THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 VP^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 ftS^
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 STUDIES, LITERARY & POLITICAL 
 AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 STUDIES, LITERARY & POLITICAL 
 AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 
 
 BY THOMAS M. KETTLE 
 
 1 ' 1 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 1918
 
 CONTEN T S 
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Page 
 
 APOLOGY Xi 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS I 
 
 ON CROSSING THE IRISH SEA I7 
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ : GENTLEMAN SOCIALIST 22 
 
 ON WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS 42 
 BODY V. SOUL: FOR THE PLAINTIFF, FRANCIS 
 
 THOMPSON 47 
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 57 
 
 A NEW WAY OF MISUNDERSTANDING Hamlet 62 
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 73 
 
 THE FATIGUE OF ANATOLE FRANCE 77 
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 88 
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 93 
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE lOI 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION IO9 
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 1 29 
 
 LABOUR : WAR OR PEACE ? I4g 
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 1 75 
 
 A MAN TROUBLED ABOUT EVERYTHING I9I 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING NARROW-MINDED I97 
 
 NOVEMBER FIRST: THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 200 
 
 THE UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 203 
 
 V
 
 The Day's Burden : studies literary and political, 
 appeared in 1910, when the late Lieutenant Kettle was a 
 brilliant young member of the Nationalist Parliamentary 
 Party. The book has been for a considerable time out of 
 print ; and its contentsare now, with the exception of a few 
 pages on " Reason in Rhyme," republished in this volume 
 of collected essays, together with a number of studies 
 contributed to the Press between 1910 and the outbreak 
 of the war. In 1912 "A Man Troubled About Every- 
 thing" (Public Opinion), and " The Day of All the Dead " 
 (Freemaii's Jouvnal); in 1913 " The Economics of Nation- 
 alism " (Irish Ecclesiastical i?£co)'rf), " The Importance of 
 Being Narrow-minded" (Public Opinion); in 1914 "The 
 World of the Blind" and "The Unimportance of 
 Politics" (British Review), "Labour and Civilization," 
 and " Labour : War or Peace ?" recall the labour troubles 
 of 1913-14, and particularly the great Dublin strike, in 
 which Mr. Kettle took so vigourous an interest. Both 
 appeared in The Dublin Review. 
 
 VI
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN
 
 TO MY WIFE 
 
 " Not the sea, only wrecks the hopes of men, 
 
 Look deeper, there is shipwreck everywhere " : 
 
 So mourned the exquisite Roman's rich despair, 
 
 Too high in death for that ignoble pen. 
 
 Nero, his wrecker, is amply wrecked since then, 
 
 And all that Rome's a whiff of charnel air ; 
 
 But to subdue Petronius' mal-de-mer 
 
 Have we found drugs ? I pray you, What? and When? 
 
 Shipwreck, one grieves to say, retains its vogue : 
 
 Or let the keel win on in stouter fashion. 
 
 And look ! your golden lie of Tir-na-n'Og 
 
 Is sunset and waste waters, chill and ashen — 
 
 Faith lasts? Nay, since I knew yotir yielded eyes, 
 
 I am content with sight .... of Paradise. 
 
 IX
 
 APOLOGY 
 
 The papers collected here have, for the most part, 
 already appeared in various journals and reviews. 
 I am indebted to the courtesy of the Morning Leader, 
 the New Ireland Review, the Fortnightly Review, and 
 Messrs. Maunsel & Co., for leave to re-publish them. 
 In all cases there has been a good deal of revision 
 and re-writing, and an attempt has been made to 
 impress a certain unity on the constituent materials 
 such as may reasonably be looked for in anything 
 that calls itself a book. The study of Otto Effertz 
 appears for the first time, and is, indeed, as far as I 
 know, the only account that has yet been given in 
 English of that bizarre but brilliant pioneer. Topical 
 articles on Egyptian Nationalism and International 
 Socialism have been included because they give a 
 glimpse of movements which, so far as one can 
 judge, are certain to endure, and of leaders whose 
 influence is likely to grow rather than to diminish in 
 the immediate future. 
 
 For title I have ventured to use The Day's Burden 
 because that seems to me to be the most characteristic 
 thing about the day, and because all these essays are 
 concerned with "problems" — economic, political, 
 and Hterary. To anyone who, glancing at the foreign 
 names which recur in these pages, asks with a sniff 
 of contempt, "What has all this got to do with 
 Ireland?" I do not know what reply to make. 
 Something like this, perhaps : Ireland, a small nation, 
 is, none the less, large enough to contain all the 
 complexities of the twentieth century. There is no 
 ecstasy and no agony of the modern soul remote from 
 her experience; there is none of all the difficulties 
 
 xi
 
 APOLOGY 
 
 which beset men, eager to build at last a wise and 
 stable society, that she has not encountered. In 
 some of them she has even been the forerunner of 
 the world. If this generation has, for its first task, 
 the recovery of the old Ireland, it has, for its second, 
 the discovery of the new Europe. Ireland awaits 
 her Goethe — but in Ireland he must not be a Pagan 
 — who will one day arise to teach her that while a 
 strong people has its own self for centre, it has the 
 universe for circumference. All cultures belong to a 
 nation that has once taken sure hold of its own 
 culture. A national literature that seeks to found 
 itself in isolation from the general life of humanity 
 can only produce the pale and waxen growths of a 
 plant isolated from the sunlight. In gaining her 
 own soul Ireland will gain the whole world. Till 
 that Goethe is born, and the new fabric begins to 
 rise under his inspiration, we must go on shovelling 
 together our trivial heaps of sand and rubble. 
 
 That is all I would dare to say in placation of the 
 contemptuous sniff. Originality is a toy that no 
 goddess left in my cradle. My only programme for 
 Ireland consists, in equal parts, of Home Rule and 
 the Ten Commandments. My only counsel to 
 Ireland is, that in order to become deeply Irish, she 
 must become European. 
 
 October 19 lo. 
 
 Xll
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
 POLITICS ' 
 
 The subject I have chosen for my paper is almost 
 an insult to your intelligence. I could occupy the 
 whole time at my disposal by merely reading you a 
 list of writers who have devoted themselves to the 
 establishment of a science of politics, and among 
 them you would find, from Aristotle downwards, the 
 masters and shapers of human thought. What then 
 must you think of the audacity of an attempt, with 
 the inadequate time and the infinitely inadequate 
 resources at my command, to give some account not 
 merely of political science but of the philosophical 
 ideas on which it rests ? I know, however, that I 
 can count on your indulgence. And I would ask you 
 to accept the title of this paper in a large and charit- 
 able way, and to forgive its pretentiousness. 
 
 It does seem to me that a political society like this 
 is under the obligation of taking an occasional bath 
 in the sea of fundamental ideas. Practical people 
 regard such a proceeding, it must be admitted, with 
 extreme distrust. If one desires an early and 
 extensive unpopularity there is no surer way to it 
 than to insist on analyzing received principles. 
 Our mothers, you will remember, used to have the 
 strangest objection to our taking their watches to 
 pieces. They rather doubted our competence to 
 put the springs and wheels together again. Society 
 experiences much the same state of mind with regard 
 
 1 Presidential Address before the Young Ireland Branch of the 
 United Irish League, December 1905. 
 
 B
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 to the attempt to reduce it to terms of mere reason. 
 Society is right, but it is only the nineteenth century 
 that has made its attitude possible. It needed a 
 long development of psychological and historical 
 study to make us understand that reason is but one 
 faculty of a many-facultied being; that the forces 
 which used to be brusquely dismissed as mere senti- 
 ment, mere instinct, mere enthusiasm, are inseparable 
 elements of human nature. We have come to realize, 
 in a word, that life is incomparably vaster, more 
 various, and more complex than any theory of it. I 
 dwell on this because it has a special bearing on our 
 subject. In approaching political science we must 
 remember that it does not profess to reproduce the 
 rich detail of life in society, but stands to it rather 
 as a chart to an ocean or a mathematical formula to 
 the path of a planet. Still, if reason has abandoned 
 the tyranny which it once aimed at, its call can none 
 the less be denied. We must render ourselves some 
 rational account of the forces by which and among 
 which we live. Among the greatest of these is the 
 society, the political framework, in which we are 
 born and in which our lives are cast. Call yourself 
 a non-politician as loudly as you choose, you will 
 never succeed in ignoring politics ; therefore of 
 necessity an attempt must be made to understand 
 them. What is the object of politics, what we are 
 justified in expecting it to do and what it cannot do, 
 what part it should play in the life of the individual 
 modern man, and what is the temper in which a wise 
 man will approach it — these are questions neither 
 remote nor abstract, but questions that come 
 knocking at your door and mine, and that have to 
 be answered. All I can hope to do to-night is to 
 suggest, in a random and completely undogmatic 
 fashion, points of view from which politics may be 
 regarded, and principles by which the efficiency of 
 institutions may be tested.
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 When we speak of politics as a science we must 
 remember that the word is used with a difference. 
 The characteristic note of a natural science is its 
 ability to predict with mathematical accuracy. Such 
 prophetic power cannot be attributed to politics. 
 The stupendous complexity of the subject-matter, 
 the endless chain of action and interaction make it 
 impossible to gather all the data necessary for 
 certainty. And then that unpredictable element 
 called free-will is constantly interloping to upset 
 the logic of your determinist drama. Still there are 
 large principles which seem to approach the certainty 
 of physical laws. One can find a ready illustration 
 in what we very properly heard a great deal about 
 at the Convention the other day, the need for unity. 
 That without unity — of action, of course, for absolute 
 unity of thought and feeling we neither can have, 
 nor should demand — a political party must be 
 ineffective is surely just as certain as any law of 
 chemistry or physics ? The principle it embodies 
 is one implicit in the constitution of every state, 
 namely, that the will of the majority of duly chosen 
 representatives must, as regards action, prevail over 
 the will of the minority. Deny that principle and 
 you cannot pass a single legislative Act ; you cannot 
 levy a single tax. In the long history of English 
 insolence there is hardly anything else so insolent as 
 Mr. Balfour's demand with regard to our University 
 Question. He said, you will remember, that no Bill 
 could be introduced to realize this reform unless 
 there was absolute unanimity among all interested 
 parties in Ireland. Had he applied that maxim 
 consistently to English political life, to political life 
 anywhere, the result would be that no government 
 could continue for twelve hours. In proclaiming it 
 Mr. Balfour was proclaiming himself an Anarchist. 
 This principle, then, that the will of the majority, 
 registered in the due forms and under the due safe-
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 guards of individual freedom, must prevail over the 
 will of the minority affords a good example of the 
 sort of established law we can hope for in political 
 science. 
 
 I pass on to the fundamental question : What is 
 the object of politics ? Politics in its largest sense 
 includes the whole control and management of 
 public affairs by the government in power, together 
 with the whole process of agitation by which the 
 masses of people not in power seek to influence 
 and alter the conduct of things. Now, if you look 
 in the text-books you will find that the object of 
 government is order. But what is the object of 
 order ? That is a point w^hich ought to be con- 
 sidered by the inflamed gentlemen from the West 
 of Ireland who write letters signed " A Disgusted 
 Loyalist " to the Irish Times demanding the vindi- 
 cation of what they call " law and order." Law 
 and order are not absolutes, but merely means to 
 an end. To mistake them for ends in themselves 
 is to regard the shell as the important element in 
 the e^^, the fence as the important element in the 
 field. The cry of " Order for Order's sake " is as 
 ruinously foolish as that of art for art's sake, or 
 money for money's sake. It is for the sake of 
 humanity that all these must exist. Behind order 
 there is life, and it is only in so far as it tends to 
 increase the sum and improve the quality of life 
 that any system of government or scheme of positive 
 law^ is ethically justifiable. If you analyse the rights 
 commonly regarded as essential and inalienable — 
 the right to property, to personal safety, to marriage 
 — you will find as the common source of them all 
 this right to life. And by life I mean not merely 
 physical existence, but that rich human existence 
 which can be had only in community, that sort of 
 life which Edmund Burke had in mind when he 
 described the State as "a partnership in all science,
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 a partnership in all art, a partnership in every 
 virtue, and in all perfection." 
 
 You will say, perhaps, that this test of govern- 
 ment — Does it forward life ? — is vague. Life, even 
 in the biological sense, has not been defined. That 
 is perfectly true. But we do not demand, as I have 
 said, in politics the mapped-out mathematical 
 certainty of natural science. The average man 
 possesses a sufficiently clear notion for practical 
 purposes of the conditions that make life desirable, 
 beautiful, and worthy to be lived. A government 
 is good or bad, the order it maintains is the dis- 
 cipline of liberty or that of oppression, in so far as 
 it promotes or hinders the \\ide diffusion of these 
 conditions. I think you will find this test of life a 
 helpful one in your attempt to gather together in 
 some binding idea the currents of effort that make 
 up contemporary Ireland. Somebody has compared 
 the role of a general idea to that of a magnet. If 
 you bring a magnet into contact with a glass plate 
 on which there is a confused mass of iron filings it 
 immediately strains and sets them into regular 
 and beautiful patterns. The filings represent 
 the chaos of concrete facts that experience brings 
 thronging in on us, and the magnetic idea that 
 makes them intelligible, as it has created them, is 
 that of life. It is the one justificatory word on the 
 tongues of the emigrants as they stream down to the 
 ships. They "want to see life." By no mere acci- 
 dent is it that the Gaelic League which started with 
 language has gathered round it games, singing, 
 dancing, and all the arts of friendly intercourse. 
 These all stand for life, joyously realizing itself under 
 benign conditions. It has been said that all govern- 
 ment exists to hang a fowl before the Sunday fire of 
 every peasant. Dancing is less necessary than eating, 
 and more beautiful. It represents the free energy 
 of a life that has not merely withstood but has 
 
 5
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 conquered the hostility of external circumstances, and 
 you will understand the sense in which I say that all 
 contemporary Irish movements exist in order to set 
 a boy and a girl dancing at a Sunday ceilidh. 
 
 Analyze the agitation to break up the grass ranches 
 and to give the land to the people and to the plough 
 and you will find that it rests on two assumptions — 
 not very daring assumptions ! The first is that the 
 life of a human being is more precious and worthier 
 to be forwarded by the State than that of a bullock. 
 The second is that if an individual persists in so using 
 the property which society allows him to control, as 
 to base his personal comfort and prosperity on the 
 misery and degradation of others, while a cleaner 
 way of living is open to him, then society has both 
 the right and the duty to break his selfish monopoly.' 
 For he has declared war on society, and has violated 
 the obligations of the social bond. 
 
 This test of life changes our attitude towards posi- 
 tive law in general. Take the common description 
 of life that it is a "continuous adjustment of internal 
 
 1 Cf. Naudet, Previiers Principes de Sociologie CathoUque. Bloud et 
 Cie, Paris. 1904. P. 31. "The Canon Law, as the great historian 
 Janssen tells us, regarded property as a fief granted by God. This 
 doctrine, founded on Scripture, involves the evident consequence 
 that the owner of property is responsible before God for the use to 
 which he puts his property. He must not use it after his mere 
 caprice ; and the Popes as guardians of the law of justice have 
 more than once asserted this principle against owners who had 
 disregarded it. Thus we find Clement IV., in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, giving permission to any stranger to break up the third part 
 of an estate which the owner persistently refused to till. Sixtus 
 IV., in the fifteenth century, decrees that ' power is given in future 
 and always to all and each to till and sow in the territory of Rome 
 and the patrimony of St. Peter, in Tuscany as well as on thejlittoral 
 of Campania, at the usual and proper times, one third of the un- 
 cultivated lands, to be chosen at will, whoever the landlord should 
 be. ..." It was held sufficient to have asked the landlord for 
 leave to enter on the lands, even though this leave had been refused." 
 Naudet cites Clement VII., Pius VI. and Pius VII. as having 
 confirmed and renewed this insistence on the social duties of 
 property.
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 to external relations" and apply it to human society, 
 and, in its light, law loses its old iron absoluteness. 
 It shows itself not as something fixed and immutable, 
 but as an imperfect transcript of the moral conditions 
 necessary to safeguard life, changing continually with 
 these conditions. Ethical principles are, of course, 
 invariable; but the formal enactments in which they 
 are imperfectly embodied form a system, developing, 
 as we hope, towards a fuller realization. It is the 
 thought-climate, called in a large way evolution, and 
 so characteristic of the nineteenth century, that has 
 given us this new point of view. We have applied 
 it to some pretensions of the law courts and seen them 
 w ither up ; we might also extend it to some of the 
 commonplaces of popular thought. There is not, I 
 suppose, a more insistent and widespread demand 
 with regard to Irish questions than that they should 
 be "finally" settled. But once grasp the idea of a 
 state as a living, developing organism, and this 
 expectation of finality is seen to be a pure illusion. 
 Popular thought is never altogether wrong, and of 
 course there is an obvious sense in which, for example, 
 a comprehensive measure of Home Rule might be 
 regarded as a "final" settlement of our political 
 status. Still, even in this case, the notion is illusory 
 and misleading. Life is growth ; growth is change ; 
 and the one thing of which we are certain is that 
 society must keep moving on. Freedom is a battle 
 and a march. It has man}' bivouacs, but no bar- 
 racks. You remember the counsel given by the 
 serving-man in the heroic tale to Diarmuid and 
 Grainne. "In the place where you catch your food 
 you must not cook it, and in the place where you 
 cook it you must not eat it, and in the place where 
 you eat it you must not sleep." On society an 
 analogous doom — if you call it a doom — has been 
 pronounced. 
 
 I have dwelt on this illusion of finality because one
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 sees it everywhere producing a dogmatic conserva- 
 tism, a feeling of things done and done with, than 
 which there is no greater obstacle to progress. You 
 go to a statesman and say — " This problem of the 
 Congested Districts is terribly pressing. You must 
 bring in legislation to deal with it." Then he looks 
 up his statute-book and says — "Congested Districts ! 
 Oh, that question is settled ; we passed an Act in 
 i8gi." It is much the same as if you were to say to 
 a starving man — " Dinner ! Oh, you had a dinner 
 two months ago." 
 
 The object of politics then is order, and the object 
 of order is to increase the sum and improve the 
 quality of human life. What, we may next ask, is 
 the drift of current opinion as to the means that 
 should be used and the psychological forces that 
 must be put in harness in order to this end ? In other 
 words, what political ideas has the experience of 
 the wonderful nineteenth century left most clearly 
 defined ? There can be but little dispute as to 
 the answer. The t\\o supreme facts, the two 
 shaping forces of the nineteenth century, were 
 Nationality and Democracy — the latter came in 
 direct lineage from the French Revolution, the 
 former brought first to full self-consciousness by the 
 reaction against the abstract cosmopolitanism of 
 '8g. Look to Irish history and j^ou will see at once 
 that these have been the shaping forces of the last 
 century of her life. But look elsewhere and you will 
 see the same; you will see that in this as in so many 
 other things Ireland has been in the main stream of 
 European history. The opinion of an Irish Nationa- 
 list may be suspect. I appeal, therefore, to the 
 authority of Professor Bury, formerly of Trinity 
 College, now Regius Professor of History at Cam- 
 bridge. He is speaking of the impulse given to 
 historical studies by the upsurging of national feeling, 
 for, of course, a nation is before all things a spiritual 
 
 8
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 principle whose source and charter is to be found in 
 history. 
 
 " The saying," he writes, " that the name of hope 
 is remembrance was vividly illustrated, on a vast 
 scale, by the spirit of resurgent nationality which 
 you know has governed, as one of the most puissant 
 forces, the political course of the last century and is 
 still unexhausted. When the peoples, inspired by 
 the national idea, were stirred to mould their destinies 
 anew, and looking back with longing to the more 
 distant past based on it their claims for independence 
 or for unity, history was one of the most effective 
 weapons in their armouries; and consequently 
 a powerful motive was supplied to historical 
 investigation." ^ 
 
 In Belgium, in Italy, in Hungary, in Germany, 
 in Norway, in Poland, in Ireland, nationality has 
 been the great formative and disruptive impulse of 
 the nineteenth century. Whatever gloomy mood we 
 may fall into in the struggle for autonomy we have 
 certainly no justification for feeling lonely ! There 
 was a school of political philosophy — it still lifts here 
 and there an antique voice — which, when it had 
 called nationality a mere sentiment, thought that it 
 had dismissed it from the arena of practical affairs. 
 That habit of mind may have been excusable in the 
 
 iBury. An Inaugural Lectiiye, igo3. P. 13. That great master 
 of common sense and uncommon sanctity, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 has his lesson for modern Imperialism — " It belonp:s to the study 
 of politics to know how great should be the magnitude of a state 
 and whether it should embrace men of one or many races ; for the 
 greatness of a state should be such that the fertility of its land is 
 sufficient to its needs, and that it should be able to repel violent 
 enemies. For it ought rather to be founded of one race ; some 
 oneness of nationality, involving the same manners and customs, 
 is that which brings about friendship among citizens because of 
 their likeness : whence states that were made up of divers nations, 
 by reason of the dissensions that they had because of the diversity 
 of their customs, were destroyed, since one party joined with the 
 enemy for hatred of the other party."— C/. H. C. O'Neill, New 
 Things and Old in St. Thomas Aquinas.
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 eighteenth century, but we understand things better 
 now. We realize life in its concrete richness 
 and man as a complex of remembrances, instincts, 
 intuitions, and emotional needs. The historical 
 studies of the last century, the Romantic Move- 
 ment, and the vast development of psychology, 
 both in formal studies and in art of every kind, 
 especially the novel, have rehabilitated that vast 
 area of consciousness which used to be dismissed 
 as " sentiment." There was a time when man was 
 conceived as an avaricious machine. If you found 
 anything in your mind other than calculating selfish- 
 ness you were outside the pale of humanity. But 
 now nobody need be ashamed to admit that he 
 detects himself in an occasional generous impulse. 
 Louis Kossuth was saying the other day that " it is 
 in active national sentiment not in political forms 
 that we are to look for the secret of government." 
 And there is not a Foreign Office in Europe but 
 recognizes that where there is an historic nationality, 
 unexpressed so far in the form of a visible state, there 
 is a contradiction of human nature which cannot 
 last. You will not ask me to analyze the idea of 
 Nationality. It has been discussed in this country 
 for the last nine or ten years with an earnestness 
 amounting often to fury, and nearly everything has 
 been said. " The nation," says Anatole France, in 
 a fine phrase, " is a communion of memories and of 
 hopes." You may well find its source in that need 
 for self-realization which is also, in one view, the 
 source of all individual morality. But that is a 
 notion drawn from German metaphysics, and meta- 
 physics, if we are to believe all we read in our weekly 
 papers, is the unforgivable sin. But this I will say, 
 that if you read any one of the treatises on politics, 
 read at Oxford and Cambridge by the young gentle- 
 men who afterwards come over to dragoon us, you 
 will find that there is not in the most exacting of 
 
 10
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 them a single test of nationality which Ireland does 
 not satisfy. A distinctive language, a characteristic 
 national temperament and outlook on life, a history, 
 a sentiment of unity in the present, common 
 memories, common interests, a geographical area 
 large enough to constitute an independent state — is 
 there a single one of these elements that we do not 
 possess? If you go even further and examine the 
 conditions demanded by these English writers to 
 justify rebellion or disruption, adding to what has 
 been said as to the satisfaction of national senti- 
 ment, this — I quote from Sidgwick — " Some serious 
 oppression or misgovernment, some unjust sacrifice 
 or grossly incompetent management of their 
 interests, or some persistent and harsh opposition 
 to their legitimate desires," you will find on the 
 principles of these English writers themselves that 
 an Irish War of Independence would be to-day 
 justifiable if it were possible. 
 
 Side by side with Nationality stands democracy. 
 It is impossible to define democracy ; it is a principle 
 still unrealized, an unfinished process. It has been 
 described as " that form of social organization which 
 tends to develop to the maximum the conscience and 
 the responsibility of the individual citizen." This 
 description lays stress on the central characteristic 
 of democracy, the belief in individuality and the 
 endeavour to foster it. To the feudalistic governing 
 mind the citizen, or rather I should say the 
 "subject," was an item, a something little better 
 than a chattel, committed to the care of those 
 whom, as the old jurists said. Providence had placed 
 over him. The placing had, as a matter of fact,, 
 been done by the luck of circumstances. If a man 
 had the wisdom to be born well, he sat on the necks 
 of the masses ; if he were born badly, his own neck 
 suffered for it. Such a tyranny as this, even if it 
 were beneficent, could not live in the atmosphere 
 
 II
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 of the modern world. We have discovered that 
 nobody is wise enough or pure enough to bear the 
 temptation of uncontrolled power, and we are 
 endeavouring as far as possible to remove such 
 occasions of sin. The democratic spirit may be 
 said to be more or less expressible in two proposi- 
 tions. The first is that government should rest on 
 the active consent of the governed. It is this right 
 and necessity of human nature that has been behind 
 the demand for representative institutions from the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century to the end, from 
 the Paris barricades of 1830 and the English Reform 
 Bill of 1832 to the Russian Revolution and the 
 Women Suffrage movement. The second thesis 
 of democracy is, roughly, that any one self-support- 
 ing and law-abiding citizen is, on the average, as 
 well qualified as another for the work of govern- 
 ment. I should prefer to put it that no citizen, 
 or section of citizens, is as likely to conduct the 
 government for the general benefit as the whole 
 body of citizens acting in concert. Wherever there 
 is a privileged class there is corruption, and a cult 
 of sectional to the disregard of wider interests. 
 Democracy will, of course, have its governing 
 classes, but they will not be fortressed about with 
 unbreachable privileges. If we now turn to Irish 
 history it is easy to see that it is a passage from 
 feudalism to democracy. Thus, when Mr. Michael 
 Davitt came to write the story of the Land War, he 
 inevitably called it The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland. 
 Under the same title j'ou might gather every stream 
 of agitation, every Act that could be in any sense 
 called beneficial, from the Abolition of Tithes and 
 Catholic Emancipation to the Local Government 
 Act. They are all parts of a process which is shift- 
 ing the centre of power from privileged, arbitrary 
 classes to responsible, representative classes. It is 
 significant also that in that question most remote 
 
 12
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 from current politics, higher education, Democracy 
 has been taken for the pillar of light. Everywhere 
 the demand is for a democratic University; and we 
 mean by that not only that the fees must be low but 
 that the civic fervour of the institution must be high, 
 and that it must be a centre of creative democratic 
 thought. 
 
 To speak of politics is necessarily to speak of edu- 
 cation, at least of education in citizenship. A few 
 w^ords must suffice. Public opinion in this country 
 has made up its mind that its schools shall be places 
 in which love and reverence for the motherland shall 
 be fostered. Democracy will teach in its schools, 
 as well, love and reverence for the State. It is the 
 fashion to disbelieve in the practical value of ideas 
 and enthusiasms, but a democratized Ireland will 
 understand human nature better. The chief 
 channel of instruction will naturally be history, 
 modern history. The complete neglect of this is 
 the scandal of English education. History is not 
 only the true scientific method of approach to social 
 problems, it is the very substance of citizenship. 
 
 "It is of vital importance," writes Professor Bury, 
 " for citizens to have a true knowledge of the past 
 and to see it in a dry light in order that their in- 
 fluence on the present and future may be exerted in 
 right directions. . . ." 
 
 And he adds — 
 
 " It seems inevitable that, as this truth is more 
 fully and widely though slowly realized, the place 
 which history occupies in national education will 
 grow larger and larger." 
 
 "In France, in Germany, in America," writes the 
 Regius Professor of History at Oxford, Mr. Firth, 
 "nineteenth century history, national and European, 
 has a permanent place in historical studies. It is 
 not considered unfit for teaching or unworthy of 
 study; nor is it held that historical teachers or 
 
 13
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 students are incapable of studying it without displays 
 of party feeling." ^ 
 
 So much for what I believe to be the two main 
 ideas explanatory of contemporary Ireland as of 
 Europe in general. One word seems to be necessary 
 as to the limitations of politics. Politics is the science 
 of order: it cannot take the place of the other 
 human activities, but can only keep them in their 
 places. Extravagant demands are sometimes made 
 on politicians, especially in Ireland. Because they 
 are described as " representative," people expect to 
 find incarnate in them the whole national life from 
 the making of shirts to the making of poetry. But 
 politics, as such, is just as much a specialized ac- 
 tivity as brick-laying. It is not co-extensive with 
 life; there are vast areas of private life into which it 
 would be tyranny for it to intrude. It does not 
 claim, and j^ou cannot ask it to make shirts or poetry. 
 Its duty is to provide the conditions in which the 
 greatest number of citizens can live happily, whether 
 by making shirts or by making sonnets. 
 
 In what spirit should one approach the actual work 
 of politics? I speak only for myself, but I think that 
 one should take enthusiasm for the driving force and 
 irony as a refuge against the inevitable disappoint- 
 ments. " What I need to realize," says Spencer, 
 "is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything 
 I can do, and how infinitely important it is that I 
 should do it." Might not a politician choose a 
 worse motto than that ? Disillusionment is so 
 commonly the fifth act of political agitation, 
 mainly because of the illusive finality upon which 
 I have touched. But a wise man soon grows dis- 
 illusioned of disillusionment. The first lilac freshness 
 of life will, indeed, never return. The graves are 
 sealed, and no hand will open them to give us 
 back dead comrades or dead dreams. As we 
 
 iC. H. Firth. A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History. P. 17. 
 
 14
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 
 
 look out on the burdened march of humanity, as we 
 look in on the leashed but straining passions of our 
 unpurified hearts, we can but bow our heads and 
 accept the discipline of pessimism. Bricriu must 
 have his hour as well as Cuchullin. But the cynical 
 mood is one that can be resisted. Cynicism, how- 
 ever excusable in literature, is in life the last treachery, 
 the irredeemable defeat. Politics, let us remember, 
 is the province not of the second-best, as has been 
 said, but of the second worst. We must be content, 
 or try to be content, with little. But we must con- 
 tinue loyal to the instinct that makes us hope much; 
 we must believe in all the Utopias. 
 
 If you engage in politics in Ireland, and if con- 
 ditions remain as they are, certain other points must 
 be remembered. You would do well to study the 
 novitiate through which an idea passes before it be- 
 comes a law. It arises out of the misery, and contains 
 in it the salvation of a countryside ; the State wel- 
 comes it with a policeman's baton. It recovers ; the 
 State puts it in jail, on a plank bed, and feeds it on 
 skilly. It becomes articulate in Parliament : a 
 statesman from the moral altitude of ^^ 5,000 a year 
 denounces it as the devilish device of a hired dema- 
 gogue. It grows old, almost obsolete, no longer 
 adequate; the statesman steals it, embodies it in an 
 Act, and goes down to British history as a daring 
 reformer. From your own side also there will be 
 something to be borne. If you cannot agree with a 
 colleague as to tactics, even though they be but 
 minor tactics, he may found a paper, or write a letter, 
 or a lyric, denouncing you to posterity as a traitor, 
 red-handed with your country's blood. I see no help 
 for it except to take these things as mere bye-play, 
 decorative flourishes on the text of politics. After 
 all there is the two-edged sword that will never fail 
 you, w^ith enthusiasm for one of its edges and irony 
 for the other. However mired and weedy be the 
 
 15
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 current of life there will be always joy and loj^alty 
 enough left to keep you unwavering in the faith that 
 politics is not as it seems in clouded moments, a 
 mere gabble and squabble of selfish interests, but 
 that it is the State in action. And the State is the 
 name by which we call the great human conspiracy 
 against hunger and cold, against loneliness and 
 ignorance ; the State is the foster-mother and war- 
 den of the arts, of love, of comradeship, of all that 
 redeems from despair that strange adventure which 
 we call human life. 
 
 i6
 
 ON CROSSING THE IRISH SEA 
 
 Geography is a prudent science : but one day she 
 will take risks, even the risk of being interesting. 
 She will hang about the naked games and gaunt 
 outline of places their due garment of romance. 
 When that time comes it is not a scientist but a poet 
 that will be chosen to evoke the spirits of hatred and 
 tragedy, of malice and despair, of irony and disillu- 
 sion which move, with un pausing haste but with 
 no rest, over the waters of the Irish Sea. 
 
 Yet there is no outer thing that should awaken 
 such a mood. It is a bright, even a radiant day as 
 we clear the harbour, which in English is the King's 
 Town, but in Irish the Fort of Laoire. The sunlight 
 as it falls is shattered into a manifold glitter of 
 diamonds. The soft purples and cloudy greys of 
 the Wicklow hills shepherd you into the fold of 
 dreams. " A pleasant land of drowsihead," as the 
 first James Thomson would have called it, with the 
 formal romanticism of his formal century. A vision 
 before which the soul might well forget its anguish, 
 and remember only its aspirations. But over it 
 there is a shadow not of the sun's casting, the 
 shadow of history. 
 
 A chapter of the New Geography may very ^^■ell 
 open somewhat after this fashion : Ireland is a small 
 but insuppressible island half an hour nearer the 
 sunset than Great Britain. From Great Britain it 
 is separated by the Irish Sea, the Act of Union, and 
 the perorations of the Tory party. The political 
 philosophy of the last of these is even shallower 
 than the physical basin of the first. Ireland is dis- 
 covered from time to time by valiant journalists, 
 
 c 17
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 mostly of a sensitive temperament. Their accounts 
 \2iry. Ireland is, however, admitted by all to be 
 unprogressive : as witness, when it is half-past twelve 
 in London it is only five minutes past twelve in 
 Dublin. 
 
 The people of Ireland are universally described as 
 absolutely incapable of united action. At the 
 same time the political machine is so monstrously 
 efficient as to suppress all individual freedom. 
 Observers are agreed that the Irish exhibit no 
 tenacity of purpose or stability of character. 
 Indeed, Froude explained the failure of Celtic 
 Ireland to develop a native drama by this circum- 
 stance. No Irishman — he argued — has sufficient 
 consistency of character to carry him through five 
 acts : and you cannot put a man into a play if he 
 insists on becoming somebody else at the end of 
 every act. Infirm of purpose and frail of ethical 
 fibre as she is — and all her impartial enemies concur 
 as to the fact — Ireland has for seven centuries with- 
 stood the impact of the strongest nation in Western 
 Europe. 
 
 Ireland has been finally conquered at least three 
 times; she has died in the last ditch repeatedly: 
 she has been a convict in the dock, a corpse on the 
 dissecting-table, a street-dog yapping at the heels of 
 Empire, a geographical expression, a misty memory. 
 And with an obtuseness to the logic of facts which 
 one can only call mulish, she still answers " Adsum." 
 Her interdicted flag still floats at the mast-head, 
 and, brooding over the symbol, she still keeps build- 
 ing an impossible future on an imaginary past. 
 English parties in turn wipe her for ever off the 
 slate of practical politics. She remains wiped off 
 for a year or two ; but as the sands slip by, the 
 sand-built policies crumble and collapse. New 
 battalions loom up to the right wing or the left; 
 and the Tory Press remembers the phrase of the 
 
 i8
 
 CROSSING THE IRISH SEA 
 
 Confederate General who saw victory suddenly 
 snatched out of his hands by Meagher's Brigade : 
 " There comes that damned green flag again !" 
 
 All this might seem a matter of racial pride, and 
 a sign of racial strength. But any Unionist can see 
 with half an eye — and people are Unionists precisely 
 because they have only half an eye to see with — that 
 it is mere obstinacy. It is motived by the same folly 
 which leads a man to waste his substance in litiga- 
 tion in order that he may live for all time as a 
 leading case. Ireland clamours incessantly for 
 Home Rule ; she wants to sit in her own armchair 
 by her own fireside and mind her own business. 
 But the very iteration of this demand is, to any well- 
 conditioned mind, conclusive proof that it is not 
 sincere. 
 
 The unbroken triumph of the same program at 
 election after election shows it to be the watchword 
 of a purely artificial agitation. To give Ireland what 
 she asks for would clearly be to promote discontent 
 and disloyalty. In view of the peril of foreign 
 assault and invasion it is an indispensable part of 
 military tactics that Great Britain and Ireland 
 should be enemies, not friends. Unless Irish mem- 
 bers of Parliament were compelled to settle the 
 question of English education, and English members 
 of Parliament compelled to settle the question of 
 Irish land tenure, the whole fabric of civilization 
 would be compromised. 
 
 It may very well be that Ireland, as a result, is 
 the spectre at the banquet of Empire. But was a 
 banquet ever dramatically complete \\ithout a 
 spectre? Lord Castlereagh's Act of Union must 
 be upheld, so much wiser is it to tie the parts of an 
 Empire together with a thread of formal law rather 
 than to let them grow together in the organic unity 
 which joins the main branch of a tree to the trunk. 
 To be sure. Home Rule does not involve the repeal 
 
 19
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 even of Lord Castlereagh's Act of Union, but it is 
 the duty of every loyal citizen to pretend that it 
 means complete separation. To tell the truth would 
 shame the devil, and where would Imperialism be 
 without the devil ? As between England and 
 Ireland, therefore, 
 
 Let wisdom, friendship, peace, and commerce die. 
 But leave us still the politician's lie. 
 
 These are, perhaps, unpardonable thoughts. It 
 would be better to go and sit in the smoking-room, 
 or move about amid the lively bustle of lawyers, 
 legislators, cattle-dealers, golfers, journalists, bat- 
 eyed tourists, and hawk-eyed commercial travellers 
 who are doing their valiant best to annex the Irish 
 Sea in the interest of that most greedy of all the 
 Imperialisms, the Commonplace. 
 
 They are doing their best, but they are not succeed- 
 ing. It was Uhland, I think, who paid the Rhine 
 boatman a double fare because he had carried, 
 unknowingly, the ghost of a dead comrade. The 
 Company would be rich, indeed, if all the ghosts 
 that hurry restlessly back and forward across 
 the Irish Sea were amenable to the ticket-office ! 
 Strongbow, the first filibuster, with MacMurrough,the 
 first traitor ; Kildare, the masterful earl ; Shane 
 O'Neill going in saffron pride to greet Elizabeth as 
 a king greets a queen ; Sarsfield passing to exile and 
 death in France ; the highwaymen-bishops of the 
 eighteenth century ; Castlereagh, O'Connell, Balfour, 
 Parnell . . . the very names are an epic and a 
 litany of desolation. 
 
 But the deck is beginning to experiment in 
 positions other than the horizontal. The grey, cold, 
 sliding treachery of the sea comes out through the 
 surface brightness. One wonders if the sea that 
 gives empires may not take them suddenly back. 
 
 20
 
 CROSSING THE IRISH SEA 
 
 At all events, I am going to be sea-sick. It will be 
 another argument for Home Rule. "The Channel," 
 said Grattan, using the English name for the Irish 
 Sea, " forbids union, as the ocean forbids separation." 
 One should be glad to be sea-sick in assertion of so 
 slashing an epigram. To-night there will be the 
 million globes of London to look at, gleaming through 
 the fog like monstrous and sinister oranges in some 
 garden of life and death. To-morrow afternoon we 
 shall be in the House of Commons supping full of 
 old calumnies and hatreds. But when is Ireland 
 going to have her chance ? When will voyagers, 
 leaning on the deck-rail, catch the first purple 
 glimpse of Wicklow with eyes innocent of political 
 passion ? 
 
 1909. 
 
 21
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ: 
 GENTLEMAN SOCIALIST' 
 
 Books have their fates; and it can only be an 
 unhappy fate that has prevented Otto Effertz' Les 
 Antagonismes Economiques from achieving a briUiant 
 position in the literature of Socialism. It is by no 
 means his first appearance, and he is very far from 
 being a raw revolutionary. As long ago as 1888 he 
 made public his novel and characteristic thought in 
 Arbeit Und Boden. The book was tendered as a 
 thesis, Effertz tells us, to every University in Ger- 
 many, and was rejected not sans phrase, but on the 
 contrary with many pharses of violent and even scur- 
 rilous contempt by them all. The Social Democrats 
 were no better pleased with a writer who claimed to 
 have shattered Marxism with a single tap of his new 
 hammer, aud none of their journals so much as re- 
 viewed Arbeit Und Boden. But, on the other hand, 
 Adere writing in Conrad's great H andworterbuch der 
 Staatswissenschaften, hailed Effertz as one of the few 
 theorists of Socialism of whom the Economics of 
 the future must take account. M. Charles Andler, 
 who contributes a preface to Les Antagonismes, 
 lectured on him in Paris. M. Adolphe Landry, whose 
 text-book is as widely used by students in France 
 and Switzerland as that of Gide, ranks him con- 
 sistently as the peer of Marshall, Schmoller and 
 Philipovich, Nevertheless, he hastens to add, this 
 original German is practically unknown, and his work 
 
 ^Les Antagonismes Economiques. Otto Effertz. Paris, Giard et 
 Brifere. 
 
 22
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 has been treated with contemptuous silence. Effertz 
 himself seems to ascribe some of his ill-fortune to 
 the fact that his first book was written in German, 
 which is a local dialect. French is the international 
 language of science ; he will, therefore, with the aid 
 of M. Landry, publish himself in French, and appeal 
 to an international jury. The new departure does 
 not seem to have succeeded. Effertz has been neither 
 condemned nor commended by that part of the jury 
 which sits in these countries. His book, although 
 issued so long ago as igo6, seems hardly to have 
 reached us. Reach us some day it must, and to 
 bridge over the interval that separates us from a 
 more competent performance of the task I venture 
 to give an outline of the ideas of this strong, subtle 
 and adventurous thinker. 
 
 Effertz is a Socialist, but he wears his red tie with 
 a difference. He is a Socialist because Socialism is 
 the only form of economic organization that will 
 allow him to be a gentleman. His theory holds out 
 to humanity the promise not of a more abundant 
 table, but of more delicate table-manners. Remem- 
 bering a fact which we are seldom suffered to forget 
 — the existence, namely, of Mr. Bernard Shaw — one 
 does not go so far as to signalize the haughtiness 
 and daintiness of Effertz as representing a new mood 
 in the mind of Socialism. But there is a wide gulf 
 between the two. What to Mr. Shaw is but an elfish 
 epigram, flung with wicked exuberance at Suburbia, 
 is to Effertz a basal belief, an ultimate dogma, a 
 burning passion. Under the stress of its attack many 
 familiar lines of interpretation and of defence must 
 be abandoned. Socialism, many of us had found 
 comfort in saying, is a mirage of hunger. It is the 
 economic science, or rather the economic poetry of 
 the poor. It is the visioned Fortunate Islands of 
 the disinherited. It is the Sociology of anaemia and 
 defeat. If the material life of humanity is, in Kropot- 
 
 23
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 kin's phrase, the conquest of bread, then popular 
 SociaHsm is the wail of those who have been 
 shouldered out of the market-place with their baskets 
 unfilled. In the philosophy of certain of our unstrung 
 capitalists it is something even worse. It is the 
 Satanic demand that stones should be changed into 
 bread, in order to sustain a population swarming 
 beyond all bounds of prudence and self-control. " You 
 are pauperized by the capitalistic regime," cried out 
 Marx in effect to the proletariat, "In the name of 
 the bread of which you are defrauded, Workers of all 
 countries. Unite I " To Effertz this hunger-Socialism, 
 as one may call it, is at once unworthy and unscien- 
 tific. Not by bread alone do men live, but by culture 
 and freedom — freedom, above all, to speak the truth. 
 He stands for a social ideal of four dimensions ; for 
 to Liberie, Egalite, Fraternite he has added another 
 watchword, more strident and enacting than any of 
 these, Dignite. His case against individualism is not 
 that it breaks the bodies of the poor with famine, but 
 that it defiles the souls of all men, the rich as well 
 as the poor. Like the aged lion in the fable he suffers 
 not so much from the pain as from the indignity of 
 the donkey's kick. Moreover, he insists, with a touch 
 of passion, popular Socialism is dishonest in the pros- 
 pect which it holds out of illimitable harvests drawn 
 from an earth so limited both in area and in fertility. 
 His system of Pono-Physiocratic Socialism assuredly 
 does not mean food for all under any circumstances 
 of increase. It offers no unbroken round of banquets, 
 fit for S3^baris. Humanity, however wisely and 
 scientifically organized, will find itself caught per- 
 petually between the Scylla of restrained reproduction 
 and the Charybdis of starvation. But if Socialism 
 does not promise a junketting Utopia, what, then, 
 does it promise ? It promises, in the horoscope of 
 Effertz, a world in which men, while declining to be 
 angels, will be able to be gentlemen. Liberty — 
 
 24
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 that is to say, mere personal liberty — already approxi- 
 mates to its maximun in modern countries; under 
 this rubric communized States will have no new 
 revelation to expound. Equality cannot but widen 
 and greaten with the growing abundance of "goods 
 of culture " the biens de calUire which he sets in such 
 antithetical contrast to the Hens d' alimentation. The 
 general " aristocratization " of the forms of social 
 life will bi'ing new kingdoms under the sway of 
 Fraternity. When we are all aristocrats it will be 
 easy for us all to be brothers. " But the great glory 
 of Pono-Physiocratic Socialism will centre in the 
 complete abolition of all the indignities of the present 
 system. A man will no longer be compelled to 
 accept the servilities, the brutalities, the lies, the 
 frauds, the treacheries, the whole mass of defilements 
 and degradations which swarm in the heart of our 
 capitalistic society, and which are forced on every 
 member of it under the penalty of starvation for 
 himself and his family." The rich will be redeemed 
 from that sense of insecurity which, more even, and 
 far more, than the appetite for actual enjoyment, is 
 the impulse behind their unquiet lives. The worker, 
 with trained hands eager to produce wealth for the 
 commodity of his fellows, will no longer stand at the 
 factory-gate begging work as an alms. The employer 
 will be free, as now he is not free, not to exploit his 
 employes. The shopkeeper will be free, as now he 
 is not free, not to lie and cheat. We shall be able 
 at last to cancel that dictum of Cicero's which is 
 now the universal charter of the business com- 
 munity ! Nihil enim proficinnt institores ipsi nisi 
 admodum mentiantur. " It is commonly said," writes 
 Effertz in the last of his six hundred vibrating pages, 
 " that the social question is a belly-question, or, in 
 more aesthetic language, a knife-and-fork question. 
 When people preach Socialism they make their 
 appeal to the famishing and the tatterdemalions. 
 
