Part 17

After one has looked into the particulars of the case, one has just the same depressing realisation of a hopeless incompatibility that one has in some matrimonial cases. It is not so much that this or that has been done or not done; it is that the two peoples are unequally yoked in temperament and intelligence; that they do not get on together; that they never will get on together while they are closely associated. The British are not good enough nor wise enough for the job; the Indians are not great enough nor patient enough. It is a case for a separation, as friendly and speedy a separation as possible, if there is not presently to be a tragic divorce.

I must confess that I cannot conjure up any very profound indignation against General Dyer. He was, I think, stupid, spasmodically violent, and unnecessarily bloody. I do not believe that the shooting at Amritsar was inevitable, and he certainly went on shooting too long. But the sort of stupid and spasmodic violence he displayed is very characteristic of many English and many Americans. I find it in myself. I have not, luckily for myself, had General Dyer’s opportunities, but it is not necessary to kill people to discover that one may be harsh and cruel when one is thwarted by mental processes one does not understand.

I had a Dyer phase, for example, as a young, eager, and untrained schoolmaster, whipping-in the difficult stragglers for class work against which they rebelled. The whole story of the Punjab troubles is really a very pitiful story not only for the native population but for the British administrators. It is the story of a conflict of resentments. One begins with an officialdom eager for “volunteers” for the Great War, unable to understand that the Great War meant nothing and should have meant nothing to any reasonable Indian person. How could it matter to them? One goes on to a story of “pressure” increasing in its ugly details until we come to thrashings, deep indignities, and tortures to stimulate the cheerful “volunteer.” Pressure passes from chief to subordinate and degenerates towards cruelty at every transition; it is hard to fix responsibility at any point. It rouses resistance. The pestered and tormented populace begin to hold meetings, make vague gestures of counter violence. The irritable ass in the Anglo-Saxon make-up responds with “firmness.” The firmness loads the rifles and prepares aeroplane bombs to disperse “dangerous assemblies.”

There is a mood of scared obstinacy in which the Anglo-Saxon becomes capable of almost any swift atrocity. He is rarely deliberately cruel, but he is easily clumsily and hotly cruel. In the twilight the highly strung creature will shoot or lynch at very slight provocation indeed. Confronted with the dead body, his self-respect demands an adequate reason for the murder he has done. So soon as the Amritsar gardens were littered with dead and dying people, it became clear to General Dyer that a very dangerous rebellion, a second Indian Mutiny, had been heroically nipped in the bud.

His military superiors did not think so. He was rebuked and punished, very properly, very necessarily. Some amends were made to smitten and outraged India in that treatment of General Dyer, and the wretched incident of Amritsar would have passed into the receding perspectives of history if it had not been for the litigious enterprise of Sir Michael O’Dwyer. Sir C. Sankaran Nair, in a book that was extensively used by the British Government for propaganda purposes in India, wrote phrases that certainly put an unjustifiable blame upon Sir Michael O’Dwyer for the Punjab outrages. Sir Michael brought his action and reopened the question.

Now the alarming and disconcerting thing is that the Court of King’s Bench showed itself far less intelligent, far less alive to the realities of the Indian situation, than General Dyer’s military superiors in India. It is impossible to read the reports of the case without realising that the mutual irritation of English and Indian, the profound temperamental incompatibility of the two worlds, was manifested in that Court in an exaggerated degree. The case transcended its proper limits and became a wrangle on the whole Punjab question. Mr. Justice McCardie took upon himself to inform the world at large and the people of India in particular, with all the weight and prestige of the High Court upon him, “speaking with due deliberation,” that in his view General Dyer had been wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India.

The case of General Dyer was not before the Court. This announcement was a lawless outbreak on the part of Justice McCardie. How much due deliberation there was in Justice McCardie’s utterance and how much instinctive passion may be judged by the fact that General Dyer does not seem to have been punished by the Secretary of State for India at all; his case did not come up to the Secretary of State for India; he was punished for his hasty excessive violence by his own proper military superiors in India. Internal dissension restrained the jury from inflicting excessive and exemplary damages upon Sir C. Sankaran Nair for his careless libel; the damages awarded amounted to five hundred pounds, but it will be very difficult, it will be impossible, to persuade the sore and sensitive, quick and resentful mind of India that Britain has not gone back upon even such clumsy and insufficient apologies and atonements as she had made for Amritsar and its associated sins.

