A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

Nor is this all. The whole institution of parliaments, as a contrivance for giving effect to the will of the peoples, has long been utterly inadequate, and must be reformed from the bottom. We elect members to carry out schemes of legislation and forms of policy never fully, and sometimes not even partially, formulated, upon which, even if they were set out in full detail, we could not possibly have any complete influence in giving our votes. For instance, let us suppose that, at a general election, one party wishes to increase the Navy, to abolish publicans’ compensation, and to legalise marriage with a deceased wife’s sister: while the other party not only objects to all these three proposals but also wishes to put a protective tariff on foodstuffs and machinery, to give Home Rule to Ireland, and to disestablish the Church of England. A Home Ruler who was also a teetotaler could not vote for either party without outraging one or other of his convictions. A believer in the support of our national supremacy who also considered that the Church ought to be disestablished would have to choose between voting against the increase of the Navy or against the Disestablishment: and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill advocate must vote against all the proposals on the other side (all of which he may agree with) if he do not wish to assist in perpetuating what he believes to be a hardship to his fellow-countrymen, and very possibly to some of his own friends, or to himself. And any of these perplexed voters, having somehow contrived to strike a balance with his conscience, and to give a vote, will, perhaps, in a year’s, or in six years’, time find that he has been the instrument of placing in power an administration which is now proceeding to pass measures that he abhors. He has no redress. Nor, abandoning the extreme case of such highly-mixed policies as I have endeavoured to amuse the reader by imagining, has the voter who changes his mind, or who finds that he has been bamboozled with false promises, any means of helping to undo the harm he has helped to do. It used to be said that, on an average, parliamentary government worked well—that it carried out in a rough way the will of the people. But the peoples of a hundred years hence are going to be much more particular about matters of such high importance. They are not going to be content with a rough approximation in matters of the very highest moment when they are able to secure with perfect accuracy most of their wishes in matters of quite minor importance. They will not be satisfied to know exactly what time it is at any moment of the day (as of course they will know, all instruments for time-measuring being controlled by wireless synchronisation) and not to know exactly what their rulers are going to do about matters upon which the very fate of the country may depend. Neither will they have remained so stupid as to think that whatever one body of politicians considers right must be right and that whatever another body thinks right must necessarily be wrong. It is quite certain that in a really intelligent age so clumsy a system as that of party government will have been relegated to oblivion.

