|Bi||li|i Key
 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 STATE NORMAL SCHOOL 
 
 LIBRARY
 
 By Ellen Key 
 
 The Century of the Child 
 
 The Education of the Child 
 
 Love and Marriage 
 
 The Woman Movement 
 
 Rahel Varnhagen 
 
 The Renaissance of Motherhood 
 
 The Younger Generation
 
 The 
 Younger Generation 
 
 By 
 Ellen Key 
 
 Translated from the Swedish by 
 Arthur G. Chater 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York and London 
 
 Ube Knickerbocker press 
 1914 
 
 ifl
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914 
 
 BY 
 ELLEN KEY 
 
 Ubc Untcherbocftcr Drew, 1Uv> Borh
 
 Ha 
 m 
 
 CO 
 
 HJALMAR BRANTING 
 
 AND 
 
 CARL LINDHAGEN 
 
 IN SYMPATHY AND ADMIRATION
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. WHAT THE AGE OFFERS AND EXPECTS 
 
 OF YOUTH ..... 3 
 
 II. ASSOCIATED ACTIVITY AND SELF- 
 CULTURE 25 
 
 III. THE PEACE PROBLEM ... 59 
 
 IV. YOUTH, WOMAN, AND ANTIMILITARISM . 95 
 
 V. "CLASS BADGES" . . . .115 
 
 VI. THE CHILDREN'S CHARTER . .131 
 
 VII. RECREATIVE CULTURE . . . 137 
 
 VIII. THE FEW AND THE MANY . .189
 
 I 
 
 WHAT THE AGE OFFERS AND EXPECTS OF YOUTH
 
 WHAT THE AGE OFFERS AND EXPECTS OF YOUTH 
 
 A MONO the empty sayings, which constitute 
 ** at least half our stock of opinions, is this : 
 that early youth is life's happiest time. On 
 the contrary setting aside exceptions the 
 age between, say, fifteen and twenty-five is 
 probably that during which the majority of 
 people suffer most. Not from this or that 
 great sorrow, for such experiences usually 
 come upon us in later years. But every 
 young person who can both think and feel 
 and it is only to such that I speak suffers 
 during those years from the sorrows inherent 
 in existence to a degree never reached in later 
 life. 
 
 Their elders seldom take the sufferings of 
 the young seriously ; they see in them the inev- 
 itable storms of the vernal equinox and rightly 
 lay stress upon the great, the immeasurable 
 good fortune of youth that of having one's 
 life before one. It is true, the young com- 
 
 3
 
 4 The Younger Generation 
 
 plain of having "their whole long life before 
 them, to suffer in." But soon from their 
 subconscious ego wells up the triumphing, 
 jubilant knowledge of being still in the morn- 
 ing of life, of having, in fact, a whole long day 
 before them. In this glad knowledge dwells 
 a power to heal even the heaviest sorrows. 
 Perhaps it is just because the old are aware 
 that life stands smiling, with her arms full 
 of gifts, before the youth who himself sees 
 nothing, since he weeps with his head in his 
 hands that these old ones take the sorrows 
 of the young more lightly than they ought, 
 the old are apt to forget the capacity for 
 
 uffering in the young, which is great enough 
 to quench even the will to live and to drive 
 a young man to his death for what others call 
 a- trifle. ") 
 
 vDuring the years we are considering, the 
 young are often called upon to solve their 
 most difficult personal problems those of 
 religious belief, of the choice of a career, of 
 love with all the possibilities of conflict 
 and pain that these problems involve^) But 
 even Supposing these problems to be easily 
 solved, every young person has to bear the 
 burden heavier in proportion as the indi- 
 viduality is richer of accommodating him-
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 5 
 
 self to existence, now that it is no longer seen 
 with the eyes of a child, the eyes to which 
 everything is as it should be. 
 
 Doubtful, groping, misunderstood, misun- 
 derstanding, the young are tormented by 
 their own ego ; by the errors of others concern- 
 ing that ego; by the disproportion between 
 their ideal longings and their weak actions; 
 by the labour of creating a will for themselves, 
 of forming opinions and shaping a mode of 
 life: that is, on the one hand, an external 
 attitude, a code of manners; on the other, a 
 personal culture, a well-defined individuality. 
 
 Even if we leave on one side the meta- 
 physical problems of being, there remain 
 difficulties enough in all the problems of human 
 intercourse, against which youth runs its head 
 from the moment it begins to discover the 
 cracks behind the fine facades, the lofty 
 walls that shelter abuses, the rag-shops that 
 bear the sign-boards of social advantage. 
 
 The young man who broods over these 
 things is called by his neighbours insufferable, 
 revolutionary, discordant. But we might as 
 well expect a correct attitude of such a^ young 
 man as of the inhabitants of Messina, when 
 they were hurled by the earthquake from the 
 fifth floor into the basement. The whole of
 
 6 The Younger Generation 
 
 existence rocks about these young people; 
 everything seems to them insane, devoid of 
 plan, rotten, empty. If they disclose their 
 feelings, the usual answer is: "Such is life; 
 one must accept the inevitable and conform to 
 reality." 
 
 Some of them follow the advice, harden their 
 hearts, and endeavour for their own part to get 
 as much as possible out of life. Others are 
 landed in scepticism, avenge themselves by 
 satire, and proclaim that this is the only "in- 
 telligent and noble attitude." Others again 
 declare a proud and gloomy despair to be the 
 "heroic" bearing. 
 
 I consider, however, that the strongest finally 
 arrive at the only position which is worthy 
 of a thinking and feeling human being: the 
 position of the youth in Klinger's etching, 
 who raises his care-worn face and his clenched 
 hands to heaven with the cry: "And yet/ In 
 spite of all I will not let myself be vanquished ; 
 in spite of all, this existence, when I leave it, 
 shall be changed in some respect. Even if 
 they are right who say that life is not good, 
 why have I entered life unless to make it 
 better?" 
 
 But a young man who has arrived at this 
 point may be confronted in very various ways
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 7 
 
 by the time he lives in. One age is poor in 
 ideas and problems, another rich. Many 
 lives, abounding in possibilities, have ended 
 in futility, because the young, with then- 
 strong desire of achievement, their seething 
 powers, have found themselves in an age that 
 demanded of them nothing more than a 
 good university degree ! 
 
 Such an age existed all over Europe in the 
 middle of last century. The young man who 
 then entered, for instance, upon university 
 life, did not encounter there any rallying 
 movement of the young, nor again did he 
 meet with any of the currents of ideas that 
 directed his own life. ^ Heavy drinking was 
 thought the sign of manliness, and the fresh- 
 man was warned against sexual abstinence 
 for "the reward of virtue" was physical and 
 mental disorder ."\Nothing was said about the 
 education received by the student involving 
 any social duty beyond that of becoming a 
 serviceable State official. Those were the 
 days when even thoughtful men dismissed 
 Darwinism with a joke about our grandfather 
 the ape and socialism with cheap phrases to 
 the effect that, if everything were equally 
 divided to-day, some would have drunk their 
 share by to-morrow!
 
 8 The Younger Generation 
 
 Then came the 'eighties, with lively dis- 
 cussion of the problems of European civilisa- 
 tion ; with burning zeal for freedom of thought 
 and speech ; with the education of the people, 
 regarded as the task of the young, now 
 awakened to a social sense. Then came 
 the scientific temperance movement, sexual 
 enlightenment, and social enlightenment; 
 through all of which youth has now received 
 in full measure from our time what youth 
 above all needs knowledge and aims. 
 
 No doubt many a young man may still be 
 found who considers "living his life" to mean 
 poisoning himself with alcohol and sexual 
 excesses. But no one can now make the 
 excuse that he has not been taught what this 
 leads to. No doubt many a young man may 
 still be found without a sense of social respon- 
 sibility. But no one can make the excuse 
 that he has lacked reminders on this subject. 
 Nowadays, while still at school, boys and 
 girls acquire a knowledge of their civil rights 
 and duties and receive instruction in social 
 problems. 
 
 Indeed, our age gives the more receptive 
 among the young such a sense of social respon- 
 sibility that one is inclined at times to fear 
 that social interests may encroach upon
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 9 
 
 individual development, that a knowledge of 
 all the ills affecting the community may act 
 as too powerful a damper on the joys of youth. 
 For youth is truly light-hearted only so long 
 as it can forget all "questions" for the 
 moment. 
 
 The most serious among the young have 
 eagerly hearkened to the demands of the time. 
 The work of popular education, the temper- 
 ance movement, the peace movement, are to a 
 great extent carried on by the young. Their 
 meetings show that the young understand 
 one of their tasks, that of bringing together the 
 different classes through social intercourse. 
 
 However we may compare the present state 
 of things with that of forty years ago, the 
 comparison proves that our time has given 
 youth weapons and implements that it pre- 
 viously lacked. Until our day, earnest Christ- 
 ians alone possessed both weapons and 
 implements; but these were of an entirely 
 different kind and served a purpose entirely 
 different from the social one. 
 
 Hitherto I have only been able to touch 
 lightly upon the many things our age offers 
 to youth and expects of it in return. The 
 greatest of them remains to be dealt with.
 
 io The Younger Generation 
 
 What this is, was known even a quarter of 
 a century ago to a few among the young. 
 For there are always some who are up at dawn, 
 who have sharper ears and clearer eyes than 
 the rest for the signs that herald daybreak. 
 
 The young men and women of our time 
 are able to enjoy the delight of being young 
 just in one of the awakening periods of our 
 race, one of its marvellous spring days; their 
 privilege is the intoxicating knowledge of hav- 
 ing their whole life before them, full of the 
 problems of new creation. 
 
 And yet there are many, even among the 
 young, who have no inkling of this good for- 
 tune ; nay, who see in the great ideas of the 
 time nothing but "aberrations." 
 
 Even in the richest periods of our race at 
 the Renaissance, for instance similar elderly 
 souls have been found, lamenting over the 
 "disappearance of old landmarks" ... or 
 of the old-fashioned Christmas! But the 
 sociologist knows as well as the meteorologist 
 that, if the "old landmarks" no longer hold 
 good, this is not due to the "depravity of the 
 times," but to changes in the atmosphere, 
 terrestrial or social. 
 
 To those who in the movements of the time 
 see nothing but "tendencies to dissolution,"
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth n 
 
 I do not address myself; but assert instead, 
 with the most immutable conviction, that the 
 sun of a new religious view of life is in process 
 of condensation from the nebulae of present- 
 day ideas, and that a new order of society is 
 organising itself out of the chaos of actual 
 conflicts. When both these processes are 
 complete, it will be seen how one has deter- 
 mined the other. The ascent of our race 
 towards ever higher forms of life, towards an 
 ever richer completeness, this is the goal which 
 the new individual piety and the new social 
 conscience embrace in common with religious 
 fervour. When the striving towards this 
 goal becomes the "categorical imperative, " 
 both for all individual ethics and for all social 
 politics, then will the keys of all social "ques- 
 tions" of to-day begin to shine around us as 
 the primroses which are also called "keys 
 of heaven" brighten the grass at Easter. 
 
 This conviction, which the age has given 
 to me, it offers to all who will receive it. 
 And to him who once possesses this faith, the 
 true line of action reveals itself spontaneously. 
 
 I do not include in this line of action ad- 
 herence to the Social-Democratic or any other 
 party. In many cases as in my own per- 
 sonal reasons may forbid one's joining any
 
 12 The Younger Generation 
 
 party. But the conduct which will be an 
 inevitable consequence of adopting the great 
 ideas of the time will consist in the first place 
 of showing by word and deed one's under- 
 standing of the path that social development 
 must follow at the outset that of class warfare. 
 The path is not the goal, and the more the 
 path can be shortened and made even, the 
 better. But the class war of the fourth 
 estate can no more be avoided than any other 
 of the class conflicts through which the social 
 organism has acquired new forms; conflicts 
 which, as in the present case of the fourth 
 estate, have been evoked by unsatisfied needs 
 of life and culture. 
 
 Such needs are met in every age by the 
 ruling strata of society just as the liberal 
 middle class after it had won its own class 
 conflict met the demands of the working- 
 class: at first with obstinate resistance, then 
 with promises of "reforms adapted to the 
 times, " so far as they might be fitted into the 
 framework of the "existing order of society." 
 Even the Conservatives are aware that the 
 profits of capital are increased by good con- 
 ditions of labour; nor are they blind to the 
 justice of certain measures of workmen's in- 
 surance, etc. But every tendency to "dis-
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 13 
 
 turb the existing order of society" is to the 
 Liberal, as to the Conservative, "anarchical." 
 
 That the liberal idea of society, founded on 
 the freedom of labour and of competition, 
 is already disturbed by the combinations of 
 capital on one side and of labour on the other, 
 is not perceived; nor again that the actual 
 task of both powers in the State is to put an 
 end by legislation to the anarchy of the la- 
 bour market, to bring the war to a close, and 
 to establish a labour peace on new bases. 
 
 The "third power in the State," the Press, 
 which during the Swedish general strike cried 
 out against the "Socialists' attempt to stifle 
 its freedom ' ' 1 is this power really free ? No ; 
 it too has become a company concern, in 
 which the influence of the financial director 
 is predominant in determining the attitude of 
 the paper. For he knows best to what extent 
 the dividends may suffer from a boycott 
 of advertisers against obnoxious views. Does 
 even the liberal Press dare to defend with 
 energy its own great principle, the right of free 
 utterance? 
 
 Liberalism thinks it still has time for moving 
 pieces. That Capitalism has already upset 
 the board, it fails to see. 
 
 1 By means of the strike of compositors. TR.
 
 14 The Younger Generation 
 
 Our immediate future depends largely on the 
 clear-sightedness of the young in this matter. 
 
 A great period of awakening makes immense 
 demands of the young; above all that of 
 recognising a great idea even when its battle 
 is fought less nobly than they had hoped, when 
 it does not march on "with white banners and 
 lily-decked spears," but comes with red flags 
 and heads upon its spear-points. 1 
 
 Will that section of the thinking and feeling 
 youth of the present day, which takes no 
 direct part in class warfare, be able to see that, 
 however ugly the conflict may now appear, it 
 is nevertheless being fought for the sake of a 
 more perfect ordering of society, a greater 
 social justice? 
 
 That we live in social war time, we all know. 
 As international war is recognised by the law 
 of nations, so must social war be recognised. 
 Sooner or later both will be abolished. Mean- 
 while both will continue ; and one of the causes 
 of their continuance is the view that a war 
 "concerns" only the belligerent nations or 
 classes. When the sense of solidarity has 
 been developed to such a point that each one 
 
 1 The conservative Press of Gothenburg was not ashamed to 
 accuse me, on the strength of these words, of inciting to a 
 sanguinary revolution!
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 15 
 
 feels the cause of all others as his own, we shall 
 be drawing near to international and to social 
 peace. 
 
 This solidarity has attained its first form 
 in class solidarity. This is forced to demand 
 that the essential weapon of the workers 
 the cessation of labour shall be as effective 
 as possible. To judge, for instance, of a 
 breach of contract, occurring during a defen- 
 sive conflict, in the same way as one would 
 judge of it in time of peace, betrays a method 
 of reasoning like that of those who call the 
 soldier a "murderer." 
 
 An action by which the individual hazards 
 great personal advantages has a different 
 ethical standard from one by which he gains 
 personal advantages. It was very fortunate 
 for Gustavus Vasa that at least there were no 
 papers to set forth his breach of faith, when 
 in spite of his oath to the Church he outraged 
 ancient laws and sacred feelings in order to 
 establish the kingdom of Sweden on the ruins 
 of the Church. 
 
 The capacity of the Press for confusing ideas 
 of justice shows itself in times of social strife 
 in so disastrous a fashion that one is tempted 
 to wish that the government, when forbidding 
 the retailing of spirits, might also forbid the
 
 16 The Younger Generation 
 
 sale of papers, and that the public might be 
 forced to content itself with telegrams about 
 the state of the conflict. After this involun- 
 tary abstinence from the stimulant of leading 
 articles the public would find its independence 
 of thought, its power of discernment, its 
 sense of justice so much increased, that the 
 solution of conflicts after these "self-denial 
 weeks" would be considerably facilitated! 
 
 The most astounding thing is to see workers 
 who have replied to a general lock-out by a 
 general strike treated by the Press as aggress- 
 ors against the "third party," society, "which 
 ought to stand outside it all." Do not the 
 locked -out workers, then, with their wives 
 and children belong to society? Does not 
 the distress caused by the lock-out fall 
 indirectly upon the third party? And even 
 if this third party were unaffected by the 
 distress, it ought at least to perceive that as 
 consumer and taxpayer it suffers just as much 
 when Capital forms its trusts and rings as 
 when Trade-Unions declare their strikes; in 
 other words, that the third party in reality 
 never can be unaffected by the present state 
 of war and never ought to be absolved of its 
 share in the responsibility for it. To regard 
 society as a third party involves a mechanical
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 17 
 
 conception of the social structure, the organic 
 nature of which was suspected even by the 
 ancient Roman, when he related on the Mons 
 Sacer the fable of the belly and its members. 
 
 The conception of society as a piece of 
 machinery leads to denunciations of the 
 wheels and belts that are responsible for 
 the partial stoppage of the machine. In the 
 organic conception, however, we witness 
 another phenomenon: the earliest, uncertain 
 stirring of a new ethical conscience, the new 
 morality of class solidarity. It shows itself 
 as a power of good and evil, exactly as the 
 morality of patriotism has shown itself. 
 Neither the one nor the other is anything but 
 a preparatory school for the final, perfect 
 solidarity within the nation and between the 
 nations. Neither the conservative nor the 
 liberal middle-class Press understands this 
 morality. It cries out for forcible measures 
 to prevent the subversion of society, for 
 police and military against the creators of 
 disturbance. Many young people even join 
 in this cry. They eagerly produce evidence 
 from national economics and statistics that 
 "socialism is on the wane," and that "the 
 labour question indisputably admits of solu- 
 tion on the basis of existing society."
 
 i8 The Younger Generation 
 
 But perhaps there are to be found other 
 young people, capable of testing psychologically 
 the spiritual phenomena of the labour move- 
 ment ; young people whose object is a complete 
 social education, who seriously devote them- 
 selves to some social problem. These will 
 sooner or later be confronted with this ques- 
 tion of conscience: whether they are willing 
 to give their powers for the preservation of the 
 social order as it now exists, or whether they 
 will hazard those powers in the transformation 
 of this order, according to which the majority, 
 with its meagre primary schooling, serves a 
 minority with the advantages of higher edu- 
 cation; according to which the majority, liv- 
 ing on or below the verge of poverty, forms 
 the foundation for a minority's unreason- 
 able accumulation of wealth. In other words, 
 whether they wish to preserve a society in 
 which money has become the end in itself 
 instead of the means, in which the prosperity, 
 not of human beings, but of companies and 
 trusts, determines the actions of those in 
 power; a society in which the welfare of a 
 minority is declared to be that of the whole 
 people. 
 
 Before the young man or woman answers 
 this question, he or she must glance at the
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 19 
 
 remaining gifts, in the shape of knowledge 
 and tasks, that the age offers to youth, and 
 ask whether these have a chance of realisation 
 in the actual order of society. The young 
 receive, for instance, instruction about the 
 sacred functions of sexual life and are exhorted 
 to keep themselves healthy and pure for these. 
 But, at the same time, the chances of marriage 
 are reduced and prostitution is maintained, 
 in a great measure, through starvation wages 
 for female labour. The young work with 
 zeal in the cause of temperance. But they 
 know that prohibition will always be cir- 
 cumvented so long as wretched dwellings, 
 bad food, and a low state of culture cause a 
 fierce desire for alcoholic stimulants. The 
 young try to promote popular education. But 
 the factory claims its victims at an early age, 
 and the long hours of labour exhaust the 
 mental elasticity of those who are grown up. 
 The young occupy themselves with the relief 
 of the poor. But at every step they meet with 
 sufferers whose injuries have their origin in 
 the existing economic system. With increas- 
 ing zeal attempts are now being made to 
 provide protection for mothers and infants. 
 But they will be of small effect in a society 
 where the labour of the mothers is exploited
 
 20 The Younger Generation 
 
 in industry. The young are working in the 
 cause of peace; but peace can never be 
 attained so long as greedy Capital, visibly 
 or invisibly, directs the fate of nations. And 
 even those measures which directly affect 
 the conditions of labour unemployment in- 
 surance, employers' liability, labour contracts, 
 arbitration can become really effectual only 
 in proportion as social policy is conducted 
 upon new principles. 
 
 When the young have considered these and 
 other allied facts seriously and from every 
 point of view, they will perhaps hesitate before 
 answering Yes to the question, whether they 
 are willing to devote their young powers to the 
 work of repairing existing society. 
 
 If the young man finally answers this 
 question in the negative, he will probably 
 become either a Social Democrat or demo- 
 cratically social, which means that he will not 
 march under the banner of class war, but will 
 co-operate fully and freely with the Social 
 Democracy in the transformation of society. 
 At the same time he will be able to assert, on 
 behalf of himself and others, that individual- 
 ism to which class warfare does not allow free 
 play, but which in the aesthetic interests 
 of the society of the future must acquire an
 
 What the Age Expects of Youth 2 1 
 
 even greater value in the mind of each, before 
 it can take its proper place in the ordering 
 of society. 
 
 Many other claims our age makes on the 
 young, who have received its great gift the 
 hope of a new society and a higher humanity. 
 But with only the greatest of these demands 
 will I now appeal with all my strength to the 
 heart of the young not to grow weary, 
 whatever experiences may come and however 
 devious may be the path of development ; never 
 to be tempted, because of the many obstacles 
 one finds in the way, to say it is not worth 
 while! It is not sufficient for the young to 
 devote their enthusiasm, their courage, their 
 ambition, their self-sacrifice to the great ideas 
 of the time ; the young must not only preserve 
 but increase their powers, if they are to be 
 really equal to their eternal task, that of 
 drawing the age in advance. Why else has 
 youth its great, gleaming wings the wings 
 of longing and of intuition if not to raise 
 itself above obstacles? 
 
 The young must be prepared to experience 
 innumerable disappointments and yet not 
 fail. 
 
 Our victories are of significance to the sum
 
 22 The Younger Generation 
 
 of being. To ourselves the victories are not 
 the supremely important matter. The great 
 thing, upon which all else depends, is not to 
 allow the greatest belief of one's life to be 
 wrecked ; or, in the words of the poet : 
 
 Canst thou through joy and grief preserve 
 Thy childlike soul unto the last, 
 Then gleams the rainbow through thy tears, 
 Then shines a halo o'er thy grave.
 
 II 
 
 ASSOCIATED ACTIVITY AND SELF-CULTURE
 
 II 
 
 ASSOCIATED ACTIVITY AND SELF-CULTURE 
 
 CVERY educated person knows that gen- 
 * ' uine culture is only to be acquired by 
 personal work and associated work. 
 
 One form of the latter is the assimilation of 
 the works of contemporary or former leaders 
 of culture. Another form is our personal 
 co-operation in the cultural movements of 
 our time. In our day this co-operation is 
 expressed above all in combination for public 
 ends; or, in other words, in the formation of 
 societies and associations. This has become 
 one of the most important means of education 
 for the younger generation. 
 
 But this method makes such demands upon 
 time and powers that an ever-diminishing 
 proportion of either is left over for personal 
 work, which alone provides a thorough and 
 serious cultivation of the mind. The true 
 relation between the two educational factors 
 has been disturbed. While certain epochs 
 
 25
 
 26 The Younger Generation 
 
 have given too great a place to personal cul- 
 ture at the expense of social activity, the re- 
 verse is now the case. The danger to culture 
 that has thereby arisen appears to me already 
 so great that it ought to be noticed and, if 
 possible, averted. 
 
 The most obvious experience of our time is 
 that a great variety of objects are advanced 
 by means of combination. Above all, the 
 power of combination has been shown in 
 socialism, which fights and conquers under 
 its banner. 
 
 And I will at once emphatically declare 
 that I am fully alive to the necessity of this, 
 the mightiest associated movement of all 
 times. Only by this means can socialism 
 attain its most proximate and least contested 
 goal : human conditions of life for all members 
 of society willing to work or incapacitated 
 for work. It is thus not combination in itself 
 that can be blamed by those who like myself 
 desire the victory of socialistic principles. 
 The ill-informed think that the goal of social- 
 ism is only new economic conditions; that 
 the whole conflict is concerned with the 
 method and division of production. These 
 ill-informed ones do not know or will not
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 27 
 
 know that the struggle has finally to do with 
 a greater and remoter object : a new and more 
 beautiful life upon earth through the highest 
 possible enhancement of the existence of each 
 human individual and thereby of that of the 
 whole race and thus also an enhancement of 
 the value of life to each individual and to the 
 whole of humanity. 
 
 The dream of this enhancement of life is 
 the innermost motive power of the socialist 
 movement, a power of a religious nature. 
 The current of emotion, which was formerly 
 directed to gaining eternal bliss, is turned in 
 socialism in the same degree as the latter 
 is permeated by evolutionism towards the 
 perfecting of earthly life. 
 
 When Conservatives and Liberals alike 
 point to this or that socialistic theory as 
 refuted nay, abandoned by socialism itself 
 and in consequence declare socialism to be 
 dead, then there always appears to my inner 
 eye a picture drawn by the pen of a great 
 poet. The subject is the nocturnal visit of 
 Nicodemus to Jesus. The colloquy has come 
 to an end, after Nicodemus has expressed his 
 doubts and Jesus has failed to dispel them. 
 All is still in the little chamber; only the 
 flame of the hanging lamp flickers in the spring
 
 28 The Younger Generation 
 
 wind. Suddenly Jesus breaks the silence 
 with the words: "Nicodemus, dost thou not 
 perceive the creative spirit, renewing its world 
 in a mighty rushing wind? " 
 
 In these two figures the poet has set forth 
 the immemorial contrast between the intel- 
 lectual and the religious natures ; the one who 
 is only convinced by proofs and facts, and the 
 one whose certainty rests upon faith, upon 
 feeling, and upon intuition. The latter has 
 the capacity for "feeling in the air" without 
 seeing with the eyes that a new springtime 
 has arrived. 
 
 To natures of this kind it is certain that 
 even if to take an example the majority 
 of Marx's precepts lay as dead as mummies 
 within the pyramid of his doctrine, yet the 
 most essential part of his message would be 
 just as ready to germinate as the grains of 
 wheat that were found after thousands of 
 years within the actual pyramids. This essen- 
 tial part is precisely the idea of combination, 
 the international combination of labour, from 
 which has arisen an entirely new sense of 
 solidarity, of mutual help and mutual respon- 
 sibility; and with it also new ethical and 
 intellectual forces within the working-class. 
 Through their passionate devotion to and
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 29 
 
 boundless self-sacrifice for the idea of combina- 
 tion, the workers have won a magnificent 
 advance in culture, the value of which is not 
 diminished by the acts of aggression, regret- 
 table in themselves, that the principle of 
 solidarity occasions here and there. 
 
 It implies, therefore, no depreciation of the 
 value of combination as an instrument of war, 
 if I here insist that it is a one-sided instrument 
 of education; nay more, that it involves a 
 serious danger to the final goal of social strife 
 the future, more perfect existence of the race. 
 
 If in what follows I attack the socialist 
 associations before all others, this is in the first 
 place because their aim is also mine ; but also 
 because one can best observe a movement of 
 the time its dangers as well as its advantages 
 by scrutinising it in its strongest, most 
 pronounced form. 
 
 What is here said about the associations of 
 socialism may, however, be applied to all other 
 forms of association. For just as it is the 
 same element that is stirred by the wind in 
 the great ocean and in the little pond, so it 
 is the same human nature that is influenced 
 by the spirit of combination in the interna- 
 tional labour organisation and in the little 
 schoolboys' club.
 
 30 The Younger Generation 
 
 When we look at the organisation of labour, 
 we find in the first place that its associated 
 life constitutes an education in discipline 
 a necessary education. For the individual 
 must be capable of subordination and self- 
 command when he belongs to a fighting army. 
 And this is easy when the object of the fight 
 is to secure that henceforth everyone shall 
 be able to attain the greatest possible develop- 
 ment and the best possible application of his 
 personal powers, the greatest possible freedom 
 of movement and richness of life, or, in a word, 
 happiness. 
 
 The means of conflict separates socialism 
 from liberalism, which calls this means thral- 
 dom. The goal of conflict separates it from 
 conservatism, which calls this goal a selfish 
 desire of happiness, springing from material- 
 ism's "frog-like view of existence." 
 
 The occasional expressions of sympathy 
 with socialism that one hears from Conserva- 
 tives apply, in fact, to its weak side: its 
 strict discipline, its rigid cohesion, its suppres- 
 sion of the personal. For all this, which 
 Socialists themselves often regard as a neces- 
 sary evil, is precisely the social ideal of con- 
 servatism: the complete subjection of the 
 individual to the idea of the State. The
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 3 1 
 
 approval of conservatism ought therefore to 
 be a serious warning to labour organisations, 
 lest they develop obedience and self-control 
 too one-sidedly at the expense of initiative 
 and self-reliance. For the aim is to liberate, 
 not to bind and break the individual powers. 
 But unless the practice of association has found 
 out how to preserve these powers, no co- 
 operation can take place in the society of the 
 future between free, creative, valuable human 
 beings since the conflict will have produced 
 only slavish souls, incapable of using their 
 powers in freedom. 
 
 We are here face to face with the fundamen- 
 tal question of the influence of co-operation 
 on the personality, of the habit of associa- 
 tion on self-culture. And however difficult 
 may be the problems of national economy 
 that the present time has to solve, they are 
 child's play in comparison with this question 
 of spiritual economy. We shall long ago 
 have done with the reign of monopoly and 
 speculation, with unearned increment and the 
 idle amassing of wealth, while the laws of 
 the soul's movements and equilibrium, while 
 the conditions of spiritual production and 
 consumption will still remain problems for the 
 solution of which we shall grope in the dark.
 
 32 The Younger Generation 
 
 Altered social conditions may remove cer- 
 tain ailments and deformities in existing 
 society. But the new and more beautiful 
 society will not be formed exclusively or 
 even mainly by improved conditions, but 
 above all by more perfect human beings. 
 
 Now someone may object that I have just 
 acknowledged association to be valuable as a 
 means of education, and to have had great 
 ethical and intellectual results. 
 
 Certainly. If we look at organised working- 
 men, especially the younger ones, we find in 
 them an encouraging development, particu- 
 larly as regards their conduct in public. 
 
 Self-control, accuracy, parliamentary tact, 
 ability to give and accept reasons, to define 
 and defend their point of view, and to listen 
 calmly to that of their opponent, all this is 
 evidence of a culture, the rapid growth of 
 which is precisely a result of various forms of 
 association for different purposes, and above 
 all of socialistic association. 
 
 But side by side with these good effects, 
 recognised by all, I must point out some that 
 are less desirable. 
 
 First and foremost, that the system of 
 association easily leads to the besetting sin of 
 formality, the passion for red tape.
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 33 
 
 How much time and energy are wasted in 
 endless discussions about rules, questions of 
 form, and paltry trifles! How often does this 
 unproductive and administrative work form 
 the main part of the society's activity ! Those 
 who would like to act, who possess initiative, 
 who are hoping to come to the point, are 
 fettered by the others' hair-splitting pedantry. 
 And in all this fussing about trifles strength is 
 frittered away; strength to see, to feel for, 
 and to act for reality the three conditions 
 without which nothing of consequence can 
 be accomplished. The serious questions that 
 are talked out or strangled with red tape are 
 more numerous than those that are killed by 
 silence; the number of people whose ideas 
 are knocked on the head in societies is greater 
 in our day than that of the solitary fighters 
 who go under. It is of the highest importance 
 that the young should be quite clear on this 
 point, so that in all that concerns statutes and 
 rules of procedure they may aim at the smallest 
 possible compass and the greatest possible breadth 
 which is only an apparent contradiction. 
 
 The temperance societies and Social-Demo- 
 cratic clubs for young people with their 
 circles for study, their courses of lectures, 
 their Sunday and evening classes, their news-
 
 34 The Younger Generation 
 
 papers and pamphlets are of great cultural 
 significance. From the young members of 
 such associations a renaissance of the social- 
 istic labour movement may certainly be 
 expected. But it is to be hoped they will let 
 the storms of rebirth sweep away formality 
 and sham importance, and substitute the joys 
 of personal activity for the fussy routine of 
 committees. And may no personal vanity 
 prevent the saving of time and energy that 
 comes of the promotion of several objects by 
 one society. How often could matters, which 
 now demand the calling together of four or 
 five different committees, be despatched by a 
 single one ! 
 
 We, who fortunately have not to fight for 
 our legal right of association, ought instead 
 seriously to examine the social and individual 
 right of forming and joining societies. Every- 
 one knows that if he continues to cut chips 
 off a piece of wood, it will finally be of no use 
 for a joist. But it is just in this way that we 
 treat our own spiritual forces. The air is 
 full of the splinters of this shattered spiritual 
 energy. But the complete souls, those who 
 devote their whole power to a single life- 
 work, these are becoming more and more rare. 
 
 The typical disease of the time is platform
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 35 
 
 mania. Those attacked by this infirmity 
 cannot sleep at night unless during the evening 
 they have heard their own voices in some 
 public assembly. They hurry from meeting 
 to meeting and every day propose the forma- 
 tion of new societies for all imaginable and 
 unimaginable purposes. x 
 
 Those who already have the disease are 
 probably incurable. All the more important 
 is it, then, to fortify ourselves against it in 
 time. This may be done by laughing when- 
 ever anyone assures us of our indispensability 
 to this cause or that, when we know very well 
 that, if we died, our place in the association 
 would be filled in a few days. It is only the 
 creative one, the man unique in his life's 
 work, whose loss may in certain cases be 
 called irreparable. Societies are never likely 
 to run short of members. And, knowing this, 
 we have a full right to decline with a smile 
 all pressing invitations to squander ourselves 
 on committee meetings. 
 
