et seq4 ,compulsion1 and sexual selection1 #ad1 #aee ,compulsory education1 #ie vaccination1 #gg ,concordat1 the1 and the independence of the ,roman ,church1 #ge ,criminals1 difference between lunatics and1 #cd1 #ce proposed vivisection of1 #gi punishment of1 #be et seq41 #ce et seq4 ,criminology as a disease1 #afg ,cruelty to children1 punishment for1 #bf-g ,delusions1 concrete and otherwise1 #cb et seq4 ,disestablishment1 author's views on1 #ge ,doctors1 as health advisers of the community1 #ee1 #eh limits to their knowledge1 #eg ,education1 compulsory1 #ie ,endeavourers1 the1 #ag ,english proletarians1 anomalous attitude of1 #age ,establishment1 author's views on1 #ge et seq4 ,ethics1 as opposed to ,eugenics1 #g ,eugenic ,law1 the first1 and negative ,eugenics1 #ai1 #bh ,eugenic ,state1 beginning of the1 #ai ,eugenics and employment1 #ada author's conception of1 #ab becomes a fashion1 #ahj beginning of1 #abe different meanings of1 #d essence of1 #d first principle of1 #ch general definition of1 #aj meanness of the motive of1 #acf et seq41 #adf moral basis of1 #e the false theory of1 #c et seq4 the real aim of1 #ia et seq4 versus ,ethics1 #g ,eugenist1 true story of a1 #aad et seq4 ,eugenists1 and their new morality1 #hb as ,casuists1 #ad as employers1 #acc1 #acg as ,euphemists1 #ab their plutocratic impulses1 #aci et seq4 ,mr4 ,wells' challenge to1 #gj secret of what they really want1 #gc et seq41 #he ,euphemists1 ,eugenists as1 #ab ,fabians1 and ,socialism1 #afj ,feeble-,minded ,bill1 the1 ,eugenists and1 #ag1 #ah1 #ai1 #bj1 #bh1 #ea1 #eb ,feeble-mindedness1 ,dr4 ,saleeby on1 #fa hereditary1 #fb1 #fc ,flogging1 revival of1 #be ,foulon1 and the ,french peasants1 #ajc ,freedom1 ,christianity and1 #aj ,free-will disbelieved by ,eugenists1 #eb ,game laws1 ,english1 result of the1 #aaj1 #aab ,golf1 a ,scotch minister's opinion of1 #aag ,great ,war1 the1 outbreak of1 and its effect on ,eugenics1 #aha ,health1 and what it is1 #ei ,mr4 ,wells' views on inheritance of1 #gj1 #he-f not necessarily allied with beauty1 #add ,health adviser of society1 the1 #ee1 #eh ,hereditary diseases1 and marriage1 #dd ,heredity1 and feeble-mindedness1 #fb1 #fc author's conception of1 #fd incontestable proof of1 #ff three first facts of1 #ff-g unsatisfactory plight of students of1 #ff uselessness of attempting to judge1 #ci ,housebreaking1 punishment for1 #cf ,household gods of the heathen1 #agf ,housing problem1 the1 #afd ,hutchinson1 ,colonel and ,mrs41 the historic instance of1 #g ,huth1 ,a4,h41 an admission by1 #ej ,idealists 7see ,autocrats7 ,idiotcy1 segregation of1 #fa ,imperialism1 and its aims1 #ic ,imprisonment1 the ,state and1 #be ,incest1 the crime of1 #h1 #i ,indeterminate sentence1 the1 instrument of1 #ce principle of1 #cg ,individualism1 the experiment of1 #acj ,individualists1 early ,victorian1 #aah ,intervention1 ,socialistic movements of1 #aff ,irish peasants1 ,t4,p4 ,o',connor on1 #add ,irishman in ,liverpool1 the1 #aba ,journalism and the ,press of to-day1 #gc ,kindred and affinity1 as a bar to marriage1 #h ,law1 the1 and restrictions on sex1 #aj and the indeterminate sentence1 #ce and the lunatic1 #ca et seq4 ,libel1 definition of1 #bh loose extension of idea of1 #bg-h ,liberty and scepticism1 #adh the eclipse of1 #adi et seq4 the ,eugenist's view of1 #af ,lodge1 ,sir ,oliver1 and the stud farm1 #ac1 #ad ,lunacy1 and ,eugenic legislation1 #ag-bj1 #bh1 #bi1 #ca et seq4 medical specialists as judges of1 #dj1 #da ,lunacy ,law1 the old1 #ch ,lunacy ,laws1 the1 extension of principle of1 #ag ,lunatic1 the1 and the law1 #ca et seq4 ,lunatics1 difference between criminals and1 #cd1 #ce ,macdonald1 ,george1 and space co-incident1 #cd ,madman1 a1 definition of1 #cb ,madness1 degrees of1 #cb medical specialists and1 #dj1 #da the essence of1 #dd 7,see also ,lunacy7 ,malthus1 and his doctrine1 #aah ,mania1 segregation of1 #fa ,marriage1 and question of hereditary disease1 #dd the aim of1 #e the ,christian religion and1 #age ,marriages1 aristocratic1 #aci et seq4 ,marxian ,socialists1 and ,capitalists1 #dg ,materialism1 as the established church1 #gg in