An example of this process is afforded by the changed attitude to hunting. A hundred years ago hunting was considered an entirely honourable pursuit, appropriate to gentlemen and advantageous to the countryside. To-day it is attacked on humanitarian grounds and voices are raised in favour of the fox. If he must be killed why not humanely? It was recently reported that a fox chased by the Cowdray hounds jumped through the window of a private residence and up the chimney flue. Efforts were made to smoke him out by lighting a fire immediately below, for all the world as if he were a boy chimney brush of a century ago instead of a fox, but they were unsuccessful. Ultimately workmen removed some bricks and the fox was got out and given to the hounds. This case caused an outcry on the ground that the fox, who had given the hounds a good run, was the victim of cruel and unsporting conduct. A similar outburst was provoked by a hunted stag who recently took refuge in the Channel, and was picked up and carried to France.
That hunting is now condemned by the moral sense of the community not because of any increase in humanitarian sentiment, but because of a change in the interests of the predominant herd, is shown by the apathy of public opinion with regard to the victims of the gun and the motor. Business men unable to hunt because of the obesity produced by their habits are not debarred from shooting. Moors are hired in Scotland and all creatures liable to interfere with the supply of game are ruthlessly exterminated. Thus a squirrel-catching society has recently been formed in Aberdeenshire. Rewards are offered for each squirrel captured, and it is estimated that between two and three thousand squirrels are killed a year. At Monte Carlo business-men sit on terraces and shoot down pigeons which have been previously imprisoned in darkened boxes, with the result that, when they are let out into the sunlight, they are too dazed to fly away. Before they are placed in the boxes the tails of these birds are removed. This impedes their flight and makes things easier for the business-men, who kill between sixty and a hundred an hour. But it is not thought, except by cranks, that the business-men are immoral for amusing themselves in this way, although it is illegal in England for boys to steal the eggs of many kinds of birds.
In the south of England, where the roads are tarred to facilitate the passage of motors and the approach of business-men is heralded over the countryside by a stink of tar and petrol, it is reported that the emanations from the roads have poisoned the waters of the Test and Itchen and caused the death of many of the living things that dwell in them. Even the fish, it seems, have begun to feel the march of progress.
Motors are frequently the cause of the death to hens, puppies, cats, and small children. Yet nobody thinks the business man’s pursuit of motoring immoral. On the contrary, it is assumed without question that the road is his property, and that the pedestrian should make way for him, while the risk to life and damage to limb consequent upon his refusal to do so are regarded as the results of culpable folly and negligence on the part not of the motorist but of himself.
Business-men are given to amassing property, but not to making friends. It is not in personal relationships that they seek the good life, but in a plenitude of goods. For this reason current herd morality visits offences against property with greater severity than offences against the person. A man will get six months for stealing a diamond necklace, but only six days for beating his wife. But, though the ill treatment of a wife by her husband is punished with comparative lightness, her appropriation by another man is considered to be the height of wickedness. This is because the man who makes love to his neighbour’s wife is committing an offence against property. For the same reason the desire on the part of a wife to secede from her existing possessor and to be an independent entity maintaining herself by her own exertions is regarded with disfavour.[4] It is as if a valuable house were to insist that it should remain uninhabited.
[4] Cp. the success of A. S. M. Hutchinson’s This Freedom.
Those who belong to a herd are in general unable to understand the wish of others to escape from it. Such a wish is an implied criticism upon the herd conception, and brings a sense of insecurity. Thus the desire for leisure and solitude, or for a life amid wild surroundings, is regarded with instinctive disapproval. A Frenchman recently exploring in Brazil came upon a party of Indians one of whom had a paler skin than the others. The pale skinned Indian turned out to be his long-lost brother, who had lived among the Indians for a number of years. The explorer immediately set to work to persuade his brother to return with him to civilization. His efforts, however, proved unavailing. The brother asked why he should return to a community in which he had to pay taxes, wear clothes and do other disagreeable things, when he could live with the Indians in a state of nature without labour of any kind. The explorer had no answer to these questions. He was unable to understand this refusal to return to the herd and accept the restrictions that existence in the herd involves. Accordingly he told his brother that he was a hopeless degenerate, and left him to what he characteristically called his fate.
Something of the same feeling is entertained by the average man towards the artist or the writer. He distrusts the contempt of herd standards which his irregular life implies. This sentiment is reinforced by a feeling of insecurity in regard to possessions. The average man is too busy to spare time for sexual immorality, and instinctively suspects the life of the artist or writer because of the facilities which it accords for meddling with his wife during office hours. The general nature of the objection entertained by the herd to sexual immorality will be examined more fully in the next chapter.
Before I close this chapter I wish to point out how the sentiments I have endeavoured to describe have been intensified by the decay of religion.
Communities in which the average man is the stronger have always been noted for their Puritanism and high moral standard. Promiscuity has historically been practised by the aristocracy rather than by the middle classes, and in societies in which the standard is set by the latter is visited accordingly with a disproportionate amount of moral obloquy. Severer steps would no doubt have been taken against it, had it not been for the conviction that the sinner would be punished hereafter. The poor man, lacking the rich man’s goods, has comforted himself with the story of Lazarus. But the moral man has found equal consolation when denying himself the pleasures of the flesh, in picturing the eternal torments which awaited those who refused to be bound by his inhibitions.