A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles

by Jane Hume Clapperton

THE ELIMINATION OF CRIME

Many a man thinks that it is his goodness which keeps him from crime, when it is only his full stomach. On half allowance, he would be as ugly and knavish as anybody. Don’t mistake potatoes for principles.—Carlyle.

A normal child of five years once asked the meaning of this expression—“hanging a murderer,” and after explanation said eagerly, “But will hanging the man make that other man alive again?” On receiving a negative reply, the remonstrance burst forth, “Then why kill him, since when he is dead we can never make him good again?”

This is a true picture of the thinking and feeling about crime which is natural to the best types of our present-day humanity. These demand that our punishments shall either reform the criminal or protect society effectively from his malfeasance. As a matter of fact, our criminal code and whole machinery and procedure relative to crime accomplish neither, and this is freely admitted by men whose position enables them to judge accurately and entitles them to express an opinion.

Mr. Justice Matthew has said at the Birmingham Assizes that the present state of the criminal law is a hundred years behind the times. Sir Edmund Du Cane, Chairman of the Directors of Convict Prisons, says of the solitary system practised in our penal prisons: “It is an artificial state of existence, absolutely opposed to that which nature points out as the condition of mental, moral and physical health.... The minds of the prisoners become enfeebled by long-continued isolation.” In the Official Report of the Departmental Committee on Prisons, 1895, these words occur: “The prisoners have been treated too much as a hopeless or worthless part of the community. The moral condition in which a large number of prisoners leave the prison, and the serious number of recommittals, have led us to think there is ample cause for a searching inquiry into the main features of prison life.” The late Judge Fitz-Stephen published his History of the Criminal Law in 1883, and pointed there to “notorious evils of which it is difficult,” said he, “to find a satisfactory remedy.” Nevertheless, he put down his finger on the crucial spot when he wrote “the law proceeds upon the principle that it is morally right to hate criminals. It confirms and justifies that sentiment by inflicting upon criminals punishment which expresses it.”

But it is not right to hate criminals. It is morally wrong, i.e. it is contrary to these laws of nature, by which alone an elevated and happy social life may be attained. The emotion of hatred creates vibrations producing evil on the moral plane, as certainly as discordant sounds, acting on sensitive ears, produce discomfort; and, if persisted in, produce organic disorganization on the physical plane. Hence, all punishment or legal procedure directed against crime, having hatred at its foundation, or historic base, must fail. On the negative side, hatred has proved ineffectual in protecting society from crime. On the positive side, it increases the anti-social feelings, whose natural outcome is crime, and frustrates, or annuls, the human forces of love, which already widely existent, and swaying humanity’s best types, are the true evolutional factors by which to annihilate crime.

Mr. Justice Matthew was simply asserting a fact of social science when he stated that the criminal law is out of date. It consists with a primitive stage of social life; but it is totally inconsistent with even the semi-civilization of to-day. The fundamental discord between our action and feeling relative to crime declares itself in the uncertainty of a criminal’s fate and the steady survival of his type. But, my reader, while accepting Justice Matthew’s premise, may doubt the conclusion at which Judge Fitz-Stephen arrived—that vindictiveness or hate lies at the root of our criminal code, and that our punishments express it. Moreover, he may condemn by anticipation a supposed tendency on my part to censure all punishments, and rely solely on a laissez-faire system of dealing with crime. Scientific meliorism, however, does not imply anarchy or the absence of governing law. Its methods repudiate the laissez-faire principle in every department of life, for this reason: Our developed faculties and accumulated knowledge make untenable the negative or inert position. We are impelled in an epoch of conscious evolution to take positive action favourable to progress.

My contention is this: love of all men, not hatred of any man or class of men ought to be the basis of our criminal code. Modern science, experience and skill are competent to redeem the criminal class, speaking generally, and in exceptional cases, where redemption is impossible, can render the criminal innocuous to society, while giving him throughout life such innocent happiness as a being organically defective may enjoy.

This thesis embraces a very wide range of action. It means the systematic rational treatment of evil-doers, from the refractory infant and juvenile pickpocket to the burglar, the fraudulent bankrupt, the felon, the traitor, the murderer, and if any exist, the born criminal. It signifies, in short, a complete science complementary to that of true education. For whereas the latter comprises all manner of attractive stimuli to noble living, this is the science of necessary social restraints to be applied in nursery, school and prison with the universal gentleness which springs from universal love. The purpose to be aimed at is, first, improving character by restraining obnoxious tendencies; second, reforming character already become anti-social; third, protecting society from all corrupt infusion that might proceed from morally diseased character.

A leading principle of the criminal law of Great Britain is that punishment be adjusted in proportion to the supposed magnitude of each individual offence. If we study this principle, we must perceive the truth of Judge Fitz-Stephen’s allegation, for what connexion has it with the reformation of the criminal? A judge or a jury makes no attempt to compute the amount of prison restraint and discipline necessary to reformation, nor are they possessed of facts for forming a judgment. Their whole attention has been focussed on the crime, not on the character of the criminal, or the antecedent and future conditions affecting the character. Neither does the judicial sentence connect itself proportionately with the mischief done to society. A fraudulent banker or commercial speculator, whose downfall involves the ruin of thousands, is not dealt with, as compared with a petty thief, on a scale of severity expressive of the magnitude of suffering entailed. And the petty thief, who steals the rich man’s goods, as compared with the criminal who beats and abuses his wife, is adjudged a severer penalty—a measure of punishment indicating the superior value of goods over wives, which is a sentiment appropriate only to barbarous times.

These anomalies, however, are explainable. Our laws have descended to us from a barbarous age, when might was right, irrespective of justice; and from a race whose punishments sprang from revenge, and were roughly proportioned to the feeling of revenge. They are little else than reactionary forces, of which some are always present in an inchoate society. Their inapplicability to the task of reforming criminals is easily proved.

In Scotland in a single year not fewer than “six hundred and ninety persons were committed to prison who had been in confinement at least ten times before. Of these, three hundred and ninety-three had been in prison at least twenty times before, and twenty-three at least fifty times!” (Hill on Crime, p. 28.) These figures speak for themselves. Our whole system is glaringly unscientific. We do not remove the conditions that act as causes of crime. We punish, and sometimes severely, yet we let loose again offenders not one whit more prepared than before to withstand the temptations of freedom. We calmly support and approve an enormous expenditure of public funds upon criminals and crime; we carefully select good men to be prison managers, officers and chaplains; we secure cleanliness and sanitation within the prisons, and so forth; but these efforts are utterly futile because the system is wrong—the criminal law of Great Britain is based upon a false, an irrational principle.

The causes of crime within our province to deal with are of a two-fold nature—objective and subjective. Poverty, i.e. hunger and want, a slum environment, rough handling in infancy and childhood, a mischievous training and the absence of all conditions favourable to gentle, virtuous life—these are some of the objective causes creating crime which society is bound to remove. Among causes deciding the innate character of every newly-born babe, the forces of heredity stand out conspicuously. I have demonstrated that aggregate humanity, in a scientific age, has the means of controlling these forces and directing them to the production of physical, mental and moral health in the individual, and consequently in the community. The born criminal type may become gradually improved by careful and wise treatment under life-long restraints. Meanwhile, to seek reformation of this type, by prison discipline alone, and treat it by methods adapted to corrigible culprits, is a folly dishonouring to the developed reason of man. We have abundant evidence that the type exists. Mr. Frederick Hill, late Inspector of Prisons, says: “Nothing has been more clearly shown in the course of my inquiries than that crime is hereditary to a considerable extent ... it proceeds from father to son in a long line of succession.” (Hill on Crime, p. 55.) Mr. J. B. Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the Perth Prison, states of the facts of prison life: “They press on my mind the conviction that crime in general is a moral disease of a chronic and congenital nature, intractable when transmitted from generation to generation.” And Mr. George Combe, speaking of prisons in the United States of America, wrote: “I have put the question to many keepers of prisons whether they believed in the possibility of reforming all offenders. From those whose minds were humane and penetrating, I have received the answer—they did not, for experience had convinced them that some criminals are incorrigible by any human means hitherto discovered. These incorrigibles,” says George Combe—and this is the point to observe, “were always found to have defective organizations; ... they are morally idiotic; and justice, as well as humanity, dictates our treating them as patients. They labour under great natural defects; ... to punish them for actions proceeding from these natural defects is no more just or beneficial to society than it would be to punish men for having crooked spines or club feet.” (George Combe’s Moral Philosophy, p. 306.) And I could refer to many more authorities on the subject were it necessary.

Accepting the theory that our born-criminals are victims of moral disease, the question arises—how should we treat them? Fifty years ago we sorely maltreated our victims to mental disease. We bound them hand and foot, we punished them sternly for their congenital defects, we shunned and hated them, and because they were martyrs to a pitiful disease we made them also the victims of unnecessary and cruel sufferings. Few men to-day could glance without a shudder at the record of our treatment of lunatics. We consign the history gladly to oblivion, and point to changes betokening the better feeling of to-day. “No one thinks of sending a madman to a lunatic asylum for a certain number of days, weeks or months. We carefully ascertain that he is unfit to be at large, and that those in whose hands we are about to place him act under due inspection and have the knowledge and skill which afford the best hope for his cure; that they will be kind to him, and inflict no more pain than is necessary for his secure custody ... we leave it to them to determine if, or when, he can be safely liberated.” (Hill on Crime, p. 151.)

