Part 18

Comments and replies, a quite copious correspondence, have brought home to me two things very plainly. One is the deep resentment aroused in many minds by the statement of what is to me an obvious fact, the littleness, imperfection and unsatisfactoriness and transitoriness of all contemporary life. Manifestly, they think Fifth Avenue in a state of traffic congestion, Ascot week, charity balls, Palm Beach, the opening of Parliament, the movie industry, and an American Presidential election are all right. Or at least right enough to live with pleasantly.

They think me a dismal and cantankerous hunks for wanting, as I seem to them to do, to shatter and reconstruct a world which sustains such delightful things. They do not realise that this world is being shattered anyhow, and will not be reconstructed by any automatic process. They want this world left as it is and not “messed about with” by innovating people. They have a will to be satisfied, an obstinate will for contentment. Mixed up with that, and probably fundamental to it, is a profound disbelief in the power of men wilfully to alter their conditions and determine their collective fate.

Now if I have any claim to distinction among journalists it is that I do not share that widespread scepticism and fatalism. I do not let the fact that some of us, myself included, are having an undeservedly good time hide the fact that the system, such as it is, is wasteful, that it cripples the possibilities of nearly everyone, and is, to millions of people, actively distressful and cruel.

I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster of wild change that is now trampling this world. We believe that human society could be and presently will be deliberately reconstructed more boldly, more elaborately, and with more definite intention, upon a scale commensurate with the greatness of modern mechanism and to an extent that will enable it to anticipate and discipline what are now the incalculable forces of change. And our faith is that the way to this expansion of life, this release from chance, lies through Universities and schools, through a universal education of the entire population of the world and through a universal and sustained thought process keeping pace with ever-changing necessities.

We are all democratic Socialists in so far as we regard it as the general concern to maintain order and law, to secure the common needs of everyone by carrying on the exploitation of natural wealth and the production and distribution of staple necessities for the universal and not for particular profit, and to provide education and health services for all; but we are aristocratic individualists in demanding world-wide freedom of movement for all, the utmost scope for self-realisation, and the freest utterance and hearing for every creative and innovating spirit--for everyone indeed who may possibly be creative. We see, as the only way to the sort of human life we desire, an immense development of the reorganisation of every sort of research and of the whole educational system of the world.

A rough parallelism of things mechanical and things mental will put the case as we see it. In the last two centuries the means of transport has developed from the stage coach and sailing ship to the automobile, express train, great liner, and aeroplane; there has been much more than a tenfold increase in speed and a corresponding increase in security, versatility, and comfort. Our mechanical power and mechanical productivity have increased in far greater proportion. There has been an educational advance also, but it has not kept pace with this. More people in the country are educated now, certain elements of education, reading and writing, have been spread very widely, but the education of a fully educated man is not conspicuously better than it was two hundred years ago, and education has not spread, as railways and factories have spread from the Atlantic countries, all over the earth.

We believe that we are now in the dawn of a phase of educational thrust, corresponding to the mechanical thrust of a century ago. That former thrust redistributed the population of every country it affected, created new towns, altered the build and lay-out of every town it touched, created new suburban systems, and revolutionised the visible aspect of life. The new thrust will reconstruct the scattered and confused mental life of the age, will create mental nuclei everywhere, link up the whole countryside to new and more powerful mental centres. I doubt whether at present, apart from school children, one person in a hundred in either Europe or America could be described as a mental worker; we foretell a time when something like one in eight or one in five will be definitely employed in work that is primarily mental, either as student, as teacher, as scientific investigator, as artist or writer.

In every village there will be a school, a reading-room, a theatre, closely associated with the health service and recreation of the place. It will be the central architectural fact of the place, the group of buildings about which the homes will cluster. In every town there will be the district schools and the great high school, the art studios, the theatres, the laboratories. Every considerable town will have a University as its chief expression and its crowning glory. The agricultural and industrial life of the land will be closely linked to the technical research of the colleges; they will go thither for advice and direction. The business and financial system will no longer be secret and private, a system of competitive conspiracies, but it will be working in close touch with the general scientific life; the banker will be a professor of economics, the iron-master will be a metallurgist. That is the order of the world we desire, and which we foresee through our hopes. That is the world that will replace the system of stampedes, scrambles, riots, and traffic jams in which we live to-day.