 1 Since it has been demonstrated that civilised man blows his 
 nose unhygienically, I am daily expecting the formation of a 
 Society for Rational Nasal Purgation ; a society which should not 
 be satisfied with less than nine members of committee and 
 nineteen statutes, the first of which, on the approved model, 
 should run: "To blow one's nose freely is a great thing; to blow 
 it properly is greater. "
 
 36 The Younger Generation 
 
 And above all the young have this right. 
 
 The young man or woman who early con- 
 tracts this disease of the platform easily 
 loses the capacity for a useful activity in 
 private. Habituation to publicity, to the 
 approval of Press and public, often gives the 
 brittle glass of the young soul one of those 
 cracks that are not noticed until the wine has 
 slowly trickled out and the glass is left empty. 
 
 The most obvious danger involved in the 
 system of association is that its machinery 
 works blindly, without any safeguards to 
 prevent those who work in it from being 
 maimed in essential parts of their personality. 
 And as the conscience of the individual is 
 lulled to sleep under the hypnotism exercised 
 by a party, a society, or a committee, the 
 danger becomes still greater, since it is un- 
 noticed. The man who stands outside a 
 parliament, a party, an association, or a 
 committee, often asks himself how the mem- 
 bers of this body can be so stone-blind to the 
 truth, when he knows that several of them 
 as individuals are possessed of intelligence. 
 How can they be so unjust, when several of 
 them as individuals show a sense of justice? 
 How can they be guilty of such gross errors,
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 37 
 
 when each is nevertheless actuated by good 
 intentions? 
 
 And the answer is always the same : Around 
 every group working in common there forms 
 an ever denser fog of involuntary ideas, such 
 as "regard for the facts of the case," for the 
 "possibility of accomplishing anything," for 
 "what is expedient at the moment." For 
 the sake of these misty visions the individual 
 is ever more willing to sacrifice his own 
 opinions, to surrender his own will, to corrupt 
 his own conscience. And all this without a 
 shadow of self-reproach! The atmosphere 
 created by association makes those who live 
 in it "devoid of responsibility and remorse," 
 to borrow one of Kierkegaard's profound 
 sayings of the dangers of shared activity. 
 
 Through never acting in public life as 
 individuals but only as "members," the con- 
 sciences of many people become like the 
 clappers of church bells in the Middle Ages 
 during Lent which had straw wound round 
 them to make them silent. The common weal 
 is the straw that is wound round the clapper 
 of the individual conscience; and so it re- 
 mains dumb. In the end there is no injustice, 
 no falsehood, no act of vengeance or oppres- 
 sion that cannot be assented to with an easy
 
 38 The Younger Generation 
 
 conscience in common with the rest of 
 the group all in the name of "discipline," 
 "the spirit of fellowship," and "the public 
 advantage." 
 
 A Jewish sage declared that from every 
 action a good or bad angel was born, but that 
 confused or half-accomplished acts, deeds 
 without meaning and without strength, gave 
 birth to angels with deformed limbs, or lack- 
 ing head or hands or feet. And to a healthy 
 eye most political resolutions appear just in 
 this way, as the deformed offspring of minds 
 bewildered by politics. This malformation 
 is the heaviest price that the race has to pay 
 in every war of culture in our time in the 
 socialistic conflict particularly. It is of the 
 very greatest importance that this price 
 should be reduced; that young Socialists 
 should devote their will to the elevation of 
 party morality and to a change of tactics in 
 those cases where they now resemble those 
 of the mediaeval Church, with compulsory 
 baptism and judgment of heretics, with tor- 
 ture and autos-da-fe. Unless this takes place, 
 the nobler natures will more and more hold 
 aloof from a movement in which acts of 
 violence and injustice are committed in the 
 name of ultimate justice. And although, no
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 39 
 
 doubt, this may be explained by the grounds of 
 the conflict, it must nevertheless incontestably 
 be deplored. Especially as it has deterred 
 many, among the youth of the universities in 
 particular, from definitely joining a movement 
 to which they belong in sympathy. 
 
 This loss to the movement can only in 
 part be made good by the educational work 
 of the young Social Democrats themselves, 
 however rich in promise this may be. 
 
 But after all the greatest danger is that in- 
 justice in a conflict acts like rust on a weapon 
 or tool; if the rust is allowed to wear away 
 the steel unhindered, it will finally render the 
 weapon useless for its purpose. 
 
 The culture afforded by association in its 
 present form acts, in short, like an education 
 founded upon complete authority on the 
 parents' side and complete obedience on that 
 of the child: it breaks down the strength of 
 individuality, it levels and makes uniform, 
 it checks enterprise, strength of will, and 
 resolution. What has been begun by home 
 and school education is continued by the life 
 of association; the different human elements 
 are kneaded together into a homogeneous 
 mass.
 
 40 The Younger Generation 
 
 Instead of the social aristocracy, which is 
 the future ideal of the most highly developed, 
 we are in this way moving towards mass rule 
 as the future form of government. That is, 
 if socialism remains true to the democratic 
 ideal and does not end by adopting that of 
 conservatism: the omnipotence of the State 
 over an obedient herd subservient to the 
 social idea. But neither by the path of mass 
 rule nor by that of State rule can the race 
 arrive at the ideal goal of socialism mentioned 
 above. 
 
 This we shall only approach in the degree 
 in which the "mass" is more and more trans- 
 formed into individuals, who will be willing, 
 in and through the full development of their 
 own best powers, to appreciate those of all 
 the rest ; who will thus be in a position to make 
 sure choice of a leader and follow him volun- 
 tarily wherever there is need of a leader, but 
 who will at the same time know how to pre- 
 serve their own independence, their own 
 characteristics, their own creativity within 
 the sphere that belongs to them. The level- 
 ling pressure exercised by private and party 
 education has its ultimate origin in the ever- 
 lasting error that the present moment must 
 be sacrificed to the future whereas the value
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 41 
 
 of the future depends precisely upon the value 
 of the whole succession of "present moments" 
 that one thoughtlessly sacrifices to the future. 
 
 For is not the present moment a part of that 
 future? Does not the bread of the future take 
 many days and nights to grow? Can we neg- 
 lect the conditions of growth at the moment 
 and still expect a harvest in the future? 
 
 Can one hour by hour allow one's nature to 
 be repressed and find it fairly grown in the 
 future? Day by day silence one's conscience 
 and find it eloquent in the future? Year by 
 year starve one's soul and find it fully de- 
 veloped in the future? The young man who 
 becomes absorbed in social, above all in 
 political work, lives on the false doctrine that 
 the individual must sacrifice himself for the 
 community; that a man gains himself by 
 forgetting himself; that he is preparing the 
 happiness of others in the future by renounc- 
 ing his own in the present. And the spiritu- 
 ally shallow rejoice in these young men, just 
 as other shallow people rejoice in the sprigs of 
 birch that are brought to market as soon as 
 the fire of the hearth has coaxed out their 
 tender leaves. To the thoughtful it is pitiful 
 to see these branches, that will never wave 
 in the winds of May or be wanned by the
 
 42 The Younger Generation 
 
 summer sun. And still more pitiful is the 
 case of the young who anticipate the course 
 of nature in their spiritual budding and 
 flowering. 
 
 Young people who throw themselves pre- 
 maturely into the life of "social activity" 
 and of associations forfeit the most important 
 period for their own self-culture. These 
 young people begin giving answers before they 
 themselves have asked serious questions, and 
 learn to question before they have listened 
 in silence. They lose the repose needed for 
 self -absorption, which perhaps can never af- 
 terwards be regained. Their views become 
 vague, their judgments precipitate, if they 
 are in a hurry to announce them in discus- 
 sions and addresses, instead of allowing them 
 to mature slowly while exchanging ideas 
 with a friend or an intimate circle. 
 
 More solitude, less association, that is what 
 young people require in their "teens, " if they 
 are not to find themselves ten years later with 
 a sense of great inward emptiness nay more, 
 if they are not to look with disgust upon the 
 social problems which they ought then to be 
 ready and eager to attack. It is far too easily 
 forgotten that the harvest is rich only when 
 every ear of corn is so; that the community
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 43 
 
 acquires its collective value not merely through 
 what its individual members accomplish, but 
 through what they are. If the units wear 
 themselves out or are exhausted for the sake 
 of the whole, the result must be that the whole 
 will sooner or later bear less fruit; this is so 
 obvious an experience that it is astonishing 
 to find it necessary to preach it again and 
 again as a forgotten truth. 
 
 The zeal of the younger generation of the 
 working-class for temperance and education 
 is one of the most promising signs of our time. 
 But the will is not enough ; it is not sufficient 
 that the external conditions of education 
 should be available in increasing abundance; 
 the inward qualifications are the all-important 
 matter. Every agriculturist knows that 
 sowing in stormy weather is an unprofitable 
 proceeding. But it is equally fruitless to 
 impart knowledge to a mind blown hither and 
 thither by the demands of public life. 
 
 Our education in other words, our growth 
 and maturing is a slow process in each of its 
 three departments ethical, aesthetic, and in- 
 tellectual. There is now amongst the young 
 a great deal of so-called "seriousness" in the 
 handling of great questions, which is in fact 
 nothing but frivolity. For true seriousness
 
 44 The Younger Generation 
 
 abstains from opinions and judgments upon 
 subjects it has only dipped into and per- 
 sons with whom it is imperfectly acquainted. 
 True seriousness rebels against the demand 
 for a ready-made, cut-and-dried view. True 
 seriousness inquires into its right to feel resent- 
 ment or enthusiasm in any given case. Only 
 when such progress has been made in self- 
 culture that the thoughts have begun to 
 assume a certain degree of clearness and the 
 feelings to concentrate themselves into a 
 motive force, will it be time to take part in 
 public life, which is now so confused and 
 debased owing to this very want of self- 
 culture in those who take part in it, whether 
 they be among the seniors or the juniors. 
 
 Another danger involved in the present-day 
 habit of association and one that is irrespec- 
 tive of class, age, or sex is that it reduces the 
 inclination for professional work and home 
 work. How much pleasanter, easier, more 
 appreciated is our work for the "society" 
 than our irksome daily round! The taste 
 for work grows less as the meetings increase 
 in number, and with the taste, the capacity 
 for work declines. But if this goes on, how 
 will it be possible one day, in the society of
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 45 
 
 the future, to meet the constantly growing 
 needs of all more completely than at present? 
 
 It is doubtless true that our vaunted mate- 
 rial civilisation now produces innumerable 
 superfluities to meet artificial needs. A higher 
 culture will have to get rid of this kind of 
 production and attach importance to things 
 entirely different from those now demanded 
 by "civilised life," even if we do not go so 
 far in our repudiation as the celebrated 
 sociologist, Professor Sombart, who would 
 shatter the whole of "modern civilisation" to 
 fragments. He asks, for example, what all 
 Berlin's electric light is worth, if it does not 
 shine upon any rambles so important from a 
 cultural point of view as Goethe's walks at 
 Weimar to and from Herder's house, walks 
 that were undertaken by the light of a little 
 lantern! Or what there is to boast of in our 
 express trains, if they do not convey anything 
 comparable in cultural value with the letters 
 exchanged by Goethe and Schiller, letters that 
 an old postwoman carried between Weimar 
 and Jena. 
 
 But even if we may hope for a new age 
 in which material civilisation will form the 
 foundation of a high spiritual culture, in 
 which industry will supply its products for
 
 46 The Younger Generation 
 
 needs at once simpler and more refined 
 work will still be wanted. And work that 
 shows a constant advance in craftsmanship, 
 if all are to enjoy the improved conditions of 
 life for which we hope. For the sake of this 
 work, a warning must be uttered against the 
 growing tendency to devote one's self to 
 "social work" at the expense of individual 
 work. Here again we have to find a middle 
 course between the excessive indifference of 
 former days and the present excessive eager- 
 ness to take part in public affairs. 
 
 The least remarked, though not on that 
 account the smallest danger involved by the 
 system of association is that the external 
 results attained by combined action are so 
 vast as to deprive us of a standard for measur- 
 ing the importance of the great single person- 
 ality, the personality which operates through 
 its solitary creative force, according to its 
 own laws and therefore with a legitimate 
 claim to special conditions of life. 
 
 No doubt there are personal advantages 
 which give one power over the moment, such 
 as clearness, breadth of vision, promptness, 
 presence of mind, or eloquence. But, on the 
 other hand, public life is unfavourable to cer-
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 47 
 
 tain finer mental gifts, certain more solid 
 qualities. And, above all, it is unfavourable to 
 the highest value of culture, genius. Genius 
 as a rule lacks the qualities that are applicable 
 and appreciated in associations. 
 
 Of course societies listen to many addresses 
 about men of genius when they are dead. 
 But in their lifetime they were still unintel- 
 ligible to the collective mind, and the con- 
 vincing power of genius has always been an 
 effect of distance. 
 
 A poet has described the nature of genius 
 by saying of one who possessed it: "He 
 looked upon the others, upon those who dwell 
 in houses, with the same impenetrable, un- 
 familiar eyes that the salamander has, the 
 salamander that lives in fire." 
 
 And fire will always remain the habitat of 
 genius. 
 
 A barrack in any sense is not the place 
 for a genius. But the more the resolutions 
 and administrative rules of societies gain the 
 upper hand, the less freedom of movement is 
 allowed to the creative will of genius. And 
 thus we now have, it is true, democratic forms 
 of the life of culture, but fewer and fewer 
 significant creations of culture. The commit- 
 tee boldly amends the ideas of the architect,
 
 48 The Younger Generation 
 
 the sculptor, and the painter; the committee 
 but I say no more. For if I should begin 
 to speak of the bungling of committees, there 
 would be no end to the story. It amounts 
 to this : that nothing but a cultural democracy 
 is any good. 
 
 "Practical politics" with increasing ruth- 
 lessness allow the little laws to neutralise the 
 great law: that all social policy ought to aim 
 at placing the executive power in the best 
 hands in every department. The little laws 
 egoism, vanity, envy, revenge now render 
 the influence of the few important ones 
 inconsiderable and that of the many unim- 
 portant ones significant. 
 
 Has any experience been more frequently 
 confirmed than that which the leader of the 
 Roycroft colony, Elbert Hubbard, has thus 
 put into words: That every great step in 
 advance is the result of the supremacy of one 
 man? And is any truth more frequently 
 overlooked in our time? For, just because the 
 effect of the mass is so powerful, one is easily 
 misled into attributing to it an importance 
 it has never possessed and can never possess. 
 
 Thus many people think that the leader, 
 who on some occasion or other enunciates a 
 great solution, is only inspired to do so because
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 49 
 
 he is surrounded by minds already full of the 
 question. But how much oftener is it the 
 leader who has impelled all these others to 
 ask that question? Many people think that 
 the current of spiritual force, which sets the 
 mass in motion, has also originated within 
 the mass itself. But they forget that the 
 spiritual force, which at a given historical 
 moment sets the mass in motion, has accumu- 
 lated from generation to generation through 
 solitary souls having hungered for justice, 
 suffered for truth, practised brotherly love, 
 seen splendid visions of the future and served 
 it with purity of will. Thus drop by drop 
 has the stream of feeling been formed, of 
 which socialism now avails itself for its motive 
 power. And the stream requires constant 
 replenishing from the heights if it is to main- 
 tain its force: replenishing from the solitary 
 souls who have in all times been the sources 
 of great strength. 
 
 The ceaseless co-operation of the present 
 day in all departments even for the enjoy- 
 ment of nature people now want a "society " 
 has for its result that all degrees of talent, 
 even that of genius, all ages, even the more 
 advanced, and all religious beliefs, even the
 
 50 The Younger Generation 
 
 Christian, lack repose and inclination for 
 serious self-examination, without which no 
 sanctity is thinkable. 
 
 Who will nowadays acknowledge this beauti- 
 ful old word? The present age laughs at 
 sanctity as at an old-fashioned garment. 
 
 To every genuine Christian, however, this 
 conception still implies that thoughts, words, 
 and actions are to be tested by an example 
 given once for all Jesus. 
 
 To the non- Christian religious person the 
 word has a different meaning. For he con- 
 siders that only those, the properties of whose 
 souls resemble those of Jesus himself, can 
 and ought to develop those properties with 
 Jesus as an ideal. 
 
 The sad thing, then, is not that the word 
 "sanctity" has acquired a new meaning in the 
 minds of the little group of persons who still 
 attribute significance to it. No, what is sad 
 is that to the great majority the word has lost 
 its meaning. 
 
 For how can we hope to attain higher social 
 conditions, unless each individual soul strives 
 to reach its own highest possibilities; unless 
 each one tries, first to form, and then step 
 by step to approach, his own ideal of the 
 supreme type of humanity?
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 51 
 
 This is sanctification in the new sense of the 
 word. And in order to render it possible we 
 must cease to spread ourselves over ever 
 wider ranges of activity. We shall be com- 
 pelled, in the sphere of mental culture also, 
 to renounce the extensive in favour of the 
 intensive system of cultivation. 
 
 I address this advice in particular to the 
 very young; for after the age of twenty- 
 five, examples may assuredly be found of 
 steady spiritual growth. But a deviation 
 common to the whole time can only be cor- 
 rected in the very young, in those who 
 take their direction or misdirection before 
 that age, those who by their "tendency" 
 will decide the character of the succeeding 
 period. 
 
 Sanctification is only another name for 
 intensification. And this implies resolutely 
 turning aside from the thousand worldly 
 things that split up the soul and make it 
 superficial; the unproductive passions that 
 burn it up, leaving it dry or empty; the 
 pleasures or pains that make it narrow or 
 weak. Only in this way can we extract from 
 ourselves the highest value of which we are 
 capable in our own degree and our own kind. 
 And to make of one's self an ever greater
 
 52 The Younger Generation 
 
 life-value this alone is, in the essential mean- 
 ing of the word, to live. 
 
 But this is indeed the desire of all soulful 
 youth really to live; a noble desire and 
 strong enough to conquer the world if it 
 were not combined with a tragic blindness in 
 seeking the road to the goal of this longing. 
 
 Therefore, I suppose, none of us elders can 
 look upon a throng of young people without 
 being touched by the deepest sadness; these 
 young people who as yet only perceive the 
 roar of life as one hears the roar of the sea 
 by putting a shell to one's ear, but who are 
 already drawing nearer and nearer to the sea 
 itself. And, once there, they will either halt 
 in dismay upon the shore, or senselessly 
 throw themselves into the surf and go under; 
 or finally here and there one will build him- 
 self a boat and steer his course towards the 
 shore of which they dreamed, when as yet 
 they only heard the roar of life as we hear the 
 sea roar in a shell. 
 
 Those who stay upon the hither shore 
 usually receive the congratulations of their 
 elders, for having recognised in time the 
 "claims of reality." 
 
 As though anything were more real than 
 the dream itself, the dream and those actions
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 53 
 
 that bring us even a single step nearer to the 
 world of our dreams ! 
 
 But when so-called realities hinder us 
 outwardly in such actions, then our refuge 
 from despair over intractable "reality" is, 
 or ought to be, the knowledge that there is 
 one sphere in which we can labour unceasingly 
 for the future; nay, that this labour is actu- 
 ally the most essential of all constructive 
 effort. This sphere is our own soul. 
 
 The neglect of this self -culture is the pro- 
 f oundest of the causes that explain why a great 
 movement is often so poor in results ; why it be- 
 comes ineffectual long before it has implanted 
 its ideas in customs and laws. Its adherents 
 were too small for the conception, it had no real- 
 ity within themselves and therefore had no pow- 
 er to effect a profound transformation of reality. 
 
 Yes, when this "reality" confronts them 
 like a gigantic wave, then the heralds of the 
 idea fall away in crowds. And there are 
 even poets who console them by declaring 
 their defection to be inevitable: 
 
 Thou wilt fall away, as all of us have done, 
 Even if thou fix thine eyes upon a star: 
 For even the stars of heaven fall. 
 
 STRINDBERG, Master Olof.
 
 54 The Younger Generation 
 
 We know that this thought is as untrue as 
 its image. We may outgrow an earlier belief, 
 but never desert the one we hold; we may 
 perish, but never fall away. 
 
 The consolatory truth has been expressed 
 by another poet-artist in a relief, in which 
 humanity young and old, strong and weak, 
 men and women, lonely and united reaches 
 up towards the stars, the stars that all these 
 longing hands sometimes almost touch. But 
 their hands ever encounter the "line of limita- 
 tion" dividing them from the constellations 
 which their longing eternally seeks but never 
 reaches. 
 
 Fortunately for then our longing would 
 cease. And our longing is the breath of our 
 soul, its very life. He who, either through 
 the nature of his co-operation with others or 
 through that of his self -culture, loses the force 
 of this longing beyond himself, that man ap- 
 plies neither the one nor the other to his 
 edification. And the work of such a man will 
 be of no essential value to the whole. Only 
 when our longing lives, grows, and rises with 
 an ever purer flame towards an ever higher 
 goal, do we bring ourselves and our race nearer 
 to that fairer future, of which we and many 
 generations after us can only have a vague
 
 Activity and Self-Culture 55 
 
 glimpse, but which thanks to the longing and 
 toil of our generation and of all before it and 
 many to come one generation will finally 
 behold, not as in a glass darkly, but face to 
 face.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE PEACE PROBLEM 
 
 57
 
 Ill 
 
 THE PEACE PROBLEM 
 
 EVERY movement that transforms the world 
 is begun by dreamers. Their prophecies 
 are treated as crimes or condemned as mad- 
 ness, until they have sunk so deeply into 
 men's consciences as to dominate them with 
 the power of a problem that must be solved. 
 
 And this is also the history of the peace 
 movement. 
 
 When Shelley whose intuition divined all 
 the problems that now agitate our race in 
 the morning of last century sang of peace, 
 he was looked upon as a criminal lunatic. 
 And the two Americans, who in 1810 founded 
 the first Peace Society, were judged to be 
 great fools. For this humble first attempt to 
 realise the peace on earth that had had its 
 advocates even in the days of the prophets 
 of Israel and the philosophers of antiquity, 
 this attempt was made just at the time when, 
 through Napoleon, the glory and honour of 
 
 59
 
 6o The Younger Generation 
 
 war had more than ever intoxicated the 
 imagination of mankind. 
 
 Can these dreamers have had even an 
 inkling of the dimensions to which the peace 
 movement would spread after the lapse of a 
 century? A network of arbitration treaties 
 and peace societies surrounds the earth. 
 Congress after congress assembles to debate 
 the question of peace. It is no longer looked 
 upon as the madness of a feeble brain. No, 
 the problem of peace is now one of the serious 
 subjects of legal and social science, one of the 
 great questions of practical politics ; the cause 
 has passed through the phase of Utopian pro- 
 posals and is now definitely within the sphere 
 of the attainable. 
 
 In spite of all this, it is neither the older 
 peace movement nor the newer pacifism that 
 works most powerfully for peace. 
 
 The great pacific propaganda has been 
 carried out by international co-operation and 
 exchange of values; by traffic in ideas and 
 material products ; which have formed an ever 
 more intimate connection, an ever stronger 
 community of interests, an ever closer de- 
 pendence between nations. A hundred years 
 ago a war might break out between two States ; 
 now every war embraces the whole world, for
 
 The Peace Problem 61 
 
 nations have gone so far in their uninten- 
 tional but incessant coalescence that a war 
 has become a serious interference with the 
 existence of all. This fact has rendered acute 
 outbreaks of war less frequent, but in arma- 
 ments the latent state of war continues. And 
 it will continue, until the nations seek their 
 safety in that economic and political organisa- 
 tion which alone can put an end to the anarchy 
 at present reigning within and between nations. 
 
 Pacifists of the older school base their hopes 
 of peace on arbitration tribunals, disarma- 
 ment, refusal of military service, and so on. 
 But none of these things can bring about 
 peace, so long as the anarchy referred to per- 
 sists. Arbitration will only be resorted to in 
 such cases as in the words of the familiar 
 reservation "do not affect the honour or the 
 vital interests" of the States concerned. The 
 disarmament of a single State would only 
 mean its voluntarily becoming the prey of a 
 fully-armed one. Wholesale refusal of mili- 
 tary service would only result in a return to 
 armies of mercenaries. 
 
 For these reasons the newer pacifists con- 
 sider that the propaganda in action which 
 cannot fail to hasten on peace consists in 
 promoting everywhere firm and binding inter-
 
 62 The Younger Generation 
 
 national institutions. With inevitable neces- 
 sity these must finally be crowned by the 
 superstructure of a confederation of States, 
 which will really and permanently supersede 
 the state of war and usher in the state of peace. 
 
 This State of States would still be formed, 
 even if the whole peace movement came to an 
 end. For it will come about by the force of 
 circumstances, which are doing more and more 
 to abolish isolation and to create a solidarity 
 among nations in the form of institutions. ' 
 
 So long, says Dr. Fried, as the friends of 
 peace hoped to gain their end by means of 
 contrivances which had no vital connection 
 with actuality, they were still in the Utopian 
 stage. The moment they begin to promote 
 the organic coalescence of nations and the 
 natural conversion of men's minds, the peace 
 problem will have quitted the domain of 
 Utopia for that of reality. 2 
 
 1 The man who first brought the cause of peace within the 
 province of science was the Swede, Gustaf Bjorklund, in his 
 book, Nationernas sammanvaxande ("The Coalescence of Na- 
 tions"). As this book has unfortunately never been translated 
 into any of the European languages, Dr. A. Fried, the editor of 
 Die Friedenswarte, was independent of Bj6rklund in arriving at 
 the same point of view. This he has developed in his pamphlet, 
 Die Grundlagen des revolutionaren Pazifismus, which deserves a 
 wide circulation. 
 
 1 The difference may best be illustrated by a comparison with 
 socialism, at the time when it was trying to solve its problems
 
 The Peace Problem 63 
 
 Although the pacifist knows that peace on 
 earth will finally arrive even without his 
 prayers, he is at the same time aware that 
 the life and happiness of many generations de- 
 pend in part on his conscious acceleration 
 of the development that is now slowly 
 taking place. 
 
 And this conscious influence may be exerted 
 either in the field of politics or in that of 
 psychology, through the conversion of men's 
 minds. Not such a conversion as Tolstoy 
 hoped for one which would abolish all strife 
 for strife is one of the conditions of develop- 
 ment, but a transformation which would give 
 strife nobler and more rational weapons than 
 those of war. 
 
 The lines of politics, like those of the spirit, 
 began to take a different direction when the 
 phase of industrialism succeeded that of 
 militarism. And to-day it is not on account 
 of a warlike disposition that the nations con- 
 tinue their rivalry of armaments. No, it is 
 because they now desire peace and look upon 
 armaments as doubtless a costly, but excellent 
 
 by the construction of ideal communities, and now, when it knows 
 that the new society will grow organically out of the given con- 
 ditions.
 
 64 The Younger Generation 
 
 form of insurance. If its premiums could be 
 exchanged for cheaper and securer ones, the 
 majority would prefer the latter. 
 
 There are, of course, still to be found iso- 
 lated advocates of war as a means to the 
 ethical regeneration of peoples. But the 
 peoples themselves are probably little in- 
 clined for this reason to remain in a state of 
 war, provided they can find an adequate sub- 
 stitute for war as an agency of power. That 
 capitalists and military men still prefer the 
 old method is certainly not due to ethical 
 motives, but to perfectly natural egoistic 
 causes. 
 
 There are a great many pacifists and social- 
 ists who put their faith in new legal arrange- 
 ments and hope that, when these have been 
 introduced, they will have the effect of turn- 
 ing men's minds. And no doubt what is 
 legally enacted has a great power over the 
 mental life of the masses. But until those 
 in power adopt new views, no new legal mea- 
 sures will be introduced. And thus it remains 
 necessary to promote pacific opinions, and at 
 the same time to strengthen the possibility 
 of counteracting incitements to war and of 
 furthering international coalescence, through 
 the development of international arbitration,
 
 The Peace Problem 65 
 
 through treaties, and through other parlia- 
 mentary or legal institutions. x 
 
 Little else can be done to hasten forward 
 the cause of peace. For the new discoveries 
 which transform the economic and intellectual 
 condition of each nation, the political events 
 which give rise to new experiences, the con- 
 sequences produced by prevailing circum- 
 stances all these things demand patience 
 and observation. 
 
 The current opinions which have first of all 
 to be influenced are undoubtedly those which 
 at present retard economic organisation within 
 and between nations. For until the anarchy 
 of free competition is done away with and the 
 economic democracy established by law, the 
 international organisation of States cannot 
 succeed. The avidity of capitalism for ex- 
 
 1 See A. Fried's pamphlet, Das Internationale Leben der Gegen- 
 wart, in which he shows that the organisation of States has already 
 some one hundred administrative bodies at its disposal. These 
 are concerned with traffic, trade, civil rights, police, science, 
 social policy, agriculture, and war. There are at this moment 
 about forty international boards and commissions in existence. 
 "The nations have long ago emerged from the phase of co-opera- 
 tion that consists in congresses, conferences, etc. The solidarity 
 of peoples has begun to condense from the nebulae of ideas and 
 speeches into institutions, which already benefit all nations 
 equally, without in any way disturbing national integrity, which 
 the organisation of peace should aim, in fact, at preserving. " 
 5
 
 66 The Younger Generation 
 
 pansion and profit is even now the most 
 dangerous motive for war. Before long uni- 
 versal trusts will be able to order their wars 
 in whatever form, colour, and size they require 
 them. Armaments are actually kept up to 
 defend the colonial interests of capitalists. 
 So long as the capitalists lend money for war 
 and make money out of armaments, they will 
 contrive that the people shall be hypnotised 
 into the belief that it is their welfare and 
 honour the armaments are to defend. So 
 long as two peoples exist within every nation 
 and every nation is the economic rival of the 
 rest, arbitration treaties will be like dams of 
 shavings to keep out the sea, and there will be 
 no prospect of combining the separate States 
 into a higher unity. Only when their con- 
 flicts are no longer the result of economic 
 interests will it be possible to find their solu- 
 tion in new legal expedients. 
 
 Therefore the economic organisation can- 
 not be the result of the political, but vice versa, 
 as the socialists have often insisted. But in 
 spite of this difference of opinion, which time 
 will decide, pacifists and socialists are working 
 indirectly for each other's ends. For both 
 are trying to awaken the consciences and open 
 the minds of men to the truth that solidarity
 
 The Peace Problem 67 
 
 within and between the nations promotes the 
 advantage of all better than isolation. * 
 
 Solidarity instead of isolation means: 
 co-operation instead of competition; 
 organisation instead of anarchy; 
 economy of force instead of waste; 
 harmony instead of confusion. 
 
 By the path of solidarity humanity will also 
 finally arrive at the justice and fraternity from 
 which Tolstoy and his disciples expect peace 
 but in vain. In the present state of economic 
 and political anarchy men are able to show 
 mercy to the downtrodden. But, speaking 
 generally, no fraternity can be realised until 
 our race has found a way of performing the first 
 duty incumbent on every individual and every 
 nation: that of prevailing in the struggle for 
 existence. A Tolstoy, who does not reckon 
 with human nature as it is, or with the 
 development of civilisation in its present 
 endless complications, who believes in the love 
 
 1 The insular people in its "splendid isolation" has given the 
 principle its tersest formulas: In economics, "Every man for 
 himself and the devil take the hindmost"; In politics, "My 
 country, right or wrong." The doctrine of solidarity, on the 
 other hand, is "One for all and all for one"; its patriotism mani- 
 fests itself above all in the desire to see one's own country lead 
 the way with its sense of justice.
 
 68 The Younger Generation 
 
 of one's neighbour as a universal quality and 
 in a return to primitive conditions as a means 
 to happiness, may preach of brotherly love as 
 the road to peace. The future will show 
 brotherly love to be the latest fruit of that 
 economic and political peace which can only 
 be attained through an ever higher organisa- 
 tion of economic and political life ; an organisa- 
 tion which will realise in laws and customs the 
 idea of mutual help, that is, of community 
 of interests, that is, of solidarity. 
 
 To win over men's brains to the idea of 
 solidarity, that is the surest way of working 
 for peace. 
 
 But to implarit this idea in their brains 
 involves what is just the difficulty. For in 
 men's brains prejudices debar the entry of 
 new ideas. The .majority is incapable of 
 forming its opinions by means of its own 
 observation, its own brain-work, its own 
 selection. 
 
 In other words, the majority is talked over. 
 The power of suggestion explains why certain 
 ideas are ineradicable. Every opportunity 
 of testing the value of an opinion, of revising 
 a judgment, of admitting a new view, is 
 rejected. Brains become rigid, and in this 
 rigidity superannuated prejudices are pre-
 
 The Peace Problem 69 
 
 served as freshly as the primeval mammoth in 
 the polar ice. 
 
 One of these ancient prejudices is that 
 "war must always be the final arbiter between 
 rival claims." 
 
 It only needs a few bellicose newspapers to 
 word the head-lines of their leading articles 
 skilfully, for let us say the German Peter 
 and the English Paul, who yesterday did not 
 dream of any conflict between their two 
 peoples, to shout to-morrow for war and 
 armaments to defend the "vital interests" 
 of their respective nations. 
 
 War and armaments are inseparably con- 
 nected in most minds with patriotism and 
 sense of duty. It would require a very 
 powerful shock to dissolve this association and 
 prepare the way for the idea that the same 
 motives patriotism and sense of duty may 
 give rise to two series of actions, entirely 
 different from each other. 
 
 He who perceives that rivalry in armaments 
 is just what stirs up unrest and ill-will; that 
 nowadays the inanimate part of war material 
 is obsolescent even before contracts are com- 
 pleted ; that the cost of this apparatus of war 
 deprives nations of the means of increasing 
 their forces of life and culture in other words,
 
 70 The Younger Generation 
 
 their most important means of defence, he 
 who perceives this will oppose outbreaks of 
 war and demands for military preparations 
 precisely on account of his deep feeling for the 
 worth and security of his native land, which 
 he regards as more firmly guaranteed by new 
 means. 
 