The political machinery to replace it will be of a nature determined by causes much too complex to be foreseen, except in the merest outline, as yet; and probably it will, like most political institutions, be a development rather than an invention. The system, already talked of, by which any matter of great national importance should be made a referendum, the subject of a direct vote by the whole nation, is no doubt capable of ingeniously modified arrangement so as to provide for its expeditious use, without undue interference with the course of ordinary business. But obviously this device is only capable of limited application, and it could not be employed at all, without producing dangerous confusions and incongruities, except in a community whose political education had made strides almost inconceivable in the light of our present limited experience. It is difficult to see how the general legislative business of a considerable nation could be carried on unless by committees of a parliamentary character; and limited as we are by the history of political institutions arising out of states of public intelligence which will have become contemptible in comparison with the intelligence of the next century, there is a difficulty in conceiving how such committees or parliaments could work out otherwise than on some sort of party system. But the analogy of progress in general may help us to a conjecture, which is here offered only for what it is worth. All progress, as we know it, is a development from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. One form of progress consists of the development of specialism. At one time, and not so very long ago, every housewife made her own jams, pickles, perfumes, essences and condiments, which are now purchased ready made. A man of science, in Davy’s time, often embraced a number of different branches as his province; whereas now even a single science is seldom completely handled by any individual professor, entomologists differentiating themselves from general biologists, and coleopterists from general entomologists. Does it not appear likely, then, that the functions of the politician and of the legislator will presently be differentiated, with great advantage to nations? In a legislature of the present time professional law-makers are numerically few, and not very highly regarded. While in a matter relatively unimportant, like coach-building, civilisation has made specialism necessary; in a matter of the highest importance, the making of a nation’s laws, we continue to trust the general practitioner, and the suggestion that specialists alone should be employed in it would probably awaken a torrent of objection not unmingled with execration. But specialism of all sorts will have extended its sway to such an extent a hundred years hence that the likeliest solution of the difficulties at present envisaged is that the business of law-making will be relegated to a specially qualified and specially educated class, and that parliaments, if they exist at all, will have nothing to do with it, but will concern themselves with what they are often rather contumeliously told now is not their business (though it ought to be); namely, the management of international policy. The way in which this evolution will come about is, moreover, fairly easy to imagine. At some time during the century the manifold confusions, inconsistencies and evident inconveniences of the existing corpus of the law are pretty sure to require drastic and laborious treatment, which can only be administered by professional experts. At the same time, the public, having awakened to the ludicrous fact that laws are passed in every session of every Parliament in the world, which, when they come to be administered, break down because they have either been so stupidly and unimaginatively conceived, or so clumsily expressed in the statutes which embody them, that practical working immediately reveals their fatal defects. A clever young lawyer once said to the present writer that he knew of no intellectual pleasure so delightful as that of discovering how to circumvent the provisions of an Act of Parliament. This diverting, if immoral, remark illustrates the faults of a social system in which laws are made chiefly by persons having little experience in the working of laws, and elected to that duty by persons having no such experience at all. Having in mind the fact that international law is already relegated practically to specialists, it requires no great effort of imagination to foresee that the Hercules that will cleanse the Augean stable of the Statute Book will be a committee of professors of law. And once the public has become familiarised with the idea, what more natural than that a similar body should be formed to provide against such legislative blunders as we were all recently laughing at, when, having provided for the restraint of habitual drunkards by placing them on what was called the black list, Parliament presently learned that it had so framed the law that no one could be black-listed except by his own consent? The development from this to a system by which laws would not merely be amended, but devised ab ovo, by professional legislators, is easy to foresee; and with properly-devised precautions to ensure that the laws created shall express the will of a sovereign people sufficiently educated in political duty to possess a will worthy of consideration, probably no better solution of the legislative difficulty can be imagined.

The conduct of foreign affairs is a matter much less easy to reform. If despotisms were not such desperately untrustworthy things, a good sound autocracy would probably be the best form of government for the function of conducting the affairs of one nation with another. The extraordinary diplomatic success of Russia is an evidence of this. But Russia also illustrates the drawbacks of despotism. In its management of foreign affairs Russia has (despite the habit which its departments occasionally display of acting in conflict with one another) beaten all the civilised nations. Russia has a “continuous” foreign policy. There are no changes of ministers to nullify each other’s work and to encourage the diplomatists of other nations to procrastinate and shilly-shally over negotiations in the hope that a general election will bring in a new set of statesmen, easier to deal with. And Russia can herself procrastinate, prevaricate and play all sorts of tricks, neglect her promises, ignore her pledges, and prosecute her cryptic aims, without the smallest fear of a question in Parliament to spoil her game by letting all the world into her dark and devious secrets. The more a nation becomes democratised, the less competent it is to manage its foreign policy against less democratic nations, and a truly popular Government is, in the present state of the world, about the worst conceivable instrument for that purpose. With an ever-increasing democratisation of all governments such as we are sure to witness during this century, foreign offices of the present kind will become more and more incompetent until some sort of machinery is invented in their place.

Nor will the disappearance of the ultimate resort to arms, as a possibility always threatening in the background, tend to improve matters. It will, on the contrary, make them worse. There can be no doubt that the awful fear of war, which must haunt the pillow of every statesman in our day with dreams of pitiable horror, does exercise an influence in settling controversies which, without this terror, would drag their slow length along from generation to exasperated generation. And if we try to imagine that the increased conscientiousness of a better time will help nations to deal more honourably with each other, it is to be feared that even the vast progress of the quick-moving century on which we have entered will not suffice to bind the princes to its pleasure and teach their senators wisdom. It is unfortunately in regard to honour between nation and nation that conscience develops most slowly, and many a man who would scorn to trick a fellow-citizen, or even defraud a railway company, and who would quite possibly hesitate before smuggling a box of cigars through the custom-house, will calmly advocate acts of international dishonesty and oppression abhorrent to any conscientious mind.

