Part 19

There is a considerable dread of Communist activities in America. That is very largely due to an uneasy conscience, aware of a great mass of unassimilated immigrant labour very unfairly treated and very inadequately educated. There may be some grounds for such apprehensions; I will confess I do not think the present schools and colleges of America good enough and strong enough for the constructive work they ought to do. There may be a future for Communism there, and there will probably be a big movement towards Communism in the industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of Socialism.

Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase, so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and fruitful.

L

THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL BE

16.8.24

What a very odd spectacle the British Parliament face to face with the housing problem is! On the strength of that issue alone I should imagine that any really civilised judgment would condemn the poor old institution at once and set about a revolutionary search for a better constructed instrument of government.

There is a shortage of housing accommodation in Great Britain; the picturesque, creeper-clad country cottage is too often a cramped, decivilising, insanitary fraud, and most of the industrial population lives in slums worse than the corresponding slums in America and little better than those on the Continent of Europe. You cannot get a house or flat in which a civilised family can live for much less than a hundred pounds a year rent, and most of those available at that price are stereotyped and dull-looking, and sometimes detestably ugly. Below that level comes a descending series of inconvenient, unsound, and unpleasant lodgments for the mass of the population. The Labour Ministry of Health has been making large encouraging gestures of help, it has projected big and complicated bargains with the building trades and the building trades unions that may--if all goes well--provide at an immense cost on a quasi-charity basis, at the public expense, a sufficiency of houses for the poorer sort of people of fifty years hence, according to the ideas of comfort and decency prevailing fifty years ago.

The Government and the local authorities are to pay about half the cost of building a multitude of houses, the assistance being given on the sole condition that they fall below a certain standard of size and comfort, and the industrial employer will be able to pay low wages in proportion to the cheapness attained. In other words, the Labour Government is doing a deal with the building trade in the interest of the low-grade employer and is putting British industry “on the rates.” They are returning by a circuitous route to the condition of things in England before the New Poor Law, when farmers grew rich by employing labour in receipt of outdoor relief, at otherwise impossibly low wages.

The most striking thing about these housing proposals is the tacit acceptance by all parties in Parliament that the population of the coming years must be put away, each family in a little separate house of its own. If anything was needed to prove that the Socialism of the Labour Party was merely skin deep and its creative intentions an electioneering bid, it would be this. If one thing is clearer than another in the outlook of the modern community, it is the impossibility of the small separate house. It is a cage of needless toil for women; it is a place of deprivation and hardship for children. The whole drift of things is in favour of the highly organised block building containing a great number of houses. In this there can be electric light, radiators, a supply of hot and cold water, efficient sanitary accommodation, group wash-houses, adequate cupboards, and convenient shopping facilities, all provided at a less cost than is needed for the same number of scattered low-grade homes, each under its separate roof, with lamps to clean, fires to light, water to boil, and every possible demand for feminine drudgery and servitude.

In their dreams people think of Mr. Wheatley’s projected houses as little flower-girdled cottages, each with a bright little garden and a drying-ground and an uncontrolled multitude of children playing in the sun; in reality we shall get rows and rows of mean little boxes on the outskirts of our towns, jammed together into slums, each fouling the air with a separate chimney, and remote from every modern amenity.

At present a large part of the population of East London lives in small houses of two stories, or two stories and a basement. Idiotic foreign visitors surveying this from train windows remark on the Englishman’s superb individualism, so that every man’s house is his castle. In the East End no man’s house is his castle; every floor, and often every room, is a separate household, and sometimes these households entertain lodgers. This state of affairs the new Labour legislation will extend and perpetuate. Yet plans have been made that show beyond dispute that the whole population of industrial London could be rehoused in fine and handsome apartment buildings, with night and day lifts, roof-gardens, and nearly all the light, air, and conveniences to be found in a Kensington flat, at hardly greater cost than would be needed to choke all the ways out of London with a corresponding spread of Wheatley hovels, and so great an amount of space could be saved by doing so that half that area of London could be made into a playground and garden.