 If we would direct the attention of mankind 
 to these new means, we must address ourselves 
 to the young. Their minds are still plastic to 
 impressions, open to new ideas, alive. But 
 as soon as the average person is claimed 
 by the duties of his calling and of society, he 
 gradually becomes hardened to impressions, 
 closed to ideas, and at last spiritually dead. 
 His faculty of discernment has been com- 
 pressed into a narrow receptacle for current 
 opinions, which then with unfailing certainty 
 glide along the well-worn tracks, and the 
 automatic brain is complete. 
 
 In so far as the average woman is taken up 
 by professional and social work, perhaps she 
 too becomes spiritually dead. 
 
 But at present women, young and old, 
 possess greater mental mobility than men of 
 the corresponding age. And it is this greater 
 spiritual animation in woman that has given
 
 The Peace Problem 71 
 
 her throughout the centuries her great import- 
 ance as a converter of souls, an importance 
 which can only be compared with that once 
 possessed by the Church. 
 
 So long as the latter was Christian, it 
 exercised its influence both in a pacific and in 
 a socialistic spirit. But since the State allied 
 itself with the Church, the latter has dechris- 
 tianised mankind by giving its sanction to the 
 doctrine that might is right. Clericalism, 
 capitalism, militarism now uphold, each in its 
 own fashion, the principle of individual and 
 national isolation against that of solidarity. 
 And in so far as women are inclined to cleri- 
 calism, capitalism, and militarism, they too 
 are amenable to the suggestion that questions 
 of national "honour and vital interests" 
 coincide with the views of the capitalists, the 
 cabinet, the generals, and the bishops on these 
 questions. These women and they are not 
 a few must at present be left out of the 
 reckoning as regards the conversion of souls. 
 
 If, on the other hand, women are really 
 Christian, they feel that pacifism and social- 
 ism possess more of the spirit of Jesus than 
 capitalism and militarism, and they use their 
 influence for solidarity against isolation. 
 
 But it is not from the Christians whether
 
 72 The Younger Generation 
 
 women or men that we may expect a sweep- 
 ing spiritual conversion to proceed. 
 
 An influence powerful enough to transform 
 the instincts, to turn immemorial feelings into 
 new channels, to evoke new manifestations of 
 will-power and establish new goals for our 
 desire, such an influence only belongs to a 
 new view of life, a new religious belief. 
 
 A great many women and men are already 
 inspired by such a belief. They know that 
 they live in a world formed out of worlds 
 that have passed away, and they know that 
 they themselves are the descendants of in- 
 numerable experimental forms, the result of 
 the action of millions of years. They honour 
 themselves as creatures of this cosmos of 
 everlasting being and becoming, and as col- 
 laborators in it. They thus hold an altogether 
 new view of their solidarity with all other 
 beings within their own race and outside it. 
 The profound saying of the East, Tat twam asi 
 that thou art is beginning to determine 
 feelings also in western lands. And thereby 
 the Occidental's repugnance to spreading de- 
 struction around him is increased. If he is 
 forced to do this within his own race, he feels 
 it as a suicide. 
 
 Side by side with this sense of solidarity
 
 The Peace Problem 73 
 
 grows the consciousness of the possible value 
 of the individual to the race. A single 
 human being may signify to the race a force 
 that has never before existed and will never 
 recur. The men of the new age look both to 
 the sense of solidarity and to individualism, 
 not only to preserve their own lives and raise 
 them to their highest and noblest potentialities 
 but also to enhance the nature of the life of 
 the race and the energy with which it is lived. 
 
 In that view of existence which saw in 
 earthly life nothing but a respite and a pre- 
 paration for eternal judgment, only the im- 
 penitent could die prematurely. Otherwise 
 death, even on the battlefield, always came 
 at the right moment. Now, however, the 
 belief that life itself is the meaning of life has 
 penetrated so deeply into the consciousness 
 of the time that a number of people uncon- 
 sciously act according to it. Many social 
 workers, for instance, believe themselves to be 
 only actuated by the Christian motive of 
 alleviating suffering. But the effect of their 
 work is nevertheless precisely that of rais- 
 ing the standard of life, of preserving and 
 enhancing living values. 
 
 And since women have long been the more 
 active in the sphere of social aid, they are
 
 74 The Younger Generation 
 
 beginning to see more clearly than men that 
 war stands in the most glaring opposition to 
 all our best efforts during peace. This "anti- 
 military agitation" is going on everywhere 
 and with such rapidly growing strength that 
 any legislation aimed against antimilitarist 
 propaganda, to be logical, ought to begin by- 
 suppressing works of charity! 
 
 With increasing consciousness the present 
 age longs to find a way of freeing our race from 
 the insane contradiction by which the most 
 zealous efforts of peace time the enhance- 
 ment of life are destroyed by war time. 
 Woman, through being shut up behind walls 
 for ages, has been strengthened in her long- 
 ing. Man has been able to translate his 
 longing into action; woman has had to store 
 hers up. Now she has this force of her longing 
 to devote to the cause of peace. 
 
 The desire of peace has found the strongest 
 of its new motives in the hope of the develop- 
 ment of the race which has been infinitely 
 increased by the doctrine of evolution. 
 
 So long as the classical idea of the State 
 governed men's minds, fathers and mothers 
 brought up their sons to be warriors as they 
 do to this day in Japan without questioning 
 the right of the State to sacrifice them to its
 
 The Peace Problem 75 
 
 ends. Mothers exhorted their sons to die 
 bravely for the power and honour of the 
 State, which were looked upon as the highest 
 values, to be not only preserved but increased 
 by every means. Christianity succeeded only 
 in partially transforming this conception of 
 the State, to which in spite of its own individ- 
 ualism it was obliged to adapt itself. Only 
 in our time has the idea of development made 
 of the race a holier conception than the State. 
 
 It is not, as some philosophers endeavour 
 to make out, an exaggerated assertion of the 
 ego, a severance of the individual from the 
 common bond, that has given rise to the pre- 
 sent hatred of war and desire for peace. No, 
 it is our recognition of the fact that what 
 have hitherto been called the ends of the 
 State have often stood in opposition to certain 
 higher ends, which individuals desire to serve 
 in and through the race. 
 
 The people of the present day are beginning 
 to deny the unconditional right of the State 
 to demand sacrifices. Whereas formerly the 
 citizens existed exclusively in the interests of 
 the State, a large number of men and a still 
 larger number of women now consider that the 
 State exists for the citizens. Whereas form- 
 erly the State unhesitatingly directed its
 
 76 The Younger Generation 
 
 policy towards such ends as territorial expan- 
 sion and colonial adventures, its right of 
 sacrificing to such objects the highest values 
 of the race the young lives, the protection 
 and enhancement of which ought, on the 
 contrary, to be the first duty of the 
 State is now contested with increasing 
 energy. 
 
 Many men and women now regard it as 
 their highest contribution to culture to be 
 the parents of the new generation. They 
 feel it to be a blasphemy against life another 
 name for God that the beings their love has 
 called into existence and fostered with infinite 
 care, the beings who bear the heritage of all 
 past generations and the potentialities of all 
 those to come, should be prematurely torn out 
 of the chain of development. 
 
 Every such link that is wrenched away from 
 unborn experiences, from unfinished work, 
 was a beginning which might have had the 
 most far-reaching effects within the race- 
 since all its most excellent qualities were the 
 creation of individual powers, individual 
 claims and passions, individual joys and 
 sorrows. 
 
 In this view of life the loss of a promising 
 or already valuable human life can only be
 
 The Peace Problem 77 
 
 counterbalanced by great gains to the race 
 as a whole. T 
 
 For it is not death that the men of the new 
 age are afraid of, but only premature and 
 meaningless death. The natural, calm extinc- 
 tion in the evening of life, or a death in the 
 morning or noontide of life, when it is the 
 highest expression of life, that is the death they 
 desire. 
 
 That to die fighting for one's country was 
 often a similar enhancement of life in former 
 days may be believed. 2 But the wars of the 
 present day seldom allow of such a death. At 
 great distances and in the midst of madden- 
 ing terrors war transforms living masses of 
 men into heaps of mangled flesh and pools 
 of blood. 
 
 And this massacre does not fall upon the 
 oldest of the nation, those who have already 
 made their contribution to life, nor upon the 
 
 1 The sacrifices demanded by the conquest of the air may be 
 mentioned as examples that conquest which is already being 
 exploited in the service of war! or the sacrifices claimed by 
 experiments with radium, X-rays, and electricity among scienti- 
 fic men, especially surgeons. 
 
 a But fair as the poets have sung it, the warrior's death can 
 never have been. In this case the arts of painting and sculp- 
 ture have been more truthful; I recall in particular the " masks 
 of dying warriors" that bear witness in the very Arsenal of 
 Berlin to the bitterness of death in battle.
 
 78 The Younger Generation 
 
 degenerates there would be some sense in 
 that no, it is just the young that are mowed 
 down, and among them the strongest, the 
 most valuable for the works of peace, the 
 best fitted to be the fathers of the new 
 generation. * 
 
 It is not only while performing their defen- 
 sive military service that the young are placed 
 in the cruel position of having to slay or be 
 slain. This unsought duty may lead to their 
 being involved in adventures of territorial 
 conquest and colonial expansion. And during 
 
 1 The apologists of war now quote the sacrifices claimed by 
 peaceful labour to prove that, in one form or another, the advance 
 of civilisation demands human life and that it is immaterial 
 whether the victims are claimed by the battlefield or the factory. 
 Thus, for instance, German statistics show that during the 
 period 1886-1906, 141,049 persons were killed in the field of 
 labour, and 1,552,749 injured, of whom 871,490 were seriously 
 injured. 
 
 But these accidents are for the most part caused by absence 
 of protective measures, by fatigue resulting from insufficient 
 nourishment and excessive work, etc. And the number of these 
 victims could be reduced to the minimum exacted by the powers 
 of nature, if that moiety of the national revenue which is now 
 applied to armaments were used to provide good conditions of 
 life and labour for the whole people. At present there is a short- 
 age of labour for those willing to work, of food for the hungry, 
 of educational advantages for those thirsting for knowledge, of 
 nursing for the sick, of care for the children. The circumstances 
 of the majority are now such as to produce, directly or indirectly, 
 crime, drunkenness, insanity, consumption, or sexual diseases in 
 large sections of the population.
 
 The Peace Problem 79 
 
 their period of training the young are deprived 
 of valuable time and still more valuable civil 
 rights; since men liable to service are still 
 subject to exceptional laws, which aim at 
 turning them into instruments of war, not 
 independent citizens, and result in killing 
 them spiritually. 
 
 Although compulsory service has thus acted 
 as a wholesale hypnotising in the interests of 
 militarism, it has had at the same time 
 among the more thoughtful a powerful anti- 
 militarist influence. It has thus become one 
 of the many bypaths by which mankind is 
 drawing near to peace. 
 
 This is in the first place apparent from the 
 fact that national service has so increased the 
 size of armies as to make it extremely costly 
 to set the apparatus of war in motion, for 
 which reason the capitalists hesitate to use 
 this machinery for the economic interests 
 that are now the final concern of war. And 
 every time two States recoil from war, peace 
 has gained ground, for the peoples thereby 
 accustom themselves to the idea that conflicts 
 can be settled peaceably. 
 
 In the next place, the fact that war may 
 claim its victims from every family and every 
 calling has caused warlike excitement to lose
 
 80 The Younger Generation 
 
 much of its power of inflaming men's minds. 
 And with the waning of warlike enthusiasm, 
 governments have lost something of their 
 former courage for light-heartedly plunging 
 their nations into war. 
 
 Finally, the causes already mentioned are 
 increasing the repugnance of the young for 
 the possible duty of murder ; for the parade 
 drill, still persisting in spite of reforms, and 
 for the occasional indignities against which 
 the conscript has no protection whatever. 
 
 All these reasons have co-operated to make 
 universal military service a leading factor both 
 in the duration of European peace and in the 
 antimilitarist trend of opinion. 
 
 The young antimilitarist party is divided 
 into two groups. One of these performs its 
 military service and seeks by a conscientious 
 fulfilment of duty to preserve its right to- 
 subsequent criticism of the system. The 
 other group avoids military service by leaving 
 the country or refuses to perform it. 
 
 Some, Tolstoy's disciples for example, refuse 
 on religious grounds. They hold that a peace- 
 ful national service should take the place of 
 the military duty. For a State that calls 
 itself Christian and respects the right of
 
 The Peace Problem 81 
 
 freedom of conscience cannot compel its 
 citizens to sin against the sixth commandment 
 of Moses and the whole doctrine of Jesus. 
 
 On the other hand, many of those who refuse 
 military service themselves use or approve of 
 force in the social conflict and therefore do not 
 hate war from religious motives. Their reasons 
 for refusing service were sharply illuminated 
 by a young working-man, whose dialogue with 
 an older companion I heard in the People's 
 House at Stockholm. The elder man ob- 
 jected that everyone defended himself when 
 personally attacked. The younger admitted 
 that he would do so too, but that, on the 
 other hand, he had no intention of going out 
 to defend "a so-called nation." 
 
 I asked him if he did not feel that the nation 
 had given him anything. The answer was a 
 curt No. I could not refrain from telling 
 him that a man who does not see that he has 
 received anything from his nation is one of 
 those the nation can well do without. 
 
 There are undoubtedly many, in Sweden 
 as in other countries, who have suffered so 
 much from unemployment, want, or injustice 
 that they are tempted to forget what their 
 country is to them; to forget that if, for 
 instance, they came under Russian rule they
 
 82 The Younger Generation 
 
 would suffer not only as they do now, but far 
 more in addition, through the loss of many 
 advantages which they now enjoy as uncon- 
 sciously as the air they breathe. 
 
 The leaf can no more deny that the roots 
 and the trunk have given it anything than the 
 individual can deny that the nation has been 
 of importance to him. Even if the soil has 
 been poor and the leaves have thus received 
 scanty nourishment, even if frost or drought 
 has impaired their freshness or shade their 
 full development, so long as they have not 
 broken away from the branch, they still have 
 more vitality than if they were blown hither 
 and thither by the wind. And each individual 
 possesses, as a member of a nation, a fulness of 
 life which he can never enjoy when cut off from 
 his stock. 
 
 Therefore a peace movement that is to 
 possess vitality cannot proceed from the 
 error that our nation has given us nothing, 
 but from the conviction that it has given us 
 an infinite abundance; that it is of supreme 
 importance to safeguard our language, our 
 land, our constitutional freedom, and all other 
 conditions necessary to the continued cultural 
 development of our people in accordance with 
 its own inherent character, a character that is
 
 The Peace Problem 83 
 
 of just as much importance to the other nations 
 as is that of the individual to his own sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 It is, in fact, precisely the conviction that 
 the millions spent on armaments provide a 
 very ineffectual guarantee for all our highest 
 national values together with the reflection 
 that these millions, applied to peaceful pur- 
 poses, might render possible an immense 
 enhancement of life and culture within each 
 separate nation that determines the action 
 of the radical and revolutionary pacifist. He 
 sees very well that a general strike of organ- 
 ised labour in face of the prospect of a Euro- 
 pean war is, in the present state of things, 
 unavailing. Refusal of military service, on 
 the other hand, as proposed to the working- 
 men of Sweden by Z. Hoglund in 1905,' and 
 as put in practice in Spain in 1909, may have 
 some significance and justification. But the 
 newer pacifism is most decidedly opposed to 
 any such refusal of defensive service as might 
 result in subjecting the more valuable culture 
 to the less valuable, and making the higher 
 human beings, nations or races the victims 
 of those of smaller worth. 
 
 1 At the time of Norway's secession from the Union, when 
 feeling ran high in Sweden. TR.
 
 84 The Younger Generation 
 
 The peace problem can no more be solved 
 by the obliteration of nations than can that of 
 socialism by making everyone uniform. Be- 
 tween the nations and within each nation 
 standards of power and tension of forces are 
 required for national and individual ends. 
 By sometimes involving a noble tension of 
 strength, wars have also involved an eleva- 
 tion of culture. And this elevation has been 
 used as an illustration of the cultural value 
 of war. That in other respects war has done 
 immeasurable damage to culture and destroyed 
 its values, has evoked swfc-human states of 
 mind and barbarous actions, all this is sup- 
 pressed by those who glorify war as a means of 
 culture. In our day the work of culture offers 
 many other opportunities for the noblest 
 exertion, which do not involve any such cul- 
 tural set-back as those just mentioned. Not 
 merely the earth's surface, but the whole 
 cosmos, now lies open to conquest. And the 
 knowledge of this is gradually rooting out the 
 superstition that the maintenance of manly 
 courage and manly achievement depends on 
 the continuance of the state of war, or that the 
 growth of culture requires manuring now and 
 then with human brains on the battlefield. 
 
 In short, the spirit of the age is undergoing
 
 The Peace Problem 85 
 
 a change in its judgment of war. This change 
 may be observed in innumerable effects, each 
 small in itself, of influences often impercepti- 
 ble; influences which, however, transform 
 views, feelings, and dispositions as completely 
 as the waves of light and heat, in which all 
 things flow, transform our outward being. 
 With ever-increasing consciousness mankind 
 longs for nobler and surer means than war and 
 armaments, to secure the existence of nations, 
 both small and great. Assuredly there^is 
 still need to influence public opinion, but 
 especially in the way of enlightening and 
 strengthening the opposition to war which 
 already exists in thought and feeling. For 
 to arouse such thoughts and feelings is now 
 unnecessary outside certain "higher" circles. 
 
 It is above all from the mothers that we 
 may hope for a zealous activity in the spiritual 
 conversion that must precede peace. The 
 mothers, whose dearest treasures are the lives 
 of the young, must use all their influence against 
 war not by forbidding their boys to play at 
 soldiers or by depreciating the warlike achieve- 
 ments of bygone days, for the former would 
 be unpsychological, the latter unhistorical; 
 but by using all their powers of gladness in
 
 86 The Younger Generation 
 
 making life more valuable and all their powers 
 of inducement in directing men's wills to the 
 task of altering the conditions that favour 
 the continuance of war and armaments. The 
 mothers must teach their sons to hate the 
 policy which may claim their lives for objects 
 which they perhaps condemn both from a 
 political and an ethical point of view. They 
 must teach their sons to dream of giving 
 their country, not a life, but a life's work; 
 they must associate their sons' ambition and 
 self-sacrifice with peace instead of with war. 
 
 The mothers have it in their power, in the 
 training of their children, to help in awakening 
 the conscience and in forming the reason of 
 the world. 
 
 Thus by degrees mankind will become 
 fully human, and thereby war will be made 
 psychically and physically impossible. For 
 the world's conscience will rebel against any 
 attempt at injustice or violence; the world's 
 reason against the irrational waste of power 
 that war involves, even when defensive. 
 Both will finally unite to form institutions in 
 which the highest human force that of the 
 brain will settle international disputes, and 
 thus the nations will attain the greatest 
 possible security with the least possible loss of
 
 The Peace Problem 87 
 
 power. And another direct gain will be that 
 of a higher culture, if we define this, with W. 
 Ostwald, as a transformation of energy, as an 
 ennobling of raw material into human power. 
 
 But as yet the power of the mothers, like 
 that of other educators, is limited. Even 
 if the child's heart is turned away from war, 
 the influences of childhood are counteracted 
 as soon as the boy goes to school, through the 
 cadet corps, the patriotic celebrations, the 
 drill and rifle practice. And later on, the man 
 comes into the clutches of "the existing state 
 of things." 
 
 Only when women have the right to vote 
 will they be able to work for peace with full 
 seriousness if they then desire it. If they 
 do not well, then their new privileges will 
 not alter the destinies of mankind in any 
 essential respect. 
 
 Women ought to start their political work 
 for peace by making a reality of defensive 
 military service ; that is, by demanding assur- 
 ance that the conscripts' period of training shall 
 not be wasted in things that are meaningless for 
 their task ; that the rules of discipline, which are 
 often offensive to the feeling of citizenship and 
 to personal self-respect, shall be altered, and 
 finally that the conscript army shall never
 
 88 The Younger Generation 
 
 be employed in aggressive wars or in those 
 civil conflicts in which a son may be opposed 
 to his father or a friend to a friend. 
 
 Further, women ought to insist that agita- 
 tion for war be punished as antimilitarist 
 agitation is now. And this new severity 
 would possess all the justification which the 
 antimilitarist laws lack. For the antimili- 
 tarist agitation, in spite of its blunders, is a 
 tentative beginning of a higher state of things. 
 But warlike agitation is a survival from lower 
 stages. 
 
 Women ought not to be content until gov- 
 ernments have been deprived of the power of 
 plunging nations into war. 
 
 Women ought to support all such inter- 
 national arrangements as promote exchange 
 and co-operation among nations : for example, 
 commercial treaties, universal postage stamps, 
 unity of coinage, weights and measures, etc. 
 They ought to work for an international law 
 of marriage and divorce, a law that is a cry- 
 ing necessity in these days of international 
 marriages. Further legislation in the direction 
 of greater uniformity is required for the legal 
 protection of private persons and for the treat- 
 ment of criminals in foreign countries, and for 
 other purposes which cannot be gone into here.
 
 The Peace Problem 89 
 
 All this, however, would only be prepara- 
 tory for future international institutions, which 
 will become real and effective when the co- 
 alescence of nations through all indirect influ- 
 ences has reached such a point that the 
 nations desire to give direct expression to the 
 unity they have attained. 
 
 Until the time arrives when they will have 
 their share of political power, women can 
 promote a good understanding between the 
 nations in many other ways. They can work 
 for an international auxiliary language and 
 international characters; for international ex- 
 change of school children during the holidays ; 
 for international correspondence, and many 
 other things of the same nature. r 
 
 In family life and in social life, in profes- 
 sional work and public employment, in their 
 homes and on their travels, women can spin 
 the fine threads which will bind the nations 
 together. In countless personal ways they 
 can strengthen sympathies and promote re- 
 ciprocity between peoples. They can tear the 
 mask of patriotism from bellicose self-interest, 
 prick the word -bubbles of nationalism and 
 laugh away worked -up fears. They can set 
 
 1 The Dutch association, Kosmos, arranges the exchange of 
 correspondence in all languages and on all subjects.
 
 90 The Younger Generation 
 
 up the highest goals for the political ambition 
 of their fathers and brothers, their husbands 
 and their sons. Above all, they can always 
 and everywhere ennoble the feelings, refine 
 the idea of justice, and sharpen the judgment 
 of those who come under their influence. 
 
 The indirect result of this influence will then 
 be that war will become more and more 
 insufferable to the feelings, repugnant to the 
 sense of justice, and absurd to the intelligence. 
 
 When thus the eyes of the best among the 
 nation are opened to the true nature of war, 
 they will finally be opened also to the way to 
 real not armed peace. 
 
 People who are impatient to see the results 
 of their efforts are often dissuaded from devot- 
 ing their energies to the peace movement by 
 the thought that the time for the realisation 
 of universal peace is so far distant. 
 
 This is true. Not even the most sanguine 
 among us believes that this realisation can take 
 place earlier than in the extreme old age of 
 those just born. All that we know with cer- 
 tainty is that future generations will live in 
 a state of peace which they will regard as 
 natural and necessary, and that those genera- 
 tions will be incapable of understanding how
 
 The Peace Problem 91 
 
 the present age looked upon the state of war 
 as natural and necessary. 
 
 We, on the other hand, who for years have 
 believed in the final victory of right over might, 
 we shall not see this victory during the brief 
 moment we call our lifetime. But what can 
 that matter to us? 
 
 We are in all, all are in us. The dead 
 triumph in us, as we shall triumph in those 
 yet unborn. The dead and the unborn, whose 
 behests we fulfil, are the mighty ones ; where- 
 as the movement produced even by the strong- 
 est of his time is only a wing-beat in the 
 infinite ocean of air. But countless rapid 
 wing-beats constitute the force that propels 
 humanity forward and upward. 
 
 We and our work are the longing of past 
 generations that has now taken shape; our 
 longing will take shape in future generations 
 and their work. We who are now living and 
 working will soon be shadows. But our 
 dreams are already moving with white feet 
 in the light of the dawn.
 
 IV 
 
 YOUTH, WOMAN, AND ANTIMILITARISM 
 
 93
 
 IV 
 
 YOUTH, WOMAN, AND ANTIMILITARISM 
 
 IN great souls, in tranquil hearts, the dream of 
 * peace on earth lived long before it became, 
 in the message of the angels, a promise from 
 heaven to mankind. A promise which ever 
 since, by generation after generation, has 
 been brought out at Christmas with other 
 heirlooms, to adorn the feast. But as soon as 
 Christmas is over, the treasure is always put 
 away again. For mankind has been expecting 
 the promise of peace to be fulfilled in the 
 millennium, as an act of heavenly grace, not as 
 a work of men. 
 
 Our age is the first to look upon peace, not 
 as a gift of God, but as an earthly goal, which 
 grows nearer as humanity strives towards it. 
 The longer the peace movement continues 
 the more it is supported, not by the Christian, 
 but by the evolutionary view of life the 
 clearer does it become that this goal is a distant 
 one ; nay, that peace on earth will have to be 
 
 95
 
 96 The Younger Generation 
 
 attained by a development as slow as that 
 through which our race itself has arisen. 
 
 As regards the genesis of peace we are still 
 in the first day of creation, the day when light 
 is separated from darkness: that is, the light 
 and warming elements in patriotism must be 
 separated from the dark ones with which they 
 are blended together in the chaos that still 
 constitutes the mutual relationship of nations ; 
 a chaos in which the instincts of the savage and 
 the prejudices of the national supremacy still 
 usurp the name of patriotism. This separa- 
 tion of light from darkness takes place above 
 all in those daily experiences of the "co- 
 alescence of nations," which a Swedish thinker, 
 the late Gustaf Bjorklund, showed with the 
 prophetic vision of genius to be the way of the 
 necessary, constitutional, organic genesis of 
 peace. And this coalescence will result in 
 the nations, themselves formed by the accre- 
 tion of smaller units, being merged in an 
 organic union that will finally include the 
 whole of mankind. This union is accelerated 
 by every advance in material and intellectual 
 culture, above all by the intercourse of the 
 present day by land, by sea, and in the air 
 and by its great industrial undertakings. 
 Mankind as a whole is becoming more and
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 97 
 
 more sensitive to interference with any of its 
 parts, and each part is becoming more and 
 more dependent on the organism as a whole. 
 
 The following is an extract from the pro- 
 spectus of Folkens framtid ("The Future of 
 the Nations"), which Bjorklund began to 
 publish in 1889: 
 
 "Those movements and efforts of the pre- 
 sent time, which the future will recognise as 
 the most significant, are often just those that 
 are most overlooked and underrated by con- 
 temporaries, not only because these move- 
 ments at their outset are feeble and impotent, 
 but because they are opposed to the prevailing 
 spirit of the age and thus have the appearance 
 of Utopias or even of errors. . . . " 
 
 Thus it is, he continues, with a movement 
 that has commenced almost simultaneously 
 in every civilised country, "the object of 
 which is nothing less than the abolition of war 
 and the settlement of international disputes 
 by judicial means. Adherents of this move- 
 ment are found in all classes and callings, from 
 the manual labourer to members of legislative 
 assemblies, scholars, and many of the most 
 enlightened and practical statesmen in the 
 world. 
 
 "The attitude of the public at large towards
 
 98 The Younger Generation 
 
 these efforts is certainly not hostile; on the 
 contrary, such a state of things as the friends 
 of peace aim at is looked upon as highly 
 desirable. But, they say, it is impossible. 
 History shows us that wars will never cease. 
 
 "No reading of history is more general or 
 betrays more superficiality than this. The 
 evidence of history goes in a diametrically 
 opposite direction. It teaches us that the 
 spheres within which a state of peace and 
 judicial authority has become a necessity by 
 the very force of development, are being 
 steadily extended. Human communities be- 
 gin as smaller units, which by development 
 coalesce into groups and are merged into ever 
 higher and more comprehensive units, in 
 accordance with laws inherent in their nature. 
 If we survey historical development from this 
 point of view, we shall find that only a few 
 centuries ago the nations now living did not 
 exist. Each nation was then a group of 
 independent provincial States, which stood in 
 the same relation to each other as nations at 
 the present day. A few centuries further 
 back we find these provincial States in turn 
 to be groups of still smaller units (hundreds, 
 for instance), which then possessed a historical 
 individuality. Further back again we find
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 99 
 
 these hundreds to be loosely connected aggre- 
 gates of self-subsisting village communities, 
 whose mutual relation was that of independent 
 belligerent powers. 
 
 "Thus history shows a slowly progressive 
 extension of the spheres within which a state 
 of judicial authority has become a necessity. 
 And the national development of our day 
 points also in the same direction. Nothing 
 is more characteristic of our time than the 
 serious exertions that are everywhere made to 
 preserve peace in the midst of unexampled and 
 steadily increasing armaments. The fear of 
 war keeps the world in a constant uneasy 
 state of excitement and the prospects of peace 
 are unceasingly discussed in the Press. What 
 is the cause of this? Has human nature, pos- 
 sibly, undergone some radical improvement? 
 Assuredly not. Doubtless it cannot be denied 
 that our manners have become gentler, our 
 way of thinking nobler and more humane, but 
 on the whole we have the same faults and 
 imperfections, the same passions and pro- 
 pensities as former generations. The funda- 
 mental causes are of an entirely different kind. 
 Through development the interests of the 
 separate nations are becoming more and 
 more bound together in solidarity. Macaulay
 
 ioo The Younger Generation 
 
 thought it no exaggeration to assert that one 
 week's war on English soil would produce mis- 
 fortunes and disturbances that would make 
 themselves felt from the Hoang-ho to the 
 Missouri, and of which traces would be per- 
 ceptible for a period of a century. " 
 
 But although the friend of peace knows with 
 absolute certainty that the whole course of 
 development is working indirectly for his ends, 
 he knows at the same time that his own 
 conscious and well-directed work can hasten 
 the organisation of the nations into an inter- 
 national constitutional commonwealth, and in 
 an even higher degree influence that spiritual 
 conversion which is the condition necessary 
 for the establishment of such a commonwealth. 
 
 For this conversion we ought to be able in 
 the first place to count upon the preachers of 
 that religion which taught two thousand years 
 ago that we are all members of one body. 
 And so long as the Church was Christian that 
 is, possessed something of the spirit of Jesus 
 it was also pacifist. The Fathers of the Church 
 did not misinterpret the words of Jesus to 
 show his approval of war. The air was then 
 still full of the wave of warmth that Christ- 
 ianity brought with it. Every Christian
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 101 
 
 felt that when Jesus spoke of rendering to 
 Caesar the things that were Caesar's and to 
 God the things that were God's, he meant 
 by the latter the soul, but a soul liberated from 
 the very passions that evoke and maintain the 
 state of war among the nations. 
 
 Now, in the time of the dechristianised 
 Church a time in which a genuinely Christ- 
 ian priest is the only great miracle that can 
 still be witnessed it is not to the Church 
 that we can look for the educational work 
 by which men's minds are to be trained for 
 the charter of all nations that is to supersede 
 the present state of things. In our time war 
 is only an acute attack of a disease, in which 
 "armed peace" corresponds to a continued, 
 progressive exhaustion; just as an attack of 
 hemorrhage shows the presence of consump- 
 tion, though it does not constitute the disease 
 itself. 
 
 No, it is from the women of the new age, 
 and above all from the young mothers, that we 
 may hope for a spiritual transformation. Not 
 from the mothers of the present day, as yet 
 uneducated for their calling, and often unfit 
 for it; mothers who still bring up their 
 children by the hand instead of by the head ; 
 who in their system of the rod are guided by
 
 102 The Younger Generation 
 
 the same base and crude notions as the men in 
 their policy of war such mothers can form 
 no souls for peace. Nor yet those mothers 
 who bring up their children in the double- 
 faced morality ; who teach them as individuals 
 rather to suffer wrong than to do wrong, rather 
 to renounce their objects than to pursue them 
 by unworthy means ; who bid them put away 
 the thought of vengeance and forgive their 
 enemies but who then with flaming eyes and 
 inciting words exhort their sons, as "defenders 
 of their country," to commit acts which, as 
 private persons, they have learned to regard as 
 base. Least of all can those mothers, who with 
 all the breath of their bodies blow the flames 
 of hate and fanaticism, prepare the minds of 
 their children for peace. Only new mothers, 
 guided by the evolutionary idea, penetrated 
 by love of life, will be able to impart to the 
 new generation an ever deeper veneration for 
 the work of intellectual and material culture, 
 an ever more burning hatred of the waste of 
 life, the devastation of culture, the degrada- 
 tion of souls which latent as well as acute war 
 still forces upon mankind. 
 
 The spiritual influence of these new mothers 
 ought not to consist in a thoughtless depre- 
 ciation of past times, when war was still
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 103 
 
 inevitable and the deeds it evoked were great 
 personal contributions to the formation of 
 society. Nor again ought the influence of the 
 mothers to be exercised in the preaching of 
 that doctrine which misinterprets the funda- 
 mental laws of life : that all strife is evil, that 
 unconditional surrender is the only conduct 
 ethically justifiable. But they must teach 
 their children to reverence, love, and serve life 
 with such devotion that they will direct the 
 whole force of their wills to that field of 
 conflict which offers to the energy of man an 
 ever-widening range as the universal common- 
 wealth extends its sway ; precisely as reverence, 
 love, and activity acquired a wider scope, a 
 deeper meaning, when class and local feeling 
 were expanded into national consciousness 
 and love of country. 
 
 The new mothers must direct their sons' 
 emulation and ambition, their imagination and 
 their will, to discoveries and inventions, to 
 the fighting of disease and the perfecting of 
 labour, to the saving of life instead of its 
 destruction, but above all to the purposeful 
 perfecting of the organisation of society. 
 They must show them how we poor inhabit- 
 ants of earth are not only exposed to dangers 
 from fire, water, and air, but also from remote
 
 104 The Younger Generation 
 
 but inevitable cosmic revolutions. In the 
 face of these catastrophes of the present and 
 possibilities of the future the mothers ought 
 to be able to make their children see what 
 madness it is, that our race on the little 
 lump of earth that it possesses so insecurely 
 in the midst of the universe should contin- 
 ually endeavour by means of gold and iron to 
 enfeeble and ruin itself, to waste the means of 
 culture, to destroy the treasures of culture, 
 and to extinguish vital values. Ought not 
 all the limbs and brains shattered on the 
 battlefield, all the power and resources sucked 
 up by armaments to have been utilised in 
 making our race better fitted to hold its place 
 in nature, in the face of whose terrestrial and 
 extra-terrestrial revolutions it is still power- 
 less? 
 
