Part 3

No society can endure when a false standard of comparative values exists. At the present time about half the working male population in Europe and America is engaged in producing or marketing things which add nothing to the virtue, the real welfare, or the joy in life of man, and for the most part he would be better off without them. There are as many directly or indirectly engaged in getting rid of these essentially useless products as there are in their manufacture. None of these men produces anything, and they must be fed, housed and clothed by those who do. It costs as much to market the surplus product as it does to bring it into existence, and the consumer pays. The result is that “labour-saving” machines have vastly increased the burden of labour; the surplus product demands markets, and exploitation both of labour and of markets becomes the foundation of industrial civilization. The modern world has become a perfectly artificial fabric of complicated indebtedness, the magnitude and ramifications of which are so enormous that nothing preserves it but public confidence. Were this removed, or even shaken seriously, the whole fabric would collapse in universal bankruptcy, a situation even now indicated for all Europe, as may be seen in Mr. Vanderlip’s remarkable book “What has Happened to Europe.” It is to correct this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous, wrong-headed and insecure way of life, that sooner or later men, women and children will seek refuge in the Walled Towns they will build, as they have gone, time out of mind, into the monasteries and convents of religion which they built for their earlier refuge.

III

In the vision that I see of the coming Walled Towns, they may rise anywhere, given only that there is sufficient arable land near by, a river that will afford power, and a site with some elements of natural beauty. They will grow from small beginnings,--a few families and individuals at first, though the number must be sufficient to establish the identity and the autonomy of the group. The members will be those for whom the present type of social life is not good enough, either in fact or in promise; men and women who think alike on a few essential matters, who still maintain the standard of comparative values of the world before modernism, and who wish to live simply, as happily as possible, and to restore the lost ideals of justice, honour, chivalry and brotherly coöperation. While fulfilling all their obligations to government as it is now established--paying taxes, rendering military service and jury duty, and voting in those occasional cases when there is a remote chance of its doing any good--they will yet set up for themselves a community, self-supporting in so far as this is possible, with its own government, its educational system, its social organism and its regulations controlling the mode of life of its members to the extent that is necessary to carry out the fundamental principles of the association.

The phrase “Walled Towns” is symbolical only; it does not imply the great ramparts of masonry with machicolated towers, moats, drawbridges and great city gates such as once guarded the beautiful cities of the Middle Ages. It might, of course; there is no reason why a city should not so protect itself from the world without, if its fancy led in this pictorial direction; and after all, anyone who has been so fortunate as to live for a time in an ancient walled town, even under modernism, knows how potent is the psychological force of grey, guarding walls, with the little city within, and beyond the gates not only the fields and orchards and vineyards as they were in the old days, but also, and kept aloof by the ancient walls, the railways and factories of an inclement modernism. No, the adjective is symbolical merely, and indicates the fact that around these communities there is drawn a definite inhibition that absolutely cuts off from the town itself and “all they that dwell therein” those things from the assault of which refuge has been sought. I could easily imagine that these inhibitions might vary more or less as between one Walled Town and another, although certain general principles would be preserved everywhere, since these would be implied in the very movement itself.

Here are certain examples of what I mean. The antithesis between capital and labour would be impossible. Some form of a restored guild system would be the only workable basis. Production would be normally for use, not profit; and advertising or exploitation of any kind, or any other form of “creating markets,” would be rigidly tabooed. Every family would hold land sufficient for its own maintenance so far as possible farm and garden products are concerned. Certain large, expensive machines, by their nature not always in use, would be owned by the community, while the transportation of surplus produce to outside markets, the maintenance of a dairy and a canning plant, possibly also a mill and bakery, would be communally undertaken. As joyful living through that simplicity which follows from the elimination of unwholesome desires is a fundamental principle, it follows that in every case there would be a revival of the old principle of sumptuary laws, certain things being excluded as vicious in themselves, others as poisoning in their influence. Of course there is great danger here, since there is the constant menace of a pernicious infringement on that personal liberty which is an essential of all right living. The fact is incontestable, however, that our present intolerable social condition which seems to focus at one point in the “high cost of living” is due to two things: first, the multiplication during the last forty years of an incalculable number of foolish luxuries and “amenities of life” we were far happier without, but which now through familiarity we look on as indispensable; second, the fact I already have referred to that more than half the labour expended today goes to produce utterly useless, grossly ugly, or vitiatingly luxurious commodities, while half the cost of this ridiculous mass of superfluities goes to the tout, the drummer, the tradesman and the advertiser. In some way the balance must be restored, and this can be accomplished partly by regulations formally set forth, partly by the moral force of a better type of life actually put in process and exerting its silent influence over the people themselves. To a great extent it would be a case of “local option” extended to more than the question of drink. It would be neither useful nor wise (indeed it might be actionable) for me to attempt a list of the things we should be better off without. Each one can make his list to suit himself, and he will be surprised, if he deals with the question frankly, at the length of the schedule.