These are the lines on which also should run our treatment of moral disease. If a man is unfit morally to be at large, we must narrow the conditions of his life, but make it as enjoyable within the coercive restraints as is compatible with improvement. And on no account must we restore his liberty until those who professionally and officially watch his daily conduct are convinced that he will not again be likely to abuse that liberty.

But apart altogether from individual delinquents, the subjective racial tendency to crime demands special treatment, and in this regard I maintain that the enlightened action of an advanced society will be analogous to the ignorant action of an earnest church in the Middle Ages with precisely opposite results. “The long period of the Dark Ages, under which Europe lay, was due, I believe, in a very considerable degree,” says Francis Galton, “to the celibacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature or to art, the social condition of the time was such that they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the church. But the church preached and exacted celibacy. The consequence was that these gentle natures had no continuance, and by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal that I am hardly able to speak of it without impatience, the church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. She acted as if she aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be alone the parents of future generations. She practised the arts which breeders would use who aimed at creating ferocious, currish and stupid natures. No wonder that club law prevailed for centuries over Europe; the wonder is, that enough good remained in the veins of Europeans to enable their race to rise to its present very moderate level of natural morality.” (Hereditary Genius, F. Galton, p. 356.)

A humane society, guided by rational forces in the epoch of conscious evolution, will practise the policy of the church of the Middle Ages on a different class of subjects. It will gather poor criminals into its bosom, and secure for them a safe and happy refuge while exacting celibacy. The racial blood shall not be poisoned by moral disease. The guardians of the present-day social life dare not be careless of future social life and the happiness of generations unborn; therefore the criminal breed must be forcibly restrained from perpetuating its kind. Now mark the result. Not gentle natures—as in the case of the church—but the innately vicious natures will have no continuance. The criminal type slowly but surely disappears.

To promote the contentment and comfort of congenital criminals within their asylum or prison home an alternative to celibacy might be offered, viz. surgical treatment, to render the male incapable of reproduction. (The treatment indicated is not the operation ordinarily performed upon some domestic animals; this, applied to human beings, would be morally and physically injurious. Particulars of the appropriate method were published in the British Medical Journal as early as May 2, 1874, at p. 586.) Were this course voluntarily chosen, the sexes might intermingle without danger to posterity; and since fuller social life tends to make all human beings happier, these convicts would become more manageable, and coercive restraints cease to be indispensable.

But the criminal stock is not great when compared with the actual crimes of to-day. Crime in a vast measure is simply produced by the outward accidental conditions of life—an evil environment and a grossly inadequate training. If we alter the environment of our masses—by establishing a new industrial system that banishes poverty from the land, by initiating a Malthusian and neo-Malthusian practice that puts the physical life on a healthy basis, by creating a family life suitable to man’s emotional nature, and supplying a true education that embraces scientific restraints on all anti-social tendencies—then, but not till then, will crime and the criminal type alike become things of the past.

We are surrounded to-day in our reformatories and board schools, in our homes and on our streets, by children of naïvely-disobedient or rebellious tendency. These are the embryo criminals of a few years hence. When a clever romanticist makes one his hero, and describes the development of trickiness in the child, and how he uses it as a weapon of defence against the “polissman” whom he defies, trips up and otherwise evades (Cleg Kelly, by Crockett), we read the account without compunction, nay, we relish the humour of the situation, and half approve the issue! Yet this assuredly is no legitimate outcome of childish bravery and sportiveness. Our levity arises from the underlying conviction, or the universal feeling begotten of genetic evolution, that the policeman’s jurisdiction here is flagrantly inappropriate.

Infantile disobedience and full-fledged crime seem far apart, but they are united by an inward deteriorating process, an outward chain of trespasses more or less petty. The links are all there, connecting the tender babe and fascinating street-arab with the thief and murderer. Similarly, on the moral plane, flow the sequences of cause and effect that bring retribution—that inalienable feature of the law of evolution. The crime that society deplores is the natural penalty for society’s neglect of children; and there is no escape from the penalty as long as the cause continues. Nor can society plead ignorance here. Herbert Spencer and Ruskin have spoken out plainly on this subject. “What we need is cessation from all these antagonisms which keep alive the brutal elements of human nature, and persistence in a peaceful life, giving unchequered play to the sympathies.” (Herbert Spencer on Arbitration.) “It is,” says Ruskin, “the lightest way of killing to stop a man’s breath. But if you bind up his thoughts by lack of true education, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body and blast his soul ... this you think no sin!” Verily, there is sin, acknowledged by the noblest, wisest of men, and brought home to us on the lips of babes—“Why kill the man, since when he is dead we can never make him good again!”

Society has to compass the task of making men good from the beginning; and in exceptional cases, where the task is impossible, the victims are simply society’s patients, to be impounded without hurt. We are as able to protect our social life from moral as from mental lunatics. The initial step, however (hardly yet taken), is to pass from the mental attitude of a barbarous race, whose habits of defence are those of arbitrary punishment, to that of a civilized nation bent on reforming its criminals, and treating its morally diseased members with uniform humanity and brotherly love. As yet the resources of man’s reason and scientific knowledge and aptitude have never been called into play to devise a system of consecutive restraints on the “brutal elements,” a system to make men good from the beginning by “working out the beast.”

The crux of the problem is how to imbue children painlessly with the truth that social life has responsibilities and limitations, obedience to which is indispensable. And I submit that this may be done in the homes and nurseries of the future, under a scientifically adapted system of training. Hard blows and even chiding tones of the human voice must have no place in childhood’s environment, but authority may be exercised through the use of a simple appliance for limiting infant freedom. When baby trespasses against some natural law of health or social life, of which he knows nothing, he is gently but promptly and firmly placed in a baby-prison standing within reach, viz. a goodly-sized basket, high at the sides, softly cushioned all round and weighted, so that it cannot be overturned by the infant culprit, who, if refractory, may kick or scream in safety there till the paroxysm passes, and he falls asleep. On waking he recalls vaguely, when older, more clearly the occurrence, and he becomes lightly possessed by a subtle sense of authority quite distinct from individual kindness or unkindness. His human relations are unhurt by the necessary training in infancy. He has been checked in wrong-doing without any wrong association of ideas, and without an awakening of anti-social feeling.

I have seen an ignorant nurse teach a child to seek solace for pain in an anti-social emotion! “Beat the naughty chair that has hurt poor baby’s head,” was the evil counsel, and the child held out to the chair struck his tiny revengeful blows, and was kissed and caressed in consequence. This happened in a rich man’s nursery. Could one blame the ignorant nurse? Her infancy was passed in a city slum, and in every such locality children swarm who freely strike out both in self-protection and brutal aggressiveness. From birth these little ones live more or less in an atmosphere of savage assault. Tyranny and force are the ruling conditions of their childhood, and the natural result—under the unalterable law of cause and effect—is this: vindictive, barbaric feeling is carried hither and thither throughout society at large, and degrades every social class.

When home-life in the middle classes has been reorganized, and nursery training is the outcome of scientific thought, children there at least will escape this taint. They will pass from nursery to schoolroom with nerves that have never been unnecessarily jarred. They will be physically stronger, and in temperament more serene. Reared without harshness, they will know no craven fear; and since the native attitude of childhood towards elders never seen angry or cross is that of confiding love, teachers will have no difficulty in bringing into play the tender emotions that are natural checks upon evil doing, and natural incentives to effort in action that is right. If playfulness intrudes, and the serious work of a class is hindered by some little urchin’s fun, the master or mistress needs neither to scold nor to cane the offender, for unspoken satisfaction and dissatisfaction are quickly perceived and responded to by children unused to punishment or an elder’s frown.

But even in the schoolroom an appeal to mechanism may sometimes prove useful. An instrument called “a characterograph” was described by its inventor to an Edinburgh audience half a century ago. This instrument for registering had been in use in Lady Byron’s Agricultural School at Ealing Grove, with moral effects markedly beneficial. There were many comments in the press of that period. It supersedes all necessity for prizes, place-taking, or any kind of reward or punishment, and renders unnecessary the master’s expressing anger or irritation—“the worst example a teacher can set to his pupils.” (Mr. E. T. Craig was inventor of the characterograph.)

If we bear in mind that the supreme object of training is social solidarity, and that social solidarity rests fundamentally on tender relations between the old, the young, and the middle-aged, we shall recognize the wisdom of elders resigning at the earliest possible moment all manifestations of personal authority. The average boy and girl, if well trained, has at fifteen, or about that age, moral powers sufficiently developed to control innate propensities. At that epoch to the young themselves should be relegated the ruling of youthful conduct in the interests of society. Not to the young singly, however, but in their corporate capacity. The organizing of juvenile committees and conduct clubs will ensue. I need not, however, treat of these here. They belong to the subject of general education, and I am merely touching on training in its relations to specific crime.