 The mothers of the new age must teach their 
 children that a world crowded with people 
 struggling for space and for bread, teeming 
 with States which in order to maintain their 
 isolated sovereignty, their tariff barriers, their 
 armed defences lower the conditions of life 
 of their inhabitants that such a world is 
 still a chaos, from which a new world must 
 arise; a world with fewer but more perfect 
 human beings, who shall possess richer oppor-
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 105 
 
 tunities, better conditions, greater security, 
 and higher forms of life. And this will come 
 about when all competition and all co-opera- 
 tion takes place under the auspices of universal 
 organisation. Within this organisation the 
 unity of a nation will be determined, not by 
 frontiers formed by conquest, but by inner 
 necessity based on history, language, and race. 
 In short, nations will not become complete 
 individualities until the States have passed 
 out of their present stage of territorial separa- 
 tion and entered that of an international social 
 relationship. 
 
 This international organisation will protect 
 the rights of all, including therefore the natives 
 of those countries which the capitalist colonial 
 policy of the present day turns into a hell. 
 
 The political party which is everywhere 
 retarding international social development 
 that is, the capitalists, who see nothing but 
 their own interests; the clergy, who comport 
 themselves like the officers of God's general 
 staff, with His plans of campaign in their 
 pockets; the diplomatists, who, free from 
 control, can go their own way or that of their 
 governments; the military men, who want an 
 outlet for their pent-up energy this party 
 can at present create and keep up war panics
 
 106 The Younger Generation 
 
 with impunity. This party always mono- 
 polises the name of the "nation," whereas it 
 is actually only a small section of the people, 
 which continually nullifies the efforts of the 
 majority. Irresponsible rulers, unscrupulous 
 capitalists, priests without spirit and diplo- 
 matists without sense, combined with the 
 "yellow" Press which lacks at the same time 
 responsibility, conscience, spirit, and sense, 
 are a perpetual menace to peace in every 
 country. 
 
 We must teach our children that "armed 
 peace" exhausts the intellectual and material 
 strength of nations that is, their foremost 
 powers of defence just as surely as, though 
 more slowly than, war; that the olive-branch 
 of peace, held in the "mailed fist," does not 
 afford that "security from attack" which is 
 alleged to be the object of armaments. For, 
 if A increases the number of his warships from 
 ten to twenty, because B has increased his to 
 the same extent, then B brings his up to thirty, 
 and so the rivalry goes on, without altering 
 the original situation at all. The small na- 
 tions gain no increased security, but are 
 impoverished and their countries depopulated 
 by emigration. As all are arming to the full 
 extent of their power, not only does the defen-
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 107 
 
 sive position remain the same, but the danger 
 of war is increased by the rivalry that creates 
 tension, breeds distrust, and stirs up hatred. 
 And when things have gone so far, the wind 
 called "popular opinion," blowing now from 
 the conservative, now from the liberal quarter, 
 soon fans into flame the heat engendered by 
 the friction between two national interests. 
 
 We must teach our children that in our time 
 lasting peace, especially for the small nations, 
 cannot be secured by armed force ; nor by such 
 alliances as are never directed towards the 
 preservation of peace, but always against some 
 common enemy; nor even by treaties of 
 arbitration. Peace is best assured by the 
 conscious opposition which warlike agitation 
 encounters in the majority of the people. 
 Every thoughtful person now knows that 
 wars are neither determined by circumstances 
 over which men have no control, nor brought 
 about in pursuance of a divine scheme, but 
 that they are determined by circumstances 
 which men are able to transform in proportion 
 as they themselves acquire a clearer judgment, 
 a higher reason, a nobler will, and a more 
 delicate sensibility. In proportion as the con- 
 sciousness grows in a people that the peri- 
 odical slaughter of the most vigorous among
 
 io8 The Younger Generation 
 
 the male population of two nations is nothing 
 but criminal madness, will a place be prepared 
 in the brains of that people for the opposite, 
 the rational idea. And this idea is the uni- 
 versal organisation, by means of which the 
 new and nobler feeling of community the 
 community of the nations and the wider 
 spirit of citizenship citizenship of the world- 
 will acquire a freedom of movement, a strength, 
 and an extension, which they could never 
 attain in the present state of international 
 anarchy, in which each nation desires the 
 supremacy, continuance, and expansion of its 
 own country at the expense of and in opposi- 
 tion to other countries. From this it follows 
 that feelings, thoughts, actions, and laws are 
 adjusted to national enmity as a permanent 
 state and to sacrifices in armaments as the 
 condition of safeguarding the integrity and 
 independence of the individual State. 
 
 Through socialism the mental attitude of 
 large numbers of people towards militarism 
 has begun to undergo a change and pacifism 
 now finds its most numerous supporters in 
 organised labour. The ' ' Pan-Idealism, ' ' which 
 the Austrian thinker Holzapfel reduced to a 
 system, influences an increasing number of
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism 109 
 
 those minds which are at all capable of ideal- 
 ism. That his book was read by Russian 
 soldiers round the camp-fires of Manchuria 
 is one of the many significant features of a 
 recent great outbreak of human slaughter. 
 This idealism ought to impel all women, not 
 only those socialistically disposed, to attach 
 themselves to the antimilitarist propaganda 
 and to bring up their children in its spirit. 
 
 The most effectual means of stimulating 
 children and young people in the cause of 
 peace is to make them familiar with those facts 
 which prove that the nations, now so closely 
 connected in their interests and so dependent 
 on one another, require a greater security than 
 that afforded by armaments ; a security which 
 can only be achieved through the mutual 
 protection provided by new international 
 organisations for the regulation of labour and 
 legal relations. 
 
 To encourage the young, on the other hand, 
 to refuse military service, is to encourage 
 them to a breach of the law which will only 
 result in a loss of power to the individual and 
 in present circumstances a danger to the 
 people. For any such international action on 
 the part of the young would only result in the 
 reintroduction of mercenary armies.
 
 no The Younger Generation 
 
 Only those young men who have duly 
 performed their military duties can possess 
 the authority to urge the refusal of military 
 service in those cases where their own country 
 begins or seeks to provoke a war. This refusal 
 of service in certain cases is a very different 
 thing from the refusal of all military service 
 on principle. By combating the warlike spirit 
 the young can unquestionably contribute to 
 diminish the danger of war. And in twenty- 
 five years' time, when these young men have 
 acquired the direction of political affairs, 
 Europe might take up the problem of dis- 
 armament with some prospect of success. 
 
 This kind of antimilitarism appears to me 
 at present the only one which meets the claims 
 both of the moment and of the future; the 
 only one in which the duty of the young to 
 protect their own country's heritage of culture 
 and their duty to assist in the elevation of 
 the culture of mankind can simultaneously be 
 fulfilled. 
 
 The antimilitarist propaganda must be 
 carried on by the women of every nation. 
 Let the men see to the needs of actual defence. 
 But let the women, who in their children bear 
 the future on their bosoms, work with all 
 their educative power to bring in the time
 
 Youth, Woman, and Antimilitarism in 
 
 when the state of war between nations shall 
 give place to that of mutual help and inter- 
 national justice. Let them, from home to 
 home, from district to district, from land to 
 land, spread the enlightenment, change the 
 ideas, intensify the feelings, and stir up the 
 resistance by means of which the evolution of 
 humanity from the state of war to that of 
 peace will finally be accomplished. In this 
 way women are fulfilling a mission just as 
 important as that of giving birth to the new 
 generation; the mission, namely, of bringing 
 about the rebirth of humanity.
 
 V 
 
 'CLASS BADGES"
 
 "CLASS BADGES" 
 
 ONE spring day I was walking in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Stockholm with a friend who 
 was in constant fear of murderers. The sight 
 of a couple of working-men terrified her even at 
 a distance, until I pointed out to her that they 
 were picking anemones! For she saw at 
 once that the state of mind, which induced the 
 men to make a laborious search for the first 
 anemones, could not very well be combined 
 with evil designs on our lives. The anemones 
 on that occasion served as a "class badge," 
 by conclusively proving that those workmen 
 could not belong to the category of hooligans ! 
 
 And consciously or unconsciously we draw 
 similar conclusions from the external to the 
 internal every time we assume any mark 
 of class to be either an excluding wall or a 
 connecting bridge between ourselves and 
 some group of our fellow -men. 
 
 The talent of caricaturists often shows itself 
 
 "5
 
 ii6 The Younger Generation 
 
 in this very faculty of catching and emphasis- 
 ing class badges. In a hundred years' time 
 our comic papers will be indispensable to 
 anyone who wants to study certain human 
 types, then presumably extinct ; just as skele- 
 tons are indispensable for the reconstruction 
 of extinct animal species. 
 
 But new caricaturists will then find new 
 class badges in new human types. For the 
 socialists will hardly turn out to be true pro- 
 phets in declaring that all class distinctions 
 will disappear as soon as the class war has 
 been carried to a victorious close. The stamp 
 of a person's occupation will never entirely 
 disappear. And this is a fortunate thing, as 
 the variety of life is a source of gladness. 
 Indeed, inner characteristics will then be 
 perhaps more pronounced than now. Uni- 
 formity will only appear in a number of 
 external things, which at present divide 
 the upper from the lower class. 
 
 Cleanliness, for instance, which the working- 
 man now frequently regards as "upper class 
 arrogance," will doubtless then be public 
 property nay, water and brushes of all sorts 
 will be a necessity of life. But should this 
 not be the case, then no victories of socialism 
 will be able to efface the class distinction
 
 " Class Badges" 117 
 
 between those who take a bath and those who 
 do not. For the nose is undoubtedly our 
 most "class-conscious" organ. And this 
 organ demands that Europe shall keep 
 pace with America, where working-clothes 
 are often left at the workshop and the traces 
 of labour are removed in the bathroom of 
 the factory. Increasing cleanliness and ap- 
 propriateness in other words, increasing 
 good taste will quite certainly tend to 
 make the workman, instead of, as now, try- 
 ing to conceal his occupation, accentuate it 
 in such a way that every trade, for which a 
 special dress is appropriate, will provide itself 
 with a "working-uniform." The peasant 
 girl, for instance, is nowadays far from looking 
 "smart" when she works in the fields in 
 shabby town finery, side by side with another 
 girl in a cotton dress which is as appropriate as 
 it is becoming. And our working-men, far 
 from presenting a genteel appearance in their 
 working-clothes, which are often cast-off 
 "gentleman's clothes," look vulgar compared 
 with the French workman in his blue blouse; 
 while the latter at his cafe is treated by every- 
 one as a gentleman so long as he himself 
 behaves as one. 
 
 Another badge of class is the lack of a re-
 
 n8 The Younger Generation 
 
 fined sense for nature. Of course working- 
 men are not the only ones who mark their 
 visits to spots of natural beauty with greasy 
 paper and broken bottles, with scattered 
 orange-peel and snapped-off branches, with 
 bawling and rowdiness; but they are never- 
 theless the worst offenders. So long as the 
 rabble whether of the lower or the upper 
 class takes its bottles and its noise into 
 nature's solitudes, no victories of socialism 
 will be able to efface the class distinction 
 between the masses and the refined minority 
 who desire to enjoy the 'beauties of scenery 
 in meditative calm. 
 
 We often hear it said that the Swedes are 
 more uncivilised than other people as regards 
 acts of vandalism committed against nature 
 or works of art. 
 
 My observations abroad, however, have 
 not led me to the conclusion that such vul- 
 garities are more rampant in Sweden than in 
 other countries. In Paris, for instance, several 
 statues in public places were recently damaged ; 
 that this was the work of young "Royalists" 
 belonging to the highest society, and that it 
 was due to political motives, does not improve 
 the matter. In Rome I have seen names 
 scribbled everywhere, from the dome of
 
 "Class Badges" 119 
 
 St. Peter's to the catacombs. My first im- 
 pression of a Greek temple in Sicily was 
 disturbed by a boy's school of the higher class, 
 the members of which concluded a day's 
 outing by smashing their empty lemonade 
 bottles against the rocks. The Swedes can 
 hardly come up to the Germans in their power 
 of spoiling a beautiful scene with blatant up- 
 roar. And a more awful rabble than that of 
 London, on such occasions as Maf eking Night, 
 I have never seen. 
 
 With every people certain sorts of roughness 
 are due to religious, patriotic, or other fanatic- 
 ism. But these, together with all other forms 
 of brutality, find their most repulsive expres- 
 sion above all, brawling under the influence 
 of drink. The campaign against alcohol and 
 a ruthless confinement of all intoxicated per- 
 sons no matter to what class they belong 
 who show themselves in streets and public 
 places these are the first and most im- 
 portant means of suppressing outbreaks of 
 rowdiness. 
 
 Intoxication is still the decisive "class 
 badge," though not between "upper" and 
 "lower" class, but between men who are 
 masters of themselves and those who are 
 their own slaves a class distinction which
 
 120 The Younger Generation 
 
 unfortunately will hold its ground longer 
 than any other. 
 
 Promiscuous spitting, on the other hand, 
 is now only a rude and unhygienic habit of 
 the uneducated. Anyone who has seen how 
 widespread this bad habit is in Italy, the very 
 home of beauty, will admit that in this respect 
 the Northern peoples show a comparative 
 refinement. But a new pernicious practice 
 not confined to any class is that of incon- 
 siderately smoking in people's faces ; of poison- 
 ing public places with tobacco fumes, and even 
 smoking where it is forbidden, in defiance of 
 regulations. I have noticed this mark of boor- 
 ishness especially among "class-conscious" 
 working-men, who, however, should be the 
 last to adopt it, since they hope for a future 
 society in which the rights of all will be pro- 
 tected by the solidarity of all in the mainten- 
 ance of lawful order. 
 
 People returning from abroad often express 
 the opinion that their own countrymen use 
 worse language than other nations. They 
 are apt to forget that in foreign countries 
 their knowledge of the vocabulary is often de- 
 fective. How many foreigners understand, for 
 instance, that the words which disappointed 
 Italian beggars call after one "May you be
 
 4 'Class Badges" 121 
 
 murdered!" are one of the worst oaths in 
 the Italian language? It cannot be denied, 
 however, that swearing is a "class badge"; 
 but how is a country lad to know any better, 
 when corporals, and indeed officers of the 
 army, frequently employ oaths as a stimulus? 
 
 Many more marks of class might be cited, 
 the nature of which may be summed up by 
 saying that the uncultivated person grasps 
 at the shadow and lets the substance go, 
 chooses the frivolities, and overlooks the real 
 values. But this mark of vulgarity also is to 
 be found both in the upper and in the lower 
 class. The rich merchant's wife with her 
 bright and showy drawing-room, but dark and 
 cramped nursery, shows her want of culture 
 just as plainly as the workman's wife, who 
 makes the family eat and sleep in the kitchen, 
 in order that she may have a "genteelly" 
 bedecked room to receive visitors in! 
 
 And this very fact that there is a vulgar 
 herd among the rich, as well as among the 
 poor, ought to convince the socialists that the 
 mark of class lies too deep to be reached by 
 external class distinctions and class codes; 
 that base feelings and vulgar inclinations form 
 the real badge of the lower class, and that
 
 122 The Younger Generation 
 
 this can only be got rid of from within. This 
 counteraction from within will have to con- 
 tinue long after the broad social justice, for 
 which we are now righting, has been won, and 
 the outward disparities, against which we are 
 now fighting, have disappeared. For even 
 if we obtain for every member of society the 
 opportunities of development, the conditions 
 of labour, the enhancement of life, that we 
 now dream of, there will always exist greater 
 and smaller capacities for mental culture. 
 And therefore we shall no doubt find again 
 in the society of the future although on a 
 higher plane a small number of thoroughly 
 cultured people, beside a majority of average 
 culture and an uncultured minority. No one 
 will then lack time and opportunity for 
 developing what is in him. But dare we 
 suppose that for the next thousand years, 
 at least all will make use of these chances? 
 
 For we see now, for instance, that young 
 "class-conscious" socialists too often resemble 
 those young members of the upper class who 
 vulgarise their existence in restaurants and 
 music-halls, who squander their means and 
 their health with alcohol and tobacco. We 
 see, too, how the "class-conscious" working- 
 man shows his self-esteem in the same "stuck-
 
 "Class Badges" 123 
 
 up" stiffness towards the "upper class" that 
 the snobs of the latter show towards all those 
 socially beneath them. We see, again, how 
 the "class-conscious" working-man imagines 
 himself to be playing the gentleman by lolling 
 in cabs and adopting other and worse upper- 
 class manners. When will the working-man 
 see that in all this he is just exposing his lack 
 of real refinement; that the "class badge" of 
 boorishness is never so conspicuous as in this 
 aping? 
 
 And we see, too, that working-men, who 
 have every reason to hate the upper-class 
 badge of coarseness heartless oppression of 
 the workers and have every reason to hate 
 international wars, carry on their social war 
 with oppression and cruelty. As, for instance, 
 when small employers are reduced to ruin 
 because they will not have incompetent or 
 drunken workmen forced upon them; when 
 working-men use personal violence for dis- 
 seminating their opinions. But I will 
 break off, for it is too painful to me to go on 
 adducing evidence of the fact that a number 
 of the workers have used the weapon of 
 violence, while at the same time condemning 
 war. 
 
 And we see working-men, who have every
 
 124 The Younger Generation 
 
 reason to hate intolerance when shown to the 
 doctrines of socialism, themselves exhibiting 
 this "class badge." 
 
 On the other hand, we already find many 
 manual labourers showing, in the street and 
 in the museum, on country excursions and in 
 the lecture hall, at party meetings and at their 
 work, that outward and inward refinement 
 which is derived, not only from justifiable 
 self-esteem, but also from consideration for 
 others. As regards cleanliness and sobriety, 
 speech and behaviour, regard for the rights 
 of others, inward delicacy and outward con- 
 sideration, these working-men are a long way 
 above a great many drunkards and rowdies 
 of the "upper class." 
 
 The deepest-lying cause of coarseness, 
 among ourselves as in other countries, is the 
 fact that the culture of the young in spite 
 of all the fine things that are said about it is 
 not the end aimed at in the school curriculum, 
 and that the behaviour resulting from com- 
 pulsory measures of school discipline does not 
 imply any acquisition of self-discipline act- 
 ing from within. Thus, when school-days are 
 over, coarseness returns. 
 
 To this must be added the class division, 
 already strongly marked by the different
 
 "Class Badges" 125 
 
 types of school, which excludes children of 
 working-class homes from the refined com- 
 panionship of children of cultured homes, and 
 deprives grown-up people of all classes of the 
 mutual education that manual workers and 
 brain workers might give one another. This 
 mutual education is, as Almqvist rightly 
 pointed out, the fundamental condition for 
 forming the various classes of a people into 
 one nation. 
 
 A thing that is indirectly to blame for the 
 coarseness of the children of the people is the 
 opinion still prevailing in many quarters that 
 grinding at catechism is the proper means of 
 educating the children of primary schools. 
 For owing to this the real intellectual cultiva- 
 tion, which might commence even in the 
 primary school, has often to be sacrificed to a 
 religious instruction that is fatal to religious 
 feeling itself. 
 
 No "class badge" is more profoundly 
 marked than the difference in the attention 
 and cultivation that children receive. And 
 the only means of counteracting coarseness on 
 a large scale and at the same time eradicating 
 class divisions would be a common school 
 for all the children of the country until reach- 
 ing the age of, say, fifteen. But this school
 
 126 The Younger Generation 
 
 would have to be entirely freed both from clerical 
 authority and from the system of compulsory 
 examinations. This would be accompanied 
 by the disappearance of the unfortunate differ- 
 ence in cultivation between teachers in schools 
 under public authority and other teachers. 
 We should have only one type of school- 
 masters and mistresses. These ought to be 
 trained by the very best methods to become 
 gardeners of young human minds; gardeners 
 who would be allowed the leisure and the right 
 to devote themselves wholly to the cultivation 
 of those minds, and not to their preparation 
 either for confirmation or for any kind of 
 examination. 
 
 But it looks as though we should have to 
 wait a long time for such schools for the eradi- 
 cation of class distinctions! The young Social 
 Democrats must therefore continue the work 
 of self -education that they have so well begun, 
 and continue it above all within their own 
 class, at their own meetings, in their own 
 lectures. 
 
 For, let us admit it, many of the character- 
 istics of a cultured class are still lacking. 
 And unfortunately we find false prophets 
 who preach that the class struggle can best 
 be carried on without the refinement which
 
 " Class Badges" 127 
 
 is one of those characteristics. But all we 
 who in the great cause of socialism love the 
 brighter future that we are trying to conjure 
 up out of the present we know that this 
 great cause has no worse enemies than these 
 very preachers of ruthlessness, of barbarity, 
 as necessary means of warfare. 
 
 There is no symbol that socialism ought now 
 to take to heart more earnestly than the pro- 
 found fable of the giant who could only be 
 slain with his own sword. On the other hand, 
 socialism will become invincible on the day 
 when it takes as its emblem the arch- 
 angel Michael, who bears in one hand a 
 flaming sword, but in the other the scales 
 of justice.
 
 VI 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S CHARTER 
 
 129
 
 VI 
 
 THE CHILDREN'S CHARTER' 
 
 A YOUNG Italian artist sent me not long 
 ** ago a drawing, representing a naked, 
 new-born babe being lifted out of dark waters 
 by a pair of woman's arms like flower-stalks, 
 while the towers and smoking factory chim- 
 neys of a great city loom in the murky 
 background. 
 
 We may venture to interpret the artist's 
 idea in this way: as the stalk of the water- 
 lily raises its white flower towards the sun, 
 so must the flower of our race, the child, be 
 raised by strong and tender hands towards 
 the light and air, which the great city and its 
 great industry are now rendering less and less 
 accessible. 
 
 Of the society of the future I know this with 
 absolute certainty: 
 
 1 Written for " Children's Day," an annual event in Scandi- 
 navia, when street collections, entertainments, etc., are held for 
 philanthropic objects. TR.
 
 132 The Younger Generation 
 
 The first and most important article of its 
 code will be that of the Rights of the Child. 
 
 This article will establish: 
 
 The right of all children to healthy parents, 
 reared for the calling of parentage. 
 
 The right of all children to protection for 
 both soul and body against blows and drudg- 
 ery, against hunger and dirt. 
 
 The right of all children to physical and 
 mental development during their whole period 
 of growth, through full participation in a 
 complete tutelary care in health and sickness, 
 in an assimilation, free from examinations, 
 of nature and culture, and in a professional 
 training according to ability, not according 
 to class. 
 
 The right of all children to disinheritance ; 
 in other words, their being placed in the 
 beneficent necessity of making full use of 
 their completely developed powers. 
 
 But what chance is there of this Children's 
 Charter being drawn up to say nothing of its 
 being followed before grown-up people really 
 begin to become as children; in other words, 
 soulful instead of greedy for riches? One 
 thing is certain, that legislation for the full 
 human rights of the child cannot come about 
 until those transformations have taken place
 
 The Children's Charter 133 
 
 which the present-day "guardians of society" 
 term "revolutionary." 
 
 The future will judge our present plane of 
 culture as we now judge that of past ages, 
 when new-born babes were exposed and the 
 young children of conquered cities were 
 dashed against the walls. 
 
 Nay, the judgment upon our time will be 
 even more severe. For the people of anti- 
 quity knew not what they did, when they 
 caused the blood of children to flow like water. 
 But our age allows millions of children to be 
 worn out, starved, maltreated, neglected, to 
 be tortured at school, and to become degen- 
 erate and criminal, and yet it knows the con- 
 sequences to the race and to the community 
 that all this involves. And why? Because 
 we are not yet willing to reckon in life-values 
 instead of in gold-values. 
 
 One " Children's Day " in the year is 
 like a cup of water among an army of the 
 thirsty. 
 
 Every day of the year ought to belong 
 first and foremost to the children, so that 
 the years of childhood might be lived in 
 the conditions indispensable to the rearing 
 \ of healthy strong, happy, and good human 
 beings. 
 
 \
 
 134 The Younger Generation 
 
 That State which is the first to translate 
 this demand into action will be foremost in 
 the civilisation of the future, the "pedagogic 
 province" desired by Goethe.
 
 VII 
 
 RECREATIVE CULTURE 
 
 135
 
 VII 
 
 RECREATIVE CULTURE 
 
 'TD the nation as a whole recreative culture 
 * is needful. But above all is it important 
 to the hosts who have inscribed on their banners 
 the just demand for eight hours' rest side by 
 side with that for eight hours' work and eight 
 hours' sleep. For, when this time of rest has 
 been won, it will be employed not only in 
 family life or in affairs of social politics, but 
 also in self -education and in enjoyment. And 
 the question will then be of even greater 
 importance than now, how this need of enjoy- 
 ment is satisfied. That enjoyment should be 
 allotted an ample share of leisure time is desir- 
 able, not only for the health and happiness of 
 the individual, but also for the value of his 
 work. Science has proved the inanity of the 
 talk we still hear about "change of work" 
 being the best form of rest, and confirmed the 
 truth of the rhyme: 
 
 137
 
 138 The Younger Generation 
 
 Much work and no joy 
 Make Jack a dull boy. 
 
 But enjoyment may also make a man dull 
 and indifferent. Not merely those pleasures 
 which, with a growing consensus of opinion, 
 are called worthless, but even those which 
 are regarded as innocent, are harmful if prac- 
 tised without restraint. But they are harm- 
 ful above all if they are such as involve 
 neither mental nor physical renewal, which is 
 just what is implied in the admirably signific- 
 ant word recreation. 
 
 Only pleasures productive in this respect 
 are, in the profoundest meaning of the word, 
 noble pleasures. 
 
 Recreative culture implies in the first place 
 cultivation of the faculty of distinguishing be- 
 tween the different kinds of pleasure, and, in 
 the next place, the will to choose the produc- 
 tive and reject the unproductive and harm- 
 ful. A Danish author, now dead, has well 
 illustrated the difference between productive 
 and unproductive mental conditions generally 
 by a simile taken from his profession, that of 
 an engineer. He compares intellectual life 
 with that of a machine, to which power in 
 some form is conducted; a power which in-
 
 Recreative Culture 139 
 
 cessantly overcomes resistance and performs 
 work, provided that the supply of power is 
 kept up. But if force is expended without a 
 constant fresh supply, or if, conversely, the 
 supply is maintained without force being ex- 
 pended, the same effects ensue in intellectual 
 life as in the machine. Only when the supply 
 and expenditure of power are in the right 
 proportion is intellectual life free, mobile, re- 
 ceptive, and productive. But if, on the other 
 hand, the right proportion is disturbed either 
 by insufficient supply or insufficient expendi- 
 ture of force intellectual life becomes empty 
 or torpid ; in one case it moves in an unproduc- 
 tive circle, in the other it is obstructed and 
 stationary. 
 
 Pleasure may be of such a kind as to bring 
 new strength to the body or the mind or both. 
 But far oftener it exhausts or merely occupies 
 one, without becoming a motive power in any 
 direction. We should not heat a boiler with 
 feathers or make bread of sawdust if we wanted 
 motive power or nutriment, and just as little 
 can we expect power and nourishment from 
 nine tenths of the so-called "diversions" and 
 "pastimes" of the present day. These words 
 are appropriate, for while pleasures that have
 
 140 The Younger Generation 
 
 a meaning collect the intellectual powers, 
 empty pleasures divert them in all directions. 
 And while noble pleasure makes every moment 
 golden, time is wasted like water when the 
 object is to "pass" it. 
 
 Whether pleasure be obtained from nature 
 or art, from the theatre or from music, from 
 intercourse with books or with men and women, 
 from sports or games, from dancing or playing, 
 noble pleasure is to be distinguished from 
 ignoble both by its effect at the moment and 
 by its after-effect. The former will have 
 enhanced the powers of body and mind, if the 
 bounds of moderation have not been exceeded. 
 Ignoble pleasure, though it may not have been 
 immoderately indulged in, leaves behind dul- 
 ness, loathing, weariness, and emptiness, even 
 in those cases where its evil effects have not 
 reached the feelings and the will. Most signi- 
 ficant in this respect is intoxication. Many 
 people defend this as ''productive," since in 
 its earlier phase it liberates certain natures 
 from heaviness, shyness, and self-criticism; 
 just as it increases the receptivity of the senses, 
 promotes the wit, and fires the inspiration. 
 But its effects in the later phases, as also its 
 after-effects, prove the fallacy of this elevation. 
 A lasting enhancement of life that is, one
 
 Recreative Culture 141 
 
 that brings growth to the mind and health to 
 the body is only to be obtained from plea- 
 sures which make a man happy and good, as 
 a child is happy and good, in the present 
 moment; or more mature in thought, feeling, 
 and will; or refreshed and ready to wrestle 
 anew with the tasks of life. If pleasure has 
 had none of these effects, it has been bad, or 
 at any rate empty. 
 
 In every class the majority allows itself 
 empty pleasures. But nowhere else is this so 
 fraught with danger as in the working-class. 
 For although of course it is equally disastrous 
 to every individual in every class to suffer 
 spiritual injury through base pleasures, it is 
 far more disastrous to the whole community 
 and to its future if the fourth estate in whose 
 hands lie the problems of the immediate 
 future suffers such injury. The working- 
 class requires to use every means, even that 
 of pleasure, for strengthening and increasing 
 its powers for their tasks. It is therefore a 
 question of supreme importance whether the 
 scanty leisure working-men now enjoy, also 
 the increased spare time they hope to gain, is 
 wasted in worthless amusements or is em- 
 ployed in true recreation, in renewal of physical 
 and mental powers.
 
 142 The Younger Generation 
 
 Working-men like most other people 
 seldom think about the pleasures they allow 
 themselves, so long as these pleasures are not 
 downright vicious or too expensive. The man 
 who has a shilling to spend on a pleasure that 
 is considered innocent throws down his coin 
 without stopping to think whether he will get 
 in return a pleasure that is full of renovating 
 force, or one that is as sterile as the sand. 
 
 There is no surer proof of a person's culture 
 than his choice of pleasures. Indeed, we find 
 out more about a person's intellectual quality 
 by watching him at play than we should by 
 observing him at work. Many a man can do 
 a good day's work, whether mental or physical, 
 and yet disclose his inward coarseness in his 
 amusements. 
 
 The latter set their stamp even upon the 
 outward man. Observe, for instance, two 
 working-men playing chess and two others 
 sitting with their beer-mugs and handling a 
 dirty pack of cards. The faces of the former 
 show shrewdness and intelligence, those of the 
 latter coarseness or lassitude. Or look at the 
 educated man who enjoys himself in society 
 without the stimulus of alcohol, and at him 
 who owes his festive mood to an excess of this 
 stimulus. One needs no psychology, but only
 
 Recreative Culture 143 
 
 a pair of seeing eyes, to know more about these 
 souls than they themselves think they are 
 revealing. 
 
 Most people including both the socialist 
 and the pillar of existing society foolishly 
 overlook the vital necessities of the soul. 
 What the body requires as a minimum for 
 existence is beginning to be known. But that 
 the soul may also descend below its minimum 
 requirements is not yet even suspected. People 
 allow themselves domestic habits, social cus- 
 toms, and public amusements which yield no 
 profit in the way of increased mental elasticity, 
 or richer emotions, or a happier disposition, or 
 strengthened will-power, or greater physical 
 health. They do not ask themselves whether 
 their mode of life gives them an ever higher 
 view of life and an ever deeper sense of beauty. 
 They ask nothing else of their pleasures but 
 amusement. If they have been able to laugh 
 and make a noise or tipple and stupefy 
 themselves then they have "enjoyed" them- 
 selves; they have "passed the time, " and they 
 feel no sense of responsibility towards their 
 souls. They would be very much annoyed 
 with themselves if they chanced to drop their 
 money into the sea. But they do not perceive 
 that in such pleasures which have done
 
 144 The Younger Generation 
 
 nothing to ennoble thought and feeling, have 
 strengthened neither the muscles nor the will, 
 have yielded neither mental nor physical 
 culture in any form they have not dropped 
 but voluntarily thrown their money into the 
 sea. 
 
