Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

§ 4

The Plantain, to which Oswald drifted back to dine, was a club gathered from the ends of the earth and very proud of the fact; it was made up of explorers, travellers, colonial officials, K.C.M.G.’s and C.M.G.’s. It was understood to be a great exchange of imperial ideas, and except for a group or so of members who lived in and about London, it had no conversation because, living for the most part at different ends of the earth, its members did not get to know each other very well. Occasionally there was sporting gossip. Shy, sunburnt men drifted in at intervals of three or four years, and dined and departed. Once a member with a sunstroke from India gave way to religious mania, and tried to preach theosophy from the great staircase to three lonely gentlemen who were reading the telegrams in the hall. He was removed with difficulty. The great red-papered, white-painted silences of the club are copiously adorned with rather old yellow maps of remote regions, and in the hall big terrestrial and celestial globes are available for any members who wish to refresh their minds upon the broad facts of our position in space. But the great glory of the club is its wealth of ethnological and sporting trophies. Scarcely is there a variety of spear, stabbing or disembowelling knife, blowing tube, bow, crossbow, or matchlock, that is not at the disposal of any member nimble enough to pluck it from the wall. In addition there is a vast collection of the heads of beasts; everywhere they project from walls and pillars; heads of bison, gazelles and wart-hogs cheer the souls of the members even in the humblest recesses. In the dining-room, above each table, a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros or a tiger or a lion glares out with glassy eyes upon the world, showing every item in its dentition. Below these monsters sits an occasional empire-builder, in the careful evening dress of the occasional visitant to civilization, seeming by contrast a very pallid, little, nicely behaved thing indeed.

To the Plantain came Oswald, proposing to dine alone, and in this dining-room he discovered Slingsby Darton, the fiscal expert, a little Cockney with scarcely any nose at all, sitting with the utmost impudence under the largest moose. Oswald was so pleased to discover any one he knew that he only remembered that he detested Slingsby Darton as he prepared to sit down with him. There was nothing for it then but to make the best of him.

Oswald chose his dinner and his wine with care. Red wines were forbidden him, but the wine waiter had good authority, authority from India and gastrically very sensitive, for the Moselle he recommended. And in answer to Slingsby Darton’s enquiries, Oswald spread out his theory that he was an amiable, pleased sort of person obliged to come home from Uganda, sorry to leave Uganda, but glad to be back in the dear old country and “at the centre of things,” and ready to take up anything——

“Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got out of sight of the parish pump.”

Politics—well, it might be. But it was a little hard to join on to things at first. “Fearful lot of squabbling—not very much doing. Not nearly as much as one had hoped.”

That seemed a restrained, reasonable sort of thing to say. Nor was it extravagant to throw out, “I thought it was ’Wake up, England’; but she seems just to be talking in her sleep.”

Out flares the New Imperialism at once in Oswald’s face. “But have you read Chamberlain’s great speeches?” Slingsby Darton protests.

“I had those in mind,” said Oswald grimly.

Both gentlemen were in the early phase of encounter. It was not yet time to join issue. Slingsby Darton heard, but made no retort. Oswald was free to develop his discontents.

Nothing seemed to be getting done, he complained. The army had been proved inefficient, incapable even of a colonial war, but what were we doing?

“Exactly,” said Slingsby Darton. “You dare not even whisper ’conscription.’”

Oswald had not been thinking of that but of a technical reorganization, more science, more equipment. But all that he could see in the way of a change were “these beastly new caps.” (Those were the days of the hated ’Brodrick.’) Then economic reorganization hung fire. “Unemployed” processions grew bigger every winter. (“Tariff,” whispered Darton. “Intelligent organization,” said Oswald.) Then education——

“Education,” said Oswald, “is at the heart of the whole business.”

“I wouldn’t say that altogether,” said Slingsby Darton.

“At the heart of the whole business,” Oswald repeated as though Slingsby Darton had not spoken. “The people do not know. Our people do not understand.” The Boer war had shown how horribly backward our education was—our higher education, our scientific and technical education, the education of our officials and generals in particular. “We have an empire as big as the world and an imagination as small as a parish.” But it would be a troublesome job to change that. Much too troublesome. Oswald became bitter and accusatory. His living side sneered. It would bother a lot of Balfour’s friends quite uncomfortably. The dear old Church couldn’t keep its grip on an education of that sort, and of course the dear old Church must have its grip on education. So after a few large-minded flourishes, the politicians had swamped the whole question of educational reform in this row about church schools and the Passive Resistance movement, both sides only too glad to get away from reality. Oswald was as bitter against the Passive Resister as he was against the Church.

“I don’t know whether I should give quite the primary place to education,” said Slingsby Darton, battling against this tirade. “I don’t know whether I should quite say that. Mr. Chamberlain——”

The fat, as the vulgar say, was in the fire.

