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abolish the Hand, since it did abolish the Handicraft.
I admit that monks have their own reasons for shaving their
heads or nuns for cutting off their hair; but my advice
to humanity outside such ecstasies would be to remain calm
and keep its hair on. That a man should surrender his luxury
is one thing; that mankind should surrender its liberty
to deal with the problem of luxury is quite another.
It is one thing to impoverish oneself; it is quite another
responsibility to impoverish a whole cultural system of its culture.
I might or might not be the better for giving up wine; I am absolutely
certain that the world would not be better for giving up wine.
Mr. Middleton Murry may be moved by a noble impulse to give up
private property, but I do not for one single moment believe
that humanity would be happier for giving up private property.
As a matter of fact, it is exactly this sort of sweeping destruction
that has made it unhappy. The modern Capitalist world, which we unite
to curse, actually came out of that notion of utterly abandoning the old
for the promise of the new. Men said about the business of scarring
English hills with rails or rolling English villages in smoke,
exactly what Mr. Murry is now saying about sacrificing ancient
faith or freedom and taxing moderate property out of existence.
They said, as he does, that it was sad, that it was hard, that it
called for a heroic sacrifice; but that we must not be sentimentalists
clinging to the past, but must look to the brighter and broader future.
And the brighter future was the epoch of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Ford.
Capitalism was actually founded by urging a new realism against an
old romanticism. The answer is that it was not necessary for a whole
society to give up beauty; and it is not necessary for a whole society
to give up liberty. And if we look back at history, we shall see
that these sweeping social renunciations have done nothing but harm.
Over all America lies like an incubus the cold corpse of Puritanism,
because one fervid generation thought that man must say farewell for ever
to priests as well as play-actors, to sacraments as well as feasts.
In short, men were asked to sacrifice everything for Calvinism as they
are now asked to sacrifice everything for Communism. But though man
may sacrifice anything, Everyman must not sacrifice everything.
Individual men must sacrifice their own liberties, but only to
restore liberty. And it is a grand irony that, while the cultured
Communist (with all respect to him) is rending everybody else's garments
and scattering ashes on other people's heads, away in many quiet places,
on the hills of Lanark or deep in my own Buckingham beech-woods,
priests and friars who have themselves renounced private property
are rebuilding the farms and families of Distributism.
-/-
THE BACKWARD BOLSHIE
AFTER all, the Bolshevist is really a Victorian. His is a
nineteenth-century dream, even if it be a twentieth-century reality.
It is notably so in the aspect which now makes the dream a nightmare;
I mean the mad optimism about the advantages of machinery.
What was offered to us as a Five Years Hence Plan ought really to have
been called a Fifty Years Ago Plan. For they are only trying to do
with Russia exactly what the Victorians did actually do with England;
turn it into the workshop of the world and fill it with dirty tools
and dismal mechanics. Marx was much more of a Victorian than Morris.
He may not have been technically a subject of Queen Victoria, though it
is quite likely that he was. By geographical extraction I suppose
he was a German--like Queen Victoria's husband and more remotely,
Queen Victoria herself. By real or racial extraction he was a Jew;
like Queen Victoria's favourite Prime Minister and a good many other
persons unnecessary to mention. But the late Victorian period was
the very period at which the Jews, and especially the German Jews,
were at the very top of their power and influence. From the time
when they forced the Egyptian War to the time when they forced
the South African War, they were imperial and immune. Certainly much
more so than they are now; for the Jews are now being jumped on very
unjustly in Germany itself, and old Victorians like Mr. Belloc and myself,
who began in the days of Jewish omnipotence by attacking the Jews,
will now probably die defending them. Anyhow, Karl Marx did not
differ from any number of Victorian Jews in type or externals.
He lived mostly in England, and launched his world religion from
something more British than the British Empire: the British Museum.
The Beard which moves Mr. Wells to impatience was simply the beard
of Victorian romance; the beard of Tennyson and Longfellow and Trollope.
And though his plan has been very imperfectly applied in the one place
in the world where he would have said it could not be applied at all
(for this true Victorian saw the great commercial cities of Western Europe
as the only possible battlefields of the future) it has all the character
of a new and rather barbaric people imitating something that is
already stale, not to say stinking, for civilised people. It was exactly
like the very Victorian incident of the industrialising of Japan.
That is, it was and is something essentially behind the times.
The Japanese wear billycock hats presumably under the impression that we
admire billycock hats. But, whatever just vengeance may fall upon
our hats, this is to do an injustice to our heads. Now, as a matter
of fact, our heads have in many ways advanced a little, since the days
when our own Five Year Plan filled England with filth and smoke.
Some rather deeper questions have arisen; questions about the individual,
about the purpose of life, about religion in history, and so on.
Philosophy, even Thomist philosophy, is heard again in Paris and Oxford.
Now Marx had no more philosophy than Macaulay. The Marxians
therefore have no more philosophy than the Manchester School.
It was enough for Macaulay to rejoice in the mere excitement
of extension, in the hope that "the roofs and chimneys of a new
Manchester may rise in the wilds of Connemara." Similarly, it is
enough for the Moscow Marxians to hope that the roofs and
chimneys of a new Manchester may rise in the wilds of Siberia.
It is true that the original Manchester men desired competition
while the Marxians desire combination; or the Combine
of All Combines. But the competition ended in a Combine
and the Combine has not really ended in a Communist State.
For it seems clear that grades of unequal wages do exist in
Bolshevist Russia, and the Bolshevist rulers can only explain
that it is a temporary necessity at this political stage and
that true, pure, perfect Communism will come in the future.
It might be the Labour Party, mightn't it?
But to carry competition to any lengths, because it is the fashion,
or to carry combination to any lengths because it is the fashion,
is not a Philosophy. A philosophy begins with Being; with the end
and value of a living thing; and it is manifest that a materialism
that only considers economic ethics, cannot cover the question at all.
If the problem of happiness were so solved by economic comfort,
the classes who are now comfortable would be happy, which is absurd.
This humourless hammering on one note is like the worst Victorian fads;
Temperance or Feminism. It is especially like that very old-fashioned
Feminism that hated to be feminine. I am told that in Russia men
and women dress roughly alike. But, mark you, that does not mean
that men wear flowers in their hair or trail about in those noble
pontifical robes with which tradition clothed every woman like a queen.
It means that women dress like men; not that men dress like women.
Now that is sheer stark, stale, dead Victorianism.
That is the only original Woman's Rights Woman, who deliberately made
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