 II 
 
 Those pleasures rank highest in cultural 
 value, in which one takes an active part one's 
 self, if not at first, then at second hand; since 
 one's whole being is braced to take advantage 
 of the pleasure that is offered. No cultural 
 development takes place without personal 
 participation; in fact, we may fully agree with 
 another Danish thinker Carl Lambek that 
 "the nature of culture is activity. " A pleasure 
 then, to have cultural value, must in some way 
 have made us active. The word must not be 
 misunderstood. There is such a thing as active 
 rest, and there is also empty apathy. There 
 are active spectators and languid lookers-on. 
 But in our days of high pressure people are 
 often too tired for this activity of rest and 
 vision. They therefore content themselves 
 with the empty pastimes which demand no 
 expenditure of force, and bring no contribu-
 
 \ 
 
 Recreative Culture 145 
 
 tion of force either. This is especially true 
 of the physically over-tired. And this is not 
 the least of the reasons for wishing that the 
 workers may obtain sufficient spare time to 
 render them capable of the more productive 
 pleasures. Only then can we hope that a 
 culture will be within the reach of the majority 
 which will penetrate their whole mode of life, 
 which will proceed from the internal to the ex- 
 ternal and form a unity; whereas in all classes 
 culture is now limited to certain spheres, 
 even if it is not confined to the exterior. The 
 assertion made above that a great part of 
 enjoyment consists in personal activity may 
 be illustrated by a simple example. A work- 
 ing-man who from a seat enjoys the view 
 of a beautiful public park has not the same 
 delight in bushes and flowers as when he 
 has seen them growing in his own garden. 
 The man who goes into the country alone to 
 take his quiet pleasure there, brings home 
 a far greater wealth of inner and outer expe- 
 rience on account of his leisure for personal 
 participation than does he who crowds on to 
 a steamboat or a train for a "pleasure trip" 
 with a number of others. Even if this pleasure 
 trip does not result in a lasting aversion to the 
 place visited owing to scattered paper and
 
 146 The Younger Generation 
 
 fruit-peel, broken bottles, flowers plucked and 
 thrown away, snapped branches, etc., wit- 
 nessing to the behaviour of the excursionists 
 it leaves as a rule with the participants nothing 
 but a memory of noise and racket, of crowding 
 and hurrying, that has prevented their re- 
 ceiving any deeper impression. Travelling 
 is rightly placed in the front rank among 
 pleasures as among means of education. But 
 one may travel round the world without ac- 
 quiring any increase of culture, while, on the 
 other hand, one may, like a French author, 
 make a "journey round one's room" and add 
 greatly to one's intellectual wealth. Those 
 Japanese who during the war with Russia 
 graced their simple meal of rice, when they 
 had the chance, with a few flowers, possessed 
 a recreative culture many times superior to 
 that of the European excursionists, who ruth- 
 lessly despoil Nature's fairest spring garment 
 and disfigure trees and monuments, tables and 
 seats with their trivial names; nay, who often 
 "amuse themselves" by breaking up and 
 ruining what others have been at great 
 pains to lay out and arrange. 
 
 This brutality shows, however, that "activ- 
 ity" is an essential part of enjoyment, and 
 that the instinct of activity finds its outlet in
 
 Recreative Culture 147 
 
 destruction when it is not led into better 
 channels. This then is precisely the point at 
 which the cultivation of enjoyment ought to 
 begin. 
 
 Children of all classes must learn good 
 behaviour in rural scenery. It should be 
 possible to combine the desire of making 
 natural history collections with a respect for 
 nature. The Scout movement properly con- 
 ducted may form an excellent means of 
 arriving at a nobler and more considerate 
 enjoyment of nature in this respect. Holiday 
 camps may do the same. The microscope 
 and camera should never be absent from such 
 a camp. 
 
 But even if the coarse way of enjoying one's 
 self in the country gives rise to most annoy- 
 ance in others, this coarseness is not the most 
 harmful kind to the individual himself. For 
 the impressions of nature may by degrees 
 affect him profoundly, though unconsciously, 
 so that his enjoyment of rural scenes will 
 gradually be elevated. 
 
 On the other hand, no potentialities of ele- v 
 vation lie in the wretched amusements of the 
 country fair, such as the ordinary waxworks 
 with their crude horrors; exhibitions of freaks, 
 silly conjuring tricks, and so on, which are to
 
 148 The Younger Generation 
 
 be found in their most vulgar forms in rural 
 districts. There, too, such circus and variety 
 programmes, farces and cinematographs are 
 thought good enough which appeal only to a 
 coarse love of sensation, low tastes, and vacant 
 giggling. Even when this is not the case, such 
 performances are often so devoid of meaning 
 that they do not even leave behind a single 
 definite mental image, much less an elevating 
 idea or emotion. On this miserable mishmash 
 which is rubbish when it is not poison 
 hundreds of thousands spend their hard- 
 earned pence and their still more valuable 
 leisure. 
 
 It is especially on the picture theatres that 
 time and money are now squandered. Un- 
 doubtedly the cinematograph has an increas- 
 ing goodwill and capacity for communicating 
 instincts and impressions of value. But even 
 when the programme is good, the cinemato- 
 graph, taken to excess, involves intellectual 
 dangers just as much as intellectual impulses. 
 For the observation is blunted and confused 
 by a number of rapidly succeeding impressions ; 
 the spectator becomes habituated to fleeting 
 and undigested ideas, to the listless reception 
 and speedy forgetting of matter with which he 
 is crammed full without any personal co-opera-
 
 Recreative Culture 149 
 
 tion, without any extension of his intellectual 
 life; nay, without even retaining any clear 
 image in his memory much less any idea or 
 emotion. 
 
 Assuredly the cinematograph is no longer 
 so brutalising and demoralising as it was in 
 the beginning. But much has yet to be accom- 
 plished by the public, the critics, and the 
 censorship, before it becomes a thoroughly 
 cultural enjoyment. 
 
 The greater number of the films still show 
 empty sensational pieces, vulgarly comic or 
 sentimental dramas, meaningless everyday 
 events, all equally poor in cultural value. For 
 neither the emotions nor the inquiring mind 
 derive any nourishment from them; only 
 vacant curiosity and love of sensation are 
 catered for. It is revolting to think of all the 
 worthless stuff that thus flows day after day 
 through the brains of the people, when the 
 cinematograph might be so powerful an edu- 
 cational factor. It is capable of giving faithful 
 pictures of the age and its passions; living 
 landscapes and views of city life with genuine 
 local colour; objects and processes of natural 
 history, as revealed by the microscope and by 
 experiment; intimate peeps into animal and 
 plant life. It can show us the operations
 
 150 The Younger Generation 
 
 of industries, handicrafts, and trades; it can 
 present the achievements of engineering, sport, 
 and traffic. And in all this it can not only give 
 life to the education of the child, but also be a 
 guide to the studies of the grown-up. Thus 
 scientists now consider, for instance, that 
 thanks to the film experiments on living ani- 
 mals for purposes of study may be considerably 
 reduced in number. Then the cinematograph 
 has been able to show farmers the action 
 of new agricultural machinery, and manufac- 
 turers new methods in industry. It has also 
 served to demonstrate model arrangements 
 in the sphere of social aid, etc. 
 
 It must of course be remembered that if, 
 on the one hand, knowledge, discerning power, 
 and depth of feeling may be increased by our 
 thus obtaining true ideas and impressions of 
 objects and phenomena which previously were 
 only empty words, on the other hand, con- 
 fused impressions result from the mixed pro- 
 grammes of cinematograph displays. The 
 suggested specialisation of these shows will 
 therefore soon be necessary, if the cinemato- 
 graph is to increase its influence as an instru- 
 ment of culture. 
 
 Here an objection may be raised, which 
 applies not merely to films, but to all illu-
 
 Recreative Culture 151 
 
 strations: that there are some events and 
 figures that the imagination itself illustrates 
 better than any picture can. In such cases 
 both the picture-book and the film will be 
 disappointing, either because they do not at 
 all correspond to the image of one's fancy, or 
 by leaving behind them a great void, when 
 they displace the creativeness of one's own 
 imagination. 
 
 From what has just been said it follows that 
 the function of the film is above all to give 
 strong impressions of such processes and 
 phenomena in which neither accurate obser- 
 vation nor free play of fancy is important. 
 
 Those films which give dramatic pictures 
 of human life are artistically justifiable only 
 when the course of their action is really suited 
 to pantomime. But from a literary point of 
 view every film must be unconditionally con- 
 demned which trespasses upon the works of 
 the great dramatists; those works in which a 
 course of psychological development is revealed, 
 a process for which the author Ibsen, for 
 example has delicately weighed every word 
 that serves to disclose the psychological con- 
 dition of his persons. On the other hand, 
 living dramatists now have a new field for 
 their invention, in the construction of plays
 
 152 The Younger Generation 
 
 intended for the film, in which words will be 
 superfluous, since the comic or tragic action 
 will speak sufficiently for itself. Furthermore, 
 there are many novels that might be adapted 
 into effective films. This appears to have 
 been done with Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Last 
 Days of Pompeii, Quo Vadis, and others. In 
 Swedish literature, G. Janson's Abraham's 
 Sacrifice may specially be pointed out as 
 suited to similar treatment. 
 
 Finally, the cinematograph ought to be 
 turned to account in physical culture, and that 
 in the way indicated by a Swedish author 
 after seeing himself on the film in giving one 
 a faithful picture of one's own "plastic incon- 
 gruities." By this means bad habits or incon- 
 sistencies of attitude, gait, and gesture might 
 be counteracted. In conjunction with the 
 gramophone the film might be to actors, 
 clergymen, and other speakers what the metal 
 mirror, the sword-point, and the pebbles were 
 to Demosthenes. 
 
 In conclusion, it may be emphasised that 
 the cinematograph at its best has not merely 
 had a direct influence on education and char- 
 acter, but has also awakened a desire to read 
 the books, or to become familiar through read- 
 ing with the phenomena, of which the public
 
 Recreative Culture 153 
 
 has been given a notion through the film. 
 The cinematograph has thus acted in the 
 same way as cheap editions in fostering a love 
 of reading. Statistics from American public 
 libraries show a steady rise in the number of 
 visitors and borrowers since the cinematograph 
 became an element in American popular 
 amusements. And this literary interest shows 
 a constant improvement of taste in the choice 
 of reading matter. 
 
 ill 
 
 The sins of the theatre are no less serious 
 than those of the cinematograph. The former 
 and this applies also to the "People's" 
 theatres confines itself far too much to the 
 field of low comedy. But the theatre, like 
 music, ought to be recreation in the highest 
 sense of the word, a renovation of the soul, if 
 this aim were clear to all its leaders. The 
 best effort that has been made in Sweden to 
 give the majority good dramatic art has been 
 that of the society known as Skadebanan. 
 But side by side with the work of Skadebanan 
 there should be another, that of encourag- 
 ing people to act themselves, by writing 
 and translating suitable plays; by furnishing
 
 154 The Younger Generation 
 
 catalogues of good dramatic works, both 
 native and foreign, that would be suitable for 
 the purpose; and finally by setting the right 
 persons to work at staging the plays as well as 
 performing them. Thus many opportunities 
 of personal activity would be afforded: as 
 authors, scene-painters, actors, costumiers, 
 etc. In many places in Tyrol, Switzerland, 
 and Bavaria; above all at Oberammergau 
 not only the young people, but their elders, 
 take part in the open-air plays for which 
 certain districts are celebrated. And if we 
 observe the people of these districts, we may 
 see in their bearing, expression, and speech the 
 refining effect that noble pleasure practised 
 from generation to generation can bring 
 about. 
 
 Serious young people, who combine cultiva- 
 tion with social interests, ought to devote all 
 their intelligence and imagination to trying 
 to find an increasing number of ennobling 
 amusements for children and those young 
 people who are exposed to the influence of 
 coarse pleasures. 
 
 Perhaps none of these nobler amusements 
 is more important than the toy theatre and 
 amateur acting.
 
 Recreative Culture 155 
 
 Those who are familiar with the life of 
 Goethe know what a powerful influence on 
 his development he ascribed to the acting of 
 his childhood and boyhood. But from other 
 sources there is also abundant evidence of 
 the admirable educational instrument that 
 amateur acting afforded to the young people 
 of the close of the eighteenth and beginning 
 of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Some schools in Sweden have already begun 
 to adopt acting as a means of combining utility 
 with enjoyment. But nowhere else in our 
 time has this been done with so clear an aim 
 as in America. An interesting book has been 
 published on this subject. It gives much- 
 needed guidance for making acting a real 
 means of the education of youth. For the 
 art of the theatre must be a pleasure which 
 sets in motion the favourable forces in the 
 personality of the young. x 
 
 The author sets out from the idea that the 
 joy of a productive activity is the strongest motive 
 force in all true education. She rightly points 
 out that much that is bad in young people 
 has its cause in unemployed force, force that 
 
 1 The book is called The Dramatic Festival, and is written by 
 Anne A. T. Craig (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 
 1912).
 
 156 The Younger Generation 
 
 longs to find expression. But when it does not 
 find it in a way that satisfies young people's 
 imagination and need of movement healthily 
 and beautifully, then this force expends itself 
 in a coarse and ugly way. She regards the 
 theatre as the best safety-valve for young 
 people's joy of life and also as the best means 
 of educating the young to purer and nobler 
 feelings, of giving their will a loftier direction, 
 and at the same time of imparting to them 
 physical and aesthetic culture. 
 
 She does not, however, wish the young to 
 undertake the great dramatic masterpieces, 
 nor yet to fall back upon the inferior current 
 repertory of the theatres. She therefore shows 
 how the history and literature, the legends 
 and popular tales of one's own and other 
 countries nay, even certain trades and call- 
 ings and natural processes are suited for 
 dramatisation, with dance, song, and panto- 
 mime as auxiliaries. For the small children 
 the result is dancing games of a more com- 
 plicated kind; for the older ones, something 
 more in the nature of drama. But in both 
 cases the young learn to acquire a bearing at 
 once graceful and controlled, besides giving 
 their elders an excellent opportunity of dis- 
 covering their aptitudes. She describes how
 
 Recreative Culture 157 
 
 some young people dramatise the material 
 chosen by all; how others make and paint 
 the scenery; some choose or compose appro- 
 priate music and practise dances; others 
 again make costumes, act as stage managers, 
 and so on. And all this gives opportunity for 
 developing originality, insight, and capacity 
 in every possible direction. The young learn 
 to work together for a definite object and to 
 subordinate themselves freely to an authority 
 they themselves have chosen. They feel that 
 they are creating and are therefore happy. 
 For even in little children's games the creative 
 joy is the essential part of the pleasure. 
 
 She tells us how the children began by 
 "dramatising" the different seasons and em- 
 ployments, rain and wind, etc. ; how they next 
 "played" fables such as ^Esop's of the 
 grasshoppers and the ants later on legends, 
 and, finally, in their college time, dramas. 
 
 The sooner the children themselves can 
 put together their pieces, the better. For the 
 author rightly insists that the most naive 
 and clumsy home-made thing is better than 
 one provided by others. 
 
 It seems to me that young socialists and 
 members of temperance societies could bring
 
 158 The Younger Generation 
 
 a fresh stream into their work of education if 
 with the help of young people of literary 
 culture they started a theatrical enterprise 
 of this sort in the halls where they meet. A 
 choice of good plays, easy to perform, might, 
 I think, be made by the directors of their 
 studies to begin with. And then it would 
 be an easy step to the more independent 
 theatre, in which the plays would come into 
 being within the circle of the young actors 
 themselves. 
 
 Of course it is necessary that the idea should 
 be taken up by the right persons, that is to 
 say, by such as would never lose sight of the 
 educational aim. But there are so many 
 young people in the country with a conscious- 
 ness of their responsibility that such leaders 
 would not be difficult to find. In each par- 
 ticular district the opportunities of seeing 
 theatrical art are few. On the other hand, 
 theatrical games might occupy many winter 
 evenings in an entertaining and profitable 
 way, first in preparation and afterwards in 
 performance. 
 
 I believe, with the American writer I have 
 quoted, that in a district where this amuse- 
 ment was regularly carried on, coarseness 
 would decline and better manners, as well as
 
 Recreative Culture 159 
 
 a nobler way of thinking, would gradually 
 take its place. 
 
 IV 
 
 Among the pleasures that dramatic art can 
 give, a good play, performed by dramatic 
 artists, obviously stands first. That our time 
 has begun to provide the working-class with 
 greater facilities for enjoying genuine dramatic 
 art as well as good music is no new thing; 
 the men of the great French Revolution, for 
 instance, tried to arrange significant popular 
 festivals and theatrical performances. Their 
 inspiration came from Rousseau that Rous- 
 seau whom it is the fashion in these reactionary 
 days to disparage, together with the French 
 Revolution itself although the leaders of 
 culture of later centuries ought rather to 
 use Tegner's words of Rousseau and of the 
 Revolution: 
 
 Hvar stodo vi, om de ej varit till ? 
 " Where were we, had they not been? " 
 
 It is unspeakably ludicrous of the reaction- 
 aries to point to this or that in Rousseau, 
 which was not "new," or to show that the 
 men of the French Revolution derived some 
 or other of their ideas from other countries.
 
 160 The Younger Generation 
 
 Everyone knows that the fuel for a great 
 beacon is collected from all sides, but that it is 
 the kindling flame that makes the fire. And 
 it was this flame that Rousseau and after 
 him the French Revolution supplied in the 
 matter of popular festivals as in others. 
 
 Rousseau gives a splendid motto for such 
 festivals in these words: " They should be such, 
 that each may see and love himself in all the 
 rest, in order that all may thus be more closely 
 united." Rousseau reminds us of the festivals 
 of the ancients to show his meaning. And it 
 was in the spirit of Rousseau and of the 
 ancients that the best men of the Revolution 
 wished to give the people national festivals 
 and spectacles, the object of which was to 
 " glorify those events of its past and present that 
 are most precious to a free people." Plastic 
 art, music, drama, athletic sports, and awards 
 of prizes ought to form part of these festivals, 
 which must be of such a kind as to "make the 
 old happy through memories, the young through 
 victories, and the children through the hope of 
 similar triumphs" 
 
 That this programme could only be imper- 
 fectly realised during the stormy period of 
 the French Revolution does not diminish the 
 vital force of the idea. And nothing is more cer-
 
 Recreative Culture 161 
 
 tain than that a nobler society will fashion its 
 festivals according to such programmes. The 
 working-men who aspire to this society have al- 
 ready shown themselves, in their Stadium festi- 
 vals, alive to this need. But only when the new 
 view of life, which is gradually penetrating 
 mankind, has gained the force of a religion, can 
 the highest festival performances be united 
 as in antiquity with the religious cult and 
 thus acquire all the renovating power that 
 was possessed by the festivals of Hellas. 
 
 In many quarters first in Germany and 
 France the idea of a 4t People's Theatre" 
 began to be realised at the close of the nine- 
 teenth century. Among its enthusiastic pro- 
 moters was the now world-famous author of 
 Jean Christophe, Remain Rolland. Besides 
 plays for the People's Theatre, he wrote arti- 
 cles on it, and the latter have been collected 
 in a volume. x He there maintains that what 
 the people really desire and need is not the 
 old, so-called classical drama; for the present 
 age is foreign to the conflicts that furnished 
 the material for the tragedies of the seventeenth 
 
 1 Remain Rolland, Le thedtre du peuple (Hachette et Cie., 
 Paris, 1913). This book should be read by all who believe in 
 the theatre as a means of popular education. His novel John 
 Christopher has been translated into English.
 
 162 The Younger Generation 
 
 century, for instance, and to the comic in- 
 trigues described in the old comedies. But 
 still less fitting is it to give the people the 
 drama of the present day, which lives on the 
 conventions and vices of the middle classes. 
 What the people need is a dramatic art which 
 sets up great aims, which steels the will, which 
 widens the view of life, which purifies and 
 deepens the emotions. The people are too good 
 to be put off with the inanities or immoralities 
 of the middle-class drama. The People's 
 Theatre must be a weapon against the decay- 
 ing society of the present day; nay, it may be 
 the voice of the coming society. A new world 
 demands a new art. Only such an art, re- 
 newing itself with the age, has any value for 
 the people. Some of the great masterpieces 
 of the past, of universal human interest, must 
 find a place on the people's stage. Otherwise 
 it must be the interpreter of our rich and 
 agitated period. But not of those aspects 
 which the plays of the middle class whether 
 tragedies, comedies, or farces depict: adultery 
 and sharp practice in business. This kind 
 of drama should not be allowed to befoul that 
 source of renewal which the theatre may be- 
 come for the people. No, the people must 
 have a drama which offers living, irresistible
 
 Recreative Culture 163 
 
 examples of a great spirit, a shining devotion, 
 an unconquerable will which aims at lofty 
 ends. Or again, plays with true comic power, 
 in which laughter attacks what is base and 
 u gly petty and contradictory, whether in 
 individuals, in a class, or in society as a whole. 
 But, Rolland continues, in order to obtain 
 such a theatre for the people, we must first 
 have a people with sufficient leisure to be able 
 to devote itself to noble pleasures; a people con- 
 scious of its great tasks and thus disposed to 
 reject the dramas that are now offered to it. 
 If, on the other hand, the fourth estate, when 
 it has won its way, becomes simply the middle 
 class over again equally coarse in its amuse- 
 ments, equally hypocritical in its morality, 
 equally unintelligent in its politics as the 
 present middle class then there is nothing 
 to be hoped for from the future. Only if the 
 fourth estate carries through a moral as well 
 as a social reformation can we obtain a really 
 new society. And with it a new theatrical 
 art, which will be at once a real enjoyment 
 and a source of renewed moral energy; an art 
 which will be a bath of rebirth; an art which 
 will create a more intimate bond between 
 human beings and a greater vigour in the 
 individual. This does not imply that art is
 
 164 The Younger Generation 
 
 to preach morality; then it would no longer 
 be art. But it must overflow with strength, 
 health, and gladness. It need not restrict its 
 choice of subject to the present day or to the 
 people itself. It is not the outside of exist- 
 ence that the people needs or even wishes to 
 see in art. No, it is the inner music, it is the 
 eternal elements in home life, the mystery in 
 all that is, the tragedy of everyday existence, 
 that must affect the people in art. That 
 being so, the material may be taken from the 
 life of the present or of the past, from the 
 history of one's own or of a foreign nation, 
 from reality or legend. The important point 
 is that ideas and ideals, errors and prejudices, 
 be represented so that they always concern us 
 who are now living. . . . The aim of art is 
 to multiply life a thousand fold. All art must 
 make life greater, stronger, more moral, and 
 more beautiful. May art arouse hatred of all 
 oppression, all baseness, all malice! May it 
 at the same time unite individuals in a better 
 understanding of and a more intimate fellow- 
 feeling with each other. Thus far Rolland. 
 
 It is only through this new spirit that the 
 theatre can be elevated, and certainly not by 
 the censorship.
 
 Recreative Culture 165 
 
 What has been quoted above points to one 
 of the foremost tasks of recreative culture, 
 that of rendering valuable pleasures still 
 more valuable by increasing their significance 
 as vehicles of culture. 
 
 Another sphere is that of athletics. The 
 more these are turned into "sport" with 
 competitions, records, and prizes the less do 
 they contribute to culture. The more they 
 aim at general physical development, inward 
 as well as outward health and equilibrium; 
 the more they are practised with the sole 
 object of attaining increased self-control and 
 presence of mind, increased capacity for 
 method and co-operation, an enhancement of 
 power and courage, the more cultural they 
 will be. One-sided sport cannot even produce 
 a graceful and supple body, which, however, 
 ought to be a main consideration in physical 
 culture. Our Swedish gymnastics rightly 
 practised, as well as rhythmical gymnastics, 
 folk-dances, and folk-games are, as regards 
 style and graceful style more important in 
 physical culture than certain forms of athletics. 
 From a cultural point of view, those kinds of 
 athletic sports must be put in the first rank 
 which facilitate a greater familiarity with 
 nature. From this point of view skiing and
 
 1 66 The Younger Generation 
 
 skating, rowing and swimming ought not 
 even to be reckoned among "athletics," but 
 to be taught to the young as indispensable 
 acquirements. 
 
 I have quoted Romain Rolland above be- 
 cause I agree with every word of his and hope 
 that these words may open the eyes of thought- 
 ful young people to the task that lies before 
 them, both in respect of the self-culture that 
 demands noble pleasures, and of the recreative 
 culture which I have already insisted upon as 
 being so important a part of the mission of the 
 young. It will not do to cast the whole blame 
 for certain aspects of modern coarseness upon 
 society. The thoughtful among us at least 
 ought to acknowledge that the worthless 
 cinematograph and theatre performances, as 
 well as the wretched "Nick Carter" style of 
 literature, bear a heavy responsibility for the 
 demoralisation of youth which all deplore. 
 Social Democrats ought to be the first to see 
 that they cannot afford, either economically 
 or intellectually, to allow themselves amuse- 
 ments of a kind that makes the managers rich 
 and the audience poor. The Social Demo-
 
 Recreative Culture 167 
 
 cracy must begin to turn its back upon this 
 extortion of character, intelligence, and feel- 
 ing as resolutely as it does upon all other 
 capitalist extortion. Just as shamelessly as 
 society offers alcoholic intoxication does com- 
 mercial enterprise supply the amusements 
 that may be compared with intoxication. 
 Opposition to them can only be brought about 
 by a new temperance movement, directed, 
 like the old one, by the instinct of self-defence 
 in the people themselves. Already working- 
 men are to be found who feel that they cannot 
 afford and have no right to waste their spiritual 
 powers, their leisure, and their means upon 
 empty pleasures. But what is wanted is that 
 more and more shall become "class-conscious " 
 in this sense. Only then will the new "tem- 
 perance movement" just referred to begin and 
 the great majority learn to test their pleasures 
 by such questions as these: 
 
 Have we gained an intellectual renewal? 
 Has our laughter really gladdened the heart? 
 Was it at the expense of stupidity and fool- 
 ishness, or of goodness and honesty that we 
 laughed? Have we experienced any emotion 
 that gave the soul a new tension towards 
 noble ends? Have we received any impres- 
 sion of beauty to carry with us while at work?
 
 168 The Younger Generation 
 
 If the answer to some of these questions be 
 not "yes," then the pleasure was an empty 
 one, if not a bad one. 
 
 Someone may object that it will be hard 
 to find amusements if they are to be tested 
 so severely. 
 
 Nothing is further from the truth. The 
 more a man turns away from stimulating 
 pleasures such as whisky the more he will 
 learn to enjoy a number of things previously 
 overlooked as means of recreation. These are 
 to be found in the realm of reality as well as 
 in that of imagination ; in the world of nature 
 as in that of man; in the children's sphere as 
 in that of animals ; in the little world we domin- 
 ate as in the great one we see glimpses of. 
 These pleasures are to be won by means of the 
 microscope, telescope, and camera, as well as 
 by refined dancing, games, and sports; by good 
 music, by art, and by poetry. A whole long 
 human life will not suffice for the enjoyment 
 of all the rich and pure sources of delight 
 that nature and culture have to offer, and 
 nowadays at a cheap price. But so long as 
 people throw away time, money, and health 
 upon gormandising, alcohol, nicotine, and 
 similar "enjoyments"; so long as they are 
 not ashamed of thus sinning against soul and
 
 Recreative Culture 169 
 
 body; so long as they do not feel a passion for 
 their own physical and mental health and 
 strength a passion which finds expression in 
 a complete and purposeful art of life, rejecting 
 everything that fetters health and strength 
 so long can we have no hope of a recreative 
 culture. Nor can we hope for any physical 
 culture of real recreative value ; that is to say, 
 with the power of making the individual more 
 developed, more shapely, and more harmoni- 
 ous in body and soul. 
 
 It is strange how little men's moral ideas 
 have to do with their pleasures. Professed 
 pietists, it is true, abstain from dancing and 
 the theatre just as much as from coarser 
 pleasures since they regard these as incom- 
 patible with a holy life. On the other hand, 
 the majority of people in every class think 
 they may take part with impunity in anything 
 in the way of amusement. 
 
 But this is just what is excluded by a 
 genuine recreative culture and art of life. 
 Instead of "taking part in anything," one 
 must learn to discover just those pleasures 
 which have most to offer. For even among 
 noble pleasures there are some which give one 
 kind of recreation but not the other. In order 
 to find out what kind of profit one derives, it
 
 170 The Younger Generation 
 
 is really necessary to "try a little taste" of 
 each. Then it will be possible to decide what 
 one can and will allow one's self in the matter 
 of enjoyment, as in every other department 
 of life. Each ought to draw up a plan for his 
 life for work and for repose, as a member of 
 a family and as a citizen in order to arrive 
 at a proper proportion between the different 
 parts, as well as harmony between them and 
 the inner personality. 
 
 Most people are without a plan of this sort 
 and therefore show themselves vague, desul- 
 tory, and boorish in their habits. They make 
 friends without any inner prompting; they 
 eat far more than is good for them; they dress 
 contrary to their own taste ; they amuse them- 
 selves like the rest of the crowd; they spend 
 more than they can afford all because they 
 have never given an hour's thought to what 
 they really need and wish for in their hearts 
 in these and all other matters. 
 
 VI 
 
 For these and a thousand other reasons one 
 is tempted to lose hope of human progress. 
 That is, at those moments when one forgets 
 that the discernment and will-power of the
 
 Recreative Culture 171 
 
 race cannot yet be mature. It is not many 
 thousand years since we became reading 
 beings; it was only a few millenniums earlier 
 that we became talking beings. And it is 
 probably inevitable that the race as a whole 
 must require a few more thousand years to 
 become cultured in thought and action. 
 
 The majority is still ape-like in so many 
 other respects that we cannot be surprised 
 to find it so in the least serious part of its 
 life its amusements! 
 
 And yet in our days of specialised labour it 
 is of increasingly serious importance that 
 leisure should be employed in such amusements 
 as may counteract the resulting one-sidedness. 
 A many-sided work in itself involves culture; 
 the man condemned to one-sided work re- 
 quires to supply the inevitable gaps in his 
 culture by means of his pleasures. It is 
 therefore doubly painful to see manual labour- 
 ers flocking round those places of amusement 
 that only excite silly giggles or malicious grins, 
 coarse fun or vulgar love of sensation. In the 
 last instance, the women are the worst. It is 
 the lowest instincts of the herd that find their 
 outlet in the thirst for sensation which is fos- 
 tered by the Press and in the law-courts, at 
 notable funerals and weddings, accidents, etc.
 
 172 The Younger Generation 
 
 To follow the crowd is in every respect 
 a proof of impersonality in culture. But 
 nowhere does a man show himself so imper- 
 sonal, so poor in invention, so much of a gre- 
 garious animal, as in his choice of pleasures. 
 
 As a proof of lack of recreative culture may 
 be quoted the disposition to enjoy even noble 
 pleasures in crowds. No doubt on festival 
 occasions, at the theatre, at competitions, and 
 musical festivals the feeling is heightened by 
 passing from one to another in a great mass of 
 people. But books, scenery, art, and often 
 music are grasped in a more intimate way 
 when only one or a few others are present. A 
 large number are never so concentrated and 
 quiet that each can assimilate the beauty of 
 nature, or a reading, or a work of art as com- 
 pletely as if he were alone. But not even 
 when alone does a person derive real profit 
 from any recreation unless he brings to it an 
 open mind, a mind prepared for full reception, 
 for giving itself up to the wealth of the moment 
 without a side-thought. Those, for instance, 
 who go into the woods with the discussion of 
 the evening before in their thoughts, get very 
 little of the sylvan scene. The main condi- 
 tions of genuine enjoyment are that neither 
 body nor mind be weary; that previous or
 
 Recreative Culture 173 
 
 present impressions do not hinder concentra- 
 tion; that every approach be kept open for 
 the pleasurable impressions one receives, and 
 that it be possible to assimilate and adapt the 
 new material in peace. For as the Danish 
 author, Lambek, already referred to, has 
 admirably shown only in stillness can one's 
 impressions be precipitated, or in an even 
 better metaphor be rooted so that they may 
 grow. The same is true of social intercourse. 
 This is only a real recreation when we bring 
 into society a mind averted from the labours 
 and cares of the day, a mind willing to give 
 and to receive. A pleasure truly experienced 
 becomes an addition to life, a growth, new 
 leaves and branches on our tree of life. The 
 more our soul is alive, the more will our plea- 
 sures become real events in our existence, 
 experiences which then in their turn make the 
 soul still more alive, in that our pleasure has 
 set new forces in motion or renewed those that 
 already were in motion. The more impress- 
 ible a person is, the more does he experience 
 with body and soul and all his senses. The 
 art of enjoying one's self depends upon the 
 capacity for seeing the significance that lies 
 concealed in everyday phenomena. Indeed, 
 this is precisely the finest culture, which en-
 
 174 The Younger Generation 
 
 ables us to find pleasure in the most simple 
 things. The emptier a soul is, the duller does 
 it find life and the more does it seek a tem- 
 porary stimulus in irritant pleasures. When 
 a soulful person is dull, it means that the 
 company or the entertainment in which he 
 involuntarily finds himself is not capable of 
 setting free his energy; when he has enjoyed 
 himself it means that he has experienced the 
 feeling of having lived completely and strongly 
 at some point. When the soulless one is 
 bored by a noble pleasure, this means that 
 owing to defects in his nature or culture he 
 is destitute of any connecting link between 
 himself and the pleasure in question, which 
 is thus incapable of setting his powers in 
 motion. And when he is amused by what is 
 coarse and low, this means that such things 
 unite with and reinforce coarse and low 
 instincts in himself. 
 
 To illustrate what has been said I will take 
 a working-class family on a Sunday excursion. 
 The air and sunshine refresh the body; the 
 song of birds and the murmur of waves, the 
 scent of flowers and the whisper of the forest 
 rejoice all the senses and awaken sweet memo- 
 ries. The happy play of the children and the 
 rested expression in the tired faces of husband
 
 Recreative Culture 175 
 
 and wife warm the hearts of the parents. 
 Observations are made which give substance 
 for thought. And on their return home all 
 have been truly "renewed." Perhaps all 
 they say is that they have "had a jolly day." 
 But those few words imply that the whole 
 being has obtained rest and strength for several 
 days. Compare now this family with those 
 who come home after a crowded bean-feast, at 
 which quantities of food and drink have been 
 the chief thing; and who finish the day mud- 
 dled with alcohol and poisoned with smoke, 
 to wake up tired, irritable, and disinclined 
 for work. 
 
 As long ago as 1896 I pointed out in a little 
 essay the weakening effect, directly on home- 
 feeling and indirectly on patriotism, of the 
 dying out of the old festival customs. The 
 present languid indifference as regards both 
 these celebrations and the ordinary daily 
 habits makes our homes devoid of style and 
 poor in poetry. No artificial and pretentious 
 customs can take the place with the children 
 of the old, simple festival usages and amuse- 
 ments. It is the children who are anxious 
 to have everything "as usual"; the children 
 who suffer when any prized custom is set aside.
 
 176 The Younger Generation 
 
 In this the children's instinct is entirely right 
 as opposed to the apathy of their elders. 
 