 25
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 The world is agreed that a rich man can be a 
 Socialist only out of condescension, or political 
 ambition, or ethical aspiration, or simply, as a joke, 
 but never on grounds of personal interest. To accept 
 this view is to understand very poorly the essence 
 of Socialism. Bread and the promise of bread, 
 there you have the weakest point of Socialism ! 
 Socialism is before all else a question of culture and 
 dignity. When we preach Socialism it is to the 
 dignity of mankind that we must primarily appeal. 
 Gentlemen of all countries, Unite ! " 
 
 Such is the ethos and inspiration of this strange 
 book. If Effertz brings a new temper to Socialism, 
 he also brings a new theory. He himself is indeed 
 urgent to disclaim all originality ; his only gift is 
 that of fertilizing the neglected commonplaces of 
 Economics. The professors of that science have not 
 understood the value of their analyses ; like Balaam's 
 ass they speak great words without understanding 
 what they speak. They have a Cyclopean power to 
 quarry huge blocks of stone, but the lyre of Apollo 
 does not sound among them to uprear the walls of 
 Troy. The fundamental truths of economic science 
 are as old as Petty and Bernouilli : they are 
 expounded in every rudimentary manual of the 
 subject. But there is a curious flaw in such exposi- 
 tions. The basal laws and problems are formulated 
 indeed, but not " sacramentally," not in sede materiae. 
 This flaw Effertz will correct, and therein lies his 
 sole originality. His only other novelty is a novelty 
 of arrangement. He introduces into Sociology the 
 dramaturgical principle. The fact of antagonism of 
 interest between individual and individual, between 
 the individual and society, between the present and 
 the future, being ultimate, we shall do well to cast 
 our treatment of it into the literary form most 
 appropriate to such an order of reality. This is 
 obviously the drama, for the essential note of drama 
 
 26
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 is the conflict of wills. The first section of such a 
 Sociology will correspond to the Intrigue, the deli- 
 neation of interests. The second will exhibit as 
 Catastrophe the clash in actual life of one economic 
 interest with another. In the third section, analogous 
 to the Intermediate Chorus, the writer will proceed 
 to an ethical criticism of a conflict, the economic 
 mechanism of which has thus been exhibited. This 
 merges into the Denouement, a discussion of the 
 legal and political arrangements by which the lesion 
 of higher interests may as far as possible be avoided ; 
 and our drama of humanity culminates in the Final 
 Chorus, with a summary of those antagonisms which 
 enquiry shows to be irreconcilable, and lamentations 
 over the incurable evils of life. The five divisions 
 may be rendered into more usual nomenclature as 
 the sciences of Pure Economics and Applied Econo- 
 mics, the arts of agitation and of statesmanship, with 
 a finale of philosophy. The adequate handling of 
 this five-fold analysis gives ample play to the rich 
 and subtle mind of Effertz. Mathematician, psycho- 
 logist, pioneer, dandy, and admirable classicist, he 
 has a sense of style and a feeling for literature 
 unequalled by any German thinker since Schopen- 
 hauer. Differential equations rub shoulders with 
 dashing epigrams. We plod with difficult steps 
 through pages of curves and graphs, and then sud- 
 denly the wilderness of x and y blossoms like the 
 rose. Effertz is, as I have said, classical in his 
 literary loyalties ; and nothing could exceed the 
 wicked delight with which he shows us all political 
 economy lying folded up in a couplet of Goethe or 
 in three threadbare hexameters of Horace. A 
 copious creator of new terms, he invents one to 
 characterize himself. It is the custom of authors to 
 publish books in orderto educate others: he publishes, 
 however, solely to educate himself. He is, in 
 scientific matters, a pure egosophe, who expounds 
 
 27
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 his thought in order that it may be criticized and 
 thereby made perfect. And if he refuses to influence 
 opinion he is even more urgent to repel the notion 
 that his theory can lead to revolutionary action. 
 University professors — whose attitude towards 
 burning questions is ever that of a cat towards 
 hot soup — have ignored him because they believed 
 that a writer who laid such emphasis on the dis- 
 harmonies and antagonisms of economic life must 
 necessarily be a disturber of the peace. Such an 
 idea is absurd. Effertz has a particular aversion 
 and contempt for bombs and barricades. " It is 
 only a partial knowledge of social antagonisms that 
 can lead men to desire a revolution. The best way 
 to make revolutions unpopular, and to create a 
 sedative temper of reform, is to furnish a complete 
 picture of these antagonisms." An agitator who 
 has heard of only a single " class-war " is in danger 
 of believing that the source of this class-war may 
 be swept away for ever, and humanity definitively 
 redeemed wath the flame and fanfare of one great 
 upheaval. It is an illusion that still exists, and that 
 must be banished. What can be more potent to 
 banish it than a Sociology which exhibits economic 
 disharmony not as an isolated and destructible 
 fortress of privilege, but as a vast labyrinth co- 
 extensive with society ? For men who respect 
 their intellects only one honourable path is open, 
 the path of peaceful reform. 
 
 After such an overture the fundamental ideas of 
 Effertz must seem bare and simple. His system is 
 characterized by M. Andler as the most vigorous 
 attempt ever made to constitute a science of Pure 
 Economics. By this term he understands the 
 analysis and interpretation of those economic facts 
 which exist independently not alone of the special 
 juridical system of any state, but also of the pro- 
 cesses of exchange. Denuded then to its ultimate 
 
 28
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 skeleton, economic life manifests itself as a drama, 
 which, like the French stage, has its "eternal tri- 
 angle." Land, labour, and consumption are the 
 three apex-points about which all economies function, 
 be they primitive or advanced. The collaboration 
 of labour with land to produce a utility is the founda- 
 tion of all systems. Every good contains a certain 
 quantity of labour and a certain quantity of land, 
 but no good contains anything else. In the metaphor 
 of Petty, labour is the father, and land is the 
 mother of all wealth. This analysis of production 
 is, we may agree with Effertz, the most worn and 
 battered common-place of all the text-books. Every 
 theorist has seen it, but hardly one has consistently 
 believed it. To anybody who grasps it steadily the 
 dictum on which Marx builds his whole system 
 comes as an amazing counter-sense. " If, then, we 
 leave out of consideration the use-value of commodi- 
 ties," writes Marx in the indispensable first chapter 
 of Das Kapital, " they have only one common pro- 
 perty left, that of being products of labour." 
 
 Marxian Socialism is by this principle, the Pono- 
 cratic illusion, involved in strange absurdities. It 
 would, for instance, necessitate the exchange of three 
 or four bullocks for one good book ; since the " labour 
 certificates," which are to be the measure of exchange, 
 would show that the named quantities of these very 
 diverse products embodied equal quantities of labour. 
 The ratio between literature and beef might indeed 
 be even more favourable to the former on the score 
 of the superior skill of the labour concerned. 
 Obviously commodities have another common pro- 
 perty ; each of them embodies a certain quantity of 
 land. In any given process of consumption — say 
 that of bread — we bite the dust in an unsuspected 
 sense, we are veritable eaters of earth. And the 
 earth being very far from infinite this fact is of domi- 
 
 29
 
 .LV X K. X wJ JUf \J XV X-/ JL-/ i.-^ 
 
 iiant importance in all economies. Effertz confesses 
 with surprise that for once literature fails him. 
 While every language has a phrase like manger du 
 travail or manger de la sucnr in currency, he cannot 
 tind either in the verses of the learned or in the pro- 
 verbs of the people any locution such as manger de la 
 ierrc. He coins it forthwith, with an explanation 
 which affords such a good example of what one may 
 term the conscientious nastiness of his science that 
 it ought to be quoted here in its more or less decent 
 veil of French. " Pour eviter les malentendus 
 grossiers, je dois faire remarquer que si je dis ' manger 
 de la sueur, de la terre,' je ne parle pas en chimiste; 
 je ne parle pas de geophagie, et je ne fais pas allusion 
 a la sueur materielle qui est melangee chimiquement 
 avec presque toutes les denrees coloniales. Je parle 
 en economiste et je pense a cette sueur et a cette 
 terre qui sont renfermees metaphysiquement dans 
 les biens." 
 
 The relation of the three elements engaged may be 
 expressed in mathematical or pseudo-mathematical 
 form. The final unknowns, positive and negative, 
 of economic calculation are x = the utilities con- 
 sumed by an individual in the unit of time, and y = 
 the labour expended by the individual in the unit of 
 time in the acquisition of these utilities. In calcul- 
 ating the curves, in which he forecasts the future of 
 mankind, Effertz employs an armoury of some forty 
 auxiliary symbols. On the technical side they con- 
 stitute, indeed, so large a part of his work that his 
 use of them ought to be illustrated. Designating, 
 then, by w the utility of a good, by a the quantity of 
 labour, and by b the quantity of land embodied in it, 
 we are able to formulate an absolute value, not de- 
 pendent on any special regime or even on exchange. 
 This absolute value varies with the quotient, satis- 
 faction: sacrifice. The productivity of any exploita- 
 
 30
 
 tion, or more generally of any form of economic 
 organization being represented by p, we arrive forth- 
 
 w 
 
 with at the formula/) = . To maximise/), by 
 
 a + b 
 weighting a and b with appropriate coefficients, and 
 by understanding the psychological determinants of 
 w, is the task laid upon all future governments. In 
 discussing further the relation of a and b, Effertz 
 makes his sole claim to originality. He has intro- 
 duced two new principles into Sociology, the principle 
 of conflict and the principle of incitation. Passing 
 by the first of these for a moment, I shall try to ex- 
 plain the second. All previous economists have 
 treated the two factors of production as co-operating 
 forces, the resultant of which is represented by a 
 diagonal. But in point of fact, Effertz argues, the 
 true relation is that of an inciting factor, labour, to 
 an incited factor, land; and the economy which 
 results corresponds not to the diagonal of the par- 
 allelogram of forces, but to what he styles a decroche- 
 ment. One who is not an initiate in the Higher 
 Mathematics had best seek refuge in the original 
 " La production est le proces par lequel I'incitant 
 travail decroche une valeur d'usage en incitant de la 
 terre." The whip, he says, in a deliberately ludic- 
 rous image, is the inciting, the cab-horse the incited 
 factor : you may manage with a smaller horse by 
 using a larger whip ; but no extension of the whip, 
 even to infinity, will compensate for the total dis- 
 appearance of the horse. This novel terminology 
 and the mathemical exercises by which it is supple- 
 mented are not much dwelt upon by M. Landry. But 
 it is difficult to see how any specialist in Mathema- 
 tical Economics can, with due regard to his own 
 competence, ignore the first section of Les Antag- 
 onismes. The third of the primordial elements w, 
 or the utility of goods, has for Effertz found its final 
 
 31
 
 iV IX I. »^ J--' \^ XV J-X J™-' X ^ 
 
 formulation in D:iniel Bernouilli's De Memiira Sortis, 
 published in 1738. Bernouilli's law contains for him 
 all the truth and none of the confusion of the " mar- 
 ginal utility" theory of the Austrians. Analogous 
 to the law of Weber and Fechner in Psycho- Physics, 
 it asserts that the subjective satisfaction produced 
 by the objective consumption of a given quantity of 
 any good is in inverse ratio to the quantity of the 
 good already consumed. Furnished with this key 
 to the variation of needs and desires, and with the 
 coefficients representing skill, fertility and the like 
 w^hich qualify a and b in any concrete case, Effertz 
 undertakes rather vainly to make his equations as 
 accurate as those of Physics. Before passing from 
 his elaborate analysis of exchange one ought, per- 
 haps, to signalize the invention of the term monoone, 
 or monoony, to designate a form of unilateral com- 
 petition, which is the obverse of monopoly, and is 
 almost as common. One seller confronting many 
 buyers gives us a phenomenon of monopoly, one 
 buyer confronting many sellers gives us a pheno- 
 menon of monoony. For the rest it is, perhaps, 
 enough to say that in Pure Economics Effertz touches 
 no question that he does not freshen; his discussions 
 cast novel, though perhaps distorting, lights on the 
 whole sub-structure of the science. 
 
 Every good is, as all economists have noted, a 
 synthesis of labour with land, but the proportions in 
 which these elements are combined vary over a very 
 wide range. On closer scrutiny there emerges a fact 
 which controls the whole future of humanity, whether 
 under Socialism or under Individualism. It is this: 
 generally speaking those goods which require for 
 their production much land and comparatively little 
 labour are articles of food, biens d' alimentation, 
 and those which require much labour and compara- 
 tively little land are instruments of culture or luxury, 
 biens de luxe ou de culture. An instance already cited 
 
 32
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 will serve here also — the contrast, namely, between 
 
 b 
 bullock and books. The variations of the quotient — 
 
 a 
 involve many important consequences. The first of 
 these is enunciated by Effertz in what he calls the 
 non-transformability or non-interchangeability of 
 forms of production. Any given form of production, 
 that is to say, cannot in general be transformed into 
 any other, but only on condition that the quotient b : a 
 of the two is approximately the same. Effertz in 
 his exposition distinguishes, but not quite clearly, 
 between quantitative and qualitative variations of 
 the land engaged in production. Judas, he points 
 out, gave utterance to very feeble though very 
 popular Economics in complaining that the precious 
 ointment had not been converted into food for the 
 poor. In this case the absurdity is obvious. Under 
 our system of exchange you can substitute one com- 
 modity for another, and transfer the sin, if there be 
 a sin, of luxury to somebody else ; but by no chre- 
 matistic magic can you tranform the first product 
 into something so different in nature as the second. 
 The more plausible fallacy, however, is that which 
 regards, not products, but branches of production 
 as interchangeable. This illusion beclouds the 
 prophetic vision alike of the Malthusian pessimists 
 and the Socialistic optimists. The former imagine 
 that when the pressure of over-population begins, 
 every other branch of production will be transformed 
 into the production of food, and that consequently 
 the debacle to which mankind, increasing at its 
 present rate, is in their view irredeemably committed 
 will have famine only as its last phase. All culture, 
 all luxury will have been thrown to the wolves 
 before their fangs come abreast of the sleigh. The 
 reply of Effertz is that if such a crisis is to come, it 
 will not end but begin with hunger. The one 
 
 D 33
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 category of goods of which there need never be a 
 scarcity is that category which demands a great deal 
 of labour, but little land — namely, goods of culture. 
 The Socialists also, when confronted with a familiar 
 criticism, reply in terms of the same fundamental 
 error. Under your Socialism, says a critic, suppose 
 that I call to your communistic store with a bunch 
 of labour-notes and ask fer a bottle of bock. They 
 have no bock, but they offer me a copy of Marx, of 
 w hich there is a superabundance ! What then ? 
 Nothing simpler, reply the Socialists. You write 
 to the Minister of Production, Department of Trans- 
 formations : he gives instructions to divert some 
 labour from printing and publishing to agriculture 
 and brew ing ; and next season there will be no 
 shortage of bock. But No! says Effertz, you are 
 working on a groundless assumption. You can 
 transform a production of Das Kapital into one of 
 Harmonics Econojniques, or one of bock into one of 
 milk or cider. But you cannot transmute a pro- 
 duction, in which very little land and a great deal 
 of labour are required, into one that demands very 
 little labour but a great deal of land. Ponocratic 
 Socialism will discover in such a juncture, that by 
 founding its currency solely on one of the primordial 
 elements, it has exhausted the other, it will have 
 eaten up imprudently its w^hole allowance of land. 
 
 In this reiterated sentence we come upon Eftertz' 
 reason for positing antagonism of interest as an 
 ultimate and unchangeable factor in human society. 
 Homo homini lupus is the law that emerges from 
 every analysis of consumption. Who touches this 
 book, said Whitman, touches a man. But with 
 EfTertz to eat a potato is to eat a man, or at least 
 the potential existence of a man. He finds remorse 
 and embarrassment mixed as ingredients in every 
 plate of soup. " I cannot get rid of the thought that 
 in eating I am destroying one of my fellows. I say 
 
 34
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 to myself, indeed, that not to eat would be to destroy 
 myself, and that I am worth as much as another. 
 But I eat it with disgust, as if I had found a hair in 
 it." Labour we must also consume, and so far forth 
 every consumer is forced to " exploit " somebody. 
 But at least there need be no remorse if one pays 
 his score by furnishing to society as much pro- 
 ductive labour as he consumes. In the world in 
 which we live this is a difficult counsel. So many 
 pleasant commodities, so many lucrative productions 
 are possible to us only on condition that others shall 
 be given over to death, servitude, or dishonour. 
 You accept, for instance, the Arab proverb that the 
 Earthly Paradise is to be found on horseback. But 
 since a horse consumes as much earth as would 
 sustain three men, to keep a horse is to murder a 
 family, to keep a stable is to maintain a sort of 
 perpetual massacre. Nor is it to be supposed that 
 this sombre halo attaches only to articles of luxury. 
 Fishers must, indeed, be drowned in order that a 
 rich woman may wear a rope of pearls, but fishers 
 must also be drowned in order that a beggar may 
 eat a herring. The shop-girl, who wears imitation 
 lace, and the duchess, who wears real lace, condemn 
 some of their sisters to slavery and exploitation with 
 the same ruthless certainty. As for dishonour, 
 society has grown itself a very rhinoceros hide of 
 hypocrisies to protect us from the edged and miser- 
 able facts which cannot be denied. You must not 
 let your right hand know what your left hand does, 
 nor whisper in your drawingroom what you thunder 
 in your office. Public opinion agrees to equate 
 honour with income, and to employ between friends 
 the suaver synonym. There is a nice gradation in 
 these things : — 
 
 Mein Sohn, o lern das Leben kennen ! 
 Gar vornehm ist es Schnaps zu brennen ; 
 Bedenklich schon ihn zu verkaufen, 
 Und ganz-erbarralich ihn zu — saufen. 
 
 35
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 If there is, however, a certain ultimate antago- 
 nism, woven into the fabric of reahty, there are many 
 secondary antagonisms which result merely from the 
 property basis on which contemporary societies agree 
 to stand. In his social pathology Effertz proceeds, 
 in his own characteristic way, upon certain ideas of 
 Rodbertus. Like the latter he finds the main source 
 and cause of economic disharmonies in the almost 
 universal clash between rcntabilite and prodnctivite. 
 Under our regime of exchange the production of 
 commodities is governed not by the needs of men, 
 but by the fluctations of the market. The individual 
 producer obtains his maximum income in many cases 
 not by maximising but, on the contrary, by restricting 
 production. The earlier strategy of the speculator 
 in this regard was brutal and elementary: it con- 
 sisted in the material destruction of products. The 
 lesson taught by the Sibyl — namely, that a monopolist 
 can exact the same price for three as for twelve 
 articles — was well learned by Rome. The manipu- 
 lation of the grain market, by the burning of 
 superabundant supplies, was so commonly practised 
 as to evoke legislation providing severe penalties for 
 this crimen dardanariatns, as it was named after 
 Dardanarius, its inventor. The Middle Ages found 
 themselves still confronted by the dardanarius, and 
 burned him alive when occasion offered; and Effert;r 
 asserts that even to-day in the East the rice market, 
 and in certain Dutch colonies the spice market, are 
 subject to the same gross and barbaric methods. 
 Modern speculation is more subtle and more effective : 
 it" understands how to hold back, and hold up sup- 
 plies, without destroying them. No consumer can 
 stretch out a hand without coming against one mesh 
 or another of the network of qnasi-dardanariatus in 
 which it has enveloped the world. This is the 
 deepest disharmony, but there are many others. 
 Present is at war with future : the wasteful technique 
 
 36
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 of American agriculture, for instance, maximises 
 production for one generation, but leaves an ex- 
 hausted soil to the next. There is a war between 
 true interest and imaginary interest, even for a man 
 who has deliberately chosen egotism for his guide : 
 even on his own low plane he is continually deluded 
 by our chrematistic, modern habit of mind. Every 
 man, labouring under higher ideals, bears about in 
 his soul a far fiercer war between the economic and 
 the gamic virtues. He has two soul-sides, one to 
 cheat, exploit, and subjugate the world with in order 
 that the other may shower luxury and advancement 
 on his household. The only variation is between 
 that struggle in which the object is destruction, and 
 that in which the object is domination. Compe- 
 tition between one employer and another, or one 
 worker and another within the same trade, supplies 
 an example of the first. Its motto is : Des einen Brod 
 ist des anderen Tod, bread to one man is death to 
 another. Conflicts between a capitalist and a labour 
 syndicate exemplify the second. The watchword in 
 this case is : Des einen Brod ist des anderen Noth, one 
 man's plenty is another man's famine. In one or 
 other of these forms the fact of antagonism is written 
 in a flaming and sinister scribble over the whole map 
 of our modern economy. The masters of that econ- 
 omy, sniffing the gold coins in their palms, echo the 
 Csesafs nonolet. But that isa judgment of chemistry, 
 not of ethics. To a mind once shaken out of our 
 habitual, dogmatic drowse all money appears tainted, 
 every sovereign stinks. We have created a civiliz- 
 ation of great and cruel splendour, and written over 
 its gate : No gentleman need apply. 
 
 Out of this base labyrinth there is only one clew 
 that can be safely followed, that of Pono-Physiocratic 
 Socialism. The weakness of popular Socialism by 
 no means lies in its supposed inability to maintain 
 production at the maximum. In comparison with 
 
 37
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 our present industrial sj'stem it offers a clear superi- 
 ority, consequent on the removal of all conflict 
 between rentabilitc and prodnctivitc, between lucrative 
 and productive exploitation. The true and fatal flaw 
 is to be found in the proposed mechanism of exchange. 
 This flaw is now for the first time removed. The 
 impossibility of the Marxian labour-certificates 
 having been demonstrated, Effertz proceeds to out- 
 line what Andler styles a bimetallism of land and 
 labour. Under this system all articles are to be 
 double-ticketed, so as to show their cost in land and 
 their cost in labour; and no article is to be sold in 
 exchange for wage-certificates of one kind only. In 
 issuing land certificates, which are, so to say, a free 
 bonus given to the worker in addition to his labour- 
 certificates, the State will keep steadily before its 
 mind the territorial area at its command, and will 
 be able to control the increase of population and to 
 avert famine. It will be able further, without invad- 
 ing the personal liberty of the citizens, to impel 
 their labour, as the need maybe, towards production 
 for the sake of culture or production for the sake of 
 sustenance. The general effect will be to equalize 
 the distribution of the necessaries of physical life. 
 This will provide — in accordance with the only 
 defensible statement of the materialistic interpreta- 
 tion of history — the negative conditions of culture, 
 Its positive reality and richness and the actual 
 distribution of biens de culture will follow a law 
 determined by the genius and ideals of individual 
 intellects. On the material side Pono-Physiocratic 
 Socialism will give equality to the equal, on the 
 mental side it will give inequality to the unequal. 
 This accords with all our experience. Even in 
 present conditions a capitalist consumes little more 
 land than a workman ; like Napoleon he can dine 
 only once in a day. His main consumption is labour, 
 his main motive is ostentation, his main instrument 
 
 38
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 of acquisition is mere money and the chrematistic 
 illusion. His psychology differs organically from that 
 of the workman. "The worker perishes when he no 
 longer has soup to eat. The capitalist perishes 
 when he no longer has Sevres ware in which to offer 
 soup to his parasites." Under the system of Effertz 
 both of them will have soup, since all men need 
 soup ; as for the Sevres, it can only be acquired by a 
 citizen who is able to supply society with labour as 
 skilled and intellectual as that which produced it. 
 A larger hope for all unfolds itself in the considera- 
 tion that in a progressive nation, while the curve of 
 goods of sustenance no sooner climbs to its maximum 
 than it is dragged down again by growing weight of 
 population, the curve of goods of culture ought to 
 maintain a continuous ascent approximating to a 
 straight line. Therein lies the rule of life of the 
 honourable, and the ambition of the wise. The 
 luxury of a Lassalle, little though it may dim the 
 brilliance of that splendid and reckless spirit, com- 
 promises the whole cause of Socialism. If you 
 would be master of the future you must rather choose 
 for your pattern, Spinoza, who built his great basilica 
 of metaphysics on twopence a day. 
 
 Effertz, with an amiable weakness not infrequent 
 among his countrymen, admits that he may well be 
 regarded as the Kant of Sociology. As Kant opened 
 a new path between dogmatism and scepticism by 
 posing sacramentally and in sede materiae the question 
 of the limits of attainable human knowledge, so 
 Effertz, by posing in the same solemn fashion the 
 question of the limits of attainable human happiness, 
 opens a new path between optimism and pessimism. 
 He founds the Critical School of Sociology. The 
 fashion in which he answers his own question has 
 already been indicated. But in believing himself to 
 be impartial he is deeply wrong : his place is with 
 the pessimists. No other judgment is possible to 
 
 39
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 any one who has toiled through the grey, chill, and 
 intricate galleries of his thought. In his vision, even 
 the light counterfeits a gloom. Asking with Faust : 
 Was kann die Welt mir wohl gewahren ? he answers 
 with Faust ! Enthehren soUst du, sollst enthehren. 
 With Schiller he declares that life is error and 
 illusion, and that only in death do we lay hold on 
 reality. " Humboldt writes somewhere that the 
 greatest happiness possible to any human being is 
 to be born an imbecile, since only an imbecile can 
 live without coming to understand the truth of 
 things. This observation holds good in general, 
 but it is specially applicable to the study of society. 
 Those who have lifted the veil of sociological truth, 
 those who have eaten the fruit of the tree of Socio- 
 logy, can never again be happy. A veil was thrown 
 over the image of Sais, because that image repre- 
 sented — Truth." It would be easy, and quite true, 
 to say that the pessimism of Effertz results from a 
 mistake of fact, taken too seriously. High authori- 
 ties can be cited to show that the menace of famine, 
 which obsesses him, is so remote as not properly to 
 enter into the present thought of humanity. It 
 would be easy, and quite idle, to observe that the 
 man who analyses is lost, and that the only counsel 
 of happiness is to feel feelings and enjoy enjoyments. 
 Optimism and pessimism are, perhaps, primary 
 colours of mind, positive and negative polarities 
 which we can only accept without understanding. 
 They are, it may be, the day and the night of the 
 human spirit, established for an eternal contrast and 
 counterchange ; and Effertz fulfils the destiny of a 
 man born under the sun's eclipse. Optimist or 
 pessimist matters little in a life marshalled under 
 the trumpet of duty : your emotions are your own, 
 and j-ou are free to feel that all the problems that 
 beset us are insoluble on condition that you help to 
 solve them. To this task Effertz has bent a strong 
 
 40
 
 OTTO EFFERTZ 
 
 and subtle mind. While he has not made Socialism 
 more tolerable he has at least made it more acute, 
 and his contribution to Pure Economics possesses a 
 high value, not at all dependent on his practical 
 creed. Les Antagonismes with its keen sense of the 
 fundamental, its harsh courage, its store of rich and 
 strange observation, cannot fail to count for some- 
 thing, nor can any economist afford to pass by in 
 complete silence the system of Otto Effertz, Gentle- 
 man Socialist. 
 
 1910. 
 
 41
 
 ON WRITTEN 
 CONSTITUTIONS 
 
 I agree that it is most unfortunate that we should have to intro- 
 duce at any time a written provision into an unwritten constitution. 
 (Hear, hear.) — Mr. Haldane in the House of Commons. 
 
 Mr. Haldane is a formidable rather than a popular 
 speaker, an authority but not an inspiration. It is, 
 of course, a question of personality. He looks like 
 a composite photograph of six German philosophers, 
 with a varnish of Renan, and that is not a bad 
 beginning. But that singular voice of his which 
 comes piping out of rotundity is too thin, light, and 
 metaphysical ever to be a trumpet of democracy. 
 It is in vain that all men concede him the aureole 
 of omniscience. It is in vain that the House rejoices 
 to see in his radiant presence a refutation of the 
 epigram in which Ecclesiastes declares that increase 
 of knowledge means increase of sorrow. He stirs 
 the imagination to pleasant pictures. To me, he is 
 always some friar of the Ingoldsby Legends lilting 
 black-letter Statutes and Gothic ideologies to the 
 music of a penny whistle. 
 
 But with all that blithe omniscience, he remains 
 formidable rather than effective. His speech of the 
 other night, from which the sentence at the head of 
 this essay is quoted, ran counter to the sense of 
 his own party. It was delivered with a sort of taut 
 rectitude, and received in, what is called, courteous 
 silence. But that particular sentence was greeted, 
 as it always is greeted in the House of Commons, 
 with a regular musketry-rattle of " Hear, hears." It 
 seems to me not inapt to the times to analyse these 
 " Hear, hears." 
 
 42
 
 WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS 
 
 This prejudice against written constitutions is, 
 beyond doubt, one of the best-estabHshed super- 
 stitions of English poHtics. Every law student, 
 nurtured on that masterpiece of romance, Dicey's 
 Law of the Constitution, has in his day written essays 
 in praise of the spontaneous and elastic system under 
 which we are supposed to live. He has been taught 
 to believe that every Continental jurist looks with 
 envy and despair from his own miserable paper- 
 guarantees of freedom to this organic body which 
 has grown with the growth, and strengthened with 
 the strength of the British nation. And somehow 
 it is suggested that, as Lohengrin had to disappear 
 on being forced to give his name and address, so the 
 magic of the English constitution would disappear 
 if it were written down. Hence these " Hear, hears." 
 
 Now I wish to submit, and by no means respect- 
 fully, that this traditional view is little better than 
 stately nonsense. Continental jurists do not envy 
 England. They say: " Truly, my friend, the British 
 constitution would, ^^■ithout doubt, be admirable. 
 But, alas ! it does not exist." The writing down of 
 custom and practice is not a misfortune, but a most 
 happy achievement. And in dealing with England 
 3'ou are dealing not with an unwritten, but with a 
 badly written, constitution. This last point demon- 
 strates itself. How do you go about to prove the 
 provisions of 3'our unwritten constitution ? By an 
 appeal to Magna Charta. But Magna Charta is a 
 document, not a custom. By an appeal to the " In- 
 demnity of Parliament " of 1407, to the Resolution 
 of 1640, to the Resolution of 1671, to the Resolu- 
 tion of 1678. These are strange elements to appear 
 in an unwritten constitution. Take away the scribe, 
 the Commons clerk, and the printer, and neither 
 Indemnity nor Resolution would exist or operate 
 to-day. 
 
 The amusing truth is that this myth of an 
 
 43
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 unwritten English constitution, with its whole 
 virtue residing in the fact that it was unwritten, 
 was invented by an Irishman. Edmund Burke 
 invented it because it happened to give him a good 
 debating-point against the French Revolution, But 
 why should our radical legatees of the French Revo- 
 lution cling to it as tenderly as to a memory of their 
 childhood ? They ought, on the contrary, to say : 
 " Since so much has been written, let us write the 
 rest, and write it clearly," 
 
 One has no difficulty in believing that Simon 
 de Montfort had a certain weakness for unwritten 
 constitutions, but that was only because, in all pro- 
 bability Simon de Montfort did not himself write or 
 read with any comfort. But the whole colour of 
 the l^times has changed. Writing, which in those 
 far-off days was the special magic of a small caste, 
 is the common form of modern democracy. Before 
 the Print Age, to rely on documents rather than on 
 custom would have been esoteric. Since the Print 
 Age, to rely on custom rather than on documents is 
 mere antiquarian pedantry. 
 
 The two opposite mistakes have this in common : 
 they are, both of them, modes of keeping govern- 
 ment separated from the dust, the tumult, and the 
 heartiness of common life. That is the aim of 
 Toryism ; and Tory constitutionalists like Mr. 
 Dicey are singing in the key of their policy when 
 they sing the praises of tacit agreements, accepted 
 conventions, and the other elements of unwritten 
 constitutions. But when Mr. Haldane joins the 
 chorus, he is, I submit, engaging in high treason 
 against those two born Progressives, the pen and 
 the printing-press. The pen in old days was the 
 jousting lance; the Press in these days is the armoured 
 Dreadnought of Radicalism. 
 
 There is nothing peculiarly English in this dread 
 of documents. It is a characteristic of all primi- 
 
 44
 
 WRITTEN CONSTITUTIONS 
 
 tive societies. You have one form of the super- 
 stition in the Arab who expects to be cured — 
 and often is cured! — b}' rolhng a piece of paper with 
 a doctor's prescription on it up into a ball and 
 swallowing it. You have another in the contempor- 
 ary farmer who cannot be induced to keep accounts. 
 He prefers to work on an unwritten constitution, 
 "like his father before him." The result is that when 
 he gets to the Bankruptcy Court he has to go with- 
 out even the poor consolation enjoyed by the rest of 
 us — namely, an exact knowledge of how he got there. 
 Within the field of law itself the whole movement is 
 from custom and the spoken word to Statute and the 
 written word. If not, why is it that when you have 
 made a contract over the telephone you immediately 
 dictate a letter embodying its terms, and send it off 
 by the evening post ? 
 
 The same thing holds true of industry and com- 
 merce. Everywhere the formula, the diagram, the 
 blue drawing, the visible, written, permanent word 
 have triumphed. In commerce, to take an example 
 from history, Venice owed her greatness partly, no 
 doubt, to geography, but largely also to book-keeping. 
 Venice held the Golden East in fee because her 
 merchants were the first to abandon the old unwritten 
 constitution of hand-to-mouth trading in favour of 
 double-entry book-keeping. Her flaming pageant, 
 in which life and art mingled their frontiers insepar- 
 ably, was organized by the glorious clerks who wrote 
 down her accounts in a large, legible hand. The 
 splendour of Titian was nothing more than the 
 flowering of a ledger. 
 
 Toryism has imagined the vague, unwritten regime, 
 which is its opportunity, as a natural and organic 
 growth. But change the image. Say instead that 
 it is like music-hall patter, made up as one goes 
 along. Say that it is like an extempore speech, and 
 that extempore speeches are always bad. Say that 
 
 45
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 it is, so far, the mere nebula and protoplasm of free- 
 dom to which this age must give clear articulation 
 and definite form. All the tides are flowing in that 
 direction. Within the last ten years England has 
 made constitutions for Australia, for the Transvaal, 
 for the Orange River, for United South Africa. It 
 is time that she made a Constitution for herself, 
 guarding liberty vidth a quantitative formula. And 
 that will help us all to join in making a Constitution 
 for Ireland. 
 
 1910. 
 
 46
 
 BODY V. SOUL 
 
 For the Plaintiff : Francis Thompson 
 
 Francis Thompson is known to us as perhaps the 
 most wastefully abundant imagination of the present 
 day. He has taken the sun for patron, and all his 
 poetry welters with the sun's fervour and fecundity. 
 They are in his very style and wordy vesture, that 
 imperial style of his into which he has adopted purple 
 Latinities as aptly as the Church has adopted the 
 stateliness of the Roman paenula. But we must be 
 on our guard against his splendours ; we must not 
 let them betray us into construing his work as 
 mere literature. One fears that some delusion of 
 the kind has captured many of those who praise him. 
 They have praised him as a lord of language, a 
 tyrant of images, and it has hardly occurred to them 
 to search out the spirit behind the grandiose cere- 
 monial. It is possible, it is even certain, that many 
 readers of such a poem as The Hound of Heaven 
 have exulted in its tidal flux without taking it to 
 mean anything in particular. But that is not the 
 colour of the poet's own mind. He has never spoken 
 for the sake of speaking, but always because he had 
 something to say. " What, after all," says Brune- 
 tiere, " is poetry but a metaphysic made manifest 
 through sensible images ?" Great poetry surely is ; 
 if not a criticism, it is a vision of life, of the structure 
 and basal laws of life. When a man's eyes have 
 been once opened the common day flames and 
 vibrates with bladed chariots. The most insignifi- 
 cant object or experience stands vested with endless 
 relations, or rather there is nothing that can any 
 longer be called insignificant. The lightest caprice 
 
 47
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 of love has its metaphysical implications, and to 
 salute a primrose is to proclaim a philosophy. We 
 all understand this, or at least our wise memories 
 do, in their choice of what to reject and what to 
 retain. That poetry alone lives in us which is so 
 great that it has forgotten to be poetic. We think 
 of its sincerity, its absolute truth, or what other 
 word we grasp at to describe what cannot be 
 described, not of its technical deftness or even 
 mastery. A something has come upon and trans- 
 muted it, it shines with the light of glorification. 
 Francis Thompson has always understood this. 
 Painting the veil of life with colours dipped out of 
 the rising and the setting of the sun, he has known 
 that nothing was of any account save what lay 
 behind the veil, the spiritual interpretation that can 
 never be wholly expressed. Earth and all the 
 business of earth have been to him at once a 
 spectacle and a sacrament. His work belongs less 
 to literature than to mysticism. Do we not think 
 of it as of something essentially hieratic, full of 
 costly spices, brought out of the East, of figured 
 chasubles, and full of the mysteries of grace ? 
 
 It was necessary to bring all this back to mind in 
 order to induce the mood in which the little book 
 before us must be considered.^ For it is no casual 
 bye-product of the writer's mind, as might possibly 
 be suspected from its appearance in a series, very 
 aptly called " The Science of Life Series." It is 
 thorough Thompson. The author has simply picked 
 out a certain drift of thought which lies implicit in 
 all his poetry, and supported it by instances and 
 considerations drawn from many quarters. Such a 
 prosifying of intuitions has an interest quite apart 
 from its subject matter. It helps to dispel the 
 notion that poetry comes irresponsibly out of the 
 
 1 Health and Holiness. A Study of the Relations between Brother 
 Ass, the Body, and his Rider, the Soul. By Francis Thompson. 
 
 48
 
 BODY V. SOUL 
 
 air, and not reflectively out of the stuff of everyday ; 
 and it shows the supreme reasonableness, the gross 
 commonsense, of mysticism. But we must not stray 
 aside, though it were, like the Crusaders, to capture 
 Constantinople. The book is simply a brief srudy 
 of the terms prescribed by ascetical tradition to 
 keep the peace between those ally-enemies, Soul 
 and Body, with a plea for a new Concordat to meet 
 new conditions. Mr. Thompson is on the side of 
 the body; in the interests of the spirit itself he 
 demands a more clement regime and never did 
 cause rejoice in an abler advocate. He has the 
 incommunicable gift of the phrase, the phrase that 
 is like a key-stone to knit together fabrics of expe- 
 rience, like a cavalry-charge to drive an argument 
 home. The task of summarizing him is therefore 
 extremely difficult, and I shall try to do no more 
 than convey in general terms the point of view from 
 which he justifies and ennobles Brother Ass. 
 
 In so far as he pleads for a mildening of the 
 discipline of the religious orders we have no concern 
 to follow him. Some have already relaxed, others 
 are in the train of relaxing their first austerity ; and 
 there must always be some that will preserve it to 
 be a refuge for those virile and passionate souls who 
 thirst for brimmed measures of expiation, and are 
 able to bear them. " The weltering problem of 
 secular religion," is, as the writer says, quite enough 
 for us. Take the unheroic, modern man, with all 
 his aches and pains, and ask what is religion to 
 make of him. What ascesis must be adopted so 
 as to make him an instrument capable of divine 
 melodies ? 
 
 For the soul is to the body, as the breath is to the flute, 
 Both together make the music, either marred and all is mute. 
 
 And first, how does this modern body stand in its 
 internal self? Surely, as Mr. Thompson says, it 
 
 E 49
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 is " an etiolated body of death." The nerves of 
 the twentieth century have gone bankrupt. Life 
 has become too elaborate and too exacting for them; 
 they have gone down under the iron rod of erudition 
 and the whip of practical labour. The age's char- 
 acteristic cry is the cry of disease. Men go about 
 making public confession of their ailments, or, 
 delivered from them, gather disciples to the gospel 
 of the perfect digestion. Patent medicines are in- 
 vested by their sellers with an all-sufficiency that 
 would have made Paracelsus blush for his modesty. 
 Commissions are appointed to enquire into Physical 
 Degeneration. The army authorities cry out that it 
 is impossible to find recruits who are even good 
 enough to be food for powder. Schools for Physical 
 Culture multiply, in England at least, with a rapidity 
 which illustrates, as even the three hundred religious 
 sects did not, that great people's genius for dissension. 
 No alert man has time to consider anything, save 
 what he shall eat and what he shall drink, and 
 wherewith he shall be clothed. We go about 
 creepily conscious of the iniquities of our livers, and 
 of the freaks of our subliminal selves. For alike 
 from the physical side and from the mental come 
 physicians. Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, Will- 
 Developers, Faith-Healers — it is beyond human 
 power to name the innnmerable brood. There is 
 an association in America, whose members are 
 pledged to spend an hour every week wishing fellow- 
 members good health and good fortune. The annual 
 subscription is only a dollar, and this will be returned 
 if within a year one does feel appreciably better, and 
 obtain a " rise." 
 
 It is a Danse Macabre, with an interfusion of the 
 crudest farce. But it is difficult to find much relief 
 in the humorous mask of it. That mask drops off, 
 and abandons us to something not far from terror. 
 Cerebral physiology, psychiatry as it is pursued, not 
 
 50
 
 BODY V. SOUL 
 
 in shilling treatises, but in the schools, begins to 
 disclose more fully the interrelations of mind and 
 body ; and the awful delicacy of the instrument on 
 which we play, its complex fallibility comes near 
 overwhelming us. It is something we have rea 
 about in the text-books, how "a. brain-fever changed 
 a straight-walking youth into a flagitious and 
 unprincipled wastrel. And recently," adds Mr, 
 Thompson, " we had the medically-reported case of 
 a model lad, who, after an illness, proved a liar and 
 a pilferer." Or it is somebody we have known, 
 flaming, impetuous, who was pushing on by forced 
 marches to his goal ; and then his outraged body 
 turned traitor, and the world had come to an end for 
 him. The brain has become the theatre of a tragedy 
 which is continually renewed. " How remote we 
 are," cries out Guyau in his poignant speech " from 
 the naive perception of the primitive world which 
 located the soul in the breast, or, it may be, even in 
 the stomach ! It is, as we kuow, the braiu that 
 thinks, it is the brain that suffers, it is the brain that 
 throbs with the torment of the Unknown, it is the 
 brain that is signed with the sacred wound of the 
 Ideal, it is the brain that quivers under the beak of 
 the winged and ravening intellect. In the moun- 
 tains of Tartary the traveller sometimes sees a strange 
 animal leap panting by in the greyness of the dawn. 
 The great eyes, strained wide with suffering, are 
 those of an antelope ; but as the hoofs thud by, the 
 ground beneath trembling like a heart in agony, two 
 huge wings are seen wildly beating to and fro above 
 the head which they seem to lift up and on. The 
 antelope dashes madly down the winding valley, 
 leaving a red trail on the rocks, staggers, falls, and 
 the two great wings soar up from the antlers, dis- 
 closing the eagle which, with talons sunk deep in the 
 skull, had been devouring the brain and the life of 
 the antelope " The parable would come with a 
 
 51
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 familiar air to Mr. Thompson, for it is obvious that 
 either from great sympathy or from sharp experience 
 he knows all these secrets of the prison-house. He 
 is cognisant of lives that have become a dread 
 Rosary in which there are only sorrowful mysteries. 
 Has not he himself written of one who 
 
 Paced the places infamous to tell, 
 
 Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes ? 
 
