Schools and Universities are surely the most paradoxical things in the whole preposterous spectacle of human life. They exist to prepare youth for a world of enormous changes, and their chief activity seems to be, at Oxford and Cambridge quite as much as at Harvard and Yale, to get youth apart from the world and conceal the forces of change from its curious and intelligent eyes. The youth of the Universities in particular should be the living eggs of the good new things of the days to come. The efforts of the governing bodies everywhere seem to be directed chiefly to getting them hard-boiled. My congratulations to Mr. Corliss Lamont for having so far escaped the culinary process. Nowadays there are Corliss Lamonts from China to Peru. The matter and the forms change but the spirit is the same. In Moscow they have to fight as hard as anywhere else; there it is to escape being made into hard-boiled Communists. By virtue of the rebellious vitality in our youth this world of mankind lives on and does not die and freeze into a monument to its Founders.
XLII
THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER
21.6.24
Miss Rebecca West, that acute and brilliant observer, has recently been in America, and she has been writing her impressions of the American scene. She has been lecturing and hand-shaking, but with commendable restraint she says little of her audiences, her hotels, and her railway journeys. She has looked over the heads of her hearers and out of the carriage windows. She has looked at the great spectacle as a whole, and she generalises about it broadly and bravely.
The lack of civil order is the thing that strikes her most, and she illustrates her perception of it by a vivid and illuminating discussion of the necessity for prohibition and its consequent evils, and of the colour trouble in the South. Various previous British visitors have noted that lack in other terms, have remarked upon the want of a sense of the State in American thought, and of the reaction upon humanity of the fierce, untutored naturalness, the wide deserts, the undisciplined rivers, and spontaneous tangled forest growths of the New World.
But when she looks for the forces that will presently bring order and graciousness into this characteristically splendid display of energy at large she calls rather startlingly for peasants. She thinks, in a phrase that might have come straight from something by Chesterton, that “nameless men who plough furrows that are straight and deep,” peasants in bulk and multitude, are needed to establish a permanent social order, an enduring and developing civilisation.
America has not enough peasants. This is an interesting development, or perhaps I had better say an interesting lapse, in the ideas of a woman we had come to regard, perhaps rashly, as a boldly progressive spirit. This is turning back to the earthy romanticism of Belloc and Chesterton, and I think it shows the profoundest misapprehension of the fundamentals of the American situation. America has not developed a peasant population—for it is sheer perversity of Miss West to write as she does of Abraham Lincoln as a peasant’s son, as a traditional plough-driver, instead of an axe-wielder from the East. America, with machines to plough straighter and deeper than any clodhopper can ever do, has no need of peasants for any purpose at all, except perhaps as negro cotton-growers in the South. America is not developing a peasantry and probably never will. At present the drift to the towns is continuous, and rural depopulation is as present a problem in the United States as in Great Britain.
That Miss West should associate civil order with a peasantry shows an odd forgetfulness of European conditions. England, which has had practically no peasantry for two centuries, but only wage-earning labourers, displays the greatest social order and security in the world; Russia, which is practically all peasantry, can, and could before the war, show a lawlessness, an indiscipline and social insecurity far exceeding anything of which Miss West complains in America. I would as soon accept Zola’s valuation of the peasant in La Terre as Miss West’s discovery of him as the soil from which all the social virtues spring.
It is in quite another quarter that I should look for the forces that will ultimately adjust and bring together into a law-abiding social harmony all the loose and conflicting elements of the American State, and that is in a great development of schools and colleges. It is from the head and centre and not from the base that the modern community must be unified. It is a point that Miss West seems to ignore altogether, that the United States is, in spite of the aggregatory form of its constitution, the first instance of a new type of community altogether, the type that steam railways, electrical communications, and power machinery have made possible. It may have much trouble and darkness in its destiny, but nothing but complete disaster can ever lead to another repetition of that levelling down and earthing up of the human spirit in peasant life that underlies the old-world civilisations. The chief faults and merits of American life are alike the characteristics of a released population that has escaped from that intimate servitude to pedestrian locality, to the dungheap, the patch, the hovel, and the bitter narrow outlook, for ever.
The reconstruction of human society in the great frame of these coming modern communities is the fascinating reality of political life behind the dullness and violence and unreality of personal rivalries and party issues. Its cardinal process is the establishment of a new education in terms of the common history and the common aim and a new training of everyone in service to scientifically conceived human purposes. It is an education that should not only occupy the first sixteen years of life altogether, but which should continue its informing and stimulating work throughout life. Only a few people, but it is a rapidly growing number, are beginning to realise the scale and equipment needed for this new nexus of education that will replace the old-world peasants’ grubby priest by the new teachers of mankind. The educational effort that lies before the world, and more immediately before the United States as the pioneer of communal life upon a new scale, must needs be a vast and elaborate one—it is useless for the American to be content with schools about as good as European schools, or a little better, or not quite so good; they have to be reconceived in relation to the coming modern community, they have to be better and more effective, they have to be wider in range, if he is not to be thwarted of his immense opportunities of leadership in the present advance of our race towards new conditions of living. But the forces of educational development in a country work obscurely, the new beginnings are difficult to come at, the living seed lies below the surface. It is easy enough to go to America and be entertained and astonished by the bootlegger and the “snow” dealer, to feel the chromatic emotions of “colour,” and note the drug store flaring at every street corner. These things signify about as much as the vivid spots that will sometimes appear on the face and shoulders of growing youth. But the research for educational developments is a subtle task, and it yields less florid pictures. We are badly in need of some stock-taking, English or American, of educational conditions in America.