book thirty

years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more costly, and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather the opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious, modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern invention, and develop these artistically. Any technical school would have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation and transport of A.D. 2027. There are now masses of literature upon the organization of labour for efficiency that could have been boiled down at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. Apparently the Ufa people did not know of these things and did not want to know about them. They were too dense to see how these things could be brought into touch with the life of to-day and made interesting to the man in the street. After the worst traditions of the cinema world, monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned balderdash, and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.

Six million marks! The waste of it!

The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced seats were full, and the gaps in these filled up reluctantly but completely before the great film began. I suppose every one had come to see what the city of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose there are multitudes of people to be “drawn” by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that “Metropolis” was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other.

_17 April, 1927._

XVII

IS LIFE BECOMING HAPPIER?

Criticism of this series of articles is not always praise. Critics, and even friendly critics, complain that I run things down. I imagined that my real failing was an impatience to push things up. It has been complained and repeated, even by Sir Alan Cobham, who ought to know better, that I take a gloomy view of aviation, whereas I take so bright a view of its possibilities that I am driven to exasperation by the financial incompetence and narrow patriotism that restrict its practical development. And I am reported to be “pessimistic” about broadcasting, though the truth is that I have anticipated its complete disappearance--confident that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue themselves to “listening-in” will soon find a better pastime for their leisure.

But these comments and certain observations arising out of that film “Metropolis,” a stray article by Mr. Mencken, and a week-end conversation, have turned my attention to the astonishing prevalence of a disposition to disregard and deny, firstly that life in general is happier than it ever was before, and secondly, that it needs but a little vigour and clearheadedness to make it much happier than it is now or ever has been.

It was pretended in that film “Metropolis,” for example, that the development of a great mechanical civilization must reduce a large part of the population from some imaginary old-world happiness, sweet, golden, tender, and true, to machine-minding drudgery. That is a quite common assertion made without a shadow of justification in fact. And we are constantly being told that the human animal is “degenerating,” body and mind, through the malign influence of big towns; that a miasma of “vulgarity” and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the human “soul,” which was formerly quite all right, is now in a very bad way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to mediæval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry, handmade furniture, honest, homely surgery without anæsthetics, long skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness. This sort of stuff is exuded in enormous volume, and it offers an immense resistance to systematic progress. It is sustained by multitudes of people who are in a position to be better informed. The Gummidge chorus is never silent; the thoughtful headshaker moping for a return to mediævalism casts his daily shadow on every patch of sunshine, on each new social enterprise and hopeful effort. Everything we have is cheapened by comparison with an entirely legendary past and with an entirely imaginary state of “natural” health and joyfulness.

Let us admit that life still displays much unhappiness and that it is overhung by the frightful dangers of modern war. Let us concede the black possibilities latent in nationalism, flag worship, educational slackening, and the class jealousy and class malignancy of the prosperous. Even so, there are the soundest reasons for maintaining that never, since life first appeared upon this planet, has there been so great a proportion of joy, happiness, and contentment as there is about us now, nor so bright an outlook.

But before we can see this issue plainly, we have to clear our minds of certain popular errors based mainly on a misconceived theology. Many people believe it is their duty to assume the perfection of nature, and with them there is no arguing. They will hold the hyena lovely and the fever germ a perfect device. If, however, we dismiss such preconceptions and ask ourselves plainly what happiness there is now in the wild life of the jungle or desert or deep sea, we shall come upon a different answer. Nature is clumsy and heedlessly cruel. Life apart from man is not a happy spectacle. It is a flight and a chase, a craving, famished business, a round of assassinations. The jungle is no merry meeting place; it is a rustling ambush in which things lurk and creep. They become noisy only under the spur of an extravagant sexual desire. How cruel and tormented seems the sexual life of almost every living creature except our modern, sophisticated selves! Even over the herd browsing in the midst of plenty hangs a constant, vague apprehension. A cracking twig will start a panic. The first motives in animal life are hunger and fear. Apart from the brief capering spring-time of young creatures--and how brief it is!--there is no intimation of any happiness whatever except the fierce, bolted gratification of an intense appetite or the monstrous triumph of a “kill.” The most fortunate thing in the life of an animal is the shortness of its memory and its want of foresight. Throughout the whole realm of nature it is only among birds and mammals that we detect any indication whatever of a real delight in life. Birds sing in spring and the young of birds and mammals play through a brief phase of parental protection; mere gleams of sunshine these on the universal hard drive for bare existence.