October, 1903, was a feverish and impassioned time in English affairs. From Birmingham that month the storm had burst. With a great splash Mr. Joseph Chamberlain had flung the issue of Protection into the sea of political affairs; huge waves of disturbance were sweeping out to the uttermost boundaries of the empire. Instead of paying taxes we were to “tax the foreigner.” To that our fine imperial dream had come. Over dinner-tables, in trains and smoking-rooms, men were quarrelling with their oldest friends. To Oswald the conversion of Imperialism into a scheme for world exploitation in the interests of Birmingham seemed the most atrocious swamping of real issues by private interests that it was possible to conceive. The Sydenham strain was an uncommercial strain. Slingsby Darton was manifestly in the full swirl of the new movement, the man looked cunning and eager, he put his pert little face on one side and raised his voice to argue. A gathering quarrelsomeness took possession of Oswald. He began to speak very rapidly and pungently. He assumed an exasperating and unjustifiable detachment in order to quarrel better. He came into these things from the outside, he declared, quite unbiased, oh! quite unbiased. And this “nail-trust organizer’s campaign” shocked him—shocked him unspeakably. Here was England confessedly in a phase of inefficiency and deterioration, needing a careful all-round effort, in education, in business organization, in military preparation. And suddenly drowning everything else in his noise came “this demagogue ironmonger with his panacea!”

Slingsby Darton was indignant. “My dear Sir! I cannot hear you speak of Mr. Chamberlain in such terms as that!”

“But consider the situation,” said Oswald. “Consider the situation! When of all things we want steady and harmonious constructive work, comes all the uproar, all the cheap, mean thinking and dishonest spouting, the music-hall tricks and poster arguments, of a Campaign.”

Slingsby Darton argued. “But, my dear Sir, it is a constructive campaign! It is based on urgent economic needs.”

Oswald would have none of that. Tariff Reform was a quack remedy. “A Zollverein. Think of it! With an empire in great detached patches all over the world. Each patch with different characteristics and different needs. A child could see that a Zollverein is absurd. A child could see it. Yet to read the speeches of Chamberlain you’d think a tariff could work geographical miracles and turn the empire into a compact continent, locked fast against the foreigner. How can a scattered host become a band of robbers? The mere attempt takes us straight towards disaster.”

“Straight away from it!” Slingsby Darton contradicted.

Oswald went on regardlessly. “An empire—scattered like ours—run on selfish and exclusive lines must bring us into conflict with every other people under the sun,” he asserted. “It must do. Apart from the utter and wanton unrighteousness, apart from the treason to humanity. Oh! I hate this New Imperialism. I hate it and dread it. It spoils my sleep at nights. It worries me and worries me....”

Slingsby Darton thought he would do better to worry about this free trade of ours which was bleeding us to death.

“I do not speak as one ignorant of the empire,” said Oswald. “I have been watching it——”

Slingsby Darton, disregarded, maintained that he, too, had been watching.

But Oswald was now at the “I tell you, Sir,” stage.

He declared that the New Imperialism came from Germany. It was invented by professors of Weltpolitik. Milner had grafted it upon us at Balliol. But German conditions were altogether different from ours, Germany was a geographical unity, all drawn together, unified by natural necessity, like a fist. Germany was indeed a fist—by geographical necessity. The British empire was like an open hand. Must be like an open hand. We were an open people—or we were nothing. We were a liberalizing power or we were the most pretentious sham in history. But we seemed to be forgetting that liberal idea for which we stood. We swaggered now like owners, forgetting that we were only trustees. Trustees for mankind. We were becoming a boastful and a sprawling people. The idea of grabbing half the world—and then shutting other peoples out with tariffs, was—Oswald was losing self-control—“a shoving tradesman’s dream.” And we were doing it—as one might expect “a trust-organizing nail-maker”—phrase rubbed in with needless emphasis—to do it. We were shoving about, treading on everybody’s toes—and failing to educate, failing to arm. Yes—shoving. It was a good word. He did not mind how many times he used it. “This dream of defying the world without an army, and dominating it without education!” The Germans were at least logical in their swagger. If they shoved about they also armed. And they educated. Anyhow they trained. But we trod on everybody’s toes and tried to keep friends all round....

So Oswald—under the moose—while Slingsby Darton did what he could by stabbing an objection at him now and again. It became clearer and clearer to Slingsby Darton that the only possibility before him of holding his own, short of throwing knives and glasses at Oswald, was to capture the offensive.

“You complain of a panacea,” he said, poking out two arresting fingers at Oswald. “That Tariff Reform is a panacea. But what of education? What of this education of yours? That also is a panacea.”

And just then apt to his aid came Walsall and the Bishop of Pinner from their table under the big, black, clerical-looking hippopotamus. Walsall was a naturalist, and had met Oswald in the days of his biological enthusiasm; the Bishop of Pinner had formerly been the Bishop of Tanganyika and knew Oswald by repute. So they came over to greet him and were at once seized upon as auxiliaries by Slingsby Darton.

“We’re getting heated over politics,” said Slingsby Darton, indicating that at least Oswald was.

“Every one is getting heated over politics,” said the bishop. “It’s as bad as the Home Rule split.”

“Sydenham’s panacea is to save the world by education. He won’t hear of economic organization.”

The bishop opened eyes and mouth at Oswald until he looked like the full moon....