The point in social science to emphasize is this: At every stage of the nation’s history its moral health or disease is the actual resultant of previous conditions of its child-life throughout the length and breadth of the land. At the present moment the public mind is astray on this subject. There is no understanding of the restraints necessary on infantile wrong-doing, the wholesome because painless checks to apply to juvenile delinquents. Science must guide us to the right path of action, society must enlist parental authority, or, if need be, coerce the child to take the indicated course. By the absence of wholesome checks and the presence of brutal conditions in childhood we suffer a vast amount of preventible crime. We evolve the criminal by sins of omission outside the prison; we brutalize him further inside the prison by undue, ill-adapted restraints.

Very significant was the experience of Mr. Obermair, of the State Prison in Munich. When appointed governor there, he found from six to seven hundred prisoners in the worst state of insubordination, and whose excesses he was told defied the harshest, most stringent discipline. The prisoners were chained together. The guard consisted of about 100 soldiers, who did duty not only at the gates and round the walls, but in the passages, and even in the workshops and dormitories; and, strangest of all, from twenty to thirty large dogs of the bloodhound breed were let loose at night in the passages and courts to keep watch and ward. The place was a perfect pandemonium, comprising the worst passions, the most slavish vices, and the most heartless tyranny within the limits of a few acres.

Mr. Obermair quickly dispensed with dogs, and nearly all the guards. He gradually relaxed the harsh system, and treated the prisoners with a consideration that gained their confidence. In the year 1852 Mr. Baillie Cochrane visited the prison, and his account is as follows: “The gates were wide open, without any sentinel at the door, and a guard of only twenty men idling away their time in a room off the entrance hall.... None of the doors were provided with bolts and bars; the only security was an ordinary lock, and as in most of the rooms the key was not turned, there was no obstacle to the men walking into the passage.... Over each workshop some of the prisoners with the best characters were appointed overseers, and Mr. Obermair assured me that when a prisoner transgressed a regulation, his companions told him ‘es ist verboten,’ and it rarely happened that he did not yield to the will of his fellow-prisoners. Within the prison walls every description of work is carried on ... each prisoner by occupation and industry maintains himself. The surplus of his earnings is given him on release, which avoids his being parted with in a state of destitution.” (This account is taken from Herbert Spencer’s Essay on Prison Ethics.) It is then clearly proved by actual experience that rough handling and brutal words—bolts and bars and bloodhounds—are alike unnecessary in the case of first offenders and in the case of the “desperate gang.”

But, turning once more from the criminal to the ultimate causes of crime, these are—destitution, or more or less grinding poverty, inherited disease, ignorance and all the degraded nurture that crushes the humanities and develops the brutalities of man. A scientific treatment of crime will eradicate these various causes of crime. No summary methods are applicable. There is no short cut to the end in view; but by patient perseverance in the scientific meliorism indicated in my chapters on Industrial Life, Sex Relations and Parentage, and to be further explained in those on Education and Home Life, the forces brought into play will prove effective in social redemption. They are essentially radical and all-embracing. Within reformatories and prisons there may be partially supplied the training for forming and reforming character that is nowhere present in the homes and schools of the lower classes to-day. Those criminals who are not structurally defective may recover moral health, and become virtuous or at least harmless social units. In all such cases liberty should be restored; but the State can never be justified in discharging its rescued criminals without resources and without protection. They must be supplied with work, i.e. some means of self-support, and guarded from dangers besetting the critical period of liberation. The educating of ignorant criminals, the reforming of corrigible criminals, the restraining from further crime of incurable criminals—these are duties of the State.

The time, however distant, will finally arrive when science, applied for generations to the task of skilfully removing all the causes of crime, will accomplish that glorious aim. By attention to the laws of heredity, by checking the too rapid increase of population, by the moral training of every member of the community, and by well-ordered, happy, domestic, industrial and social life, the criminal nature will die out, and crime itself be simply historical—a thing to study with interest, an extirpated social disease.

PART IV
EVOLUTION OF THE EMOTIONS

We must never forget that human aspirations, human ideals, are as much a part of the phenomena which makes up this causally-connected Universe as the instincts and appetites that are common to man and the other animals.—David G. Ritchie.

CHAPTER I
THE SENTIMENTS OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The dawning century will have to undertake a new education of mankind if we are not to relapse.... New inventions are less needed than new ethics.—Dr. Max Nordau.

Herbert Spencer tells us that: “Free institutions can only be properly worked by men, each of whom is jealous of his own rights and sympathetically jealous of the rights of others—who will neither himself aggress on his neighbour in small things or great, nor tolerate aggression on them by others.”

The state of mind or sentiment to which Mr. Spencer here points is complex. It comprises an egoism that is not anti-social, and an altruism that is broadly social. The genesis of this sentiment is intellectual, implying a recognition in some sort of the laws of nature, by virtue of which individual rights do not conflict with nature’s harmonies or its fundamental organic unity. It is possible, therefore, only to a race comparatively advanced, i.e. intellectually endowed; but the children and children’s children of that race may possess the sentiment of individual rights as an instinct with no apprehension whatever of its source or its justification. Its alliance with, and perfect conformity to, natural law are certainly not understood, and confusion is increased in the public mind by the unscientific teaching of the daily press. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from a middle-class journal. “Law is command, control. Nature is instinctive force, and can neither give nor receive laws. There are no laws of nature, and there are no rights of man. We are using meaningless phrases when we speak of either. Man has no natural rights any more than the wolf and the bear. All rights are conventional.”

Now, before man had made a direct study of nature, and, marking the invariability of sequence in the precision of its phenomena, had attached to that invariability the term “laws of nature,” the word “law” denoted a lawgiver issuing arbitrary commands. It is in this primitive sense that our journalist uses the word “law.” He entirely ignores its appropriation by science and the modern acceptation of the term “laws of nature.” Nature has no arbitrary commands, he says, and therefore infers no laws. We admit the premise while denying the inference. The laws of health are invariable, although they do not necessarily dominate, since other and opposing laws of disorganization may at any moment get the upper hand. Man is competent to disregard the laws of life; but if he so acts, another course of natural order is initiated, and he becomes subject to pathological laws which conduct him steadily to the grave. Necessity without arbitrary command rules in the cosmos; and if happiness, which all humanity desires, is attained, it will be by conforming to all the laws of nature that favour that end. Within, there are the laws of human organization, without, the laws of circumstance or environment. The humanity that has intellect and scientific knowledge may, by union and co-operation, take a firm advantage of these laws or uniformities of nature and march steadily forward, controlling the forces of nature by a willing obedience to natural law.

No sooner, observe, does this control become possible than natural rights come into existence. Man rises in the scale of being to a sphere of self-direction and comparative liberty. The wolf and bear and all wild animals are on the lower level, and have no natural rights. They are controlled by forces external to themselves, and the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the law of destiny to them. It is not so, however, with the horse, dog, cat, etc., for man has lifted all domesticated animals from under the rule of genetic forces, and placed them under the rule of reasoned forces. He controls their breeding, limits their numbers, and gives them a happy life consistent with his own. Further, he claims for them and concedes to them natural rights; and note this point, the last phrase of our journalist’s misleading paragraph is strictly true: “All rights are conventional.” Convention means by tacit agreement, and it is by tacit agreement on the part of civilized men that rights of men and rights of animals exist and are respected. An impulse of the higher life, viz., a law of sympathy, impels civilized man to seek happiness for other beings as well as himself, and intelligence shows him that individual happiness promotes general happiness, and further that no individual happiness is possible without a certain amount of personal liberty.

Individual rights, then, are a claim for a certain amount of personal liberty, and the sentiment of individual rights is an unconscious inward preparedness to defend that claim. It lies at the very foundation of modern ethics, since from it there springs the outward equipoise of egoistic and altruistic forces, the inward, subtle, delicate sense of equitable relations, in other words, justice—the moral backbone of the modern conscience.

Let us see how we treat, in our nurseries, this foundation of ethics, this sentiment of individual rights. We enter a middle-class nursery where a baby and his sister Jessie, a child of three years of age, are side by side on the floor. An impulse seizes baby to clutch the doll, which Jessie holds firmly. Baby screams and nurse turns round and lifts him in her arms. “See, Jessie,” she says, “he wants your doll, surely you will be kind to baby brother?” She takes the doll from Jessie and gives it to the infant. Jessie throws herself on the ground and kicks and screams. A paroxysm of emotion sweeps over her, and until the wave has spent itself tranquillity in nerve or muscle is simply impossible. But the nurse, ignorant of the fact that the child is for the moment bereft of any power of self-control, commands her to be still, and when not obeyed, she scolds her severely. Finally she puts her in a corner, and there poor Jessie sobs and weeps till pure exhaustion brings her to passivity and an abject state of mind which nurse calls “being good again.” She signifies her approval of it by a kiss of forgiveness as unmerited as the previous anger.