There comes a time in the relationships of nations and peoples, as in the relationships of partners and lovers and married couples, when offences become irrevocable. The breaking point seemed to have been reached by the British in India. The argument is practically over, the negotiations at an end. When in the opening stages of the Great War Ireland was bilked of Home Rule there remained nothing for it, between Britain and Ireland, but a practical separation. Englishmen like myself, who regard the present detachment of Ireland and England as excessive and regrettable, were entangled, in spite of themselves, in that offence; and we were helpless to avert its just and logical consequences. So now with India. It is a sort of treachery to Indians to go on talking liberally to them, to seek their friendship, to attempt co-operations, with Dyer’s impenitent rifles reloaded and our Justice McCardies ready and eager to tear up our poor attempts to make amends.

XLV

THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM: IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL?

12.7.24

During the last few weeks an extraordinary fuss has been made over the brutal murder of one of Signor Mussolini’s most able and honourable opponents. Fascism has been put upon its defence. Weak but distinct sounds of disapproval have come from the more respectable sections of the Italian public. Even the London _Times_ has published leading articles that seem to hint at a faint reluctant perception that the Italian dictator is remotely connected with the bloody and filthy terrorism on which his power rests.

It is, I say, an extraordinary fuss, a remarkable and almost unaccountable outbreak of the public conscience of Europe. Because it is surely a matter of common knowledge that hundreds of people have been beaten and tortured to death by the Fascisti, that innumerable outrages of a peculiarly dirty kind have been committed, that arson, wreckage, and threats are the normal expedients of Italian political life, and that the power of Mussolini has been built up upon the organisation of such violence. These things have been going on for some years in Italy. Ambitious imitators have arisen in France and Germany and Britain. British “Crusaders” have gathered for the blessing of the Duke of York and strange young men in Oxford and Cambridge have braved misunderstanding by wearing badges bearing the challenging initials B. F. Young Italians in black shirts have even been allowed to insult the decent British dead by cocking snooks--or performing whatever the Fascist salutation is--holding out an arm and twiddling the fingers or something of that sort--at the Westminster Cenotaph. In America, however, there does not seem to be much of a Fascist movement. There has been no temptation for America, with the Ku Klux Klan in active operation and a long tradition of lynch law, to adopt the Italian model. But there have been many American expressions of sympathy with Fascism. And then in the full tide of sunny approval just one more little murder occurs--a murder not essentially different from many other Fascist murders--and the world wakes up to the infernal vileness of a thing that has been plainly before its eyes for years.

There never was so remarkable a case of the camel bearing itself bravely up to the very moment of the last straw.

To me this break back from Fascism is astonishing. I am inclined to think that Signor Mussolini found it so too. His prompt repudiation of the crime, his eager search for the body of his butchered antagonist, his sacrifice of valued cronies and close associates seem to show that his rich, emotional, rhetorical nature was very considerably scared. Nitti’s house had been burnt and Nitti driven abroad. No one had protested, except perhaps Nitti. No apology to Nitti has been made by Mussolini, and no apology, no reparation for the stupid, malicious violence shown him, is likely to be made. And now, simply because Matteotti had been more difficult to handle and had got himself rather nastily killed, this uproar! It may be some time before the dictator is really comfortable again about the matter.

I do not propose to speculate here whether the storm will blow itself out and leave Signor Mussolini still on his blood-stained pedestal doing his solemn gestures of good government before the world, or whether we are in sight of the beginning of the end of Fascism. What interests me most is the complex of motives that drives behind Fascism, Ku Klux Klanism, the British Crusaders, and all these romantic attempts to organise ultra-legal tyrannies. The destructive instinct that gives us all a pleasure in smashing plates is plainly there, the natural malice against the unlike or the disturbing is very powerfully present, and the craving to exercise power. The stuff is in all of us, almost ineradicably so. (It betrays itself in this article.) We repress these impulses to a very large extent largely out of a fear of our fellow creatures’ reprisals. But by joining a great society with high and disinterested professions of purpose we can conspire with a certain number of our fellows for a common indulgence of this malignant drive, and we can get some protection from the consequences and establish a real sense of moral justification. Many of us who would never dare to stab a negro in the street because of his offensive contrast with ourselves, or even to push him off the sidewalk if we encountered him alone, can respond to the call for his lynching with a tremulous reassurance. Many an Italian employer who would not dare to face his workers in a crisis about wages will help burn up a Labour Party office with a stout heart.

But it is claimed in the case of all these societies for intimidation and cruelty that the main motive is something higher and better than this. A state of danger, social indiscipline, and slackness is alleged; a failure of the normal processes of law and police. The cruelties and filthy outrages that are the normal activities of these organisations are declared to be the acts of strong men resolute to restore peace, justice, and confidence to a disordered world.