But even to entertain schemes of that sort requires imagination, and the new Labour Government has shown itself the least imaginative of Governments. It has excreted or suppressed all its creative elements. It is a class-Government, and it embodies the subdued mind of the common wages-earner. Whatever is, it accepts, from Court costume to slums. Its idea of life is the life of the back street in which it has always lived, and it wants more back streets and cheaper back streets to live in, with an occasional treat in the garden of Buckingham Palace. In dealing with housing, just as in dealing with mines or with transport, it shows itself incapable of any breadth or power of initiative.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this housing legislation is the ineffectiveness of the women. When women were struggling for the vote the world was given to understand that their success would be an end to “man-made laws” and “man-made” ways of living. There was to be an astonishing release of the sensible, practical feminine mind. Well, here is a question that concerns women primarily. A very large proportion of the girls and women of to-day, before their lives are out, will have to live either in the slums that the Labour Government is failing to reorganise, or in the rows and clumps of boxes of brick or timber that are to be spread out over the outskirts of every centre of population. There was nothing to prevent the distinguished women of the Labour Party from giving these men who are framing-up these schemes to build pauper houses and endow the building trade at the public expense a lead towards better things. These houses of the Wheatley project mean an effectual subjugation of great multitudes of women to dingy drudgery for scores of years to come; they mean the growth of a new generation of children with miserable standards of comfort and freedom. But so far we have had no guidance from intelligent women at all, but only speeches from such mere party supporters as Dr. Marion Phillips sustaining the preposterous pretensions of Mr. Wheatley. The Women’s Housing Councils’ National Federation, with its resolutions for the glorification of Mr. Wheatley’s building ramp, does no more than emphasise the general feminine apathy. Generally, the women of the country seem not to be awake to the manner in which this business concerns them.

Only one exception occurs to me at the present moment in the widespread indifference of intelligent and influential women to the comfort and outlook of the mass of their sex, and that is Mrs. Leonora Eyles, the novelist. Her book, _The Woman in the Little House_, is a most intelligent, sympathetic, and illuminating account of what it means to live in just such little houses as Mr. Wheatley and his friends, the employers and employed of the building trade, are conspiring to stereotype. She describes not slum life but the life of an ordinary working man’s wife in London, without exaggeration and without extenuation. It is a picture of extreme dinginess and meanness, relieved only by the pluck and devotion and hopefulness and cheerful humour that enable these people to hang on and hope for better things. It is this sort of life the Wheatley legislation proposes to extend and perpetuate, because in Britain, as everywhere in the world, political life is divorced from the creative imagination, and because the mass of common men and women in the world do not know how much they may reasonably ask for from those who have access to the science and control of the resources of the world.

LI

THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS

23.8.24

The other day I was discussing the political outlook in Great Britain with a very close and shrewd observer of political motives. I live very much in a dream of a saner world and he lives in active reaction to the passing hour, but we both knew most of the leading figures in public affairs and we were surveying the present extraordinary fragmentation of parties in Parliament--for even the Labour Party now is hardly on speaking terms with itself and has nothing but office to hold it together. His thoughts ran much more on personalities than mine did. Was Mr. Asquith played out? Would Lloyd George “come back”? What was the future of Lord Birkenhead? Would Mr. Baldwin ever be brighter and better? Was Mr. Masterman the resuscitated hope of the Liberal Party? Was there anyone of any promise at all in the Labour Party? And so on.

Unlike my friend, I do not go about culling incompatible posies of politicians. I have no interest in gathering together a marketable bunch. The failure of party government, the dissolution of all British

## parties, cheers and pleases me. Great Britain, I said, would have to

lead the way to a new stage of democratic government and get itself a Legislature of a more manageable size, elected by Proportional Representation.

“They won’t,” said my friend, meaning by “they” our bright-eyed millions of voters. “They can’t grasp ideas like that--new, _difficult_ ideas. It takes ten minutes’ attention to understand Proportional Representation. You can’t go to the country with a thing like that.”

“But unless we get a more efficient Legislature, how can we tackle our difficulties with money, with Europe, with India?”

“We don’t tackle difficulties,” said my friend; “Parliaments can’t.”

“Most of the Labour Party promised to support Proportional Representation at the last election.”