 He comes in this book to write of these things in 
 plain prose, to consider how they can be wrought up 
 into religion, and whether sanctity may not have in 
 it a tonic quality. The demand which he makes of 
 the life, whether of the saint or of the rest of us, is 
 simply that it shall live. " Holiness energises. The 
 commonest of common taunts is that of 'idle monks,' 
 'lazy saints,' and the like. But, most contrary to 
 that superficial taunt, a holy man was never yet an 
 idle man .... and a saintly could never be an 
 effete world." But I could not do justice to his 
 thought without quoting in full those proud, trumpet- 
 pages, in which he celebrates the " incidental great- 
 ness" of the saints when they turned half-disdainfuUy 
 to secular pursuits — the lyric majesty of the Prophets, 
 the Confessions of Augustine, the Hymn to the Sun 
 of St. Francis of Assisi, the incomparable prose of 
 St. Francis de Sales. The problem w ith us all, then, 
 is to evoke from the federation of body and soul the 
 fullest stream of energy, and to turn it to the highest 
 ends ; and to do this we must respect the laws and 
 the limitations of both. The body is like a wick 
 immersed in the oil of the spirit — it was Heine's 
 image — and "though the oil can immensely energize 
 and prolong the life of the wick, it is on that cor- 
 poreal wick, after all, that the flame of active energy 
 depends." How then is our end to be accomplished? 
 
 Not by the heroic maceration of the first or the 
 middle ages. The ascesis of these days, transmitted 
 
 52
 
 BODY V. SOUL 
 
 to us in the discipline of the Orders, was framed for 
 men of robuster mould and unspeakably less sensi- 
 tive nerves. Their obstacle was that of opulence ; 
 they served God, as they foreswore Him, with 
 wasteful thoroughness. Our obstacle is that of 
 poverty. Onr ancestors put out their follies at com- 
 pound interest and we are reaping the harvest. 
 The human frame has, Mr. Thompson believes, under 
 this burden and under the complications of modern 
 life suffered a radical diminution of sheer vital power. 
 No faculty has increased except the faculty of 
 suffering, for in the elaboration of its nerves it has 
 become, as it were, soaked in mind. It cries out not 
 for a curb against the excess of its passions, but for 
 the energy to be passionate at all, "Merely to front 
 existence, for some, is a surrender of self, a choice of 
 ineludibly rigorous abnegation." Surely then we 
 must treat our bodies alter another fashion than that 
 of old if we are to make them fit receptacles for 
 sanctity? Mr. Thompson thinks so, and he has dis- 
 covered a wise director of souls, the late Archbishop 
 Porter, S.J., who thought with him. "Better to eat 
 meat on Good Friday," \\rites the Archbishop, "than 
 to live in war with every one about us. I fear much 
 you do not take enough food and rest. You stand 
 in need of both, and it is not wise to starve yourself 
 into misery." And he prescribes Vichy and Carlsbad 
 against a visitation of evil thoughts. It is an ascesis 
 no less than the other, and no less difficult. We 
 must study to take our bodies with that shrewd and 
 half humorous gravity which we find in nearly all 
 the wise, and to rule by obeying them. " That the 
 demon could have been purged from Saul by medi- 
 cinal draughts," writes Mr. Thompson in a sentence 
 worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, " were a supposition 
 too much in the manner of the Higher Criticism," 
 But Dryden tells us that whenever " he had a poem 
 to write" — divine tradesman — he choose that method 
 
 53
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 of depurating his spirit. It is hardly a point to dwell 
 on. But let us put an end to the old boycott of the 
 body. Let us be tender and thrifty of its forces. In 
 the strange commerce of spirit and matter, a holida}', 
 prudently taken, may be not only better than a 
 half-done duty, but better even than a wandering 
 prayer. 
 
 Such is the drift of Health and Holiness, and no 
 one who has any appreciation of the grounds on 
 which it rests will be likely to dispute the conclusion. 
 As against the practice of certain Orders it may be 
 a necessary protest ; and there is no head of a 
 convent or college (so long engaged in the great 
 Intermediate conspiracy) but will profit by reading 
 it. We laymen must look to ourselves, and the 
 Church, as we know her, is amply indulgent. She 
 does not debilitate us with fasts and penances. What 
 is of far deeper interest than these special applica- 
 tions of it is the noble philosophy which glimpses 
 through the book. The temper of Plotinus, who was 
 so shamed of his body that he always refused to dis- 
 close the date or place of his birth, possesses, of 
 course, a relative truth, but it has been far too domi- 
 nant within the Church. We have forgotten that 
 the Scholastics built psychology on the compositnm 
 Jiiiinannm, the dual unit of soul and body. We have 
 forgotten that the body is the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost, or remembered it only at catechism time. 
 But so it is, and in the light of this interpretation 
 the trivialities of every-day shine with an unsuspected 
 poetry. It is an interpretation confirmed by all our 
 fairest instincts. Most of us have had moments when 
 sensations of which we are commonly a little ashamed 
 lost their supposed grossness, when a cup of milk 
 drunk among the mountains had in it a lyric ecstasy, 
 and the least spiritual of the senses ^^ as transfused 
 with spirit. I do not speak of those experiences 
 which Coventry Patmore touched with the rapture 
 
 54
 
 BODY V. SOUL 
 
 of his vision ; but in his poem To the Body the whole 
 essence of Health and Holiness is to be found. As men 
 come back to the simplicities of life their minds grow 
 more habitable tc thoughts like these. The growing 
 nausea of cities, the desire to live in the nearer inti- 
 macy of air and earth, the yearning for physical 
 health, of which I have spoken, are all symptoms of 
 a veritable rehabilitation of the body. What could 
 be more appropriate than that a poet should come at 
 this moment to confirm the indispensable truth amid 
 many extravagances, and to Christianise what 
 otherwise tends to the most naive Paganism ? 
 
 Mr. Thompson has his vision of the future. " The 
 remedy for modern lassitude of body, for modern 
 weakness of will, is Holiness. . . . Of the potency, 
 magisterial, benevolent, even tyrannous, which goes 
 forth from the spirit on the body, we have but young 
 knowledge. Nevertheless, it is in rapid act of 
 blossoming. Hypnotism, faith-healing, radium — all 
 these, of such seeming multiple divergence, are really 
 concentrating their rays upon a common centre. 
 When that centre is divined, we shall have scientific 
 witness, demonstrated certification, to the commerce 
 between body and spirit, the regality of will over 
 matter, . . . Then will lie open the truth which 
 now we can merely point to by plausibilities, and 
 fortify by instances, the sanctity is medicinal. Holi- 
 ness a healer. . . , Health, I have well-nigh 
 said, is Holiness. What if Holiness be Health? . . ." 
 Have we not all a forecast of some such perfect mar- 
 riage of soul and body, in which the two will be no 
 more at war than thought with word ? It is vouch- 
 safed to us here and there in a gracious example, 
 some saint whose every action is ordered with a 
 divine courtesy, some lady who seems to live to an 
 ever-sounding, interior music. Perhaps it is a dream 
 of the glorified rather than of the earthly body ; but 
 let us hear the poets when they describe it, lest we 
 
 55
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 should not recognize our inheritance when it comes 
 to us. 
 
 It is curious to compare Francis Thompson's 
 vision with that of Guyau, most spiritual of evolu- 
 tionists. "Pleasure, even physical pleasure growing 
 more and more delicate, and mingling with moral 
 ideas, will become more and more esthetic ; we see 
 as the ideal term of evolution a race to which every 
 pleasure will be beautiful, every agreeable action 
 artistic, We should then be like those instruments, 
 which are so amply sonorous, that it is impossible to 
 touch them without evoking a sound of musical 
 value ; the lightest stimulus would set in vibration 
 the depths of our moral life. . . . Art will no 
 longer stand severed from life ; our consciousness 
 will have grown so vast and so delicate as to be ever 
 alert to the harmony of life, and all our pleasures 
 will bear the sacred seal of beauty." 
 
 They are alike ideals; but they help in very 
 different ways to keep alive in us that curiosity 
 which is the seed of the future, and to remind us 
 that man, if not in this life perfectible, is capable of 
 endless progress. The superiority of the Catholic 
 poet is that he reinforces the natural will by waters 
 falling an infinite height from the infinite ocean of 
 Spirit. He has two worlds against one. If we place 
 our Fortunate Islands solely within the walls of space 
 and time, they will dissolve into a mocking dream ; 
 for there will always be pain that no wisdom can 
 assuage. They must lie on the edge of the horizon 
 with the glimmer of a strange sea about their shores, 
 and their mountain peaks hidden among the clouds. 
 
 1905. 
 
 56
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 
 
 It is the last day of the Winter Assizes. If you 
 want a metaphor to drape it in, you may call it the 
 punitive clearing-house of Society. The cheques of 
 crime come in, with sinister crinklings and rustlings, 
 to receive the cancelling stamp which announces that 
 in six months or twenty years — or, it may be, three 
 weeks, with a hempen halter at the end — the criminal 
 will have cleared his account with the State. He 
 may then begin anew . . . if he be sufficiently 
 alive. There is no tragic strain in the air as the 
 sentenced prisoners pass out of the dock to lose their 
 freedom, their clothes, their tobacco, and their names 
 for the stated period. They do not, as that young 
 reporter racing over the last page of his flimsy is 
 sure to write, " appear to realize their position." 
 They are only the raw material of tragedy. They 
 have never, like you and me, read Gorky in bad 
 English. They have not participated in the revival 
 of Greek drama; nor even, with the aid of a free 
 pass, studied the free passions of the Stage Society. 
 
 So placed, you would, doubtless, gather about you 
 the purple folds of a sorrow so terrible as to swallow 
 up all remembrance of its cause, and I would mimic 
 wicked marquises who went to the tumbrils with a 
 fine phrase and an incomparable gesture. But the 
 enemy of Society now in the dock, in course of 
 receiving seven years, is probably wondering under 
 his yellow and scrubby face how the skilly will taste, 
 and whether they will wash him very hard in jail. 
 
 Seven or eight days in an Assize Court help one 
 to understand the anarchist and his attitude towards 
 crime. The theorists of Anarchism propose to sweep 
 
 57
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 away the whole traditional, minute machinery of 
 penal law, and leave the criminal to the spontaneous 
 justice of his neighbours. It may be that the 
 neighbours will lynch a child-beater, and, shrouding 
 their faces before a supreme anguish, will let a man 
 who has killed go free. They will take a human, 
 not a judicial view of things. But be that as it may, 
 one does feel intensely that these legal forms and 
 moulds are too narrow, too icily definite, too blank 
 to psychology to contain the passionate chaos of 
 life that is poured into them. Think of the colossal 
 pretensions of this courthouse — this drab granite 
 building, with the unwashed mud on its pavements, 
 and the susurrus of crowds that sweat and chatter 
 about it ! It is a temple to the Problem of Evil. It 
 is a temple to the Problem of Evidence. It is a 
 temple to the Mystery of Death. And when you 
 have uttered these three words you have called up 
 the whole moral, intellectual, and metaphysical life 
 of humanity. 
 
 If it were not contempt of court you would rise 
 up and cry out to all these actors — ^judge, jury, 
 counsel, prisoner, policeman — that the tragic halo 
 is about their heads. You would recall them to the 
 bitter greatness which they seem to have forgotten. 
 Sad-robed priests — if your vision could be made fact 
 — would chant prayers around the smoke of conse- 
 crated censers in the Doric portico of this Temple 
 of Fear. And the prisoner, sinner and victim at 
 once, would go to his doom covered with pity as with 
 sacrificial garlands. 
 
 You may be quite certain that none of these things 
 will happen. There is no provision made for them in 
 Stephens' Digest of the Criminal Law, or in Archbold 
 on Evidence. To imagine them is to welcome the 
 decadence. But then, as you look up at the bench, 
 your eye is caught by a veritable, decadent touch — 
 the judge's flowers. I do not know whether it is 
 
 58
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 
 
 part of the ritual or not, but I have never been at a 
 Criminal Assizes without seeing that incongruous 
 bunch of flowers — this time they are ragged, white 
 chrysanthemums in a vase of blue china — beside the 
 inkpot in which the judicial pen is dipped as it takes 
 notes of the evidence or records the conviction. It 
 reminds one of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai, Blossoms 
 of Sin. 
 
 But, after all, you may expect anything of the 
 judge. He is a wild symbolist. He wears scarlet 
 to manifest the wrath of the law, and ermine for 
 the purity of the law — a spotted purity, to guess 
 from the specimen before us — and a black cap 
 by times for the gloom of death. Probably there 
 is some guarded mystery in the number of curls in 
 his wig of white horse-hair. And the policemen — 
 it is in Ireland, but crime is as cosmopolitan as 
 money ! — are admirable studies in silver and jet ; 
 especially the district inspectors, with their braided 
 hussar-jackets and the gleam of chains and brooch- 
 buckles upon them. It seems an artistic imperti- 
 nence that crime should lift its shaggy head against 
 so many perfumed people, dressed out in such 
 splendid raiment. But great as are the virtues of 
 uniform, they do not quite reach to the total extinc- 
 tion of evil. 
 
 You had a sense of utter futility as you listened 
 to the steady, infinitesimal drip of evidence. It was 
 like the nagging and pecking patter of thin rain on 
 a hat. It proved everything with absolute conclu- 
 siveness except the moral guilt of the prisoner. You 
 have the same sense of the emptiness of criminology 
 as a pale, sensitive face appears above the spikes of 
 the dock. He might be a poet, an Assisi peasant 
 turned saint, but certainly there is no signature of 
 crime in his visage. As a matter of fact, he stabbed 
 a neighbour to death because of a difference of 
 opinion as to the rate of wages in North Carolina. 
 
 59
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 It seems a poor reason enough. To act like that is 
 to take truth too heavily, and life too lightly. 
 Besides, there are plenty of things to quarrel about 
 at home without going to Carolina, North or South. 
 
 How did the prisoner come to do it ? You can 
 see that he is as puzzled to answ^er the question as 
 anybody else. He stands in the dock clasping and 
 unclasping the fingers of that horrible right hand 
 which held the knife. It seems to him a foreign 
 body: it is surely not his ? The late Mr. Browning, 
 perhaps, could explain it. After all, if any truth is 
 of any importance, every truth is of infinite import- 
 ance. And think of the monstrous spectacle before 
 Heaven of this dead man riding easily about the 
 country sowing stories two dollars a week wrong as 
 to the rate of wages in North Carolina ! How many 
 destinies he might mis-shape with his eight-and- 
 fourpenny error ! Well, he will propagate no more 
 economic blunders. And his slayer will wear the 
 yellow and arrowed jacket for ten years to come. 
 But will that give back the dead disputant to the 
 sunlight or to his wife ? 
 
 The courthouse is somehow growing too small. 
 Your brain is growing too small. The world itself 
 is too small for these explosive and shattering specu- 
 lations. The judge is doing his best ; everybody is 
 doing his best; even Mr. Gladstone who undertakes 
 in his Borstal repair-shops to patch up a moral 
 personality, as good as new, for all and divers his 
 Majesty's subjects in prison. If the thing is to be 
 done at all it must be done after this fashion. 
 
 Certainly, one has no substitute to offer for this 
 Judaeo-Roman-English criminal laws and, perhaps, 
 equally criminal civilization. Still, one is conscious 
 of a vague protest against it all. In crime, in moral 
 evil, the veiled destinies have set mankind a problem 
 too hard to understand, too heavy to endure. For 
 my part, I can only fall back on the serpent and the 
 
 60
 
 REVERIES OF ASSIZE 
 
 apple, and an obscure something which, as my Penny 
 Catechism says, " darkened our understanding, 
 weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclina- 
 tion to evil." 
 
 1909. 
 
 61
 
 A NEW WAY 
 OF MISUNDERSTANDING 
 HAMLET 
 
 What one felt most painfully at Mr. Harvey's 
 recent performance of Hamlet was the artistic bank- 
 ruptcy of the play. Of course no decent citizen 
 confessed his boredom, because Shakespeare is the 
 keystone of the conventions, a " national asset " as 
 is said in England. But if art means freshness, 
 words with raw, vivid sensation behind them, sur- 
 prise and an element of strangeness ? And what 
 else does it mean ? Already a hundred years ago 
 the humane Charles Lamb was able to write that 
 all the shining things in the play had been " so 
 handled and pawed by declamatory boys and men " 
 that for him they were " perfect dead members." 
 And since then ! The great Law of Ennui has vin- 
 dicated itself even against Shakespeare. He has 
 been mummified into an orthodoxy. He is a field 
 for antiquarians, a proud heritage, an excuse for 
 sumptuous scenery, but as an artist in the strict 
 sense he hardly exists. Only one thing can restore 
 him, a prolonged bath of oblivion. If he is to be 
 brought to life again he must be redeemed from his 
 immortality, which will be better than to redeem 
 his house from the Americans. Societies must be 
 started to destroy his works, at all events to lose 
 them for a hundred and fifty years, and so make it 
 possible for unborn happier generations to come to 
 him as to a fresh and breathing phenomenon. 
 Failing that he must be excluded from all school 
 and university courses, and forbidden under heavy 
 
 62
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 
 
 penalties to any one not having attained his majority. 
 
 The pity is that, with the calamity of so long life, 
 he should not have the happiness to be understood. 
 The inky Dane, in especial, has had as evil fortune 
 in this regard as if he had walked the actual earth 
 and devoted himself to politics. Critic after critic 
 has arisen to misrepresent him, and this secular 
 misrepresentation has so crept into the empire of 
 our imagination that direct vision of the play is 
 impossible. Tieck's Hamlet we know, and Goethe's 
 and Coleridge's and Mr. Tree's and Mr. Harvey's, 
 but Shakespeare's Hamlet no man knows. Shake- 
 speare's Hamlet, as a painful matter of fact, no man 
 can ever know. We know how much sub-meaning 
 and personal colour the same set of words takes on 
 in different minds, and that these are never exactly 
 what they were in the creator's mind. And then in 
 Hamlet there is the added barrier of Elizabethan 
 English, and the fact that Shakespeare is as topical 
 as a pantomime. What each of us does is to con- 
 struct a private understanding of Ilamlet (which is 
 certain to be a misunderstanding) out of materials 
 furnished conjointly by ourselves, Shakespeare, a 
 cloud of critics, and the actor who happens to be 
 concrete before our eyes at the moment ; and it is 
 in confession of this, and not as a poor paradox, 
 that the title of this paper has been devised. 
 
 The points I wish modestly to put forward here 
 will be most intelligible as a comment on the popular 
 reading. That reading has one merit at least, that 
 of simplicity. According to it the plastic principle 
 of the play, or rather the flaw that suffers it to stream 
 down its ruinous course, is a vice of character — 
 Hamlet's " inability to act." It is Goethe's " oak 
 planted in a costly vase which should have only borne 
 pleasant flowers"; it is Coleridge's "man living in 
 meditation, called upon to act by every motive, 
 human and divine, but the great object of whose 
 
 63
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet 
 doing nothing but resolve." These are the phrases 
 that have captured the general mind, and flowed 
 like a mist over the outlines of the play. But 
 consider for a moment. Remembering Goethe's 
 paltry performance — thanks to his superculture — 
 in the liberation of Germany, and the lamentable 
 life story of Coleridge, who can doubt that we have 
 here not so much the poet's imagination as that of 
 his critics ? Quicquid recipitur secundum modum reci- 
 pientis, we get out of things what we bring to them ; 
 and I submit that the apocalypse of moral insuffi- 
 ciency discerned by these two eminent minds in 
 Hamlet was brought with them in the satchels of 
 their conscience. They are simply making General 
 Confessions at the expense of the unfortunate Prince. 
 Let us analyse this interpretation popularized by 
 them. The kernel of it is this. It demands in the 
 place of Hamlet a crude, gory, gullible, instantanous 
 savage who not only believes in ghosts but lacks 
 even the elementary savage's knowledge that there 
 are evil as well as good ghosts, and whose will is 
 hung on a hair-trigger dischargeable by the airiest 
 impulse and subject to no restraint, moral or pru- 
 dential. The commercial blandness with which 
 people talk of Hamlet's " plain duty " makes one 
 wonder if they recognize such a thing as plain 
 morality. The " removal " of an uncle without 
 due process of law and on the unsupported state- 
 ment of an unsubpcenable ghost ; the widowing of 
 a mother and her casting-off as unspeakably vile, 
 are treated as enterprises about which a man has no 
 right to hesitate or even to feel unhappy. Because, 
 meshed about with murder, adultery, usurpation, 
 espionage, hypocrisy, and all other natural horrors, 
 reinforced by the still greater horror of the super- 
 natural, because in these cheerful conditions Hamlet 
 is healthy-minded enough to grow " thought-sick," 
 
 64
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 
 
 he is marked down as one " unstable as water." 
 What bewilders most of all is that there lurks in 
 the popular view (and I appeal to the general expe- 
 rience) a vague conviction that if Hamlet had only 
 shown himself morally-fibrous enough, all the blood 
 and tears would somehow have been averted and 
 the curtain would fall on a serene Denmark. 
 
 I do not deny that a tragedy derived from super- 
 culture and a feeble will would be admirable. 
 Indeed if it be wanted it can be found in the purest 
 essence in Turgeneffs Rudin. But I submit that 
 this is not the true ethos of Hamlet. I submit that 
 Hamlet, so far from being the most " internal " of 
 Shakespeare's plays, is nearly the most " external," 
 and has for plastic principle not character but that 
 veiled force which we call destiny. What, in fine, 
 is it but a tale of justice, bloodily executed 
 through what seem "accidental judgments, casual 
 slaughters " ? Such indeed was the reading of the 
 Prince himself: — 
 
 Heaven hath pleased it so 
 
 To punish me with this, and this with me, 
 
 That I must be their scourge and minister. 
 
 The problem is set wholly from the outside. It is 
 not a product of Hamlet's superculture, but of the 
 sin of his uncle and the lesser sin of his mother, 
 and it is a problem so overwhelming that, however 
 it be handled and by whatever type of character, it 
 must issue in abundant tears and blood. What is 
 claimed here for Hamlet's solution is, that it is the 
 only one justified by the character of the evidence 
 and the practical means at his command, and that, 
 above all, it is justified by results. The destinies 
 approve and aid him, and when the curtain falls on 
 a terrible harvest of horror we feel, nevertheless, a 
 deep appeasement. The agony of Hamlet is over, 
 the due ransom of sin has been paid with lives guilty 
 
 F 65
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 and innocent, and with the inearthing of much moral 
 refuse, the world sweeps into pure air again. The 
 roll of Fortinbras' drums is not so much the irony 
 as the recuperative force of life, lingering with praise 
 over the body of him who has made recuperation 
 possible. 
 
 This is a point which must not be ignored : the 
 play ends, thanks to Hamlet's course of action, in 
 absolutely the best way in which it could end. The 
 king, of course, was due to the sword. But surely 
 Gertrude also is better out of the world than in it ? 
 Had she lived there was nothing but the gnawing of 
 the worm, shame and remorse, or perhaps — and the 
 closet scene shows her capable of it — the triumph of 
 the fouler part of her, and the pursuit of her son 
 with hatred and vengeance. Does anybody drop 
 tears over Laertes, that polished cutter of throats i' 
 the church ? There remain Polonius and Ophelia. 
 The comic side of Polonius is always played with 
 such over-emphasis as to hide the dangerous side of 
 him. His complicity in the murder of the elder 
 Hamlet may be disputed, although it is not easy 
 otherwise to explain his overweening influence with 
 Claudius. He certainly conspired with the latter in 
 his usurpation, and we cannot say what is the bound 
 to his falseness. Suppose he had not been slain 
 behind the arras, but had lived to carry his tale to 
 Claudius, what course of action would he have coun- 
 selled? Like son, like father; his plan would have 
 differed from the poisoned rapier only in being, 
 perhaps, a little more politic. Polonius helps to 
 remind us that we may have comic murderers, just 
 as the Burghleys and other contemporary statesmen 
 show that we may have pious murderers. As for 
 Ophelia, she is one of those who are organized for 
 unhappiness. Hamlet's disgust with life is so violent, 
 just and incurable that the old magic of their love 
 can never return, and his straits are such that, how- 
 
 66
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 
 
 ever he acts, enough misery will be produced to 
 dethrone her frail reason. 
 
 I have submitted also that the evidence in Hamlet's 
 possession never reaches that daylight certainty 
 which justifies private vengeance. If Shakespeare 
 had intended to exhibit a mind which is at once 
 absolutely sure of itself and incapable of action, 
 would he not have brought the murder to light by 
 the agency of some courtier who had secretly 
 witnessed it? In fact the ghost is the one great 
 blot and uncombining ingredient in the play. Had 
 Shakespeare preserved the mental climate of the 
 original story the ghost might perhaps have been 
 tolerated, but he is quite out of joint with so thorough 
 a modern as Hamlet. He complicates the whole 
 action, and steeps it in incongruity. Hamlet's desire 
 to have more relative grounds than the word of this 
 visitant in whom it is impossible to believe fully 
 except during his actual presence is in the highest 
 degree natural. He therefore tries the experiment 
 of the play, and fails. What he had hoped was to 
 provoke Claudius to " proclaim his malefaction " in 
 the ear of the court, for the case that has to be built 
 up is one that will convince not only Hamlet, but 
 also the public at large. What really is provoked? 
 A temporary indisposition which can be explained 
 away in two sentences the next day. It may convince 
 Hamlet, but it certainly would not secure his acquittal 
 before a jur)-. 
 
 But even supposing him to be justifiably certain, 
 has he the practical means to kill Claudius without, 
 by the same act, surrendering himself to death ? 
 Claudius was popular enough to override Hamlet's 
 claims and have himself chosen king. In that office 
 he had shown competence, his relations with England 
 and Norway being most excellent. He had a levy 
 of three thousand men in the immediate neighbour- 
 hood of the court whom he kept in good humour by 
 
 67
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 frequent carousals. His courtiers were so loyal that 
 the Court-play apparently awoke not the least 
 suspicion or hostility in a single one of them, and 
 that, even after, Laertes' confession of his treachery, 
 when Hamlet plunges his rapier into Claudius, they 
 shriek " Treason ! Treason ! " and would no doubt 
 have cut the young prince down were that not plainly 
 superfluous. As against this, Hamlet is a student, 
 just come home, super-intelligent and a hater of bores 
 and shams. His opinion of the masquerade of royalty 
 may be gathered from that one remark of his : " Let's 
 to the Court! for, by my fay, I cannot reason." He 
 applies his literary criticism to every-day conver- 
 sation, and anal3'ses received platitudes with the most 
 ruthless candour. To crown all, he is a Temperance 
 Pioneer! In short, the situation is such that no one 
 would have much chance of organizing support 
 enough to oust Claudius, but that Hamlet, by the 
 sheer force of his superiorities, has no chance at all. 
 Of course it is always possible for him to slay the 
 king and sacrifice his ow n life to his vengeance. But 
 that would be something worse even than " hire and 
 salary," and he has no enthusiasm for dying. Many 
 people assume that he has, but in fact he is philoso- 
 pher enough to be afraid of death. True, like every 
 man of high intellect, he has moments of moral 
 nausea, when he almost thinks that the best thing 
 is not to be born, the next best to leave life as quickly 
 as may be. But he recoils from the invisible event ; 
 above all, he never caresses the idea of suicide. The 
 great " to be or not to be " monologue, sometimes 
 interpreted in this sense, is really the precise opposite. 
 It is rather an admonition to himself to defy death 
 which he sees to be probably bound up with his 
 revenge, and not to suffer his great enterprise, to be 
 turned away by the fear of death. In short he never 
 is absolutely certain of the facts of the crime, nor in 
 a position to punish it with safety to himself. And, 
 
 68
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 
 
 although Shakespeare cannot amend this latter 
 circumstance, he does amend the former, and with 
 exquisite dramatic courtesy allows Hamlet full 
 evidence of the king's guilt of another murder before 
 calling his retributive sword into action. 
 
 What counts against Hamlet in popular estimation 
 is his continual self-reproach. But this springs just 
 from his exacting ideal of action, for he would shorten 
 a straight line to reach his end. Religious biography 
 will furnish a parallel ; it is not among the actual 
 sinners that we hnd self-contempt and a consciousness 
 of the unforgiveable sin, but among the Bunyans 
 and the Saint Alphonsus Ligouris. There is another 
 motive behind Hamlet's outbursts. He is not certain 
 enough to act, but his tense and tortured mind must 
 find relief, and words are not irrevocable. But after 
 the emotional debauch of his monologues, the lucid 
 judgment returns, with its questionings and firm 
 grasp of difficulties. Hamlet is compromised also by 
 the speculative embroideries which his mind works 
 over the drab stuff of experience. People think with 
 Horatio that it is " to enquire too curiously " to find 
 the dust of Alexander stopping a beer-barrel. But 
 is it? Is not Hamlet rather the avid intellect, which 
 must needs think out of things everything that is to 
 be found in them ? " Hamlet's obstacles are internal." 
 He certainly has internal obstacles. He is hampered 
 by conscience, natural affection, an exquisite taste 
 and a capacity for metaphysics; very grave obstacles, 
 if what is desired is immediate bloodshed. Some 
 critics hold that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet to purge 
 his countrymen of these qualities which he perceived 
 spreading, to the infinite prejudice of Elizabethan 
 Jingoism. It may be so, and I am free to confess 
 that, as far as public policy goes, his countrymen 
 have reformed them indifferently. But it is just 
 because of these failings that Hamlet possesses 
 human significance. Without them, he might be 
 very interesting from the point of view of a tiger, but 
 
 69
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 he would never have touched and troubled out- 
 imagination. As it is, we think of him as the noble 
 and courtly prince who passes through life, annotating 
 it with ;i gloss of melancholy speculation that has 
 been absorbed into the mind of Europe, and who so 
 confronts it practically that the destinies adopt him 
 for their minister, and, through him, draw, out of 
 unexampled horrors, justice and even a certain 
 terrible peace/ 
 
 As a perhaps tedious supplement, I submit that 
 the character of Horatio has been as favourably, as 
 that of Hamlet has been unfavourably, misunderstood. 
 He enjoys the reputation of being the strong, silent, 
 truly virile man, held up in contrast to the gusty and 
 barren metaphysician. In support of this there can 
 be produced just a single speech of Hamlet's: against 
 it there is the whole of Horatio's words and actions. 
 The eulogy, like so many other passages, has, however, 
 never been construed in its dramatic context. It is 
 spoken, be it remembered, immediately before the 
 play, when Hamlet is tense with the most terrible 
 expectation. He is about to probe the King's 
 conscience to the quick, and naturally wants cor- 
 roboration of his own prejudiced eyes, and perhaps 
 assistance in the scene that may follow. In order to 
 induce the de{)lorable Horatio to render even this 
 petty service it is necessary to flatter him, and the 
 exaggerated courtesy, natural to Hamlet — as in the 
 reception of Rosencranz and Guildenstern — combines 
 with his immediate need to produce superlatives. 
 His own fine taste rebels against them, and, as is 
 
 1 The only sustainable charge that can be made against Hamlet 
 is one of over-hasty action — with regard, I mean, to Rosencranz 
 and Guildenstern. He sent them to death without anything like 
 decisive proof of 'their complicity in the design to have him 
 executed in England. There is nothing to show that they knew 
 the contents of the original commission : indeed the contrary is 
 established by their continuing their journey after losing Hamlet. 
 Most people will, however, accept the latter's justification of 
 himself as satisfactory. 
 
 70
 
 MISUNDERSTANDING HAMLET 
 
 known, he concludes with " something too much of 
 this ! " (Were I a German I would suggest that 
 these words are an amending note of Shakespeare on 
 the MS., which he is known to have been revising, 
 that he meant to recast the lines, and that his private 
 note has been interpolated into Hamlet's speech.) 
 What, as a matter of fact, is Horatio's record in 
 the play? He is at Elsinore two months before 
 he thinks it worth while to call on his old friend 
 Hamlet, although he knows the latter to be in the 
 most grievous trouble. At the first appearance of 
 the ghost he has not wit enough to address it in 
 Latin, although that is what he was brought there 
 for by Marcellus. At the second appearance he is 
 not able even to tell Hamlet the time, and later is 
 guilty of a much grosser ineptitude. Marcellus 
 urges him to come on after the Prince and the 
 ghost. " Oh !" says Horatio, " Heaven will direct 
 it ! " and his delegation of his duty to Providence 
 has to be crushed by Marcellus' " Nay, let's follow 
 him." At what stage he comes to know of the 
 King's crime is not clear, but he certainly possesses 
 all Hamlet's knowledge of it after the the Court 
 Play. And what does this strong silent man do ? 
 Organize a party, as Laertes found friends to 
 oragani/e one, to execute vengeance against 
 Claudius? By no means. He has nothing better 
 to say than that he very well noted the King and 
 that Hamlet ought to rhyme the quatrain in which 
 his frenzy extravagates. Afterwards, when the 
 Prince is sent to England under the most sinister 
 circumstances, does the good Horatio make an 
 attempt either to accompany or to liberate him ? 
 As a matter of fact he lies conscientiously low, and 
 cultivates the best relations with Cladius. His next 
 opportunity is at Hamlet's relation of his escape 
 from the death intended for him in England. 
 Horatio has indeed the grace to admire Hamlet's 
 superior firmness of character — " Why, what a king 
 
 71
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 is this!" — but he does his best to cancel this by 
 sympathetic tears over Rosencranz and Guildenstern. 
 Before the duel he administers draughts of dis- 
 couragement and superstition, and he has not the 
 sense to see that Laertes' rapier is unbated. In 
 fact from beginning to end he is a wandering inepti- 
 tude who has never a single suggestion, and whose 
 speech consists mainly of " Ay, my Lords," " That 
 is most certain," " Is it possible," and other helpful 
 phrases. At the last he has one good impulse to 
 finish the poisoned cup, but the dying Hamlet 
 intervenes, and Horatio addresses himself to funeral 
 orations which are certainly much more after his 
 heart. He is prayed merely to absent himself from 
 felicity awhile, but we may be sure that he does not 
 construe the last as the emphatic word, but stands 
 in as an echo to Fortinbras and absents himself as 
 long as possible. And this is the strong silent man 
 after whom Hamlet should have modelled himself! 
 In truth he compares poorly with Osric, who was 
 at any rate a stylist. 
 
 I cannot abstain from a word on Hamlet as an 
 art critic. His theory that the stage should hold 
 the mirror up to nature is of course absurd, at least 
 as far as gesture and outer expression of emotion 
 goes. I refer rather to his employment of art as 
 an oblique moral inquisition — a most remark- 
 able anticipation of what Browning has to say in 
 the Epilogue of "The Ring and the Book"; and 
 to his delightful prophetic criticism of the two 
 great achievements of the modern theatre — the 
 musical comed}' and the problem play. Polonius 
 has grown impatient at the length of the fine epic 
 passage recited by the players ; Hamlet turns on 
 him with his unforgettable " Oh, he must have a jig 
 or a tale of bawdy, or he falls asleep." 
 
 1905. 
 72
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 
 
 Geneva, September igog. 
 
 The Congress of the Jeunesse Egyptienne is over. 
 The Rue Bartholomy is no longer splashed with 
 the crimson and scarlet of the tarbouch which one 
 learns is the correct term for what we more naturally 
 call the fez. And as one sits by the lake shore, 
 drowsed with the dim and misted beauty of the 
 Swiss September, there are no grave, dark faces, no 
 star and crescent favours, no cataracts of vowelled 
 Arabic to force one back again to the dusty duties 
 of political conflict. 
 
 All this is to say that the Congress, as a spectacle, 
 was brilliant and picturesque. The Jeunesse 
 Egyptienne is, to a large extent, a jeunesse doree. 
 It is also a movement of intellectuals. The great 
 body of the delegates were students — students in 
 law, medicine, or arts — who thronged here from 
 Lyons, Paris, Dijon, Oxford. The President, M. 
 Mohamed Fahmy, is a " free professor " of Mahome- 
 tan law at the University of Geneva. Hamed El 
 Alaily, who read perhaps the most brilliant paper at 
 the Congress, " A Plea for a Constructive Policy," 
 is at Oxford, and carries about him a curious sense 
 at once of the tine essence of Oxford and the fine 
 essence of that Arab culture which gave us Avicenna 
 and Averroes. M. Loutfi Goumah, who swept the 
 Congress off its feet on the second day with a 
 passionate reply to Mr. Keir Hardie, entertains me 
 in the evening with a lecture on Eastern lyrical 
 poetry. When Egypt is free he assures me with a 
 smile that he will at last have time to complete a 
 
 73
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 criticism of German philosophy from the Arabic point 
 of view. 
 
 Decidedly whatever you may call the Young 
 Egyptians, you cannot call them uneducated or 
 irresponsible. On the contrary, they manifest every 
 sign of wealth, culture, knowledge of the world, and 
 a courtesy suave beyond expression. There is a 
 wide range of racial types from the noble Arabian 
 profile to something that seems almost Ethiopian. 
 In social intercourse one is impressed by the fact 
 that they have all gone to a good tradition for their 
 manners and to a good tailor for their clothes. One 
 is impressed still more by the evidences of firmness 
 of character. Hardly any of them touches wine. 
 Most of them do not seem to smoke. " You see," 
 says one of the non-smokers, " tobacco darkens the 
 complexion. And, mon Dieu ! am I not dark enough 
 already ?" 
 
 Whether this abstinence has any religious sanction 
 at the present day is a matter difficult to determine. 
 One hardly thinks so ; and yet I have a picture of a 
 stout and amiable pasha at the Congress slipping 
 his Rosary Beads through his fingers with incredible 
 industry, with a murmur for each bead of " Allah !" 
 
 For the moment there is one binding idea, and 
 only one, dominant in the assembly, and that is not 
 a religious but a political idea. Three parties are 
 represented, grading down from fierce extremists to 
 somewhat timid reformers, but let a speaker fling 
 out the cry of" Egypt for the Egyptians," and Con- 
 servative hands clap as loudly as Radical hands to 
 a fusillade of " Tres biens " and " Bravos." The 
 Congress is inspired by a sincere passion for nation- 
 ality. It has no hatred for England except in so 
 far as Egypt cannot belong at the same time to the 
 English and to the Egyptians. 
 
 And here I must signalize the dramatic moment 
 of the proceedings. Just as every picture has its 
 
 74
 
 YOUNG EGYPT 
 
 centre of repose, so every assembly has its centre of 
 tension. At Geneva this central point was found 
 when M. Loutfi Goumah leaped to his feet to reph' 
 to some things that Mr. Keir Hardie had said, and 
 to other things which he had not said. " Mr. Hardie 
 has spoken of helping us to achieve * some effective 
 form of self-government.' We do not want ' some 
 effective form of self-government.' Egypt demands 
 a free constitution, flowing to her not from the 
 British Parliament but from her own monarch, the 
 Khedive. Mr. Hardie promises to ask questions in 
 tho House of Commons. What sort of questions ? 
 He will ask whether Cairo has a good drainage 
 system, and whether the water is drinkable in Alex- 
 andria. But we want fundamental questions about 
 fundamental matters. We want him to ask what is 
 to be the date of the evacuation." 
 
 My duty is not to appraise, but merely to chronicle 
 facts, and without discussing the strange interpre- 
 tation which exhibited Mr. Hardie as a Conservative, 
 I have only to say that as M. Goumah proceeded 
 with his speech, the tides of passion rose higher and 
 higher in the Congress, and that he resumed his 
 chair amid a tumult of cheers. Crimson tarbouches 
 bobbed their way to the platform, and groups of 
 students flung themselves on the orator, embracing 
 him, and kissing his hands. " The Mazzini of 
 Egypt!" shouted somebody beside me in the crowd. 
 
 Undoubtedly he is one of the men of the future. 
 Small and spare, with a drooping moustache, he 
 throbs with such intense energy that you expect to 
 see electric sparks leap out of his gesturing figure. 
 He speaks French, English, and Arabic with the same 
 fluent precision. He has the gift of epigram, and» 
 unlike his compatriots, a quick sense of humour. 
 With Hamed El Alaily, and Mohamed Fahmy — 
 this latter a striking figure with countless centuries 
 of Oriental shrewdness in his face — he constitutes 
 
 75
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the pivot around which this new movement will 
 revolve. 
 
 Opinions differ, and hopes will be disappointed, 
 but for my part I regard this second Congress as 
 opening a new epoch in the Egyptian Nationalist 
 movement. The actual work of the three days, 
 including the foundation of a new propagandist 
 journal and the initiation of a system of free national 
 schools in Egypt, has already been recorded in the 
 newspapers. I am concerned only to give some 
 faint sense of the tone and atmosphere of the 
 Congress. It was alive in every fibre. The papers 
 read, although somewhat too encyclopsedic for the 
 occasion, were the work of cultured men. The few 
 differences as to details merely lent relief to the 
 keenness and enthusiasm of the assembly. And with 
 all this there was behind the whole programme a 
 sincere desire for peace. The so-called " violence" 
 of the speeches consisted merely in saying what 
 ■every Englishman has heartily said with Simon De 
 Montfort, and Hampden, and Locke, and John 
 
 Stuart Mill. 
 
 . • • • 
 
 Much has happened since the Geneva Congress. 
 ThatTartuffe-Tartarin, Colonel Roosevelt, has trailed 
 the Stars and Stripes in the foulest mud of Imperi- 
 alism. M. Briand has forbidden the Congress of 
 1910 to meet in Paris, and, thereby, proclaimed the 
 nothingness of France in international politics. The 
 Suez Canal affair has on the one hand, unified 
 national feeling in Egypt, and, on the other, has 
 provoked British Imperialists to a fresh campaign in 
 favour of annexation. The problem has grown more 
 acute, and at the same time more soluble. The 
 Canal is the difficulty. But if the Canal be definitely 
 neutralized, on terms fair to Egypt and England 
 alike, what pretext will then remain for the 
 maintenance of the occupation? 
 
 76
 
 THE FATIGUE 
 OF ANATOLE FRANCE^ 
 
 ^L'lle des Pingoitins. Les Contes de Jacques Tournebroche. By 
 Anatole France. 1908. 
 
 The autumn of M. Anatole France is coloured 
 by the one vanity of human existence against which 
 his soul had not hitherto adventured: he has become 
 popular. " My last years," Schopenhauer used to 
 say, " bring me roses, but they are white roses." It 
 may be that there is a like pallor in the coronals 
 which have of late been showered so abundantly on 
 the great French master of irony, tenderness, and 
 despair. It may be that he experiences but a sombre 
 consolation at seeing his radiant and incomparable 
 prose rendered, with many refractions into English. 
 But at all events he has achieved notoriety. Certain 
 of his phrases — poison in crystal cups or ambrosia 
 of the gods in vinegar-vials : who shall say ? — have 
 been finally adopted into the gold currency of litera- 
 ture. The man himself is no longer a veiled prophet. 
 The famous bust in which he looks out over an 
 Hebraic nose between a stiff imperial and what seems 
 to be a loose forage cap, has passed through Europe, 
 at least in photogravure. The book-reader of Brixton 
 has been impelled as urgently as the bookseller of 
 his own Quai Malaquais to guess at the secret behind 
 that ridged and ambiguous mask. The face, some of 
 his interpreters have said, is that of a Bcncdictin 
 narquois. Rather is it the face of a soldier ready to 
 die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe, 
 on condition, be it understood, that he shall not be 
 asked to die in a tragic or, as one might say. in a 
 
 77
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 muddy fashion. He looks out at you like a veteran 
 of the lost cause of intellect, to whose soul the trumpet 
 of defeat strikes with as mournful and vehement a 
 music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks 
 that a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself 
 up in evil days with an anecdote after the manner 
 of his master Rabelais. 
 