XLVIII

THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS, WHALES, AND GORILLAS

2.8.24

The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is open to all sorts of criticism, and is occasionally quite absurd, but it contrives to be entertaining. Many of us dislike the Kipling quality and the strong, unpleasant flavour of Imperial Preference that hang about it. I have reviled its commercialism; its relative disregard of educational duties and responsibilities; its suggestion of imperial self-sufficiency. But all sorts of conferences are meeting at Wembley, and occasionally a strong breath of human common sense dispels for a time the stuffy, foggy conceit of our recent and transitory Empire. Wembley, in spite of itself, becomes international and contributes to the project of a new world.

The British Electrical and Associated Trades have been holding a most enlightening and hopeful conference on the power resources of the world--not of the Empire, be it noted, but of the world. Prominent among the speakers at the opening were the secretary of the United States Federal Power Commission, the president of the Italian Electrical Committee, and other “outsiders.” A real attempt to see the world as one economic whole has been made. A frank admission of the need for organised world unity and world co-operation underlies the

## activities of this particular gathering.

The President of the Conference was the Prince of Wales. He made a very remarkable speech. Three or four years ago I made a number of people extremely indignant by criticising the world tour of the Prince. I complained that his speeches and proceedings seemed to ignore the world situation and to intensify the imperialist egotism of the narrower sort of English throughout the world. He did seem to me then to be behaving as so many Army and Indian Civil Service people and so forth still behave, as if the British Empire was a clique of Anglican communities aloof from the common interests of mankind.

Quite a number of worthy persons seemed to think that a typical common Englishman like myself had no right to pass a judgment upon a young man, a quarter of a century his junior, simply because that young man happened to be the Heir Apparent. They wanted him to be treated as divine, above politics. But that sort of thing is not in the English tradition. The British Royal Family is not divine; it cannot keep out of politics if it is to function at all, because it has constantly to speak and act for the Empire as a whole; and it is a matter of very great importance that the Prince should show himself as he has now shown himself, growing in political wisdom and sensible of the wider vision of human unity that opens before mankind. Here, for example, is a sentence from his speech in which he sinks the Prince altogether, lost in that much nobler thing, the creative citizen of the world:

“Finance, science and research are universal, but the utilisation of the results derived from these activities is not universal, and in this disparity lies one of the greatest obstacles to progress.”

And again: “You have before you, in the reports submitted to the World Power Conference, the raw material for a survey of the power resources of the world; you can now explore many countries which have hitherto been veiled in mystery, and assess at their true value the possibilities of an immense industrial development in many of them; you may, from this material, erect the structure which will go beyond the confines of one country, or group of countries, and include all those parts of the world where man can hope to prosper. International co-operation may emerge from the realm of the ideal into the realm of practical utilisation as the result of your deliberations, and I sincerely trust that full success will attend them.”

I doubt if any royal personage has ever so distinctly repudiated that narrow particularism to the realm, to which royalty is supposed to be distinctly pledged. This is hoisting the flag of the world-State over all the Imperial flags that wave from the Wembley buildings as plainly and frankly as, considering all things, it can be done--at Wembley.

In very many ways the last half-year has been a year of mental and moral recovery in Europe. A year ago, when one wrote of nationalism as a dangerous and dividing sentiment, of national sovereignty as a nuisance, of the pre-emption of this or that area of the world’s surface and of this or that supply of necessary national material in the interests of the exploiters under this or that flag as a method of crippling and wasting the whole economic life of mankind, one felt that one was writing and thinking in an almost hopeless minority. All the world seemed to have gone nationalist and exclusive. One felt one shouted to an entirely inattentive preoccupied crowd under a stormy sky against which nothing was bright but the national and Imperial flags. Flags were supreme. Now it is as if the sun of reason shone everywhere, and the sundering flags visibly droop in that sunlight.

There are moments when it would seem that after all man is a reasonable creature. The accumulation of considerations that is now plainly driving men, in spite of ancient traditions and prejudices, towards an organised cosmopolitanism is very great. These considerations come in on us from all sides. While one is refusing to be anything but an isolated patriot on this count, one is being undermined almost unawares upon another. Many of us who will hear of no super-Government to save us from war, nor of any properly equipped and provided super-Court to settle international disputes, find ourselves presently confronted by the problem of epidemics and consenting to the idea of supernational controls from the health point of view. The postal union, which the Great War strained but has not destroyed, is after all only the thin framework of a much more comprehensive union of communications. When I read the speech of the Prince of Wales at the World Power Conference I was at once reminded of the preachings and efforts of that wonderful old man, David Lubin, the Israelite who set up the International Institute of Agriculture. The chief objective of this “Institute” was a contemporary survey with a view to a proper distribution of the world’s staple productions. Shortages were to be anticipated and headed off; over-production was to be restrained. And arising out of this main idea was Lubin’s secondary project, the placing of all the shipping of the world and all the great international railway lines--he lived before air transport seemed a probability--under one world authority which would fix freights as we fix postal charges. This Power Conference has been talking pure Lubinism about the world distribution of power.

