Part 5

Within the Walled Towns the educational system shows few points of resemblance to the standards and methods still pursued outside. It is universally recognized that the prime object of all education is the development of inherent character, and for this reason it is never divorced from religion; the idea of a rigidly secularized education is abhorrent, and the dwellers in the Walled Towns rightly attribute to its prevalence in the nineteenth century much of the retrogression in character, the loss of sound standards of value, and the disappearance of leadership which synchronized with the twentieth century break-down of civilization even if it were not indeed its primary cause. Neither is there any false estimate of the possibilities of education; it is held that while it can measurably develop qualities latent in the child by reason of its racial impulse, it cannot put in what is not there already. The old superstition that education and environment were omnipotent, and that they were the safeguards as well as the justification of democracy, since given an identical environment and equal educational opportunities an hundred children of as many classes, races and antecedents would turn out equal as potential members of a free society, has long since been abandoned. It is impossible to enter into this question at length, but the chief points are these.

Education is not compulsory, but parents are bound to see that their children can “read, write and cipher.” Primary schools are maintained by the town and are conducted largely along the lines first developed by Dr. Thomas Edward Shields in the early twentieth century. Beyond primary grades the schools are maintained by various units such as the guilds, the parish and the monasteries and convents. While considerable variation exists as between one school and another, they are all under the supervision of the Director of Education in order that certain standards may be maintained. Variety both in subjects taught and in methods followed is held to be most desirable, and complete freedom of choice exists between the schools, though a parent wishing to send a child to some school other than those maintained by his own guild pays an annual fee for the privilege. Beyond reading, writing, arithmetic and music, which are common to all, the curriculum varies widely, though history, literature and Latin are practically universal. In some schools mathematics will be carried further than in others, in some natural science, while elsewhere literature, history, modern languages will be emphasized. There is no effort to subject all children to the same methods and to force them to follow the same courses,--quite the reverse; neither is the object the carrying of all children through the same schools to the same point. It is held that beyond a certain stage most children profit little or nothing by continued intensive study. On the other hand, there are always those whose desires and capacities would carry them to the limit. These are watched for with the most jealous care, and if a boy or girl shows special aptitude along any particular line he becomes an honour student, and thereafter he is in a sense a ward of the community, being sent without charge to the higher schools, the college, and even on occasion to some university beyond the limits of the Walled Town if he can gain there something not available within the walls. Of course any student may continue as far as he likes, or is able, but this is not encouraged except in the case of the honour student, and he must himself meet his own expenses. The authorities are particularly careful to discover any special ability in any of the arts, literature and philosophy, and it is the boast of the Walled Towns that no one who gives promise along any one of these lines need fail of achievement through lack of opportunity. In the case of the various crafts also the same care is exercised, and a boy showing particular aptitude is at once given the opportunity of entrance into the proper guild as an apprentice, after he has been prepared for this by a modified course of instruction adapted to his particular ability.

The college has something the effect of a blending of New College, Oxford, and St. John’s, Cambridge. It is perhaps the most beautiful element in the Walled Town, and here every intellectual, spiritual and artistic quality is fostered to the fullest degree. The college is a corporation under control of the alumni and the faculty, not in the hands of trustees, as was the unfortunate fashion amongst American universities in the nineteenth century. There are many fellowships granted for notable achievements along many lines, and a Fellow may claim free food and lodgings for life, if he choose, the return being certain service of a limited nature in the line of instruction, either as lecturer or preceptor. A few students are received from without the walls, but the number may not exceed five per cent of the student body, and high fees are charged for the privilege. There are no regular courses divided into four years. An honour student must take his Bachelor’s Degree within six years, his Master’s Degree in not less than two years thereafter, and his Doctorate in another four years, otherwise his privilege lapses and he must pay as other students, in which case there are no limits whatever and a man may spend a lifetime in study if he desires--and can pay the price. All the regular members of the Faculty must be burgesses, but many lecture courses are given by visiting professors from all parts of the world. Latin is a prerequisite for the Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, and Greek for a Doctorate, whatever the line that may be followed.

