Among the many it is of little importance to any one but the individual which side is chosen. What is of importance is that, the choice being made, each man should see things clearly; should “clear himself of cant”; should realise that he is a soldier fighting for a cause, to be deflected from his purpose by no weakness and no vacillation. Whatever the future may bring, to him the matter of vital moment is that he should refuse to betray under any temptation those who have trusted him with their allegiance.
The reformers who have enrolled themselves with the advocates of change must not expect too speedily to realise even an appreciable percentage of their aims. Most men, setting out to move the mountain, will be content at the end if they have made some impression on the molehill. The divergence between the roseate vision of the ideal and the hard effort of practical affairs is a divergence which sometimes excites impatience and sometimes awakens suspicion of lethargy and compromise. Yet in a settled society, such as that of England to-day, where the overwhelming forces of the community are against any too sudden dislocation, we may be very content if some visible improvement can be estimated in a year or a decade. The forlorn and tattered flag “Work or Revolt,” flapping dejectedly over a procession of the ineffectual unemployed, is more scornful and cruel in dissociation of promise and performance than any attack from outside. It exhibits a challenge to the forces of this country by those who would be mown down like sheep or massacred like flies if they gave any real trouble or excited any real anxiety amongst the governing classes of England.
And this “security” is exceedingly strengthened by the inability of the majority of mankind to picture any life but the life that they have always known. The defiance of the future by the present—the insistence of hard, tangible things against a kingdom of dreams and speculations—is a defiance too often forgotten by those who are impatient of the slow processes of change. They see evil to be overcome, visions of clearer horizons and a fairer dawn. They cannot understand why mankind round them—equally intelligent, equally pitiful—do not find their feet marching to the same militant melody. They fail to apprehend rightly the crushing effect of the present, especially as embodied in solid, material realities, upon the minds of the majority. To these, history is but a misty panorama of uncertain meaning, geography a story of things wonderful and strange, but remote and negligible. Here is the real world: the houses of commerce, four-square, of stone, ample Government offices, law courts, police stations, secure private dwellings. “Let him change it who can,” their innermost souls declare, in a declaration which actually signifies, “It never will be changed at all.” By the many, of all classes, the affirmation of the Psalmist would be readily re-echoed,—“He has held the round world so fast, that it cannot be moved at any time.” Inhabitants of the earthquake zones are always convinced that each successive tremor will be the last tremor, that now, at length, the old earth, after a final shaking, has settled down to sleep. And the same is true of the shaking of the children of earth—the call, sounding to the nations in succeeding centuries, which has shattered custom, convention, security, and all the accepted ways. Each revolution is always the last revolution, the final effort of a violence which has expired in this ultimate convulsion. Now, at last, and after all the centuries, mankind is to be allowed to “settle down” in reasonable comfort to accept and to enjoy.
This tyranny of the present upon the imagination, is perhaps the greatest of all obstacles to reform. It is not only that the inhabitants of London cannot picture what London was when the Abbey of Westminster stood up white from green gardens, and over the river where now dwell two millions of persons the roads ran on causeways through sullen marshes lit by will-o’-the-wisps and fever fires. It is that they are unable even to imagine a time when Cadogan Square was a huddle of slum tenements, and Islington an expanse of meadow land, and the places they now occupy, quiet fields. Lacking such imagination, they find it impossible to stand up and face the domination of the present with the naked vision of the future. Mr. Wells, at the end of his voyage into Utopia, has described the traveller returning, standing, after so adventurous a journey, at the familiar spot where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square. Everything is the same—the railway stations, the tall buildings with winking sky signs, the column and the lions of the Square, the long, low, brooding ugliness of the National Gallery. Amongst them move the busy people, hurrying, to-day as yesterday, to and from their sedentary occupations and their comfortable suburban homes. It all appears “so fast” that “it cannot be moved at any time.” Utopia, before this intrusive reality—to be seen, touched, handled—rises from the earth and joins all other cloud cities “built in heaven.” An ironical touch may be given by the sight of a squalid, tiny crowd gathered round one of these pillars, with banners demanding the speedy coming of “the Social Revolution”; mocked at alike by the solid architecture, the indulgent policemen, the indifferent multitude that passes by. Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a dialogue recently published, confronted a banker, of enlightened views, with the protest of an idealist and reformer against present social injustices. The reformer—from a University common room—has much the best of the argument. Looking out from those pleasant paths and gardens, not only over the injustices of the present, but also over all time and all existence, he can reveal to the man of business the impossibility of these injustices continuing, the urgent necessity for change. The banker has but one argument, but with that he can overwhelm his antagonist. That argument is the actual existence of the present, in solid, appreciable reality. He can counter the reformer’s acute and ready phrases with steamships and factories, Lombard Street, Pimlico, Manchester; against which the random Socialist, academic or anarchical, can make no more impression than a rat attempting to gnaw through the granite stones of the Bank of England. Here in part is the insistence of things against ideas, the dominance of the material; “the things” which, according to Emerson, are “in the saddle and ride mankind.” Samuel Butler once pictured the revolt of the machine against its master, a kind of universal Frankenstein monster come to life and striking blindly in the dark, like the furious rebellion of some slave race which in the past has occasionally wiped out a civilisation in hideous ruin. But apart from the possibility of such revolt, no first visitor to the newer industrial centres but is aware of a certain shrivelling up of man’s importance before the aggregate of material construction. The sense of proportion is dwarfed by the mere divergence in size and stability, as the weak, unprotected human body is contrasted with vast levers and furnaces which at any moment could crack him like an eggshell, or shrivel him up like sawdust. Human life and mechanical life come to be pictured in permanence like those gaunt and sullen streets of East London, where tiny cottages crouch beneath tall encompassing walls so high that between them men scarce can see the sun. And behind the weight laid upon the imagination by mass and matter is the perhaps more oppressive weight of custom and convention. “Every body”—so commences Newton’s famous law—“continues in its state of rest or motion in a straight line.” More than of any projectiles careering through space is this true of the mind of man—continuing always, unless forcibly and sometimes brutally wrested away by impacting forces, in its motion in a straight line. Bagehot tells a story of the “very conservative” people of Fiji. “A chief was one day going over a mountain path, followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.” Fiji is too remote a dwelling-place for such a leader. He resides to-day in Dulwich, in Poplar, in Eaton Square.
Not only is the present in its resistance to the future secure in its own armies and entrenchments. It is continually trafficking—and successfully—with the forces of the invader, purchasing them in single spies and in battalions. Every reform, successfully effected, transfers whole divisions and army corps from the attacking to the defending army. The giving of old age pensions, for example, at one stroke swings half a million aged persons passionately on the side of the status quo, passionately against any upheaval which would jeopardise, or might be thought to jeopardise, the regular reckonable dole of two half-crowns per week. And amongst individuals, nine out of ten at least of the men who would be competent to lead a movement towards change are to-day immediately caught up in the huge machine and provided outlet for their ambitions within a tangible and realisable present. How many potential Labour leaders and Socialists, through the operation of the huge sieve-net of the new scholarship system, are being swept into secondary schools from working-class homes? and thence, as clerks in great businesses, through university training, in subsequent Government or private employment, destined to be firmly cemented into the fabric of the present social order? Even the Labour leader, if successful, tends to become conservative, to despise the material he once organised, the masses of unskilled labour, as scattered dust or crumbling snow.
But the great majority of the children of ability in the industrial classes are being intercepted before the opportunity of becoming “Labour leaders” will arise. Their energies are being deflected from politics into commercial or industrial enterprise. Socialism seems destined to be left to the idealist and the economic failure, to the man with ready tongue and little stable capacity for work, like the “Masterman” so cruelly portrayed in Mr. Wells’s “Kipps,” to the reformer who revolts from the harsh operation of present law, but finds no allies except a proletariat from which the intelligence has been steadily drained in early boyhood. We seem destined to pass from the antithesis of the class war—the rich against the poor—to the antithesis which Nietzsche foresaw many years ago—the Many against the Few; the demands of incapacity to share in the benefits created by the competent. It is under such circumstances that the very sombre architecture of the present seem to smile down derisive indulgence at the vapourings and pleadings of those who still hope to change the world a little. The infant, says Mr. Whiteing in The Yellow Van, was blowing lustily upon a tin whistle as the van of the land reformers passed under the walls of Allonby Castle. “Nothing happened to the walls.”
Yet against this tyranny of the present the reformer, after all, has some sources of protection. “He laughs best who laughs the last”: and the longest laugh is always on the side of the forces of change. The hills are nothing, and flow from form to form; the mountains smoke at the touch of His hand: “He washeth away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of man.” Researches in the great canyon of Arizona have revealed not only an eating through miles of solid rock by the flow of a quiet stream of water in a gulf created through almost limitless time, but behind this, in incalculable space of years, a succession of previous operations, formation and upheaval of continents and their overthrow, swinging the plummet of the mind into abysses beyond the powers of that mind ever to comprehend. The sun and rain and delicate air are wasting away, not only the backbone of the mountains, but also the granite stones of the Bank of England. The Future has great allies. Despite the momentary insistence of the material in factory and furnace, the mind can find tranquillity in realisation that this is merely the Idea, clothing itself for a season and in a temporary habitation; the Idea which can make the rocks dance to its music, and the solid ground tremble at its advent. Such has always been the vision of the poet; of all who can see not beyond the present, but through the present, to the future. To all such insight
“Cities and thrones and powers
Stand in Time’s eye
Almost as long as flowers