“And ran away from it. There was a tuppenny-ha’penny advantage in cheating on that, so of course they cheated. They’ll run away from everything except office. They’re just a lot of poor things who’ve spent too much money on Court clothes and in dressing up their wives and daughters fit and proper for the Garden Parties, and they want to get the wear out of it all before they go back into the shadows. Nobody in Parliament who isn’t conspicuous is going to let Parliament be altered so that it excludes second-rate people. It’s against nature. You might as soon expect Congress to scrap the American Constitution. You’ll never live to see a General Election in England or America that isn’t fought on thoroughly silly lines--on the old electoral method.”

“But think of the tasks that lie before the world!”

“What’s the good of thinking of them?” asked my friend. “It only worries you.”

“There has to be an organisation of international affairs to prevent war, there has to be disarmament with security, world transport at standard charges, the re-establishment of a workable world currency, the development of education throughout the world----”

“Things like that aren’t going to be done by Parliament,” said my friend. “They may be done behind the backs of the politicians--if there are interests and intelligences big enough to want them and organise them, but----Have you ever met the average voter?”

“I know, I suppose, as many people as you do.”

“But your head’s in the clouds....”

My friend paused, and then remarked with malignant satisfaction, “The next big question for England is Prohibition.”

“But it’s such a secondary matter!”

“Exactly. That’s why it’s going to be primary. It’s trivial enough for a democracy to be really earnest about it. Take international settlements and war possibilities; these are infinitely more important things, I grant you. But what does the average voter know about them? There are possibilities of enslavement, of blood and death, of millions of the silly rabbits being scared and starved and mutilated and killed in international conflicts. But these voters of yours can’t grasp the complexity of that. They want peace, of course, but they don’t know what makes peace. So everybody puts peace on the party platform, peace and the League of Nations, or peace and conscription, ‘be prepared,’ or peace and isolation, peace and the dear old flag. It doesn’t matter. The poor mutts can’t grasp it at all. Talk of that kind of thing, argument about that kind of thing, only confuses and wearies them. It doesn’t count in politics. And then there’s currency and finance. Even the bankers don’t understand that--and most of them don’t want to. Prices go up and down and credit expands and contracts and the rabbits get suddenly well off and full of conceit, or they get out-of-work and starved and driven to suicide, but it’s all quite beyond them how it happens, and it gives them a headache and a vicious temper even to try to understand. Obviously they don’t know and obviously therefore they ought to be concerned for knowledge, but what is obvious to you or me isn’t obvious to them. What is the vote-catching value of spending money on scientific and social and political research? What is the vote-catching value of raising the school age to sixteen? That only makes the grown-up voter jealous of the next generation.

“But Prohibition, shutting the public-house round the corner, every man and woman understands that, and the women will vote for it anyhow, blind to every other consideration. That is something they can understand, and the peace of the world, the volume of trade, and economic justice may go hang so long as son and husband can be shut and barred from the drink. Interference with the personal habits of other people is innate in women; they acquire it as sisters, wives, and mothers. The enfranchisement of women was the last step in the devotion of democracy to futility. It ended the last possibilities of constructive legislation and inaugurated the age of restraint.”

He went on to sketch the growth of the Prohibition movement in England; the drift of politicians towards a defined attitude in the matter; the way in which the question could be used to thrust aside wider and more abstract issues. “Watch the speeches of Lloyd George,” he said. “Watch the speeches of the pushing young men. They are nearer to it than you are. They know.” So-and-so said this yesterday, and So-and-so said that last week.

He produced an effect of being detestably right about his facts. He said that making Prohibition a part of the American Constitution was the silliest thing in history; one might hold the extremest temperance views and still understand that a matter of personal health and conduct should have no part in the fundamental laws of a State. But the American citizen had lost any idea of what a constitution was. Presently the American woman might put a morning bath in the constitution, or the weekly weighing of babies or the universal use of tooth-brushes. Or they might require every married man and woman to carry his or her marriage lines conspicuously displayed upon the person, like the bright little licence on an English motor-car. These were the things they held important. England was going the same way, following a few years behind America, because it was a country of more deeply established disciplines and diffidences, but I might rest assured it would get to the same end. In twenty years’ time there would be no politics left in Parliament but the politics of scandal and minor moralities, and the big things of human life would be managed in some other fashion.