On that assertion of Slingsby Darton’s they drifted past the paying-desk to the small smoking-room, and there they had a great dispute about education beneath a gallery audience, so to speak, composed of antelope, Barbary sheep, gnu, yaks, and a sea lion. Oswald had never realized before how passionately he believed in education. It was a revelation. He discovered himself. He wanted to tell these men they were uneducated. He did succeed in saying that Mr. Chamberlain was “essentially an uneducated man.”

Walsall was a very trying opponent for a disputant of swift and passionate convictions. He had a judicial affectation, a Socratic pose. He was a grey, fluffy-headed man with large tortoiseshell spectacles and a general resemblance to a kind wise owl. He liked to waggle his head slowly from side to side and smile. He liked to begin sentences with “But have you thought——?” or “I think you have overlooked——” or “So far from believing that, I hold the exact converse.” He said these things in a very suave voice as though each remark was carefully dressed in oil before serving.

He expressed grave doubts whether there was “any benefit in education—any benefit whatever.”

But the argument that formed that evening’s entertainment for the sea lion and those assorted ruminating artiodactyls was too prolonged and heated and discursive to interest any but the most sedulous reader. Every possible sort of heresy about education seemed loose that night for the affliction of Oswald. Slingsby Darton said, “Make men prosperous and education will come of its own accord.” Walsall thought that the sort of people who benefited by education “would get on anyhow.” He thought knowledge was of value according to the difficulty one experienced in attaining it. (Could any sane man really believe that?) “I would persecute science,” said Walsall, “and then it would be taken care of by enthusiasts.”

“But do you know,” said Oswald, with an immense quiet in his manner, “that there is a—a British Empire? An empire with rather urgent needs?”

(Suppressed murmur from Slingsby Darton: “Then I don’t see what your position is at all!”)

Walsall disputed these “needs.” Weren’t we all too much disposed to make the empire a thing of plan and will? An empire was a growth. It was like a man, it grew without taking thought. Presently it aged and decayed. We were not going to save the empire by taking thought.

(Slingsby Darton, disregarded, now disagreeing with Walsall.)

“Germany takes thought,” Oswald interjected.

“To its own undoing, perhaps,” said Walsall....

The bishop’s method of annoyance was even blander than Walsall’s, and more exasperating to the fevered victim. He talked of the evils of an “educated proletariat.” For a stable community only a certain proportion of educated people was advisable. You could upset the social balance by over-educating the masses. “We destroy good, honest, simple-souled workers in order to make discontented clerks.” Oswald spluttered, “You must make a citizen in a modern population understand something of the State he belongs to!”

“Better, Faith,” said the bishop. “Far better, Faith. Teach them a simple Catechism.”

He had visited Russia. He had been to the coronation of the Tzar, a beautiful ceremony, only a little marred by a quite accidental massacre of some of the spectators. Those were the days before the Russo-Japanese war and the coming of the Duma. There was much to admire in Russia, the good bishop declared; much to learn. Russia was the land of Mary, great-souled and blessed; ours alas! was the land of bustling Martha. Nothing more enviable than the political solidarity of Russia—“after our warring voices.... Time after time I asked myself, ’Aren’t we Westerns on the wrong track? Here is something—Great. And growing greater. Something simple. Here is obedience and a sort of primitive contentment. Trust in the Little White Father, belief in God. Here Christianity lives indeed.’”

About eleven o’clock Walsall was propounding a paradox. “All this talk of education,” he said, “reminds me of the man who tried to lift himself by his own ears. How, I ask myself, can a democracy such as ours take an intelligent interest in its destiny unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destiny? How escape that dilemma?”

“A community,” said Oswald, grappling with this after a moment, “a community isn’t one mind, it’s a number of minds, some more intelligent, some less. It’s a perpetual flow of new minds——”

Then something gave way within him.

“We sit here,” he said in a voice so full of fury that the mouth of the bishop fell open, “and while we talk this half-witted, half-clever muck to excuse ourselves from getting the nation into order, the sands run out of the glass. The time draws near when the empire will be challenged——”

He stood up abruptly.

“Have you any idea,” he said, “what the empire might be? Have you thought of these hundreds of millions to whom we might give light—had we light? Are we to be a possessing and profit-hunting people because we have not the education to be a leaderly people? Are we to do no better than Rome and Carthage—and loot the provinces of the world? Loot or education, that is the choice of every imperial opportunity. All England, I find, is echoing with screams for loot. Have none of us vision? None?”

The bishop shook his head sadly. The man, he thought, was raving.

“What is this vision of yours?” sneered Walsall. “Ten thousand professors?”

“After all,” said Slingsby Darton with a weary insidiousness, “we do not differ about our fundamental idea. You must have funds. You must endow your schools. Without Tariff Reform to give you revenue——”

But Oswald was not going to begin over again.

“I ought to be in bed,” he said, looking at his watch. “My doctor sends me to bed at ten....”

“My God!” he whispered as he put on his coat under the benevolent supervision of an exceptionally fine Indian buffalo.

“What is to happen to the empire,” he cried, going out into the night and addressing himself to the moon, to the monument which commemorates the heroic incompetence of the Duke of York, and to an interested hansom cabby, “what is to happen to the empire—when these are its educated opinions?”