I suppose it is because I had a biological training that I find one of the most attractive arguments for world unity, and the suppression of flag-worship, in the need of protecting whales from ourselves and ourselves from bacteria. The dwindling world fauna of this planet is in urgent need of international game laws and a supernational game-keeper. Species of whales are being exterminated because the ocean is no man’s land, and if one State restrains its whalers from excessive wasteful slaughter they can shelter their activities beneath some less scrupulous flag. Diseases cannot be stamped out of the world by systematic sanitation while one affected Power sees fit to exercise its sovereign right to remain filthy. And any species of birds or beasts that lives under a careless flag may be exterminated by the sportsman and no one have a right to protest. The gorilla, they say, is going fast, and the African elephant. These marvels of life, these strange and wonderful beings of whose vitality and impulses we know so little, are being killed because they are insufficiently protected. Their chief slaughterers are patriotic collectors, and the fewer the survivors the hotter is the competition for specimens to adorn their beastly national collections. Yet the gorilla belongs not to the flag that claims its habitat but to all mankind. It belongs to me, to any man in Canada or in Texas, as much as it does to any West African or any Belgian. But there is no world control to protect these grotesque and marvellous creatures for us and for our children’s children. They will go--one more vivid item in the vast wastage of animal, vegetable and mineral wealth that the scrambling insufficiency of mere flag rule involves. For them and for a thousand vital treasures the world government may come too late. Yet that it is coming rapidly and surely, the words and the spirit of the discourse of the Prince of Wales, in that very temple of British Imperial exclusiveness, the Wembley Empire Exhibition, bear witness. Wembley was to have inaugurated Imperial Preference, but it is really Imperial Preference lying in state. I wonder how many years it will be before we have a World Exhibition to bring home to us the need for free trade, free speech, and free movement everywhere under unified world controls.

XLIX

HAS COMMUNISM A FUTURE? THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOCIALIST RENASCENCE

9.8.24

I have a real affection for Communists--and a temperate admiration. It is the sort of love that leaps forward to chasten. In a world of oafish self-complacencies set in a morass of dull submission to the chances of life it is a consolation and refreshment to find any people who realise the self-destructiveness of the present system and, however vaguely, the possibility of remaking human society upon richer and happier lines. The value of the Communist Party as an organised ferment is very high. I should like to see a properly accredited representative of the party free to air his opinions in every high school and college--particularly in the United States. Everybody in the place would be the brighter and better for his beneficent irritation.

The House of Lords entertains its leisure by passing Bills to suppress Communist Sunday Schools, and the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks in tones of horror of the teachings in these establishments. Nothing could witness more effectively to the wholesome mental stir these schools create. Most of the teaching in Anglican Sunday Schools is equally repulsive to me, but so long as they do not raid the public funds for their support I do not see why they should not teach what they like. I am English, not Anglican. My blood and traditions incline me to the utmost free speech and free teaching and free propaganda for everyone. No one is obliged to send his children to a Communist School, and I do not see why the half truth of Anglicanism should not have to face the half truth of Communism. The founder of Christianity talked a lot of Communism, but I cannot recall a solitary phrase of His to justify the existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yet at the same time I am doubtful whether there is much of a future for the Communist Party. I doubt whether in twenty-five years’ time there will be many Communists, under that name, below middle-age. A few nice, fierce old gentlemen will survive in smoking-rooms and cafés. The Communist movement is a part of the present world, it is a shadow cast by existing economic absurdities, it is a current reaction. In five-and-twenty years’ time the projects of a scientific Socialism will have converted and absorbed most of the youthful enthusiasm and resentful energy that now finds its expression in Communism. Communism is a phase, a bitter and sterile experiment, in the development of the Socialist idea. Socialism is its parent and its heir. The movement for the organised exploitation of the whole world in the collective interest existed before the Communist Party, and will be going on long after that party is a quaint tradition.