Thoughtless people talk of “nature’s remedies” and imagine that every wild animal with that instinctive pharmacopœia must be in the pink of condition. But variations are far too infrequent and natural selection far too loose a guide to keep pace with the secular change of conditions and equip animals with an inherent cure for every ailment and an automatic counter-stroke to every danger. There is no such self-righting arrangement in the natural world. Most of nature’s handwork is loose-jointed and casual. The sick and weak and maimed are sooner destroyed and less in evidence, that is all. Wild species are just as subject to epidemics and hideous parasitism as man. Few creatures seem to have found their “perfect” food, or, having found it, are able to keep to it. Indigestion and malnutrition are as rife in the forest as the slum. Elephant-hunters say they can tell the proximity of a herd by the borborygmic noises the poor brutes emit, and Glasfurd describes a tiger’s life as an alternation of uncomfortable hunger and uncomfortable repletion. There is no reason to suppose that early man was any better off than an animal or any happier. Like the animals he was a fear-driven, hunger-driven, lust-driven creature, feeding perforce on what he could find. Some of the earliest known human bones are diseased bones.

The story of the common man since the beginning of social life has been anything but a record of innocent festivals and homely happiness. With the development of agriculture he began to escape from the hunger and fear, the tramp’s life in the wilderness, of the wandering savage, but only by accepting an increasing burthen of regular toil. History and archæology preserve only the records of the successful few; we must guess how many myriads of drudges worked the mines, pulled the galleys, and hoed the fields for the greatness of the Pyramids or the pretty palaces of Cnossus. And pestilence and famine returned in every lifetime. Pestilence and famine have disappeared from the general routine of life in the last hundred years or less, and that only in the Atlantic civilizations. The social history of the Old Testament goes to the accompaniment of a prolonged groan from the common people. The Roman Empire was an administrative pyramid based on slaves, serfs, and distressed taxpayers. Its distinctive instrument of social discipline was the cross. There is no period in the past upon which a well-informed man can put his finger and say, “At this time common men had more joyful lives than they have to-day.”

There is only a very scanty account of the life of the common man through most of the historical period. It was not worth writing about. As M. Abel Chevalley points out in his admirable study of that father of the English novel, Thomas Deloney, it is suddenly in the Elizabethan period that literature stoops so low as to tell of tradespeople and their servants. Peasant life still remained in darkness. Even now we get only half-lit pictures of that earthly underworld. Mr. Liam O’Flaherty’s glimpses of the Irish cultivator and Mr. Caradoc Evans’s sketches of the primitive folk in Wales are more convincing than pleasant. Deloney shows us a squabbling, insecure, undignified life, much pervaded by envy and malice, ill-housed, ill-clothed, and irregularly fed, without medical attention, amusement, reading, change of scene. It is much the same squalor that we find as the background of the adventures in the Roman world of Petronius. And still it was a marked advance, as Chevalley notes, on mediæval life.

That squalid life remained the common life until the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century. There seemed little hope of any improvement. There were great social changes, an increase of productivity and population in the eighteenth century, but they brought no perceptible amelioration of the common lot. The common man remained dirty and ignorant, needy, or incessantly laborious. The first clumsy machines brought trouble rather than relief; they threw multitudes out of employment; they needed drudges to prepare the way for them; they needed drudges to supplement their mechanical imperfections.

It was only after the middle of the nineteenth century that the real significance of mechanical invention and the practical applications of scientific knowledge and method became apparent. Then it began to dawn upon mankind that the age of the mere drudge was at an end. The outbreak of universal education in Western Europe was the practical recognition of this. Meanly and grudgingly planned, against the resistance of many privileged people, and much disturbed by their intense jealousy of their “social inferiors,” the establishment of compulsory elementary education marks, nevertheless, a new phase in the history of our species. It is the beginning of at least a chance for everybody. Close upon it came a fall in the birth-rate, and an even greater fall in the infantile death-rate--clear intimations that the common people no longer consented to leave their increase to the unchecked urgency of bestial instincts nor the health of their offspring to chance. Concurrently, too, there began such a shortening of the hours of work as to extend leisure, which had once been the privilege of a minority, to nearly the whole population.