There can be no doubt that the most deleterious influence of our times, which encourages nations to delay and deny to each other justice and the fulfilment of solemn obligations, is the habit of waiting upon the chances of a minister’s fall, and a resulting change of policy. So long as almost any day may bring a new set of statesmen, predisposed against anything which their predecessors may have approved, diplomacy will be disfigured by ways that are dark and tricks that are vain: and the logical twentieth of the centuries may be trusted to perceive this. Consequently some method will have to be devised by which a continuous foreign policy may be made compatible with the performance of a nation’s will. And here the wiser nature of the new age will assist the constructive genius of the reformer. No doubt the habit of changing our minds on the basic principles of government about once every six years will have been eradicated. Peoples will deliberate more intelligently upon the important questions which they decide by their votes: and it will no longer be thought—or rather, we shall no longer act as if we thought—that a modification of general opinion in regard (say) to Home Rule for Ireland must necessarily carry with it a change of opinion as to whether it is desirable to extend our influence in Afghanistan. When this error is abandoned, probably foreign affairs will no longer be made part and parcel of the work of the same set of men that is elected to manage domestic policy. It will then be possible for the people to express—as they rarely have any opportunity to express under the present system—their sovereign will in regard to international matters. And here, as everywhere, responsibility will certainly exercise an educative influence. When men intelligently realise that by their votes they are deciding the fate of their country, they will deliberate long before yielding a decision so momentous. Inasmuch as the foreign affairs of any nation are truly understood only by a very limited class, because very few people are willing to give up enough of their leisure to the studies necessary for such an understanding, it seems reasonable to think that one feature of the polity of the year 2000 may be the limitation of the right to vote on foreign affairs to men and women who have demonstrated in some sufficient manner their competence to assist in directing the action of their representatives in matters so intricate. The increased leisure with which other reforms already foreseen will endow the people will of course facilitate the acquirement of this competence, and the right to vote on foreign affairs will doubtless be a coveted social distinction, subserving the perennial love of titles and the childlike pleasure of having letters after one’s name. Nor need we be too much daunted in this conjecture by the whispered word “oligarchy.” When oligarchy really means government by those best qualified to govern—the nature of this “bestness” being intelligently determined—oligarchy will be recognised as the most satisfactory form of government: and in order to exclude objectionable one-sidedness in the method of selecting voters for the high duty of guarding the nation’s honour, no doubt some method of selection by vote can be discovered, free from liability to reintroduce the baleful evil of party.

Coming now to other functions of a State, the most obvious subject for conjecture is that suggested by the tendency in recent times of governments (and following their example of municipalities) to engage in trade. The comment which gained currency over a decade ago, that we were all socialists then, is still more justified now. Will States continue their increasing practice of usurping the place of private adventurers? Will railways, canals, telephonic and teleautographic systems, street conveyances, and so forth, be owned and controlled by various public authorities, after education, some other functions, including the feeding and clothing of poor children during school age, and the care of the unemployed (which States before long will certainly have embraced) have by a more enlightened polity been returned to the proper hands? The whole question of whether socialism is a probable solution of the difficulties which its advocates believe it capable of solving is here involved. Applying our familiar principle of estimating the tendencies of the future by the trend of events in the past, it seems certain that there will for a good many years immediately to come be an increase in the functions assumed by the State: but that the whole plunge into socialism will not be undertaken. For, while measures undisguisedly socialistic in character are more and more advocated and adopted, the open principle of State socialism seems to find less support every year. Whenever distress becomes prevalent, plenty of writers, for instance, loudly denounce Governments for not finding work for everyone who fails to find work for himself—so long as he is a man! (No one appears to think it the Government’s duty to find work for women.) But when socialism is openly propounded, the same authors just as vehemently denounce the socialistic system to which this principle of regarding the State as the duty-bound employer of the workless clearly tends. What will most likely happen is that devices, more and more socialistic, for dealing with emergencies, and inconveniences of various sorts, will be adopted and maintained until their own inconvenience and injustice have made themselves felt: and then a more reasonable age will get rid of them—better remedies having meantime been discovered—at the same time perceiving their deleterious effect upon private responsibility, and wondering why it has tolerated the old methods so long. In other words, socialistic experiments will have demonstrated their own evils before the habit of indulging in them has gone so far as to allow States to drift the whole way into socialism. It is even possible that the example of some single nation, drifting thus far, and setting up a socialistic State, may serve as a useful warning to the rest of the world, and determine the gradual abandonment of the dangerous tendencies which will have increasingly manifested themselves. For it is certain that, unless in exceptional and abnormal instances—of which the Australian Commonwealth is very likely to furnish an example—political systems will always continue to develop by evolutionary, and not by revolutionary, steps. We shall pass gradually, and by a process of construction and elimination, from one condition to another, until the very greatly improved system of government and administration whose period of existence I have ventured to place at about the beginning of the next century, has become general throughout the world.