 M. France has achieved notoriety, but hardly 
 happiness. If Ulle des Pingouins has been one of 
 the best discussed volumes of late years, it is none 
 the less a bulletin of fatigue, which notifies us of the 
 burial of yet another illusion. The book, indeed, 
 seems intended as the last chapter of a period. In it 
 Anatole France, savant, stylist, and Olympian, pro- 
 nounces with affection and contempt a funeral 
 discourse over Anatole France, republican, Socialist, 
 and Dreyfusard. The man of letters lays aside, with 
 smiling sadness, the sword of a fighting publicist, and 
 an interesting case of dual personality comes to an 
 end. The Socialists are naturally in despair. At 
 least one critic, belonging to that party, confesses 
 that he has long entertained doubts not merely about 
 the stability of M. France, but even about his sales, 
 and thinks it probable that an edition of one of his 
 books nowadays means only two hundred copies. 
 But had not his greatest interpreter, George Brandes, 
 foreseen the present reversion to type, as one may 
 call it ? " It may be," wrote Brandes, after hearing 
 the master speak at a Socialist meeting in the Paris 
 Trocadero in 1904, " that as the popular orator — a 
 career for which he was not intended by nature — 
 he has proclaimed himself rather more strongly 
 convinced than he is in his inmost soul." Had not 
 Doctor Trublet in L'Hisioire Comiqtie separated 
 himself for ever from the "advanced" thinkers who 
 believe that republicanism is the final truth of politics, 
 and that by the application of this truth the human 
 race is infinitely perfectible ? " My business," says 
 
 78
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 Trublet, " is to comfort men and console " them. 
 How can one comfort or console anybody without 
 lying ? It was not that M. France refused to make 
 sacrifices to the will to believe in political Utopias. 
 On the contrary, he went so far as to write an 
 introduction to the collected speeches of M. Emile 
 Combes, and even, it was said, to read the novels of 
 M. Zola. Having thus acquired a firm faith in 
 humanity, he was at pains to record it in the course 
 of a speech on Renan. " Lentement, mais toujours, 
 I'humanite realise les reves des sages." That was in 
 1903. In 1908, having come to understand that the 
 process of realization is as slow as the movement of 
 a glacier and as tortuous as the way of an eagle in 
 the air, he returns to the orbit of his temperament. 
 His futility on Blessed Jeanne d'Arc laid aside, he 
 contributes an introduction to the memoirs of 
 Mademoiselle Loie Fuller, a dancer, aud publishes 
 Penguin Island and Les Conies de Jacques Tournebroche. 
 L'lle des Pingouins is to all intents a comic history 
 of France. The narrative is introduced by a char- 
 acteristic preface, in which the author of so many 
 brilliant reconstructions of the past denies, and not 
 for the first time, the possibility of any history, 
 serious or comic. He consults the masters of 
 paleography, but they indignantly decline to be 
 called historians. Who has ever detected them in 
 an attempt to distil the scantiest trickle of life or 
 truth from a document? That is an enterprise which 
 may attract vain and imaginative persons, but for 
 their part they work in the spirit of positive science. 
 They confine themselves to verifiable facts — that is 
 to say, to texts — and refuse to be tempted into the 
 fantastic world of ideas. It is possible to be certain 
 about the shape of words, but not about their 
 significance. M. France passes on to the recognized 
 historians, who are shocked to find that he proposes 
 to write an original history. An original historian, 
 
 79
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 they assure him, is the object of universal distrust and 
 contempt. History may very well be the lie agreed 
 upon ; the great point is that it is agreed upon. 
 Readers of history do not like to be surprised; they 
 look to find only the stupidities with which they are 
 already familiar, and regard any novel suggestion as 
 an affront to some cherished belief. The historian 
 must therefore be on his guard against originalit}-. 
 He must also be respectful towards established insti- 
 tutions, and, on these two conditions, success is 
 witliin his grasp. Fortified by these counsels M. 
 France proceeds, in much humility of spirit, to 
 narrate the story of the island of Alca, from its 
 beginnings in hagiography to its ending in dynamite. 
 There is little need to set out here in any detail 
 the substance of the book. The title is easily 
 explained. The old saint Mael, a missionary of 
 deep faith but defective eyesight, is transported to 
 the Arctic regions in a miraculous stone trough. 
 There, mistaking a colony of penguins for men and 
 philosophers, he pronounces the formula of baptism 
 over them, and creates a theological impasse which 
 can only be relieved by the actual transformation 
 of the penguins into human shape. The island is 
 then towed by Saint Mael to the coast of Brittany, 
 and there under the name of Penguinia, or Alca, it 
 enters the comity of civilization. It evolves through 
 the customary stages, inventing in turns clothes — 
 a suggestion of the devil — individual property, a 
 royal dynasty, a patron saint, and the taxation of 
 the weak for the benefit of the strong. These 
 matters afford obvious scope for the subtle and 
 perverse spirit of M. France. The pages on the 
 origin of property are not only powerful but even 
 passionate : his heart is for the moment engaged in 
 the writing. A chapter on the mediaeval art of 
 Penguinia gives him an opportunity to parody, with 
 delightful malice, the English theorists of the 
 
 80
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 pre-Raphaelite movement. But it must be confessed 
 that the first half of the book languishes on the 
 perilous edge of dullness. The serene improprieties 
 with which M. France annotates his Lives of the 
 Saints, mingling, as one might say, the odour of the 
 smoke-room with the odour of sanctity, are very 
 Latin, but not very amusing. M. France himself 
 seems to perceive that his grasp on his material is 
 weakening : he makes an abrupt plunge from the 
 Renaissance into modern history, and his spright- 
 liness is at once restored. The second part, 
 comprising more than half the entire volume, is a 
 continuation and conclusion of the novels which 
 have been published since 1897 under the general 
 title of Histoire Contemporaine. The cometary career 
 of Boulanger and the Dreyfus Affaire are recon- 
 structed with incomparable verve. Every phrase 
 tells, every figure moves in the glow of supreme 
 comedy. The Visire Ministry, which was carried 
 into office by the reaction in favour of Dreyfus, 
 " declared itself prudently progressive. Paul Visire 
 and his colleagues were eager for reforms, and it 
 was only in order to avoid compromising the prospect 
 of these reforms that they refrained from proposing 
 them. For they were deep politicians, and they 
 knew that to propose a reform is to compromise it." 
 From history we pass on to prophecy. The fate of 
 the Clemenceau Ministry, plunged ultimately by 
 rich Jews, reckless journalists, and the intrigues of 
 one Madame Ceres ieto an irreparable war, is some- 
 what vaguely outlined ; and in a last chapter we 
 are permitted to see M. France's vision of the future.^ 
 It is not a very cheerful vision. The continued 
 concentration of industry has evolved a society of 
 but two classes, millionaires and employees. The 
 millionaire type exhibits the physical characteristics 
 of Mr. Rockefeller developed to the last limit of 
 possibility. Drier of body, thinner of lip, and 
 
 G 81
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 yellower of complexion than the old Spanish monks, 
 they cultivate a mysticism and even an asceticism 
 of opulence. Living in their offices on eggs and 
 milk, they have no intercourse with the world save 
 through the medium of an electric button : they 
 steadily amass wealth of which they no longer see 
 even the metallic symbols, and acquire infinite means 
 for the satisfaction of desires which they no longer 
 experience. The material constituents of this world 
 of the future are monstrous and tentacular cities, 
 temples of " slaughterous industry, infamous specu- 
 lations, hideous luxury, and a colossal uniformity of 
 ugliness." Such a society cannot be reformed; it 
 can only be destroyed. And under the shattering 
 logic of dynamite, or rather of an explosive to which 
 dynamite is as the crackle of a schoolboy's squib, 
 the world of clerks and capitalists dissolves. An 
 entire civilization is effaced, and wild horses pasture 
 on the site of the capital of Alca. Then the story 
 of civilization begins anew, the story without an 
 end. The hunter comes, and after him, in a dreary 
 cycle, the shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the weaver 
 of wool, the worker in iron. The effaced civilization 
 is, with infinite labour rebuilt. Once more we are 
 in a world of millionaires and employees, of 
 monstrous and tentacular cities. . . . The thing 
 that has been is the thing that shall be, and the 
 achievement of the future will be as that of the 
 past. The epitaph of generations unborn wall be 
 that which has been written upon the tombstones 
 of generations forgotten. " They were born, they 
 suffered, thev died." It is the Eternal Return of 
 ancient philosophy, in a garment more sombre than 
 any of which the ancients ever dreamed. It is less 
 an Eternal Return, than an eternal and infinitely 
 monotonous tautology. 
 
 Such is the wisdom to which Anatole France has 
 come, after wandering for ten years in the desert of 
 
 82
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 politics. One recalls the circumstances under which 
 he came to appear in the role of a publicist. The 
 year 1897 witnessed his election to the Immortals ; 
 it also witnessed the publication of the first two 
 volumes of his Histoire Contemporaine. Until that 
 year he had not descended from his tower of ivory 
 to discover the actual world. In his candidature 
 for the Academy he was regarded as a Conservative, 
 and was opposed to Ferdinand Fabre, a writer 
 notorious for his hostility to the Church. There is 
 no need to suggest a corrupt silence on his part, or 
 a sinister coincidence ; but the truth is that once 
 safely installed in the chair vacated by M. Ferdinand 
 de Lesseps, he began to exhibit an active interest in 
 politics. He put his head out of the window, dis- 
 covered the Dreyfus Affaire, and took his stand 
 with the Socialists. He revised his judgments, even 
 in matters of literature. Zola, whose "disgusting 
 celebrity" he had declined to envy, and of whom 
 he had written that no man had " so exerted him- 
 self to abase humanity, and to deny everything that 
 is good and right," became for him not only a 
 valiant citizen, but even a great novelist, " whose 
 harping had raised up a spacious city of the ideal." 
 In the interval M. France has had a \^'ider experi- 
 ence of politics ; he has rubbed intimate shoulders 
 with the prophets of progress, and has watched the 
 Hux of events and the transformations of men. It 
 would be unjust to say that Penguin Island is a 
 recantation of his democratic and socialistic utter- 
 ances. He is still the son of the Revolution, and 
 there is a tremor of sincere passion in his voice as 
 he tells us of the grimed and hungry workers who 
 swarm out in times of Royalist aggression to defend 
 the Republic — the Republic which nevertheless is 
 to them a symbol of hope merely and not of fulfil- 
 ment. He proclaims not the bankruptcy of 
 Socialism, but rather the emptiness of politics as 
 
 83
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 such. It is impossible not to identify France with 
 his own Bidault-Coquille, the student of asteroids. 
 Bidault-Coquille had come down from the old fire- 
 escape, from which he was accustomed to observe 
 the heavens, in order to fight for the eternal 
 principles of justice which he took to be involved 
 in the Affaire Pyrot or Dreyfus. He found himself 
 in alliance with hysterical adventuresses, ambitious 
 generals, vain journalists, and the St. Pauls of 
 Socialism, eager for Utopia, but also eager for 
 portfolios. Justice is triumphant, but the triumph 
 is clouded with meanness, and he returns to his 
 asteroids, disillusioned, and disillusioned most of 
 all with regard to his own motives. " Go back to 
 5^our fire-escape and your stars," he says to himself, 
 " but go back in humility of spirit. You thought 
 to yourself, ' I will step down into the streets and 
 show myself a noble and valiant citizen. Then I 
 shall be able to repose calmly in the esteem of m}- 
 contemporaries and the approval of history.' But 
 you have not even suffered for conscience sake ; for 
 with the decay of belief and character your country- 
 men have become incapable of that savagery which 
 once lent a tragic greatness to the conflict of ideas. 
 Now that you have buried your illusions ; now that 
 5'ou know how hard it is to redress injustice and 
 how one must be ever beginning anew, you are going 
 back to your asteroids. Go back then ! but go back 
 in humilit}' of spirit." 
 
 The conclusion was inevitable, and rightly con- 
 sidered it casts no sort of discredit upon politics. It 
 is no doubt useful that parliament-men should be 
 credulous of their power to create by Statute a new 
 heaven and a new earth. It is perhaps excusable 
 that Socialism should believe in the infinite per- 
 fectability of the human race. But it is necessary 
 that the world of culture should retain its sense of 
 limitation. Humanity must at all costs refuse to be 
 
 84
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 satisfied with itself. If progress belongs at all to 
 the sphere of real things and of good things, its 
 future depends on those who rise up to question its 
 reality. Faust cannot be redeemed except by the 
 serviceable hostility of Mephistophles. Anatole 
 France is a scandal and a stumbling-block to many 
 serious minds. Of the deep waters of religion he 
 has never tasted ; he is a sense short, or, as the 
 psychologists say, he has a blind spot on his soul. 
 But that much said, is it not wise to remember that 
 Ecclesiastes also is among the prophets ? Is not 
 the whole Christian conception of life rooted in 
 pessimism, as becomes a philosophy expressive of a 
 world in which the ideal can never quite overcome 
 the crumbling incoherence of matter ? May we not 
 say of all good causes what Arnold said only of the 
 proud and defeated Celts : " They went down to 
 battle but they always fell r" Behind politics there 
 is economics ; behind economics there is philosophy ; 
 and when it comes to a philosophy of values, opti- 
 mism, with regard to our present plane of experience, 
 can only be regarded as an attractive form of mental 
 disease. 
 
 A comparison of L' lie des Pingoiiins with Gulliver's 
 Trai'tf/s is obvious, although not, perhaps, very illumin- 
 ating. M. France is suave where Swift is barbaric; he 
 is dainty where Swift is foul; but it is none the less 
 true that Swift's disbelief in humanity was childlike 
 and elementary compared with that which hints 
 itself through Penguin Island. Between the two 
 there is the tropical forest of Romanticism with its 
 splendid and noxious blooms : there is the unplumbed, 
 salt, estranging sea of all who have praised death 
 rather than life, from Leopardi and Schopenhauer 
 to D'Annunzio and Hardy. What then ? " The 
 life of a people," writes one of the mythical sages 
 quoted in this book, " is a succession of misfortunes, 
 crimes, and stupidities. This is true of the Penguin 
 
 85
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 nation as of all others. But with that reserve made, 
 their history is admirable from beginning to end." 
 There is a certain malice in the phrasing, but who 
 that has lived and suffered would challenge its 
 substance of truth ? Reason and justice constitute, 
 no doubt, the elements of a pure science, but it is a 
 science of ver\' imperfect application to the concrete 
 world. M, France has had the courage of his dis- 
 couragement. He has but repeated in terms of 
 politics what he had already said in terms of art and 
 erudition, of passion and philosophy — namely, that 
 the eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear with 
 hearing. Even more than Bourget, and precisely 
 because his touch is lighter than Bourget's, and 
 because he imagines that his rapier is that of an 
 enemy, he continues the tradition of that Latin and 
 Catholic pessimism w^hich is so indispensable a 
 propaedeutic to any valorous religion. We have 
 heard of a tyranny which was tempered by chansons. 
 A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance 
 of epigrams, as a thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, 
 is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A 
 reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of 
 consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement 
 that will help many men to bearwith more resignation 
 the burden ot our century. If there be inexcusable 
 flippancies, and there are inany in L'lle des Pingonins, 
 they belong, perhaps, for the most part to that 
 temperamental heritage of Latinism which we bar- 
 barians have never been able to understand. For the 
 rest, the book is merely an indication that the cobbler 
 is about to return to his last. After ten years of 
 politics Anatole France is fatigued, but by expressing 
 he has banished his fatigue. Two lines of develop- 
 ment seem now to be open to him, and, unhappily, 
 one of them is that facilis decensits which his master 
 Renan chose in his old age. Les Contes de Jacques 
 Tournehroche — a volume with curious red and gold 
 
 86
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 and blue and gold illustrations by Leon Lebegue — 
 seems to indicate a declension towards the lower 
 level of his temperament. It is enough to say of this 
 collection of stories that it is by turns graceful, 
 mediocre, and abject, and that there is not a 
 characteristic turn of phrase or a memorable idea in 
 it from beginning to end. The other mood in which 
 M. France may elect to cast the books that he has 
 yet to write — he is sixty-five — is that which gave us 
 the tenderness of Le Livre de Mon Ami, and the 
 spacious sadness of the best pages of Le Jardin 
 d' Epicure. M. France will not spend his last years, 
 as Taine did, " reading Marcus Aurelius as a sort of 
 liturgical exercise." Epicure of emotions that he is, 
 and that was Brunetiere's judgment against him, he 
 will act on taste and not on any principle. That he 
 will choose his own road is certain; let us hope that 
 this man, whose every page if not a European event 
 (and what page now' is?) is at least a shining 
 masterpiece of style, will choose the high road. 
 
 87
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 
 
 Stuttgart, September 1907. 
 
 I merely strayed into Stuttgart. The high peaks 
 of the Dolomites, and the higher prices of Salzburg 
 — Salt City, without the Lake — have faded into 
 history. The Munich Alp-tourists, who had lain 
 back, limply mountainous, in the corners, showing in 
 the flame of their faces and their peeling skins the 
 brand of glacier-sunshine, have "steiged" heavily out 
 of their native city, where pictures and potations will 
 soon undo the severities of the holiday season. You 
 have passed Augsburg, where somebody confessed 
 his insuperable objections to Confession. You have 
 drunk a crowded and unseemly beer at Ulm. And 
 you are in Stuttgart. - . . 
 
 The Congress is going on in the Liederhalle, a 
 combined restaurant and concert-hall. As one sits 
 here in the garden, under an absolute stillness of 
 chestnuts and acacias, it is hard to imagine so much 
 of life as there is in the undistinguished building. 
 Two or three delegates walk up and down, smoking 
 and meditating. A door-keeper leans on the bar 
 counter, under red-and-black and red-and-yellow 
 streamers, and drinks cool, dark beer. A far-from-tidy 
 Fraulein crunches her leisurely way across the gravel 
 to take your order. Another has fallen asleep, her 
 head leaned back against a beech trunk. In the 
 lines of her face there comes out, as often in sleep, a 
 certain forlornness, a sense of defeated dreams. It 
 is a commentary. There are brown and twisted 
 leaves on the gravel ; and on state-creeds and state- 
 crafts, too, there comes the inevitable autumn. 
 
 88
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 
 
 But in which of all the Utopias, smouldering in 
 certain fierce eyes that met yours to-day in Stuttgart, 
 will there be no stain of the burden and sorrow of 
 women ? If one never got tired, one would always 
 be with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with 
 Fourier, and Kropotkin. Bnt the soul's energy is 
 straitly limited ; and with weariness there comes the 
 need for compromise, for "machines," for repetition, 
 for routine. Fatigue is the beginning of political 
 wisdom. 
 
 Those who read the papers know fairly well the 
 resolutions, or, rather, theses, to which the Congress 
 said " Aye." To an actual spectator the dominant 
 note was that of realism. Here and there the vague 
 music of a passionate revolt and an impossible 
 redemption broke out, as when Rosa Luxemburg, 
 clutching her plaid shawl, called up the bloody 
 ghosts of Russian comrades in judgment on the weak 
 "good-sense" of the Congress. But most of the 
 speakers submitted to the strict discipline of fact. 
 Kautsky opposed the demand for the legal establish- 
 ment of a minimum wage. A powerful argument 
 was led to show that if you establish a minimum wage 
 it tends to operate as a maximum. " Yes ! " said 
 Ellenbogen, of Austria. " Theoretically your position 
 is a strong one. Ten years ago I should have voted 
 for it. But since then we have made the experiment 
 in practice. A minimum wage of four francs a day 
 has been established in Zurich, and it has not operated 
 as a maximum." 
 
 The Swiss delegates accepted the statement of 
 fact, and at once the Congress swung over to the 
 side of Ellenbogen. "Practical!" cried Vaillant. 
 " You are practical enough. Our programme was 
 once a gospel of enthusiasm. Now it is a party 
 machine, a war-chest, a game of tactics." 
 
 In effect this was the dominant tone. The only 
 vote that rang in discord with it was that in favour 
 
 89
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 of the resolution condemning the whole work of 
 colonization as intrinsically and irredeemably bad. 
 This decision was a genuine surprise. Bebel, 
 Vollmar, Bernstein, the English and Americans, 
 all declared against it, but it was, nevertheless, 
 carried. An analysis of the majority drew attention 
 to another characteristic of the Congress — the 
 dominance of the national idea. Bebel and 
 Bernstein were sufficiently clear on this point. 
 The constitution of the Congress was based on a 
 recognition of it. In the old International which 
 was created by Marx, and afterwards, with the teeth 
 of Bakunin, ate Marx up, you had thorough, abstract 
 internationalism. The workers were affiliated 
 directly with the central committee. But with 
 the Congress of 1907 they were affiliated only 
 through the medium of their national organizations. 
 
 This raises another question. What will be the 
 binding-power and practical value of the Stuttgart 
 resolutions ? Are not those who claim that a com- 
 plete synthesis of nationalism and internationalism 
 has been effected a little premature ? Colonization 
 and colonies stank in the nostrils of the Stuttgart 
 Congress. But will Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in the 
 House of Commons and Herr Bebel in the 
 Reichstag act upon that decision ? 
 
 As a spectacle, a masque of personalities, the 
 Congress lives in one's memory. It may be a 
 superficial point of view, but it was irresistible. 
 The marvellous interpreters ! Whenever anyone 
 speaks they must speak, and they have spoken for 
 five days \\ ithout growing hoarse. 
 
 Of course, there were complaints. Vaillant com- 
 plained ; Vandervelde ascribed the feud between 
 the Labour Party and the S. D. F. to the difficulty 
 of rendering " Klassenkampf " in English. Quelch 
 was verbally mistranslated, before being geographi- 
 cally translated. And there was the Indian Princess. 
 
 90
 
 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS 
 
 Hyndman has a long beard, which is a con- 
 siderable dramatic asset. One still sees him 
 shaking his hands and shouting at Singer, who — 
 large, broad, and with a slight air of the police 
 official — swings the Presidential bell back and forth, 
 to the horror and final collapse of all ears. And 
 Herve, standing on the table so that all the world 
 might see him, voting for the majority's anti- 
 militarist resolution " with both hands." It must 
 not be thought that the proceedings were in the least 
 tumultuous. They were vehement, but then there is 
 always the House of Commons. By the way, every- 
 body smoked at will in the hall, and one saw many 
 delegates drinking beer at their tables. 
 
 Is there a definite. Socialist way of dressing? The 
 red tie has long since gone over to museums and to 
 popular novels. The fluid felt hat is not at all 
 universal. Does anything remain ? Well, there is 
 Herve, in a curious tunic buttoned tight up to the 
 throat, and trousers which bag in an unprecedented 
 way as he hurries along, gesticulating with his knees. 
 But there is no exclusive, Socialist dress. 
 
 " Do you think," I asked a newspaper man in the 
 Hotel Royal— the English delegates were having a 
 concert there, and you heard the chorus rolled 
 heavily out through their door — 
 
 Let cowards flinch, and traitors fear. 
 We'll keep tlie Red Flag flying here — 
 
 " do you think that the Congress has been of much 
 use " " It will do more to guarantee the peace of 
 the world," he said, "than twenty Hague Conferences. 
 If everybody could afford to travel, there would be 
 no wars. People would discover their neighbours 
 to be so remarkably human. Besides, I am grateful 
 to Stuttgart for not taking it out of us. At the Hague 
 I paid ;{;22 a month for two rooms in a private house. 
 
 91
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 The Brazilian delegation left their hotel because they 
 were charged £^^4 a day for four rooms. Peace hath 
 its voracities no less redoubtable than war." 
 
 I cannot better his words. Stuttgart did not raise 
 its prices. And \A'hen you had swept away precon- 
 ceptions and prejudices, you found International 
 Socialism unexpectedly human — human, above all, 
 in its fundamental mistake. 
 
 92
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND' 
 
 iThis study appears as the Introduction to the English version 
 of L'Irlande Contemporaine, by M. Paul-Dubois, published under the 
 title of Contemporary Ireland (Maunsel & Co., Dublin). 
 
 It is the French that have come closest to the secret 
 of Ireland. De Beaumont, that great pupil of De 
 Tocqueville, in 1839, Cardinal Perraud in 1869,. 
 painted our national life with the authoritative brush 
 of masters. In addition to these we have had an 
 unbroken line of studies, sketches, and monographs 
 in which Daryl, Bechaux, Le Roz, Fournier, 
 Schindler, Potez, Filon, Flach, De Lavergne, and a 
 cloud of other witnesses have said their word. 
 Edouard Rod shaped the personal tragedy of Parnell 
 into a novel ; and in one of his most recent stories 
 Paul Bourget has shuddered at the dresses of 
 fashionable Dublin, and yielded with lyrical abandon 
 to the drowsy and purple magic of the Western 
 lotus-land. M. Paul-Dubois finds one-half of the 
 explanation of this old alliance in history, and the 
 other in likeness of blood and temperament. In 
 exchange for the swords of the Wild Geese, France 
 sent us back priests, or at least the learning that 
 turned Irish boys into priests. She sent too, in later 
 and not less disastrous years, Hoche and Humbert ; 
 and both nations have good memories, and until a 
 very little while ago they shared a common hatred. 
 This Irish mind is, moreover, like the French, "lucid, 
 vigorous and positive," though less methodical, since 
 it never had the happiness to undergo the Latin 
 discipline. France and Ireland have been made to 
 understand each other. 
 
 93
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 M. Paul-Dubois, then, has the advantage of 
 temperamental S3'mpath3% wise forerunners, and a 
 long tradition. He had, further, the advantage of 
 language, for it is perhaps only in French that 
 Sociology can become scientific without ceasing to 
 be human. His personal equipment is of the first 
 order. Son of the late President of the Academie 
 des Beaux-Arts, son-in-law of the great Taine, and 
 himself one of the chief officials of the Cour des 
 Comptes, he is a member of the group which 
 Brunetiere's erudite enthusiasm gathered round the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes. Was it not Taine who 
 originated the phrase " well-documented," and made 
 it the touchstone of all books dealing with social 
 or historical science ? At all events it is in that 
 spirit of thoroughness that M. Paul-Dubois has 
 wished to write. The extent of his reading may 
 be gathered from the references in his foot-notes. 
 He paid more than one visit to Ireland, and had 
 he but met some member of the Irish Party — of 
 which he writes with a harshness that is constantly 
 in contradiction with itself — he might fairly claim 
 to have met everybody. The Irish reader of his 
 book may not be in entire agreement with his con- 
 clusions. To someone armed with special knowledge 
 on this subject, his exposition may seem inadequate; 
 to someone moved by special passion on that subject, 
 his criticism may even prove an irritant ; but, when 
 all is said, his five hundred crowded pages represent 
 the attempt of a mind, at once scientific and imagi- 
 native, to see Ireland steadilj^ and to see it whole. 
 If it is comforting to be understood, it is also of 
 some profit to be misunderstood in a friendly way. 
 M. Paul-Dubois confesses on our behalf no sins that 
 someone or other has not already shouted from the 
 housetops. Whatever he may have to say of the 
 internal life of Ireland, his verdict on the inter- 
 national issue is given clearly and definitely for 
 
 94
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 
 
 Ireland and against England. His voice is raised 
 for the Gaelic League, and against linguistic 
 Imperialism ; for the ploughed field, and against 
 the grazing ranch; for Home Rule, and against 
 the Act of Union. One may wish to enter a caveat 
 against this or that contention, but the book is 
 founded not on prejudice, or unreasoned feeling, 
 or raw idealism, but on a broad colligation of facts ; 
 and, with all reserves made, I believe that it will in 
 due time take rank with the great studies of modern 
 communities like Bodley's " France " and Miinster- 
 berg's " The Americans." 
 
 What, then, is the Irish Question as seen by this 
 sociologist, so inspired and so equipped? It is "an 
 extreme case of social pathology," an instance of 
 the phenomenon called arrested development. It 
 is to history that one naturally turns for proof and 
 illustration of this thesis ; and if, as a great Shake- 
 spearean critic has said, tragedy is simply waste, 
 the history of Ireland as it passes before us in M. 
 Paul-Dubois' Introduction, marshalled in sombre 
 and picturesque lines, is essential tragedy indeed. 
 It matters nothing whether we approach it in the 
 spirit of those who desire revenge or of those who 
 desire reconstruction : the impression is the same. 
 A civilization shaken by Norse invasion before it 
 had quite ripened ; swept by Anglo-Norman invasion 
 before it had quite recovered ; a people plunged in 
 an unimaginable chaos of races, religions, ideas, 
 appetites, and provincialisms ; brayed in the mortar 
 without emerging as a consolidated whole ; tenacious 
 of the national idea, but unable to bringit to triumph ; 
 riven and pillaged by invasion without being con- 
 quered — how could such a people find leisure to 
 grow up, or such a civilization realize its full 
 potentialities of development and discipline? There 
 are writers who would have us burn our Irish 
 Histories. But the historical method imposes itself, 
 
 95
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 not out of political passion, but by a mere scientific 
 necessity, upon all students of contemporary social, 
 or, indeed, spiritual problems. What is no doubt 
 important is that the past should be studied by the 
 social reformer not for its own sake but for the sake 
 of the present, and from the point of view of the 
 present. It is by this purpose that M. Paul-Dubois 
 has been guided in his masterly Historical Intro- 
 duction ; and I do not know of any summary of 
 the same length which traces the forces of current 
 Irish life so clearly to their origins, and sets the 
 fabric of fact, by which we are to-day confronted, 
 in such true and vivid perspective. But oyer and 
 beyond that, his Introduction possesses the interest 
 of literature. The period since the Union has never 
 been outlined with more telling or more human 
 touches. O'Connell, the inventor of that " consti- 
 tutional agitation " which is now the prime weapon 
 of all democracies, passes away leaving "a great 
 memory but not a great party." Young Ireland 
 affords us the supreme instance of the antithetical 
 temperaments ever to be found in Nationalist 
 politics; Davis, the reformer, inspired by love of 
 Ireland, and Mitchel, the revolutionist, inspired by 
 hatred of England. And so through Famine and 
 Fenianism we come down to the brilliant feebleness 
 of Butt and the icy passion of Parnell, who " had 
 more followers than friends/' and to the struggle of 
 the Gaelic Renaissance for "psychological Home 
 
 Rule." 
 
 For this is, in last analysis, what M. Paul-Dubois 
 takes to be the deep malady of Ireland: she has 
 not gained the whole world, but she has come 
 perilously near losing her own soul. A certain 
 laxity of will, a certain mystical scepticism in 
 face of the material world, an eloquence which, in 
 depicting Utopias, exhausts the energy that might 
 better be spent in creating them, a continual 
 
 96
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 
 
 tendency to fall back on the alibi of the inner life, 
 make Ireland the Hamlet, or still more, the Rudin 
 of the nations. Is this to say that she is unfit for 
 modern, economic civilization ? By no means. 
 M. Paul-Dubois, having sounded every weakness 
 and surveyed every difficulty, ends with the belief 
 that the forces of re-growth will prevail over the 
 process of decay ; and that although Ireland's last 
 cards are now on the table, she is capable, if she 
 plays them well, not only of preserving an ancient 
 people but of creating a new civilization. 
 
 What is the path to this achievement ? First of 
 all, under the present regime, England is the enemy. 
 
 If Ireland is to realize herself, she must become 
 mistress of her own hearth, her own purse, and her 
 own cupboard. She does assuredly stand in urgent 
 need of peace from politics, and so far her Unionist 
 critics are right. There is indubitably a deep sense 
 in which a nation's life begins where her politics 
 end. People speak as if the outcry against Parlia- 
 mentarianism were a novel and a unique thing. But, 
 fifty years ago, Marx taught all realists to crack the 
 shells of political formulas and parties and judge 
 them by the moral and economic kernel within. 
 To-day you can pick up anywhere in Paris or 
 Brussels half-a-dozen pamphlets called "The Crisis 
 of Parliamentarianism," " The Absurdity of Parlia- 
 mentarianism," or "The End of Parliamentarian- 
 ism." But that peace from the purely political 
 struggle, which is so indispensable if Ireland is to 
 develop character and create material wealth, can 
 come to her only as a result of political autonomy. 
 Until autonomy is won — carrying with it a re-adjust- 
 ment of taxation — "on the cause must go." And 
 the politicians who keep it going, whatever their 
 special party or tactics, are playing the part of 
 economic realists quite as effectively as any worker 
 on the land or at the loom. 
 
 H 97
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 M. Paul-Dubois naturally devotes many chapters 
 to the Land Question. He rightly treats it as a 
 complexus of three questions — the tenure, the distri- 
 bution, and the use of the land. The first two are 
 being solved, in a fashion, at the cost of Irish taxes, 
 and by the pledging of Irish rates, by the Estates 
 Commissioners and the Congested Districts Board. 
 Landlordism is dying, and dying meanly, " its last 
 thought being of a bargain to be made." The edifice 
 of Feudalism is being dismantled at a cost that raises 
 a very real menace of national bankruptcy, but at all 
 events the grim walls are coming down. But while 
 the liberation of the Irish conntryside from land- 
 lordism was necessary, it is not sufficient. The 
 farmer must learn to use his land productively; and 
 so there must be a great development of agricultural 
 education, leading up to a general system of " mixed 
 farming." The Department of Agriculture must 
 therefore be a prime concern of a self-governing 
 Ireland. He must learn to combine; and in this 
 respect, at least as regards the small holders, 
 Co-operation possesses the secret of the future. He 
 must come free of the egoism and pessimism which 
 have remained in his blood since the Great Famine; 
 and nothing can expel these except the singing and 
 dancing Gaelic League. But, even with all this 
 accomplished, he will still be a snake-strangled 
 Laocoon until he has in some wise reformed and 
 mastered his Railways and Banks. 
 
 When we turn to the industrial condition of the 
 country we find, since the Union, a steady degener- 
 ation of economic tissue. Population doubles 
 between 1800 and 1841, but manufacture decays. 
 The cotton workers of Belfast fall in number within 
 that period from 27,000 to 12,000; and the factory 
 hands of Dublin from 4,938 to 682. The consumption 
 of luxuries, an excellent test of wealth, shows an 
 immediate decline, tobacco falling in thirty years by 
 
 98
 
 A FRENCHMAN'S IRELAND 
 
 37 per cent, and wine by 47 per cent. Loss of trade 
 follows loss of the flag. London, having become 
 the political centre of gravity of Ireland, tends also 
 to become her financial and commercial centre of 
 gravity. There is a diminution of the productive, 
 and a great increase of the parasitic classes. The 
 home market slips away from the home manufacturer; 
 a sort of mania of exchange takes possession of the 
 country; and she imports much that she might 
 produce at home, and exports much that she might 
 consume at home, paying ruinous tribute on both 
 processes to the Shylocks of transit. It is a situation 
 too sadly familiar to us all. M. Paul-Dubois' remedy, 
 too, is familiar; it is the programme of the men of 
 1779 and of the Industrial Pioneers of to-day. Use 
 at home as many as you need of the things that are 
 made at home, and make at home as many as 
 possible of the things that are used at home. He 
 neither anticipates nor desires any notable develop- 
 ment of industry on the great scale, but looks for 
 the prosperity of Ireland to progressive agriculture, 
 and the smaller rural industries that come naturally 
 to cluster around it. 
 
 Such is, in bare outline, the diagnosis of Ireland 
 made by this detached and sympathetic student. 
 He touches upon many other subjects, upon that of 
 Clericalism and Anti-Clericalism, with particular 
 delicacy and insight. One may regret that, with his 
 French experience, he does not discuss such problems 
 as that now rising very definitely on the political 
 horizon : Does Ireland stand to gain or to lose by 
 Protection ? One may find a fault of line or of colour 
 here and there, or chance on an irritating phrase. 
 But on the whole and as a whole this is the best 
 book that has been written in recent years on the 
 problems of Ireland. The meaner journalism may 
 seek in it for nothing better than party capital. But 
 the worker in any Irish movement, who possesses 
 
 99
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the supreme wisdom of humility, and who had rather 
 be bettered than flattered, will be glad to have seen 
 himself in M. Paul-Dubois' mirror. His last message 
 is one of hope. He ma)', as his Conclusion shows, 
 have under-rated the resolution of Ireland to secure 
 integral Home Rule — a National Government being 
 a delicate and intricate machine which cannot be set 
 working in halves. He may, by times, have seemed 
 to forget that there are many kinds of Conciliation, 
 that, for instance, an infalliable method of conciliating 
 a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured. But, as 
 between us and our rulers, he gives his verdict, on 
 the evidence, for Ireland and against England. And 
 he foreshadows a possible unification of all progres- 
 sive parties on the Irish side, a tacit Concordat 
 under which, on the sole condition that the national 
 idea be not submerged or the national flag lowered 
 in surrender, all progressive parties would come to 
 regard themselves as but different regiments of the 
 same Army of Advance. May that hope come true! 
 
 100
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE 
 
 The smell of the sea, so raw and stringent in a 
 landsman's nostrils, brings thoughts with it and a 
 strange spume of memories. To me it brings a per- 
 ception of what people mean when they toss in the 
 air that dusty adjective. " cynical." A cynic is a 
 man who, finding himself, for all striving, incurably 
 sad from the lips in, sets himself to be incorrigibly gay 
 from the lips out. It is a triumph of will over 
 temperament, a way of courage, and, by times, even 
 a way of nobleness. 
 
 So it appears to me at least with the wash of the 
 river about the brattling boat. But why should 
 cables and gangways, cranes and the throb of steam, 
 waved white handkerchiefs and all that apparatus 
 of adieu, set anyone framing definitions of " cynic- 
 ism"? It is because a dead Frenchman, who had 
 not wit enough even to keep himself from being 
 forgotten, a cynic as they say, one Brizeux, murmurs 
 to himself in one of his comedies as I murmur to 
 myself every time I leave Ireland : " Do not cry 
 out against la patrie. Your native land after all will 
 give you the two most exquisite pleasures of your 
 life, that of leaving her and that of coming back." 
 He left many other sharp sentences along his way, 
 but I only remember that of Cecile after she had 
 transferred her affections. " And to think that six 
 months ago I loved Alphonse ! Mon Dieu ! How 
 he has changed ! " 
 
 There are no taxis in my native city of Dublin. 
 But the depressed jarvey who drove me to the 
 North Wall knows that they are coming. He starts 
 already in his dreams at the hoot of their horns. 
 
 loi
 
 , THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 You cannot stand against science, he says: look at 
 Corbett, and Tommy Burns, and Johnson. A man 
 can't get bread at it nowadays, although, of course, 
 " when a body meets a free-spoken, free-handed 
 gentleman like yourself, sir ; none o' these mane 
 divils that'd be resthrictin' you to your legal fare, 
 mind you. . . ." The electric trams were bad 
 enough, but this other would be the end. The 
 Merrion Square doctors were good friends of the 
 poor man, would think nothing of taking your car 
 for two or three hours and leaving a sovereign in your 
 palm, but first one got a motor, and now they all have 
 motors. What is one to say ? 
 
 A member of Parliament ought to be a minister 
 of consolation, at all events in matters of livelihood. 
 All that occurs to me to tell my driver is that he is 
 an element in an interesting transition in the organ- 
 ization of transport. The domestication of horses 
 created him and his tribe, the domestication of petrol 
 is in course of blotting them out. Mr. Galsworthy 
 will write a play on the subject and make us quiver 
 unhelpfully ; and there is always the workhouse 
 coffin to look to, and an absolutely gratuitous burial. 
 Meantime, he had better be rehearsing his adieus. 
 But it seems hardly worth while dropping that oil 
 into his wounds. There will, one fears, be more 
 hunger than dignity in his leave-taking. Semi- 
 starvation, mitigated by a gay heart and an incessant 
 tongue, will take him, and not gently, by the hand, 
 and show him, the Way Out. And by way of 
 monument he shall have, perhaps, the one-ten 
 millionth part of a paragraph in some economic 
 history that will be written by some sociologist of 
 Teutonic extraction. 
 
 An old woman, once questioned by a journalist, 
 declared that the only bothersome thing about 
 walking was that the miles began at the wrong end. 
 Kant, who could talk to Time and Space like an 
 
 102
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE 
 
 equal, is dead, and so nobody will ever know what 
 the old lady meant. I record the observation here 
 merely because it sounds so horribly intelligent. 
 
 But there is a constant heart-break in travel 
 which comes from this that every departure is a 
 sort of geographical suicide. To live anywhere even 
 for an hour or a day is to become inwoven into a 
 manifold tissue, material and spiritual. You cannot 
 pluck yourself suddenly out without carrying a fringe 
 of destruction, and it is your own personality that 
 dies in every snapped fibre. Philosophers have 
 thought of the soul as a spiritus — a rapid gust of 
 breath blown along the worlds and quickly dissi- 
 pated. In truth our conscious life is like a white 
 drift of fog that leaves a vestige of itself clinging 
 to every object that it passes. It is a sustained good- 
 bye. I cannot reach any thought except by leaving 
 another. Even so common and kindly an experi- 
 ence as dinner is not exempt from this spiritual 
 succession duty: your coffee is bitter with the 
 unspoken adieus of the soup, and the fish, and the 
 fowl, and the roast over whose graves you have 
 marched to fulfilment. Life is a cheap table d'hdte 
 in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing 
 the plates before you have had enough of anything. 
 We were bewildered at school to be told that 
 walking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in a 
 far more significant way, a perpetual dying. Death 
 is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of the 
 universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they 
 call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of Hamlet, 
 over corpses piled up in such abundance as to be 
 almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, but let 
 us not praise him on wrong grounds. His strength 
 lies not in his leaning out to new things — that may 
 be mere curiosity — but in his power to abandon old 
 things. All his courage is a courage of adieus. 
 The romance of travel appealed to many in old 
 
 103
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 days, and now, after menace of extinction, it has 
 been conclusively restored by the Tariff Reform 
 deputations. Others were light enough to think that 
 no one can travel without striking one day upon the 
 path of wisdom. But this cannot altogether be 
 granted. We Leinstermen used to hit off the 
 idealism of distance in a proverb : " All the cows 
 in Connaught have long horns." Clarence Mangan 
 was of the same mind : 
 
 Moor, Egyptian, Persian, Turk and Roman 
 Thread one common downhill path of doom ; 
 
 Everywhere the word is man and woman, 
 Everywhere the old sad sins find room. 
 
 But Brizeux cuts deeper when he shows that the 
 true value of going away is that it enables one to 
 come back. I once knew a man who was commis- 
 sioned by a railway company to write a booklet on 
 the attractions of certain towns, among others, Xyz. 
 He produced this page : " Attractions of Xyz. Print 
 here in large type all the trains by which it is 
 possible to leave Xyz." He was a native of it, and 
 in such a light must one's native place sometimes 
 appear. You burn to break the monotone with a 
 great shout, to shake its trivial dust off your feet, to 
 strain to yours the throbbing bosom of life, to mix 
 brooks and stars and art and love and youth into one 
 crashing orchestra of experience. And then, when 
 you have taken this wide way, you find yourself 
 burning to come back to that native place of yours 
 where, as you now remember, the water was more 
 cordial than wine, and the women sweeter than 
 angels. 
 
 There is only one journey, as it seems to me, in 
 this inweaving of parables and facts, in which we 
 attain our ideal of going away and going home at 
 the same time. Death, normally encountered, has 
 all the attractions of suicide without any of its 
 
 104
 
 ON SAYING GOOD-BYE 
 
 horrors. The old woman when she comes to that 
 road will find the miles beginning at the right end. 
 We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother- 
 gaolers of ours, Time and Space; and though the 
 handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have 
 power to cheat or defeat us. " However amusing 
 the comedy may have been," wrote Pascal, " there 
 is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little 
 dust on your face; and then all is over for ever." 
 Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily 
 mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us 
 pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines 
 and a timely exit ; but, fine or feeble, there is com- 
 fort in breaking the parting word into its two 
 significant halves, a Dieu. Since life has been a 
 constant slipping from one good-bye into another, 
 why should we fear that sole good-bye which 
 promises to cancel all its fore-runners ? 
 
 1910. 
 
 105
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 The dogmatic mantle has long since fallen out of 
 fashion among economists. That too pushing 
 omniscience, once imputed to the tribe by satirists, 
 angers nobody now ; it exists only as a memory of 
 veterans. Economics is no longer presented as an 
 integral, or even a partial, Rule of Life : if the 
 modern masters of the science are guilty of any sin 
 in that regard it is an excessive reluctance in counsel. 
 The critic complains, if at all, of their remoteness 
 and detachment. They have organized too well 
 their escape from real life, some into history, some 
 into the serene shadow-land of mathematics. 
 
 This attitude reflects through a special medium 
 the mind of the community. It is doubtful whether 
 there were ever before in the world at any moment 
 so many honest, bew ildered men. We feel, most of 
 us, as much astray and amazed as a peasant 
 suddenly plunged into the clamour of dynamos, or 
 into that of the Stock Exchange, The twentieth 
 century, which cuts such a fine figure in encyclo- 
 paedias, is most familiarly known to the majority of 
 its children as a new sort of headache. And its 
 moral burden is felt to be unbearable. In a simple 
 social organization, justice is an ideal that carries 
 straight to the mark. It is constantly reinforced by 
 obvious fulfilment. It does not get lost on the way. 
 But in our vast and unimaginable maze of interde- 
 pendent processes and reactions, mere honesty comes 
 to appear to the discouraged mind as the laudable, 
 but entirely fruitless, caprice of a cipher. Any 
 personal attempt to redress the balance of distribution 
 is commonly regarded as either a freak, an imperti- 
 
 109
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 nence, a nullitj', or a betrayal. Raise voluntarily the 
 wages of your workmen, and you are "branded" as 
 a traitor to your class. Improve factory conditions 
 that fall within your own control, and you are 
 denounced for a subtle intrigue against the loyalty of 
 your workers to their class. You are gilding the oats 
 of servitude for your slaves. Intervene in a strike 
 with an appeal for peace, and you become a Derby 
 dog for the contempt and the missiles of both parties 
 to the quarrel. Tr}' to give a penny to a poor 
 woman outside the church door after Mass, and all 
 civilization is mobilized to prevent such a horror. 
 Adhere to the opposite view that salvation is only of 
 a committee, that everything must be anonymous, 
 departmentalized, and even State-managed, and you 
 are in no better case. Oppose the Insurance Act, 
 for instance, and Mr. Masterman characterizes you 
 as a thick-hided and miserly individualist. Accept 
 it, and Mr. Belloc trounces you as a hireling prophet, 
 and forerunner of the Servile State. Tolerate or 
 even explain Mr. Larkin, and you are a mad, 
 contract-breaking anarchist. Support Mr. Ramsay 
 Macdonald against him, and you are either a crawling 
 fusionist and trimmer, or, in the alternative, the dupe 
 of a wrecker, who is all the more dangerous because 
 of his smooth and plausible ways. 
 