Now here we have an emotion supremely important to the welfare of humanity rudely desecrated in infancy. There was nothing base, sordid, exclusive or even selfish in the tempest of feeling that swept away the placidity of Jessie’s little soul. Mingled together there was an impulse to defend her personal rights and a hot indignation that any infringement of these rights should occur. And the whole was a wave of the complex forces destined to weld society into an organic whole, capable of maintaining free institutions. When the nurse through ignorance punished the child for the involuntary expression of a virtuous social-emotion, she was opposing the very order of nature that genetic evolution is striving to attain; she was checking the progress of modern civilization.

Later in the day Jessie with her doll restored to her arms is happy again. Baby plays with his rattle on nurse’s knee; but Jessie thinks, “My dolly is a baby too and wants a rattle.” She takes the rattle out of baby’s hands to give to dolly. Baby shouts and kicks, and nurse is furious. She slaps Jessie and calls her a “naughty child.” There is no ebullition of anger this time, although the tender little fingers ache from the rude blow. Jessie shrinks aside with a subdued air. Had her former rebellion been an impulse of pure vindictiveness it would have repeated itself now. It had no such feature. It revealed the fact that Jessie was the offspring of a self-dependent, self-protective race preparing for a new stage of social evolution, and her aspect at the present crisis reveals the same. She did not know she was in the wrong; but vaguely she felt it. She had trespassed on baby’s rights, and conscience dumbly stirred in her infant bosom. If intelligence is strong the child questions silently, “Why may baby take my doll when I may not take his rattle?” The nurse will give no answer. Her province is to feed and cleanse and clothe her charges, and, if need be, punish action. But the motive springs of action lie quite beyond her range, and what is the consequence? If Jessie’s intellect predominates over her emotional quality, her conscience may develop, although under adverse conditions; but if the balance tends the other way the position is fatal. The child gathers her ideas of right and wrong from the frowns and smiles, the slaps or kisses of an ignorant woman who is ruling the nursery with an authority purely barbaric, and the budding conscience of a modern civilization adapts itself to the archaic environment and reverts or lapses backward.

Further, observe, the nurse strove to create—in this case, at least—sympathy towards a baby brother. Was this wise? It was not wise, although well-intentioned. Sympathy never develops under command, and to order a child to be kind at the moment when an aggression has been made on his or her rights is like commanding a steam-engine to move forward without turning on the steam! Moreover, baby, young as he was, suffered mentally and morally by the event. He learned an evil lesson, viz., that if he cried he would probably get what he wanted. Vigorously, though unconsciously, he will pursue that vicious course and act up to the principle.

Does my reader inquire “What should the nurse have done?” She should have instantly removed the baby, saying gently to Jessie, “Children must never take things from one another. Not even a baby can be permitted to do that, and we must teach him better. But see he is so young, he does not know the doll is yours, not his. Would you like to lend it to him for a little? No? Ah, well he cannot have it then, but come and help me to amuse him that he may forget the doll.” The older child puts down her treasure to fondle her baby brother, and there are ten chances to one that by-and-bye her sympathy—called out naturally and not by command—carries her a step further, and she says: “Nurse, baby may hold my doll for a little now.” Later, when the brilliant idea occurs that dolly would enjoy the rattle, Jessie understands—she does not blindly, vaguely feel, she knows—that she must not trespass on baby’s rights. She restrains her impulse therefore to snatch the rattle, and in this self-control she is exercising the noblest faculty of her nature under the dominion of a moral conscience—a sense of justice or equivalence of rights.

And now we pass from an upper middle-class nursery to any British boys’ school or playground. We find that quarrels there arise not so much from the simple barbarous impulses of cruelty, hatred, revenge, fear, as from a different source—an effective sense of personal rights unbalanced by an equally effective sense of sympathy with the rights of others. The phenomenon here is justice in embryo, self-conscious, but lacking development on the altruistic side. “It isn’t” or “it wasn’t fair” is a phrase frequently upon a schoolboy’s lips, and it is remarkable with what courage and dignity an urchin of ten or twelve will criticize a master’s treatment of him, and perhaps tell the man of fifty to his face that this or that “wasn’t fair.”

Were every boy as eager that all human beings—schoolmasters included—should be as fairly treated as he himself, the only further regulation of conduct necessary would be a clear intelligence to discern truth from falsehood in every case of misdemeanour. Instructed intelligence is however a minus quantity, and the sympathetic jealousy for the rights of others that exists here and there amongst boys in minor quantity, gets deflected from its true course. It links boys of one age together in a mutual fellowship that excludes masters and all others. Nor is this difficult to understand. Mutual interests is the soil in which sympathy grows; but with arbitrary authority in the field, also conflicting desires, and no distinct teaching on the subject, the deeper relations of life, I mean the mutual interests of teacher and taught and of the whole school as a social unity, are often ignored. To shield a companion from punishment, at all hazards, becomes virtue in a schoolboy’s eyes, and antagonisms spring up with confused notions of right and wrong, and a general impulse to falsehood and deceit in special directions. These are menacing features of character for the social life of the future. Men of introspection have recognized in themselves the baneful after-effects of the clannishness engendered at school. Robert Louis Stevenson bewailed the extreme difficulty he had in forcing himself to perform a distinct public duty. It involved some exposure dishonourable to a former schoolmate! “I felt,” he said, “like a cad!”

From middle-class nurseries where authority is chiefly barbaric and the budding conscience is hurt, children destined to become the élite of a future society and its rulers, pass into schools where there is no clear and definite training for the emotional nature, no scientific development of the social, and repression of the anti-social impulses. From school the student passes to college or university, and is emancipated more or less from outward control. When he enters upon the duties and pleasures of adult life he presents, in many ways, an element of social danger, for this simple reason, his native bumptiousness, his sense of individual rights is not held in check by an intelligent understanding of, and feeling of sympathy with, the equal rights of others. The groundwork of the modern conscience has been tampered with while authority—propelled by genetic forces of evolution—has gradually relaxed and fallen back before the free-born British schoolboy. By our present system of education we destroy infant virtue in the nursery and in the school. We dwarf that sympathy which should grow and expand till it bursts forth in manhood into deeds of rectitude, justice, love, manifesting the threefold quality of human nature which alone is competent to lift the whole area of man’s existence into line with cosmic order. Our schools are yearly pouring into the busy world a rich harvest of human aptitudes that are quickly absorbed in activities mercantile, professional, legislative, but the outcome of these activities is not tuning life into social harmony, it is merely increasing national wealth, and that without any marked increase of plenty and pleasure to the nation at large. The picture presented is one of perpetual warfare—an outward struggle in money-making for oneself and family, an inward contentious spirit that reveals itself abroad in our blatant imperialism, at home in class antagonisms—the whole re-acting fatally on individual character and lowering the general standard of civilized life. Generous enthusiasms die down, the emotional nature hardens, till intelligence itself is dimmed and becomes incapable of any wide outlook that entails unselfish effort.

As a rule—though with honourable exceptions—our compatriots advanced in life do not fulfil the promise of their youth; and with forces of nature amenable to man’s will, if wisely directed, real progress in this scientific age is wofully sluggish. We focus attention on environments that press on adults only, and in seeking reform overlook the environments that vitally effect our infant population, therefore the adult life of the future.

How different is our action in other directions. In horticultural nurseries, for instance, progress is not sluggish. Scientific discovery and methods of practice are applied and promptly produce definite results. The composite plants are distinguished from simple plants, and while all are secured in necessary conditions of healthy life—good soil, air, light, etc.—those receive from the gardener a special fostering care. He studies the laws of differentiation, the peculiarities of each organism with its hidden possibilities of varied efflorescence, and by fitting environment to wider issues, watching them day by day, nourishing every tendency favourable, checking every tendency unfavourable, he induces an outburst of blossom as varied in colour and form as it is marvellous in beauty or grace, and that in spite of the fact that unaided by natural forces he is utterly powerless to make a blade of grass grow.

That human plants give promise of blossoming into a moral beauty as yet undreamed of by the British public is patent to any wise observer of the confused social life of to-day. Our greatest realists in fiction note the point. We have George Meredith putting into the mouth of his hero, Matthew Weyburn, these significant words: “Eminent station among men doesn’t give a larger outlook ... I have come now and then across people we call common, slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts and ready to learn and logical. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice upon which wisdom is founded ... that is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air there’s no peace and no steady advance. But these humble people had it. I felt them to be my superiors. On the other hand, I have not felt the same with our senators, rulers and lawgivers. They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.” (Lord Ormont and his Aminta.)