There is something in this plea. It is not to be too lightly dismissed. The condition of Italy before the Fascista movement crystallised out was certainly very bad. The lawlessness of Italian life existed before the Fascists and will outlive them. After the war it expressed itself in terms of Communism; robbing took the name of expropriation, and the natural resentment of human beings at uninteresting and inferior work expressed itself in entirely mischievous strikes. The manifest injustices of the social system were made the plea for a multitude of outrages that did nothing to remedy them. There have been Communist murders and Communist outrages in Italy, though nothing to parallel the extensive systematic terrorism of the Fascista régime. The difference between Communist and Fascist is mainly this, that one conspires and does mischief and cruelty to bring about a state of order and justice that cannot exist, and the other to defend and sustain one that exists only in his imagination.

Moscow and Rome are alike in this, that they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorise criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness. Violent revolution and violent reaction are two aspects of one asinine thing, violent uncritical conviction. Neither recognises the enormously tentative quality of human institutions, and the tangled and scarcely explored difficulties in the path of social reconstruction. But they feel these things they will not recognise, these tangles and possible complications, as perverse opposition, and their impatient souls rebel. Your party Communist, like your Fascist, is neither hero nor criminal; he is an ignorant, immodest, impatient fool who wants to grab the glory of inaugurating an epoch that cannot yet possibly begin. The great future of our race will owe little to either of these current nuisances. The maker of that future is the unconvenanted scientific man who works on without hurry and without delay, dissolving problem after problem in the solvent of clear knowledge, insisting on plain speech and free publication, refusing concealment, refusing to conspire and compel, respecting himself completely in his infinite respect for his fellow-men.

At the present level of education in the world, progress is like pushing one’s way through a riot. The underlying fact in all these matters is that the common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and public affairs. He can work in no way better than his quality. He has not sufficient understanding to work in any other way. If there were no Fascism there would be something else of the same sort. The hope of the world lies in a broader and altogether more powerful organisation of education. Only as that develops will the vehement self-righteous and malignant ass abate his mischief in the world.

XLVI

THE RACE CONFLICT: IS IT UNAVOIDABLE?

19.7.24

The action of the United States in setting aside its gentlemanly understanding with Japan in the matter of immigration and excluding the Japanese altogether has greatly exercised the British mind. At this distance it strikes us as an altogether uncivilised thing to do. We believe that for all practical purposes the peace of the Pacific rests on the tripod, America, Britain, Japan; we attached immense importance to the Washington Agreement and the feeling of concord it developed; we abandoned the Anglo-Japanese alliance to American feeling and, after a struggle at home, the threat of the Singapore developments was withdrawn. Our dominant idea was the collaboration, mutual trust, and mutual forbearance of three great civilised Powers. Then, apparently as a move in the dismal party game that still rules American political life, in order to secure California for the Republican Party, Japan is smacked on the face good and hard, and most of this difficult and elaborate work of reassurance is undone.

It is not a question of excluding cheap labour or alien mass immigration; that has been fairly well done for some time. It is an intolerable assertion that individual educated Japanese are unfitted by race and culture for helpful participation in the high civilisation of the Pacific Coast. It implies that Japanese and Americans are for ever incompatible, are for ever two peoples; that for ever on this little planet their destinies are to be worked out parallel or apart--or to mingle only in a bitter conflict for exclusive survival.

These are immensely dangerous implications. It is impossible to believe that they express the real intelligence of the American public in this matter. But they do express a very widely diffused feeling, prevailing especially on the Pacific slope. That same reckless levity of the party politician, which in Britain in the “great days” of Gladstone and Disraeli, made the relations of Russia to Britain a mere party counter, has appealed to that feeling. We are forced to recognise that a great multitude of people in California and elsewhere are at a mental level from which it is possible to contemplate a future of pent-up races and cultures, each living in its own bit of the little planet and forcibly restrained from wandering or expanding beyond its boundaries.

Is such a future possible for mankind? It was, one must admit, a dominant idea in the past. More’s _Utopia_ and most of the old Utopias were closed countries. Japan itself was a completely closed country for several centuries, and no one went into or came out of it. It was Americans who forced the closed door of Japan; they of all peoples have the least reason to complain of the Japanese spill-over into their world. But no country yet tolerates the free movement of peoples. Yet the secular force of human inventiveness fights against this system of pen and barrier.