 For it is only constantly recurring habits 
 that have the power, on work-days and holi- 
 days, to impart deep and heartfelt impres- 
 sions. From this point of view it is a pity 
 when parents omit to give a fixed style to the 
 great festivals of the year, as well as to family 
 celebrations. That families in great cities 
 are getting more and more into the way of 
 keeping Christmas and other festivals at 
 tourist hotels is one of the many symptoms 
 of the degeneration of family life in cities. 
 In the country, on the other hand, pietism 
 has been largely to blame for the decay of the 
 beautiful old festival customs. Thus in my 
 young days I heard a clergyman compare the 
 dance round the May-pole to that of the 
 Israelites round the golden calf! 
 
 To keep old festivals is not a meaningless 
 piece of childishness, but a fine old custom 
 which links us of the present day with our 
 forefathers and their emotions. 
 
 Even if city families try to keep up the 
 recreations which formerly brought young 
 and old together for music and reading aloud, 
 for romps and games of skill, for story-telling 
 and fireside chat, they have a very unequal
 
 Recreative Culture 177 
 
 fight with all the things that take the young 
 away from home schools, sport, societies, 
 and more or less healthy amusements. As 
 regards working-class homes, we know that 
 nowadays the mother as often as the father is 
 employed out-of-doors and in such circum- 
 stances it is of course impossible for her to 
 provide the children with the innocent amuse- 
 ments of former days. I wonder whether the 
 children of the present day would even con- 
 descend to the childish amusements of their 
 grandparents, such as roasting apples or 
 baking toffy? In the country perhaps, but 
 in town? To this must be added the crowded 
 state of working-class dwellings, unfortunate 
 from every point of view, which forces the 
 children and young people into the street, 
 unless special institutions, such as clubs, 
 libraries, and so on, are open to them. 
 
 In this connection it must be remembered 
 that the temperance movement counteracts 
 coarseness and that socialist ideals elevate the 
 minds of the people, so that many low amuse- 
 ments are becoming repulsive to an increasing 
 number. But, on the other hand, recreative 
 culture is being counteracted by the specialisa- 
 tion of labour, which does more and more to 
 kill the joy of work. For the man who is
 
 178 The Younger Generation 
 
 weary and bored is the most likely to take to 
 poor or worthless pleasures, unless he con- 
 sciously struggles against this tendency in 
 himself or his companions in other words, 
 unless his eyes have been opened to the import- 
 ance of recreative culture. 
 
 If much is now being done in large towns, 
 through private enterprise as well as through 
 the schools and other public institutions, to 
 teach the youth of both sexes while in their 
 teens to spend their money and their leisure 
 hours on nobler pleasures, in the country such 
 provisions for the young are very few and far 
 between. I heard the other day a young couple 
 declare their intention of quietly throwing 
 open a large room in their country house, with 
 a fire and lamps, books, illustrated papers, and 
 so on, where the boys and young men who 
 hang about the cross-roads might meet on 
 winter evenings. And how easily such resorts 
 might be provided in parish-rooms as well as 
 in country houses ! Of course with the proviso 
 that cards, alcohol, and tobacco are strictly 
 forbidden. How willingly those young people 
 who have had greater educational advantages 
 ought to devote an occasional evening to 
 instructing the others in dancing, games, or 
 choral singing ! How glad those working-men
 
 Recreative Culture 179 
 
 who themselves play the fiddle, mouth-organ, 
 or concertina would be to have the chance of 
 contributing to the entertainment. If some- 
 one gave a backgammon board, dominoes, 
 chessmen, spillikins, etc., and showed how 
 they were to be used, a fresh amusement 
 would be found. An occasional reading from 
 an amusing, popular book, and special even- 
 ings for music and dancing could easily be 
 arranged. By these simple means the winter 
 evenings the heavy boredom of which now 
 does more than anything else to drive young 
 people from the country to the towns would 
 be transformed into bright spots in everyday 
 life, and would serve at the same time to raise 
 the tone of the whole district's amusements. 
 
 In all intellectual culture of which recrea- 
 tive culture forms part daily habits are what 
 tell in the long run. Only with nobler daily 
 pleasures can we get firm ground to build 
 upon. 
 
 VII 
 
 I have already said that the young Social 
 Democrats must not stop at the fight against 
 "Nick Carter" literature and intoxicating 
 liquors, but that, side by side with the struggle
 
 i8o The Younger Generation 
 
 for increased leisure, they must strive to ob- 
 tain the recreative culture without which that 
 leisure will be ill-spent. Recreative culture 
 ought to be a powerful factor in the splendid 
 educational activity both of the young tem- 
 perance workers and of the young Social 
 Democrats, and in their awakening zeal for 
 physical culture. The young must root out 
 the prejudice in which the older generation 
 grew strong but one-sided: that if the condi- 
 tions of production and distribution be re- 
 formed and intoxicating liquors forbidden, 
 then all other social incongruities will cease 
 of themselves. That view is a superstition. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that in a 
 society thus reformed, new disparities will 
 make life unbearable, unless new men with a 
 loftier ethical and aesthetic, physical and intel- 
 lectual culture take the new society in hand. 
 
 It is true that with better conditions of 
 production and distribution the majority will 
 have more spare time and more means for 
 real recreation; will be relieved from the pres- 
 sure of economic cares. And all this is the 
 qualification for what I have called recreative 
 culture. But the use to which these advant- 
 ages may be put may still be good or bad, 
 according as the people are themselves.
 
 Recreative Culture 181 
 
 Side by side with the class war, the culture 
 war must ceaselessly be waged by the young 
 and among the young, upon whom rests the 
 responsibility of making the new society better 
 for all than the old could be. In the best of 
 the young Social Democrats a sense of respon- 
 sibility as regards this culture war is even now 
 alive. 
 
 But this sense must also be communicated 
 to the majority with the hundredfold force 
 of an agitation. Only when the Social 
 Democrat shall ask himself every evening 
 whether during the day he has worked, amused 
 himself, or discussed politics in such a way as 
 to make himself more efficient, more conscien- 
 tious, mentally richer, happier and can reply 
 to the question in the affirmative will the 
 happiness which international socialism pro- 
 mises to all appear on the horizon. If, on 
 the other hand, he is obliged to answer no, 
 then he will have reduced his party's chances 
 of victory by just so much as he himself has 
 that day declined in value. 
 
 It is true enough that a strong party may 
 win victories through the firm cohesion of all 
 its parts; but only victories over opposition. 
 As soon as the opposition is broken and the 
 building of the new society commenced, cohe-
 
 1 82 The Younger Generation 
 
 sion will no longer be enough; it will then 
 depend on the nature of every component 
 part whether the whole is to be strong and 
 beautiful. Social-Democratic articles of faith 
 can no more abolish the laws of nature than 
 can theological ones. And it is a spiritual law 
 of nature that the greatest truths are bungled 
 by inferior adherents. 
 
 All slowness of development, all relapses, 
 all reactions are explained by this fact, re- 
 peated century after century. 
 
 Thus, then, if Social Democracy intends to 
 create anything lasting, each of its members 
 must begin to shape his individual life accord- 
 ing to a lofty ideal. Neither in love nor poli- 
 tics, money matters nor work, education nor 
 pleasures will it do to "take life as it comes." 
 Every time a man sacrifices something valu- 
 able for something worthless ; every time he is 
 remiss with regard to a bad habit, lax in per- 
 forming a duty, coarse in his pleasures, he 
 lowers the power of his soul and reduces his 
 standard of life. Every time he chooses a 
 noble line of conduct rather than an ignoble 
 one, a productive enjoyment rather than an 
 empty one, he becomes not only a better man 
 but also a better servant of his social ideal. 
 
 This ideal implies, among other things,
 
 Recreative Culture 183 
 
 that one day we shall arrive at that freedom 
 from care which Jesus symbolised in the images 
 of the lilies of the field and the birds of the 
 air. Now, on the contrary, taking thought 
 for the morrow is what characterises the lives 
 of the majority. But we may look forward 
 with certainty to a society without these con- 
 suming cares of subsistence, which now make 
 most human lives so cheerless and empty. 
 A better state of things, in which "money, 
 money, money" will no longer be the chief 
 question of life, that is the primary condition 
 which must precede the creation of a higher 
 spiritual existence. But the reforms which 
 are necessary in order that this condition may 
 be satisfied must never be regarded otherwise 
 than as means to this higher spiritual existence 
 of which we are speaking. It is not enough 
 to introduce more common sense, coherence, 
 system, appropriateness, and harmony into 
 the production and distribution of the neces- 
 saries of life; all these things must also enter 
 into the conduct of the individual citizen. It 
 is not enough to increase the resources and 
 leisure of all; what is above all important is 
 that their mode of life should acquire more 
 perfect forms. 
 
 I have already put forward in my Essays
 
 1 84 The Younger Generation 
 
 an idea which has become an ever firmer belief 
 with me; that, the more rich and beautiful 
 life becomes, the fewer will be the followers 
 of the "liberal" arts. Only the great, crea- 
 tive spirits will, I believe, continue to produce 
 art in the proper sense of the word: the art 
 that gradually makes the lives of all richer 
 at the moment and awakens an intuition of a 
 future reality, more perfect than the present. 
 Great art is only produced by those who them- 
 selves, with senses as with soul, have had an 
 ardent and profound perception of the mani- 
 fold richness of life, and who have so perfect 
 a control of the sensuous means of expression 
 belonging to their art that they are able to 
 communicate the same perception to others. 
 
 The artistic instinct of all other people 
 and hardly any one is without it has its own 
 proper and infinite sphere, in which the con- 
 duct of life itself may become a great and noble 
 exercise of art. And what is true of art is 
 also true of pleasure. Special "entertain- 
 ments" may become limited more and more 
 to the great popular festivals and the highest 
 artistic gratifications. 
 
 But so long as labour uses up the powers of 
 the majority; so long as leisure is lacking for 
 personal exercise of energy in the way of re-
 
 Recreative Culture 185 
 
 creation; so long as innumerable things still 
 distort and disfigure existence so long will 
 recreations remain a necessary of life in the 
 ordinary acceptance of the term. And there- 
 with recreative culture becomes a crying 
 need, in order that this claim may be satisfied 
 in a healthy and becoming way. Then slowly 
 but surely a race will be formed, to which 
 working days and holidays alike, from the 
 awakening with the morning light to falling 
 asleep under the stars, will be full of pleasures 
 reverently enjoyed. 
 
 To those who scoff at these "fancies, impos- 
 sible of realisation in an imperfect world," 
 I will reply in the words of a great and true 
 saying: 
 
 Where there is no vision the people perish. 
 
 No dream, however great, has ever injured 
 a nation or a class. Dreaming is only harmful 
 when it is indulged in at the expense of action, 
 or when it is in irreconcilable opposition to the 
 laws of existence. 
 
 Only those who have not perceived that 
 precisely humanity 's will to perfect itself is the 
 highest law of earthly life can despair of a 
 more perfect humanity.
 
 1 86 The Younger Generation 
 
 The final goal of this perfecting we do not 
 know, nor do we need to know it. We know 
 that we possess the perfecting instinct and 
 that we have accomplished the task laid upon 
 us in the scheme of the universe by this in- 
 stinct, when all the best possibilities of our 
 nature have co-operated with this, the highest 
 of all our incentives.
 
 VIII 
 
 THE FEW AND THE MANY 
 
 187
 
 VIII 
 
 THE FEW AND THE MANY 
 
 I. Introduction. Egoism and Fellow- Feeling 
 
 'T'HE kernel of the history of human develop- 
 * ment is the interaction of egoism and 
 fellow-feeling. 
 
 At certain periods egoism has been the 
 stronger. The mere mention of the words 
 "Hellenism," "Renaissance," calls up a vision 
 of godlike figures passing in procession and 
 filling the air with sound and colour. These 
 periods have permanently enriched life by 
 their profound, self-centred sense of life and 
 surging creative joy. 
 
 At other periods fellow-feeling has been 
 predominant. Not the good fortune of the in- 
 dividual, but the sufferings of the many, have 
 occupied the minds of thinkers. Periods of 
 powerful conflict arise, when both egoism and 
 fellow-feeling have found forcible expression. 
 
 Our time is one of these. On the one hand 
 189
 
 The Younger Generation 
 
 we have a Tolstoy, whose fellow-feeling led 
 him to a remedy for human suffering which 
 in its extreme is an annihilation of individual- 
 ity, as in the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana. Even 
 the remnant of individualism preserved by 
 Christianity, namely the hope of salvation, 
 is of no importance to Tolstoy, He only 
 desires the establishment of that kingdom of 
 God upon earth which was preached by the 
 prophets of Israel and by Christianity. And 
 he believes that this kingdom can be reached 
 by a full realisation of the doctrine of Jesus, 
 with a selflessness so complete that it finally 
 results in the extinction of the race, and by a 
 return to primitive conditions so thorough 
 that it finally results in the destruction of 
 civilisation. 
 
 In his condemnation of the State and of laws 
 Tolstoy is in complete agreement with anarch- 
 ism, whose temporary weapon, violence, he, 
 however, unconditionally abhors. Anarchism 
 also had dreams of the millennium, but dreams 
 of a more beautiful and spiritual kind than 
 Tolstoy's. Its hope is to unite the need of 
 social reform with individualism, the feeling 
 of fraternity with cultural development, in a 
 state of things in which laws and armies, 
 property and government shall have disap-
 
 The Few and the Many 191 
 
 peared, and every one shall be able to follow 
 his then purified impulses. Only thus will 
 personality freely find expression in religion 
 and science, in art and poetry, in work and 
 repose. Krapotkin is in our time the purest 
 and most eminent champion of this anarchism. 
 
 As often happens, the extreme Left, Tolstoy 
 and anarchism, meets with the extreme Right, 
 individualism. The latter has in our time 
 maintained the right of egoism in the face of 
 fellow-feeling in a way that has never been 
 seen before. And just as fellow-feeling found 
 its great, personal spokesman in Tolstoy, so 
 has egoism been voiced by Nietzsche. This 
 mighty genius as every one now knows 
 glorified individualism and the great person- 
 ality with a Will to Power so strong, with an 
 absorption in the ego so intense, that they led 
 to the shattering of the thinker's own ego. 
 
 Individualism has no dreams of reducing 
 suffering on earth, which it regards as unavoid- 
 able. It insists only that we ought to oppose 
 the suffering that would arise, if the higher 
 individuals were prevented from attaining 
 their full development and enjoying full free- 
 dom for their personalities. This obstruction 
 might come from the many. Therefore in 
 order to prevent these many from exercising
 
 192 The Younger Generation 
 
 pressure on the few, we must pitilessly sacri- 
 fice the majority to the minority. These few 
 show themselves to be in possession of the 
 true "master nature" precisely in being able 
 to go forward over the bodies of the slaves, 
 whom they trample underfoot by the right 
 of the stronger, if they themselves can only 
 reach their goal by so doing. 
 
 This out-and-out individualism rejects the 
 claims both of Christianity and liberalism that 
 they too represent the cause of personality. 
 
 Christianity, which makes pity the first of 
 duties and thereby encourages weakness and 
 incapacity; Christianity, which depreciates 
 genius and exalts the poor in spirit; which 
 commends servility in the name of humility 
 and makes self-obliteration its highest aim, 
 is not able to develop free and noble spirits. 
 On the contrary, through its doctrine of 
 fraternity and the eternal value of every soul, 
 it has opened the way to liberalism's demo- 
 cratisation of social relations. This democra- 
 tisation went with the Puritans to America, 
 and from there came to Europe, where, since 
 1789, the mill-stones of equality and frater- 
 nity have crushed personality between them. 
 Since that time everything individual has been 
 levelled down by something "universal": in-
 
 The Few and the Many 193 
 
 telligence by universal education; character by 
 universal suffrage ; art by universal mechanical 
 processes; nationality by universal brother- 
 hood. Everywhere the universal effort, ac- 
 cording to Nietzsche, is "with the least possible 
 force to arrive at the greatest possible stupid- 
 ity." And, in the opinion of individualists, 
 the immediate result of the levelling work of 
 Christianity and liberalism is socialism. 
 
 This again demands of the individual the 
 most extreme self-renunciation, that of no 
 longer possessing property. And it demands 
 this renunciation on the part of the few for 
 the sake of the many, of humanity. It 
 everywhere opposes what is peculiar, what is 
 characteristic, egoism. If it is victorious, 
 the few will be sacrificed to the many, the 
 masters to the slaves; "herd-humanity" will 
 trample the supermen under its bestial hoofs. 
 
 In certain of the programmes of socialism, 
 out-and-out individualism has, it is true, 
 found its extreme opposite. 
 
 These two extremes of self-esteem on the 
 one hand and self-renunciation on the other 
 deserve the closest attention, just because they 
 are extremes. For we may be sure that, when 
 each of them has worked out its extreme con- 
 sequences, development will appropriate and 
 13
 
 194 The Younger Generation 
 
 preserve what each has most profoundly justi- 
 fied. Any outcome of the struggle, which left 
 one of them the victor, would bring develop- 
 ment into a bypath, and we should be forced 
 to go back and fetch the vanquished one. 
 
 2. Social Utopias and the Position of the 
 Social Question in our Day 
 
 Even at the beginning of the i88o's, social- 
 ism was little feared, only ridiculed. All that 
 some so-called "statesmen" knew about it 
 was that a socialist had said that "property is 
 theft." Occasionally they went so far in their 
 thoroughness as to prove that if "as the 
 socialists desired" everything were equally 
 divided to-day, by to-morrow inequality would 
 have reappeared! Sometimes, again, it was 
 explained that the demands of socialism were 
 extremely ancient, and that this was the best 
 proof of their unreasonableness. 
 
 However it may be with their irrationality, 
 their antiquity is incontestable. The prophets 
 of the Old Testament already had visions of 
 justice, which like a mighty stream was to 
 overwhelm those who oppress the poor. 1 In 
 
 1 See, for example, Amos, c. 2 and 5, and in Isaiah, c. 5 (and 
 elsewhere), the description of contemporary conditions, or (in 
 Pseudo-Isaiah) the visions of the future in c. 65.
 
 The Few and the Many 195 
 
 the same spirit spoke Jesus and the oldest 
 Fathers of the Church, using expressions so 
 violent that they can be compared only with 
 those of the most extreme socialism. In the 
 first centuries the Fathers of the Church called 
 the earth the common property of all; they 
 saw in riches the source of the greatest human 
 injustice; the rich were called thieves and the 
 inheritors of thieves; no one ought to own 
 more than was sufficient for his needs, all the 
 rest was to be given to those who had nothing. 
 When the rich made private property of what 
 God had made common to all, they were 
 murderers; the few had taken for themselves 
 the inheritance of all, namely the common 
 gifts of nature; common property was the 
 will of God, private ownership was a violation 
 of that will. 
 
 Genuine Christianity, of the revival of 
 which we now hear so much, is expressed in 
 part by what is quoted above. And in all 
 periods during which this genuine Christianity 
 again becomes living, the words of Christ to 
 the young man, who asked him how he might 
 be saved " Sell all that thou hast and give 
 to the poor " have once more become a re- 
 proachful exhortation in the minds of men. 
 The Christian doctrine of brotherhood and the
 
 196 The Younger Generation 
 
 Jewish doctrine of justice have then acquired 
 a revolutionary force. But the opponents of 
 this force and its communistic claims have 
 hastened to use not only the sword of civil 
 order, but also the cross of the Christian 
 religion against it. 
 
 For Christianity on this point is divided 
 against itself. It has inherited the Jewish 
 ideal of justice, but side by side with this it 
 has its own new ideal, that of human immor- 
 tality. Christianity's greatest power over 
 men's minds rests upon the fact that it has 
 not only given consolation in suffering, which 
 is the experience of all mankind, but has done 
 more given a meaning and a sanctity to this 
 experience. The symbol of Christianity was 
 the cross, the story of the passion became the 
 central point of its doctrine, poverty and sad- 
 ness on earth were the basis of the hope of 
 bliss in heaven. The effort to improve our 
 earthly condition, on the other hand, was 
 looked upon as a manifestation of the worldly 
 mind; it is as a vale of tears that the earth 
 becomes a preparation for the joys of eternity. 
 Nay, Christianity in the same breath enjoins 
 on us charity towards the suffering, and 
 patience when we ourselves suffer. 
 
 Most of the interpreters of Christianity have
 
 The Few and the Many 197 
 
 thus taken the substance out of the most 
 unambiguous words of Jesus as to what is 
 demanded by love of one's neighbour; indeed, 
 one may even hear Christians speak scorn- 
 fully of those who insist on the full import of 
 Jesus' claims on neighbour-love. They think, 
 these profound Christians, that quite different 
 and greater sacrifices were demanded than 
 the divison of loaves of bread. It is true 
 enough that there are sacrifices that touch 
 the personality far more nearly. But this 
 ought surely not to prevent these Christians 
 from also fulfilling the commands of Jesus, 
 regarded by them as so easy, among which 
 the division of all their property to the poor is 
 undeniably one to which Jesus himself at- 
 tached no small importance. For according 
 to him "to love one's neighbour as one's self" 
 is only a figure of speech, unless it involves 
 allowing one's neighbour a full share of all one 
 needs and desires for one's self. 
 
 But not only in the Jewish and Christian 
 world of ideas do we find the antecedents of 
 socialism. In Hellas it was Plato who pro- 
 phesied of a state of things in which the "two 
 nations, rich and poor," would become one 
 nation. The Renaissance also had its glowing 
 Utopias, and the second Renaissance, the
 
 198 The Younger Generation 
 
 Goethe period, had one in Heine's glorious 
 Ardinghello or the Happy Isles. 1 
 
 Even in those periods in which egoism has 
 been strongest, such spirits as have been dis- 
 turbed in their own harmony by the discord 
 surrounding them, or have been seized by 
 fellow-feeling for the suffering, have begun 
 to dream dreams. 
 
 And all these dreams, as well as the antiquity 
 of them what is it that they prove? 
 
 That humanity bears within itself an ideal 
 of happiness and an ideal of justice, which it 
 seeks to approach; that the Utopias are one 
 expression of these ideal claims, which appear 
 again and again in new forms and compel the 
 gradual transformation of social conditions, 
 which must be continued until we have arrived 
 at a state of things which provides the out- 
 ward conditions of happiness for all. 
 
 While the demands for social reform are 
 very ancient, the position of the social question 
 in our time is, on the other hand, new. 
 
 Every great idea has the same history as 
 the Parsifal of the mediaeval legend, whose 
 mother brought him up in solitude and, on the 
 day when he wished to go out into the world, 
 
 1 Closely akin to the Utopias of the Renaissance is William 
 Morris's News from Nowhere.
 
 The Few and the Many 199 
 
 put on him the dress of a fool, which in the 
 course of his conflicts he finally exchanged for 
 the trappings of victory. Socialism is another 
 such child of the age, which under conflict 
 has doffed the cap and bells. 
 
 Socialism now confronts us in every news- 
 paper and review; in the theatre and in Par- 
 liament; in the Vatican under Leo XIII. 
 and in the French Academy. Many distin- 
 guished men within the Catholic Church have 
 embraced the ideas of socialism as regards the 
 reform of society. The Catholic priest is 
 better prepared than the Protestant clergyman 
 to recognise the connection between the social 
 question and Christianity. For through celi- 
 bacy the former is more easily liberated from 
 worldly interests, and through administering 
 the relief of the poor he is brought nearer to 
 the enigma of hunger. But Christians of all 
 denominations fear socialism when it comes 
 to the transformation of religious opinions. 
 For while, on the one hand, socialism finds 
 support in the Christian sense of fraternity 
 and justice, it brings at the same time the 
 above-mentioned charge against Christianity 
 that its preaching of patience and renuncia- 
 tion, of unselfishness and unworldliness, stands 
 in the way of a really powerful desire of reform
 
 200 The Younger Generation 
 
 where the incongruities of earthly life are con- 
 cerned. And in addition to this there is the 
 whole trust in providence that Jesus recom- 
 mends to take no thought for the morrow, 
 to imitate the birds of the air and the lilies 
 of the field an idealism which, when it is 
 genuine, must make Christians indifferent 
 towards economic questions of every kind. 
 
 The Social Democracy hopes for much, 
 though far from everything, from the feeling 
 of fraternity to which the Christians and 
 Tolstoy appeal. The Social Democracy knows 
 that in its essence it is the liberation of the 
 strongest "Will to Power" that the history 
 of the world has yet seen that of the fourth 
 estate. The liberation of this will has been 
 promoted in the first place by the greater 
 equality in civil rights and education that 
 resulted from the French Revolution. For 
 increased civil equality has caused economic 
 inequality to seem more unbearable to the 
 lower classes. In the next place, these lower 
 classes have been steadily increased owing to 
 the existing conditions of production forcing 
 one stratum after another of the upper classes 
 down to an inferior economic standpoint. 
 And these elements which bring with them 
 better education and greater claims on life
 
 The Few and the Many 201 
 
 strengthen the discontent of the proletariat 
 with the existing state of things. 
 
 To intensify this discontent has been the 
 task often unwisely performed, but necessary 
 of social agitation. And the number of 
 those is ever increasing who acknowledge that 
 "the disparity between our external circum- 
 stances and the needs of civilised life is one 
 of the deepest causes of the melancholy of 
 the present day"; and who perceive that "the 
 satisfied sit still and do nothing, whereas the 
 dissatisfied are the world's only benefactors." 
 
 As the fourth estate's "will to power" is now 
 once for all set free, it is bound by the laws of 
 nature to reach its goal. A French working- 
 man, who at a meeting some years ago was 
 speaking about classes, was interrupted by 
 the remark that the French Revolution had 
 put an end to all classes. He went on, how- 
 ever, to show with convincing logic that money 
 has taken the place of privileges in forming 
 class distinctions; nay, that the amount of 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity a man ac- 
 tually enjoys, depends to a great extent on his 
 means. 
 
 The increase of population, the growth of 
 mechanical production, the rise of competition 
 in the field of labour, intensify year by year
 
 202 The Younger Generation 
 
 that struggle of all against all which is the 
 characteristic of existing economic conditions. 
 The larger capitalists swallow up the smaller, 
 and the latter therefore combine more and 
 more into great companies, which make pro- 
 duction and distribution collective. Among 
 the wow-collective agriculturists those work- 
 ing with small capital, or small manufac- 
 turers and retailers, or literary men and artists, 
 and others, the existing state of things claims 
 daily victims. And these victims, as well as 
 every new trust, every new company, every 
 business crisis, every fight between free trade 
 and protection, all witness to the social trans- 
 formation which is taking place by a regular 
 process of evolution. 
 
 This transformation socialism seeks to carry 
 out logically. Only in this way do socialists 
 believe they will be able to change the con- 
 ditions of life of the great majority, which is 
 condemned by the present system to destruc- 
 tion or to an unalterable subjection. 
 
 It is this inevitable transformation to which 
 liberalism its eyes bandaged with the tri- 
 colour is blind. 
 
 Liberalism and socialism, both children of 
 the French Revolution, regard each other 
 with that mutual resentment which usually
 
 The Few and the Many 203 
 
 results when the elder brother has received 
 practically the whole inheritance. 
 
 Liberalism, the elder brother, assumes a 
 haughty attitude towards the younger. But 
 this does not prevent liberalism from being 
 constantly forced to preserve its power by 
 concessions to the demands which whenever 
 they have been first put forward by socialism 
 have been called "infringements of personal 
 liberty." In this connection it is only neces- 
 sary to recall the normal working day, work- 
 men's compensation, old-age insurance, and 
 the regulation of female and child labour. 
 But in making these concessions liberals insist 
 that their object is to prevent the final trans- 
 formation, the needlessness of which, they say, 
 will become apparent when all these partial 
 reforms have taken place. And in order to 
 hinder the final transformation they show the 
 same tendency in practical politics as did the 
 corresponding "liberals" of the eighteenth 
 century of doing everything for the people, 
 but nothing through the people themselves. 
 
 Meanwhile liberalism is becoming more and 
 more hybrid. It becomes so, on the one hand, 
 through being forced to adopt more and more 
 of the claims of socialism in its programme; 
 on the other, through assuming a more and
 
 204 The Younger Generation 
 
 more conservative attitude towards existing 
 conditions. Now, however, as a hundred years 
 ago, the only proof of true liberalism is being 
 able to liberate one's self from the prejudices 
 peculiar to one's own time not from those of 
 another age. 
 
 The truly liberal-minded man is no more 
 frightened now than he was during the French 
 Revolution, at seeing the waves of the time 
 wash up bodies and wreckage. He does not 
 stand on the beach, wringing his hands and 
 cursing the sea, the life-giving sea, without 
 which men would not be able to live and 
 breathe on the dry land. 
 
 "Now are we frightened," say these so- 
 called liberals, "by a shipwreck or two. It 
 is only the inundations of the sea, not its 
 movement, that we hope to prevent. For if 
 the waves of socialism are allowed to rise, 
 they will wash away all the liberties we have 
 laboriously won, all the best culture humanity 
 has acquired. We do not fear the awakening 
 of the fourth estate, but its social-democratisa- 
 tion of society." 
 
 With such apprehensions one is justified in 
 building dams. It is only what is justifiable 
 in these misgivings that can be the subject of 
 an investigation.
 
 The Few and the Many 205 
 
 3. Liberalism and Socialism. Social and In- 
 dividual Liberty. The Right to Work 
 
 In their uneasiness liberals have forgotten 
 that history has never shown us any perma- 
 nent outward transformation except by an 
 inward transformation: that of men's feelings 
 and ideas regarding the values of life and the 
 conditions of happiness. When no preceding 
 inward transformation has taken place, the 
 revolution is followed by a reaction. And 
 the knowledge of this makes the Social Demo- 
 cracy tend to become more evolutionary 
 instead of revolutionary, more unwilling to 
 force a new state of things upon society. 
 Liberals, on the other hand, continue to as- 
 sume that the new conditions would be im- 
 posed by coercion, but at the same time they 
 think that the members of society, oppressed 
 by the socialists, would be squeezed into a 
 homogeneous mass, from which the social 
 "State" might knead whatever forms it 
 pleased. History shows us, however, that 
 nations have never behaved as a mass de- 
 prived of force and will, except during certain 
 limited periods before rulers who based their 
 power upon divine authority. The Israelites, 
 who did not acknowledge the divinity of
 
 206 The Younger Generation 
 
 Pharaoh, organised that well managed strike 
 which is known as the deliverance of the 
 children of Israel from the land of bondage. 
 With the small acceptance the belief in divine 
 authority finds in our day, it is not to be 
 supposed that the Social Democracy will be 
 able to rely for support on such a faith. And 
 thus from the point of view of human nature 
 a reaction is bound to succeed any conceiv- 
 able attempt at transformation according to 
 a fixed programme. Even if such a mis- 
 fortune came about as that the savages of our 
 lowest social strata seized power by the right 
 of the stronger, the sons of these savages 
 would be found to react against their fathers' 
 encroachments on liberty and culture. We 
 may be as certain of this as we are that when 
 real savages are able to eat their fill in peace, 
 they begin to feel impulses towards culture. 
 Knowledge of this, however, does not get rid 
 of the fact that such a period of savagery, even 
 if transitory, would involve great sufferings 
 on the few, without appreciably diminishing 
 the old sufferings of the many. Such a trans- 
 itional period, therefore, is the last thing 
 desired by thoughtful Social Democrats. 
 
 But even when the liberal is wise enough 
 not to fear so violent a revolution, he is ap-
 
 The Few and the Many 207 
 
 prehensive lest the programme of liberalism 
 political self-government and economic 
 freedom should be exchanged in a socialist 
 State for State absolutism and centralisation. 
 But it is difficult to grasp how a despotic 
 form of government could be possible in a 
 society in which each individual citizen would 
 feel that / am the State. Would not every 
 law, every branch of labour, every official 
 department then come into being through 
 those to whom these laws and administrative 
 arrangements applied? Only the old view, 
 which sees in the State an independent ex- 
 ternal entity, instead of an epitome of the 
 citizens themselves, makes it possible to fear 
 an absolute despotism in Social Democracy. 
 Every law or arrangement disapproved by the 
 popular will would infallibly be reformed. 
 Not the immutability but the continual 
 changeableness of the government is what may 
 be feared in a society where all take part in 
 making laws and electing administrators. 
 To counteract this tendency to change is the 
 very problem that statesmanship will have 
 to deal with in a socialistically transformed 
 State. The representation of minorities, the 
 irremovability of judges and certain other 
 officials, the complete distinction between
 
 2o8 The Younger Generation 
 
 legislative, judiciary, and administrative func- 
 tions assuredly provide some, though far from 
 sufficient means of guarding against demoral- 
 isation under democratic forms of society. 
 Pure, naked democracy has not unfrequently 
 shown itself envious or suspicious of great 
 personalities, has delighted in humiliating 
 them, has been ungrateful, fickle, and domi- 
 neering; sometimes even dishonest and unjust. 
 There is, therefore, no thinking person who 
 believes that universal suffrage is a final goal. 
 It is the necessary first step to a gradual 
 transformation of our whole social life into 
 forms, compared with which all that we now 
 call representation, parliamentarism, adminis- 
 tration, and the press will appear as much 
 out of date as absolutism and the censorship 
 appear to us at the present day. We can see 
 already how conscientious natures suffer from 
 having to deal with the press or parliament- 
 arism, since they have found these institutions 
 swayed, not by ideas, but by love of power 
 and above all of profit. 
 
 But since absolutism, not of the government 
 but of the majority, is the real danger of all 
 democracy, it follows that every new majority 
 that accidentally has the power, can use it for 
 making regulations hostile to liberty, if the
 
 The Few and the Many 209 
 
 new society has been founded upon central- 
 isation instead of self-government. And the 
 socialists know this very well. Many of their 
 leaders are therefore more and more inclined 
 to abandon the idea of centralisation in favour 
 of self-government within the different de- 
 partments of labour, while they insist on co- 
 operation between these departments only for 
 the sake of the systematic regulation of all 
 production. Socialists, like William Morris 
 and others, are more and more becoming 
 anarchists on this point, owing to the fear that 
 State officials who can no more be expected 
 in the future than in the present to be gods 
 in omniscience may fetter the freedom both 
 of production and of consumption. If all 
 exchange and all production were to be regu- 
 lated in detail by the State, it is obvious that 
 not only would individual initiative be fet- 
 tered, but the needs of the public could not 
 be satisfied to the same extent as now, when 
 the trader's business interest keeps him alive 
 to these needs. The State as sole employer 
 without a competitor, as sole customer and 
 sole seller this hard-and-fast, barrack-life 
 idea is being more and more abandoned by 
 socialists in favour of that of a common State 
 direction for the main features of production, 
 14
 
 2io The Younger Generation 
 
 but otherwise self -management ; thus, in every 
 department, a democratic foundation with 
 an aristocratic superstructure. No one need 
 wonder at the word aristocratic. For an 
 anarchist, management actually means an 
 aristocratic one after a short time; that is, a 
 management in which by psychological neces- 
 sity the most efficient, the best, as a rule, come 
 to the front. 
 