As has been said above, the recreation quarter of the town is around a square or garden a short distance from the central square. Here are to be found the public baths and gymnasium, together with a number of gay and attractive cafés and restaurants, the theatres, concert halls, etc. To a very great extent all the music and drama are the product of the people themselves. As has been said, music is almost the foundation of the educational system, therefore trained as they are from earliest childhood, good music, vocal, instrumental, orchestral, even operatic, is a natural and even inevitable result. The same is true of the drama, and nightly plays, operas, concerts are given by the townspeople themselves which reach a standard comparable with that of professionals elsewhere. Now and then, as a mark of special commendation, actors, singers and musicians are invited by the Provost and Council to visit the town, but as a general thing all is done by the people themselves. The moving picture show is prohibited.

With all the rich pageantry of life in a Walled Town, the magnificent church services, where all the arts assemble in the greatest æsthetic synthesis man has ever devised, the religious and secular festivals with their processions and merrymaking and dancing, the form and ceremony of ecclesiastical and civic life, and the unbroken environment of beauty, the craving for “shows” which holds without the walls and must be satisfied by tawdry and sensational dramatic performances, professional entertainers and the “movies,” is largely absent here where all life is couched in terms of true drama and living beauty. Here is no hard line of demarcation between a drab and sordid and hustling daily life on the one hand, and “amusement” on the other. All the arts are in constant use, and music and drama are merely extensions of this common use into slightly different fields. The same holds good of the other arts. An “art museum” is unknown, for it is a contradiction in terms. The Walled Town is full of pictures and sculpture and all the products of the art-crafts; but the latter are in every household, while the pictures and sculptures are in all the churches and public buildings, where they belong, and are constantly and universally visible. If an old picture is obtained, or a Mediæval statue or a tapestry, it is at once placed in a position similar to that for which it was originally intended. It would be perfectly impossible for the authorities to put a Bellini altar-piece in a yawning museum, jostled by crowded others and visible on week-days on payment of an admission fee, “Saturday afternoon and Sunday free.” Instead it is placed over an altar in the parish church or in some chapel. There are museums of sorts, but they are connected with the guild halls and contain only models for instruction and emulation.

And what of the social organism as it has developed under these definite modes of action? In the first place there are certain explicit inhibitions, as has already been indicated, the elimination of many details of luxury and artificial desires which tend to turn much human energy to futile ends, to raise the cost of living to abnormal heights, to establish false levels between those that have and those that have not, and that defeat every sane effort towards a simplification of life and its maintenance in accordance with right standards of comparative value. Desires have not been reduced in force, but they have been vastly cut down in number and turned towards real values. Owing to the ban on usury and the unearned increment, and the restoration of production for use in place of production for profit, wide variations in wealth no longer exist, although there are still differences due to thrift, more intelligent or prolonged work, and above all to superiority in the thing produced. Variations in social status still exist; indeed they are fostered, as a matter of fact, but they are no longer based either on money or on power. A Walled Town is at the same time individualist, coöperative and aristocratic, so far more closely resembling Mediæval society than any other that has existed, and therefore sharply differentiated both from society as it had become in the nineteenth century, and as it was aimed at by the socialists, the anarchists and the democrats of the same period. As all society is organized in guilds, and as in each there are the three classes of apprentices, journeymen and masters, so while each class has its own recognized status, there is an equally recognized difference between them. An apprentice may not hold land, therefore he cannot be a burgess of the free city, while a journeyman or master may not become a burgess unless he does hold land, and only burgesses participate in the civic duties and privileges of the town. There are certain offices which only a master may hold, and there are others which are open only to those masters who have become members of one of the Academies, or who belong to the Order of Knighthood. The Provost, for example, may be chosen only from amongst the knights. These highest ranks of dignity are constituted as follows:

In each Walled Town there are several Academies, each made up of those masters in the several guilds who have achieved the highest eminence. There is one Academy of Science and Craft, an Academy of Arts and Letters, an Academy of Philosophy, etc. Entrance into this circle of supreme achievement is effected either by direct choice of the members of the Academy, in which case the guild from which the candidate is chosen must ratify the choice, or by nomination on the part of the guild, when the recommendation so made must be sanctioned by the members of the Academy. Only high proficiency in some specified direction is ground for election to these Academies, and membership is an honour of the greatest distinction. The Order of Knighthood, however, is conferred rather for high qualities of character and for public service; any man, apprentice, minor official, servant, may be made a Knight if he demonstrates some high quality of honour or service. Here the power to nominate lies in the hands both of the Provost and of the knights themselves, but the latter have the right to confirm or reject the nominee of the Provost, while he has the same power if the nomination comes from the knights. Both the Academies and the knights have the right to degrade and expel a member of their own order; but when this is done it must be as the result of an open trial, if the accused so demands. Conviction of certain crimes and offences works degradation automatically.