There is no way in which life can be brought back to a sane and wholesome and noble basis except through the recovery of a right religion and a right philosophy, the establishing of a new industrial and commercial system as radically opposed to the insanities of Bolshevism as it is to the sinister efficiency of the capitalist-proletarian _régime_, and by the elimination of the useless and crushing impedimenta that have been heaped upon us by “labour-saving” machines, the craft and ingenuity of misguided inventors, and the monumental ability of the system of advertising. Within the deadly coil of life as it is now irrevocably fixed by the society of today, there is no possibility of escape (barring the threatened success of Marxian socialism as this has taken shape in internationalism and Bolshevism), for the individual is helpless, bound hand and foot by the forces of custom, public opinion, lethargy and luxury, and by what Dr. Jacks so well calls “the tyranny of mere things.” So the real men felt in the time of St. Benedict, and of St. Odo of Cluny and St. Robert of Molesmes, of St. Norbert and St. Francis and St. Dominic and St. Bruno. They left the world in order that they might regain it, even though their eyes were fixed on a heavenly country. For themselves and their followers they gained a better type of life than the world could then offer, and their deeds lived after them in centuries of a regenerated life.

It is our habit of mind to think of the period of decline and catastrophe that intervenes between one era and the next as something awful and ominous, when the whole world realizes the horror of change and is sunk in black despair. In this we are undoubtedly as wrong as we are in the case of our interpretation of history. St. Augustine and St. Jerome saw the significance of the fall of the Roman Empire, but such other documentary evidence as exists would indicate that the Romans as a whole took it much as a matter of course, with little sense of the vastness of the catastrophe and the plenitude of the humiliation. In the ninth century men were so steeped in the universal sin and corruption they ceased to retain any perspective whatever. Very likely while Marozia and her clan were turning Rome and the Church into a monstrous offence against decency, the general public, as well as the world-wide corrupting influences themselves, thought that their “civilization” was really not so bad after all. The same is true of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the beginnings of the Renaissance dazzled man’s eyes to the tragedy of the ending of Mediævalism and the fast growing profligacy in act and thought. We ourselves are in similar case. We are so near the events that are bringing modernism to an end that we can estimate them not at all in their true nature. Read any newspaper of today, talk with any “practical business man,” or indeed almost any clergyman, educator or professed “philosopher,” and you will find the attitude of mind that looks on the war and the current beginnings of social revolution as untoward episodes, the insane creations of froward men, that only need time and patience for the crushing, to permit the world to go on again just as before, only faster and more gloriously, towards the iridescent apotheosis of democratic politics, imperial business, scientific acquisition, and the reign of reason. The incubus of the thing-that-is cannot be shifted and, as so many times before, it is only ruthless catastrophe that can bring it to an end.

Similarly we do not realize how new a thing is this tyranny of the material product, this obsession of the machine and the things it produces, the ideas and habits and superstitions it generates. I am not so old a man, as lives run, but I can still remember the old patriarchal life of the New England countryside before the juggernaut that crushed wholesome society and sane living had begun its fatal course. In the year 1880, when I first knew a great city, there were only three forces then in operation which differentiated its growth that had not existed in the time of Cæsar--steam as power, the electric telegraph and the elevator, the last a novelty of less than ten years’ existence. The great forces that were to transform society had been in existence for varying periods: some from the Renaissance, some from the Reformation, some from the Civil Wars in England, some from the French Revolution, some from the mechanical discoveries between 1767 and 1830, some from our own Civil War. It is not until the latter date, however, that they became fully operative; and the incubus we would now remove, if we could, and if we fully realized its nature, is actually the creation of the last fifty years.

I have said above that I clearly remember the old _régime_ as it stood at the opening of this fifty-year period of monstrous aggregation, exaggeration and acceleration, and this memory, together with some thirty years of study of Mediæval civilization, has much to do with the conviction that man cannot be free or sane or reasonably happy until he forcibly tears himself (or forcibly is torn) from the deadly evil of modernism in which he is enmeshed. The positive memory may help to show something of that to which I conceive we must return.