As regards physical health, I have shown the necessity for stirpiculture and the birth of the fit; as regards mental and moral health, i.e. Humanity’s efflorescence on higher planes—the need of the times is less eugenics than education and training. Germs of truth, justice, love, lie latent in the basic structure of our half-civilized race, and so long as we neglect or destroy these germs it were folly to desire material of finer quality. “Our raw material is of the very best,” said the headmistress of a London Board School, “our children are full of generous impulses and fearless spontaneity. I sometimes think the no-rule in the homes of the masses a better preparation for life than the factitious training given in homes of the classes. But our teachers are so few and so seldom scientifically enlightened that we spoil very much of the good material.” On behalf of the classes my reader might argue that susceptibility to beauty or the aesthetic sentiment with its creative expression in art belongs almost exclusively to the upper section of society, and is deemed by some social reformers the very foundation of moral life, the basis of the ethical temper.

It is not my purpose to provoke comparison between the classes and the masses, and I fully recognize the value of the fine arts as factors in the general elevation of life and character, but I submit that evolution does not pursue the same line of development in the various races of mankind, and in the British race an advanced ethical temper is in process of formation quite irrespective of the fine arts and the aesthetic sentiment.

Dr. Le Bon laid before the French Geographical Society an account of a primitive group of people, numbering several hundred thousand, who inhabit a remote region high up among the Carpathian mountains. Of this people, the Podhalians, he says, “they are born improvisatori, poets and musicians, singing their own songs, set to music of their own composition. Their poetry is tender and artless in sentiment, generous and elevated in style.” He attributes these qualities to the wealth of spontaneous resources possessed by natures which neither know violent passions nor unnatural excitements. The British race, moulded by different conditions—geographical and historical—has developed differently. Great masses of our population are wholly insensitive to the influences of art. The picture drawn by Wordsworth of his Peter Bell comes nearer to our native uncultured type—

A primrose by the river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

The soft blue sky did never melt

Into his heart, he never felt

The witchery of the soft blue sky.

Nevertheless, through another channel he was touched to the quick. Thrilled into sudden sweetness and pathos by the sight of a widow’s tears—

In agony of silent grief

From his own thoughts did Peter start;

He longs to press her to his heart

From love that cannot find relief.

The hard life of our workers has undoubtedly deprived them, as yet, of any widespread aesthetic development, but the chords of their vital part, if played upon, produce a sentient state far removed from the rudimentary stage. It is a product of centuries of evolution.

This humanity will move forward to higher planes of existence, and a spiritual plenitude—of which aestheticism is by no means the crown and glory, but only an imperfect foretaste—by two convergent paths trodden concurrently. These are a steady growth in social qualities and the happiness that flows from these qualities, the creation, in short, of organic socialism; and the opening up outwardly of channels of sympathy and community of interests throughout the whole nation, causing the banishment of class distinctions, the establishment of an organized socialism. Perfection in art is not the appropriate ideal for this age, but perfection in social life, and it is not from a love of art to a love of mankind and the practices of moral rectitude that our masses will advance. It is by the practice of all the humanities on ever broader, deeper lines, until the nation, vibrating with harmonized life, frames new visions of art, and strengthens all the well-springs of art’s creation.

The aestheticism that belongs exclusively to one social class neither elevates general morals nor produces the noblest art. Its narrowing influences are exemplified in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son: “If you love music, go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a contemptible light; ... few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert with a fiddle under your chin.” Lord Chesterfield belonged to a past century, but the spirit of his thought is not dead; it manifests prominently to-day. In my own experience a lady novelist was invited to a London At Home, and accepted conditionally. If evening costume were necessary she must decline, but if less ceremonious dress were permissible she would gladly appear, and the hostess consenting, she did so. Now I heard a large group of middle-class ladies passionately condemning this action, on the ground that aestheticism had been outraged and the rules of society set at nought by a blot in rooms otherwise beautiful. Yet the novelist had been tastefully attired, that was freely admitted. She had sinned merely in nonconformity to fashion and in covering her neck and arms. Can we seriously believe that the type of humanity to which these ladies belong is developing the liberal mind which alone may create and support the highest morality, the noblest art? Are we not compelled to recognize the truth of Mr. J. H. Levy’s profound remark: “In the present stage of human progress the aesthetic and the moral are conterminate at neither end. Aesthetic emotion may be roused in us by that which is ethically odious, and moral feeling may be called up by that which is artistically ugly.” (The National Reformer.)

The true ethical temper is engendered by a complexity of social attractions issuing in an inward sense of justice and the delicate equipoise of natural rights between meum and tuum. The task before us is to unite the half-conscious, instinctive justice already existent with an intellectual apprehension and clear understanding of right and wrong, in other words, to complete the modern conscience; and in view of this task we must distinctly realize that the sentiment of what is proper and improper in conventional society has no ethical value, and is a false guide to conduct.

CHAPTER II
RAPACITY, PRIDE, LOVE OF PROPERTY

The facts which it is at once most important and most difficult to appreciate are what may be called the facts of feeling.—Lecky.

The area of man’s emotional life is one of vast magnitude. It lies behind the scenes of his outward existence, yet it interpenetrates the social structure throughout, and stretches beyond it to distances we know not whence or whither. Mysterious as this region is, no sooner does man aspire to control the social forces of collective life, as he already largely controls the natural forces of physical life, than he is compelled to apply his reason scientifically to the phenomena of human emotions, and to contemplate, trace out and master there the general features of the process of evolution.

In the case of personal development the task is comparatively easy. A child’s feelings are simple, not compound. For the most part they seem vague and indefinite, always fleeting and evanescent; but as the child grows his powers of feeling grow likewise and alter in character. Their childish simplicity passes away; they augment in mass, they become complex, more permanent and coherent in their nature, and far more delicate in susceptibility. Consequently the breadth of range, the depth and richness of emotion possible in an adult, as compared with the emotions of a child, are as the music of an organ to the sweet notes that lie within the compass of a penny whistle.

In racial development evolution of feeling has not pursued one invariable course. Distinctive sentiments and modes of feeling characterize the different races of mankind as well as distinctive outward features, and the impressing on a plastic race of these divergent states of feeling is mainly, though not entirely, due to external conditions—not climatic and geographical conditions only, but also the form of civilization that had taken root and moulded the habits and customs of the race. Greek civilization, for instance, tended to develop largely the aesthetic group of feelings, while in Scotland these feelings, through outward influences I must not pause to consider, have been stunted in growth, and moral sentiments have had a deeper and firmer development.

Amongst barbarous tribes of men the violent emotions—anger, fear, jealousy, revenge—generally speaking, hold sway; but there are also in various parts of the world uncivilized communities where these fierce passions are little known, and where, in consequence of the absence of warlike surroundings, the gentle, tender sentiments that have for their foundation family ties and peaceful social life, prevail, and are considerably developed.

The conditions of emotional evolution in a given race, then, are complex. We have to bear in mind a threefold environment—cosmic, planetary, social—pressing upon individual life and powerfully swaying the emotional part of it. Social environment is pre-eminently potent in modifying emotional characteristics; yet the prime factor of change in social environment springs from this region of feeling, and this factor may, under rational guidance, take a path of direct and rapid progression.

British civilization is the product of a turbulent, militant stage of evolution, an epoch of military glory, followed by a long period of industrial development and commercial activity. We inherit a survival of virtues and vices from each of these evolutional stages. To the first we attribute our courage, independence and proper pride, both national and individual; and we are apt to suppose that without the experience of military glory our manly John Bull would have been a milk-sop. That may or may not be true; but when we infer that the above characteristics depend fundamentally and absolutely upon a military environment we are vastly mistaken. Observe what is said by travellers and missionaries of certain unwarlike tribes found in India and the Malay Peninsula. The Jakuns are inclined, we are told, to gratitude and beneficence, their tendency being not to ask favours, but to confer them. The Arifuras have a very excusable ambition to gain the name of rich men by paying the debts of their poorer fellow-villagers! One gentle Arifura, who had hoped to be chosen chief of his village and was not, met his disappointment with the spirit of a philosopher and philanthropist, saying: “What reason have I to grieve? I still have it in my power to assist my fellow-villagers.” When brought into contact with men of an opposite type—hardy, fierce and turbulent, they have no tendency to show the white feather. The amiable Dhimal is independent and courageous, and resists “with dogged obstinacy” injunctions that are urged injudiciously. The Jakun is extremely proud—his pride showing itself in refusals to be domesticated and made useful to men of a different race and therefore alien to himself. The simple-minded Santal has a “strong natural sense of justice, and should any attempt be made to coerce him, he flies the country. The Santal is courteous and hospitable, whilst at the same time he is free from cringing.” Dalton writes of the Hos—a tribe belonging to the same group as the Santals—“a reflection on a man’s honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to self-destruction”; and of the Lepchas, Hooker says, “In all my dealings with them they have proved scrupulously honest.... They cheer on the traveller by their unostentatious zeal in his service, and when a present is given to them, it is divided equally among many without a syllable of discontent or a grudging look or word.”[^[4]]

[4]. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, pp. 628, 630, 631.

