Scotland. Steps were taken in the spring of this year to transfer to Scotland a film depicting the explorations of Livingstone. An extract from the daily paper tells us that “Prohibitionists there are already strenuously objecting to the incident which shows Livingstone, after he has been found by Stanley, drinking champagne with his rescuer! The difficulty is that the incident is historically correct ... and the problem is whether truth should be suppressed in the interests of morality. ‘At any rate’ said the Secretary of the London Missionary Society ‘the raising of the question is evidence of the progress made since his time.’” It can scarcely be doubted that if the meeting had taken place to-day, Livingstone would have acknowledged the march of progress by drinking water.
A straw shows the direction of the wind, and I should not be at all surprised to see Scotland go dry in the next fifty years, especially if she is successful in obtaining Home Rule. If Scotland goes dry, it is not to be expected that England will fail ultimately to follow suit. The increase in efficiency among dry workmen is very great, and if the business men remain “the stronger” in the community, they cannot continue indefinitely to be blind to its advantages, especially as they themselves would be immune from the hardships it entails. If we ask whether an officially dry but unofficially wet business class, and a working class which is dry both officially and unofficially, does not mean one law for the rich and another for the poor, our answer is that conventional morals always does mean this.[8]
[8] Cp. the case of the legs of the chorus and the principals, [p. 70].
The practice of virtue, we are often told, is dependent upon the possession of a sufficient income. It is only the well to do who can afford to be generous, honest, and unselfish, because they have no temptation to be otherwise. But what is true of virtue is equally true of vice, and the experience of the working of prohibition in America shows how easy it is for the rich to procure illicit indulgences which are out of the reach of the poor.
There is likely to be legislation against wantonness in dress. By wantonness is meant the practice among females of unnecessarily exposing parts of their body. The curious belief that the body is in some way disgraceful, and that the exhibition of it is, therefore, wicked is very prevalent among Western peoples. It arises partly from natural prudery, partly from the property view of marriage, and partly from the inclemency of the climate which makes bathing a comparative rarity. The Japanese who have a bath twice a day, observe no discrimination between the sexes in their bathing. “One day”, said the Marquis of X who had just returned from Japan, “my wife went to have a bath, and she got as far as the rinsing stage when two young Japanese came in. She had to take refuge in the tank, screaming at the top of her voice until the two young men were taken away. They no doubt thought her a very fastidious young woman”.
The conviction that the body is wicked and ought to be concealed is important, because it leads women to expose portions of it which they would otherwise protect, and rightly protect, from the rigours of the atmosphere, in the belief that they are making themselves attractive. Thus women swathed in layers of furs in respect of the rest of their persons, will venture forth on the coldest day with bare bosoms and open-work stockings. It is with the same object that, though their religion bids them mortify the flesh and refrain from making of themselves a stumbling block to others, they will appear at dinner with necks, bosoms, backs, and arms completely naked, a proceeding not only acquiesced in but encouraged by their males. This sort of thing is anathema to the herd, who cannot afford the evening dress and the furs, and to the old, the condition of whose bodies does not, except in the case of the incurably optimistic, permit them to take the same liberties as their daughters. Hence we may expect a considerable stiffening of public opinion in the matter of decorum in dress and a return to the days in which everything except the hands and the face was carefully covered up.
In the sphere of what is called sexual morality we may expect a growing tendency to make wickedness (that is to say conduct which is not in the interests of the stronger) punishable by law. Attempts will be made, and successfully made, to multiply crimes by Act of Parliament.
A good example of this tendency will be found in the Bill entitled The Children, Young Persons, etc., Bill, introduced by a Labour Member during the tenure of office by the Labour Government in 1924. It represents bourgeois or herd morality “in excelsis.” It is known as the Offences against the Person Bill, and its object is to codify and extend the existing enactments against abortion, cruelty to children, offences against children, and neglect of children. Many of its provisions are admirable and afford what is no doubt a necessary protection to children against suffering and neglect. Nevertheless it menaces individual liberty in two ways. In the first place it increases the number of offences punishable by law, often in an arbitrary manner. For example, it is made a crime punishable by two years hard labour for a girl of sixteen to have intercourse with a young man of eighteen, the criminal being not, as one might have expected, the elder of the two parties concerned, but the girl. She alone is liable to imprisonment; the young man is allowed to go free. It is also a criminal offence to conceal the birth of a dead child, to cause or encourage a child to beg, or to celebrate the marriage of a boy and a girl under sixteen, such marriages being declared invalid.