The present phase of these changes shows us the old once necessary drudge population becoming in part an unemployable and unwanted abyss of people who are either natural inferiors or exceptionally unlucky individuals, and in part a much larger and increasing new mass of comparatively versatile semi-skilled workers, whose efficiency and standards of life are rising, whose security, leisure, and opportunity increase. These latter are the new common people that the extension of knowledge and machine production has given the world, and their development will be the measure of civilization in the future. Even at its present level it is an unprecedented mass of happy and hopeful life in comparison with any common life that has ever existed before, and there are many reasons for hoping--if great wars can be avoided and if it does not swamp itself by unrestrained proliferation--that it will go on to much higher levels still.

This expanding mass of new common people bulks largest in the United States of America, but it is as highly developed in the more complex British system even though proportionally it is not so great, and it exists with qualifications and differences in all industrialized Europe. It needs only a decade or so of peace and security to appear in China, and as the economic reconstruction of Russia brings that country into line and co-operation again with other European developments, we shall probably find that there also the conditions of machine production have evoked a new town population and a new agricultural worker, able to read, write, discuss, and think, with much the same amount of leisure and freedom as his Western comrade. The dictatorship of the proletariat may dictate what it likes, but the machine will insist, there as everywhere, that the people who will work it and for whom it will work must have minds quickened by education and refreshed by leisure, must be reasonably versatile, and must not be overworked or embittered.

Let me note one or two other points making for happiness in our days. For the first time in history over large parts of the earth the beating of inferiors has disappeared. For the first time in history the common worker has leisure assigned to him as his right. Never have common people been so well clad or so well housed. Never have they had so much freedom of movement. There is a horror of cruelty to men and animals more widely diffused than it has ever been before. There has been an extraordinary increase in social gentleness. There has never been so small a proportion of sickness and death in the community. All these things mean happiness--more universal than it has ever been.

But this general march towards happiness is not fated and assured. There is no guarantee in progress. This much of release for the common man from disease, privation, and drudgery has come about very rapidly as a consequence of inventions and discoveries that were not made to that end, and the development of the new common people into a world of civilization of free and happy individuals is manifestly challenged by enormous antagonistic forces. It may be impeded, delayed, or defeated. Flags and the loyalties and passions of insensate nationalism are flatly opposed to the attainment of a general human welfare. Every man in military uniform is a threat of violence; every gun and military implement is a man-trap in the path to a universal order. The false legend of the glorious past of our race is in a perpetual struggle against the hope of its future. Obscurantism and fear lie in wait for every courageous innovation in social and economic life. Indolence is their ally and false thinking their friend. Continual progress can only be assured by an incessant acutely critical vigilance. None the less, the common man to-day is happier than he has ever been, and with a clearer hope of continuing betterment. The common man in quite a little space of years may be better off than are even the fortunate few to-day.

And now call me a pessimist if you can!

_1 May, 1927._

XVIII

EXPERIMENTING WITH MARRIAGE. LEGAL RECOGNITION OF CURRENT REALITIES

For some time sounds of confused disputation have been coming out of Denver and gathering the attention of the world. The story is complex in its telling but simple in its essentials. Judge Lindsey, of the well-known Juvenile Court in that city, is being subjected to processes of ousting that need not hold our attention too closely. Mighty forces have worked for his overthrow. The Ku Klux Klansmen have gathered in “Klavern” against the Judge. The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a Baptist minister in his less fiery moments, seems to be in unwonted alliance with eminent Roman Catholic leaders against him. He is violently assailed and violently supported. In detail the conflict becomes squabble, but the matter upon which issue is raised is one of quite fundamental significance to any one concerned with the present drift of things. The fight rages about the institution of marriage. Judge Lindsey has been offering to improve it.

That Juvenile Court in Denver is known throughout the civilized world. It has attracted many European students and inquirers. It is as old as the century. It owes its constitution and methods very largely to Lindsey’s indefatigable zeal. Its primary function was the separation of delinquent children and juvenile first offenders from the hard atmosphere of the common police court. They were to be dealt with upon special lines, saved from the stigma of conviction, and if possible turned back from becoming members of the criminal class. This task the court has performed admirably. Its functions developed into very valuable preventive work. It became a place of reconciliation between parents and erring and recalcitrant sons and daughters, it shepherded home a multitude of runaways, and it saved great numbers of misguided and luckless girls from shame and degradation. Naturally it antagonized the saloon and the white-slave trader. For twenty years it worked with the blessing of the Roman Catholic community. Father McMenamin, one of the leading clergy in Denver, described it as “a constructive force in our community, and a godsend to many a boy and girl.”