From these facts we gather that a number of virtues associated in our minds with Western civilization are present amid barbarous tribes, and that the vices associated by us with barbarism—cruelty, dishonesty, treachery, selfishness—are in some cases glaringly absent. Human nature is not dependent on culture or Christianity to humanize and make it lovable. There is that in the very groundwork of its nature which renders it capable of developing, under favourable conditions, into what is admirable, pure and gracious. The traits given us of these peoples show virtue, truth, generosity, moral courage and justice, and what nobler, more elevated sentiments have as yet been found in civilized man?

The favourable conditions are an entire absence of warlike surroundings and warlike training, hence an absence also of any inheritance of warlike proclivities. These tribes “have remained unmolested for generation after generation; they have inflicted no injuries on others.” Their social or unselfish feelings have been fostered and nourished by the sympathetic intercourse of a peaceful life.

In a purely military state unselfish feelings are necessarily repressed, whilst the bold, keen, hard and cruel side of human nature is liberally developed. To hate an enemy and avenge an injury are manly virtues. The predatory instincts are useful and approved. Treachery is not discredited, and the man clever enough to take advantage of an enemy and successfully intrigue against him may be ranked among the gods! The plunderer who falters not in keen pursuit of prey and in the hour of victory shows relentless cruelty is deemed heroic. No thought of happiness or misery to others gives him pause; military glory is his absorbing aim, and in the intervals of peace his callous nature manifests in ruling with tyrannic power slavish subordinates, who bend and cringe before him.

Now let us glance at two of these militant characteristics, viz. rapacity and personal pride, with a view to observe how their survival into our industrial epoch has vitiated the national life.

The purely militant stage of British development has passed, and the outward form of our collective life is industrial, not military. A sanguinary path of glory has no intrinsic fascination for our people, and there is no national desire to conquer and rule over races established on other parts of the earth’s surface, however superior to ours may be their climate and quarters. Nevertheless, within the last half century we have fought battles and shed blood copiously in China, Persia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere. Seldom, however, has the nation itself clamoured for war. In the year 1854 a relapse into militant mood occurred, and, in spite of unwillingness on the part of individual rulers, the Government yielded to a sinister wave of barbaric feeling in the nation—a martial frenzy that impelled to the Crimean War. Since that period wars have originated from other causes than the will of the nation. Our people, immersed in a painful struggle for livelihood at home, are indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the many squabbles into which we flounder abroad. General malevolence has no part in this matter; our real collective attitude towards foreigners is one of friendliness, combined with an impulse to the peaceful exchange of commodities, kind words and gentle arts—the whole provocative of love, not hatred.

The fundamental causes of war, then, have been: first, the commercial interests of a capitalist class, or, if expressed in terms of feeling, the desire in that class for increased wealth—a desire partly the product of inherited rapacity, a sentiment descended to us from our militant epoch; second, national pride—a pride which has kindled animosities, embroiled us in disputes and dragged us into wars, the pettiness of whose small beginnings is only matched by the pettiness of British conduct throughout their whole extent. But both this rapacity and this national pride belong almost exclusively to our ruling classes. Their existence is explained by the action of outward conditions on special sections of the community. The British passed suddenly out of a period of constant fighting and feud into a period of frantic industrial activity. Feudal chiefs and their descendants became grasping landlords. There also sprang up a class of sharp-witted, keen-sighted men, whose native rapacity strengthened in the genial hot-bed of our brilliant commercial success. A tremendous start in the international race after wealth was secured to Great Britain by her possession of iron, coal, etc. She absorbed riches from every quarter of the globe, and mercantile triumph swelled the pride already deeply implanted in our industrial organizers, our politicians and plenipotentiaries. The great mass of the people were differently affected by industrial conditions. Workers of every description, packed together in towns and factories, rapidly developed the qualities of intimate social life, and out-grew, in the main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker, nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the joys and blessings of universal peace.

But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all strongly in evidence.

The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.

In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of others.

No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and energies are set free for further development. Some social units become complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism.

Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol. of Essays, 2nd series, p. 132.)

That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth (but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice and inward misery and corruption.

The British merchant goes on accumulating long after he has amply provided for himself and family, and many a poor man feels towards that other’s wealth precisely as a savage feels towards his fetish. He is filled with reverence, admiration, desire and a sense of distance from the golden calf that makes him hopeless, abject, despairing.

The American millionaire, as depicted by Mr. Howells, will, “on a hot day, when the mortal glare of the sun blazes in upon heart and brain, plot and plan in his New York office till he swoons at the desk.” Such a man is as much a victim to over-development of acquisitiveness as the drunkard is victim to an undue development of the love of stimulants, and in each case the depraved taste carries ruin to the individual and havoc into society. Social unity is rent in twain. A life of exuberant wealth and extravagant expenditure runs parallel with one of constant, inescapable poverty, and so long as the nation continues to heap up riches in private possession, just so long must we reap an emotional harvest of envy, malice, private animosities, class hatreds and a subtle estrangement of heart throughout the length and breadth of the land. Yet even the great poet Tennyson in his writings exalts into a worthy motive for holy wedlock this sentiment—love of property. An affectionate father, in the poem, “The Sisters,” exhorts his daughters thus: “One should marry, or ... all the broad lands will pass collaterally”!

The small accumulator whose petty hoard of gold was gloated over piece by piece has long been labelled miser. He is publicly condemned, and in literature derided. But the merchant-prince who, already wealthy, devotes days and years and his whole mind and heart to business; the proprietor of broad lands who adds acre to acre, and anxiously meditates on their passing collaterally; the rich capitalist who craftily seeks to lower wages in the interests of employers; the gambler on the Stock Exchange; the market manipulator whose predatory instincts are so pleasurably excited by risks and gains that he will hazard in the game all that nobler men hold precious—these beings, I say, are as worthy of scorn and infinitely more baneful than the miser. They must take their true place by his side in public estimation. They are social deformities, morally diseased. In other words, these men are incapable of moral duty, which consists in “the observance of those rules of conduct that contribute to the welfare of society—the end of society being peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.” (Huxley’s Life, vol. ii. p. 305.)

In the preceding chapter I have shown that the self-regarding sentiment exercised with due consideration for the welfare of others is a social virtue. It promotes national prosperity and personal improvement. But self-regarding actions, induced by this master-passion over-acquisitiveness, invariably issue in automatic selfishness and general deterioration.

In regard to aesthetic emotions also the cleavage between rich and poor has a fatal significance. A luxurious, idle, for the most part, inane, life led by the rich, profoundly influences the poor; not by creating anti-social feeling only, but by checking aesthetic development. In the city of many slums there is also a west-end of gay shops filled with objects de luxe, of showily dressed women, profligate men, theatre, music-hall and ball-room entrances, at which to stand gazing as into a fairy peep-show. Suggestion here plays a mischievous part. Poverty hinders the purchase of all commodities that possess any real artistic value, but commercial enterprise has flooded the markets with meretricious imitations. East-end shops reflect the glitter and glow of west-end attractions, and the ignorant, spell-bound by suggestion, become possessors of that which degrades and vulgarizes taste or the sense of the beautiful. Now that science partially dominates thought, our eyes have been opened to the fact of essential unity in human groups. We may trace the cause of a social evil to a special section or class, but the effects of that cause radiate forth till they touch every section or class. Dwellers in the west-end cannot escape disease propagated by the vilely unwholesome conditions of life at the east-end. Micro-organisms of disease are wafted from hither to thither, and on the physical plane social unity is recognized. A like continuity exists on the non-physical side. Minds are as closely united by psychical law as bodies by physical law. The experienced facts of hypnotism make this clear, and the logical inference is that in Western civilization the vices of wealthy classes infect and corrupt the masses.

That the imagination of the great mass of our people should be snared and their evolutional progress thwarted by mental suggestion from a banal, vicious life led by a comparatively small portion of the nation, is an outrage on civilization. It renders it imperative that the cause of this evil, viz., our contentious, i.e. our competitive system of industry, should be fundamentally changed.

For every group of human beings the steady growth of those social qualities which create happiness and the steady advance in intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual life, depend on a close community of interests and the constant opening up of fresh channels of sympathy throughout the group. But the British racial group has lost this community of interests—this primary condition of steady growth. It is split up into, first, a class of property possessors made effeminate by ill-spent leisure, often inflated by pride, and at all times demanding the artificial pleasures of a luxurious life; second, a class striving to amass property, a class whose thoughts and desires circle round and centre in property, and who to acquire it often sacrifice serenity of mind, health of body, and even life itself; and third, the mass of the people who, having no property, are yet enslaved by it, and who on the emotional side of their human nature are debased and corrupted by the mental state of the classes.

As evolution approaches the era of manhood of human reason it becomes conscious, and demands a national effort to improve. That effort first appears in the strenuous, scientific study of life as it is, in attempts at social reconstruction, and at improvement in public and private education. It is seen to be necessary to stamp out all the militant and predatory instincts of mankind by ethical nurture and training, while all the gentle, gracious qualities of mankind must be carefully guarded and nourished, until, in every social unit the effort to improve is habitual, i.e. has become “the essential mode of its being.” (J. McGavin Sloan.)