At present the Communist Party still dominates the government of Russia. But it does so at the sacrifice of all its constructive claims. In seven years the Russian experiment has demonstrated the intellectual sterility of the movement beyond any further dispute.

The Bolshevik Government came to power in a state of ignorant confidence, treating criticisms as a blasphemous reflection on its omniscience, insulting and persecuting every sort of Socialist outside its trained and disciplined ranks. The Government took over factories, uncertain whether it meant to run them under a quasi-military discipline or on guild lines as free communities of workers; it “smashed” money, and discovered it had no other way of computing the mutual services and obligations of men. It was touching to see Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920 struggling with childish projects for the “electrification of Russia” and unable to explain what sort of town centre, if any, his Communist Russia would possess. He had no working ideas that were worth a rap about this very obvious matter. I left him, sympathetic with him in the face of his stupendous task, but a little amazed at his extreme unpreparedness. However, if one may trust a virulent article by Trotsky that has just been published in English, he lost his temper in true Communist fashion at being asked awkward questions and resorted to Trotsky for comfort. “Ugh!” said Lenin. “_What_ a perfect petit bourgeois!” and so restored the mental calm my entirely respectful scepticism had ruffled. For in Communist circles if you can call anyone or anything “bourgeois,” the question is settled and discussion is at an end.

The emptiness of plan, the extreme assurance, which distinguishes modern Communism is the secret alike of its attractiveness in times of social trouble and its futility in constructive effort. It does not worry the oppressed, the discontented, and the unhappy with difficult projects for human readjustment. It lumps together the complex and various disorders of social life, the muddle of human prejudices and impulses, as one malignant thing, the “Capitalist system.” Destroy this legendary monster and the Millennium will ensue. Instead of overcoming the fool in Everyman, you must obstruct, waste, sabotage all the current services of the community. Having convinced the world that nothing else will work, the dictatorship of the party will ensue. There could be no teaching more successful in a mass meeting and less useful in a bureau. It gives all the excitement and release of a revolution with none of its tiresome responsibilities.

It was Marx who created modern Communism. It is the sterile mule of Socialism and a scientific ambition. Socialism from the days of Robert Owen onward was a thing of schemes and projects. It was perpetually seeking better arrangements. Its methods were Utopian. But Marx was bitten by an ambition to rival Darwin; he was to be the Darwin of social and political science, with none of Darwin’s modesty or Darwin’s intellectual patience. He had the mind of a theologian with the pretension of a scientific inquirer, and he had the dull man’s hatred and contempt for the human imagination. His movement was to be “scientific” with all the magic that word carried half a century ago. There was to be nothing imaginative and no confounded ideals. It was all to be fatalistic. It was never going to plan what would happen because it was going to know what would happen. He and his associates produced a very sound and ample analysis of the processes of decay in the business life of the time, but with such ambitions and such repudiations they could produce no scheme of any replacement system. They have no scheme to this day. Even Russia has not taught the Communist the practical need of Utopias.

At a certain level of intelligence party Communism is a very attractive teaching indeed. Its self-assurance is very reassuring. Any human being not absolutely stupid hates to be robbed of freedom and educational opportunity before thirteen or fourteen and thrust into uncongenial and hopeless toil. Most employment is bitter for young people. At the same time people whose education is truncated so soon usually fail to develop sufficient intellectual power to understand complex industrial and financial processes. They develop an inferiority complex about such things that clamours in them for comfort.

Communism embodies that hate and provides that comfort. It points to the “Capitalist” as the oppressor and claims to furnish in a few phrases all that needs to be known. In a social system that educated everyone to sixteen or eighteen and then gave a fair wide choice of public service there would be none of that hate and that defensive aggressiveness, that suppressed suspicion of ignorance and inefficiency that makes Communist controversy so loud and rude, which has made Mr. Trotsky so loud and rude. The marshes in which the cantankerous spirit of Communism grows would be drained and evaporated. By the theory of Marx it was in the highly developed industrial system of Western Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, that the Communist Revolution would first occur. The disconcerting fact for Communists is that it occurred in Russia, where the industrial organisation was at a low level and there were eighty per cent. of illiterates. In Great Britain nobody except the enterprising people who want to raise money from imbecile dukes and rich old ladies even pretends to be afraid of a Communist Revolution.