 With regard to the different trades it will 
 easily be seen that it is not only important 
 to restrict the partial over-production to 
 which the socialists rightly point, but also 
 to promote that class of production which 
 cannot be put into figures, since it depends on 
 individual initiative; the production through 
 which new forms, new patterns, new inven- 
 tions make their appearance, without having 
 been foreseen, inquired for, or indicated. And 
 side by side with this freedom for individual 
 initiative in every trade, it is desirable that 
 the manager chosen by the board of direction 
 or by the workers themselves should not be 
 easily removable, but should possess strong 
 and active powers. Otherwise the adminis- 
 tration will be conducted with as much 
 waste of time and force as is customary with 
 "boards," whereas the single strong will can
 
 The Few and the Many 211 
 
 usually do great things within its own 
 limits. 
 
 Of course there will then as now be the 
 danger that a manager may use pressure. 
 He might have many ways of attacking a 
 person he disliked ; moving him from one place 
 to another, from a more leading to a more 
 subordinate position, from a pleasant to an 
 unpleasant kind of work. But it would not 
 be possible to use any of these or similar 
 means in so violently coercive a way as is 
 now done. If we could measure the pressure 
 that weighs upon every one who has to work 
 for his livelihood; what endless precautions, 
 what cowardice, what slackness and indiffer- 
 ence are fostered by the need of daily bread; 
 if we could trace all the economic causes of 
 the want of character or the hopelessness that 
 succeeds to the courage, the self-sacrifice, the 
 love of truth, the devotion, with which so 
 many young people begin life we should 
 find at the back of all this the order of society 
 which often brings an independent man face 
 to face with the choice between submission 
 against his conscience and loss of his means 
 of livelihood. And this social order is not 
 favourable to that development of the indi- 
 viduality, about which people are always so
 
 212 The Younger Generation 
 
 scrupulous when socialism is mentioned. This 
 order is hostile to the individuality in a far 
 greater degree than a social arrangement 
 could be, whose first principle was: 
 
 Nobody can be made out-of-work. 
 
 With this " Magna Charta" personal liberty 
 would have made the greatest step in advance 
 that had ever been made since protection of 
 life and property was recognised as social 
 rights. For at bottom protection of life and 
 property is not fully operative when a man 
 can be made out-of-work. And liberty of 
 conscience and of thought does not exist in 
 reality when on account of his words and 
 thoughts, his belief or non-belief a man may 
 lose the livelihood of himself and his family. 
 
 4. Can the Independence of the Individual be 
 Maintained in a Socialistic Society? 
 
 In order that every one may enjoy the right 
 to work, the socialists, as is now known, con- 
 sider that certain members of society the 
 owners of the means of production must 
 resign this private ownership. How and 
 whether socialism will be able to abolish the 
 right of private property in the means of
 
 The Few and the Many 213 
 
 production; how and whether it will then be 
 able to provide work for all; how and whether 
 it will succeed in so arranging collective pro- 
 duction that it will continue to grow all this 
 belongs to the national-economic side of the 
 question. Into this I do not enter, since I do 
 not understand it. And even were I to do so, 
 I consider it scarcely possible to discuss this 
 side of the question. For in these matters 
 there are many different schools of socialism, 
 and in every country appears the differentia- 
 tion indicated above, which is one of the signs 
 of development. New proposals are con- 
 stantly being formulated, concerning which 
 one can be sure of only one thing: that they 
 will never be carried out in their entirety. 
 Programmes of the future have no other sig- 
 nificance than that of the scaffolding round a 
 house. It helps the builders in their work, 
 but is pulled down when the house is finished. 
 And the building will be nothing like its 
 scaffolding. 
 
 As regards the shape that future conditions 
 will take, there is now only one thing certain 
 among evolutionary socialists : that the social- 
 istic "State of the future" cannot come into 
 being in its entirety. They know that we 
 must "keep the sky in view in order to reach
 
 214 The Younger Generation 
 
 the brow of the hill." They recognise that 
 much of the present order of things will be 
 found applicable as a form, when its meaning 
 has been changed. They understand that 
 this new meaning will no doubt come into 
 being partly by altered conditions, but above 
 all by growth from within, out of the old 
 conditions. They do not believe in a total 
 reconstruction, and with reason. For how- 
 ever longingly each new generation turns its 
 eyes towards "the land of the future" no 
 human foot ever yet trod its soil. A hundred 
 years ago the revolutionaries then striving 
 and suffering believed that we in the end 
 of the following century should be living 
 happily in the land of the future; just as we 
 now hope that those who follow us will be 
 happy, whereas they will certainly be occupied 
 by new sufferings, mistakes, and demands of 
 reform. But we know that, even if each new 
 generation has fresh tasks and in more than 
 one case has to do again the work of preceding 
 reforms, yet these reforms have always left 
 behind certain indestructible results. Thus 
 the privileges of the nobility as they existed 
 before 1789 are now for ever impossible. And 
 thus some day the privileges of capitalists 
 will be made impossible, through a social
 
 The Few and the Many 215 
 
 transformation which in other respects will 
 perhaps undergo similar modifications to those 
 of the reforms of 1789. The position of the 
 mature socialist towards the State of the future 
 has been expressed by Georg von Vollmar in 
 the following simile: 
 
 "He who would make new roads in society, 
 meets with the same experience as the bold 
 pioneer in unexplored regions. The latter 
 knows that he must leave the lowlands and 
 sees in the distance the high plateau over 
 which he is to build his road. But whether 
 its course will be straight or zigzag, its gradi- 
 ents easy or steep, or at what point it will reach 
 the heights all this he cannot know before- 
 hand. He must examine the ground step by 
 step, and in doing so he will always be coming 
 upon something new which will cause him to 
 alter his plans. But he must never keep his 
 eyes fixed on the small piece of ground that 
 lies immediately in front of him; by doing so 
 he would get on no better than if he tried to 
 build his road straight through the air. If, 
 on the other hand, he keeps the continuity in 
 view and fixes his eyes on the goal, his work 
 will be accomplished. In many ways it will 
 turn out differently from his original idea. 
 Nor will the height he has reached prove to be
 
 216 The Younger Generation 
 
 the last, but before him new heights will rise, 
 and new prospects, hitherto unsuspected, 
 will open out. But along his road men will 
 have made a certain advance; and thus the 
 road-builder will not have worked in vain." 
 
 There is only one thing of which we may be 
 absolutely certain, and that is, that whatever 
 changes may be made in the programmes for 
 the solution of the social question and however 
 socialism may be transformed a transforma- 
 tion that takes place with psychological ne- 
 cessity, the more socialism leaves the simple 
 homogeneous phase of agitation and becomes 
 complicated and differentiated under contact 
 with reality the social question will always 
 be with us, until a solution of it has been found 
 for the few as well as for the many. 
 
 My argument in the following pages will 
 start from the assumption that for the present 
 a solution of the social problem has been 
 found in a reform based in its main features 
 on the demands of socialism. And it is with 
 this assumption that I will mention some of the 
 points of view from which we have reason to 
 hope that individuality will be more favoured 
 in a society so transformed, as well as some 
 points of view from which the contrary may 
 be feared.
 
 The Few and the Many 217 
 
 The possibility of the suppression of indi- 
 viduality by socialism has been to me, as to 
 many others, the great and valid objection 
 to socialism. Unless it can have the same, 
 nay, a much greater regard for the interests of 
 individuality than existing society, the social- 
 istic society will not be permanent. Before 
 we thus find cause for deciding our attitude to 
 the work of social reform, we must make clear 
 to ourselves the mutual relation of individual- 
 ism and socialism. If, for instance, we assume 
 that the right of private ownership of the 
 means of production is the essential condition 
 of individual development, then socialism is 
 at once put out of court. But if, on the other 
 hand, we consider how few among significant 
 personalities have been owners of the means 
 of production, we must immediately say to 
 ourselves that the great number of those who 
 have not owned these means proves their 
 unessentiality to the development of person- 
 ality in a far greater degree than the fact of 
 one or two landlords or manufacturers having 
 attained by their help a fine personal develop- 
 ment proves the contrary. If this is reassur- 
 ing even now to the many who, lacking the 
 means of production, would otherwise be 
 condemned to an undeveloped individuality,
 
 218 The Younger Generation 
 
 then it may also reassure us with regard to 
 the future. In speaking of the rights of 
 property, I will here only recall the fact that 
 society has time after time claimed similar 
 restrictions to those now demanded by social- 
 ism, restrictions of the liberties of some, when 
 these have proved incompatible with the 
 liberty of all. Nothing is more significant in 
 this respect than the case in which the sense 
 of ownership was at least as deeply grounded 
 in human nature as it is where property in the 
 means of production is concerned ; I mean the 
 father's right of property in his children. 
 That part of this right which implies the 
 liberty of the father to kill, sell, illtreat, and 
 marry off his children, or to let them grow up 
 ignorant, has been taken away from him step 
 by step by society. And it is certain that 
 each time the fathers have felt their liberty 
 to be violated by this interference of the law 
 with the "sacredness of private property." 
 Now, on the other hand, every one sees that 
 this interference has contributed to develop 
 the relations between father and children into 
 the rich and personal connection that we often 
 see in modern life. 
 
 At each such limitation of freedom, how- 
 ever, it must be made a condition that it
 
 The Few and the Many 219 
 
 promotes a more essential liberty, by restrict- 
 ing a less essential one. No other restriction 
 of liberty can or ought to be tolerated. And 
 unless the socialists provide a fully adequate 
 compensation for the freedom they propose 
 to abolish, they cannot count upon a long 
 duration for their reforms. 
 
 The strength of the socialist faith, however, 
 rests precisely upon the certainty of being 
 able to provide this adequate compensation. 
 
 5. The Adaptation of Egoism to a Society 
 Socialistically Transformed 
 
 The socialist's train of thought is this: 
 Now the many are dependent on the few, the 
 workers on the owners of the means of pro- 
 duction. The majority work as wage-earners 
 of the State or of private persons; in both 
 cases the employer retains the greater part of 
 what these wage-earners produce. They thus 
 keep the wage-earners down to a minimum of 
 subsistence, which is proportionate neither 
 to their physical nor their intellectual needs, 
 so long as they are capable of work. When 
 they cease to be so, owing to illness or age, 
 they are faced by complete destitution or 
 dependence on charity. When, on the other
 
 22O The Younger Generation 
 
 hand, all become partners and fellow-workers 
 in a common production, their ample wage, 
 their certainty of wanting neither work nor 
 provision for sickness and old age, and the 
 consciousness of working one for all and all 
 for one, will foster a much stronger sense of 
 responsibility and honour than now exists. 
 And this sense, together with man's natural 
 need of work, when it is moderate and well 
 paid, must increase the love of work. The 
 extent and the value of production will be 
 greatly multiplied compared with the present, 
 for it is now stimulated only by a minority's 
 hope of profit, while the majority knows that 
 it is condemned to lifelong, hopeless drudgery. 
 But this is not all ; the enhanced sense of life, 
 which accompanies better conditions of exist- 
 ence and increased intellectual development, 
 will have a liberating effect on the personality. 
 The assumptions of socialism in the present, 
 as in other cases, rest upon the experience 
 that feelings can be transformed. This ap- 
 plies in particular to the feelings of those who 
 now represent ability and talent in different 
 departments. These must learn to find their 
 pleasure in activity for the whole community 
 instead of for their private profit. And such 
 a transformation of feeling is not unthinkable.
 
 The Few and the Many 221 
 
 Thus, for instance, the warlike spirit is trans- 
 formed during long periods of peace. Other 
 equally profound instincts have changed in 
 connection with a changed view of the values 
 of life. And such a new view is incontestably 
 in process of formation; a view which may 
 result in a complete metamorphosis of the 
 desire of profit. 
 
 But there is another side to the matter. 
 The desire of profit usually has a deeper cause 
 than profit alone. It is not only possession 
 that satisfies, but the effort itself; nay, often 
 the effort more than the possession. For the 
 effort enhances the sense of power, and in this 
 happiness has its origin. Profit, moreover, 
 has its great psychological significance as a 
 measure of our expenditure of force, as an 
 expression of our success or failure. 
 
 Those on whose efficiency, inventiveness, 
 mental work, and creative power it finally 
 depends that culture shall not perish and 
 the hard struggle with nature begin again, 
 must acquire a new measure of the success 
 of their efforts, if profit is no longer to ful- 
 fil that function. And that other measures 
 exist is all the more evident, as even now 
 the creators themselves seldom become rich 
 through their inventions, works of art, and
 
 222 The Younger Generation 
 
 books, but still their creative joy is not 
 diminished. 
 
 Just as the individual expresses in the 
 family his nature as a member of the race, so 
 does he express in work his nature as a member 
 of society. In both spheres the demands of 
 personality are freedom in the choice of what 
 one loves; permanence of the relation, so that 
 one is not separated by external agency from 
 what one loves ; peace and the right to become 
 more and more absorbed in what one loves. 
 And finally, to be loved back by the object 
 of one's love; which in the case of work means 
 that it smiles upon one with the smile of 
 success. Only on those conditions does one 
 feel in work as in family life that liberation 
 of forces, that rich sense of life, that impression 
 of capability, which constitute happiness. 
 In this sense the "will to power" is only 
 equivalent to the will to happiness. 
 
 The more highly developed an individual 
 is, the more complicated all the above-men- 
 tioned conditions of his happiness become. 
 And the more highly developed an individual 
 is, the more significant is his happiness, above 
 all his happiness in work, to the community. 
 Of the greatest minds, the creators, this is 
 true in such a degree that a social transforma-
 
 The Few and the Many 223 
 
 tion which deprived a single such mind of the 
 sense of freedom and thereby of the power of 
 creation, but gave prosperity to everyday 
 people, would finally prove to be a misfortune 
 even to the everyday people. 
 
 Not every socialist thinker is conscious of 
 this danger, but many are so. They have 
 therefore begun to abandon the proposition 
 that all work is of equal value and that the 
 hours of work are the only available standard 
 of value. They are beginning to recognise 
 that the hours of work vary with different 
 kinds of work, different individuals, different 
 moods of the same person, different work per- 
 formed by the same person in different phases 
 of the development of the methods of work; 
 or with different places, so that the result 
 (a building, for instance) may have a far 
 greater value in one district compared with 
 another and that thus the hours of work 
 will not serve as a standard of value. It is 
 also beginning to be acknowledged that every 
 kind of work is not of equal value to society. 
 One that lasts an hour (a surgical operation, 
 for instance), but saves a valuable force for 
 society, is worth more than years of work of 
 an everyday kind, apart from the fact that 
 this one hour's work is actually rendered possi-
 
 224 The Younger Generation 
 
 ble only by many years of preparatory study, 
 and moreover wears out the nervous system 
 more rapidly than less straining work, so 
 that from these indirect points of view it is 
 also worth more. A number of socialists 
 have put forward similar views and in con- 
 nection therewith have proposed the following 
 desideratum: That, while security without 
 work should be reserved only for children, 
 invalids, and the aged, while the work of all 
 ought to. be rewarded so that good conditions 
 of life may be obtained by moderate work, 
 greater efficiency and a more valuable kind of 
 work ought nevertheless to be able to secure 
 a maximum of the means of existence. This, 
 however, should never differ from the minimum 
 in such a proportion as, for instance, the high- 
 est and lowest rates of salary in our existing 
 government departments or companies. 
 
 The strongest, most direct stimulus of the 
 working energy of most people the hope of 
 in some degree improving their conditions of 
 life would thus be preserved in the socialist 
 community. It is also frequently suggested 
 that property in such things as are not means 
 of production and cannot easily be made to 
 produce interest, might very well be retained 
 and be hereditary. Such objects are, for
 
 The Few and the Many 22^ 
 
 instance, the furniture, the books, the works 
 of art, through which I express my personality 
 in my own home, or which I have learned to 
 love in the home of my parents. The possi- 
 bility of acquiring and keeping such objects, 
 of being able to travel, of having more op- 
 portunities for material and intellectual en- 
 joyment all these things would remain to 
 stimulate the effort to attain efficiency. 
 
 If, on the other hand, all amusements were 
 made freely accessible, as is proposed in 
 certain socialistic Utopias, they would not 
 only lose much of their power of heightening 
 the sense of life, but society would also lose 
 a strong stimulus to work. And if the gifted 
 and capable member of society were held 
 down to the same economic level as the dull, 
 lazy, and inapt one, this would be not merely 
 an injustice, it would be a loss of productive 
 energy so immense that it would reduce the 
 well-being of all, including the dull and stupid. 
 
 Socialism is becoming increasingly alive to 
 this, as well as to the importance of efficiency 
 and experience in different departments of 
 work. It is thus pointed out that the 
 possibility of reaching a leading position, as 
 well as the right of retaining the place that 
 one's labour has endeared to one, will con- 
 is
 
 226 The Younger Generation 
 
 stitute incentives to work. But, on the other 
 hand, the socialists have not sufficiently re- 
 marked that there is a far more important 
 way of giving a man promotion; namely, by 
 allowing him increased freedom in his work, 
 through a gradual reduction of control. 
 
 It is beginning to be more clearly seen that 
 equality is not justice, either as regards punish- 
 ment or reward. A punishment which would 
 be intolerable to a finer nature, is indifferent 
 to a coarser one, and vice versa. A state of 
 things which would permit Wagner to make 
 rules for Faust and Sancho Panza to keep 
 Don Quixote in check would be martyrdom 
 to Faust and Don Quixote. Nor does exist- 
 ing society smooth the way for the exceptional 
 nature, but the latter nevertheless has a 
 chance of forcing its way to the front. On 
 the other hand, an order of society which 
 would force a Pasteur to observe the same 
 normal hours of work as a shoemaker; which 
 would provide a Michel Angelo with work on 
 the same terms as a stonemason, and allow a 
 Goethe the same household accommodation 
 as a farm labourer; or would snatch a Pasteur, 
 a Michel Angelo, a Goethe from their re- 
 searches and inspirations for so many hours 
 of "social" forced labour, such an arrange-
 
 The Few and the Many 227 
 
 ment would be anything but favourable to 
 their powers of production. The more deeply 
 a man is intellectually occupied, the more 
 painfully he feels any interruption. All such 
 proposals as an exchange between different 
 employments; alternate physical and mental 
 work at different times of year, thus making 
 the intellectual worker earn his living by easy 
 manual labour these proposals, which have 
 so often been made by socialists, rest upon an 
 entire misunderstanding of creative mental 
 work and of the necessity of acquiring by pre- 
 paration and practice the efficiency which 
 can render a change of work a rest instead of 
 a drudgery. Even if a more harmonious 
 education than the present may render more 
 variety of work possible, it is certain that a 
 fundamental distinction will nevertheless per- 
 sist between the physical and the intellectual 
 worker, a distinction which rests upon psycho- 
 logical and physical laws. If an exchange of 
 activity may be a rest to a few men, to many 
 it is only increased toil. Besides this, it 
 would be an absurdity if that part of my work 
 which is unessential to my personality should 
 be what was socially valued and secured my 
 existence as a citizen, while my essential 
 creative work should be regarded as my private
 
 228 The Younger Generation 
 
 amusement. Such an inversion of all real 
 values would involve a most profound depre- 
 ciation of the powers of production of creative 
 genius. It would make the man of science, 
 the poet, and the artist endeavour to bring 
 about a return to the present state of things, 
 the uncertainty of which is doubtless painful, 
 but the freedom is nevertheless great enough 
 to render possible that tension of the powers 
 which gives life colour and value. In a co- 
 ercive society, again, a genius would lapse 
 into disgust with life, although he would 
 possess from the beginning what in some cases 
 he does not attain in a whole lifetime security 
 of livelihood and provision for old age. 
 
 To these dangers must be added this, that 
 in the socialist community the value of intel- 
 lectual work would be determined by the 
 opinion of the majority. The majority never 
 wants what is original and new, but these 
 things have to force themselves upon the 
 majority by persistent attacks. If a majority 
 were able entirely to preclude the possibility 
 of these original efforts, the result would be 
 at first a stagnation, then a retrogression in 
 culture. 
 
 In our existing society the value of intel- 
 lectual work is depreciated partly by failure
 
 The Few and the Many 229 
 
 to recognise it, owing to insufficient culture; 
 partly by economic compulsion which leads 
 to weak productions being given to the world ; 
 partly by taking advantage of the taste of the 
 buying public, and finally by the temptation 
 to leave intellectual work for more profitable 
 speculations. In this field, as in all others, 
 that of politics especially, our present society 
 is demoralised by the economic struggle for 
 existence. 
 
 These existing dangers to intellectual work 
 would to a great extent disappear in a reformed 
 society. If this society were arranged by an 
 uncultivated majority, the possibilities pointed 
 out above would, on the other hand, oppress 
 the intellectual upper class and to some extent 
 become realities. And in that case the con- 
 ditions for production would be impaired for 
 the time being. If, on the other hand, the 
 leaders of culture take part in the transforma- 
 tion of society, they will certainly know how 
 to provide incentives, security and freedom for 
 intellectual work. Culture in the socialist 
 State will be, as everywhere else, an expression 
 . of the cultural needs of the community. And 
 that these may be provided for in circum- 
 stances entirely different from the present is 
 proved by many examples in history, above
 
 230 The Younger Generation 
 
 all that of the monastery. We may hardly 
 suppose that any socialistic community would 
 leave us less personal liberty, introduce a 
 more communistic mode of life, and retain 
 fewer personal motives for work than was 
 done by the monasteries. And yet the monas- 
 tery was the chief vehicle of culture during 
 the Middle Ages and individual propensities 
 enjoyed great freedom of movement within 
 its walls. It is significant in this connection 
 that the most celebrated monastery of South 
 Germany, Benediktbeuern, erected a little 
 hermitage on the shore of one of the glorious 
 mountain lakes of Bavaria, where the in- 
 trospective, nature-loving, poetic, or artistic 
 among the monks might retire from the bustle 
 and regulations of the great convent and seek 
 inspiration and leisure for work. 
 
 It may be objected that it was piety that 
 impelled the monks' pen and brush ; that their 
 faith compensated for the absence of personal 
 interest in their work. But piety was often 
 only another name for personal desire of 
 creation. And that the latter was so powerful 
 in the monastery was due to a deeper cause 
 than religious views, a cause to which I shall 
 return later. Moreover it is not inconceiv- 
 able that the social sense may one day become
 
 The Few and the Many 231 
 
 a religious motive force to the same extent as 
 piety was in the monastery. We who are 
 now living stand at the commencement of 
 the epoch of solidarity and can have only a 
 presentiment of the transformations this sense 
 will be able to produce, the value of the new 
 motives it will give humanity, and the height 
 of the feelings of happiness it will create. 
 
 6. Intellectual and Material Labour. The 
 Class Distinction Involved Therein 
 
 Although some socialists recognise the ne- 
 cessity of different conditions for intellectual 
 and material labour, others think that such 
 distinctions would also preserve the social 
 inequalities in the community. 
 
 Yes, they certainly would do so ; but only 
 those inequalities which no altered circum- 
 stances could abolish, inequalities in talent. 
 And that these are the work of Nature herself, 
 and not of external circumstances, is proved 
 to us by life, when the same family produces 
 the genius and the idiot. In the face of the 
 intellectual upper and lower class created by 
 Nature, no reform is of any avail, although a 
 long course of outer and inner influences may 
 contribute to adjust to some extent the natural
 
 232 The Younger Generation 
 
 inequality. And it can never seriously sug- 
 gest itself to a reasonable person to preach 
 revolution against the privileges of Nature. 
 "Genius," says a Swedish writer, "cannot 
 oppress . . . but wealth and rank can oppress. 
 . . . The former cannot be owned by all, nor 
 can it be alienated; the latter can be owned 
 by all and can change owners. It is only 
 these advantages that are the objects of envy 
 and may become objects of hatred, nay, of 
 violence and revolution." 
 
 The unnatural class distinction on the other 
 hand, which capital now creates, must be 
 abolished just as surely as the unnatural class 
 distinction once created by birth. Capital- 
 ism still makes it possible for slave souls to 
 tyrannise over master souls. Figaro is still 
 a servant, though not to the Count but to the 
 banker. The artistic spirit is often obliged 
 to confine itself to the workshop while dilet- 
 tantism holds sway in the drawing-room; the 
 inventor not unfrequently has to keep his 
 subordinate place in the factory, because he 
 has not the capital to carry out his own inven- 
 tion, the fruits of which enrich the manu- 
 facturer and are squandered by his sons. 
 
 But in an order of society not controlled 
 by capital there would be a much greater
 
 The Few and the Many 233 
 
 possibility and a much greater inducement to 
 afford every gifted man an opportunity of 
 performing what he could do better than the 
 rest. The many who have no marked apti- 
 tude, or those who have a difficulty in making 
 the value of their talents intelligible to all, 
 would then as now be obliged to do some 
 work which was not altogether to their taste. 
 But the specially gifted man would have both 
 the means and the time to work his way and 
 finally to obtain acknowledgment for his 
 peculiar talents, his new ideas. And it would 
 be to the common interest of all to ease the 
 conditions of labour of the manual workers 
 by means of new inventions and new machin- 
 ery; whereas in many cases new machinery 
 now only increases the profit of the employers 
 and reduces the earnings of labour. At the 
 same time as the conditions of manual labour 
 were made easier, every one, before entering 
 upon it, would have received the general 
 education and the opportunity for continued 
 education that are now wanting. Thereby 
 the present class distinction would be removed 
 which consists in other feelings, other thoughts, 
 and other life-values, so that each class has 
 neither understanding nor respect for the 
 values of the other.
 
 234 The Younger Generation 
 
 Above all, that mark of lower and upper 
 class would be abolished which consists in one 
 being the servants or employees of the other. 
 All would know that they were fellow-workers 
 dependent on each other's health. After all 
 these sweeping changes the manual workers 
 would acquire quite another view of the value 
 of intellectual work than they can now possess, 
 when they have little chance of enjoying the 
 fruits of the inventions that are made indeed, 
 are often thrown out of work by them and 
 when, for want of education or time, they can 
 seldom have a share in the book or work of art 
 that is produced by the representatives of 
 intellectual labour. 
 
 With regard to the conditions of labour, I 
 will venture the assumption that in the social- 
 ist State where the wishes of all will be able 
 to make themselves heard the extreme spe- 
 cialisation of labour, which is the condition 
 of existing production, will be compelled in 
 the interests of individualism to give way. 
 Owing to specialisation the individual has 
 little joy in his work, since he cannot express 
 himself in it. The most perfect happiness 
 in work that I have seen was in the case of an 
 old locksmith, who made keys and ornaments. 
 Every wrinkle in his face was dug either by
 
 The Few and the Many 235 
 
 pondering over problems or by the delight of 
 having solved them. He caressed every ob- 
 ject with eye and hand before he let it go. 
 In looking at him the idea occurred to me, 
 which I afterwards found had been expressed 
 by Ruskin, that the head, heart, and hand 
 ought to share in every work, if it is to bring 
 joy to the worker and be a living expression 
 of his personality. No other hand than that 
 of the artist himself, says Ruskin, can execute 
 the jewel, the glass, the bowl that his imagina- 
 tion has created. In this union of art and 
 handicraft lay the superiority of antiquity 
 and of the Renaissance. Household imple- 
 ments just as much as works of art were then 
 the expression of a person's creative joy and 
 skill. 
 
 Ruskin thinks that when all work becomes 
 a happy exercise of art; when the workers 
 are surrounded by healthy and beautiful con- 
 ditions of life without which no true beauty 
 can come into being then the quantity of 
 production will indeed be decreased, but its 
 quality will be immeasurably improved. 
 
 Ruskin further insists that we must 
 make political economy follow the sense of 
 beauty. We must resolutely sacrifice all 
 such convenience, cheapness, and beauty as
 
 236 The Younger Generation 
 
 depends on the degradation of the workers 
 and grows out of the inhuman ugliness and 
 poverty of the slums. Thus all will gradually 
 be trained to understand true beauty, which 
 is not a luxury, but a moderate, appropriate, 
 personal, and tasteful way of satisfying real 
 needs. 
 
 It is easy to point to exaggeration in what is 
 quoted above, and yet it is not inconceivable 
 that Ruskin's ideas in certain cases are those 
 of the future. Whereas, on the one hand, 
 machinery will more and more perform such 
 work with which head and heart have little 
 or nothing to do, handicraft may reconquer 
 those fields in which the personality can find 
 a real expression. Even now the ornaments 
 turned out by the dozen which unquestion- 
 ably have had a certain importance in develop- 
 ing and satisfying the sense of beauty are 
 beginning to be replaced in refined homes by 
 more artistic objects. And to a conscience 
 aesthetically and socially awakened the cheap 
 articles referred to are intolerable. They 
 have the effect of spots of dirt upon festival 
 attire, since one knows them to be products 
 of hunger and sweating. 
 
 Since the necessity pointed out above of 
 entirely abandoning perfect equality which
 
 The Few and the Many 237 
 
 means perfect injustice has been put forward, 
 a new objection has been made, that, with 
 unequal conditions of labour, one man will 
 find an opportunity of making his talents, his 
 objects of art or other values "bear interest" 
 at the expense of another. This is very 
 probable. But the greatest temptation to the 
 majority to allow themselves to be thus 
 financially misused will disappear when every 
 one has a safe livelihood in return for moderate 
 work. Does not many a man even now re- 
 fuse to sacrifice his leisure for insufficiently 
 paid work? And above all we may assume 
 that a new sense of justice will be developed, 
 which will condemn such anti-social deeds as 
 dishonourable, just as forgery is now con- 
 demned in the capitalist society. To begin 
 with, however, regulations will certainly be 
 needed to hinder such abuses. In the Middle 
 Ages, we may remember, the rulers used to 
 forbid the erection of fortified castles, when 
 they were used as centres of robbery. Now 
 there are no such prohibitions, as in the present 
 state of society it does not occur to any one 
 to fortify a castle for himself. Thus too the 
 robber customs of our time may die out in a 
 future where everything will contribute to 
 starve them out.
 
 238 The Younger Generation 
 
 It is obvious that new conflicts, at present 
 unforeseen, must arise in a transformed so- 
 ciety. As greed of gain decreases, desire of 
 power, thirst for fame and other forms of 
 ambition will probably increase. Ideal con- 
 ditions can be realised only through ideal men. 
 And in this case Christianity is always right 
 life proceeds from the heart. Not merely 
 from better conditions of life, but above all 
 from ennobled souls will a greater happiness 
 blossom. But at the same time we must not 
 underestimate the importance of improved 
 conditions of life to moral and intellectual 
 development. Conditions of life have a great 
 significance in the spiritual transformation 
 which is to make other motives than the pre- 
 sent ones decide the issues of life and other 
 values the object of our endeavours. 
 
 What is materialistic and one-sided in the 
 socialist agitation in the course of which 
 many socialists have called the social question 
 a "question of the stomach," and asserted 
 that the whole history of development is only 
 the history of economy this one-sidedness 
 has perhaps been useful to the agitation. A 
 bow too finely carved breaks when it is bent. 
 
 But now socialism requires above all to be 
 spiritually deepened. It is therefore a for-
 
 The Few and the Many 239 
 
 tunate thing for socialism that anarchism is 
 forcing it to "anarchise" its theories, just as 
 socialism has forced liberalism to ' ' socialise' ' its 
 policy. Anarchism has certain grave warnings 
 to offer. It takes the part of individualism 
 against the tyranny of the State; of self- 
 government against centralisation; of initiative 
 against control. Although the outrages of 
 the anarchists are detestable, although their 
 present theories if logically carried out would 
 lead to the struggles of a state of savagery 
 a life in which every man's hand would be 
 against every man their ideal is nevertheless 
 the pillar of fire that shows us where the land 
 of promise lies: the land where the ideas both 
 of individualism and socialism will finally be 
 absorbed in a higher unity. 
 
 7. The Influence of Society on the Development 
 of the Individuality 
 
 But, even if all the necessary considerations 
 for the rights of the individual pointed out 
 above are provided for in the socialistic society, 
 the protest of out-and-out individualism still 
 remains. 
 
 While the anarchist hopes that the indi- 
 vidual will come into his full rights and happi-
 
 240 The Younger Generation 
 
 ness when every one receives according to his 
 needs, when every one works according to 
 his inclination and acts according to his will, 
 when everything exists for all and humanity 
 becomes one great family, in which the strong 
 will protect the weak while the anarchist 
 thus entertains a superstitious belief in the 
 ennobling of human nature merely through 
 altered circumstances the individualist, on 
 the other hand, is profoundly sceptical. He 
 is even more so with regard to the ennobling 
 of the masses than he is about the transforma- 
 tion of conditions. He assumes that a uni- 
 versal equality in the conditions of life and 
 in education would only flatten out originality 
 and make the masses less willing to allow the 
 superman to advance in unfettered freedom 
 according to the demands of his nature. 
 For the masses themselves will never be able 
 to produce culture- values. They are the 
 deep black soil, the prosaic anterior condition 
 for the golden ears, the swelling grapes, the 
 crimson roses that culture grows. 
 