CHAPTER III
PERSONAL JEALOUSY—NATIONAL PATRIOTISM

“Jealousy is cruel as the grave.”

We shall progress faster by diligent striving to fashion the feeling of the time and stir it from the intellectual apathy which is the chiefest curse of the State.—Alex. M. Thomson.

The danger that confronts the new century is the recrudescence of racial antipathies and national animosities.—Hermann Adler.

The passion of jealousy has a long and significant history, and a pedigree more ancient than the allied sentiment, love of property, which has just been considered. The passion was useful to the welfare of the tribe at an early period, but it survives as purely a vice in the midst of consolidated nations, for it is essentially anti-social, not necessary to general welfare, and impossible to be exercised sympathetically or for the good of others. If I am jealous it means that I have a source of personal delight that I would guard from others and monopolise if I could. The happiness may be self-produced or rest on a being whom I love. In both cases it causes within me fears of interference, suspicion of my fellows, and a general tendency to dislike, nay, even to hate them if they dare to meddle with my secret joy. The emotion is fundamentally selfish, and when an individual is sympathetic all round he becomes incapable of it. He has risen above the egoistic passion of jealousy.

Mr. Darwin tells us that amongst savages addicted to “intemperance, utter licentiousness and unnatural crimes, no sooner does marriage, whether polygamous or monogamous, become common than jealousy leads to the inculcation of female virtue.” This gives the clue to the problem of jealousy’s evolutional value. It has played a part in the destiny of woman, and tended to shape her emotional nature. Its history is inextricably intertwined with hers, in all the varying degrees of servitude that mark her slow advance from a condition of absolute chattelism to one of rational equality with man.

By virtue of superior strength man has acted on the theory that he was made for God, and woman for him! and in the process of establishing his dominancy jealousy appeared and aided powerfully the gradual development of a new emotion—constancy, a social grace and virtue as certain to wax and grow as jealousy is to wane and slowly disappear.

In literature one finds a reflection of the entire history of jealousy and all its consecutive changes from barbarous times through the ages, when frequent duels witnessed to the honourable place it held in public estimation down to the present day, when it is somewhat discredited, and duelling—in Great Britain at least—has ceased altogether. To track this history were impossible here; I can only point to one or two significant pictures.

The play of “Othello” depicts the barbarous social conditions in which jealousy flourishes. Shakespeare reveals both the anti-social nature of the passion and the intellectual weakness of the mind that harbours it. “Trifles light as air,” says Iago, “are to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ.” And in effect Othello is incapable of sifting evidence. The poor device of the stolen handkerchief seals the fate of Desdemona! Woman’s subject position is plainly set forth, and the foundations of the passion in masculine master-hood and pride of power are fully exposed. Othello’s wife must be his slave and puppet. “Out of my sight,” he cries, and patiently she goes. “Mistress,” he calls, and she returns. “You did wish,” he says to Lodovico, “that I would make her turn.” Desdemona is the very type of patient, gentle, enslaved womanhood, the ideal woman of a rough, brutal age. Her father describes her as—

A maiden never bold;

Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion

Blush’d at herself.

Observe, however, inwardly she is more advanced than the men. She perceives the low nature of jealousy, and to Emilia says touchingly, “My noble Moor is true of mind, and made of no such baseness as jealous creatures are.” Alas, for her generous confidence! And when the base passion transforms her “noble Moor” into a monster of cruelty, she, true to the type of her sex at the period, resembles a pet dog that fawns upon and licks the hand that strikes him. This patient moan is all her utterance—

’Tis meet I should be used so, very meet,

How have I been behaved that he might stick

The small’st opinion on my least misuse.

The only dignity she shows is in her refusal to display her sorrow before Emilia:

Do not talk to me, Emilia;

I cannot weep, nor answer I have none.

Jealousy and duelling flourished long after the Shakesperian period. Prose fiction in the eighteenth century is full of the subject of masculine rivalry in the appropriation of the female sex. The woman passionately desired is the prize or reward of a victory in which the hero has manifested adroitness in arts of bloodshed. Feminine will plays no part in the decision to which man the heroine shall belong, and the rivals for her possession make no pretence of superior character as a claim on her favour. The gentle spiritual qualities that alone create union of heart and mind seem unknown. Master-hood, an apotheosis of force, is the key to the drama; and the rapid rise of the novel in public esteem shows that pleasurable sensations were closely allied with the barbarous actions and feelings that belong to a militant age.

Early in the nineteenth century George Eliot draws the hero of her first great novel (Adam Bede) in the act of picking a quarrel with a rival for a woman’s love. She shows jealousy in him springing chiefly from a sense of property in Hetty. The wounded pride and self-importance of a too despotic nature finds relief in fighting Arthur Donnithorne. In Middlemarch the transition to a higher stage of evolution is marked. She gives us there a graphic picture of a woman wrestling with jealousy in the secrecy of her own chamber, and correctly places in the tenderly emotional nature of that sex the primary impulse to subdue the vile passion. Female jealousy made no appeal to arms, but in a thousand subtle ways it was sending forth currents of anti-social force, and without a widespread feminine repudiation of jealousy no clear advance to higher social life was possible. Dorothea is a true type of progressing womanhood. She gains a victory in the noble warfare we see her waging inwardly, and, rising far above the vile passion, she goes forth to her rival in a glow of generous emotion that not only compels the confidence of the latter, but for the time draws that selfish, narrow nature up to the level of her own.

There is no false note in this picture, and if we glance at the transcript of real life at the period we may easily find its counterpart. The well-known writer, Mrs. Jamieson (in her Commonplace Book) relates: “I was not more than six years old when I suffered, from the fear of not being loved, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me! Whether those around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper or a fit of illness I do not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered me, but I never forgot that suffering. It left a deep impression, and the recollection was so far salutary that in after life I guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonizing thing which men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralizing effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror and even a sort of disgust.”

The knell of a departing phase of inner life was sounding when womanhood acquired the power to sift evidence from childish recollections, to detect the utter uselessness of the suffering jealousy creates and the ignominy of allowing it to become a cause of suffering at all.

Mrs. Jamieson stands on the threshold of a new era, for critical intellect here enters the sphere of the emotions, and these, yielding to guidance and control, human reason is henceforth a prime factor in emotional evolution.

But further, sympathy when developed to a certain point inevitably leads men astray if not guided by reason. Let me here relate a sequence of events that occurred in my own experience.

Two girls became deeply attached; they worked and studied together, and their friendship was a source of constant joy. In course of time, however, one married, and the other girl felt forsaken. She suffered from jealousy, and imagined that the husband would suffer similarly if she kept her place in her friend’s affections. A husband’s right amounted, in her view, to a monopoly of a wife’s tenderness. She strove, therefore, to loosen the bond of friendship; to cool her own ardent affection and make no claims, lest it should disturb conjugal bliss. The action was brave and prompted by sympathy, but it did not make for happiness. In a few short years the wife on her deathbed spoke thus to her former friend: “Why did you separate yourself from me? How could you think my love would change? I have been happy in my husband and child, but love never narrowed, it widened me. There was plenty of room for friendship, too. I sorely missed you, and felt your loss threw a shadow over my married life.”

Sympathy alone, then, is no unerring guide to conduct. Nevertheless, in a society permeated by true knowledge of the nature of the emotions and their significance in evolution primitive good-feeling may evolve, passing through each stage from the basic or simple to the complex, and every generous emotion prove accordant with the truth of things, and therefore productive of inward joy and outward right action, i.e. action tending to general welfare even in all the labyrinthine complexities of a high civilization. Emotion accordant with the truth of things—that is the crux of the position; and again I can best illustrate the point by reference to events that occurred within my own knowledge—events, too, by no means uncommon. During eight years a girl was engaged to marry a man we shall call Roger. He was in India and she in England. They corresponded, but meanwhile an intimacy sprang up between the girl and another man—we may call him Mark—to whom unwittingly her heart went out more warmly than it had ever done to Roger. She thought the relation to Mark was one of pure friendship, and he knew nothing of her engagement to Roger. The latter’s approaching return to England, however, opened the girl’s eyes to her true position, and on Mark it fell as a cruel blow. He had courted affection and responded to it in all sincerity, and was merely withheld from an open avowal by the consciousness of, as yet, insufficient means to justify his suit in the eyes of her parents. When concealment was at an end the problem to him seemed simple enough. “Which do you love best?” he asked, and added dominantly, “he is the man you should marry.” The girl was not convinced. The knowledge that she could not love Roger best filled her with tenderness towards him. Her emotional nature—wide enough to embrace both rivals with sympathy—could give no decision, and intellect was confused by false teaching in childhood. “Duty,” she thought, “is always difficult; ought I not then to choose the hardest path of the two before me, and give up Mark?” In this grave dilemma she turned for advice to an elderly man on whose judgment she felt reliance. Bravely and truthfully she stated her case, innocently betraying that ignorance and the wish to do right were dangerously near carrying her into action that was wrong. “Let us reverse the position,” said her mentor. “Roger, we shall suppose, has written to you to come out to India and marry him, the fact being he has fallen in love with another girl. He did not mean to do that. His heart slipped away from you to her unconsciously, and he is shocked, and blames himself, not wholly without cause. But being an honourable man, he reasons with himself thus: ‘I am bound to keep my engagement to Mary; I will do so, and strive to make her happy.’ He meets you then with a lie in his heart, not on his tongue, for he will say nothing of your rival and of his sacrifice and pain. Would you be happy, think you? Would you miss nothing? And if later you discovered the truth, would you feel that the generous action was a just one to you?” “No, no,” she cried, “I never could wish him to sacrifice his happiness to mine; I would infinitely rather he told me the truth, and married the other girl.” “Precisely so,” said her friend, “the truth is always best; but I see you think Roger is less unselfish than you are! Is that just to him?” “I hardly know,” she murmured, “men are jealous, are they not?” “Jealous, ah, well, we men are frail, no doubt! But were I Roger, I tell you frankly, it would not mend matters to me that I had won my wife without the priceless jewel of her love. Be true to yourself, my young friend, that means also justice to him, and fling to the winds all fears that make you swerve from the path of open rectitude.” The girl fulfilled her difficult task. She relinquished the heroic mood, met her first lover with perfect candour, and a short time later became Mark’s wife. “Roger freed me at once,” she said to her wise mentor; “he’d rather have my friendship, which is perfectly sincere, than love with a strain of falseness. Oh, I am glad, and yet I know he grieves; I would give much to be able to console him!” “Ah,” said her friend, “beware of sentimentality and self-importance there. Roger’s consolation will come through his own true heart. In time he will love again. See to it that you ‘let the dead past bury its dead.’”