The Klansmen, however, were early hostile, and their first hostility was based on the good relations between the Juvenile Court and the Catholics. They denounced Judge Lindsey for sending girls, girls of Catholic antecedents, to the Catholic House of the Good Shepherd, to work for nothing, as they alleged, in the laundry and be debauched. That was their agreeable version of the methods of a well-managed Catholic Home of spotless repute. It is interesting to consider the proposals that could bring Klansmen and Catholic, in spite of this, into alliance against the Judge.

Nothing could better illuminate the struggle between innovation and conservative reaction in matrimonial relations that goes on to-day all over the civilized world. It is not a struggle between good men and bad men; it is a struggle between novel and established ideas, between projected and time-honoured social usages. Father McMenamin and Judge Lindsey are well-known men in Denver; their characters have been gauged by years of public service, and there can be no question that each is a conspicuously honest, trustworthy, disinterested leader. The Klansmen lie a little under the shadow of “Elmer Gantry,” that deadly book; there is much rant, froth, and violence upon their Denver record, and their testimonial remains in suspense, but for our present purposes we can very well restrict the issue to the two unquestionably straightforward protagonists, Judge Lindsey and Father McMenamin.

Now this is what has blown up Judge Lindsey and his Juvenile Court in Denver. After years of experience of adolescent misbehaviour he has come to the conclusion that in our modern community marriage is delayed too late, and that a long and lengthening gap has been opened between the days when school and college are left behind and the days when it seems safe and reasonable to settle down and found a family. There is a growing proportion of fretting and impatient young people in the community, and out of their undisciplined eagerness springs a tangle of furtive promiscuity, prostitution, disease, crime, and general unhappiness. Young men cannot apply themselves to sound work because of nature’s strong preoccupation, and the life of possibly even a majority of young women is a life of tormented uncertainty. Judge Lindsey, with the weight of a new immense experience upon him, and with the assertions of the advocates of birth control before him, has suggested a more orderly accommodation of social life to the new conditions.

He has proposed a type of preliminary marriage which he calls Companionate Marriage. This is to be a marriage undertaken by two people for “mutual comfort,” as the Prayer-book has it, with a full knowledge of birth control, and with the deliberate intention of not having children. So long as there are no children and with due deliberation, this companionate marriage may be dissolved by mutual consent. On the other hand, at any time the couple may turn their marriage into the permanent “family marriage” form. That is his proposal, and the State of Colorado has full power to make the experiment of such an institution. He wants such laws to be made. He believes that in most cases such marriages would develop naturally into permanent unions and that their establishment would clear the social atmosphere of a vast distressful system of illicit relationships, irrevocable blunders, abortions, desertions, crimes, furtive experimenting and all those dangers to honour, health, and happiness that go with furtiveness in these matters. He believes it would mean a great simplification and purification of social life and the release of much vexed and miserable energy.

Now before we consider the opposition of Father McMenamin to this project it may be well to note the fact that there is a considerable conflict of authority about this birth control. It is certainly not a sure and complete avoidance of offspring in all cases, though with due observances and with most people it works as Judge Lindsey counts upon its working. But a certain small percentage of his companionate marriages will unintentionally convert themselves into normal family marriages. Birth control does not certainly remove, it does but diminish, the probability of consequences, and it affords no such opening of “flood gates” to “unbridled licence,” and so forth, as its antagonists assume. Furtive and illicit indulgence are not relieved of anxiety by current birth-control knowledge. That is one point in this question not generally made clear.

Another criticism of wilfully restrained fecundity seems to be of far less value. People of medical and quasi-scientific standing who dislike birth control talk of its disastrous effects upon the nerves and general health. They babble of “nervous wrecks.” They produce no evidence of these effects, they assert that they exist and talk copiously of their own remarkable opportunities for observation. But equally authoritative witnesses of an opposite school of thought, with equally remarkable opportunities for observation, will talk of the disastrous consequences of chastity and suppression. It is a field in which most people seem to think with individual bias and a violent disregard of fact. The truth seems to be that the human constitution is remarkably adaptable in these matters, a normal individual can establish habits of self-indulgence or habits of restraint, can pass from phases of great liveliness to phases of apathy and remain a happy and healthy organism. We can build up systems of habit either way. There is no standard sexual life.