 I do not wish to exaggerate, but it is a fact of 
 daily experience that many a fine straightness of 
 purpose is getting itself twisted in the confusion of 
 the times. The violent splutter of adjectives which 
 passes for social philosophy, not only among the 
 untrained missionaries of discontent but also among 
 the well-trained orthodox, is admirably calculated to 
 produce that spiritual nausea which we call cynicism. 
 Not a little of the restless end even desperate 
 frivolity, which is deplored as the characteristic vice 
 of the age, may be traced to that source. Many 
 people, and not always the worst, feel sincerely that 
 
 no
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 they have minds equal to the task of taking the 
 world flippantly, but not equal to anything more 
 serious. They turn with hectic enthusiasm to Auction 
 Bridge and the Tango, partly because they cannot 
 find a key to the graver business of civilisation. They 
 are not enemies to the light, but merely aliens. They 
 will tell you that they are not on the road to 
 Damascus largely because they cannot find it, and 
 the excuse will not be without a certain tinge or 
 infiltration of truth. The road upon which they are 
 is, in truth, paved with good intentions: one can see 
 that, and, dazed by the contention of the guides, can 
 understand the weariness that unshouldered baggage 
 so awkward. 
 
 Such is the psychology of some part at least of 
 our f aim ance. The remainder is not so respectable 
 in its origins, and neither imagines itself nor is 
 imagined to be anything more complex than the 
 static inertia of comfort. But that there is sincere 
 trouble of mind among men of goodwill may be 
 taken as beyond question. It is palpably there, it 
 is real, and it is so deeply and variously rooted in 
 everyday conditions as to be difficult even to reach 
 with any hope of dispersal. But there is nothing to 
 justify the throwing up of impotent hands. Impos- 
 sibilism is a poor word and an unmanly doctrine. 
 We have got to keep moving on, and, since that is 
 so, we had better put as good thought as we can 
 into our itinerary. The task of civilization was 
 never easy. Freedom — the phrase belongs to 
 Fichte, or to someone of his circle — has always 
 been a battle and a march : it is of the nature of 
 both that they should appear to be the participants, 
 during the heat of movement, as planless and 
 chaotic. The Bill Adamses do in fact win the 
 Waterloo of history, but they do not know how. 
 It is their sons, pouring over picture books, who 
 grasp the tactical integrity of the affair, and their 
 
 III
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 grandsons who understand its human significance. 
 Whatever else economic life may be, it is of late 
 very plainly a battle. But no such lapse of time is 
 now needed for comprehension : it explains itself as 
 it goes on. The policy of labour is no longer an 
 eyeless, instinctive groping ; it is a mature and self- 
 conscious campaign. It has its definite goal, its 
 metaphysics, its very sophisticated poetry. The 
 rest of society has undergone a similar mental 
 transformation. It has acquired the faculty of 
 doubling the roles of actor and spectator. It has 
 at hand information not before available as to con- 
 ditions of life. In short it is able, although not 
 without an effort, to rationalize its development, 
 and to elect between the alternatives posed in 
 practical conflict. 
 
 In the perplexity spoken of there is probably a 
 considerable leaven of self-deception. The dead 
 weight of details overwhelms us, largely because we 
 lack the courage of the obvious. We are muscle- 
 bound, not precisely by downright egotism or 
 dullness, but by that unaccountable palsy, some- 
 times experienced, in which mind and brain seem to 
 be cloven into unrelated halves. The goads of 
 economic life we grasp with one iialf of ourselves as 
 the grossest of platitudes ; the responsive kicks and 
 twitchings are regarded by the other half as a dark 
 and evil paradox. The simple truth is that, in con- 
 temporary conditions, what v^'e call the Labour 
 Unrest is just as normal as pain in disease. There 
 is a proved discord between the business order of 
 things on the one part, and the human order on the 
 other. Our industrial system clashes not only with 
 ethical, but even with physiological requirements. 
 Thirty per cent, of our whole population dwell just 
 on or just below the hunger line, and local or 
 seasonal disadvantages depress a great body of 
 them to a level even lower. Our contemporary age, 
 
 112
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 if marked out in the calendar by its humane enthu- 
 siasms, is also unhappily marked out by rising prices. 
 If the worker is pinched and cramped in respect of 
 those two fundamentals, food and clothing, his 
 relation to the third, shelter, is even more abject. 
 The plenitude of large-scale production, and power 
 transport, has cheapened wheat and woollens much 
 more effectively than it has cheapened houses. It 
 is not only in Dublin that the damnosa haereditas of 
 the slum curtains the cradle of the poor with its 
 misery and its defilement. All this we know very 
 well : we repeat it over and over till it becomes 
 almost an idle tale, and the next moment we are 
 crying out with astonishment at some fresh strike. 
 That is not a wise, or even an intelligible attitude. 
 The first principle to lay firm hold on, as it seems 
 to me, is the causal bond between want and unrest. 
 The continual heel-flingings of which we complain 
 are reallv reflex rather than deliberate. It will 
 further be discovered to be a sound, though a rough, 
 working-clue to assume that all strikes are the same 
 strike. If we are to master the situation at all we 
 must think of the worker not as a unit in a Board 
 of Trade table, nor j^et as a nihilist, a metaphysician, 
 or a prophet. Taking him as we find him, we are, 
 especially in these countries, in presence of a man 
 concrete in temper almost to the point of earthiness. 
 He offers the most unpromising material for a 
 chapter in demonology. Not only does he prefer 
 peace to war, but he even prefers work to idleness. 
 No other man in the state accepts so stoutly the 
 discipline of incessant striving, or savours so heartily 
 the frugal comforts and common pleasures of 
 existence. Let me not seem to suggest the absurd 
 and belittling notion that he is devoid of idealism. 
 Certain of his theorists have indeed constantly 
 treated him as a mere resultant of appetites; but 
 a Catholic at least knows that, at his highest, 
 
 I 113
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 he has been the guardian and keeper of the shrine. 
 But he is a man who lives, if the phrase be allowed, 
 very close to life, and very far away from all species 
 of cloudy architecture. His revolutions are 
 essentially revolutions of the kitchen cup-board. 
 In substance, if not in technical form, his 
 cmeiites all relate back to such tremendous sim- 
 plicities as that. When he rises against the dis- 
 missal of a Driver Knox, for instance, he is not 
 concerned in the least to assert what some of his 
 Corinthians have formulated as the divine right to 
 get drunk outside business hours. Nor is it the core 
 of his grievance that the frontiers of his leisure have 
 been violated, or that his social habits have been 
 subjected to criticism. It is that any rash or fussy 
 person, set in authority, has the power to call into 
 action against him, suddenly and on any lightest 
 pretext, good or bad, that armoury of which the 
 chief weapon is starvation. When a Trade Union 
 is fighting for recognition, a very brief inquiry will 
 show you that the typical combatant is not, in the 
 last analysis, very passionately interested in the 
 abstract or the remote. He regards his organization 
 not as a piece of grandiose mythology, after the 
 fashion of a Pouget, a Sorel, or even a Larkin, but 
 as a known and definite mode of putting or keeping 
 wages up. 
 
 Side by side with this practical tradition, ambient 
 about it like a sort of astral body, there is also of 
 course the metaphysical tradition of labour. That 
 is, in some of its phases, visionary and sinister 
 enough to justify the most picturesque of night- 
 mares. In its place it merits the most careful study. 
 But with the ordinary striker, or " unrestful " 
 worker it has very little to do. And that is a very 
 fortunate circumstance. The great task of to-day 
 is to rally the worker to civilization. If the panic- 
 pictures of him were true, that would be an 
 
 114
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 impossible task. If it were true that the worker 
 really desired to end the present organization of 
 society, there is no power on earth that could balk, 
 or even long postpone, his passage from will to deed. 
 You could not invoke against him the authority of 
 Parliament, for in democratic states he is the 
 majority that creates and could control Parliament. 
 Nor could you appeal to force, for he is the police, 
 the army and the navy. The fact is so obvious as 
 to demand no elaboration. It forms the ground- 
 work of what is perhaps the most lyrical invitation, 
 and at the same time the angriest rebuke in all the 
 prophetic books of revolutionism. But the prophets 
 of overthrow are altogether wrong in believing that 
 the quiescence of labour is due to the apathy of 
 habit, to lack of imagination, or to cowardice. The 
 worker will not make an end of civilization simply 
 because he is himself a civilized man. He feels — 
 for it is feeling rather than logic — that there is in 
 our system of private ownership, despite everything, 
 a sort of bedrock fitness and necessity. The justice 
 towards which he is groping is there, if not in 
 actuality at any rate as a ratio seminalis. Scientific 
 control of nature is there, adequate, if it be but 
 guided by common sense and good will, to the con- 
 quest of destitution. Scope is there for the play 
 of personality ; and to a man, whose unrealized 
 ambitions cry out anew for fulfilment in his children, 
 that is by no means the least virtue of our system. 
 The worker is already rallied to the idea, to the 
 schematic essence of our Western civilization. Our 
 task is to rally him to its actual shape by so trans- 
 forming that latter, as given to us by the accidents 
 of history, that it shall be fit for the habitation of 
 the idea. 
 
 Some apology should perhaps be offered for such 
 an italicizing of the obvious. But if a landscape is, 
 as has been said, a state of mind, a society is, in an 
 
 115
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 even deeper sense, a state of mind or rather of will. 
 One of the effects of terror with some people is to 
 make them shut their eyes: it is a duty of those of 
 us who, although frightened, are not so badly 
 frightened, to give evidence as to the nature of the 
 things we see. 
 
 If the foregoing analysis is, in its main lines, correct, 
 it follows that there is not much matter to be learned 
 from a minute consideration of recent upheavals such 
 as those of Dublin, and, on a smaller scale, of Leeds. 
 There was something Byronic about the Dublin 
 struggle: it taught us little, but we undoubtedly 
 "felt it like a thunder-roll." No note of the whole 
 scale of melodrama was absent. Patriotism and"' 
 bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter and religion, 
 religion and economic solidarity, nationalism and 
 internationalism, diplomacy and war, the catastro- 
 phic method and the gradual, dictatorship and 
 democracy, and one knows not how many other 
 great ideas were clashed against one another in 
 arbitrary and hopeless antithesis. Stones, batons, 
 nearly all the pomp and all the not infrequent 
 absurdity of the law, secret councils, processions, 
 amazing perorations, epigrams that were veritable 
 wads of gun-cotton, disguises, slayings, arrests, and 
 escapes — it was all in the mode not merely of melo- 
 drama, but of the cinema theatre. It is in the nature 
 of a very miserable destiny that everything that 
 happens in Ireland, from a public banquet to a 
 private funeral, should be seized on as affording a 
 conclusive reason against Home Rule, the Catholic 
 hierarchy, the Gaelic League, the Gulf Stream or 
 some other of our special iniquities. It is hardly 
 necessary to say that the Dublin strike proved to a 
 large number of enthusiastic writers that all their 
 worst fears, and their best hopes, on both sides of all 
 questions affecting our future were more than 
 justified. The serious significance of it is perhaps 
 
 ii6
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 best reached in a less confident way. By a strange 
 paradox it was at once the most individual, and the 
 most general of all recent outbreaks. Of all the 
 great cities of the United Kingdom, Dublin is the 
 weakest in economic structure. It is a capital of 
 government officials, professional men, annuitants; 
 its wealth, such as it is, is concentrated in those 
 classes which the popular mind, untruly and yet not 
 fantastically, regards as parasitical. Their incomes 
 are drawn not from the volume of local production, 
 but from that larger stream of national production 
 which is tributary to their specialized pursuits, though 
 jiot to others. The business world is occupied chiefly 
 with carrying and commerce, very little with manu- 
 facture. The great body of the workers are engaged 
 in low-wage occupations. Not less than one-fourth 
 of the population is constantly below the human 
 minimum. Housing is particularly bad, the "poor 
 street" being in the typical instance a decayed "good 
 street," planned originally for other uses and \\ holly 
 unsuitable to that to v.-hich it has come. The labour 
 propaganda had hardly reached the mass of the 
 unskilled : organization was almost unknown to them. 
 On this terrain appeared suddenly the disturbing 
 personality of Mr. Larkin. Picturesque, eloquent, 
 prophetic, at once dictatorial and intimate, he was, 
 as he might say himself, the very man for the job. 
 The Dublin worker is not a natural revolutionary, 
 but he is a natural soldier. Mr. Larkin, appealing 
 at once to all his instincts, organized not so much a 
 Union as an arm}'. In a long series of attacks, the 
 main strength of which resided in the fact that they 
 were sudden and concentrated on a single employer 
 or group of employers, he won much oftener than he 
 lost. His opponents were taken by surprise. In 
 many instances they had but a very poor defence: 
 wages were not only under the human minimum, but 
 in some trades they were clearly lower than business 
 
 TT7
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 could bear, and they had not, for an unduly long 
 time, shown any improvement. In all cases the 
 employers were inadequately trained to modern 
 methods of industrial diplomacy. Without quite 
 knowing what they were about, they allowed them- 
 selves to be manoeuvred into an apparent challenge 
 to the fundamental principle of Trade Unionism. 
 Both in argument, and in conflict, they failed very 
 notably to hold their own. A condition of day-to-da}- 
 menace and insecurity was created; no employer, 
 sitting down to his correspondence in the morning, 
 felt certain that his men would not be called out bj' 
 telephone before the dinner-hour. But among the 
 employers also the idea of solidarity began to 
 germinate. They, too, by one of those chances or 
 ordinations that supply most of the interest of 
 history, found a leader of the requisite type at the 
 crucial momemt. Mr. William Murphy is a humane 
 man, known for his personal honour and charity ; a 
 "good employer" as it is called, a successful captain 
 of enterprise, an insensitive imagination, in short, a 
 very dangerous opponent. Under his impulsion they 
 consolidated their forces. How far the process of 
 federation went, what was the nature of its financial 
 basis, what subventions, if any, it received from the 
 English federated employers we do not know. But 
 these facts, if known, would furnish us with the 
 master-key to the course of the struggle. What is 
 evident is that when the Dublin committee declared 
 that they had made up their minds "to smash 
 Larkinism" and to drive him out of the capital as he 
 had been driven out of Belfast, Cork and Wexford, 
 they were not spinning phrases. They were talking 
 by the most influential of all books, the bank-book. 
 They threatened, and they performed. 
 
 The sense in which the Dublin struggle was strongly 
 individual, provoked and controlled by things local 
 and not universal, will appear from this rough 
 
 ii8
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 analysis. But we have to note further that it came 
 at a point of crisis in the history of labour. The 
 critics of Parliamentarianism, the apostles of direct 
 action, of economic as contrasted with political 
 pressure, found in the fighting spirit of the Dublin 
 worker an asset and an opportunity irresistible to 
 them. The issues had been posed in such terms 
 that, on the face of it, the most conservative Trade 
 Unionist had no choice but to support the men. 
 With the assurance of this solid support, the more 
 extreme spirits were free to play with fire. The 
 class-war was preached in whirling superlatives. 
 The force of gutter-journalism, on both sides, could 
 no further go. It was a humiliation to read in one 
 column the noblest appeal to justice or to order, and, 
 in the next, to come on a personal irrelevant foulness, 
 as of a well wantonly choked with garbage. Nobody 
 wants to be a prude or a dandy in these matters, but 
 the mud which besmears impartially the flinger of it, 
 and his target, is not a contribution to human pro- 
 gress. A dramatic demonstration was given of the 
 triumph of class solidarity over racial, religious and 
 even geographical division : at least that was how 
 the affair appeared to the Syndicalist " rebel chiefs." 
 Behind it all the civic organism, within which the 
 duel had been joined, displayed every symptom of a 
 very real distress. The workers fought with admir- 
 able courage : there was very little drinking or 
 violence and a great deal of idealism and soldierly 
 sacrifice. But there is a point beyond which the belt 
 cannot be tightened. The English labour officials 
 repudiated what they regarded as the reckless and 
 impossible strategy of Mr. Larkin, and cut off supplies. 
 The employers, on their part, carried out with 
 resolution and success their programme of " fighting 
 to a finish." They rejected with open contempt all 
 attempts at conciliatory intervention by a Citizens' 
 Peace Committee, overturning Lord Mayors, Privy 
 
 119
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Councillors, Deans, doctors and professors like 
 disregarded ninepins. They glanced at Sir George 
 Askwith's Dublin Castle Report, and pitched it 
 forthwith in the lire. In these circumstances there 
 could be only one issue. We are left with an 
 extremely ambiguous state of affairs. The dispute 
 has not come to a conclusion, it has merely stopped: 
 no settlement has been formulated. In some cases 
 the men have gone back with no questions asked. 
 In the building trades they have signed the obnoxious 
 "document" which proscribes the Transport Union. 
 The carpenters have had served on them a requisition, 
 which so far has been refused, to introduce into their 
 agreement new clauses renouncing the "sympathetic 
 strike," and the doctrine of " tainted goods." There 
 has been plenty of "victimization," and plenty of 
 " desertion." Not less than six thousand strikers are 
 estimated to be still drifting about unemployed. The 
 introduction of motor lorries in large numbers during 
 the dispute has added to other problems that of the 
 displacement of labour by machinery. Not a single 
 member of the submerged fourth seems to be any 
 nearer a living, or as it is now currently called, an 
 economic wage. The Housing Report in increasing 
 knowledge has certainly increased sadness, but, in 
 the absence of Imperial aid such as has been 
 promised to local authorities, we are no closer to a 
 solution. 
 
 At the first blush it would seem as if the masters 
 had won all along the line. But they themselves 
 are not quite certain what it is that they have won. 
 People ask, like the mathematician after the pla)': 
 What does all that prove ? What in fact does it 
 prove .'' It is not a victory over Trade Unionism, 
 for the employers formally declared that they were 
 fighting not Trade Unionism but Mr. Larkin. It is 
 not a failure of the General Strike, or even of the 
 much more limited sympathetic strike : neither was 
 
 I20
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 seriously tried. On this point some explanation is 
 needed. The sympathetic strike, as understood in 
 England, is essentially a strike declared by one 
 Union in support of another. In Dubhn the con- 
 trolling feature was the fact that the Transport 
 Union was not a specialized trade or craft body, but 
 a sort of omnibus or hotch-potch organization into 
 which such diverse elements as biscuit-makers, 
 tramway-men, and agricultural labourers were 
 gathered. It might have been founded on that 
 classic page in which Mill points out that all 
 economic effort is reducible to the moving of matter 
 from one place to another. Any collective action 
 on the part of such a body is bound to hit the com- 
 munity simultaneously at many points. The blows 
 are more numerous, but there is less weight behind 
 them. Nobody supposes that things in Dublin 
 have swung back to anything like stable equilibrium. 
 Mr. Larkin may^go to South Africa, but he will not 
 take with him the slums, the hunger, or the hope- 
 lessness of outlook that are the true organizers of 
 revolution. If there is peace in Dublin it is the 
 peace of industrial anaemia, not that of a healthy 
 civilization. 
 
 But if no problem has been solved many have 
 been posed with a new exigence. They are either 
 local or general, and again they are either mechani- 
 cal and secondary, or else of that fundamental kind 
 outlined earlier in this paper. The whole business 
 future of the Irish capital has been posed as a 
 problem. You lack the key to it until you under- 
 stand that Dublin itself is grievously under- 
 developed, and that it focusses with lamentable 
 truth the arrested development of the nation as a 
 whole. The change to a new economic order in this 
 regard is, for most of us in Ireland, bound up with 
 the change to a new political order : that, however, 
 is not a discussion immediately proper to these 
 
 T2T
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 pages. As for more general considerations, we 
 may well style mechanical and secondary all those 
 relating to schemes of arbitration and conciliation. 
 There is no saving virtue in "bringing people 
 together " as the phrase goes : the prize-ring, for 
 instance, brings pugilists together, but the result is 
 not conspicuously peaceful. Everything depends 
 on the philosophy of action behind the lips of the 
 negotiators and on the actual facts of the case. In 
 one point of view all economic inquiries are an 
 unqualified good, namely, as sources of information. 
 In that point of view they must be developed and 
 extended until each half of the world knows exactly 
 how the other half lives. Our knowledge on the 
 subject, although greatly improved of late years, is 
 still inadequate to the point of humiliation. The 
 Board of Trade investigations into wages, rents and 
 prices; the Income Tax and Death Duty returns, 
 the economic importance of which is certainly not 
 inferior to the fiscal ; the Census of Production, and 
 a whole range of publications that will come to mind, 
 ought to be conceived not as casual Blue Books but 
 as the germ of a new literature. The Year Books, 
 among which one may signalize particularly the 
 Year Book of Social Progress and the Encyclopedia of 
 Industrialist}!, both of which seem to owe their extra- 
 ordinary usefulness to the inspiration of Professor 
 Ashley; the work of Mr. Chiozza Money, Professor 
 Bow ley, Mr. J. A. Hobson, Professor Chapman, 
 Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, and the more responsible 
 Fabians ; all the publications of the Catholic Social 
 Guild and especially of Monsignor Parkinson — one 
 mentions only random examples — are not mere 
 books, but the lines of a new social orientation. 
 The Oxford volume on Property, although it is not 
 much more than St. Thomas Aquinas and water, 
 and Mr. Cole's brilliant and dangerous World of 
 Labour are significant recent additions. The time 
 
 122
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 has come for the State, which alone commands the 
 authority and the resources, toconsoHdate the results 
 of all these diverse investigations into one Manual 
 of Citizenship. In so far as Courts of Conciliation 
 which, from the nature of things, must be Courts of 
 Inquiry, help to elicit the actual facts of economic 
 life they should be strongly favoured. 
 
 When they are conceived as agencies of peace we 
 enter a new area. The outstanding problem posed 
 by the Dublin employers is that of compulsory arbi- 
 tration, penally enforceable through the medium of 
 money guarantees. The interest of this proposal can 
 hardly be exaggerated. It challenges, or at any 
 rate, appears to challenge, the present position of 
 Trade Unions before the law, and this is, in effect, 
 to challenge their whole historical achievement. It 
 dismisses the considered report of the Industrial 
 Council, which, be it noted, is a joint and not a 
 sectional Board. They found unanimously (Cd. 
 6952. 1913) that moral obligation and mutual con- 
 sent afforded a much stronger guarantee of peace 
 than a«y legal penalty or prohibition. But what 
 renders the proposal even more interesting is the 
 diminishing disfavour with which compulsory arbi- 
 tration of some kind is regarded by Parliamentary 
 Socialists like Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. 
 Snowden. Mr. Crooks has long been known as an 
 advocate of it, and he has been roundly condemned 
 by the Trade Union Congress. But one finds Mr. 
 Cole declaring that the Congress may very likely 
 accept it, if another and less repugnant name can be 
 devised. And in Mr. Macdonald's last book, The 
 Social Unrest, one comes upon a suggestive passage : 
 
 "... the field upon which organized labour 
 can win victories is being so narrowed as to impose 
 a heavy handicap on the workmen. Capital is 
 being concentrated for industrial purposes, and 
 
 123
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 federated for defensive purposes against Labour 
 combinations, and organized Capital left to deal 
 with organized Labour under existing conditions 
 enters a contest with everything in its favour. 
 That is the reason why Trade Unionism is turning 
 its thoughts more and more towards legislation, 
 and is finding ideas of compulsory arbitration 
 more and more consistent with that new 
 position." 
 
 It is evident enough that Mr. Macdonald wants 
 Ids State to keep the capitalist in order, and that 
 the Dublin employers want their State to keep the 
 Unions in order. But the question has been posed. 
 The close federation of employers was visibly 
 present ; its success may very well be a new point 
 of departure. 
 
 In all that has been said it should be clearly 
 understood that there is no belittlement of the 
 function of Conciliation Boards. In an atmosphere 
 of goodwill they may be very valuable aids to peace. 
 The fact that the Irish bishops have exercised their 
 immense moral influence towards the establishment 
 of such bodies in Ireland is of the greatest import- 
 ance. To say that machinery is not, of its own 
 inherent magic, adequate to the situation is very 
 far from saying that it is not, in its place, valuable 
 and even indispensable. The creation of it, 
 especially in Dublin, is indeed of all secondary 
 tasks before us the most urgent. 
 
 But it is our social philosophy, and the practical 
 policy founded on it, that alone can rally the workers 
 to civilization. The strike must be grasped not 
 only as a disturbance, and an act of war, but as a 
 monstrously expensive advertisement of the present 
 abject condition of labour. Until we have made up 
 our minds to change that condition we shall only 
 be padding round in a verbal prison. Let us look 
 
 124
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 at things in the simplest possible way. The 
 function of an economic system is to feed, clothe, 
 and shelter, in a human way, its human units. Since 
 ours does not accomplish that, we must so amend it 
 that it shall do so. There is no vain dream of an 
 impossible Utopia, and no hope of banishing that 
 part of the mass of destitution which is due to 
 personal malfeasance. But neither should there be 
 a too easy acceptance of things given. The business 
 world as we have inherited it from the exploiters of 
 the great inventions, and their economic counsellors, 
 was not, in its origins, framed on any high ethical 
 model : we may come some day to look back on it 
 not as one of the supreme triumphs, but as one of 
 the strange aberrations of the human spirit. Such is 
 the suggestion of writers so far removed from Com- 
 munism as the late Arnold Toynbee, and Mr. Hilaire 
 Belloc. In the effort to transform this fabric, we 
 must not think so fantastically well of human nature 
 as to suppose that logic and justice will suffice. 
 There may be need from time to time for the minis- 
 tration of war : it may be taken for granted that 
 situations will develop out of which no humaner way 
 will appear possible. All the time each economic 
 class will find it necessary so to organize its strength 
 as to exert its appropriate, stabilizing "pull" on the 
 process of distribution. That is the rationale alike 
 of Consumer's Leagues, Co-operatives of all kinds, 
 Employers' Federations, and Trade Unions. Equili- 
 brium between these forces is not to be maintained 
 by mere slackness and resignation : it imposes on 
 the community a strain as constant as the muscular 
 tension of a wire-walking acrobat. Occasional 
 disturbance is, unhappily, lodged as a menace in the 
 very principle of our system. While human beings 
 continue to be born into a sub-human existence, 
 from which only the strongest and the luckiest can 
 hope to escape, our civilization is, so far forth, a 
 
 125
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 contradiction in terms. That must be the material 
 foundation, and the mind of the worker must be the 
 moral foundation of any philosophy of peace. If, on 
 the one hand, the Hving wage were unattainable, if, 
 when the skeleton went, the feast had to go, or if, on 
 the other, the worker had finally chosen revolution 
 as his trade, the outlook for our world would be 
 hopeless. But although things are bad, they are not 
 so bad as that. What is essential is that the conser- 
 vative should realize that there must be a great 
 change, and that the extremist should realize that 
 the change can only be gradual. To ignore either 
 condition is to lose hold of the problem. The 
 transformation cannot be catastrophic : even the 
 theorists of Socialism have long since ceased to think 
 in economic Jenas or Sedans. In too many parasitic 
 or casual industries the immediate choice is between 
 bad wages and no wages. To enforce forthwith even 
 a moderate standard would be to drive out all the 
 marginal employers, and to add whole new regiments 
 to the army of unemployment. But to torture these 
 commonplaces into a new Iron Law, to linger on the 
 difficulties and to deprecate the necessity of a changed 
 order, is to have already declared war on the soul of 
 labour. Forbid me to hope for myself, and it is a 
 hard saying but not intolerable : widen that inter- 
 diction until you exile eternally from the sun my 
 children, and my children's children, and you make 
 peace nothing better than the drowse of poltroons. 
 There is in our midnight a hidden morrow; if we 
 deliberately commit our energies to the task we can, 
 year by year, and stage by stage, remoralize our 
 society. It is that prospect, and not its actual shape, 
 that will rally to it in faith and action the working 
 class. They are realists, and if they see such a 
 purpose honestly pursued, we need have no fear as to 
 the flag of their election. We must also, as it seems 
 to me, be more discriminate in onr alliances. Divide 
 
 126
 
 LABOUR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 et inipera is a dangerous maxim, and those spokesmen 
 of orthodoxy who regard it as good tactics to exag- 
 gerate every difference of opinion that may chance to 
 arise in the labour camp, to embroil its various parties, 
 and to include them all in one impartial condem- 
 nation, are conspicuously ill-inspired. Where the 
 cause at issue is personal vanity you may well, as 
 the phrase goes, "play off" one agitator against 
 another: but when ultimate human needs come in 
 question any such effort must be at once mean and 
 vain. If we find men, whose spiritual orientation 
 is not altogether ours, marching in the same 
 direction, we ought to march with them to the 
 term of our common objective, and not separate 
 for battle until that term has been reached. Every 
 voluntary and every State proposal that tends to 
 broaden the basis of property — co-operation, co- 
 partnership, prosperity sharing, manufacturing 
 guilds, taxation of unprotective surpluses — ought 
 to be welcomed by us. But in the end it is person- 
 ality that counts. If we are to be saved we must 
 help in the saving. The great Encyclicals of 
 Leo XIII, those spacious and noble utterances of 
 the true social philosophy, bring all our eifort to 
 its inevitable point. 
 
 " Every one should put his hand to the work 
 which falls to his share, and that at once and 
 straightway, lest the evil which is already so great 
 become through delay absolutely beyond remedy. 
 Those who rule the State should avail themselves 
 of the laws and institutions of the country ; 
 masters and wealthy owners must be mindful of 
 their duty ; the poor, whose interests are at stake, 
 should make every lawful and proper effort ; and 
 since religion alone .... can avail to destroy 
 the evil at its root, all men should rest persuaded 
 that the main thing needful is to return to real 
 
 127
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Christianity, apart from which all the plans and 
 devices of the wisest will prove of little avail. . . . 
 Never cease to urge upon men of every class, upon 
 the highest placed as well as the lowly, the Gospel 
 doctrines of Christian life." [Condition of the 
 Working Classes.'] 
 
 128
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF 
 NATIONALISM' 
 
 The science of Economics is commonly held to be 
 lamentably arid and dismal. If that is your experi- 
 ence of it, blame the economists. For the slice of 
 life, with which Economics has to deal, vibrates and, 
 so to say, bleeds with human actuality. All science, 
 all exploration, all history in its material factors, 
 the whole epic of man's effort to subdue the earth 
 and establish himself on it, fall within the domain 
 of the economist. His material consists of the 
 ordinary man in the ordinary business of mundane 
 life, that, namely, of getting a living. This means 
 more than food, clothes, and shelter. The highest 
 activities of art and religion can function only under 
 material forms. Churches have to be paid for as 
 well as factories ; you can no more get a bar of 
 Caruso for nothing than you can get a bar of soap 
 for nothing. Economics, moreover, is committed 
 to an analysis not only of the production, but also of 
 the distribution of wealth. In other words, it has 
 to face formally the vast and dismaying problem of 
 poverty. In the accomplishment of these tasks, 
 moreover, the economist, preoccupied with one mode 
 of organization among mankind, must necessarily con- 
 sider the influence on it of other modes devised or 
 evolved for other ends. Politics imposes itself on 
 him. He can evade the political aspect of his 
 material only by evading reality. 
 
 1 Part of a paper read at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, 
 December 5, 1912. 
 
 K 129
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 It is to a special hinterland of this last tract 
 of territory that I wish to direct your minds to- 
 night. Our inquiry is simple enough, and begins, 
 as far as concerns myself, with a personal 
 examination of conscience. Does the title National 
 Economics amount to a contradiction in terms ? 
 If it does not, and if the nation holds a legiti- 
 mate place in economc life and thought, is it 
 that of a blessing or that of a nuisance? And if 
 it is beneficient can we formulate an economic ideal 
 fitted to express the self-realization of a nation which 
 is resolute to realize itself? 
 
 A good many critics, endowed with that verbal 
 deftness so characteristic of Irish critics, have said to 
 me: " You have a Chair of National Economics in 
 your college. Have you also by any chance a Chair 
 of National Trigonometry or National Biology ? " 
 The gibe does not go home. So long as you keep 
 to the sphere of the highly abstract sciences any 
 limiting particularity is certainly incongruous. But 
 as you pass from the greyness of theory to the golden- 
 green foliage of the tree of life, to the rich and endless 
 differentiation of concrete fact, the incongruity 
 diminishes. A National Mathematics is absurd; a 
 National Biology is not quite so absurd, seeing that 
 every country has its own peculiar flora and fauna. 
 When you come to a National Economics the 
 incongruity has wholly disappeared. Plainly you can 
 constitute for each nation under that title a branch 
 of Descriptive Economics. Plainly since one nation 
 is at one stage of growth, and another at another, 
 and since the economy of each is, so to say, steeped 
 and soaked in its temperament and history, your 
 corpus of fact will in each case be strongly 
 individual. Plainly you will have in each case a 
 separate therapeutic. But I suggest to you that the 
 
 130
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 doctrine of Nationalism in Economics goes far deeper 
 than that. 
 
 Nationahty is a principle of organization. You 
 may regard it as ultimate and good, or as transitorial 
 and bad, and there is no narrowly scientific test by 
 which either view can be dismissed. But in 
 accordance with your first standpoint your whole 
 outlook is determined. Now, there is no doubt that 
 the classical or English school of Political Economy 
 did appear in its early years to be an almost irresis- 
 tible solvent of Nationalism. You will find in 
 Toynbee's Industrial Revolution two curiously similar 
 judgments to that effect left on record by two 
 such conflicting contemporaries as Coleridge and 
 Napoleon. The reasons are in no way mysterious. 
 The Classicists were all for freedom — free trade, free 
 contract, free competition — and Nationalism appeared 
 to them under the form of restrictions on freedom. 
 Internal tolls were disappearing: why should not 
 the custom-house disappear? Self-contained manor 
 and self-contained town had been fused by a long 
 historical process into the nation : why should not 
 the nations be fused into a world-economy ? The 
 tides seemed to be setting in that direction. Capital 
 was becoming at once more powerful and more fluid, 
 and there is in capital an inherent cosmopolitanism. 
 Labour moved towards internationalism as an 
 essential part of its "gospel of deliverance." What 
 were armies and navies but the watch-dogs of the 
 rich? What were national flags and songs but parts 
 of a ritual which they employed to intoxicate and 
 exploit the poor ? " The proletariat," cried out 
 Marx in his thunderous manifesto, " has no father- 
 land." The whole thought of that period is, indeed, 
 dyed in the grain with cosmopolitanism. And then 
 there comes that sudden upheaving renaissance, and 
 Nationalism is there as a colossal fact. The simplest 
 account of the change is that it was a spontaneous 
 
 131
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 outgush from the deep wells of human nature, and 
 from the overlaid but unexhausted springs of history. 
 From that time on to our own every nation sets 
 deliberately about the task of self-realization, material 
 and intellectual. 
 
 The English bias towards the "classical" economy 
 was readily intelligible. Dominating the world she 
 took her dominance for granted: she was unconscious 
 of her nationality in the sense in which an entirely 
 healthy man is unconscious of his digestion: and she 
 devised a regime under which every other nation 
 should be, in reference to her, a pupil and a tributary. 
 But as the forces of growth matured and expanded 
 in other nations they declined to Peter-Pan it to 
 England. And so effective was their refusal that if 
 you turn to a contemporary German text-book you 
 will find the three periods of modern economic 
 thought formally classified as (i) Mercantilism, (2) 
 Liberalism, and (3) Nationalism. 
 
 What is the case for Nationalism ? Well, if you 
 turn to the leaders of the revolt of which I have 
 spoken, such as List, or Henry Carey, the Irish- 
 American, 3'ou will find a scientific or semi-scientific 
 statement of it. If you turn to a modern leader of 
 the revolt against what I may call Juggernaut 
 Imperialism, such as Mr. Chesterton, you will find 
 a better statement in terms of poetry and human 
 nature. . . . You will, of course, bear in mind 
 that Mr. Chesterton is not sufficiently dull to be 
 authoritative. Being an artist, he is ever labouring 
 to add to an old truth the radiance of a new beauty, 
 which compromises him with the grave and the 
 learned. . . . Let me try in a less adequate way 
 to suggest in outline the creed of Nationalism. 
 Professor Cannan, in his recent book. The Economic 
 Outlook, elaborates an antithesis between Socialism 
 and Nationalism. And in that form the case for 
 Nationalism is best stated. His view would seem 
 
 132
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 to be not that Nationalism is visibly dying, but that 
 it can be shown to be obviously incompatible with 
 Socialism, and that, therefore, presumably, it must 
 die. 
 
 The stern, inevitable logic of this conclusion 
 escapes me. The presence of the steam engine on 
 George Stephenson's pioneer railway was incom- 
 patible with the presence of the cow, but it was not 
 the engme that perished in the encounter. The 
 whole tradition of Europe is for Nationalism and 
 against Socialism. Give us deep-cutting reforms ; 
 liberate and redeem labour ; bind property and 
 service in a bond that must be respected; assume 
 for the nation all the economic functions w hich in 
 the hands of individuals "degenerate into waste or 
 tyranny ; render it impossible for any man to 
 become, by mere dead weight of money, master of 
 his fellows, body and soul. So far we are with you. 
 But propose to ladle us all, with all that we own 
 and are, into your communistic hotch-pot, and, 
 entrenched behind the ancient bulwarks of person- 
 ality, family, nationality, we repel and annihilate 
 you in the name of civilization. If too much 
 unearned property is the grave of freedom, some 
 earned property, with the seal of service on it, is 
 the cradle of freedom. Even in Ibsen the button- 
 moulder was able to fling back Peer Gynt into the 
 melting-pot only because Peer had remained all his 
 life a mere self-amorous incoherence, in the true 
 sense, a nonentity. But the nation that is a richly 
 positive entity cannot so be dissolved and dismissed. 
 Destroy Nationalism, and you extinguish the sacri- 
 ficial flames about which the greatest nobleness of 
 the world has gathered in abnegation. You shatter 
 the altar vessels in which the precious wine of 
 freedom has been passed from lip to lip. 
 
 " Cosmopolitanism," says Turgenev in Rudin, " is 
 all twaddle. . . . Even the ideal face must have 
 
 133
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 an individual expression." Tiiis humanity, to the 
 worship of which you are to butcher NationaHsm, 
 is too vast, too vague, too bloodless an abstraction. 
 Our arms are not long enough to fold it in an 
 embrace. Ireland I feel equal to, and Dublin, and 
 that windy Atlantic cliff, straining out against the 
 ocean and the sunset, and that farmer to whom I 
 spoke at Tralee fair, and that publican in Tyrone, 
 and the labourers, spoiled by unemployment, who 
 come to me at my house nearly every day, and for 
 whom I can get no work. But as for the world as 
 a whole, even its geography is too large for my head, 
 to say nothing of its problems, and its emotions are 
 too large for my heart. What is humanity ? You 
 and I and the man round the corner, or over the sea, 
 are humanity. And if it is the nature of us all to 
 come to amplest self-expression by living our lives 
 here and now, for a community which is small 
 enough to know and to love, then by " transcending" 
 national categories you do not enrich, you impover- 
 ish, humanity. 
 
 Nationalism, indeed, like every other fine faith, 
 has the misfortune to be judged less by its core of 
 dogma than by its shell of superstition. Tariffism 
 and militarism are its apes, not the authentic sons 
 of its house. The parallel to which appeal has been 
 made avails here also. If I knock you down in the 
 street, or, when you call on me, slam the door in 
 your face, these are beyond all doubt impressive 
 proofs of the fact that I enjoy an existence separate 
 from yours. But there are other and better proofs, 
 as, for instance, to buy from you, to learn from you, 
 to feed, foster, or help you. There are better ways 
 of putting heads together than banging them 
 together. In precisely the same way a nation 
 degrades and cancels Nationalism by choosing to 
 identify it ^^•ith isolation or aggressiveness. The 
 first blunder is at war with the conscience of all 
 
 134
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 ages : a character as Goethe says, can fashion itself 
 only in the stream of the world. The second is 
 certainly at war with the conscience of this age. 
 To receive hospitably, and assimilate deeply; to 
 toil, to think, and to communicate without penury 
 or reserve — these remain the marks of a strong 
 nation as of a strong man. Free trade in ideas as 
 in commodities is the desired regime of those who 
 have attained maturity. But it is a strange altruism 
 which bids me not only give myself, but slay myself, 
 so that at the end of the process there is no basis 
 left either for self-regarding or for altruistic action. 
 I must own myself in order to give myself. 
 
 Curiously enough, it is in the writings of contem- 
 porary theorists of continental Socialism that we 
 find the most eloquent repudiation of Professor 
 Cannan's philosophy. Practice had preceded theory. 
 Labour once thought — in the days of the Communist 
 Manifesto — that its destiny centered in cosmopolitan- 
 ism. On that basis it sought to construct an Inter- 
 national, but it failed, and the failure led to a 
 notable transformation of Marxism. To-day you 
 have an International that possesses reality because 
 it roots in Nationalism. We Nationalists may 
 appeal to the authoritative words of Professor 
 Sombart in his Socialism and the Social Movement : — 
 
 " Marx's opinion, ' The working-classes have no 
 fatherland,' is being replaced by another, ' If that 
 is so, let us give them one.' . . . The view is 
 gaining ground among Socialists — indeed especi- 
 ally among them — that all civilization has its 
 roots in nationality, and that civilization can 
 reach its highest development only on the basis 
 of nationality." 
 
 He goes on to quote glowing and splendid passages 
 from David and Penestorfer, to one of which we may 
 appeal : 
 
 135
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 " Socialism and national idea are thus not 
 opposed to each other ; they rather supplement 
 each other. Every attempt to weaken the 
 national idea is an attempt to lessen the precious 
 possessions of mankind. . . . Socialism wants 
 to organize, and not disintegrate, humanity. But 
 in the organisms of mankind, not individuals, but 
 nations, are the tissues, and if the whole organism 
 is to remain wholly healthy, it is necessary for the 
 tissues to be healthy." 
 
 As for your capitalist who, in those days, was a 
 cosmopolitan, he is now in every country a jingo. 
 Herr Goldenberg is no sooner settled in Park Lane 
 than you find his name heading the list of subscrip- 
 tions to Lord Roberts' Conscription League. 
 
 The general significance of the new politics is 
 twofold. It substitutes an organic for the old 
 atomistic conception of economic life. And in 
 establishing the nation as a principle of organization 
 it establishes it also as a principle of sacrifice, and 
 therein provides the only basis of Protection that is 
 not intellectually disreputable. 
 
 II 
 
 Such "sentimentalities" will strike strangely and 
 even harshly on the ears of those who have been 
 bred up to believe that Political Economy began 
 with Adam Smith and ended with John Stuart Mill, 
 and that between 1780 and 1850 the laws underlying 
 the business life of mankind were defined, once and 
 for all, in immutable formulae. The line of thought 
 suggested by them is very ill represented in English 
 text-books. There is a reason for the lacuna, as for 
 most things, and it lies on the surface. If you want 
 a full appreciation of the significance of health you 
 
 136
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 must go not to the athlete's gymnasium, but to the 
 hospital ward. If you want an appreciation of the 
 value of national freedom and unity, you must go, 
 not to the one nation which entered the Steam Age 
 with these foundations of greatness deeply estab- 
 lished, but to one of those which, during the 
 nineteenth centurj^ had to work out their salvation, 
 political and economic, through blood and tears. 
 During the period of crystallization of the Classical 
 Economy the industrial hegemony of Great Britain 
 was absolute. Her supremacy in coal, in iron, 
 in shipping, in machinery, in the technique of 
 manufacture was unchallenged. On this basis the 
 great theorists, like Ricardo, implicitly, if not 
 deliberately, proceeded. The system which they 
 evolved was at once too English in matter, too 
 abstract in method, and too dogmatic in tone. 
 Protests against its exclusiveness, its insularity, 
 could be multiplied from the pages of Continental 
 economics. Thus Adolph Wagner, the great Austrian 
 master, summarizing Roscher, a precursor, in his 
 Foundations, writes : — 
 
 "They (the English school) have a tendency to 
 rely solely on abstract deduction, and to exaggerate 
 its importance . . . . ; in theory, but especially in 
 practice, they isolate economic phenomena too 
 radically from the other social phenomena with 
 which they are intimately associated ; they assign 
 to economic phenomena and institutions, and to 
 their solutions of economic questions, a character 
 too absolute, instead of assigning only that relative 
 and historical character which is proper to all the 
 facts of history ; their verdict on Free Trade, and 
 its results, is in many respects erroneous, and a 
 great deal too optimistic; they efface the State too 
 completely, and misunderstand its role as regulator 
 of the national economy." 
 