Loyalty to truth is not firmly rooted in humanity, while without truth as its guiding principle social feeling, constantly rising, overflows old channels and floods with new dangers the semi-civilization of the present. There is no escape at this juncture from the absolute necessity of developing the critical faculty and applying it to the social questions of the day; in other words, using reason, intelligence, knowledge, as the guides and controllers of feeling.

We turn now from personal emotions to an emotion that sways mankind collectively, and manifests itself in still more direful results than those of individual jealousy. Patriotism, like jealousy, is of ancient origin, and at one time possessed social utility. Without it there could hardly have occurred the transformation of vagrant tribes into massive communities solidly established on one portion of the earth’s surface and sectionally swarming to other portions as occasion requires.

The original element holding a tribe together has been termed by a recent sociologist “consciousness of kind,” i.e. a feeling not dependent on intellectual congeniality or emotional sympathy, but simply on nearness in place, time and blood. With tribal growth cohesion proves necessary to self-protection from adverse environments, whether of natural forces, wild animals or human foes. Experience reveals that union is strength, and hostility to other tribes fosters union in opposition. The inward attitude becomes complex; it embraces cohesion and repulsion; it is essentially a union in enmity. Now we have seen how in boyhood an innocent camaraderie or esprit de corps begets injustice to schoolmasters, and balks the development of the modern conscience; similarly here there are ethical dangers inseparable from a sentiment that beginning in “consciousness of kind” expands into sociality, yet has a converse side of hostility and hate. At the present day patriotism and international warfare are closely combined. The student of life who knows that the general trend of evolution is towards a reign of universal peace, recognizes that although nations have been consolidated by outward warfare and inward patriotism, this sentiment, so limited in range and so largely anti-social, can be no virtue for all time. Patriotism belongs to the militant stage of national history, and as regards Great Britain it is plainly out of date. Its action is not good, but evil.

The war in South Africa begun in 1899 was not caused by racial enmity, but by mercantile enterprise. Economic forces involved in Great Britain’s competitive commercial system were the prime factors in its creation, but without the existence of a vague unintelligent patriotic sentiment in the country generally the Government would not have been supported by the people in the prosecution of that war. Our enfranchised masses, fired by a sudden enthusiasm and racked by sympathy in the brave deeds and cruel sufferings of our soldiers and sailors, saw the phantasmagoria of modern warfare in false colours. Imagination was grasped and controlled by a press working—though half-unconsciously—in the interests of a special mercantile class; and while tender emotions overflowed in generous help to one’s own kind, a sympathy stimulated by public laudation, the reverse side of the picture was ignored. But in this, as in all wars, sympathy had its counterpoise in antagonism and rancorous enmity. All the brutal instincts latent in a race that had fought its way to supremacy among European Powers were roused afresh and stirred into fatal activity, and the evolving modern conscience and sentiments of justice, honour, truth towards all men, were checked and overborne by a loyalty that condones the fierce primitive passions. Hatred and uncharitableness were even voiced from some pulpits, and the term Pro-Boer was opprobriously launched at those lovers of peace who tried to defend their country’s foes from exaggerated blame. It was skilfully handled to promote militant enthusiasm, and discountenance all criticism of militant action and feeling.

On the emotional side of human nature inimical effects of warfare were wholly disregarded, and opinions on the subject of war given forth by a so-called educated class of men and eagerly imbibed by an ignorant public were confused, often false and shamefully misleading. One of these pseudo-teachers alleged that the wars of past times indicated chronic disease, but militarism in the present was useful, because in the home-life of the nation the restraints of authority are becoming weak (Capt. Mahan). And an eminent statesman announced his impression that the South African war was “designed to build up those moral qualities which are after all the only solid and the only permanent foundation on which any empire can be built”! (Mr. Balfour’s speech at Manchester; Scotsman’s Report, January 9, 1900.)

But the true method of judging an event is to exercise comparison, taking into account a far greater mass of social phenomena than that of the immediate present. Now the careful study of past history has proved that an outbreak of militant fraternity, combined with indulgence in the principle of enmity, leaves a society less fraternal than before in regard to the labours of peace and of building up; and against the claim that military training is a good preparation for civic life there lies the whole testimony of civilization. Further, the survival of militancy frustrates the solving of our great social problems, and the recent relapse to the militarist ideal is a grave hindrance to that social science which would provide the true ways of humanizing defective types. (I refer my reader for a fuller statement on these lines to Mr. J. M. Robertson’s Patriotism and Empire.) “After Waterloo,” says Mr. Robertson, “it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe that militarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant on them.” Nevertheless, they reappeared, as we know, galvanized into fatal activity in human affairs, at the close of the nineteenth century.

Again, the action of international capitalism and the ideal of imperialism have been analysed from the standpoint of social philosophy by Mr. J. A. Hobson, an advanced and logical thinker on economic questions. His conclusion is that the driving forces of aggressive imperialism are the organized influences of certain professional and commercial classes which have definite economic advantages to gain by assuming a spurious patriotism, and the most potent of all these influences emanates from the financier. The power of financiers, exerted directly upon politicians and indirectly through the press upon public opinion, is, perhaps, so says Mr. Hobson, the most serious problem in public life to-day.[^[5]]

[5]. The Contemporary Review of January, 1900.

It is not by sanguinary conflicts in which victory turns on superior numbers, superior arms, and superior cunning in military tactics, that a nation’s greatness is built up at this period of the world’s history. What progress demands is not more of national wealth and international power; it is a better system of industrial life and a finer type of humanity—men and women of clear intellectual insight, high moral courage, unselfish instincts and humane sentiments guiltless of narrow exclusiveness. These men and women, discerning ideally the best methods of building up a nation’s greatness on the happiness of its people, will aid our half-civilized races to embody that ideal on the physical plane, and to educate their children to live up to it and show forth all its beauty.

In the mental basis of a high spiritual life even now our children are a reproach, for here and there they emit sparks indicative of embryonic sentiment in advance of practice around them. At the height of the Boer War a child in his nursery on being told that his nurse was opening a tin of boar’s head for breakfast, exclaimed, every feature quivering with sudden disgust, “Catch me eat my enemy’s head.”

When a nation repudiates with similar disgust that wholesale destruction of life, which is no whit less evil than the cannibalism of an earlier date, then will war and patriotism cease to be—their place taken by a civilization standing firm on the foundation of human happiness and love.

Given such outward conditions of life as are favourable to a freer exercise of the noblest social attributes and impulses of man, and the ethical temper will prevail. By ethical temper I mean not only the absence of all animosities that engender conflict, but the presence of a strong sense of personal rights and an equally strong protectiveness over the rights of others—a national impulse, in short, to an equivalence of liberty and social comfort for all mankind. But this justice is a supremely complex emotion—the one of all others that demands most of human capacity. It rests upon mental development, i.e. a universal enlargement of mind.

Industrial changes there must be, but these alone will not secure progress; we need true education, for in the deeper strata of existence—the region of feeling, the movements of change must be guided from the old order to the new. Hence the vital importance of moral education—an education that will create an intelligent appreciation of truth wherever presented, and bind all men together in loyalty to truth.

PART V
EDUCATION
OR
DIRECT TRAINING OF CHILDHOOD TO THE CIVILIZED HABIT OF MIND

We acquire the virtues by doing the acts.

We become builders by building.

Aristotle.