In the year 1870 my grandfather’s place was to all intents and purposes what it had been since the first portion of the old house was built during the reign of William and Mary. He was “The Squire” in his family and over the community, as his fathers had been before him for two centuries. If wills were to be drawn, land surveyed, property transferred, family quarrels adjusted, the duty fell upon him. From a material point of view the house and the farm and the way of life were as they had been. There was, I think, a mechanical corn-sheller, but I remember no other new-fangled mechanical device. The wheat for flour was grown on the place and ground at a near-by mill. Until but a few years before, the wool and flax for clothing and linen were also of home production, while the great loom was still in its place in the dim attic with its odour of thyme and beeswax. In addition to all the necessary fruits and vegetables, all the butter, cheese, bacon, hams came from the estate. So of course did the honey and the metheglyn, or honey-wine as you read of it in Chaucer, which, I verily believe, was made there last of all places in the world. To a great extent the life was still communal. For mowing, planting, harvesting, shearing, husking, the farmers came together to work in common, while the disability of one brought the others together to do his work. Communal also in a sense was the household. Many a time have I awakened as a boy, between lavender-scented homespun sheets, and beneath a wonderful woven coverlet, to dress in the early dawn and go down to the long kitchen with its eight-foot fireplace, to find all the feminine portion of the household preparing such a breakfast as the present day cannot afford; and later I have watched the neighbors gathered in the “east room” ingeniously “drawing in” rugs and mats of marvellous (if not strictly artistic) design and colour. As was the custom in that country, the house was double, the eldest son occupying the new wing until in time he removed to the old part and his son in turn took the new. It was a place of tradition, of immemorial custom, of self-respecting because arduous life, and every inch of ancient house, of vast and rambling barns, even of the fields and pastures, gardens and orchards and woodland, was redolent of old history, of permanence, of stability, of dignity and of a vivid liberty.

Here was no telephone, no automobile, no elaborate collection of complicated and costly machines, no flood of cheap newspapers, magazines or other “literature,” no weekly expedition to the “movies,” no ready-made clothes that must be constantly replaced or that annually went out of fashion, no pianola or graphophone, no “art-furniture,” no candy and cheap drinks and fruit out-of-season. Neither was there any labour problem, or strikes or poverty or high-cost-of-living.

“A hard life”? Yes, in a way, but its hardness was more than balanced by what it gave: self-respect, liberty, freedom from the tyranny and oppression of outside forces; above all, _character_, and of a strength and simplicity and fineness it would be hard to match today. I do not doubt that country and village life as it was then in the North, and had been in the South until ten years before (not as it had become in another twenty years when the new forces had begun to seep in), was more productive of real happiness and of sterling character than has been any form of life that has developed since.

Of course there was the other side to the case. Life then, good as it was, lacked some of the qualities that existed in the Middle Ages, the loss of which was a serious handicap. There was a hard and unlovely religion, the arts had wholly disappeared, and the exquisite environment man had always made for himself had vanished from life. The stimulus and the vital communal sense of the old guilds, the games, the merrymaking, the living religious practices, had faded into a colder and more austere neighbourliness. The comradeship of pilgrimage and common adventure and “church ales” had vanished utterly, and in every way life was becoming more drab and colourless. Much remained, however, though in a vanishing estate, of the clean and simple and wholesome life of a dead past, and in comparison with the common life of today, on the farm, in the factory, in village or great city, it must commend itself in such degree that many sacrifices are worth while if we can win it back. Win it back, but not as it stood then. Out of a farther past must come many things to enrich its content and make more beautiful its condition. Out of the present must come much also. An archæological or artificial restoration would be as undesirable as it is impossible. What modernism has given--or sold--that is in itself good, must be retained, and this is much. The trouble is the good is so intricately mixed with the bad that the untangling seems almost hopeless. Since our standard of comparative values is so distorted we have no sound basis from which we can set to work. Only through the process of what is really a new spiritual enlightenment, manifesting itself through both religion and philosophy, can the task be accomplished, for no ingenious engine, no clever device, no political panacea will prove even of temporary value. Probably the control of this spiritual stimulus is out of our hands; it usually is, being granted to men at times, at other times withheld. While we await the issue we can at least try humbly, and perhaps doubtfully, if we cannot take the first steps towards earning the indispensable boon, and it may be the first step will be into Walled Towns.