We may, for instance, very easily imagine how a more intelligent electorate will abolish some abuses, by considering the condition of the post-office department of this and other countries. It is hardly thinkable that, during any period of the world’s history, the business of carrying letters can be thrown open to anyone who chooses to undertake it. If there were nothing to be dealt with except the domestic correspondence of each nation, probably it would be a great deal better that it should be thus thrown open to competition: it is hardly likely that the vast business of international correspondence can ever be satisfactorily conducted, except by administrations acting in the name and behalf of every State. But there is not the least reason for thinking that the abuses which deface the postal department of this and every other nation will be perpetual. The British post-office contributes annually a “profit” of several millions sterling to the Exchequer. Every person who writes a letter, therefore, is taxed for doing it. In proportion to the intelligence, commercial enterprise, family affection, or professional diligence by which he is prompted to use correspondence, every one of us is compelled to contribute something more to the up-keep of the State than his neighbour who is too lazy, too ignorant or too callous to trouble himself with letter-writing. No doubt it is impossible, without a loss which would amount to subsidising, in an equally objectionable manner, the users of the post-office, to conduct that department except at a profit of some sort: but it surely will not be pretended that it could not be conducted without exacting such a surplus as the post-office does annually contribute to the Budget. The vicious manner in which we treat the postal service as a sort of trading department, expected to yield the Chancellor of the Exchequer a convenient sum towards his expenditure, is illustrated by the disgraceful underpayment of the minor officials, such as postmen, small post-masters, telegraph messengers and the like. The post-office buys its labour in the cheapest market: there is but too much reason for the belief that it treats with oppressive harshness attempts on the part of its servants to better their wages by organisation: and when reproved in the House of Commons for sweating his work-people, a postmaster-general can always reply, amid applause, that he dare not embarrass his right-honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The polity of the enlightened future will assuredly desist from penalising intelligence, enterprise, and the other commendable characteristics which tend to increase a man’s correspondence; and the postmaster-general who will be praised a hundred years hence will be that one who has succeeded in managing his department with the smallest possible surplus. We have only to envisage the obvious justice of this ambition to perceive the objections which attach to the adoption of trading functions by the State. Though it is very likely that railways will be nationalised in this, as they have been nationalised or subsidised in many other countries, it is quite certain that if we do nationalise them we shall be compensated by none of the advantages which make us tolerant, and even unconscious, of the abuses of the British post-office—itself in most respects one of the least imperfect of bureaucracies. The faults generally found with railways are precisely the faults of bureaucracy, and in proportion as railways become more and more united in their policy, through amalgamation and arrangements for mutual assistance, those faults constantly increase. The same will presently be found true of all governmental usurpations of private enterprise: and it cannot be doubted that in this, as in so many other respects, the functions of governments will be greatly reduced a hundred years hence.