 137
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 This judgment, which is not precisely a con- 
 demnation of scientific principles, but rather a 
 methodological admonition, may now be said to be 
 universally accepted. It is interesting to note that 
 one of the first, and most influential, writers to 
 propagate it in English was John Kells Ingram. 
 Still more interesting is it to note the essential 
 identity of the human reality behind it with that 
 behind "Who Fears to Speak of '98?" The red fire 
 of passion has been transmuted into the illumination 
 of science, but here, as always, Ingram voices the 
 revolt of the small nations against the Czarism, 
 scientific and political, of the great. The reaction 
 in Economics is most adequately represented b)^ the 
 German Historical School. Of its leaders, from List 
 and Roscher to Schmoller and Wagner, it is not 
 too much to say that every nerve and fibre of their 
 science quivers with Nationalism. The simplest 
 account of German history during the second gener- 
 ation of the nineteenth century is that it w^as the 
 adolescence of a giant. It is significant of the giant's 
 future that, during that period, he finds it most 
 natural to call the study of business life not "Political 
 Economy " or merely " Economics," but " National 
 Economics," Nationaloehonomik. From the purely 
 scientific point of view the reaction was, undoubtedly, 
 carried too far. If it was the fashion of the Classical 
 School to dogmatize about everything, from a 
 minimum of experience, it became that of the 
 Historical School to accumulate all the experience 
 of all time, and then to decline to dogmatize about 
 anything. The one sect burned incense, and very 
 often offered up human sacrifice, on the altar of 
 inexorable laws. The other did, indeed, question 
 from time to time the propriety of certain details of 
 the ritual, but their dissent went very much deeper. 
 They said simply: There are no such laws. You 
 are worshipping the non-existent. But as spokes- 
 
 138
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 men of real life against the phantasm of the intellect, 
 which had come to be mistaken for real life, the 
 historical economists were wholly in the right. The 
 fruitfulness of their influences is best witnessed by 
 a writer who does not wholly sympathize with it. 
 Thus Professor Landry, one of the leaders of the 
 newer generation in France, observes in his Manuel 
 d'Economiqne : — 
 
 " It is much easier now to distinguish the 
 Economics of one nation from that of another 
 than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century. This results in part from the fact that 
 in the interval the content of Economics has been 
 greatly enriched, and, in consequence, greatly 
 diversified. But it is also to be explained by the 
 development, during the nineteenth century, of 
 the spirit of Nationalism in, at all events, many 
 parts of the civilized world. For more than a 
 hundred years the countries in question have 
 deliberate!}' sought to differentiate themselves in 
 the region of scientific research from their neigh- 
 bours. Indeed, strange and deplorable as it may 
 seem, there are even countries in which economic 
 writers deliberately cover with contempt the pro- 
 ductive economy of their neighbours, or else 
 refuse to consider it at all." 
 
 That the Historical School should also be, under 
 another aspect, the National School, can occasion 
 no surprise. On the one hand, if you turn to history 
 at all the first fact that impressesitself is the colossal 
 fact of nationality : on the other, every concrete 
 nationality is in origin, form and tendency an his- 
 torical product. 
 
 So much for what we may style the rehabilitation 
 of the national idea. I may seem to you to have 
 laboured it too much with something of a Falstaffian 
 
 139
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 parade of erudition : if so, the explanation is obvious. 
 When you come to mix in the actual life of our con- 
 temporary Ireland, you will find everybody on the 
 one side concerned about national self-realization, 
 political and economic. You will find everybody on 
 the other parrotting forth the perennial nonsense 
 that the Irish question is not political but purely 
 economic. You \Nill turn to some standard text- 
 book for enlightenment — in the nature of things it 
 will be an English text-book — and you will be con- 
 fused and discouraged to find principles, which you 
 greatly value, either cheapened or ignored. I have 
 tried to suggest to you that there is an historical 
 explanation for all this. Continental experience 
 comes much closer to ours than does English 
 experience, and Continental thought, is, as a result, 
 a much truer source of guidance. To offer a purely 
 economic solution for a politico-economic problem, 
 such as ours, is futile, and even absurd. It is as if 
 a doctor were to tell his patient, that once his lungs 
 are brought back to health, it does not matter 
 whether there is an aneurism in his heart or not. 
 
 It should be added that the line of criticism sug- 
 gested is fully valid only as against the popularizers, 
 not as against the masters of the English school. . 
 
 Ill 
 
 The acceptance of the national as against the 
 individual, of the organic as against the atomistic, 
 point of view, transforms nearly every economic 
 problem. Let us consider one or two of them very 
 briefly, and first of all that of external trade policy. 
 
 I have already described what may be called 
 platform Protectionism as intellectually disreputable. 
 The orthodox Free Trader has no difficulty in 
 riddling it. It is true that, theoretically in certain 
 
 140
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 posited conditions, and in one or two rare instances 
 in practice, a tax on an import may be thrown back 
 on to the foreign producer. But, in general, the 
 very object of a Protective tariff is to raise prices, 
 obtainable by the home producer, and payable by 
 the home consumer, in the home market. If that 
 object is not attained the tariff affords no " Pro- 
 tection." In the long run the increase of prices 
 may, indeed, lead to the exploitation of native 
 resources, hitherto untapped, and prices may 
 gradually sink to their former level. But, for the 
 time being, a tribute is, and must be, levied on the 
 consumer. How, then, are we to describe except as 
 impostors the Protectionists who run gaily about the 
 country with their big and their little loaves, and all 
 the rest of the paraphernalia, explaining that they 
 are going to make everybody richer by adding a tax 
 to the price of everything ? So far, the Manchester 
 stalwart is certainly entitled to the verdict as against 
 him of Birmingham. But, when we have reached 
 this point, the controversy is so far from being at an 
 end that it is in truth only beginning. The advocate 
 of taxed, as against untaxed, imports retreats to 
 higher ground, or rather launches his charge from 
 it. We have already quoted one great Irishman, 
 Dr. Ingram; we now fall back on another, Professor 
 Bastable, both of Trinity College, Dublin : — 
 
 "To understand the position taken up by the 
 modern opponents of Free Trade (writes Professor 
 Bastable in his Commerce of Nations), it is, above 
 all, essential to recognize that the key-note of their 
 system is nationality. . . . Theclaimsof the nation 
 as a whole are accentuated, and regarded as far 
 more important than those of the individual, or the 
 world at large." 
 
 The nation has a continuity of existence to which 
 
 141
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 none of its children can pretend. It has been from 
 of old ; it will still be long after the dust of this 
 generation has been blown about the barren plains, 
 or sealed within the iron hills. Given such an 
 organism, so extended in space and time, it is 
 reasonable to sacrifice the welfare of a part of it to 
 that of the whole, and to sacrifice its own present to 
 its future. The nation is held to be entitled to require 
 from each of its citizens, even in time of peace, tax- 
 contributions which will be spent on great public 
 objects in which assuredly he has no bread-and-butter 
 interest ; in time of war, it will exact from him his 
 property, his service in arms, and finally his blood. 
 The nation does not live by bread alone, but, if its 
 bread fails, the special type of culture of ^^■hich it is 
 the representative must perish. Is it not clear, then, 
 that if the industrial and cultural strength of a people 
 is compromised by the trend of its trade, the govern- 
 ment of that people has the right to interfere, to 
 impose minor economic sacrifices on this or that class, 
 for the behoof of the community, and even to lay 
 burdens on the ^^hole community for the benefit of 
 its future citizens in the same spirit in which a father 
 will work hard, and live sparely, in order to secure 
 for his children a place in the sun? 
 
 Such circumstances may be held to exist in three 
 typical situations: — 
 
 (i) If the effect of foreign importation is to 
 confine, or depress, to low-grade industries a 
 country capable of high-grade industries. 
 
 (2) If a country is known to possess great 
 industrial possibilities which have, nevertheless, 
 been over-laid and annulled by the disastrous 
 accidents of history, and by the inertia which has 
 thus been engendered. 
 
 (3) If the development of a country has been 
 one-sided — a predominance, let us say, of manu- 
 
 142
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 facture over agriculture — so as to leave it dependent 
 on the ends of the earth for its food-supply, and so 
 to increase enormously the perils of war. 
 
 In such instances it may be argued that the levy 
 imposed on the consumer by a customs tariff is 
 analogous to public expenditure on education, or on 
 defence. I am not — let me observe — making out a 
 case for Protection, but merely indicating a plane 
 upon which there may be made out a case which, 
 although it may be fallacious, is certainly very far 
 from being a mere imposture. You will notice that 
 the central reality from which all these arguments, 
 economic and non-economic, radiate, the dogma 
 which lends them their whole value and vitality, is 
 that of sacrifice, temporary or permanent, in the 
 name of Nationalism. 
 
 It would be misleading not to add that, on the 
 same plane and in terms of the same creed, a policy 
 of Free Trade, not merely for the England, but for 
 the Ireland of 1913, may be vindicated. Here, again, 
 the national interest, and not the interest of this or 
 that individual, is paramount. The reply runs: — 
 
 (i) Protective duties, being a mode of indirect 
 taxation, oppress the poor, to the advantage of 
 the rich, and so poison the wells of national 
 renewal. 
 
 (2) They do not evoke efficiency, but merely 
 shelter and stereotype inefficiency. 
 
 (3) They lead to profound corruption of the 
 national political life. 
 
 (4) Ifwe are to subsidize experimental industries, 
 let it be done openly through the medium of 
 bounties or grants definitely assigned to the pro- 
 moters of such enterprises to enable them to train 
 labour. 
 
 143
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 I am myself a Free Trader, varying from the 
 orthodox, United Kingdom type, however, in laying 
 strong emphasis on this last rubric. That this is 
 my view is not a matter of much importance. But 
 it is a matter of considerable importance that it 
 was the view of John Stuart Mill. It may, or may 
 not, be known to those who are so fond of his 
 "infant industries" exception, but it is a fact that 
 he withdrew from the position taken up in that 
 passage. Actual observation of the pernicious effects 
 on public life of tariff experiments in the Australian 
 colonies, and in America, led to that withdrawal : — 
 
 " I am now (he writes, in 1868) much shaken in 
 the opinion, which has so often been quoted for 
 purposes which it did not warrant ; and I am 
 disposed to think that when it is advisable, as it 
 may sometimes be, to subsidize a new industry in 
 its commencement, this had better be done by a 
 direct annual grant, which is far less likely to be 
 continued after the conditions which alone justified 
 it have ceased to exist." 
 
 So much for external trade policy. Let us now 
 turn to certain matters of internal development, 
 bearing in mind always that we are not attempting 
 to examine them fully on their merits, but only to 
 construe them in terms of Economic Nationalism. 
 The struggle in Ireland between pasture and tillage 
 and the future of our railway system will serve as 
 examples. 
 
 Nothing has so much compromised economic 
 science in this country as the fact that "the 
 Economists" were supposed to have approved of 
 all the clearances and consolidations which came 
 from 1820 on, and to have greeted the cattle-jobbing 
 grazier with a paean of applause as the first true 
 specimen of the homo cecoiiomicns vouchsafed to 
 
 144
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 Ireland. In Sir Samuel Ferguson's remarkable 
 poem, " Inheritor and Economist," the reader will 
 find them denounced with extraordinary vehemence 
 on these and other scores. And the pity is that 
 although very ill-founded as affecting a great Liberal 
 like Mill, they were very well-founded as affecting 
 the journalistic popularizers. When The Times 
 wrote that in Ireland " man had for long been a 
 nuisance, and population a drug on the market," 
 that diagnosis was eminently orthodox. Ireland, 
 to the popularizers, was an entirely simple case of 
 over-population. Since any one part of the earth 
 was, to their cosmopolitanism, very much the same 
 as any other — England and her chosen people always, 
 of course, implicitly excepted — and since it was the 
 nature of labour and of capital to flow to the point 
 of maximum productiveness, the emigration of men 
 and money was a normal, and even a beneficent, 
 phenomenon. Indeed, M'Culloch went very near 
 saying that the drain of absentee rents was a positive 
 advantage. Moreover, with that extravagant optim- 
 ism for which Wagner rebukes them, he and his 
 friends never wavered in their faith that the line 
 of maximum personal acquisitiveness is also the line 
 of maximum public benefit. And so, beyond doubt, 
 the gambler in cattle entered the rural economy 
 of Ireland, panoplied in the " Laws of Political 
 Economy." Indeed, so long as we keep to the 
 individual as against the national, to the atomistic 
 as against the organic conception of economic life, 
 the ranches are unassailable. It would be difficult 
 to cite many instances in which the quotient 
 
 net personal profit • ^ , i i 
 
 personal effort ^^ "^^ ^^ large, or very nearly as large, 
 for the grass-farmer as it would be for the holder 
 of an equal extent of land devoted to mixed 
 farming. It is to be remembered that, in the 
 former case, effort is reduced to a minimum,
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 and leisure raised to a maximum. But the moment 
 we apply the touchstone of national interest the whole 
 aspect of the problem alters. Mixed farming will 
 give an indefinitely larger gross output, and support 
 a correspondingly larger number of people. Not only 
 will it enrich the nation in point of numbers, but it 
 will, by the greater variety and difficulty of its 
 technique, improve them in intellectual and moral 
 quality. 
 
 Appeal to the gospel of Economic Nationalism, 
 and the controversy is closed: reject that gospel, fall 
 back on what are, rather ridiculously, styled "purely 
 business considerations," and there is no reason why 
 your latifundia should not increase instead of 
 disappearing. 
 
 The railway system you can similarly regard, 
 either as a profit-earning enterprise for certain 
 individuals, or as a fundamental instrument of 
 national development. If you take the former view, 
 the line of exploitation of these railways ought to be 
 simply that of maximum dividends. You may argue, 
 if you like, that this will also be the line of maximum 
 public advantage, but, unless you have a singular 
 aptitude for rose-coloured visions, you will find it 
 hard to convince even yourself of the truth of this 
 proposition. Take the other point of view, and it 
 becomes your duty so to use the railways as to 
 maximise national production. You are entitled to 
 act on long-run instead of short-run calculations; 
 to lose money, for the time being, instead of 
 making money; to undertake, for the sake of the 
 future, large expenditures by way of subsidy and 
 re-organization which, under private enterprise, 
 would be either impossible or else a fraud on your 
 shareholders. 
 
 These illustrations might be almost indefinitely 
 multiplied. But this paper has already run to 
 inordinate length, and I must close it, leaving 
 
 146
 
 THE ECONOMICS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 unanswered my own question as to the economic 
 ideal which Ireland ought to set before herself. 
 That must stand over for some other occasion. Had 
 there been time to consider it, much of our discussion 
 must have turned on the country town. That, and 
 not the great city, is the germinal cell of industrial 
 expansion in Ireland. In function as in name it is 
 capable of effecting a synthesis of our two great 
 interests, falsely supposed to be irreconcilable 
 enemies. The country town must manufacture or 
 perish. As capital accumulates in the hands of the 
 new farmers, our condition of progress will be 
 realized. As soon as they come to understand that 
 the safest investment for it is not some oil or rubber 
 mirage in the waste of the earth but an enterprise, 
 associated with farming, conducted under their own 
 eyes and their own control, the economy of Ireland 
 will be transformed. 
 
 That is a mere suggestion. For the moment, I 
 must be content with having unfolded to you the 
 outline of an argument which re-establishes Nation- 
 alism, and national self-direction, as ranking among 
 the human First Principles of material prosperity. 
 If it helps 3'ou to join up the dreams — as 3'et 
 unformulated — of the Irish nation \\ith the intel- 
 lectual tradition of Europe, then I shall not have 
 wasted either your evening or my own. 
 
 147
 
 LABOUR : WAR OR PEACE 
 
 Our contemporary world is modestly conscious of 
 the possession of many qualities the excellence or 
 the reality of which it would be idle to deny; we 
 have curiosity, spaciousness of vision, and a very 
 notable turn for the exposition of depressing truths. 
 But we have our defects, and one of them stands 
 nakedly out like a headland ; we may not be more 
 frightened than our forerunners, but we are frightened 
 on a larger scale. We have the genius of panic. 
 Every difficulty, caught up into the enlarging 
 atmosphere of our newspapers, becomes forthwith a 
 crisis, every trouble a tragedy, every political blunder 
 a planned betrayal of the nation and posterity. There 
 is not a school-child in the land but has already 
 survived at least three or four final cataclysms, and 
 ends-of-all-things. We must not seem to suggest 
 that this faculty of exaggeration is characteristically 
 modern, it is as old as the hills and human nature. 
 The world over, and at all periods, the worst evil to 
 any man is that which at the moment has him in its 
 claws. Last year's influenza is tolerable in com- 
 parison with this year's cold ; a boot, which pinches 
 me here and now, nips out of my consciousness all 
 the fantastic tortures of China. And if there is any 
 sphere in which even a slight jolt to the established 
 order may naturally and almost reasonably set us 
 alarming one another it is certainly that of industry. 
 The economic process is one from which none of us 
 can stand apart, unless we chance to be at one and 
 the same time rich and mad. For the ninety per 
 cent, of us for whom ninety per cent, of the energy 
 of daily life is committed to the conquest of bread 
 
 148
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 the movements of economic life have all the fascina- 
 tion of a great machine, imperfectly understood, 
 indispensable, and full of menace. Every new 
 development seems to make it more subtle and, by 
 consequence, more vulnerable. The old stable 
 societies, we say to ourselves, were a Temple of 
 Gaza, they might crash down in ruins, but at least 
 one saw the vast arms of Samson knotted about 
 the pillars before the crash. In our new society with 
 its amazing network of international trade, finance, 
 science, and anarchism, there need be no such great 
 and visible intervention. Let somebody only push 
 a lever, or even press an electric button, out of 
 season, or, still worse, decline to push or press them 
 and the whole fabric falls to pieces. And here, we 
 go on, 3-0U have the only people who know how to 
 work the most essential parts of the complication 
 perpetually grumbling, with perpetual threats. Is 
 it not the end of all things, or something very like 
 it ? With what assurance can we keep on believing 
 that the world will last our time ? In the improbable 
 contingency of any world continuing to exist it will 
 certainly not be that which has so far nourished us, 
 and our achievements. It will be, on the contrary, 
 a sort of blood-stained Bedlam, the plans of which 
 have already been prepared by a number of unpro- 
 nounceable foreign, and unspeakable home agitators, 
 hideously devoted to the hideous cult of Syndicalism. 
 This picture exaggerates no doubt, but not greatly, 
 the exaggerations of our modern fear. But it is a 
 recognizable transcript of the talk of the railway 
 train, the club smoke-room, and the golf-links, that 
 is to say of the three foci of middle-class civilization. 
 Such an attitude of mind is, in many respects, a 
 public gain of extreme importance. It has at least 
 broken up the monstrous apathy of the comfortable, 
 and delivered them from the sin of being at ease in 
 Zion. It may save them from that, as imaginative 
 
 149
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 persons are sometimes saved from drink by the sight 
 of twisted, sinister, and non-existent snakes. But 
 such terror is not a good foundation for a sound 
 economic system, nor, on reflection, will it bear the 
 scrutiny of recent experience. Transportation and 
 fuel are fundamental necessities, but neither the 
 railwaymen's strike, nor the miners' strike, nor, for 
 that matter, any other of the late industrial dis- 
 turbances affords any justification for the despair 
 which it is now fashionable to affect. The world 
 has known, and lived through, much dirtier weather. 
 No man of prudent temper will seek to underrate 
 the gravity of these conflicts. But there were brave 
 men before Achilles, and there were strikes before 
 those strikes. They are to be regarded as no more 
 than incidents in the epic of labour, and in the large 
 epic of humanity ; they spring from old and familiar 
 causes ; and in the real and vital forces, which 
 function behind them, there is nothing that threatens 
 a new dispensation. There is a test at hand which 
 hardly anybody ever dreams of applying. The 
 reader is invited to forget, for the moment, what 
 he reads about the dismal procession of life, and to 
 recall what he sees, and his own role as a marcher 
 in it. If he encounters, day by day, red ruin and 
 the breaking up of laws, pale riders on white horses, 
 and apocalyptic dawns, no more is to be said. 
 He belongs to the "intellectual minority," the 
 "remnant," and those of us who do not may wish 
 him joy of his ticket of admission. With us modern 
 life has not yet dealt so harshly. We have not been 
 menaced in our morning bath by any Charlotte 
 Corday of domestic Syndicalism, or bidden by the 
 porter at our suburban station to off coat and shovel 
 coal, or by the newsboy to plunge into the brattle of 
 the composing-room. We find that meat, milk, 
 clothes, transportation, and even an accurate report 
 of Professor Schafer, are still to be had in exchange 
 
 150
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 for the very different services which, as the outcome 
 of a series of accidents, we happen to be at present 
 rendering to society. Looking out we discover the 
 way of the world to be, in view of all the prophecies, 
 scandalously familiar. People in general are observed 
 to be still enduring the ancient discipline, and 
 exploiting the ancient joys of life. Dedicated to 
 plough, loom, and engine they still seem to keep on 
 grumbling and toiling ; making little of much and 
 much of little ; homely, loyal, industrious, reckless, 
 impatient ; interested in religion, happiness, the 
 prospects of the football season and the Insurance 
 Act. Some of them even reach as high as the 
 crucial Act of Hope ; they marry and desire children. 
 So much is necessary by way of striking the key 
 in which any useful discussion of our present indus- 
 trial inconveniences must proceed. Mr. Wells 
 lately announced that until we became conscious 
 that everything touching labour is new — a new 
 atmosphere, a new mood, a new outlook — we must 
 abide blind and impotent. The truth is that, viewed 
 in another aspect, everything is as old as the edict 
 that joined bread with the sweat of a man's brow, 
 and that, although the colour of the counters may 
 change, the game in its essentials does not change. 
 The answer, the simple and the sole adequate answer, 
 to Socialism, to Syndicalism, to every perversion is 
 human nature. But the key thus set, every honest 
 inquirer will admit that we are in presence of a 
 serious situation, not at all novel, and not so 
 menacing as the wolf-shouters are pleased to think, 
 but, for all that, exacting and doubtful. People ask 
 indignantly: Why is Labour discontented? But 
 how could it be anything else? The condition of the 
 workers of these islands is not such as either to 
 command or deserve permanence. Thirty per cent, 
 of them, more than twelve million human beings, 
 count themselves fortunate if they are able to hold 
 
 151
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 their places in the dim borderland where destitution 
 merges into mere poverty. They are constantly 
 slipping into the blacker depths, sometimes to recover 
 their hold, sometimes to perish. As we go higher in 
 the hierarchy of skill and opportunity, things, no 
 doubt, improve, but we have to go unexpectedly and 
 painfully high before we reach the plane of the 
 genuine living wage. And once on that plane, or 
 nearing it, a new force comes into play. We are 
 caught in the sweep of the law of economic progress, 
 the simplest statement of which is that, having put 
 an inch between himself and destitution, a man will 
 seek to put an ell. The sublimical worker, if one 
 may so call him, is numbed by the weight on him, 
 without hope and in the end almost without feeling. 
 Ease the pressure, and the forces of growth are 
 released in his soul. He advances in education that 
 is to say, he advances at once in sensitiveness, in 
 economic appetite, and in power of organization. 
 Something will have much, and much will have 
 more. In his vision the future, whether construed 
 in personal or in social terms, must be progressively 
 better than the past. Too often he produces his line 
 of desire to infinity, quits altogether the sober and 
 fettered earth, and loses himself in the millennial 
 mirage of Socialism. Now it is submitted that you 
 have here, in all essential features, the story of what 
 has been called the epic of labour. The strike, now 
 and then intensifies some episode of it into drama, 
 but the pull of the deep under-currents is always at 
 work. Those of us who believe individualism to be 
 the ultimate and permanent form of any free society, 
 are a shade too fond of lecturing labour. There is no 
 use in lecturing labour, we had better understand it. 
 Let us, therefore, say frankly that tiie condition of 
 our poorest is a poignant and horrible fact. It does 
 not justify the enfeebling sentimentality or the 
 blood-hunger of what a speaker at the Trade Union 
 
 152
 
 LABOUR : WAR OR PEACE ? 
 
 Congress described the other day as the "flapdoodle 
 revolutionaries." But it is an urgent and ever-present 
 warning to us that, while we defend and conserve 
 our present industrial fabric on its fundamental lines, 
 we must drastically re-model many of its subsidiary 
 features. Moreover, we had better recognize that if 
 the desire of labour to make its future better than its 
 past is criminal, then we are all tarred with the same 
 guilty brush. The continuity of family life, and wise 
 instinct which sets men planting acorns so that their 
 children may enjoy the matured oak, are the best 
 economic bulwarks of the institution of private 
 property. If anybody is to have the inspiration of 
 this hope then everybody must have it. With greater 
 justice it might be complained that the rising 
 standard of life among the workers tends in some 
 respects, in the direction of mere waste and luxury. 
 But who can appear in court sufficiently clean- 
 handed to lodge that complaint? If the "lower 
 classes" are corrupted it is the "middle" and "upper" 
 classes that have been their educators in corruption; 
 it does not lie with these latter to preach any very 
 honest asceticism. The truth is that if you look at 
 humanitv in the mass vou will find it not much worse 
 and not much better than its familiar, historical 
 record. Desire still keeps it on the march, and 
 desire in all sorts and conditions of men occasionally 
 puffs itself out into an intolerable egotism and lust 
 for luxury. But if you examine the form which it 
 takes among the mass of industrial labourers in our 
 day, you will find it to be modest in the extreme. 
 A little more leisure, a little more comfort, a little 
 more security of life, some slight treasure of hope to 
 bequeath to one's children. 
 
 So much for what may be taken to be the all but 
 universal psychology of labour unrest. Is there any 
 ground for believing that recent manifestations have 
 transformed an old problem, integrally and beyond 
 
 153
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 recognition? To the present writer it seems that 
 there is none, or, at most, very little, and that very 
 vague. He submits the following analysis of the 
 situation. 
 
 The late strikes were not serious beyond pre- 
 cedent. 
 
 It is not necessary to involve any panic-stricken 
 hypothesis of a new Anarchism in order to explain 
 them ; they can be traced, in great part, to certain 
 objective and, so to say, mechanical conditions. 
 
 The " New Anarchism " is neither so new in idea, 
 nor so minatory in fact, as is supposed. Nevertheless, 
 society is in an unstable equilibrium, and the time is 
 ripe for a reconsideration of the whole wage-system, 
 and of every device by which its harshness and 
 variability may be mitigated. 
 
 The first of these statements speaks but too plainly 
 for itself. It is not necessary to go back to the 
 Peasants' Revolt, or the tire de Lyon, or to the blind 
 Samson smashing machines and getting himself 
 ridden down by cavalry at Peterloo, of the hangings 
 and transportations of the strikers of the eighteen- 
 forties, or to the Irish Land War, in order to find 
 parallels. The single point of interest in such an 
 historical retrospect is that any of these disturbances 
 of the established order is now seen to have been 
 more humane and tolerable than the order which it 
 disturbed. But in modern industry, and in our own 
 time, the strike has been rather a normal feature 
 than a deplorable extravaganza. For the decade 
 1901-10 the figures for Great Britain and Ireland 
 show an annual average of 464 trade disputes, 
 affecting 221,059 workers, and involving the loss 
 yearly of 4,260,859 days. If we extend the period, 
 and bring in France (which, it is well to remember, 
 was in this regard not the corrupter but the pupil 
 of England), we arrive at the following table : 
 
 154
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 Working Days Lost Through Trade Disputes 
 
 United Kingdom France 
 
 1891— 1S95 14,032,298 1,497,768 
 
 1896 — 1900 7,010,096 1,990,546 
 
 I9OI— 1905 2,791,257 3,228,490 
 
 1906 — 1908 5,947,000 4,907,000 
 
 For 1911 the United Kingdom statistics record 
 864 trade disputes, affecting 931,050 workers, and 
 involving the loss of 10,247,100 working days. This 
 is a lamentable increase, but if we recover per- 
 spective by putting it into comparison with other 
 great strike years, it does not seem so overwhelming : 
 
 Working Days Lost Through Trade Disputes 
 IN the United Kingdom 
 
 1893 31,205,062 
 
 1897 11,463,523 
 
 1898 14,171,478 
 
 1908 10,834,188 
 
 191 1 10,247,100 
 
 The figures for the first six months of 1912 are, 
 indeed, dismaying. In that period no fewer than 
 37,500,000 working days were lost through trade 
 disputes, notably that of March. But large as that 
 number is it does not constitute a phenomenon of a 
 new order. Those cited serve to show that there 
 are but too many melancholy precedents for our 
 unrest. Nor do available records bear out what we 
 may call the bound-to-be-beaten argument so often 
 addressed to strikers. The following table sum- 
 marizes, by percentages, for the period igoo-1909. 
 the results of the strikes which fook place in five 
 great industrial countries in Europe : 
 
 155
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 1900-1909 
 
 ^ji Victory complete 
 
 Defeat of 
 
 S,„k„ Country ^Se^i °' Strikers 
 
 100 Belgium 34'89 65' 11 
 
 100 Germany 54'2i 45'79 
 
 100 United Kingdom 56*44 43"56 
 
 100 France 64" 19 35'8i 
 
 100 Italy 66"6o 33"40 
 
 It is to be borne in mind that these percentages 
 are calculated in terms of the number of strikes, and 
 do not give an accurate picture of the magnitude of 
 the interests affected. But we have the definite 
 testimony of the railway leaders that their strike 
 "paid," as they say, " a substantial dividend," and 
 the same holds, beyond doubt, of the miners. The 
 strike, therefore, would appear to be by no means 
 the abnormal and by no means the discredited 
 manoeuvre which it is, in some quarters, supposed 
 to be. 
 
 But it is said that the late employment of it on a 
 large scale is a phenomenon of a new order, because 
 it was deliberately motived by the new policy of 
 Syndicalism. The argument apparently is that if 
 Af. Georges Sorel had never written his Reflections 
 on Violence, the miners would never have struck for 
 a minimum wage, and Mr. Ben Tillett would never 
 have had occasion to pray for Lord Devonport. So 
 stated, the attempt to ascribe — whether by way of 
 boastfulness or of terror — all contemporary labour 
 troubles to the malign impulse of Syndicalism wears 
 its unreality on its face. There is no need to soar 
 to an)' such abstract and refined theory. A single, 
 hard concrete fact is sufficient to explain the restive- 
 ness of labour, the divergence, namely, between 
 the standard of money wages and the cost of living. 
 To raise the former a little above the latter is, when 
 
 156
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 all is said and done, the main effort of organized 
 labour, and we are accustomed to acclaim, if not 
 the whole of the nineteenth century, at all events 
 the Victorian Age as having been, in that regard, a 
 period of growing success. The year 1850 or there- 
 abouts had come to be regarded as the turning of 
 the tide. Without striking into a maze of statistics 
 we may summarize the general significance for labour 
 of the period in two passages from two great econo- 
 mists, Thorold Rogers writing in England and 
 Professor Gide in France. Having characterized 
 the earlier centuries of which we possess records, 
 Rogers goes on : 
 
 " . . . .in the first half of the eighteenth 
 century, though still far below the level of the 
 fifteenth, it (the condition of the English labourer) 
 achieved comparative plenty. Then it began to 
 sink again, and the workman experienced the 
 direst misery during the great continental war. 
 Latterly, almost within our own memory and 
 knowledge, it has experienced a slow and partial 
 improvement, the causes of which are to be found 
 in the liberation of industry from protective laws, 
 in the adoption of certain principles which 
 restrained employment in some directions, and 
 most of all in the concession to labourers of the 
 right so long denied of forming labour partner- 
 ships." 
 
 Rogers had in mind mainly the first half of the 
 nineteenth century. Gide, with the complete picture 
 of it before him, echoes the same highly ambiguous 
 optimism. Judging by present experience, he 
 observes, the condition of the workers between 1800 
 and 1830 was " probably worse than at any previous 
 period in their history, very much worse than that 
 of preceding centuries." It was a "lugubrious age." 
 
 157
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 When the tide turned the inflow was tardy and 
 penurious. 
 
 " If wages rose enormously during the last three- 
 quarters of the nineteenth century we must, 
 nevertheless, be on our guard against the illusion 
 that they have even now reached a high level. 
 What the movement means is that they started 
 from a very low level. He may well be amazed 
 at the fact that it took a hundred long years of 
 conflict and advance to raise the wage of labour 
 to the miserable figure at which, for the greater of 
 the working class, it now stands." ^ 
 
 Thus testified Gide in igoo. In the intervening 
 decade things have not bettered, but worsened. The 
 curve of prices has outdistanced the curve of wages. 
 The majority of economists appear to be agreed that 
 this rise in prices, and especially in export prices, 
 is due to the enormous increase in the output of gold. 
 A similar upward jump between 1854 and 1863 is so 
 to be explained. This upclimb of prices is held to 
 have stimulated production, and even to have 
 begotten a boom. But it has reacted sorely on labour. 
 Professor Ashley estimates that a worker could buy 
 as much for 20s. in 1896 as he could buy for about 
 24s. in igio. Between these dates the price of food 
 had risen, according to his estimate, by at least 19 
 per cent., according to that of Professor Gide by 25 
 per cent. Wages are calculated to have increased in 
 the same period by not more than 11 per cent. 
 These figures are, of course, largely conjectural, no 
 complete inquiry having yet been made, but in so far 
 as they are our dail}' experience must convince us 
 that they err on the side of optimism. Such cir- 
 cumstances must inevitably produce unrest. The 
 enormous economic pressure indicated has come 
 
 '^Institutions de Progrei Social. New Edition. 1912. 
 
 158
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 most heavily, not on the budget which at all times 
 has ample reserves, but on the line-ball budget of 
 the wage-earner. The weakest feels it worst. The 
 movement in prices has not merely checked the 
 rising curve of working-class prosperity, but seems to 
 have actually depressed it below its former level. In 
 the opinion of Professor Ashley it has deprived labour 
 " of all, and perhaps more than all," that it had 
 gained in the way of higher wages in the last decade 
 and a half. 
 
 This harsh and embittering experience would offer 
 a sufficient explanation of more than the present 
 discontent. That the discontent in question springs 
 from defeat in the old struggle for food, shelter and 
 clothes, and not from any new diabolism, is strikingly 
 confirmed by Mr. Vernon Hartshorn, the ablest of 
 the "revolutionaries." "This is not a question," 
 he writes, "of Socialism or Syndicalism. . . . 
 The worker is not out for a theory. He is out for 
 something more tangible — bread." 
 
 But it is entirely natural that in such an atmos- 
 phere novel and violent doctrines should find audience 
 if not acceptance. The ear of hunger is ready to 
 listen to any new analysis of society, any new 
 programme or campaign that announces itself in 
 fervent and sweeping formulas. In this case it is 
 invited to a somew hat ragged version of the words 
 of M. Sorel, and the deeds of M. Pataud. The 
 poorness of the lodgment found by that version is 
 obvious. At the recent Trade Union Congress there 
 was to have been a full-dress debate on Syndicalism. 
 All the heavy artillery was to have taken the field. 
 But as it turned out there were but two delegates, 
 two young Welsh miners, who attempted to defend 
 the new creed, and neither of them w^as at any 
 particular pains to define it. The Congress carried 
 by a majority so large as to constitute an all but 
 unanimous decision, an anti-Syndicalist resolution. 
 
 159
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 What the precise tenets of Syndicalism are it is far 
 from easy to say. This is claimed as a virtue, for it 
 is argued that vagueness and vitality go together. 
 "Why should you be expected," asks Mr. J. H. 
 Harley — in what we may call a tongue-in-the-cheek 
 exposition of Sorel — " to know the site of every 
 temple erected on the site of your expected New 
 Jerusalem. . . . Intellect is discursive and limitative; 
 it is intuition that gives us the rounded or perfect 
 whole." M. Bergson has said so, and the mantle of 
 his philosophy is deemed sufficient to cover a whole 
 mob of doctrines that would otherwise incur 
 suspicion. If vagueness is characteristic of the vital 
 impulse so also is violence, and the blinder it is the 
 better. This economic Agnosticism has its notable 
 advantages, but it may help also to explain the 
 Syndicalist revolt against Parliamentary government. 
 Parliamentarianism means elections, and elections 
 mean definite programmes. The election address of 
 a devotee of these doctrines would afford agreeable 
 reading : 
 
 "You ask me, comrade, whether I am in favour 
 of this, or in favour of that. In putting such a 
 question you are seeking to envelop my spontaneity 
 in the limitative, discursive, and generally low- 
 caste categories of intellect. Rise to the plane of 
 intuition on which alone a philosopher can consent 
 to dwell. My programme is this. I will Intuit. 
 I will creatively evolve. I will continually and 
 progressively sprout into fresh spontaneities. . . ." 
 
 It is to be feared that at this point some member 
 of the audience might be moved to intone the 
 popular American song: " I don't know where I'm 
 going, but I'm on my way." Nobody demands a 
 minute and accurately starred Baedeker of these 
 Utopians. The lendemain de la Revolution may well 
 
 1 60
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 be rather clouded and dim of prospect. But we are 
 certainly entitled to demand something a little 
 more or less definite. Fortunately many of the 
 Syndicalists have so far forgotten themselves as to say 
 what they mean. They offer apparently two contri- 
 butions, one of which belongs to the practical and the 
 other to the theoretical order. They have a recipe by 
 which labour is to become master of the world, and a 
 plan on which the world is to be reorganized after that 
 mastery has been achieved. Let us take this latter 
 first. It is proposed to replace the wage-system, by 
 hypothesis overthrown, by a network of productive 
 groups : in some schemes each of these groups is to 
 own the instruments of production in its particular 
 industry, in others the group is merely to control 
 the techinque of production. In this second plan all 
 industrial ownership is concentrated in the State, 
 which also directs the whole process of distribution. 
 It is difficult to discern any impressive novelty in 
 this proposal. One form of it is merely a specializa- 
 tion and elaboration of socialism, and is steeped in 
 all the injustices and impossibilities of that system. 
 The other is a mere reproduction of the dreams of 
 speculative Anarchists like Kropotkin — the free 
 association of self-organized economic groups dis- 
 placing that compulsory association which we call 
 the State — and although conserving some sort of 
 freedom it throws to the winds an element of 
 co-equal importance, order. Both display, on exami- 
 nation, the lineaments of old friends, or rather, old 
 enemies. They are the eternally repelled, eternally 
 reappearing standards of decivilization. M. Sorel 
 and his fellow-theorists have indeed issued mani- 
 festoes of amazing intellectual power and fervour, 
 veritable lyrics and pseans, so did Proudhon, so did 
 Bakunin, so did Stimer, so did Nietzsche, so, in his 
 own way, did Marx. But the ancient ways of human 
 nature, and the deep laws of human association, 
 
 i6i M
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 rejected these destroying visions, and they will reject 
 that of Syndicalism. 
 
 In innumerable passages the new literature echoes, 
 as we have said, the long hatred of Anarchist for 
 Socialist, a hatred which naturally extends itself to 
 politics in general. But the tone has changed. The 
 Syndicalist does not protest so much against what 
 Whitman calls " the insolence of elected persons," 
 as against their economic incompetence. M. Sorel 
 represents the contempt of the craftsman for the 
 mere bureaucrat. Syndicalism stands, even etymo- 
 logically, for the men trained to some special process, 
 the man who can do some particular thing, and who 
 is lull of pride in his skill and his work. M. Sorel, 
 it appears, has condemned sabotage in express and 
 passionate terms ; to him it is a sort of unpardon- 
 able treachery committed by a man against what 
 is best in his own self, as if Rodin were, in a temper, 
 to take a hammer and smash his Balzac. With 
 this pride of the craftsman in his soul Sorel looks 
 with forecasting eye at the spectacle of a committee 
 of Parliamentary orators set to run a steel works, 
 or an engine-shop, or a woollen factory. He 
 shudders, and the comparative popularity of his 
 shudder is of good omen for the future of labour. 
 In general we may say that, while the Syndicalist 
 Utopia is no more possible or desirable than its fore- 
 runners, the Syndicalist critique has many valuable 
 elements. At least it helps to lead back the mind 
 of labour from "flapdoodle" revolution to realism, 
 service, and a kind of tonic pride. 
 
 The new strategy of Syndicalism is, of course, 
 the general strike. Is it so new ? As a speculation 
 it lies in a hundred places all along the literature 
 of social discontent. Sir Arthur Clay has very 
 aptly recalled a crystalizing phrase of Mirabeau's : 
 " Le peuple, dont les seule immobility serait formid- 
 able." Such immobility is imagined in a very 
 
 162
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 concrete form in a very well-known sonnet of Sully 
 Prudhomme which seems, curiously enough, to have 
 been overlooked : 
 
 Le laboureur m'a dit en songe : " Fais ton pain, 
 
 Je ne te nourris plus, gratte la terre et seme, ' ' 
 
 Le tisserand m'a dit : " Fais tes habits toi-meme," 
 
 Et le majon m'a dit : " Prends la truelle en main," 
 
 Et seul, abandonne de tout le genre humain, 
 
 Dont je trainais partout I'implacable anatheme 
 
 Quand j'implorais du ciel una pitie supreme, 
 
 Je trouvais des yeux, doutant si I'anbe etait rt-elle, 
 
 De hardis compagnons sifflaient sur leur echelle, 
 
 Les metiers bourdonnaient, less champs etaient semes : 
 
 Je connus mon bonheur, et qu'au monde oii nous sommes 
 
 Nul ne peut se vauter de se passer des hommes, 
 
 Et depuis ce jonr-la je les ai tous aimes. 
 
 Sully Prudhomme had his dream, and turned it 
 to excellent purpose ; in our time the experience has 
 come to some of the more timid in the blacker habili- 
 ments of a nightmare and has had no better result 
 than to set them babbling of volleys at the pit 
 mouths, and cavalry charges in the factory towns. 
 
 The strike is a lamentably old and familiar weapon, 
 and the passage in thought from a single strike to 
 the conception of a general strike is not very difficult. 
 When we come to a passage in reality, however, 
 which is the sole point of interest, the case is very 
 different. It is hard to believe that there can be 
 anywhere a scaremonger so scared as to believe 
 that the dream of Sully Prudhomme has any relation 
 to the actualities of igi2. Such queer people, how- 
 ever, do apparently exist ; if any of them asks why 
 his nightmare is to be so dogmatically dismissed, 
 and why it is impossible, we can only answer that 
 men are not built that way. That a trade union not 
 on strike should sympathise with a trade union on 
 strike is very natural, and in such cases the sympathy 
 in question often takes the shape of a subsidy. But 
 the "sympathetic strike," the mildest prologue 
 
 163
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN ' 
 
 imaginable to a general strike, has failed hope- 
 lessly in the few instances in which it was tried, as, 
 for example, by the Irish railway men. By the 
 terms of the hypothesis the larger conflict must be 
 inaugurated and directed by the trade unions, and 
 these bodies would not inaugurate if they could, nor 
 could they if they would. And for very good reasons. 
 The unions, powerful though they are, represent but 
 a small fraction of the whole mass of labour. They 
 are, as testified by the late Congress, extremely con- 
 servative and pacific : their benefit sections, in 
 contrast to the more revolutionary French organiza- 
 tions, are of enormous importance, and the Insurance 
 Act gives them a greatly increased interest in having 
 the peace kept. But there is a deeper, a more 
 nakedly human bulwark of security. The worker, 
 like everybody else in the community, is, in the first 
 place, a consumer, and a general strike means 
 general starvation. Except in the event of total loss 
 of reason men will not saw through the branch on 
 which not only themselves but their wives and families 
 are supported. So much for Syndicalism in its main 
 features. It might almost be defined as trade union- 
 ism in a temper, and in a violent hurry. As for its 
 alleged revolt against politics and the whole working 
 machinery of the State, aud its exclusive reliance on 
 direct action, this is not to be taken very seriously. 
 No man with a heavy weight to lift, and two arms to 
 lift it with, will ever be persuaded to fit himself for 
 his task by deliberately amputating one of them. 
 Nothing is commoner than to find a Syndicalist who, 
 in his first sentence, has abjured the State, pro- 
 ceeding, in his second, to demand a whole code of 
 new laws. Just as many a German votes Socialist 
 solely in order to goad or jog on the more conservative 
 elements on the path of social policy, so a few young 
 and impatient spirits have seized on Syndicalism as 
 a cudgel with which to accelerate the pace of the 
 
 164
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 Parliamentary Labour Party. Time will probably 
 take its revenge on more than one of them by sending 
 them, in due course, into Parliament. 
 
