It is very difficult to avoid what seem to be rhetorical phrases in describing this age of ours: the age which some profess to find prosy and materialistic in comparison with the earlier age when a handful of plethoric land-owners ruled England, and little children worked in filthy rooms for twelve hours a day, and cut-throats, in most charming costumes, slew each other in the fields of London. I have not the least desire to use rhetoric; I do but express my feeling, and what I take to be the feeling of “advanced” people generally, as it comes to me. But in this poetry there is the solidity of scientific prose. Some time ago I sailed slowly toward Teneriffe from the south. Eighty miles away, on a fine morning, the summit of the Peak showed its delicate contour in the clouds, hardly distinguishable from them. We thought it an illusion, a simulating cloud, because far below the summit the blue sky seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The Peak floated in the air. But, as we drew nearer, the blue band below it grew thinner, and at last it disclosed the massive bulk of the supporting mountain.
Speaking as a sober student of history and science, I say that this dream of a brighter and happier earth rests on no less solid a foundation. We see primitive man, blindly, and with infinite slowness, move towards civilisation: we see civilisation slowly, with many a tragic interruption, advance toward the modern age: and now we see the pace quicken enormously, and we find a new consciousness of power and a deliberate aim at higher things bear the race onward. The reformer’s belief in the future is a scientific deduction from the past.
The failure of the mass of people to co-operate in the realisation of this ideal is due, not to indolence or stupidity, but to the obsessing influence of the old traditions. They choke the fires of the mind: they make us insensible to the real enormity of a great deal of our social arrangements. Hence it is that the reformer’s appeal is cast so frequently in a negative or aggressive form. The most powerful thing in our world is, not truth, but untruth; and the most important thing in the world is to assail it. “Great is truth, and it will prevail,” said an ancient writer. But the civilisation which gave birth to that sentiment died, and all its promising young truths perished with it, and Europe fell under the rule of lies for more than a thousand years. Untruth is millennia older than truth. Its roots run deep into the flesh of the heart, while the rootlets of truth are struggling for a frail clasp in the intellect. Great is untruth, and it will prevail—unless it is attacked unceasingly. No untruth ever died a natural death. Being the sacred truth of yesterday, it is usually entrenched in powerful corporations, embodied in the law and life of nations, enshrined in the tenacious affections of the millions. At one time you incurred sentence of death if you challenged it: now you incur slander, misrepresentation, and mockery. The race has been made docile to it by a kind of negative Eugenic—perhaps we ought to say Cacogenic—selection. Yet nearly everything which the majority venerate as truth to-day began its career as heresy and will end it as lie.
So the first task of the well-wisher of mankind is to distinguish truth from untruth in our traditions. The story of man is a long story of the tyranny of consecrated shams, with occasional intervals of rebellion and advance to a higher stage. Rebellion is the salt of the earth. There comes a time in the history of every civilisation when the mind of a few rises high enough to survey critically that stream of traditions in which the majority lazily float. Then comes the inevitable revolt; hence the close kinship which we feel across the ages with “the Preacher,” with Socrates, with Omar Khayyám, with Erasmus, with Molière. We are at the same stage of evolution, with the difference that we moderns have an immense mass of knowledge of history and pre-history to aid us in testing the value of our traditions. Already we have discarded scores of old dogmas: in religion, politics, education, law, and every department of our common life. It would be folly to attempt to fence off any province of our life from this critical scrutiny. And since we obstinately retain many traditions which a very high proportion of properly educated people regard as unsound and mischievous, since these traditions are the chief obstacle to the advance of the race, one of the most pressing needs of our time is, surely, a stern campaign for the abolition of this tyranny of shams.
Footnote
1 ↑ This chapter is, with a few alterations, reproduced from The English Review, October 1914.
CHAPTER II THE MILITARY SHAM
In the original conception of this work militarism was selected as the first sham to be assailed because it is at once the most costly and the least excusable. The way to remove many of the blots on our civilisation is by no means plain. A dozen conflicting theories confront you, and each has a sufficiently large body of adherents to entitle it to consideration. But there are others in regard to which a large and practical measure of agreement has been reached. Here we do not need so much the subtle dissection of arguments and proposals as the kindling of that ardent and imperious sentiment which spurs a man or a race to action. The evil is recognised: the way to remedy it is sufficiently clear. What we need is, in the mass of the people, that fiery resentment of a hated tyranny which will shake the lie from its throne.
The first, the gravest, the most flagrant and most vivid in our minds at the moment of these obvious shams is war, with the military system which it involves. Here there is no sacred legend of a divine origin to confuse the minds of the ignorant. There are legends of divine approval, it is true, but the clergy do not press them and they have little influence. War is a practice or institution which we clearly trace to the wild impulses and imperfect social forms of early man: even to the sheer passion of the beast that was still strong in him. No sophistry can obscure this bestial origin. We men and women of the twentieth century cling to one feature, at least, of an age on which we look back with high disdain: an age with which we would bitterly resent any comparison in point of intelligence and feeling. We may try to gild it with glittering phrases about a nation’s honour, but we know, all the while, that the honour of a nation no more demands that it shall dye its hands in the blood of a sister-nation than the honour of an individual requires so barbaric a consolation.
We maintain this sham in an age when mechanical progress has made such strides that it has turned the industry of war into our chief and most oppressive occupation. We cannot, with all our sacrifices, find the means to carry out most urgent reforms in our social life; we cannot put flesh on the bones and light in the eyes of poor children, or ease the lives of worn workers and helpless widows; because we need these, and even greater resources, to sharpen the sabre for our neighbour’s throat and enlarge the calibre of the tube that will scatter a hail of death. We have for years stood in such attitude confronting each other, we civilised nations, that on any day of any year the bugle might peal, and the soil and seas of Europe be reddened with blood, and the pain which knows no remedy shoot through millions of homes; and now the tragedy has opened , grimmer than the dourest prophet had ever pictured it. Why have we done this? Ultimately, because man, the primeval savage, knowing nothing