speech1 #df ,materialists1 modern1 #abh ,medical specialists and madness1 #dj1 #da ,mendicancy laws1 result of the1 #aac ,metternich tradition1 the1 #aed ,midas1 #abi ,middle ,ages1 the1 #ia et seq4 ,midias1 segregation of1 #bi ,monogamy1 author's views on1 #agf ,morality1 and restraints on sex1 #h ,neisser1 ,dr41 #gi ,newspapers1 anarchic tendency of modern1 #bf decadence of present-day1 #gc ,niagara1 comparison of modern world with1 #bd ,nietzsche1 #ahb ,non-eugenic unions1 and children1 #g ,o',connor1 ,t4,p41 on the ,irish peasants1 #add ,oedipus1 and his incestuous marriage1 #h ,om1 the formless god of the ,east1 #dh ,on1 meaning and use of the word1 #dh ,osborne1 ,dorothy1 and ,sir ,william ,temple1 #g ,pagan slave1 the1 difference between ,christian serf and1 #ajb ,pearson1 ,dr4 ,karl1 #ej1 #fe1 #aha ,peasant art1 comic songs as an instance of1 #agj ,persecution1 author's views on1 #gg et seq4 ,platonic friendship1 #ach ,politics in the ,middle ,ages1 #ib ,post ,office1 the ,state1 #afa twin model of1 #afb ,precedenters1 the1 #ag ,press1 the1 criticisms of1 #gc1 #afi ,prevention not better than cure1 #ee ,preventive medicine1 fallacy of1 #ee ,prison system1 the1 #afb ,procreation1 prevention of1 #ach ,profiteering1 author on1 #abd ,proletarian art1 #afi ,property1 author's views on1 #afj ,punishment1 extension of1 #be ,puritanical moral stories1 immorality of1 #abf ,realities1 denial of1 #cc ,reason versus ,authority1 #acb ,rebellion1 ,christian conception of1 #bc meaning of1 #bb ,reform and ,repeal1 #ie ,relations of the sexes1 atheists and1 #dg ,religion in the ,middle ,ages1 #ib ,representative ,government1 the procedure of1 #aaf ,rockefeller1 ,mr41 #abd ,russian ,orthodox ,church1 the1 and the ,state1 #ge ,saladin1 ,sultan1 #ajj ,saleeby1 ,dr41 #ej and a health-book1 #eh and feeble-mindedness1 #fa and heredity1 #fh ,saturnalia1 the ,roman1 #bd ,scepticism1 reactionary1 #adh ,science and tyranny1 #gf ,scotland1 ,church of1 #gf ,scotland1 drunkenness in1 #abb ,segregation of strong-minded people1 a suggested1 #ea ,serf1 the1 different from pagan slave1 #ajb ,servile ,state1 the1 ,mr4 ,belloc's theory of1 #ba1 #afe ,sex-relationship1 controlled by coercion1 #aee ,sexes1 the1 relations of1 #dg ,sexual selection a destruction of ,eugenics1 #i ,shaw1 ,bernard1 #afb and ,sidney ,webb1 #afa as ,puritan1 #fi ,slaves1 breeding of1 #aj ,slum children1 ,mrs4 ,alec ,tweedie and1 #adc ,smiles1 ,dr4 ,samuel1 and the ,english tramp1 #aai ,snobbishness1 an inverted1 #aag ,socialism as oppressor of the poor1 #aff ,socialism1 the transformation of1 #aei et seq4 ,socialist system1 foundation of the1 #aei ,socialists1 and solidarity1 #df their view of the ,state1 #afc ,specialists 7medical7 and madness1 #dj1 #da ,spiritual pride1 an example of1 #if ,spiritual world1 the1 author's belief in1 #fc ,state1 the1 and compulsion1 #ad ,socialist view of1 #afc ,statistics1 fundamental fallacy in use of1 #fa ,steinmetz1 ,dr4 ,r4,s41 #h1 #aha ,stevenson1 ,r4,l41 and pre-natal conditions1 #de ,temperance ,reform1 #afd ,temple1 ,sir ,william1 and ,dorothy ,osborne1 #g ,tithes1 question of1 #ge ,tory conception of anarchy1 the1 #bb ,tramp1 true history of a1 #aja et seq4 ,truant schools4 ,socialists and1 #afg ,tweedie1 ,mrs4 ,alec1 and the children of the slums1 #adc ,tyranny of government by ,science1 #gf ,vaccination1 compulsory1 #gg ,vanity1 hereditary--and other1 #fb ,victorian ,individualists1 optimism of1 #aah snobbishness1 #aag ,wages1 rise and fall of1 #dg ,webb1 ,sidney1 and ,bernard ,shaw1 #afa ,wells1 ,h4,g41 #ee1 #aed author's criticism of1 #fi-gj his ,mankind in the ,making1 #gj ,white ,slave traffic1 punishment for1 #be ,witchcraft1 punishment for1 #bf ,witch-hunting and witch burning1 #fc1 #fd ,,printed ,,in ,,england ,,by ,,cassell ,,company1 ,,limited1 ,,london1 ,e4,c4#d4 99 99 99 99 99 ---------------------------------------- ------------------- ,typographical errors corrected in text3 ,page #fb3 pepole replaced with people ,page #fe3 undoubledly replaced with undoubtedly ---------------------------------------- ------------------- 99 99 99 99 99