 But let us guard against lapsing back into com- 
 fortable apathy. It is mere rhetoric to say that 
 our present industrial system has been tried and 
 condemned, but its flaws and distortions have 
 certainly been dramatically unveiled. Impressed by 
 the appalling waste of industrial war business men 
 are everywhere demanding some absolute specific, 
 and guarantee of peace. The demand is Utopian, 
 for no such Economists' Stone is to be found. 
 Compulsory arbitration is plainly impracticable, and 
 if we inquire into the justice of such a scheme we 
 cannot but be surprised to discover that its chief 
 advocates are those who, as against the trade unions, 
 warmly defend the right of the individual labourer 
 to sell or to refuse to sell his work at a given wage. 
 Compulsory arbitration is illusory, for the simple 
 reason that there is not in the nation force sufficient 
 to drive organized labour into mine or factory against 
 its will. Organized labour refuses vehemently, and 
 from its own point of view very properly, to surrender 
 its right to appeal in last resort to the strike, but 
 even without this formal refusal any attempt at 
 coercion must of its nature be futile. The idea 
 of submitting the whole industrial population to 
 military discipline and martial law, and of hanging 
 strikers as you would deserters, is preposterous. But 
 we can hope, and must press strongly for compulsory 
 inquiry into the facts and merits of the dispute. The 
 whole lesson of the history of the great strikes is 
 that it is public opinion which in the end decides 
 the result, and public opinion is entitled in these 
 complex times to the aid of some skilled official 
 tribunal, as distinguished from that of necessarily 
 partisan newspapers, in its attempt to discover the 
 real truth of a trade dispute. But the main hope in 
 
 165
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 this regard lies in a continuance of the conserv'ative 
 attitude of the trade union leaders. They have 
 signified again and again their reluctance to bring 
 the weapon of the strike into play except in 
 extremities. It involves the commission on a large 
 scale of the one unpardonable, economic sin, that of 
 waste. It is a method of barbarism, and, rightly 
 understood, it is not a triumph but a defeat of trade 
 unionism. It is highly creditable to these " paid 
 agitators," as they are sometimes foolishly called, 
 that they should stand so firmly for unpopular sanities 
 as against the blood and thunder insurgents of their 
 own army. In France some of them apparently rise 
 to an even higher plane and question whether " so 
 grave a lesion to the fraternal solidarity of labour " 
 as is involved in the idea of a strike is in strict theory 
 at all justifiable. What comes to be universally 
 perceived is that the commisariat on which labour 
 enters these wars is very meagre, and that the sorest 
 w^ounds inflicted by a striker are on the striker 
 himself, and his class. All this is to say in other 
 words that the prospect of industrial peace is bound 
 up not with the suppression, but with the extension 
 of trade unions. We may echo dogmatically the 
 maxim of Professor Pigou that the employer who 
 fights against recognition is always wrong. Nor is 
 there either wisdom or any germ of success in the 
 attempt to strangle the realities of trade unionism 
 with laws or legal decisions. It is easy to elaboi"ate 
 a fine-drawn argument showing that the unions 
 occupy a position of privilege, and even tyranny. 
 There is even a glimmer of truth in the complaint. 
 Unanimity of action is of the very essence of their 
 policy, and a union has to choose between absolute 
 supremacy in its own particular trade or ineffective- 
 ness. The rationale of what might otherwise be 
 questioned stands clearly expressed in history and 
 experience. It cannot be better put than in the 
 
 i66
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 authoritative words of Professor R. T. Ely, the 
 distinguished American economist : 
 
 " Whatever bad traits naturally characterize 
 labour organizations are aggravated so long as they 
 are obliged to struggle for existence. Whenever 
 the fact of their right to exist is frankly acknow- 
 ledged, and employers, ceasing to persecute them 
 or their officials, recognize the man who treats in 
 a representative capacity for the sale of the 
 commodity labour as courteously as they would 
 an agent for the sale of corn or wheat; finally, 
 whenever courts cease to harrow them with legal 
 chicanery, as courts long did in England, they tend 
 to become strong and conservative." 
 
 When we come to consider suggested modifications 
 of the wage-system our task becomes very formidable. 
 It can be attempted in these pages only in a very 
 bald and summary fashion. All the proposed schemes 
 aim at altering the arrangement which at present 
 embattles labour and capital in two mutually hostile 
 camps. In all of them the shaping idea is to give 
 the industrial worker an interest in the prosperity 
 of the capital employed in his industry, and they 
 arrange themselves in a regular hierarchy in pro- 
 portion to the size of that interest. In the first 
 type we have the wage-system in its pure form ; in 
 the second, profit-sharing, we have that system 
 modified by giving the worker a share in the profits, 
 but not in the capital or the control of the enter- 
 prise ; in the third, co-partnership, the worker acquires 
 in addition to his wages a share, allocated by way 
 of annual bonus, either in the capital alone or, in 
 the more advanced stage, in both capital and control ; 
 and the final term of the process is reached in co- 
 operative production, in which capital and labour 
 coalesce in the same body of workers. The under- 
 
 167
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 lying principle of all these reconstructions is 
 obviously endowed with a peculiar fascination. To 
 get rid of an enemy, or rather of his enmity, by 
 enlisting him for service under your own colours is 
 an attractive prospect. Generous minds have con- 
 stantly revolted against the notion of one man 
 selling himself or hiring himself, body and soni, as 
 they phrase it, to another. Certain Catholic writers, 
 especially in Austria, have attempted by a subtle 
 but unconvincing analysis to represent the relation 
 between employer and employed, not as contractual, 
 but as associational. But are these schemes work- 
 able, and, if they are, do they afford an adequate 
 specific for social unrest? Professor Chapman has, 
 with his customary wisdom, been lately asking us to 
 approach such solutions, and indeed all solutions of 
 a great difficulty, in an absolutely non-doctrinaire 
 spirit. We must look at them in a realistic and 
 concrete way, studying particular facts rather than 
 hastily formulating universal laws. 
 
 With regard to all these modes of association we 
 have considerable experience to guide us. Profit- 
 sharing assumes either of two forms ; in the one the 
 employer formally contracts to divide, annually or 
 bi-annually, a percentage of the profits of the 
 business among the employees ; in the other there is 
 no formal engagement, but, as a matter of practice, 
 wages are supplemented by the voluntary grant of 
 bonuses. This latter method of increasing at once 
 the efficiency and the peacefulness of labour is very 
 general, especially in the world of commerce, but its 
 scope is obviously very limited. It does not create 
 any genuine association ; it comprises the integrity 
 of that collective bargaining which is the essence of 
 trade unionism ; and it has a tendency to sap the 
 independence of the worker. In fact. Professor 
 Gide, commenting on the schedule of bonuses 
 allowed in the factory of Van Marken at Delft — a 
 
 i68
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE ? 
 
 notable case in point — observes that it reduces grown 
 men to the level of " schoolboj's to whom marks are 
 allotted for good conduct." Sometimes this sj-stem 
 is superimposed on the formal engagement. Of the 
 latter, and of the whole device in general, Mr. D. F, 
 Selloss, our greatest authority, takes a view far from 
 flattering. Profit-sharing, he observes, has been in 
 operation in these countries for more than half a 
 century, but it has rarely succeeded, and in a great 
 many cases has had to be abandoned. Its weak- 
 nesses are patent. From the point of view of capital 
 it must always seem absurd that labour should share 
 in the profit but not in the losses of an enterprise. 
 The workers on their part complain that the profits 
 divided among them have first to be earned by extra 
 intensity of labour — they are a sort not of overtime 
 but of over-toil payment ; if an enterprise can afford 
 an increased dividend to labour it had better come 
 in the form of a rise in wages; and, finally, even in 
 favourable circumstances the income accruing under 
 the head of profits is so trivial in comparison with 
 that accruing under the head of wages that no real 
 synthesis of the interests of labour with those of 
 capital is effected. On this last rock we have 
 seen many schemes go to pieces in recent years. 
 An examination of any striking success confirms its 
 importance. In the case of the Suez Canal Company, 
 for instance, we are told that the emploj^ees are so 
 devoted that when the telegraph board announces 
 an increase in the number of vessels that have passed 
 through during the day the whole staff claps hands. 
 Enquiry shows that the profits shared by this 
 company amount to no less than 30 to 40 per cent, 
 of the wages. Co-partnership, now becomes the 
 fetish of some writers, promises better, but unhappily, 
 experience does not uniformly confirm its promises. 
 Did it possess the almost miraculous virtues ascribed 
 to it, it must by this time have covered with its 
 
 169
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 sheltering branches a great part of the industrial 
 world ; for the Fauiilistcre of Godin at Guise dates 
 back almost to the inauguration of British Free 
 Trade. Successes are to be chronicled in that 
 instance, in the woollen factory of Mr. Cooke Taylor 
 at Batley, in the Cash Register establishment at 
 Dayton, Ohio, in the printing firm of Van Marken 
 at Delft, and in the London gas companies. In 
 this last instance it is significant to note that the 
 managements found it necessary to compel the 
 workers to acquire a share in the capital. But, 
 despite the brilliant and widel}' celebrated success 
 of these experiments, the co-partnership idea has 
 not greatly expanded ; it seems neither to gain 
 ground nor to lose it. Co-operative production is 
 in no better case. As a plan of organization for the 
 whole of industry it amounts substantially to the 
 impossible dream of the Syndicalists-Socialists. As 
 a type among the other types of enterprise it lies 
 under two main disadvantages, the difficulty of 
 obtaining capital and that of maintaining discipline. 
 In agriculture it undoubtedly possesses the secret of 
 the future, but there it becomes a phenomenon of a 
 different order. In manufacturing industry it is 
 apparently able to hold its ground only when it rests 
 on a basis of associations of consumers, confines the 
 co-operative formula to the side of capital, and 
 employs labour under the discipline of the present 
 wage-system. Its one notable triumph of late, the 
 Glass- Workers' Association of Albi, turned largely 
 on subsidies and preferences granted, mainly on 
 political grounds, by public bodies and " Co-opera- 
 tives of Consumption." Other experiments have 
 been tried, particularly what Mr. Lever of Port 
 Sunlight calls " prosperity-sharing." This is the 
 programme of the palace factory and the garden 
 city. In every instance in which employers have 
 followed Mr. Lever's plan of humanizing the con- 
 
 170
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 ditions of labour, surrounding their workers with 
 comfort and even a hint of luxury, they have been 
 amply repaid. Advocates hav-e also appeared in the 
 field on behalf of an intermediate plan by which 
 not the individual worker but the trade union would 
 acquire considerable blocks of the capital of their 
 industries. Others propound a scheme under which 
 the workers, or groups of them, would take jobs on 
 piece-rates from the employer, and apportion among 
 themselves both the labour and the remuneration. 
 
 There is none of these proposals that is not worthy 
 of consideration. Any one of them may, in some 
 particular trade in some particular place, be the best 
 path to peace and development. But any such 
 association seems to demand exceptional personality, 
 and an exceptional tradition. Everything indicates 
 that it is likely to appear only as a happy accident, 
 and that the normal type of enterprise will continue 
 to be based on the wage-system. What we have got 
 to realize, to absorb into our social philosophy, to 
 get into our bones, as the phrase is, is that the wage- 
 system as at present in operation is profoundly 
 unsatisfactory. It must be amended if it is to endure. 
 The standard of wages is, in general, too low ; over 
 a great area it is so low as to shut out the recipients 
 of it, not only from the amenities but even fiom the 
 necessaries of life. This undenied fact is the lion in 
 the path. The worker is under a further disad- 
 vantage, which has manifested itself very prominently 
 in his recent history; he makes his contract of service, 
 not in terms of the economic realities which he needs 
 — food, clothes and shelter — but in terms of an 
 economic symbol, money. If the fluctuations of the 
 latter are unfavourable to him he finds the whole 
 sense of his agreement gone, while the latter remains. 
 If he disregards that he is in danger of estranging 
 public opinion by what is represented as a breach of 
 faith. There is vet another characteristic of the 
 
 171
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 personal wage-history of the wage-earner. Unlike 
 the public functionary, or the mental labourer in 
 general, he does not enjoy an income which rises 
 steadily if slowly, offering automatic provision for the 
 responsibilities of marriage, and the growing disabili- 
 ties of age. The wage-earner reaches his maximum 
 early, stays there during maturity, to slip lamentably 
 down as his hair blanches. Nothing could well be 
 more pathetic than the recorded fact that in some 
 English industrial towns the unusual consumption of 
 hair-dye has been traced not to feminine coquetry, 
 but to the desperate attempts of ageing workers to 
 conceal their age. Nor must it be forgotten that 
 the majority of them have had to support their 
 manhood on a wage which made thrift not only 
 impossible hut almost criminal. To what measures 
 are we to look for amelioration ? The first essential 
 is a change of mind; there must be a deliberate 
 adhesion, not a mere grudging and forced assent, to 
 the principle that the level of real wages in all but 
 all industries, but especially in those in which labour 
 is not organized, is too low for social health or 
 stability, and that it must rise. The divergence of 
 nominal from real wages is mainly a matter of 
 terminology. We have simpl}' got to recognize that 
 ever}^ collective agreement fixing the price of labour 
 is controlled by a rebus sic stentibiis proviso. A rise 
 in real wages is the substantial end to be attained, 
 and the attainment of it is the solution of the social 
 problem. The mode of attainment most widely dis- 
 cussed at present is the establishment, by law, of a 
 minimum wage in every industry. This proposal 
 has encountered many criticisms, the most surprising 
 being to the effect that it is revolutionary and 
 Socialistic. The truth is that it proposes merely to 
 extend to unorganized labour, through the machinery 
 of the State, what organized labour has obtained 
 through trade unionism. And so far is this scheme 
 
 172
 
 LABOUR: WAR OR PEACE? 
 
 from being Socialistic, that on the Continent it is 
 specially identified with the Catholic School of 
 Economics, although it must be said that so 
 distinguished a theorist as Rombaud prefers a 
 customary to a statutory wage. Will industry 
 everywhere be able to bear forthwith a minimum 
 high enough to constitute a genuine living wage ? 
 Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has a short way of dealing 
 with this fundamental difficulty. If any industry is 
 not able to do so, let it perish ; it is a mere parasite, 
 a national loss rather than an asset. Such a dictum 
 is hopelessly at war with realities, and with the 
 realistic temper of mind, which alone can achieve 
 lasting results. There are literally thousands of 
 instances in which the customary w-age is, for the 
 time being, less than a genuine living wage; in which, 
 for the time being, no better is possible; and yet the 
 destruction of which would be nothing less than 
 insanity. The universal establishment of a human 
 minimum is, indeed, the ideal towards which w^e 
 must work. But we must come to it by a steady 
 process of amelioration, not by a sudden stroke of 
 Utopianism. Any Minimun Wage Act must be 
 indefinitely flexible: permitted variations from place 
 to place, and perhaps a sliding-scale arrangement 
 must enable it to adjust itself to the varying 
 actualities to which it is applied. So framed, it 
 offers itself, if not as a panacea, at least as a 
 promising experiment. As for the other peculiar 
 difficulties of the wage-earner's life (arising from 
 sickness, unemployment and age), the State has 
 already intervened. And we may take it for granted 
 that, whatever details may be corrected in the light 
 of experience, the area of social legislation is bound 
 not to contract, but to widen. 
 
 Such more or less mechanical readjustments must 
 come, but unless there is in the community a suffi- 
 cient reserve of good-will to keep the wheels oiled, 
 
 173
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 we cannot expect them to function very smoothly. 
 It is no mere rhetoric that appeals for a change of 
 spirit. We have already chronicled it as a good 
 omen that the worker is beginning to recover his 
 pride of craftsmanship, and to discover that to bear 
 burdens, although toilsome, is a toil of honour. He 
 may well desire that a similar pride in tasks accom- 
 plished and duties loyally fulfilled should find 
 expression among the wealthier classes. A world 
 in which everybody proclaims his grievances and 
 forgets his obligations must necessarily rock with 
 unrest. We have all got to accept life as a hard 
 but cleansing discipline, of which effort, after painful 
 effort, is the normal texture, and pleasure but a rare 
 embroidery. In the restoration of such a sane social 
 philosophy it is often announced that the Church 
 has a great part to play. To me it seems that the 
 sanctuary and the laboratory of the Church is the 
 individual conscience. There are good grounds for 
 adding to the curriculum of ecclesiastical colleges a 
 course in economics, and the social sciences in 
 general. A priest with spare time can help greatly 
 towards peace, not by lecturing his people — as a 
 rule with more fervour than insight — but by reason- 
 ing out with them in quiet conference the significance 
 of the economic conditions among which their lot is 
 cast. On that line much, and very much, can be 
 done. But anj' attempt to formulate in the name 
 of the Church a rigorous and exclusive social pro- 
 gramme, and to insist that that is sound Catholic 
 policy, must, of its nature, be futile and even dangerous. 
 It is indeed part of the mission of the Church to 
 safeguard those ethical truths which lie at the basis 
 of all society ; but when it comes to a discussion of 
 the technical processes of society, economic and poli- 
 tical, every man must effect his own sj'nthesis of prin- 
 ciple and technique, and he must be free to follow the 
 light of his own conscience and his owh experience. 
 
 174
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 War has long been accepted as our best aid to the 
 teaching of geography : blood is an expensive marking 
 fluid for maps, but it is vivid and indelible. Through 
 its virtue alone have the Egypts, the Tibets, and the 
 Koreas been opened to general vision. And it would 
 seem as if a similar passage through calamity to 
 knowledge will fall to be recorded in regard to that 
 most secret province of all, the World of the Blind. 
 Mr. Pearson, a great master of journals, is stricken 
 with this ancient affliction. Immediately his vast 
 power is thrown behind the organization which has 
 so long been labouring towards a true understanding 
 of it. The public attention is fixed. We resolve to 
 be no longer blind to blindness, but set about what 
 is at once a study and a campaign. Mr. Pearson has 
 transformed his personal misfortune into a source of 
 light and promise. 
 
 In such circumstances any elucidation of the 
 psychological process that goes on behind closed 
 eyes is valuable, but a report proceeding from the 
 centre of that obscure world possesses a very special 
 value. If the author of that account from within be, 
 as well, a trained observer, a writer already dis- 
 tinguished, and a man of genuine scientific balance, 
 his book ceases to be a document that may or may 
 not be read. It imposes itself. All these conditions 
 are amply fulfilled in Le Monde des Avetigles^ of M. 
 Pierre Villey. Self-analysis by the blind is no new 
 phenomenon; no one is likely to forget, for instance, 
 the almost ecstatic quality of the writings of Helen 
 Keller, or the provocative interest of her revelations. 
 
 ^Flammarion, Paris, 1914.
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 But with M. Villey we enter another order of litera- 
 ture. Trained on Braille, and using it as his material 
 apparatus of communication, he has on the one hand 
 become master of a deep general culture, and on the 
 other he has produced a calm, exact, reasoned, and 
 in all points convincing examination of the mental 
 processes of his fellow-blind. His book is a veritable 
 Baedeker of the veiled country in which they dwell. 
 It is a notable step from myth and legend to reality. 
 For, indeed, there is no strangeness of human 
 experience about which the mythopoeic faculty has 
 more eagerly woven its w^ebs. This exile from the 
 sun is so dramatic, so absolute in its blackness, as to 
 incite any imagination. That incitement is doubled 
 when it is discovered that a calamity which seems 
 the end of everything does not end everything, but 
 that the blind manage to move about, to live, and 
 even to be useful in a world of the seeing. In 
 primitive civilizations this miracle is ascribed to 
 special commerce with the gods. The man from 
 whom the visible has been withdrawn is recognized 
 as the seer of the invisible and the diviner of the 
 future. Such are in the Greek story Tiresias and 
 even Homer himself. In Korea to-day the blind are 
 respected as exorcists, magicians, and healers. In 
 Turkey they are valued as reciters of the Koran on 
 ceremonial occasions, and their prayers are beyond 
 all others acceptable to Allah, In Russia the proverb 
 runs that "God Himself is the teacher of the blind, 
 and His works are made manifest in them." In 
 modern communities the legend assumes a different 
 form. Artistically it is employed as a unique symbol 
 by the pessimists. Synge, for example, finds it a fit 
 vessel in which to dip out that Marah-water which 
 he finds in his "Well of the Saints." In popular 
 science, or rather the unexamined hearsay that passes 
 for science, it appears as an exaggeration of those 
 faculties which are not impaired by the loss of sight. 
 
 176
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 The blind distinguish colours by touch independently 
 of texture. They play cards with great success, 
 especially when they themselves are the dealers, 
 for they feel accurately the whole hands of their 
 opponents. They carve statues, are king's tailors, 
 and duke's coachmen. They know by the trot of a 
 horse that he is blind, and distinguish one pigeon 
 from another by the mere sound of its wings. In 
 music especially they are supreme. Every blind 
 person is a potential, if not an actual, fiddler; a 
 marvellous talent is at all events native in them and 
 universal. M. Villey, who refers us for these 
 traditionary anecdotes to writers so little tainted 
 with "credulity," as Bayle, Diderot, and Garnier, 
 and to a Biography of the Blind by James Wilson, 
 does not attempt to sift them in detail ; he sets the 
 whole mass aside as belonging to the sphere oUegendes 
 abracadabrantes. He proceeds upon the sounder 
 basis of laboratory exploration and scientifically 
 examined records of actual experience. Brushing 
 aside all legends, he is concerned to establish two 
 positions, first, that the blind person is not necessarily 
 in respect of any sense or faculty a genius of any 
 kind, and second, that he is just as little of necessity 
 an idiot of any kind. To M. Villey the most difficult 
 task before his blind is that of merely living, of 
 earning the bread of independence: the more their 
 mentality is misunderstood, whether by way of 
 exaggeration or the reverse, the more difficult does 
 that task become. Almost with passion he repu- 
 diates as a priori absurd the notion that four senses 
 are better than five. Any special refinement, say 
 of touch or hearing, that may manifest itself is due 
 solely to a narrower localization of attention. 
 Sight being the sense of distractions, and essentially 
 vagrant and diffuse, the closing-up of it may pre- 
 dispose to a more concentrated inner life, but in 
 general the only principle involved is that of 
 
 N 177
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 intensive culture of a faculty. And, however 
 exceptionally endowed a blind subject may be, he 
 must always be a sense short. With equal passion, 
 however, M. Villey begs us not to argue from this 
 to a mutilated personality. In the ordinary case 
 the normal mind, and the whole mind, is there behind 
 the diminished apparatus of perception. The world 
 of space can be adequately realized through tactile 
 impressions. If necessarily somewhat limited as 
 regards freedom of movement, the healthy blind can 
 nevertheless be delivered, by appropriate education, 
 from complete helplessness even in that regard. 
 They can be trained up to be economically inde- 
 penndent, and not mere pitiable parasites. No 
 intellectual or moral idea is inaccessible to them. 
 Given the material apparatus of instruction, in the 
 shape mainly of a sufficient equipment of Braille 
 finger-language books, they can build a line of com- 
 munication to any section of general culture. It is 
 to be understood that this claim is made only where 
 blindness is the sole disability. Where graver lesions 
 of the organism, and especially of the brain, are 
 involved, we are commonly in presence of a pheno- 
 menon of mental as well as of physical defectiveness, 
 and due allowance must be made. 
 
 The psychology of the blind raises three central 
 points of controversy: the acuteness of the senses 
 taken singly, the substitution of the missing sense 
 of vision by one or more of the others, and the 
 adequacy of the four-sense apparatus to the interpre- 
 tation of reality as given. The first is a measurable 
 problem of psycho-physics. The evidence of the 
 laboratory is alone conclusive, or it would be but for 
 a weakness on which M. Villey lays a shrewd finger. 
 " Our instruments think : they share our prejudices." 
 The sesthesiometer, to cite the simplest, yields 
 different results according to the sharpness of its 
 points and the substance of which the compass legs 
 
 178
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 are made. A more serious element of error is intro- 
 duced by the character of the subjects available for 
 examination. There is blindness and blindness. In 
 some instances the vision, and only the vision, is 
 affected. In others the brain, the spinal cord, and 
 the whole nervous system are disturbed and debili- 
 tated by some grave organic lesion. To classify all 
 these together under the common rubric of " the 
 blind " is plainly to invite wide-ranging discrepancies. 
 Since that is precisely what has been done, it is not 
 surprising to find two opinions in the field. On the 
 one side, Griesbach and Kunz claim to have shown 
 by a series of many thousand experiments that the 
 sensibility of the blind is in no respect superior and 
 is in very many respects inferior to that of the 
 seeing. They established no difference as regards 
 hearing or smell. To tactile impressions they judge 
 the blind to be less acutely responsive. Strangely 
 enough, they found the hand, and, of the hand, the 
 index or reading finger, to be eminently the area of 
 inferiority. On the other side the superiority of the 
 blind, having long been accepted as an axiom, has 
 not failed to secure laboratory confirmation by 
 Czemak, Goltz, Gastner, Hocheisen, and Stern. 
 Laura Bridgman, possessing only the single sense 
 of touch, would seem bound a priori to excel in tactile 
 sensibility: actual measurement showed it to be two 
 or three times the normal. But strangely enough, 
 Helen Keller, examined in a more coldly scientific 
 spirit, exhibited no notable superiority. M. Villey, 
 grasping the controversy, as it were, from within as 
 well as from without, is convinced that, other organic 
 conditions being equal, no relation of superiority 
 and inferiority can be scientifically established. 
 Blindness does not induce either a general stupor 
 or a general exhaltation of the other senses. 
 
 The nisi intellectus ipse by the addition of which 
 Leibnitz corrected Locke's Nihil est in intellectu quod 
 
 179
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 noil ante fnerit in sensu is to M. Villey the key to the 
 whole business. Not in the perceiving sense but in 
 the interpreting mind does the true centre of 
 difference reside. The only " miracle " with which 
 we are confronted is that of specialized attention 
 and memory. These are the most familiar activities 
 of conscious life, and are the matter of a hundred 
 text-book instances. An officer will detect at the 
 first glance at a line of soldiers an irregularity of 
 uniform or equipment which would escape an hour's 
 conscientious scrutiny by a layman. To a European 
 newly landed in the East all Chinamen seem the 
 same ; in two or three days he has already begun 
 to distinguish individuals. In each case it is not 
 the eye but the mind that sees more. The datum 
 of sense is received into a richer associational mass 
 and more swiftly construed. The stream of con- 
 sciousness, impinging on a narrower area, strikes 
 that area with more urgent force. Blindness, then, 
 as a condition of mental life, is for all the world like 
 the closing of a lock-gate. There is no intensifica- 
 tion of the individual senses, but there is an 
 enhanced rapidity of interpretation. The vicariate 
 of the senses, as M. Villey styles it, presents itself 
 to him under an image which is very clear and 
 suggestive : 
 
 " We must not see in it, as is too often supposed, 
 a sort of estate which, on the death of one brother, 
 is divided among his four surviving brothers. Rather 
 do I see it as a workshop, suddenly deserted by one 
 of its artizans, the most active and intelligent of all, 
 one of those aristocrats of labour who by sheer 
 weight of superior ability reduce the initiative of 
 their fellows almost to zero and lay hold of the 
 effective direction of affairs. Confronted with the 
 enormous increase of their burdens the survivors 
 may doubtless give way to despair, and reduce con- 
 currently their own efforts and rewards and the total 
 
 i8o
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 volume of production. But, on the other hand, if 
 they are men of courage, they may redouble their 
 efforts, and, profiting by the imperious need of their 
 employer, greatly improve their material situation. 
 Were their comrade, instead of leaving, simply to 
 turn over to them part of his task, an identical result 
 might be reached " (p. 70). 
 
 The exploitation of the senses proceeds under a 
 sort of Ricardian law of rent. The most profitable, 
 that of vision, naturally comes first into use, and 
 always yields the maximum return. But, under the 
 pressure of circumstances, the margin of cultivation 
 widens, and even the poorest outlying province of 
 perception is made to support life. The normal 
 man, lord of five senses, is free to squander a great 
 part of his less valuable resources. Strip his heritage 
 to four as with M. Villey, to two as with Helen 
 Keller, to one as with Laura Bridgman, and you 
 find the reply of life and genius in what may be 
 called, if you choose, a deepening " miracle " of con- 
 centration. Where a blind person does possess a 
 congenital acuteness in any mode of perception, that 
 mode is, of course, likely to play a r6le of propor- 
 tional importance. Le Monde des Aveugles abounds 
 in verified modern examples. For Marie Heurtin, 
 as for Helen Keller, every person of her acquaintance 
 has a special odour as recognizable as the perfume 
 of a flower. She never makes a mistake. Sent to 
 the sewing-room with a message to one of her com- 
 panions, she stands there on her arrival slowly 
 turning her head and sniffing the air, until she 
 locates her goal. M. Yves Guegan, who is com- 
 pletely deaf, knows that the post has come by 
 the smell of the postman's letter-bag which he 
 detects on the floor next below him. In a series of 
 experiments he was able to determine his precise 
 position in a room, but lost this power as soon as 
 his nostrils were closed with small rubber-faced 
 
 181
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 pincers. A severe cold in the head had the same 
 disabling influence as the pincers. This subtle 
 mastery of odour, combined with the guidance 
 afforded by muscular memory, enables him to find 
 his way almost freely about the town of Brest where 
 he resides. In the sphere of touch M. Villey's 
 explanation dissolves into simplicity the " marvels " 
 which so strongly impress certain seeing observers. 
 Fluent reading from Braille, involving as it does the 
 perception through the index finger of more than 
 two thousand raised dots per minute, is on analysis 
 no more amazing than, say, piano-playing by the 
 normal person. The printing of the matter read 
 involves the two thousand dots, but they have not 
 been cognized in detail. A small, scattered minority 
 of them is sufficient to "spring the imagination," as 
 Meredith's phrase has it, to stir the associational 
 mass in the mind behind the finger. Perhaps the 
 most striking example of a very unpromising area 
 of perception fructified by deliberate attention is 
 afforded by the blind deaf mutes. Sight and sound 
 as such are forbidden to them, but they learn to 
 detect the minutest vibratory movements involved in 
 these phenomena. The least change in temperature 
 or the lightest undulation of a column of air is laid 
 hold of by them and developed into a far from 
 ineffective guide. M. Guegan, for instance, recog- 
 nizes his friends by the vibrations "produced by the 
 impact of their feet on the ground." 
 
 " I never cross a street," he writes, " without 
 stopping for some seconds to assure myself that no 
 vehicle is passing : this I judge from the vibrations 
 of the ground under my feet. These are to me a 
 fruitful source of information ; I perceive them so 
 clearly that I have the illusion of actually hearing." 
 
 The mythology of the subject has uniformly 
 ascribed to the blind a sixth sense, sometimes 
 represented as the sense of orientation, sometimes 
 
 182
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 as that of obstacles. Certain psychologists, like 
 M. Woelfflin, have not only believed that there is 
 such a sense, but they have even located it for its 
 physiological base in the nervus trigeminus. But 
 upon the non-existence of any such compensation 
 M. Villey is sharply definite. It is true, we learn 
 from him, that many blind persons claim to be 
 conscious of a sort of toucher a distance, a new order 
 of sensation experienced mainly about the temples. 
 But on examination the evidence is found to be 
 inconclusive. In many instances, whether the sub- 
 ject be blind or seeing, some cutaneous affection such 
 as scarlatina or smallpox will be found to have 
 produced hyper-aesthesia. In the remainder the 
 sixth sense is no more than a more sensitive inter- 
 pretation of the data normally given, especially of 
 those of temperature, odour, and undulation. 
 
 Among the most fascinating of his chapters is that 
 in which M. Villey discusses the possibility of 
 attaining, through purely tactile impressions, an 
 adequate perception of space. Such a question 
 clearly plunges us en pleine metaphysique, and runs 
 down to the foundations of epistemology. According 
 to an authority like Platner, the blind perceive 
 extension under the form, not of space, but of time. 
 Between them and the seeing there is fixed a gulf 
 which can never be crossed. To the fantastic 
 geometries of four dimensions must be added 
 another still stranger, the geometry of the blind. 
 Such a view receives no support from the author 
 of Le Monde des Aveiigles. The problem of the 
 Many and the One, the passage from concrete and 
 multiple impressions to the generic idea, is no doubt 
 worked out more painfully in terms of touch than in 
 those of sight. But the process of elaboration leaves 
 the sightless also in possession of images "extended, 
 synthetic, extremely supple and mobile." It is a 
 sort of tactile vision. 
 
 183
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 " The word sight alone seems adequate to those 
 apparitions which surge through the mind, free from 
 any admixture of purely muscular sensations, from 
 any representation through the fingers or the hands, 
 less rich, less complex, considerably less extended 
 than visual ideas, but like them at the same time 
 one and many, grasped in their integrity and in their 
 details by the inner eye of consciousness " (p. 167). 
 
 The difference of modality does not prevent the 
 conquest of the same substantial result. The pro- 
 cedure of touch is analytical and successive, whereas 
 that of vision is synthetic and instantaneous. But 
 when the material given in perception has been, so 
 to say, chewed over by the mind, it undergoes a 
 transformation. Memory brings back an object not 
 fragmentarily, but in a flash : 
 
 " It is not a defile, a successive unfolding, however 
 rapid, of representations in which the different parts 
 are added one to the other in the order in which 
 they were first experienced. It is a fountaining 
 forth (jaillisseuient). The object recurs en bloc." 
 
 If we turn to the degree of mastery of practical 
 life which modern educational apparatus permits a 
 blind person to attain, at least in favourable circum- 
 stances, we come on many interesting facts. One of 
 M. Villey's correspondents is a commercial traveller 
 who makes long railway journeys without any dis- 
 agreeable incident. Many others are musicians, 
 especially organists. M. Beraud, of Marseilles, works 
 with success as an electrician ; M. Demonet, of 
 Vichy, is a prosperous piano-maker. It would, how- 
 ever, be a mere illusion of optimism to suppose that 
 in any of these skilled pursuits the real handicap of 
 blindness has been wholly overcome. M. Villey 
 himself has made a distinguished mark in literature, 
 and, what is even more remarkable, in the literature 
 of erudition. He is one of the best-known Montaigne 
 scholars. His edition of the Essais is, in the full 
 
 184
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 sense of the word, monumental. He has followed, 
 with the most minute care, the track of Montaigne's 
 reading and has reconstructed, almost year by year, 
 a history of his mind and imagination. It goes 
 without saying that in this huge task he had the aid 
 of secretaries and friends, but, when all that has 
 been taken into account, it remains an astonishing 
 achievement. Accomplished critic that he is, M. 
 Villey is at his best in his analysis of the art life 
 possible to the blind, both creative and appreciative. 
 He introduces us to a blind German novelist of 
 great merit, Oskar Baum, author of Das Leben im 
 Dunkeln, and to a French poetess, Mme. Galeron. 
 He examines passages from Flaubert and Hugo, and 
 finds them curiously independent of visual sensations, 
 almost wholly compacted of sound and movement. 
 In the lyrical pages of Helen Keller he is sorry to 
 discover at many points mere verbalism, or even 
 psittacism. Most of all does he distrust her claim 
 to penetrate into the spirit and meaning of sculpture 
 through the medium of touch. For him, visible 
 beauty is a world shut hopelessly against the blind. 
 From the reports of the seeing they may, indeed, 
 construct some vague notion of such a reality, but 
 this is far from constituting any real knowledge of 
 it. The gates of that Eden are closed against them. 
 But much is open. How much, one hardly under- 
 stands until one has accompanied this humane and 
 gracious scholar in his survey of a strange world. 
 The long educational effort extending through Haiiy 
 and Braille down to our own time has delivered these 
 disinherited from isolation and restored them to 
 human intercourse. The pathos of their affliction 
 is no longer intolerable. If they accept the condi- 
 tions set them in the noble spirit that breathes 
 through Le Monde des Avetigles, they are lifted into 
 a sort of mountain-air of morality : they wear their 
 calamity like a crown. 
 
 185
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 I cannot think of any single piece of work that 
 would help to an understanding of the blind so 
 greatly as an English translation of this book. 
 M. Villey's scientific equipment is at all points 
 adequate. He has produced a chapter of compara- 
 tive psychology of a new order, and of unique 
 value. It is a clear addition to the weight of 
 evidence in support of the spiritual interpretation of 
 conscious life as against the meaner theories of 
 empiricism. Everywhere we come upon a soul 
 straining painfully for expression behind the 
 mutilated organs of sense, but it is an integral soul. 
 
 As I have said, the scientific interest of M. Villey's 
 work is touched throughout with a warm glow of 
 emotion. A great wind of loneliness blows through 
 it ; you are made aware of the more than feminine 
 passion for sympathy of these gens incompris of 
 our kind. But behind all is the desire that the 
 seeing may understand in order that they may help. 
 Not the almoner but the educator, not " institu- 
 tional treatment," as our chilly phrase has it — with 
 its leading-strings, and crutches, and uniforms, and 
 big refectories smelling of shell-cocoa — but, as far as 
 possible, the life of the economically independent 
 citizen, such is the burden of M. Villey's appeal. 
 How far is it realizable ? The results of an enquiry 
 undertaken in 1905 into the progress of 264 pupils 
 of the Institiiiion Nationale des Jewies Aveugles, are 
 suggestive. Of these 64 had been obliged to return 
 home after their school course; 30 of them 
 were able to make some contribution to the house- 
 hold budget, but the remainder were, through 
 disease or inferiority of intelligence, entirely 
 dependent. A second group of 94 just contrived to 
 support a celibate existence. Some of them were 
 obliged from time to time to apply for assistance, but 
 per centra some also were found to be almost well-to- 
 do. Forty per cent., that is to say, 106, had married, 
 
 186
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 and were enjoying the normal life of domesticity. 
 Of these i6 had failed in the struggle, i8 were 
 imable to keep going without occasional help from 
 the Institution, but the remaining 72 had made their 
 way,, and 30 of them were very comfortable. In all 
 85 per cent, had discovered in our economic 
 organization some niche into which they fitted. The 
 figures, it should be added, relate exclusively to 
 males. 
 
 A curious feature noted is that, subjectively, this 
 success is felt to be greater than in its objective self 
 it actually is. Many of the pupils came from the 
 poorest sections of the labouring classes: their 
 physical affliction procured for them an education 
 far superior to that available for their healthier 
 brothers and sisters, and on leaving school they took 
 their places several stages higher in the hierarchy 
 of industry. Many of them go so far as to refer to 
 their blindness as a " happy accident," a " pro- 
 vidential calamity," and so on. The more naive 
 and self-sufficient, indeed, develop in regard to their 
 relatives all the symptoms of the thorough snob. 
 
 The occupations to which the specialized education 
 of the blind leads them to gravitate have already 
 been indicated. We may set aside as freaks of 
 genius the more astonishing of the cases on record. 
 True, we do find at Marseilles M. Beraud working 
 successfully as an electrical engineer. He has. 
 unaided except by an apprentice, planned and 
 erected many installations, private and ecclesiastical. 
 At the Paris Automobile Exhibition of 1910 he took 
 down, repaired, and set up again many motor 
 vehicles. At the automobile trials of Ventouse in 
 1911 a tandem motor bicycle, built in part by 
 himself, with his mechanic as pilot and himself as 
 passenger, obtained second prize. Similar, though 
 less impressive, is the work of M. Mounnich at 
 Magdeburg. We have details of a blind brewer whO' 
 
 187
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 exercised his profession with considerable success 
 for ten years, of a blind cut-glass worker, of a blind 
 vine-dresser whose skill had become a tradition of 
 his country-side. M. Viliey himself personally 
 examined the case of a blind cutler, recently dead, 
 at Vichy. Under the eyes of our author he per- 
 formed all the most difficult processes of his trade. 
 What most impressed M. Viliey was the infallible 
 precision with which he put together the component 
 pieces, six or seven in number, of his knife-hafts, 
 already shaped by himself in ivory, horn, copper, or 
 iron. A M. Person, also at Paris, had arrived, and 
 believed that any blind mechanic could arrive, at a 
 complete mastery of clock-cleaning and repairing. 
 But, in M. Villey's reasoned judgment, success in 
 such enterprises demands a " conspiracy of benevo- 
 lence " in addition to a marked originality which is 
 by no means the general heritage of the blind. He 
 found further, on investigation of the "documented" 
 marvels, that in practically no instance was the 
 blind mechanic, however well he worked, able to 
 work fast enough to earn his living. In other 
 branches in which less skill is required, and in which 
 special training operates as a set-off against the 
 natural advantage of the seeing, the prospect is much 
 more hopeful. Chief of these are music, and the 
 industries associated with it. As is well-known, the 
 teaching of music has long occupied a prominent 
 place in the curriculum of the blind, and this study 
 is so neglected in normal schools that something 
 approximating to a fair start is possible. The 
 natural faculty of the blind pupil is so fully evoked 
 as to transform a iiiinus into a plus. Very many 
 blind persons of both sexes have made their way as 
 organists, music-teachers, and even minor com- 
 posers. The less fine talents attempted, against 
 the advice of their educators, piano-tuning, with the 
 slight grasp of mechanics involved, and from that 
 
 1 88
 
 THE WORLD OF THE BLIND 
 
 passed on to piano-building, and in certain cases to 
 furniture-making. Of this class the success of 
 genius is that of M. Demonet. He acquired a 
 decaying piano-factory, and in one year more 
 than restored its former prosperity. His story, 
 which is too long for minute narration, approaches 
 more nearly than any of the others to the fairy- 
 tale. Its special interest is that it centres in a 
 domain for which the blind are specialized, and in 
 which, in all the capacities enumerated, they have 
 in large numbers succeeded. Medical massage 
 is yet another of these particular areas. The 
 "more scientific fingers" of the blind, that touch 
 which has long been legendary, find in massage an 
 occupation that literally plays into their hand. And 
 as massage becomes a more and more popular treat- 
 ment, and as the employment of a blind masseuse or 
 masseur enables a lady or gentleman of fashion to 
 gratify without any extra expense the two passions 
 of curiosity and pity, it would seem to be a career 
 with a future. The teaching of modern languages 
 is another avenue of promise opened by a change of 
 method. Living languages are now learned not 
 from dead print but from living speech. With 
 appropriate training the memory of a blind pupil of 
 a linguistic turn can easily be stocked with adequate 
 material of instruction. The Braille system opens a 
 way, though a narrow way, into the garden of litera- 
 ture. The demand for the teaching of modern 
 languages grows every year, and all these are favour- 
 able influences. At the same time the attainment 
 of a position in the world of erudition comparable to 
 that of M. Villey's must continue to be a phenom- 
 enon as rare as it is precious. 
 
 The whole task before us is the adaptation of the 
 blind to their economic environment. It is not 
 enough to spend benevolently : the State and private 
 philanthropists must also spend intelligently. The 
 
 189
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 blind fiddler, led about by his faithful dog, and the 
 blind osier-weaver and basket-maker, do not exhaust 
 the field of proved possibility. A more valuable 
 help towards ths new programme than Le Monde des 
 Aveugles I cannot easily imagine. On the one side 
 it is the science and the politics of blindness ; on the 
 other its most poignant because its most penetrating 
 literature. We have been accustomed to speak of 
 the blind leading the blind as a counter-sense. In 
 M. Villey there enters a blind man who also leads 
 ^he seeing. 
 
 190
 
 A MAN TROUBLED ABOUT 
 EVERYTHING 
 
 My drowse had already been shattered by a sharp 
 click on the pavement of the verandah. Then, as a 
 chair was pushed back with that crunching creak, 
 which is the least tolerable of all domestic noises, I 
 turned to my neighbour. 
 
 " You have lost your pipe?" 
 
 Together we found it. He borrowed my tobacco 
 pouch — the ritual of initiation into friendship. He 
 stared with dead eyes into the fires and darknesses 
 of a sea, caressed by a headland, wooded down to the 
 shore, and said heavily : 
 
 "It is good to find a lost pipe, but it is easy. I 
 have lost something else that I do not think even 
 the Paduan Saint Anthony will find for me : / have 
 lost my Table of Vahies." 
 
 "Are you a worshipper at the shrine of the idyllic 
 cabbage?" I asked, "and are they food values? Or 
 a painter, and are they colour values? Or a mere 
 stockbroker, left without a key to the madness of the 
 money page in this evening's paper?" 
 
 " I speak," he went on, " of what I would call life 
 values, if that vocable ' life ' had any clear meaning. 
 Those two-column arrangements of experience into 
 Good and Bad, Good and Better .... a more 
 important distinction .... Right and Wrong, Aye 
 and No." 
 