The object of these higher circles of specially chosen individuals is the official recognition of character and achievement and the constituting of certain groups of distinguished men whose duty it is to guard the highest ideals, not only of their own crafts, but of society itself through the free city which embodies their communal life. The Walled Towns know well that, while all men are equal in the sight of God and before the Law, there is otherwise no such thing as equality, that it would be fatal were it ever achieved, and that the efforts at its accomplishment have undermined such society as we once had until it has crumbled and crashed into the unhandsome _débris_ of its own ruin. The determination of inequalities by false standards of comparative value is almost as ill-favoured a thing as a doctrinaire equality; between the cash values of the bourgeois nineteenth century and the crazy overturnings and levellings and topsy-turvydom of twentieth century “democracy,” or Bolshevism, there is little to choose. High values, few, cherished, recognized and honoured, are one great end of society, of life itself, and it is in these crowning marks of distinction and achievement that humanity finds its best expression as well as its safe guides and sure leaders. In the Walled Towns is always the ardent quest for something to honour, whether it is some concrete product of art, science, letters, craftsmanship, or whether it is a citizen, an ideal, a memory of the past, a figure in history, a saint--or God Himself. Honour, service, loyalty, worship,--these things have wholly taken the place of an insolent assurance of equality, a bawling about rights, a denial of superiority, a proclaiming of the omnipotence of men “by virtue of their manhood alone.”

V

It will be evident at once that the Walled Towns are founded in deliberate opposition to nineteenth century democracy as well as to its bastard issue, its Mordred and its Nemesis, anarchy and Bolshevism, and to its inevitable but blood-kin enemy, socialism. Through state socialism, communism or internationalism a fool-hardy and illiterate democracy, surrendering at discretion to the materialism of industrial civilization, has striven to maintain the thing itself in all its integrity and its wealth-producing potency while turning its products into the hands of the many rather than the few. Even now, with the myrrh of war still bitter on the lips, the dim visions of greater things are fading away, and only one cry goes up for ever greater production, for more intensive effort, in order that the material losses may be retrieved.

Neither by state-socialism nor by soviets nor by any other ingenious device can wholesome social conditions be brought out of a thing unwholesome in itself; neither can a new control, a new basis of production and distribution, or new laws, compacts and covenants, take the place of a new spiritual energy, a new vision of ultimate values and their relationships. That communism, collectivism and social democracy have all gone bankrupt during and following the war is one truth at least we have learned. The methods were foolish enough but the object aimed at, the preservation and redemption of modern industrialism, was worse.

The impulse and incentive towards Walled Towns, whenever it comes, will be primarily social, the revolt of man against the imperial scale, against a life of false values impregnably intrenched behind custom, superstition and self-interest, against the quantitative standard, the tyranny of bulk, the gross oppression of majorities. It will echo a demand for beauty in life and of life, for the reasonable and wholesome unit of human scale, for high values in ideal and in action, for simplicity and distinction and a realization of true aristocracy. Engendered of a new spiritual outlook, it may be fostered by the compulsion of circumstance, for in spite of the brave front assumed by those who even now are looking towards a future, it becomes daily more apparent that the war has destroyed modern society and that in spite of all the best intentions in the world it can never be restored. The whole fabric of industrial civilization, already rotten at heart, has collapsed; it could not save the world from universal war and it possesses no power to enforce its own recuperation. In five years the potential in men has been cut down by millions, an enormous amount of machinery for production and transportation has been destroyed, together with much arable land and many mines. The birth-rate steadily decreases all over the world and with no evident prospect of a reversal of the process. The debts of all the warring nations have reached a point where in some cases the interest charges alone will almost amount to the whole pre-war budget. The entire system of credit and of international finance has become hopelessly disorganized and no one has yet suggested any way in which it may adequately be restored. Neither armistice nor peace has brought about even the beginnings of industrial recovery; the demand is fabulous and acute, but the problems of raw materials, transportation, credits, and of markets that will not only take but also pay, are apparently unsolvable; meanwhile national debts are still increasing through the payment of enormous amounts to the unemployed.

