CONCLUSION.
"Respect is often paid in proportion as it is claimed."
Dr. Johnson.
Respectable reader, you are perchance by this time partly inclined to at least agree that this disease of yours may be harmful to yourself and to others. I have not minced my words in discussing the unpleasant symptoms of your ailment. You are a prey to hallucinations, and it behoved me, as a judicious physician, to jeer at your fancies and to deride your dreads. I have endeavoured to convince you that Respectability is anti-social, improgressive, and often cruel. You cannot deny that the world's greatest moral worthies have been the Non-Respectables, the Unconventionalists, the enlightened Eccentrics. They have all deviated in some particular, or in many ways, from the ordinary standards and customs of the majority. In many instances they have been accounted immoral, but that has not deterred them, because new morality has always been deemed immorality by the Respectables. Wesley, for example, thought it immoral to doubt the existence of witches. Yet, who to-day but the most degraded peasants of the wild hills believes in witches? Mr. Gladstone considers divorce immoral; but those who differ from him may be counted in millions. They are the adherents of a new morality, more reasonable, just, and humane than the old which has passed away.
Therefore, to make progress we are compelled to defy Respectability, and to outrage propriety. But that does not mean that we are to become ruthless Vandals, taking delight in destroying everything that is old. Far from it. We must pull down that idol Respectability from its throne, and set up some worthier object of veneration in its place. True worth and integrity of character can have no alliance with intellectual insincerity and social hypocrisy. We need more brave-hearted men and women, with the courage of their opinions, more heterodox thinkers, more consistent heretics to stand solidly together in a great attack on the shams and falsehoods that constitute Respectability.
Our children must be taught to use their brains, so that when they grow up they will not allow their little corner of the world to rule their lives and make them cowardly and deceitful. The words of the Knight in "Pericles" should be taught to boys: "We are gentlemen that neither in our hearts nor outward eyes envy the great, nor do the low despise." Education must be freed from the restrictions and hindrances of Respectability, and made catholic, comprehensive, and equal for both sexes.
The canker has eaten too long at the heart of our great nation. Its ravages, if unchecked, will ultimately destroy our prestige, and we shall fall as Babylon, Rome, and Greece have fallen. Our social affections are blighted and chilled by this fell disease, our emotions are shrivelled, our national virility enfeebled. Colonies in their youth offer us a good illustration of the rapid progress of a people who have abandoned the cant of Respectability. In such communities men and women work for the commonweal, on a fraternal basis, with no heed to rank and precedence, and it is in these societies that individualism, independence, and unconventionality have full play and outlet. Only at a later stage does the blight of Respectability descend upon the people of a new country, as we see it now in America, and, to a certain extent in Australia and Canada, where the bourgeoisie have established themselves and infected the populace with their disease. "This diabolical invention of gentility," as Thackeray terms it, is disintegrating society in England, slowly and surely. It is not foreign aggression, nor anarchy within, that we should most fear, but the insidious virus of the disease that is sapping our vitals.
It is the middle-men of the middle class who chiefly spread the contagion and transmit it to posterity. Antiquated political economists tell us that the middleman is useful to everyone, and that the man who gambles with other folk's money is a benefactor. There was a time when trade meant a handicraft; now it is a term for gambling with articles made by ill-rewarded workers. And the man who lives by this system of dealing expects the farmer, the miner, and craftsmen to doff their caps to him, and call him gentleman. "Since every Jack became a gentleman, there's many a gentle person made a Jack," says Shakspere. No one with a clear gaze on the future can delude himself that the middleman is a permanent institution, to be preserved and commended. His respectability, without dwelling upon his economic raison d'être, has made him the contempt of the upper class and the detestation of the working population. He has made himself king of provincial towns, censor of morals, and patron of the arts; and the mob has let him gain the upper hand, looking on with mouths agape at his cleverness. Respectability in its worst forms will last as long as the bourgeoisie possess this power over the masses.
I leave it to Anarchists, Socialists, Individualist, Tories, and the rest to settle whether the shoddy god, Respectability, is to reign despotically over England.