 " Have you applied to your Party Whips ? " I 
 pursued. " A friend of mine always gets his there 
 ready made. Very reasonably, too. Of course they 
 don't always fit at the shoulders as well as the 
 
 191
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 tailored article. But they keep out the cold, and 
 keep you out of it ? Have you tried the Bishop of 
 London? Or Mr. Garvin ? Or the Militants ? Or 
 Mr. Ramsay Macdonald ? Or Mr. Bernard Shaw, 
 to mention whom — I omit Messieurs Belloc and 
 Chesterton — is now a recognized duty in conver- 
 sation ? Or, greatest of English names, Mr. F. E. 
 Smith ? There are no flies of doubt to spoil the 
 soup of certainty for any of these people. They 
 know." 
 
 My companion almost slipped into anger, but 
 caught himself short on the brink. 
 
 "Of the Militants," he said, "let us not speak 
 either in praise or blame. Who am I that I should 
 refuse the epic duel of sex ? I am not greedy : I do 
 not ask for woman's wisdom, only for man's. That 
 gaitered contradiction, the Bishop of London, is of 
 no use to me, nor that candent Scotchman, who 
 thinks himself a Socialist while he is only a meta- 
 physician. Shaw bores me : besides, he is a 
 hippo-cerf. Mr. Smith's manners are so bad that 
 even if he had the secret of eternal life I should 
 decline to be saved under the barking monosyllable 
 of his opprobrious name. Mr. Garvin is a squirrel. 
 Here he is now, cracking nuts among the fallen leaves. 
 Your eyes quit him for a moment, and when you see 
 him again he is perched on some quite ridiculous 
 tree, looking as debonair and dogmatic about his 
 new posture as he was about his old. Party Whips 
 are good as far as they go. I do not want to see 
 them slain at the crossing of the ways, and the world 
 swaggering into anarchism. But there is no ultimacy 
 in them. Their function is — if you follow me — 
 soaked in relativity ? " 
 
 When a large metaphysical boulder of this kind is 
 hurled at you it is discreet to be offensive, and, if 
 possible, literary. 
 
 " Balzac," I observed, " recounts in one of his 
 
 192
 
 A MAN TROUBLED ABOUT EVERYTHING 
 
 novels what he calls the pursuit of the absolute. Pur- 
 suit and pursuer end, I seem to remember, in a 
 commodious lunatic asylum, agreeably situated in a 
 well-kept forest." 
 
 "Yes! they attain certainty in these places," he 
 mused, "but the price is too big. A lunatic, observe, 
 is a person who is quite sure about one thing, and 
 that thing is wrong. I had a friend who was quite 
 sure that he was a poached egg. They had to 
 upholster his chair with dry toast in order to induce 
 him to sit down. To attain that certainty about a 
 right thing, and without the expense and bother of 
 going mad, is just my problem." 
 
 " Is it not possible," I asked, still smarting, " to 
 live on the accumulations of history, and the 
 momentum of civilization ? Just keep up with the 
 band, you know ? " 
 
 " There are so many bands and so many airs ! I 
 can't march to infinity in all directions at the same 
 time. Besides it is undignified to drown the music 
 of the soul in somebody else's tin whistle ! " 
 
 " What are you chiefly troubled about ? " 
 
 " I am chiefly troubled about everything," came 
 his reply, somewhat brusquely. " The world sets 
 me the conundrum : Christianity or .... or ... . 
 or the other thing ? I am, as they say, at heart a 
 Christian. But I read a twelve-and-sixpenny book 
 blowing it sky-high .... a good metaphor that, by 
 the way. How can anything be true enough to 
 withstand the assault of a twelve-and-sixpenny book ? 
 Then I read another twelve-and-sixpenny book in 
 defence of it, usually by a German professor. I end 
 by not knowing even what Christianity is. Then 
 the world says : Marriage or .... or the other 
 thing. I am all for indissoluble marriage. But 
 people send me pamphlets. Here in this very hotel 
 I meet a lady, a most charming lady, who assures 
 me that unless divorce is made cheap, private, and 
 
 193 o
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 almost automatic she will be forced to poison her 
 husband, a most estimable man with a splendid golf 
 temperament." 
 
 " Hard lines on her," I managed to interpolate. 
 " And poisoning is such a highly specialized industry 
 nowadays ! " 
 
 "Then the world says: Individualism or Socialism? 
 I know myself that our present industrial system is 
 enough to make a cat laugh, and an angel weep. 
 But I read a book — I am always reading books — 
 which tells me that, if we have public ownership, 
 my individuality will be kneaded into an amorphic 
 mass .... or mess, I forget which. I don't want 
 to be kneaded into either. Going home I am kept 
 waiting five, ten, thirty minutes for my train. Like 
 any other gentleman I mutter: Bless these railway 
 directors ! Some red-tie overhears me. He insists 
 on linking me into my compartment, and assaults 
 me with Socialist principles and Prussian statistics 
 until my head reels, and my individualism with it." 
 " You have at least the comfort that goes with an 
 open mind ? " 
 
 "An open mind brings about as much comfort as 
 an open door on a sleety day in January. Militarism 
 or Pacifism ? I dislike killing : that makes me the 
 one. I dislike the German syntax : that makes me 
 the other. Free Trade or Tariff Reform I have 
 happily been able to postpone." 
 "Indeed!" I said. 
 
 "Yes," he iterated firmly. "There is such a jolly 
 scuffle going on between the various tariffs in their 
 own kennel that I can wait till the winning dog 
 emerges. But then: Bacon or Shakespeare? John 
 Masefield or ... . poetry ? And so on, for the path 
 between these antitheses leads to the world's end 
 and dips over into infinity." 
 After a pause, he went on : 
 
 " Have the courtesy at least not to mention Hamlet, 
 a detestable play in which the supreme intellectual 
 
 194
 
 A MAN TROUBLED ABOUT EVERYTHING 
 
 problem, that of evidence, is solved in terms of Drury 
 Lane. ... I have not spoken of such minor but 
 besetting dubieties as: When shall we have a General 
 Election? Who will win the Cricket Championship?" 
 
 "Still," I said, "If we are to live at all we must 
 have a point of view, a philosophy." 
 
 "Philosophy," he replied, "is a blanket which men 
 have woven to protect themselves against life, which 
 is, I suggest, on the whole something of a frost. 
 When more than usually frightened they pull the 
 blanket up over their heads. But I too have mine. 
 Did you ever see a weather-vane ? " 
 
 " Really," I was beginning. 
 
 " Most people know it only as a literary image. 
 A weather-vane is a very insubstantial, rotatory 
 object set on a very substantial, fixed object, say, a 
 tin arrow on a cathedral. My public self is the tin 
 arrow which whirls round with every breeze. My 
 reserve personality is the cathedral. That it is there 
 I know: what it is like I can in no way discover. I 
 follow the most popular of all religions, the religion 
 of never giving yourself away." 
 
 Then, catching at an unspoken question : 
 
 "How I earn my living? I don't. I am a gentle- 
 man of independent means. This religion of mine 
 is fully furnished. It, too, if we may continue the 
 figure, has its cathedral : that vastest and most 
 splendid of all contemporary buildings, the hotel. 
 It has its seven sacraments: the cheque-book, the 
 motor-car, the golf-links, the chef, and .... why 
 yes! .... three whiskey-and-sodas. Goodnight!" 
 
 The chair crunched departure. The Man who 
 has lost his Table of Values disappeared, and left 
 me staring into the darkness and the fires of night. 
 
 Our modern disease is not that we are proud, but 
 that we are proud about the wrong things. We 
 have gained the whole world, and cravenly cancelled 
 our own souls. Many of our popular novelists and 
 their readers are in the case of the king in the fairy- 
 
 195
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 tale : they are naked to all the winds. Human life 
 needs a garment of philosophy if it is to endure, and 
 they have none. If a man will but consent to accept 
 that which has been woven for him by the secular 
 labour of civilization out of many inter-mixed fibres 
 — God, immortality, the Christian creed, marriage, 
 property, and freedom — he need not shiver. As a 
 magnet pulls into patterned order what was an 
 incoherent mass of iron filings, so these central 
 ideas send out a current of principle through the vast 
 and amazing medley of modern life and literature. 
 
 It is because Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand 
 for these romantic and redeeming commonplaces 
 that they are the greatest spiritual forces in English 
 letters. But even they shine with a dimmed lustre. 
 I cannot forgive Mr. Belloc that knock-about 
 anarchism, which he mistakes for political health. 
 And who can forgive Mr. Chesterton his awful 
 jolliness ? Show him a corpse, just fished out of 
 the Thames, or the murderer of it, or an interna- 
 tional financier, or any other hideous object, and he 
 is off at once to dictate an article for the Daily News, 
 explaining how awfully jolly the whole thing is. 
 Optimism must dominate the orchestra, no doubt, 
 but it ought to be played on discreetly muted strings. 
 
 We touch the highest wisdom when we learn to 
 rejoice in our limitations. Why be angry at the 
 narrowness of our compass, seeing that we have all 
 eternity in which progressively to widen it ? It 
 braces the curious mind — and what is mind but 
 curiosity ? — to realize that, because of the inexhausti- 
 bility of knowledge, we are saved from all menace 
 of tedium ; that a new adventure awaits us behind 
 every blade of grass ; and that, released at last from 
 the fetters of time and space, but not from those of 
 individuality, our finitude will have scope to follow 
 the old trail of infinity in an endless asymptote. 
 Truly, narrow-mindednessisthe beginning of wisdom. 
 
 196
 
 NOVEMBER FIRST : THE DAY 
 OF ALL THE DEAD 
 
 Verlaine, to whom the whole rebellion of art 
 came under the form of music, in that mode also 
 experienced autumn. Not through the eye, as with 
 Keats, but through the ear her ambiguous beauty of 
 achievement and decay entered his soul. He heard 
 it as a long-sobbing violin, to which a tumult of 
 leaves and illusions, severed from the roots of life, 
 circled about in a grave saraband of despair. And 
 since music is, as it is, a food as fit for melancholy 
 as for love, the high road of initiation into death, 
 and the cradle-language of immortality, the exquisite 
 dereliction of the French poet does in truth evoke 
 the very spirit of this withering and sombre time. 
 
 Circumambient blue walls of mist close up our 
 horizons of hope, rising as Merlin's prison rises in 
 the saga. We feel a chill drovv-siness flowing 
 through all the veins of existence : it is as if the 
 world, like Socrates, were dying from the feet up. 
 A wintry silence has fallen on the birds, if it be not 
 for that epitome of loneliness, the cry of the lapwing, 
 or the clangour of rooks or of wedged battalions of 
 wild geese, cleaving the emptiness of the sky. 
 
 Over all this ritual of desolation the trees prevail, 
 towering above the rout like the captains of a 
 defeated army. The flame of October has burned 
 itself out ; the glory of red and orange, and bronze 
 which wrapped the woods in a conflagration of 
 beauty has smouldered down to faint embers. The 
 oak still keeps its leaf, and here and there the eye 
 encounters the bulk of an elm, not yet denuded, or 
 
 197
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the lyrical gleam of a birch that has so far missed 
 its cue of departure. But as for the rest, they are 
 no more than a shuddering nakedness. To Verlaine, 
 as to all the poets, they are the wailing violins or 
 lutes of the storm. Along many an avenue or 
 canal as gracious as that which Hobbima painted, 
 the poplars stand up above the dim water like 
 candlesticks of mourning set beside a catafalque. 
 In truth they are the funeral torches of autumn. 
 
 The poets, since poetry first was, have recorded 
 all this spectacle of decadence with the faithful 
 agony with which one records the oncoming of death 
 over the lineaments of a beloved face. In magic of 
 description there is hardly anywhere a touch that 
 excels the " leopard woods " and " mouse-coloured 
 waters " celebrated by Mr. Yeats. As for symbol- 
 ism and philosophy, all the singers are but too prone 
 to sentimentalize themselves into a mere pagan 
 cowardice of despair. Religion alone confronts 
 material dissolution with right courage — the courage 
 of the faith that looks through death. 
 
 For it is no chance, but a deliberate choice, that 
 consecrates this grey prologue of winter to the 
 memory of" All the Dead." Not a village in France 
 — the true Catholic France — but will see to-day the 
 last flowers of the year strewn, for a festival in which 
 belief almost becomes vision, over graves at which 
 the elders will kneel, and the children be not for- 
 bidden to play. In Tyrolese hamlets the little fonts 
 of holy water that hang by every tombstone, how- 
 ever wretched, will be filled for sprinkling, and 
 the bells rung. 
 
 In many an Irish farmhouse or cottage, where 
 the old customs are not wholly forgotten, the hearth 
 will be clean swept, and a new fire laid down, with 
 a chair set before it for every member of the house- 
 hold who has passed ex umhrh et imnginibiis. For 
 it is thought that they are privileged to revisit to- 
 
 198
 
 NOVEMBER FIRST 
 
 night the place of their childhood. Dead names 
 will be cried about the winds, the names of those 
 who achieved, the names of those who were broken 
 or who broke themselves. Not a heart but about 
 its portals there will flutter a strange drift of mem- 
 ories, for it is the Day of All the Dead. Happy — 
 thrice happy in " drear-nighted November " — is the 
 faith of those for whom the dead have gone not into 
 the night, but into the light. 
 
 199
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING 
 NARROW-MINDED 
 
 The attempt of any individual mind to come to 
 terms with the modern world as a whole is like an 
 attempt to decant the Atlantic into a thimble. 
 
 Every contemporary book is a record of the fashion 
 in which some particular thimble was defeated, and 
 of the mood or the philosophy in which it accepted 
 its defeat. The characteristic note of our day is not 
 pride. It is not Professor Schafer's threat that, if 
 we are not very nice to him, he will one day manu- 
 facture a frog out of an old pair of boots and a bowl 
 of sugar. Nor is it the graver threat of the Eugenic 
 Society that, if we are very nice, they will arrange 
 for the birth of a race of beings so glorious as to be 
 indistinguishable from the members of their own 
 committee. Nor that less scientific and more toler- 
 able will-o'-the-wisp, the Superman, lately deceased; 
 nor any other proclamation of our imminent omni- 
 potence. 
 
 On the contrary, it is the re-discovery of the intoxi- 
 cating fact that man is finite, fallible, prone to sin, 
 dyspepsia, and influenza, and that, in general, he is 
 rather small beer. Lord Rosebery, for instance, is 
 so annoyed at an inspection of the shelves laden with 
 books which he cannot possibly read, that he invites 
 us to put a match to every library, and cremate 
 those corpses which poison his originality. Mr. 
 Balfour retires from public leadership, explaining 
 that politics have become so complicated that he is 
 unable to understand them any longer, and must 
 delegate that task to Mr. Bonar Law. Not inappro- 
 priately he writes an article on M. Bergson, that 
 
 200
 
 ON BEING NARROW-MINDED 
 
 philosopher of the tea-table, who has discarded the 
 understanding altogether in favour of the much more 
 agreeable faculty of intuition. 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, having set the hero of his last 
 novel, " Marriage," thinking about modern life 
 through several hundred monologues, unloaded on 
 a very patient young lady, is obliged to send both 
 of them to Labrador to cool their heads. It is 
 rumoured that Mr. Shaw is about to write to the 
 Times, explaining that he once — although, of course, 
 only once — made a mistake. As for Mr. Belloc and 
 Mr. Chesterton, they may be counted on to continue 
 wallowing in their respective humilities till the end 
 of time, and probably well on into eternity. 
 
 Of the proved inadequacy of the thimble there 
 can, therefore, be no doubt. In the face of it, two 
 attitudes are possible. The first is that of the boy 
 who, in presence of the Christmas pudding, is 
 plunged into the sourest pessimism by the discord 
 which manifests itself in him between desire and 
 capacity. The other is that of M. Renan, who, on 
 leaving the great Paris Exhibition in which, in 
 glittering avenue after avenue, the glory of civiliza- 
 tion had filled his eyes, exclaimed: "Mon Dieu\ 
 How many exquisite things there are which one can 
 do without!" Our choice lies between the dis- 
 tended depression of the schoolboy and the smiling 
 asceticism of M. Renan : the former is, I fear, more 
 typical of our time. 
 
 Indeed, most of our contemporaries are infinitely 
 angry at not being infinite. So much happiness, 
 so much exultant life, and they are allowed to drink 
 only some of it — not all ! Such a bewildering multi- 
 plicity of books, of people, and they are suffered to 
 dip a mere liqueur glass out of the ocean ! When 
 Professor Schafer does produce his frog, these 
 gourmands of experience will envy the unhappy 
 animal his froggishness — a whole area of sensation 
 from which they are shut out. This crowded com- 
 
 201
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 plexity of life has touched many of our finest minds. 
 It tortures Mr. Wells with a metaphysical headache. 
 It so affects Mr. Arnold Bennett that in his recent 
 novels, if the hero meets a policeman and a porter 
 at a railway station, you may safely expect a foot- 
 note or an inset advertisement announcing that in 
 1914 Mr, Bennett will publish, in a further supple- 
 mentary novel, the spiritual history of the police- 
 man, and in 1916 that of the porter. 
 
 The late Professor William James, in his Inger- 
 sol lecture on immortality, finds it facing him in an 
 even grimmer form. Since everybody is immortal, 
 and since, on his cheerful hypothesis, everybody is 
 going to Heaven, we are confronted with a horrible 
 prospect of Paradisaical congestion. But he con- 
 siderately goes on to observe that, on the other side 
 of the grave, each of us will continue to exist only 
 as a point of view, and that you can fit any number 
 of points of view into a given space, and still more 
 into that which confesses no bondage at all to space. 
 
 Great consolation for those whose only trouble 
 about human life is that there is so much of it, is to 
 be found in three central truths which, for the sake 
 of simplicity, we may call the I-ness of the I, the 
 hie et nunc-ity of consciousness, and the ad Jioc-ness 
 of action. Expressed in the obscurer language of 
 everyday, this means that you are yourself, mainly 
 because you are nobody else, and that your parti- 
 cular mind exists in a particular body at a particular 
 time in a particular place, with its energies mortgaged 
 to particular pursuits, chiefly that of getting enough 
 to eat. And, so far from these gyves hampering, 
 they actually enfranchise you. They may shut you 
 out from the Riviera, but they admit you to the 
 empyrean. Your study window, however small, is 
 large enough to contain the whole procession of the 
 stars, and if you dig deep enough in your back 
 garden, you will come on the flaming genesis of the 
 world. 
 
 202
 
 THE UNIMPORTANCE OF 
 POLITICS 
 
 This is no "withering denunciation " or "scathing 
 exposure " of those ambassadors at the Court ot 
 Notoriety whom we style politicians. Nobody is 
 " branded " in it as a traitor, an anarchist, an incendi- 
 ary, an elderly King's Counsel, a cabbage-headed 
 mule, an ill-masked Fenian, a certificated despatch- 
 rider, a village ruffian, or even a disliker of legal 
 blasphemy. It goes simply upon a large fact as to 
 which there can be no dispute, and asks whether 
 that fact is of good or of evil countenance. The fact 
 in question is that we are all politicians now. 
 Certain albino blotches do indeed run counter to 
 type, prigs for the most part, but with that excep- 
 tion we are all tarred with the same brush. Is the 
 brush too heavily charged, too industrious and 
 wide-wandering ? Do we assign disproportionate 
 importance to homo politicns, with his equipment of 
 masks and megaphones ? Do we, in short, gesture 
 and bellow too much for the good of our souls ? It 
 cannot be too clearly understood that the line of 
 approach to the enquiry is not Olympian, but con- 
 fessional. Any of us is ready enough to admit that 
 there are too many of the other kind of fellow about. 
 For me, the appearance of a thing called Unionism, 
 for instance, is numbered among the darkest and 
 least penetrable mysteries. On the other hand it 
 has long since been suggested that the world would 
 go much better if Ireland was towed into mid- 
 Atlantic, and sunk. Some Radicals could spare a 
 coronet or two without tears, or indeed the whole 
 
 203
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 practice of coronetcy in general, while some Dukes 
 are convinced that there is exactly one Lloyd- 
 George in excess of requirements. Such conclusions 
 are easy to reach, but they are vain. The only real 
 problems are those that concern the inner life, and 
 its institution in wisdom. And the suggestion of 
 this paper is that we make overmuch of politics. 
 We cheat ourselves. Our days are only twenty- 
 four hours broad, and not more than sixty years 
 long, truncated by sleep and sickness. We have, 
 as we say, a terrible lot of things to get through, 
 and if we give to any of them, and especially to the 
 poorer sort, too much head-tumult and heart-break, 
 we are betrayed and undone. 
 
 It is necessary to begin by repudiating that view 
 which would dismiss politics as mere sham and rococo. 
 Job himself might well lose patience, as indeed he 
 did, with such chatter. The State does not argue, 
 it imposes itself. The only sanctuary of escape 
 from it is the lunatic asylum. It is the raw material 
 in which we have all got to work, without which we 
 can do nothing. The particular State to which any 
 of us belongs is a moment of equilibrium, stable or 
 unstable, in the secular scuffle for the ownership of 
 the two most real things we know, land and men. 
 So real is the fight for these ingredients of welfare 
 that there is not the least prospect of its ever reach- 
 ing a term. The porcupine image, employed by 
 Schopenhauer, is rich in suggestion. Seeing men 
 not as trees walking, but as porcupines grubbing, 
 he points out that the task of society is to bring its 
 units so close together that they shall keep one 
 another warm, and to keep them as far apart as will 
 secure each against the bristling quills of his 
 neighbours. The process of re-arrangement goes 
 on without break or respite. Who is to stand 
 where ? Each porcine group has its own notion, 
 accompanied by a map with a statistical appendix; 
 
 204
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 no two maps agree, and there is a continual stir of 
 hustling and shouldering in the mass. And, for all 
 their trouble, colds and blood-letting are more 
 frequent than the ideal disposition. If you are very 
 dainty, you may call the affair rather disreputable, 
 and decidedly mixed. Nothing human is alien from 
 that fate. But to call it unreal would be a sad 
 absurdity. Moreover, its scope is as wide as civiliza- 
 tion. No provision has been made for disinterested 
 spectators. The Lucretian tower of ivory was found, 
 when completed, to be too frail for habitation, and 
 the judgment-seat of Gallio was long since broken 
 up for firewood. 
 
 The first note of politics, then, is not unreality 
 and remoteness, but on the contrary, intimate and 
 dominant reality. The second is, beyond all doubt, 
 unreason. The late William James records the 
 inspiration of one of those founders of minor 
 religions, the names of which sound like a disease : 
 this prophet felt that " he had fire enough in his 
 belly to burn up all the sins of the world." That is 
 the sort of thing that fashions the course of politics. 
 Movements which are, in the last analysis, not 
 exactly blind appetites, but at any rate Bergsonian 
 waves of appetency, accomplish themselves, if they 
 have vitality enough, if not, they simply break in 
 foam, and disappear. In neither case has reason, 
 mere platform and nev/spaper reason, created the 
 event out of its entrails. Ireland — if I may again 
 use her as an illustration — has not argued or even 
 fought, she has simply lived her way back to some 
 sort of autonomy. I must not be understood as 
 denying that there is in politics such a phenomenon 
 as conversion. But it is much more commonly 
 catastrophic than discursive. The mind is not a 
 scientific balance, delicately responsive to the 
 differential ounce: it is much more like a home- 
 made bomb which quite dramatically explodes. In 
 
 205
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 England what usually happens is that an elector sees 
 suddenly that something or other is a damned shame, 
 and decides to vote the other way next time. The 
 moving consideration may be, and often is, trivial, 
 irrelevant, or dead : an enquirer, reading Irish history 
 for the first time, for instance, becomes a Home 
 Ruler in order to let Queen Elizabeth and Oliver 
 Cromwell know what he thinks of their disgusting 
 conduct. But such illumination very seldom results 
 from a course of Hansard, or systematic attendance 
 at meetings of the opponent colour. Your typical 
 party leader does not even aim at convincing his 
 enemies, he makes speeches in order to explain him- 
 self to his friends. And your sound party man is a 
 good deal more of the mystic than of the rationalist. 
 Loyalty, to him, consists in accepting not the known 
 thing which his leader said yesterday, but the 
 unknown thing which he will say to-morrow. The 
 disbelief in the arbitrament of reason, which lurks 
 under so many forms of controversy, finds by times 
 an even franker expression. The gospel of violence 
 was never preached from such high places, or with 
 so confident a challenge, as in this mellow age of 
 sociology. Arson has become the paltriest of inci- 
 dental by-play. The right of rebellion at haphazard, 
 as one may say, has received ceremonial sanction at 
 the very fountain-head of law. 
 
 These facts may please or displease us, but at any 
 rate they are facts. And, whether pleased or not, a 
 prudent man will adjust himself to facts. What is 
 the general scheme of our adjustment? Mainly 
 noise. We have with loving care created an appa- 
 ratus of clamour from which none can escape, to 
 which none can listen without the gravest disturbance 
 of judgment. We all shout so loudly that nobody 
 hears his own voice. We wallow in a sea of leading 
 articles. We cram ourselves into drab and draughty 
 halls, we slap our knees in railway-carriages, we rattle 
 
 206
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 the plates at dinner with dialectic vehemence, we 
 sleep on the preparation of nasty epigrams, we 
 muddy our souls with that form of art known as 
 the "thumping poster." It is necessary for our 
 comfort that our opponents should be daily con- 
 victed, not only of scoundrelism wholesale, but of 
 scoundrelism retail. Every day must furnish a new 
 crisis, and an unprecedented betrayal. No Shop 
 Hours Act shall procure them a half-day's respite ; 
 the peace of Sunday itself would be intolerable if it 
 were not punctuated with thunder. It would be no 
 fantastic definition of an " active politician " to say 
 that he is a man who is always arguing with another 
 man, without ever seeing the other man's point. 
 Now it may be urged that this way of going-on 
 proves at least that we take politics seriously, and 
 treat it with respect due to it as the most important 
 of secular realities. But in fact it proves the contrary. 
 The true human response to real things is not 
 garrulity, but action. People who talk daggers 
 incessantly do not, as a rule, use even bodkins. And 
 if the excessive word is, in general, at enmity with 
 the necessary deed, there are features even more 
 disabling in the special case with which we are 
 occupied. It is the old story of destroying emphasis 
 by emphasizing everything. We have all met the 
 student who does not feel at home with his text- 
 book until he has underlined every sentence in it. 
 Political controversy — one had better say gladiator- 
 dom — is deeply infected with the same illusion. All 
 the little fishes in it talk like whales. The youngest 
 of us has lived through such a succession of 
 "tremendous crises" and "turning points in the 
 march of progress," he has seen the " final ruin of 
 the Empire " accomplished, "civilization outraged" 
 and "purity of administration poisoned at its very 
 source" so often, and on the other hand, has parti- 
 cipated in so many of the " greatest steps forward in 
 
 207
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 our time and generation " that he has become, or 
 ought to have become, somewhat critical and even 
 callous. The schoolboy who had been to Julius 
 CcEsar expressed himself as jolly glad that he had 
 not been born in ancient Rome: it was blank verse 
 all the time, and he was sure that he never could 
 have managed it. It is just as severe a tax on the 
 ordinary mind to live in a political world in which 
 it is Armageddon or the New Jerusalem all the time. 
 If garrulity, then, weakens the faculty and 
 debauches the aim of action, can it be justified on 
 the ground that it makes converts? Even if this 
 plea be stated at its strongest it will not, I think, be 
 found adequate : the size of the crop is no return for 
 the seed scattered, and the cost of the sowing. The 
 process of conversion is, as has been suggested, freaky, 
 erratic, and not reducible to any clear principles of 
 causation. The man who is led to change sides by 
 a little silent, stiff reading of books must not be 
 credited as a gain to the diurnal apparatus of contro- 
 versy with which we are now dealing. That forbids 
 silence, and does not express itself in the spacious 
 solidity of books. Indeed, English literature, so rich 
 in everything else, is singularly poor in what may 
 be called books of induction into politics. Other 
 turnovers are referable to other motives. An elector 
 will discover, for instance, that the leaders of his 
 party have expunged the not from a commandment 
 which had previously been held fundamental. He 
 does not leave the party, the party leaves him. The 
 entrance of others into the new light is consequent 
 upon careful study, and a sound prognostic, of the 
 phenomenon of feline saltation. These are not, in 
 the strict sense, converts; this point of view is indeed 
 often pressed upon them with a certain harshness of 
 language. But it ought to be noted in their favour 
 that they are among the most trustworthy of 
 politicians. You always know where to find them ; 
 
 208
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 you have only to go to the winning side. Further 
 defections and adhesions are to be ascribed to family 
 affection. A nephew, or a son-in-law, or the son of 
 a friend, is seeking a public career in the opposite 
 camp, and an elector, previously Blue, will vote 
 Yellow in order to give the young fellow a leg up. 
 The damned-shame theory will be found to cover 
 most of the remainder, and this involves a mystical 
 passion which is not really explicable at all in terms 
 ofthe platform. We must not, of course, ignore the 
 cardinal consideration that most people are not 
 convertible at all, and are never converted. Things 
 go against them, it is true, and they are left bewailing 
 the wholesomer past, and fighting a hopelesss rear- 
 guard action against the triumphant evil of the 
 present. Their children growing up in the shadow 
 of the accomplished fact do not have to renounce 
 the prejudices of their fathers : they are simply born 
 on the other side, and there is an end of the matter. 
 Whether a psychology of these processes can be 
 constructed is doubtful : certainly they root deeply 
 in human nature. Every habit is a sort of organic 
 Toryism, every idea is a Radical, at least in potentia. 
 We cannot very well get on without some equipment 
 of both, and the harmony established between them, 
 early or late, determines our politics. It is not 
 established without a struggle. It is not only in 
 Tartaran of Tarascon that two personalities conflict, 
 the one calling to labour and glory, the other to old 
 slippers and familiar delights. Some balance we 
 must reach between what is and what might be, and 
 most of us reach it pretty soon. We attach ourselves 
 to some ism, and spend the rest of our lives in dis- 
 covering gradually what it means, and why we 
 believe it to be right. We certainly do not need, 
 morning and evening, tonic draughts of dialectic to 
 confirm us. They do not make our faith better, and 
 
 p 209
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 they do keep us in a fret of censoriousness, a ferment 
 of self-praise, which cannot be good for anybody. 
 
 Our hygiene of intellect is then demonstrably at 
 fault, very much at fault. The endless iteration to 
 which we decree ourselves is defended as a necessary 
 means of " keeping the party's pecker up." M. 
 Sorel would, perhaps, think it more dignified to 
 speak of the perpetuation of the myth, or poetical 
 lie, which, in his interpretation, inspires each group 
 to the conquest of truth. Some eager spirits cannot 
 be happy unless they are constantly "rubbing it in," 
 as if wisdom was a sort of embrocation, and others 
 conceive their art as a form of hypnotism. This last 
 is the central and common idea, and the slightest 
 examination of it condemns our procedure. Our 
 methods produce boredom, and boredom happens to 
 be the one condition of mind that makes hypnotism 
 impossible. No one can be hypnotised without 
 intense concentration on his part, generated by 
 acute interest. And if our conduct of the intellect 
 is foolish, the attitude of our wills is almost wicked. 
 We ascribe to certain lines of policy — our own 
 programme, to wit — a magic potency and fruitfulness 
 which we well know they do not possess. We 
 deceive the young with extravagant hopes, the failure 
 of which plunges them into that calf-melancholy 
 which they call "disillusionment." We mislead the 
 poor with promises grossly in excess of the limitations 
 of political reform. This is no special vice of any 
 particular party; we are all in the same boat. There 
 is involved, be it noted, a grave offence to human 
 nature. We reduce the integral man to the status 
 of a mere political unit, and we then reduce his 
 politics to terms of a single factor. We treat him, 
 not as a man, but as an aspect of a point of view. 
 The fiscal controversy furnishes a clinching example 
 of this. We know that external trade policy is only 
 one element in the complicated web of causation 
 
 210
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 that makes nations prosperous or miserable. We 
 know that, whatever else may be said about the sort 
 of Protection proposed, the one thing certain is that 
 a scheme so limited will not make much difference 
 one way or the other. But we talk on both sides as 
 if nothing else in the world counted, or mattered. 
 Our pockets bulge with quack Utopias for sale to 
 the crowd : " Free Trade and big loaves for every- 
 body," "Tariff Reform and fine jobs for everybody." 
 We even insult other nations with our rhetoric. 
 Germany, the United States, France, are all Hells 
 on earth or Heavens on earth according to our bias: 
 none of them is allowed to be merely an earth on 
 earth. This habit of over-crying our goods is so 
 deeply enregistered in us that any lapse attracts 
 attention. Our Irish realism, for instance, is over- 
 whelmed with reproaches. English observers are 
 shocked or, as the case may be, exultant at what 
 they call our lack of enthusiasm at the approach of 
 Home Rule. They expect rhapsodies and sunbursts, 
 and are bewildered to find only very earnest discus- 
 sions of the probable influence of autonomy on 
 taxation and tweed, on bad roads and the beef 
 export. Every sin against the set limits of life, every 
 breaking of bounds by the practical imagination, 
 carries its own retribution with it. In the present 
 instance the penalty is heavy. It consists in the 
 ruling out of politics of the experimental method, 
 and this is a great misfortune. For the normal man 
 is not, of his own choice, a prophet. Faced with 
 one of those vast and serious problems of our intricate 
 modern life, his own impulse would lead him to try 
 some solution, to see how it worked, and to learn 
 from experience. Such scientific modesty is not 
 permitted us. The politician who does not dogmatize 
 in advance of the facts islost. Successistothemanwho 
 is more cocksure about everything than anybody ought 
 to be about anything. The Myth exacts its sacrifices. 
 
 211
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 Is there to be discerned any promise of relief? It 
 may, I think, be said that there is a glimmer, faint 
 but perceptible. The first condition of a cure is 
 certainly present, namely, a realisation of the fact 
 of disease. There is a general, vague sense of 
 malaise, a feeling that the place of politics in the 
 communal life is not what it was, and that new 
 adjustments are necessary. The suggestion appears 
 in many shapes, some of them extremely question- 
 able. The protest, or rather, the riot in ink associated 
 with the names of Mr. Belloc and the Messrs. 
 Chesterton, is perhaps the most respectable, although 
 it is by no means tiresomely respectable. Men of 
 true literary genius are nearly always feverish and 
 incompetent politicians, and these men of genius 
 have not escaped the laws of their temperament. 
 No movement was ever before so brilliantly, and so 
 variously wrong. Their campaign is wrong in 
 principle, in aim, in method, and in temper. I 
 doubt whether their followers understand in any 
 sort of vital way the full menace and horror of their 
 programme. Roughly it amounts to an assertion 
 that the ordinary citizen is insufficiently interested 
 in the conduct of the State. At present he spends 
 only about half his spare time talking politics; in 
 future he must so spend it all. He must follow, 
 clause by clause, the business of Parliament, instant 
 to detect tyranny in a comma, and enslavement in 
 a schedule. The party system — that convenient 
 canalization of political effort — must disappear. 
 Every voter must be his own leader : he must whip 
 himself up every day to whatever scratch dominates 
 his conscience for the time being. As for his general 
 attitude towards Parliament and the members of it, 
 instruction in detail cannot be given, but it must be 
 one of contempt. Only thus can the people enter 
 into its heritage. Such a programme affects me like 
 something half way between a pantomime and a 
 
 212
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 nightmare. It stupefies, it overwhelms. And why 
 has it been formulated? Because Mr. Belloc dis- 
 covered that Ministers sometimes promote their 
 relatives, and Mr. Chesterton discovered that they 
 sometimes dip their pannikins into the milky flood 
 of the Stock Exchange. To strike upon a motive 
 so trivial was bad enough ; still worse is it that the 
 blow should have come from Brutus. One could 
 understand a machine-shop Socialist like Mr. Wells, 
 whose very dreams must glisten like polished steel, 
 kicking his world to pieces because a few specks of 
 dust have got into the mechanism. But Mr. Belloc 
 and Mr. Chesterton cannot do so without a complete 
 abandonment of their philosophy. The very spiritual 
 essence of them was that they spoke up for the 
 warm, fallible, and human man against the bloodless- 
 perfect phantasms and categories. And now they 
 suddenly denounce walking because you cannot walk 
 without compromising the unsullied cleanness of 
 your boots. Losing a ship for the lack of a 
 ha'porth of tar was nothing to this : they desert 
 the ship because a few drops of tar have been spilled 
 on her snowy deck. Coventry Patmore says some- 
 where that belief in man's perfectability on earth is 
 the last proof of insanity. That is sound Catholic 
 doctrine, full of good sense and intelligent humility. 
 Nobody knows better than the authors of the League 
 for Clean Government that there never existed, and 
 never \^■ill exist, in this world an absolutely clean 
 government. There runs through the whole of the 
 material a certain obvious flaw which inhibits any 
 such ideal sculptor — that flaw which is known to the 
 highest science as Original Sin. The devil is not 
 dead, and he does not neglect his business. Where- 
 ever you look, whether in the State or in the human 
 organization of the Church, you are bound to find 
 a leaven of corruption. To suggest that in our 
 time, and not before it, this leaven has become more 
 
 213
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 noticeable and more dangerous is a flat denial of 
 facts of which neither Mr. Belloc nor the Messrs. 
 Chesterton would be guilty. One must reluctantly 
 charge them with the gravest of all political offences : 
 they have disturbed the soul of youth with impossible 
 dreams. They have committed high treason against 
 the decent finitude of life. To the workers, rejoic- 
 ing in their newly-won safeguard against destitution, 
 they have cried out a learned jeer about bread and 
 circuses: by telling men authoritatively that they 
 were slaves they have in truth enslaved them. These 
 are sad divagations, and they point to a future even 
 more sinister. Let Mr. Gilbert Chesterton keep 
 company for even a little longer with these inhuman 
 cleannesses, and he will end up as President of the 
 Eugenic Society. His brother will likely become 
 not merely a Dickensian, but a real barrister. Mr. 
 Belloc, who is an excellent economist, will wake up 
 to find himself promoting a company to suppress 
 company promoting. 
 
 The truth is that the party machine is necessary, 
 and that it is very far from being a necessary evil. 
 Only by acceptance, and the right use of it, can the 
 ordinary citizen hope to live at his maximum of poli- 
 tical efficiency, and at the same time keep something 
 of himself for that more secret spiritual activity 
 w^hich, for lack of a better name, is called culture. 
 If political life is to continue at all, bodies of men 
 must agree to act together. The moment they 
 decide on such general action — naturally on the 
 basis of ideas held in common — a party organization 
 creates itself. A constitution, officers, committees, 
 inner committees spring almost spontaneously into 
 existence. The subscriptions that needs must be 
 levied generate that awful fact, a party fund. What 
 is there to quarrel with ? For any individual mem- 
 ber of such a body to complain that he cannot 
 express through it his whole mind and temperament 
 
 214
 
 UNIMPORTANCE OF POLITICS 
 
 is absurd: it is like condemning a garden spade 
 because you cannot shave with it. There is no 
 foreshortening, and no oppression of conscience. 
 Matters on which we differ are left outside, as not 
 relevant to our Hmited and special purpose. And 
 party programmes are not static formulae, but 
 organic growths. If it seems to us that ours ought 
 to develop in certain directions it is our task to 
 explain, to argue, to canvass, to force our new ideas 
 into it by the pressure of vitality. Contempt for 
 the technical forms, under which laws are both made 
 and administered, is a wholesome exuberance of the 
 young. It helps to preserve the spirit from the letter 
 that kills, but it does not affect the clear necessity 
 for some sort of letter. Ritual is of the essence of 
 social organization. An anarchist may deny all 
 authority, but you cannot have a meeting of 
 anarchists without a chairman set in authority over 
 it. Contempt for politicians, for the type of person- 
 ality produced by their calling, is a still poorer 
 foundation. It is significant that the only skilled 
 pursuit in which the amateur sneers at the pro- 
 fessional is politics. The sneer is, moreover, wholly 
 unjustified. The ethical level of contemporary 
 "professional" politics is certainly higher than 
 that of contemporary business; its intellectual level 
 is certainly higher than that of contemporary litera- 
 ture. And, of the three, the public man has the 
 hardest task set him. He is the only citizen who 
 is obliged to choose omniscience for his specialism. 
 The nature of the relationship binding him to his 
 constituents is one of the most baffling cases in 
 casuistry, and it is for him an acute and daily 
 problem. No other man is asked to drive so difficult 
 a pair of chariot-horses as his of private ambition 
 and public duty. We must not idealize, but to me 
 he seems to make rather a better hand of his exact- 
 ing trade than we make of ours. It is the fashion 
 
 215
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 to speak of the qualities requisite for political life 
 as altogether paltry and undistinguished. M. 
 Clemenceau, for instance, when asked the other 
 day what were the claims of M. Doumergue to the 
 Premiership, replied : " He has a very loud voice." 
 But aptitude, ranging from average talent to decisive 
 genius, is a force just as dominant and unmistakable 
 in the profession of politics as in any other. The 
 contention that the pecuniary rewards are extra- 
 vagant cannot be treated seriously. You can have 
 two Members of Parliament at the nominal cost of 
 one middling Civil Servant, and at a much lower 
 real cost. A greed that is satisfied with ;^400 a 
 year is much too modest to be dangerous. 
 
 The politician invites ridicule when with Mr. Lloyd 
 George he calls himself the priest of humanity. If 
 his function sometimes approaches the sacerdotal, 
 it bears, at other times, a strong resemblance to 
 that of the scavenger. It is a specialized calling, 
 made necessary by our complex civilization, no 
 better and no worse than any other. You become 
 master of the masters of it not by barren abuse, but 
 by fruitful acceptance. In my native city it used 
 to be a bye-word of folly that a man should hire a 
 cab and run after it. There is no better wisdom in 
 creating a highly articulated system of delegation, 
 conference, and enactment, and then proceeding to 
 do personally the work that we have deputized. 
 That citizen economizes his energy best, who con- 
 cerns himself only with large principles, and leaves 
 to his appropriate specialist all matters of technique. 
 There is involved no peril to freedom. The " insolence 
 of elected persons " which angered Walt Whitman 
 is not in truth formidable. Go beyond their time 
 they cannot, and, if they go beyond their programme, 
 the evil can only be temporary. The community at 
 large is amply protected, protected above all by that 
 very palladium of liberty, the Right to Yawn. 
 
 216
 
 UNIMPORTANCE, OF POLITICS 
 
 Freezing, which is merely the yawn of water, will 
 crumble any rock. Gulliver, in the fable, delivers 
 himself from the mesh woven about his sleep by the 
 Liliputians by the simple process of stretching him- 
 self. The national organism best repels outrage not 
 by incessant twitchings, but by long, receptive, 
 silent accumulations of force duly discharging 
 themselves in the end in that muscular avalanche of 
 a yawn which is styled a General Election. In 
 addition to this regimen there is, of course, need also 
 of a philosophy. One does not like to use the term 
 pessimism ; it is a word that has kept very queer 
 company in its day. If you so much as suggest that 
 you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's lugs, 
 make a pint pot hold a quart, or butter parsnips with 
 soft words, the odds are that somebody will call you 
 a pessimist, or even a dyspeptic crank. But it is 
 very advisable that, at a reasonably raw age, a citizen 
 should, like Arnold, or rather Empedocles, decide to 
 nurse no extravagant hope. Politics can never be 
 the architect of the New Jerusalem : it is not cut 
 out to be much more than a speculative, suburban 
 builder. It is, as Lord Morley says, eminently the 
 province of the second best. Vou cannot do any- 
 thing in it without doing some harm. It is far from 
 being a patent specific against all the ills that human 
 hearts endure. Used in the way suggested it will 
 give us a world just good enough to live in. So 
 using it the citizen may hope to approximate to a 
 frugal content. With hardly a pang of envy he will 
 leave the Olympus of the illustrated papers to be 
 ruled by Tango actresses, Cabinet ministers, authors, 
 and the more select aud imaginative criminals. For 
 his part he will ripen in the joyous humiliations of 
 marriage, and the dynamic wisdom of the nursery. 
 He will devote himself to those pursuits by which 
 the soul of man is bettered: a reduction of his golf 
 handicap, music, religion, and ascetical control of 
 
 217
 
 THE DAY'S BURDEN 
 
 the enlarging girth. He will have time for picture- 
 theatres, revues, aviation meetings, dinners to 
 distinguished French Pagans, Sir George Alexander, 
 Mr. Granville Barker, the Abbey Players, and Miss 
 Horniman's repertory company. For crown of 
 his happiness, he will also have time to read the 
 admirable books of Mr. Belloc, and the two 
 Chestertons, major and minor. He may even 
 manage, although this is improbable, to keep within 
 say two novels' length of Mr. Eden Philpotts, and 
 three of Mr. Arnold Bennett, and to miss no more 
 than four or five masterpieces of Mr. John Masefield 
 in a lucky year. Upon this golden possibility I beg 
 humbly to conclude. 
 
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