One subject which cannot be neglected in any attempt to foresee the conditions of the law in the next century is the delicate and difficult one of marriage laws: and on no subject are differences of opinion so numerous and so acute. All that seems to be generally agreed is that under the present system inconveniences and immoralities occur: and it is (of course) supposed to be a corollary that if the system were changed these inconveniences and immoralities would disappear. This is the usual method of considering social difficulties. Hardly anyone will consent to base plans for the future upon experience of the past. It is always presumed that new laws can reform abuses, without changes in the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the abuses. One class of thinkers, despairing of moral improvement, considers that, immorality being irremediable, the only thing to be done is to give it sanction; as it must exist, it must be made respectable and unscandalous. Another set of reformers would penalise immorality by forbidding the guilty party in a divorce suit to re-marry, just as there are people who would prevent the physically unfit from marrying at all. Both forget that the prohibition of legal unions is much more likely to lead to an increase of irregular connections than to produce any other effect. No doubt we could improve the physical standard of the legitimately born by the prohibition last digressively mentioned: but it would be at the expense of an increase in illegitimate births accompanied by the additional disadvantage of bodily weakness. Similarly, so far from the prohibition of re-marriage restraining the immorally disposed, it is much more likely that it would encourage them: the fact that a co-respondent could not be called upon to marry the woman divorced in consequence of her guilty association with him would hardly act generally as a deterrent; while, if he had been willing to face the probable consequences of publicity, expense and inconvenience attending a liaison with a woman under coverture, the co-respondent would not think it necessary to abandon his confederate, if he wished, and she were willing, to continue their connection after all the penalties had been suffered, merely because the law prevented a regular union. It is agreed by all jurists that the only justification for the greater severity with which matrimonial infidelity is visited on women as compared with men is the greater social degradation with which society visits women who have offended. To penalise their offence by prohibiting re-marriage would only perpetuate their degradation, and does in fact so perpetuate and increase it in countries where the condemned party in a divorce is forbidden the altar.

On the other hand, to recognise a sort of promiscuity, as some writers have suggested that we shall be obliged to do, would probably be attended by worse effects than the bold and straightforward acceptance of polygamy as a necessary remedy for the excess of feminine population, which a writer of letters to the shocked and astonished newspapers of this city recently proposed. Neither expedient is capable of being adopted: nor does there seem much likelihood that public morality can be improved by legislation, though it is certain to be much improved by the spontaneous amelioration of public sentiment. No doubt in one or two particulars the marriage laws will gradually undergo amendment. It will be realised that it is much more immoral to compel unwilling couples to live together matrimonially, than to set them free to remedy one of the most hideous of all possible mistakes. The difficulty of determining what shall be done where one party wishes for divorce, while the other does not, is greater: but on the whole it will probably be considered more conducive to morality to dissolve the marriage here, after a precautionary and experimental period of provisional separation, than to insist upon its perpetuation. That age will only be ripe for such a reform as this, which, by moral progress, has rendered intolerable the position of a libertine capable of entering into matrimony with the deliberate intention of getting out of it again when it ceases to be attractive, and in which the social estimate of a person who acted in the same manner through instability of character would be not much better. In any reform of the kind suggested, it would no doubt be arranged that pecuniary liabilities, allocated to the support and education of children, would follow the party insisting on divorce; and this also would act as a check upon dishonest contracts of marriage.

Thus, for any radical improvement in the system of matrimonial connections, we must look to a corresponding improvement in the spirit of the age, and the first step in advance will have been taken when marriage ceases to be the only legal contract which is enforced notwithstanding the ignorance of a contracting party as to the engagement entered into. The frequency of divorce petitions will be greatly diminished from the time we get rid of the idiotic and almost incredibly wicked convention by which we take every possible precaution we can think of to ensure that a girl, when she marries, shall have no possible means of knowing to what she is committing herself. No more ingenious contrivance for obtaining marital infelicity could be imagined. The next step will have been taken when it is recognised as disgraceful for parents to put pressure upon the inclinations of their children of either sex to induce them to marry, and when social execration renders such pressure impossible. Concurrently with this, or as a result of it, a third step will be some abatement of our present entire neglect of any demand for good character in a bridegroom who would be outraged if he thought that the least aspersion could be suggested concerning his bride. In other words, the greatest improvements in the status of the world with regard to matrimony will be effected when we recognise the claim of woman to be made the equal of man in knowledge, in discretion and in social rights. No legislative reform as yet ever suggested could have anything like as much effect in removing the evils under which we groan, in respect to matrimony, as this natural and inevitable development.