Thus my friend, and I found it very difficult to gainsay him.

LII

SEX ANTAGONISM: AN UNAVOIDABLE AND INCREASING FACTOR IN MODERN LIFE

30.8.24

I have been reading a book called _Ancilla’s Share_; it professes to be an indictment of Sex Antagonism, but indeed it is an artless demonstration of it. It was first published as anonymous, but then came paragraphs ascribing it to Miss Elizabeth Robins. Now I gather she admits her authorship. I find little of her fine gloomy talent in it. Possibly she is only partly responsible.

It is under a confusing number of heads a tirade against the hostility of man to woman. Instances from all the ages jostle one another. Men do not even give women fair literary criticism, and this point is rather stressed. Mr. Birrell disliked the work of Hannah More; Mr. Max Beerbohm, in a delightful and probably untruthful sketch, says he cut up and burnt a work by some woman novelist unnamed. But I doubt if strong sexual feeling underlay either offence. It happened to be a woman novelist. But Mr. Max Beerbohm has been distinctly unflattering to various men contemporaries, and I doubt if Mr. Birrell would wallow in praise of Herbert Spencer. It happens that I have annotated several of the works of Professor Nicholas Murray Butler in a disparaging spirit; marginal illustrations are my weakness; and I have been at great pains to destroy by fire a large nobly printed card, very thick and strong and stylish, exhibiting one of his aphorisms. It was sent me by some American admirer we evidently share between us; it was probably intended to dominate my bedroom or study; and it found a useful rôle at last, charred but invincible--for fire recoiled from it--as packing for a picture. I suppose these facts would win me a place side by side with Mr. Birrell and Mr. Max Beerbohm in a revised edition of _Ancilla’s Share_. As it is they merely prove that we all have our literary dislikes. I don’t think Jane Austen has any case against men for lack of appreciation. I don’t think that any writing woman of Miss Robins’s generation can complain of anything in her reception by male critics, except perhaps a too eager welcome.

But I will not embark upon any detailed treatment of the confused riot of assertions against men in this book. Need one even pretend to take seriously Miss Robins’s proposition that women would have managed the world better than men have done, that they would have prevented the world war and arrested the financial disorganisation of Europe? This talk of Ancilla’s tremendous nobility in the political field is sheer nonsense. So far the enfranchisement of women in Britain and America has had a confusing and belittling influence upon politics. It was the women’s influence in politics which achieved the crowning silliness of making Prohibition a part of the constitution of the United States, and in England women have done nothing to save the face of the countryside from Mr. Wheatley’s dismal women-enslaving house pustules. The drive for better education is no stronger than it was before our sisters had the vote; the drive for more scientific research is perceptibly feebler. Disarmament is manifestly a question of minor importance to women. Nevertheless this book proves by its temper what it fails to prove by its arguments, that sex antagonism is a fact of very great and increasing importance in our world.

Miss Robins thinks she is at war with men; she is really at war with sex. She wants to have men restrained, reproached, and incessantly scolded for things for which they are no more responsible than girls in a nunnery. Women dress extravagantly, paint their faces, brighten their eyes, wear high heels, disregard serious for trivial effective interests. It is the men, she says, who make them do it. It is not. It is the presence of men in the world which leads to these exaggerations and intensifications of sexual attraction; but that is a different matter altogether. If all men were reduced to a helot class, there would still be magnificent dresses and extreme physical display by women. And men do not welcome women as a sort of neutral competitors in their fields of work, because sex imposes a different attitude upon them. Sex is mentally as important, if not more important, to a normal man than it is to a normal woman. I am not writing of what ought to be, but of what is. Sex is an enormous physiological burthen for a woman, but not, it would seem, in most cases, such a mental burthen, and it does not last out her lifetime as it does a man’s. But for a normally constituted man woman is the natural symbol of life, and he cannot live fully and happily without her companionship and reassurance. She has a material need of his strength and his greater power over resources, but he is dependent upon her for gifts of peace and encouragement that cannot be covenanted for.