 Darwinism has been profoundly abused in 
 being held up as an aristocratic principle 
 applicable alike to the domain of culture and 
 to that of nature. For Darwinism in reality 
 has nothing to do with the formation of an
 
 The Few and the Many 241 
 
 upper and a lower class, such as we now see. 
 Within this class system complicated condi- 
 tions of property and production have done 
 their best to upset the Darwinian law of the 
 "survival of the fittest." In this, as in so 
 many other cases, society has departed from 
 nature, has hindered the selection of the best, 
 and often preserved the worst instead. 
 
 That the superman will be the result of a 
 long succession of happy selections among 
 fortunately placed men of culture is one of the 
 sayings we often hear. Those who speak 
 thus forget the old experience of the rapid 
 degeneration of ruling classes or brilliant 
 families. Especially when the passion for 
 wealth has got the upper hand and exhausted 
 all their strength, such families seldom con- 
 tinue beyond the second or third generation 
 without showing all the signs of degeneration. 
 It is also forgotten that most men of genius 
 have arisen directly from the lower class 
 frequently with a clergyman or official as an 
 intermediate link, among us in the North. 
 All the uneducated "natural geniuses" are 
 forgotten, of whom there are so many 
 everywhere in mechanics especially, in our 
 country. It is the fresh brains, hitherto un- 
 used for the purposes of culture, that, as a 
 
 16
 
 242 The Younger Generation 
 
 rule, prove to be the most fertile, the most 
 creative. 
 
 On the other hand, it is true that there exists 
 a physical and psychical refinement which is a 
 mark of breeding, a product of long-continued 
 culture. But these refined ones often enjoy 
 far more keenly than they create. 
 
 Nor is this refinement a consequence of 
 upper class life alone. We may see, for in- 
 stance, a child, born in the lower but adopted 
 into the upper class, showing at once so intense 
 an enjoyment of the beautiful, so natural a 
 refinement, so delicate a sensitiveness to all 
 that is ugly, that if it had remained within its 
 own class, it would have been tempted to 
 satisfy its craving for beauty by pernicious 
 means, or forced to suffer through life from 
 the incompatibility between its profoundest 
 needs and the conditions of its life. A single 
 child like this teaches us more of the deepest 
 import of the social question than hundreds 
 of essays. 
 
 If individualism thus knows no more than 
 any other theory about the genesis of the 
 "superman," this does not prevent it from 
 uttering deeply significant truths about his 
 path through life. 
 
 Individualism is right in its protest against
 
 The Few and the Many 243 
 
 the tendency of all democracy to promote the 
 condition of the many more than that of the 
 few, against its disposition to measure likes 
 and dislikes according to the low standard of 
 the majority. Individualism is right in de- 
 manding ample space for the great personality. 
 It is obliged to insist, with Nietzsche and 
 many before him that the essence of genius 
 is an overflow of forces, a rapture of inspiration, 
 an infinity, which demands altogether differ- 
 ent conditions for its creative power, especially 
 in art, from those applicable to ordinary men. 
 The spokesmen of individualism are indis- 
 pensable and have been obliged to be one- 
 sided in order to stir men's minds. Especially 
 to awaken a perception of the fact that more 
 small souls than great ones come into being, 
 more unproductive minds than productive, 
 and that it would be an abuse if the former 
 were allowed to draw the latter down to their 
 level. Emerson and Mill have pleaded the 
 cause of the individuality; Carlyle has in- 
 sisted on the supremacy of the hero, as has 
 Browning on that of passion; Kierkegaard 
 bases his hope on the individual and Ibsen 
 on the solitary ; Stirner would make the unique 
 one supreme, and Nietzsche dreamed of his 
 superman as master of the world. Nietzsche's
 
 244 The Younger Generation 
 
 prophetic voice was heard at the right time, 
 when there was a danger that the many, "the 
 herd," would outvoice the few with their 
 claims. This deep significance of Nietzsche 
 may be fully acknowledged without our being 
 obliged to accept one of his attributes for the 
 superman: that of pitilessly and relentlessly 
 passing over the herd. For more than one has 
 become a "superman" through directing his 
 "will to power" to making the many happy. 
 More than one superman has ended as a man 
 of the "herd," although or because his 
 path lay over the existence of others. It is 
 certainly by deeper signs than pitilessness 
 that slave or master souls are to be recognised. 
 That mighty superman Spinoza, who has 
 perhaps given deeper impulses to the intel- 
 lectual life of the nineteenth century than 
 any other thinker, laid down once for all in 
 his Ethics the limitations of the superman. 
 He proclaims it as the foremost duty of every 
 man to follow the first law of nature that 
 every one should love himself and defend his 
 own existence. Everything that physically 
 or psychically promotes my existence, that 
 calls forth a general development of force, and 
 that leads from a lower to a higher degree of 
 perfection, is happiness; everything that acts
 
 The Few and the Many 245 
 
 in the contrary direction is suffering. The 
 stronger our spiritual life is, the greater our 
 joy; the greater our joy is, the greater our 
 perfection. Each has the right to everything, 
 so far as his power extends. But as each man 
 can best maintain his existence, develop his 
 perfection, and exercise his power in associa- 
 tion with other men, it becomes necessary that 
 none shall obstruct the existence of others; 
 that, on the contrary, each shall so far limit 
 his rights, as not to demand of others that 
 they shall do or submit to what he himself 
 will not do or submit to. 
 
 Our own interest, indeed, prompts us to 
 this. For if we hinder the existence and 
 development of others, our own existence will 
 not be so rich and developed as it would be- 
 come by reciprocal interaction with others. 
 
 In this the absolute claim of the superman 
 is attacked with a dialectic weapon as subtle 
 as that which Nietzsche wielded against the 
 claims of the herd. 
 
 Even if the masses could be kept altogether 
 down, this would result not only in an even 
 greater loss of values to culture, values which 
 the supermen who now not unfrequently 
 emerge from the "herd" would then be alto- 
 gether prevented from producing. No, the
 
 246 The Younger Generation 
 
 masters themselves, secure in their supremacy, 
 would lead a more and more cramped exist- 
 ence up on their heights, if they were not 
 surrounded by the warm climate which the 
 sympathy of the many provides. 
 
 For it needs no proof that the produc- 
 tion of culture- values always stands in a cer- 
 tain relation to the spirit of the age, even if 
 we have ceased to regard genius as merely a 
 creature of that spirit. Genius is always a 
 miracle, but one that has been prepared: 
 we do not expect a Darwin from Tierra del 
 Fuego or an Eskimo Dante. We know that 
 when genius is born, it is from the womb of 
 the nation's culture, and that the many who 
 assimilate the work of a great genius and are 
 enriched and refined by it, enhance in their 
 turn the creative power of the genius. 
 
 If individualism is easily refuted in its 
 modern claims that the many exist to serve 
 the few supermen its position is all the 
 stronger in another respect, namely, in the 
 assertion that the levelling of the conditions 
 of life, of inequalities of education, and of 
 social forms, which is now taking place through 
 an increasing democratisation and uniformity, 
 will crush out individuality itself and gradu- 
 ally deprive culture of great minds, since it
 
 The Few and the Many 247 
 
 will be entirely impossible for great minds to 
 appear. Our own time is already used as a 
 proof of this; but it is forgotten that in all 
 times proximity reduces the measure of great- 
 ness in the eyes of contemporaries. It is 
 quite certain that in a hundred years our time 
 will be glorified in comparison with the paltri- 
 ness then existing. 
 
 But in spite of this evident injustice towards 
 our contemporaries, every thoughtful person 
 must see that there is nevertheless an increas- 
 ing danger that the unique, intellectually 
 aristocratic personality will become rare in a 
 democratised community. America gives us 
 an example of this. But this American demo- 
 cracy is still one in which economic considera- 
 tions are supreme. The calm acquisition of 
 culture is in that country almost the greatest 
 of luxuries. Life is nothing but a hunt for 
 wealth, a hunt in which many fall, while a 
 few become multimillionaires. All the politi- 
 cally democratic institutions have for their 
 real president the dollar. America is the 
 great proof of the fact that democracy and 
 capitalism together create tyranny. And 
 therefore people in America are becoming 
 increasingly alive to the necessity of social 
 reform. Switzerland is another democratic
 
 248 The Younger Generation 
 
 example. Tranquillity prevails there, a general 
 well-being and in the words of Laboulaye's 
 apt definition of a democracy a self-govern- 
 ment which operates incessantly within small 
 circles for objects which even the least of the 
 citizens understands. But there the people 
 are absorbed in a narrow-minded local particu- 
 larism; no rich movements occur to promote 
 culture, no really great centres of culture 
 exist; great geniuses are seldom born there, 
 although many of the most original and 
 vigorous of the talented men of our day have 
 there seen the light. 
 
 But, on the other hand, history shows demo- 
 cracies in which the general level of culture 
 was that of the high plateau, without this 
 preventing bright summits from rising above 
 the plain. 
 
 For the culture of a people does not depend 
 only upon its political forms. It depends 
 upon whether the nation lives well in an intel- 
 lectual sense, with a happily asserted inde- 
 pendence, in a material prosperity which 
 allows of cheerful sacrifices in the interests of 
 culture; and upon its possessing an open eye 
 and a real passion for its cultural tasks. A 
 nation becomes cultured when, simultane- 
 ously with the appearance of great creative
 
 The Few and the Many 249 
 
 minds, the lives of the many are also full of 
 meaning, so that they receive from the few, 
 and give to the few, impulses of cultural 
 significance. In a community organised on 
 social-democratic lines the individuality could 
 thus be saved, if life in general were to be 
 made more profound and manifold, instead 
 of being reduced to a dead level. 
 
 Thus this path also brings us back to the 
 question already asked: whether there is a 
 prospect that, in a new society, new life- 
 values will also arise? 
 
 8. Enjoyment of Life in Existing Society and 
 
 its Possible Enhancement in a 
 
 Transformed Society 
 
 Greed of gain and competition lead to a 
 constantly increasing production. But the 
 capacity for enjoying the values thus created 
 declines almost in the same proportion as the 
 values increase. 
 
 From this period of financial swindles, stock- 
 exchange panics, suicides, and nervous diseases 
 rises a steadily growing desire for quietness, 
 health, beauty even if it were within the 
 walls of a convent. As at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century, romanticism has be-
 
 250 The Younger Generation 
 
 come a manifestation of this longing for rest 
 from the feverish agitation of life. What is 
 genuine in the symbolism and mysticism of 
 modern literature and art is an expression 
 both of the thirst for beauty and of the de- 
 mand for reform felt by our time. Many of 
 the symbolists of the 1890*5 were at the same 
 time anarchists and attached themselves to 
 Jesus' doctrine of fraternity with the same 
 aesthetic enthusiasm and personal heterodoxy 
 as the older romantic school attached them- 
 selves to Catholicism. Even at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century, Rahel Varnhagen 
 declared that "new means for the salvation of 
 mankind must be discovered ; the old ones are 
 worn out." And the nineteenth century was 
 one in which Utopias of reform succeeded one 
 another, all witnessing to humanity's increas- 
 ing consciousness of the torments it was 
 suffering in the existing state of things. 
 Therefore it now clutches at the hope that a 
 state of society may be attained in which every 
 one will be able to use his now languishing 
 vital energy. These sufferings have been 
 called "the malady of the end of the century," 
 as though the end of the century before had 
 not been a period remarkable above all for 
 vital force. But at the end of the eighteenth
 
 The Few and the Many 251 
 
 century, as at the end of the nineteenth, 
 humanity found itself at the close of one phase 
 of culture and in expectation of another. 
 This is what makes us despondent our no 
 longer being satisfied with what we possess. 
 We no longer regard Christianity as a solu- 
 tion of the problem of life; we no longer look 
 upon the existing conditions of family life, 
 the State, and economics as a basis for con- 
 tinued development. The old society was 
 shattered by the Revolution; the whole nine- 
 teenth century was an expression of this dis- 
 ruption and a preparation for a new society, 
 from which we expect daylight, not merely 
 "revolutionary lightnings and philanthropic 
 shooting stars." 
 
 If we call the great evil of the age weariness 
 of life, we have certainly gained a name for 
 the disease; but this does not help us to reach 
 its manifold causes. The most significant 
 of these is the impossibility of living that is 
 everywhere produced by the struggle for life. 
 For the few life is now concentrated upon the 
 acquisition of wealth, for the many upon the 
 maintenance of life. For those who amass 
 the means of enjoyment, do so less for the 
 sake of enjoying than for the sake of posses- 
 sing; they wish to increase or manifest
 
 252 The Younger Generation 
 
 their wealth, not to heighten their joy in 
 life. 
 
 If all the spiritual energy which on both 
 sides is thus confined to purely material ends, 
 were set free, life would be transformed in a 
 way we can scarcely divine. 
 
 Many now believe that existence would 
 lose all its strong forces, if the struggle for 
 existence were to cease. 
 
 But would not existence continue to be 
 determined by the great, mysterious laws of 
 nature; should we not still have the riddles of 
 life and death, anxiety and grief, beauty and 
 pain? Would not human beings, then as now, 
 be born, love, suffer, and die? 
 
 And an immense afflux of personal meaning 
 would take place in all the great spheres of 
 life, if men acquired what they do not now 
 possess: leisure and peace to rejoice in their 
 happiness, to feel their sorrows, to deepen 
 their impressions of the glories of nature, art, 
 and literature. To "have the right to idle- 
 ness" is the psychological condition for lasting 
 impressions and strong creative power, when 
 the impressions have been assimilated at 
 leisure. This was the secret of the productive 
 energy of the cloistered life, while, on the 
 other hand, the rareness of strong impres-
 
 The Few and the Many 253 
 
 sions involved a great limitation of that 
 energy. 
 
 The struggle for daily bread, the cares of 
 livelihood the most harassing, blunting, and 
 disfiguring of all worries are now the stamp 
 of private as well as public life. Everywhere 
 around us they check untold possibilities of 
 loving, enjoying, and creating. 
 
 Married people have no time to cultivate 
 their feelings for one another, to follow the 
 light and shade of each other's spiritual life, 
 to make a mutual exchange of their develop- 
 ment for any of those things which often 
 made the period before marriage so rich. 
 Through the cares of livelihood parents have 
 no time to live with their children, to study 
 them in order to be able really to educate them. 
 The school has no time to develop personali- 
 ties, only to prepare for examinations, those 
 fishing-lines with which to catch one's food. 
 And in this way life is everywhere wasted, 
 while people wear themselves out to maintain 
 life. 
 
 Nothing hinders the development of the 
 individuality to such an extent as the double 
 influence under which it now lives from child- 
 hood. On the one hand, Christianity's com- 
 mandments of charity, the law of unselfishness,
 
 254 The Younger Generation 
 
 the importance of self-sacrifice are inculcated. 
 On the other, the same growing person hears 
 and experiences what is demanded by reality: 
 a relentless struggle to get on in an existence 
 in which competition sets each man's hand 
 against all; in which he must strike or be 
 struck, defend his prey like a wild beast or 
 starve, and in which the ruin of one is the 
 salvation of another. In such circumstances 
 personal unity becomes an impossibility. 
 
 We often hear the apprehension expressed 
 that a social transformation would abolish 
 the home and the family. Most certainly 
 their forms would be to some extent altered, 
 but a transformation which attacked the 
 very essence of the relations of life in which 
 human nature has hitherto found its greatest 
 happiness, is unthinkable. Whereas existing 
 society offers ever fewer opportunities of 
 marriage and thus tends to the stunting or 
 brutalising of the emotions connected there- 
 with the new society would not merely 
 render marriage possible to all; it would also 
 assist the realisation of marriage in a more 
 beautiful way. 
 
 For when economic or other low considera- 
 tions no longer have any bearing on marriage, 
 men and women would seek and find one
 
 The Few and the Many 255 
 
 another from more or less personal motives. 
 Marriage would be able in both sexes to de- 
 velop new, undreamt-of possibilities of mutual 
 happiness. To what extent such a develop- 
 ment is possible is disclosed by a retrospect 
 of erotic emotional life only a hundred, nay, 
 fifty years ago; a retrospect which will show 
 how materially that emotional life was already 
 enlarged and refined, in spite of all incongrui- 
 ties still prevailing. The optimism of Alfred 
 Russel Wallace is thus not unfounded, when 
 he bases his hope of the continued develop- 
 ment of the human race on the erotic idealism 
 of women in conjunction with socialism. In 
 a socially transformed State, he thinks, no 
 woman will be compelled by want to sell her- 
 self, either in or outside marriage. And 
 every woman will receive an education so 
 universal and thorough, that the age of mar- 
 riage will be advanced and woman may become 
 a developed personality by the time she makes 
 her choice of love. This will then be a real 
 selection; most women will probably remain 
 unmarried until they have found the man with 
 whom they can unite themselves in full mutual 
 and personal love; or, if they do not find him, 
 they may prefer to abstain altogether from 
 marriage. The man or woman physically
 
 256 The Younger Generation 
 
 or psychically diseased or defective would 
 thus, as a rule, have no chance of rearing a 
 family; whereas now, if they have the means, 
 such people are able to propagate the race, 
 while others, excellently qualified in body and 
 mind, are prevented by poverty from mar- 
 rying. When marriage comes to be contracted, 
 as a rule, from mutual, sympathetic love 
 between individuals who have reached full 
 mental and physical maturity ; when marriage 
 comes to be regarded as the highest form of 
 life, which has been more and more perfected, 
 and when at the same time the economic 
 pressure of existing society, with its physically 
 and psychically demoralising, stunting, and 
 brutalising influences, has been removed- 
 then a new race may arise. Then the selec- 
 tion of the physically faultless and high- 
 minded individuals must gradually result in 
 the average man of the future reaching the 
 height that is now occupied by genius. And 
 the genius of that time will stand as high 
 above these gifted average men as a Goethe, 
 a Humboldt, a Shakespeare, and a Newton 
 stood above the average men of their time. 
 So far Wallace. 
 
 If humanity arrived at economic peace, 
 then, I hope, not only would spiritual life
 
 The Few and the Many 257 
 
 itself be made deeper, but its manifestations 
 would become richer. The faculty of com- 
 municating one's self, and of showing fine 
 shades in one's intercourse, would not only 
 recover the delicacy it possessed before the 
 age of steam and electricity, but might be 
 even further refined. An art critic has pointed 
 out that the Japanese have developed their 
 sense of touch so that their finger-tips enjoy 
 soft, smooth, agreeable surfaces as keenly as 
 we enjoy colours and forms and tones. All 
 our senses, our whole temperament, ought to 
 be able to attain a similar development, so 
 that accents, expressions, gestures, sensations 
 of every kind would acquire a fuller, more 
 individual, and vivifying character. 
 
 Psychico-physiological research in our time 
 also gives forebodings of a hitherto unknown 
 enhancement and extension of our personality, 
 which however cannot take place so long as 
 our energy is fettered by the struggle for 
 existence and can only exceptionally be directed 
 inwards. It is not to spiritualist superstition 
 that I refer, but to natural, though as yet 
 only exceptional manifestations of our psychi- 
 cal and physical powers. This development 
 will be connected with a return to nature, 
 from which man has been more and more 
 
 17
 
 258 The Younger Generation 
 
 separated by the stress of work, while at the 
 same time the finest beauties of nature are 
 now destroyed for the many by the few, who 
 again have often no choice in the present 
 economic struggle and themselves not unfre- 
 quently suffer from the destruction they set 
 on foot. With a different order of society 
 we may expect that all would regard it as a 
 common right and duty to protect the beauty 
 of nature, as instead of the meaningless 
 luxury which is now the privilege of a few 
 an ever-increasing intercourse with nature 
 would be the source of redoubled joy and 
 strength for all. 
 
 And in the same way science, art, and litera- 
 ture would become in an entirely new degree 
 life- values to men who were no longer driven 
 by the struggle for livelihood; men who can 
 now only see that intellectual life has banquets 
 in preparation, in which they will never have 
 a chance of taking part. 
 
 Just as our intellectual energy might be 
 multiplied, so might our power of giving and 
 receiving real values in social intercourse be 
 developed. At present our social life is to 
 a great extent an expression of our economic 
 interests, our need of credit, our business or 
 official connections, our class position.
 
 The Few and the Many 259 
 
 But when the economic motives were re- 
 moved, we should have more power and cour- 
 age to arrange our life as an expression of our 
 nature, not of our income. Now it is, as a 
 rule, only millionaires who are able to allow 
 themselves the luxury of originality. The 
 poor have no choice; the well-to-do often 
 think themselves obliged "for their credit's 
 sake" to imitate the rich, and these to imitate 
 the richer. Thus, if poverty brutalises the 
 personality, wealth makes it commonplace. 
 His numerous "duties" to his position blunt 
 the individuality of the rich man to such a 
 degree that he becomes a peculiar type just 
 as rarely as the day labourer, and neither the 
 one nor the other has time for real personal 
 life. 
 
 9. Luxury and Culture. Future Possibilities 
 of Happiness 
 
 We sometimes hear it asserted that the 
 wealth of the few, who thereby have the op- 
 portunity of developing luxury, is a condition 
 of all higher culture, and that art in particular 
 would languish without riches. 
 
 If this were really so, the condition of enter- 
 ing into the heaven of fraternity would be
 
 260 The Younger Generation 
 
 plucking out the eye of the sense of beauty 
 and cutting off the creative hand. But it is 
 not true that luxury is an indispensable con- 
 dition of lofty culture. In Athens the State, 
 not the private person, was the patron of 
 art; the private home was simple, the public 
 building magnificent. In Rome again, as 
 everywhere else, it was finally shown that 
 luxury that is, an inappropriate, unnatural, 
 and expensive way of satisfying artificial 
 wants did not develop a true sense of beauty. 
 The latter endeavours in an appropriate, 
 moderate, and beautiful way to satisfy real 
 wants. Indeed, one of the greatest lovers of 
 beauty that ever lived, Goethe, says that all 
 real pleasure is simple; that luxury may do 
 for people without ideas, whereas he himself 
 felt all his mental elasticity relaxed in gor- 
 geous surroundings. The enjoyment of beauty 
 often stands in an inverse proportion to the 
 elaborateness of the apparatus. 
 
 The ancients already expressed the dangers 
 of aestheticism in the subtle saying: "Where 
 you want slaves, you must make music." 
 Isolated enjoyment of beauty leads to the 
 thraldom of the mind and hinders the de- 
 velopment of character which really forms 
 noble, free personalities. Over-refinement
 
 The Few and the Many 261 
 
 always ends in brutality, which is the final 
 stimulus of exhausted nerves. Neither the 
 frigid zone of paucity nor the torrid zone of 
 luxury, but, in this case also, only the tem- 
 perate zone is favourable to the growth of a 
 lofty culture. 
 
 In a society in which no one could indulge 
 in luxury, its place would be taken by what is 
 genuine and exquisite, that is, what bears the 
 stamp of personality. Only that which cor- 
 responded to one's true ego would be looked 
 upon as worthy in every field. Only when 
 each one lived by what he could perform bet- 
 ter than others; when each one associated only 
 with those with whom he was in sympathy; 
 when every home was filled with objects 
 which were fashioned lovingly and chosen 
 and arranged according to the personal taste 
 of their owner; when every one was esteemed, 
 not according to his share in the means of 
 production, but according to his own powers 
 of production only then would the way be 
 prepared for a really beautiful life. 
 
 Of course, even in such conditions, it is not 
 every one who would be able to make life 
 beautiful. All hindrances to the realisation 
 of happiness that proceed from the personality 
 itself, hindrances that are derived either from
 
 262 The Younger Generation 
 
 a heavy or a light temperament, either from 
 a hard or from an over-refined disposition, 
 either from too much frost or from too much 
 fire; all the complications arising from tem- 
 perament or circumstances, between heart 
 and duty, between thought and feeling, be- 
 tween the individuality and society; all these 
 hindrances and complications will still remain 
 even when the economic stress is removed. 
 In a word, psychical laws will continue to 
 operate just as much as the physical laws 
 of nature; and both psychical and physi- 
 cal laws in their inflexible course will of- 
 ten render happiness impossible or produce 
 suffering. 
 
 And new sufferings will arise as the conse- 
 quences, at present unknown, of new condi- 
 tions. These new forms of suffering as well 
 as the old ones may, moreover, be felt more 
 keenly, when we have more leisure for being 
 impressed by pain. But all our sufferings 
 might become more personal, more noble, 
 when they were not, as is now so often the 
 case, caused by or connected with the struggle 
 for livelihood. 
 
 In a reformed society nothing will prove 
 to be perfect. But everything may acquire 
 a starting-point, based upon more real values,
 
 The Few and the Many 263 
 
 for continued development. The belief that 
 they were advancing towards something better 
 would heighten every one's enjoyment of 
 life, whereas now a doubt of all life's val- 
 ues is one of the profoundest causes of 
 weariness. 
 
 It happens not unfrequently that the indi- 
 vidual, after some serious crisis in his life, 
 considers all his spiritual resources exhausted 
 and thinks he has no more strength to suffer 
 or to love. But to his surprise new powers 
 grow up from the mysterious, unknown depths 
 of his own soul. As with the individual, so 
 it is with mankind. 
 
 There have been periods of its history when 
 men have believed themselves faced by a close, 
 whereas they actually stood at a beginning. 
 And those who were preparing this beginning 
 were just the ones who were thought to be 
 hastening the end. 
 
 If at a Roman banquet under the Empire a 
 Stoical philosopher turned the conversation 
 to the abolition of slavery; or if the chaplain 
 of a feudal castle hinted that the serfs could 
 work better in different circumstances ; or if a 
 philanthropist in a French court circle of the 
 eighteenth century spoke of the rights of the 
 people what answer did they receive? That
 
 264 The Younger Generation 
 
 any abolition of existing circumstances would 
 destroy society and civilisation, which the 
 speakers unconsciously identified with their 
 own supremacy. But we know that all these 
 conditions of labour and production have 
 nevertheless been transformed; we know that 
 each time new forces, till then unused, have 
 appeared, and that the material has been cast 
 into new shapes, till then unknown. And 
 there is no reason to despair of humanity's 
 continued power of renewal. 
 
 Two artists have drawn for us what may be 
 and what is. 
 
 Every one knows Guido Reni's Aurora, in 
 which the god of day advances across the sky, 
 while the Hours move round him in a joyful, 
 majestic, graceful dance. Our contemporary, 
 Walter Crane, on the other hand, has repre- 
 sented the Cavalcade of the Hours at the 
 present time in the likeness of charioteers 
 driving their teams with furious lashes of the 
 whip and dashing past each other in a wild 
 race. 
 
 When the hours of the day again appear as 
 the Renaissance artist saw them, treading 
 the dance with ivory feet and beautiful, 
 restrained gestures then will life once more 
 be worth living.
 
 The Few and the Many 265 
 
 10. The Reconciliation of Egoism and Fellow- 
 Feeling 
 
 In a society in which, since the conditions 
 of existence were secured, the aim was the 
 creation not of capital but of culture, it would 
 be possible to use all means for developing 
 individuality if it was seen to be threatened 
 by levelling and to use them as zealously 
 as the education of home, school, and society 
 is now used to extinguish individuality. 
 
 When the wild competitive struggle for 
 existence no longer snatches the women from 
 home, the majority will once more find a field 
 of work there. In a society in which every 
 one could freely seek the work that he found 
 most desirable, aptitude alone would draw a 
 distinction between man's and woman's work. 
 We should see all women taking some part in 
 the government of society, and many devoting 
 themselves to public affairs. But most of them 
 would probably find they had work enough 
 in the capacity of wives, mothers, and house- 
 keepers. In the last-named case we may 
 expect their work to be simplified, both by a 
 more collective arrangement of labour and 
 by constant improvements, but on the whole 
 it would demand more personal work on the
 
 266 The Younger Generation 
 
 part of all, as there would be no special domes- 
 tic servants. This does not, however, preclude 
 the possibility of a practical field of work 
 being found for many women in those homes 
 from which the housewife herself was called 
 away by some public employment. 
 
 Most wives and mothers, however, would 
 doubtless regard the realisation of married 
 life and the bringing-up of their children as 
 their great social work, their science and their 
 art. The training of children must by degrees 
 become as different from that of the present 
 day as the latter is from that of the cave- 
 dwellers. The parents at home, masters and 
 mistresses at school, would all work together 
 in finding out and developing individual apti- 
 tudes, when once it had been seen that the 
 present school system is their death, not their 
 development. And the programme of social- 
 ism the same schools for all must be altered 
 in such a way that higher education became 
 possible for all, but was communicated in a 
 number of schools differing among themselves; 
 or preferably no "schools" at all, but a num- 
 ber of small groups, in which the teachers 
 would have perfect freedom to work with 
 different methods towards the same end the 
 development of personality. The greatest
 
 The Few and the Many 267 
 
 freedom of choice, leisure for absorbing im- 
 pressions and for private study, the best 
 material and the most excellent personal 
 assistance would co-operate towards this end. 
 And it could be reached in a community 
 whose whole endeavour was to cultivate indi- 
 viduality, to discover special powers and put 
 them in the place where they would be most 
 effective. The task would then be, first to 
 allow all to assimilate a certain measure of 
 general education, in order thereby to develop 
 the whole personality, but above all the 
 strongest part of it, the individual aptitude; 
 and then to direct this aptitude to its special 
 object. Now general education is a hindrance 
 to professional training, as it is to individual 
 development, and vice versa. But the experi- 
 ence that a weak general education to a certain 
 extent impedes the progress of the technically 
 trained, and a retarded special training that 
 of the generally educated, must involve the 
 most strenuous efforts to solve the problem in 
 such a way that both branches of education 
 may be given their full rights, when the time 
 arrives at which the training of the younger 
 generation becomes, in reality and not merely 
 in school orations, the vital question of 
 society.
 
 268 The Younger Generation 
 
 But only a society transformed from the 
 foundation can afford the leisure and the 
 means for thus at the same time promoting 
 general education and cultivating individual- 
 ity. Mistakes would of course occur even 
 then. But he who, by the error of himself 
 or others, had taken the wrong road, would 
 have, after an individual training, far more 
 reserve force for making a new road for him- 
 self than he has now in similar circumstances. 
 
 Besides all the possibilities here alluded to 
 of a richer individual cultivation in altered 
 conditions, there is that of enhancing our 
 enjoyment of life by developing our fellow- 
 feeling. Hereby, too, a prospect is opened 
 up that our own enjoyment of life may be 
 infinitely increased through sympathy with 
 others' perceptions of life, a sympathy which 
 is continually deadened by the present labour 
 system based entirely on egoism and com- 
 petition. 
 
 This great and rich fellow-feeling is some- 
 thing quite different from the pity which 
 Nietzsche though unjustly asserts to be 
 the mark of the slavish soul. We find this 
 great fellow-feeling in the real heroes of 
 humanity, who in some form or other have 
 all been helpers of the weak. They have
 
 The Few and the Many 269 
 
 possessed both the individual and the social 
 will, both originality and universality; they 
 have been at the same time realists and ideal- 
 ists, lovers of liberty and philanthropists, or, 
 in a word, incarnate prophecies of the final 
 harmony of humanity, shining proofs of its 
 boundless possibilities of perfection. The 
 hope of this final harmony, in the realisation 
 of which socialism is only one of many transi- 
 tional factors, this hope it is that at great, 
 historic periods of renewal has shed its glory 
 over the age. Men have heard again the 
 voices of the prophets and of Christianity, 
 promising a millennium in which those who 
 have reaped the corn shall eat it and those 
 who have gathered the wine shall drink it; 
 where the voice of weeping shall be no more 
 heard; where one shall not build and another 
 inhabit, and where every man shall sit under 
 his own vine. At such times the greatest 
 spirits have been those who appeared in the 
 noble image of a giant, forcing his own way 
 with one arm, and with the other raising his 
 wounded comrade instead of using both 
 arms to cut his own passage, or both to carry 
 and bind up the wounded. 
 
 We live in one of these great epochs. The 
 battle is still raging between individualism,
 
 270 The Younger Generation 
 
 which demands room for the few, and social- 
 ism, which claims it for the many. When it 
 comes to action in the existing phase, it is 
 the spokesmen of the many who at present 
 have the most important contribution to 
 make. I will sum up my train of thought in 
 an image, which I have used once before in 
 another connection, but which is suggestive 
 in more than one respect. A traveller in the 
 desert was asked by his guide in the silence 
 of the night whether he did not hear deep 
 sighs. "Who should be sighing?" asked the 
 traveller. "The desert," answered his guide; 
 "the desert it is that sighs with longing to 
 become a meadow." 
 
 It is the sigh of this great, uniform desert, 
 still unfertile for culture, that our time, with 
 socialism as its guide, has learned to hear. 
 When the desert has once been transformed 
 into a meadow, there may be a danger that 
 the solitary trees will be forced out by a 
 dense wilderness of grass. But so long as 
 the sandy waste extends between one oasis 
 and another, the uneasy murmurs of the trees 
 there growing are less important than the 
 sighing of the desert.
 
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 between the sexes is a natural one. An 
 interesting suggestion toward the solu- 
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 the form of a proposed subsidizing of 
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 CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His 
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 With an Introduction by Havelock Ellis 
 
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 of what Ellen Key considers to be the new phase it is now entering 
 on, a phase in which the claim to exert the rights and functions of 
 men is less important than the claims of woman's rights as the 
 mother and educator of the coming generation. 
 
 Rahel Varnhagen 
 
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 a target for attacks of various kinds. Friends 
 have in connection with the issues that have 
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 become enemies and friction has been caused 
 in many homes. Her ideals and her purposes 
 have been misquoted and misinterpreted until 
 the very convictions for which she stood have 
 been twisted so as to appear to be the evils that 
 she was attempting to combat. Her critics, not 
 content with decrying and distorting the mes- 
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 even attacked her personal character; and as 
 the majority of these had no direct knowledge 
 in the matter, strange rumors and fancies have 
 been spread abroad about her life. The 
 readers of her books, who are now to be 
 counted throughout the world by the hundreds 
 of thousands, who desire to know the truth 
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 will be interested in this critical study by 
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 been intimate with Ellen Key since her youth. 
 She is herself the wife of the founder of the 
 People's Institute inStockholm,where for over 
 twenty years Ellen Key taught and lectured. 
 
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