IV

Beaulieu is a Walled Town and it lies about forty miles from one of the largest cities of New England. The forty-mile road is in all things about what such a road is today; the same industrial suburbs, with the further fringe of slate-grey tenements in their dreary and dirty yards, then the subsidiary towns of dull or flamboyant cottages, barren railway stations, third-rate shops, harsh factories, each separated from the next by marshes or barrens where refuse is dumped, and speculative roads and house-lots cry their unsavoury wares. Little by little decent residences crop up and so the ring of reasonable opulence is reached,--now as then good so far as nature is let alone, bad where the architect and landscapist and gardener exercise their ingenuity. Farms follow, and pasture and woodland, unkempt but inoffensive, sometimes even beautiful when the hand of man has been withheld. Three or four ambitious and growing towns break the good country, each contributing of its own in the shape of mills, slums, wastes, commercial architecture, gaudy signs, hurry, noise, dust and bad smells. After the last there is an interval of comparative quiet and decency while the road runs through a respectable forest, rising as it enters among low hills, with a glimpse of water here and there, a small lake, a brook, and at last a fairly wide view.

On the bridge the view changes. There is something different in the lands beyond, though the difference is at first intangible. It is farming land for some two or three miles in front and reaching in a wide sweep right and left, while beyond the land rises swiftly with a rather thick growth of large trees above which lift two or three grey stone towers, and a silvery spire, very delicate and lofty; a view that might be in any English county or in France or the Rhineland. The farms are evidently under high cultivation, divided into rather small fields by hedgerows marked by an unusual number of well-kept trees. There are few farmhouses but many large barns of stone somewhat suggesting those of western Pennsylvania. Such houses as there are, are also of stone in great part, with brick here and there and considerable white plaster. The well-built road is, as before, crowded with motor vehicles, but two things have wholly ceased at the river--advertising signs and smoking factory chimney; as far as the eye can see neither is visible.

The zone of farms is quickly passed and then comes a space of orchards and vineyards; the highway divides, one branch to the right, another to the left, and at the fork stands a stone shrine with the figure of St. Christopher; practically all the motors go to the right, but we take the road to the left, which curves sharply after a few hundred yards, crosses a stone bridge of a single arch over a narrow but swift river, and is intercepted by a long, irregular mass of stone buildings with many mullioned windows, and a lofty tower something like that of St. John’s College in Cambridge, with a broad, high, pointed arch, and a chain reaching from side to side, blocking the way to all wheeled traffic. This is the Bar Gate of the Walled Town of Beaulieu, and here all automobiles must stop, for they are not permitted within the town. There is a good garage on one side; a sort of inn and a livery stable on the other, where one may hire a carriage or saddle horses, which alone are allowed inside the gates.

The rambling grey-stone building, which in parts rises sheer from the river’s edge and is not unlike Warwick Castle, serves many purposes. The octroi is strict and all goods brought into the town for sale must pay a varying _ad valorem_ tax, while the “liberty of the town” is granted to outsiders only on payment of a small fee. No one can sell in the town without a license, while some things are wholly prohibited, such, for example, as those things that would compete with native products, whether of food-stuffs, manufacture or artisanship, and those articles which the town has prohibited as deleterious or as “useless luxuries.” A bailiff and council of three sit here in a fine stone-vaulted room opening off the great gate, for three hours each morning, to issue their licenses or prohibitions. Here also are the town telephones and telegraphs, for while these as well as motor cars are recognized as necessities on emergency occasions, they are held to be “useless luxuries” as private possessions and are forbidden within the walls. There is nothing to prevent a townsman owning and using a motor car or private telephone beyond the town walls, if he likes, though this is looked on with disfavour, and as a matter of fact is unusual. In the early days of this, as of all Walled Towns, and to some extent thereafter, those who became townsmen continued their business or professions “in the world outside the walls,” that is to say in some neighboring city, and the jurisdiction of the Walled Town did not extend beyond its own precincts and lands. Usually in a few years’ time these men adapted themselves to the town life and law, giving up their outside interests and becoming “Burgesses of the Free City” with their interests and material activities concentrated within its limits. Conduct of government is wholly within the hands of these burgesses. As for the town telephones and motor cars, their use is free to all townsmen in cases of illness or other recognized emergency.