Quite apart from the varieties of temperamental type, each type is capable of living in a variety of ways and there is practically nothing in any of these vehement asseverations for or against this or that liberty or this or that restriction. Many abstinent people and many declared birth-controllers are obviously healthy and vigorous people; the way of living of one sort is just as healthy as the way of living of the other sort; there are sturdy old rakes, equally sturdy priests and other celibates, hale grandmothers of a multitude, and brisk and happy old maids. One has but to look around one at the people one meets to make all this alarmist propaganda dissolve away.

Speaking very loosely and generally I would give it as my own matured impression that amidst the strains, provocations, challenges, incessant suggestions and reminders of modern life, it conduces to calm of mind and personal pride, it is the least troublesome and easiest way of living for most people, to lead a life of normal sexual reactions reasonably safeguarded against overwhelming offspring, and that all the specific demands of nature upon the nerves and health of even the most feminine of women are to be met by bringing one or two children into the world. Nature is much more accommodating than moral and social theories. The question of physical health has indeed very little to do with these discussions. It is a pity that each side will drag it in.

But after dismissing that much of the argument there still remains a complex tangle of perplexities about marriage. It is a tangle that it may be perhaps impossible to resolve altogether. Many modern people discuss it as though it was a simple problem for the comfortable satisfaction of physical desire. But in the human being there is no such thing as unmixed physical desire; there is always in matters sexual a stir of the imagination. Thereby even the grossest sexual indulgence is lifted to a plane above gourmandize or gluttony. And also, long before one begins to think about the way in which children affect the problem, there is a vast system of reactions between men and women over and above sexuality. There is a general magic, there are elements of admiration, vague pleasure, fear and friendship long before the development of those crowding preferences that become love. Further beyond the passion of love, resting upon that as a basis, resting upon the intimacy and association it establishes, is married love, which is the deepest and tenderest relationship on earth. It is in its fullness a slow growth; perhaps it needs youth and a struggle in common for its perfect establishment, perhaps like some sorts of fruit it needs cold and storm as well as sunshine for its ripening.

In the atmosphere created by this sure, deep-rooted married love alone can one find the happy assurance, the perfect security of help and loyal sympathy in which children will grow easily and insensibly to the loyalties, the habitual serviceableness, the necessary generosities, of modern citizenship.

I believe at the bottom of the mind of such a good man as Father McMenamin in his antagonism to Judge Lindsey is an intense conviction that for most people married love is the highest good, and certainly that is the persuasion of all his more reputable allies. They think it is not only the highest personal good but the highest social good. And because they know it is a thing of slow growth, they want to protect people against hasty and fitful breaches, to tie them irrevocably, to bind their habits and interests into one indissoluble bundle, so that they may grow together in spite of themselves. They hate any thought of divorce. They distrust birth control because it seems to them to minimize fidelity. They will not trust people to find out for themselves in time how good and precious this thorough, permanent, inseparable union can be. They are afraid that Judge Lindsey’s companionate marriages will be too readily voided and that a shallow, promiscuous habit of mind will be established in young people. Judge Lindsey argues, on the contrary, that his project enables them to begin a lifelong association at the very outset of their emotional lives and that the greater danger of promiscuity and the trivialization of the sexual life lies in a delayed marriage. He thinks that the rigidities of the established system defeat its own ends. The real issue lies there.

This is not fundamentally a religious question. People are too inclined to think that the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to any dissolution of marriage or the family, as a part of its faith, but this is a complete mistake. The Roman Catholic Church, it is true, sets its face against divorce, but on the other hand it will annul a marriage with great facility and so reduce children who have imagined themselves to be legitimate to the status of bastards, a thing no sort of civil divorce has ever done. If such annulments are infrequent in the Roman Catholic community, that is not because of any doctrinal bar to them, but because the habits and organization and common sense of that community are against a ready resort to such releases. It is as unfair to accuse Roman Catholicism of distinctive rigidity here as it is to charge liberal thinkers with immoral motives. Religious prejudice is as much out of place in this discussion as medical prejudice. The real issue is one of social psychology; whether one universal binding, invariable, intolerant marriage contract does or does not conduce to the establishment in the larger number of cases of this deep, fine, full, rich, socially beneficial, child-protecting relationship of married love or whether that is a harmful delusion. Those who are with Father McMenamin are of the former opinion; those who are with Judge Lindsey, of the latter.

For my own