Our States, our boundaries become intolerably small to the new methods of communication, to the broadening general intelligence. Our economic lives, in spite of tariffs and the most strenuous resistance, spread out to the ends of the earth. Financially the world is one. No peoples on the earth travel and migrate more widely, or would suffer more acutely in mind and spirit from the complete restriction of international movement than the British and Americans--the Americans even more now than the British. But we cannot go thrusting our white faces into the markets of Timbuctoo, the bazaars of Central Asia, and the temples of Osaka, if we refuse to see brown and black and yellow in the street cars of Chicago and London. There is a plain antagonism of ideals here, between a venerable parochial and a new planetary mind. Is it not time for us to sort out our ideas in these matters a little more exactly?

Opinion lies between the absolute exclusionist and the free mixer. Most of us find ourselves somewhere intermediate between these extremes. The case of the exclusionists is based on just these increasing facilities of communication which make others think that at any cost the world must become one united system. This quicker and closer intercourse is intensifying racial clash. It was all very well when only a few foreigners could travel with difficulty to one’s country, but now they come in multitudes, they come to settle, they congest in lumps too solid for assimilation. It is necessary, says the exclusionist, to make the barriers higher and stronger. Yet is this more than a temporary arrest of racial conflict in a world where finance is world-wide and every people has a need, a necessity for the produce of lands unacceptable to it? In a world, too, of increasing hygienic knowledge, in which populations tend to increase and overflow? Is it anything more than the opening phase of a development of an antagonism whose natural end is war?

It seems to me that the forces that make for material world unification, the forces of invention and enlightenment, are now so great, various and subtle that they cannot be defeated. They may be delayed, but in the end they will be stronger than any exclusionist localism. The practical question before mankind is how we are to react to these forces; and the practical alternatives are either a vast cycle of wars and race conflicts, race riots, tyrannies of secret societies, struggles for ascendancy ending perhaps after many centuries of tragedy and wasted opportunity in the complete triumph of some specific culture, or a deliberate attempt to minimise race hostility, devise fair methods of co-operation and work out a mixed and various world society with a code of mutual tolerance and service for the common good.

This is not to be done by ignoring race and racial differences; the natural thought forms, and dispositions and instinctive reactions of northern Europeans and Jews, negroes and whites, Indians and Chinese, vary subtly and profoundly; you can no more ignore differences of race than differences of sex. They are things greatly intensified and supplemented by differences of tradition, training, and conditions, but when all such modifications are eliminated, essential differences remain. Intermarriage provides no remedy but rather a multiplication of types. But a well-directed education can at least restrain a passionate exaggeration of these differences and prevent the antagonisms that arise out of their recognition. Man is by nature a fierce resentful being of excessive desires and facile prejudices, and no society has ever existed or could ever exist without some sort of educational adaptation of this natural savage, some schooling and toning down of his hostile impulses. But the educational necessities of the small and limited past are as nothing to the educational necessities of the present time. If races are to be brought together, and not merely jumbled together or still more dangerously held apart, an educational effort has to be made on an altogether unprecedented scale.

An educational effort on an altogether unprecedented scale; that, I take it, is the only way of escape from the chancy, disorderly, restricted, and tragic life men are living now. The question of race, like every other great question in human affairs so soon as we follow it up, leads us to the school--no! it does not bring us to the school as we know it, but to the site of the school, the crying blank for a school that has yet to be. Get on with a school and college system commensurate with the enormous needs and dangers of this new age of world communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone born into the world the history of mankind, the significance of racial differences, expand every individual imagination to the conception of the racial life as a great adventure, and to some sense of what it may achieve in the days to come. Replace the suspicious conservatism of ignorance by the curiosity and generosity of wide vision. These are enormous demands.

No community has yet spread more than the thinnest veneer of teaching over its whole population. But the alternative to doing so is to have the machinery and methods of the new age used to arm and intensify the passions of the old. A world no better educated than this will never be very much better than this; it will be a world of race mobs and lynchings, of pogroms and race brigandage, of furious struggles for disputed territories, and wars and wars and wars. If they continue upon the present lines of narrow patriotism, of race pressure and race exclusion, I do not see how a war between Japan and the United States can be avoided for very many years. And until they have made a great educational effort I do not see how they can get away from their present lines of action.

XLVII

THE SCHOOLS OF A NEW AGE: A FORECAST

26.7.24

In these articles I have been harping continuously on the vast disorder, the uncertainty and waste of the world spectacle to-day; and I have been clamouring for more education, for much more education, for a more strenuous and devoted educational effort.