To meet the crisis there is an unanimous cry for a resumption of production, and for a vastly augmented output through increased efficiency and more intensive methods, but the crying is in vain, for meanwhile the working element has entered on a course of restriction that will inevitably nullify every effort at increasing the output. Partly through its pre-war victories in the contest with capital, partly through the abnormal wage returns brought into being through the desperation of the managers of the war, labour is now successfully engaged in the work of cutting down production far below what it was even ten years ago, both by reducing the hours of work and by vastly augmenting the wage. The actual productivity of a “labour unit” today is less than at any time since industrialism became the controlling element in life, and in many categories it is less and less productive of satisfactory results. Under these conditions it is hard to see just how the reconstructionists expect to obtain that greatly increased output they admit is the only visible hope of saving the world from bankruptcy, chaos and barbarism.

The contest is an unfair one, for the entrance of Bolshevism has added a new factor hitherto unknown. Enraged by the failure of strikes and other war measures to improve their condition, labour is increasingly turning to the small minority of avowed revolutionists who proclaim the rather obvious fact that so long as industry is engineered by the two antagonistic forces of capitalism and proletarianism, no permanent improvement in the state of the latter is possible. Every increase in wages is followed automatically by a greater increase in the cost of living, and the ratio today between a wage of eighty cents an hour and the cost of food, clothing and shelter, is less advantageous than was the case when this sum represented not a wage per hour, but per day. The reason for this state of things is not thought out with any particular degree of exactness, and the leap is made in the dark to revolution, confiscation and, of late, to Bolshevism. The ease with which an insignificant, alien and unscrupulous minority has succeeded in destroying society in Russia and Hungary, and the apparent ease with which the same theory has almost been carried out in Germany, and may be carried out in France and Italy--not to speak of North Dakota--has aroused all the latent savagery and the impulse to revolt in large sections of the working classes, but it has also completely terrorized the politicians if not the capitalists themselves, and the menace of anarchy is met cringingly and half-heartedly. It has even acquired a strong if somewhat veiled defence among contemporary directors of human destiny.

Were it not for the results of Bolshevism wherever it is being tried, the situation might appear hopeless, for it begins to look very much as though the attitude of labour, now apparently fixed, would make impossible the industrial restoration on which statesmen, captains of industry and high financiers count for the saving of the situation. If this fails then there appears no escape from international bankruptcy and a complete breakdown of the modern social system, with all this implies of poverty, unemployment and even starvation. This is the breeding-ground of Bolshevism, but the hope lies in the fact which is becoming more apparent every day, that the thing is even worse for the proletarian than for the capitalist or the man of culture and education, the criminal being the only one that derives any profit from the adventure. A few months more of Lenine, Trotsky and Bela Kun, and the danger of Bolshevism will have passed, so far certainly as the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy are concerned.

Yet with the removal of this peril the possibility of a social and industrial breakdown still remains, and whether in anticipation thereof, or as a forced expedient under sudden catastrophe, the Walled Town offers itself as a means of solution, since it does not depend for its existence on the maintenance or recovery of the pre-war industrial system--rather on its rejection and reversal--while equally it is the prophylactic against Bolshevism and its entire reversal.

And so the Walled Towns go back to an earlier age before modernism began; back to the dim cities, the proud cities, the free cities of centuries ago. They wall themselves against the world without, and build up within their grey ramparts, and guard with their tall towers, a life that is simpler and more beautiful and more joyful and more just than that they had known and rejected because of its folly and its sin. As, long ago, when the world became too gross or the terror of its downfall too ominous, cell and hermitage, convent and monastery grew up now here, now there, in secluded valleys, on inaccessible mountains, in the barren and forgotten wilderness; as the solitary drew around him first a handful, then a horde; as the damp cave or the wattled hut gave way to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and the tall towers of enormous churches, so now, when time has come full circle again, is all to be done over once more though after a different fashion.

Men have despaired of redeeming a crumbling or recalcitrant world and have gone out into the desert for the saving of their own souls, and lo, the world followed and by them was saved. From each centre of righteousness and beauty and salvation radiated circle after circle of ever widening influence; the desert and the waste became orchard and garden, the ribald and the lawless and the insolent came knocking at the gates; soldier and bravo and king humbled their heads before tonsured monk and mitred abbot. Ever wider waxed the increasing circles until they touched, merged,--and the wonder was accomplished; ill had come to an end and good had come into being.