What’s Wrong with the World quotes

But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly.

Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede.

This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility;

Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life.

Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth.

Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous.

But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease.

Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache.

Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.

We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book “What Is Wrong with the World,” but the rather wild title refers only to one point.

What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy—the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man.

It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man.

Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work.

A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all.

It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.

It is then necessary to drop one’s daily agnosticism and attempt rerum cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man may mend it.

It has no philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.

There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner when he is backed.

There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the murder was efficient.

People have begun to be terrified of an improvement merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting Education Bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite.

while in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they will admit.

Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It is merely concealed, like a sin.

Dr. Clifford really wants a theological atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something might be done for them.

It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.

Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog.

So a Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its way;

But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision.

Believers bump into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other’s way.

A creed is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our existing divisions. They keep out of each other’s way;

They keep out of each other’s way; the Tory paper and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare.

For the sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.

The really burning enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy’s arguments as eagerly as a spy would listen to the enemy’s arrangements.

he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat.

Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters.

To all this plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who is not there.

It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil.

The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future.

Evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground;

there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough.

An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.

The Boer War, for instance, was coloured not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea.

Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society.

The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-By, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children.

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Napoleon.

I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals.

I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals.

They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this:

They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.

Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back.

He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. Tomorrow is the Gorgon;

He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some call Nirvana.

Tomorrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday.

If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone.

When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists—or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint?

I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.

This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination.

We often read nowadays of the valour or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother.

The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true freethinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know what to answer.

That which was prevented is always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered.

Exactly because Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief or incidental.

that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French Revolution has half succeeded and half failed.

but certainly it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed.

He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket.

So strong is our faith in this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenu by pedigree;

Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all over it.

The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look at a king; unless it is a very tame cat.

Even where the press is free for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you could say “The K⸺ of Br⸺rd is a profligate.”

Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples.

History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt builder.

This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.

the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt builder.

This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.

On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth.

There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun.

If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal, and that is to do it.

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old.

Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of history.

Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house.

Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to be let into it.

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing.

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea.

God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything.

In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them;

The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colours he admires; but he can paint his own house with what colour he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice.

Property is merely the art of the democracy.

It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits;

But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s. When they remove their neighbour’s landmark, they also remove their own.

A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle.

A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith’s garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown’s. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbour’s.

The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure.

The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon.

All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.

The two must hold each other to do justice to each other.

If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

The two must hold each other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.

The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for maintenances.

An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other people’s wives.

And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern “problem plays” is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard day’s work.

And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all “advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy.

It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter.

But he is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls.

Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.

Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working model for the present inquiry.

But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like.

For a plain, hardworking man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to.

Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train.

But a railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts.

An idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.

For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the earth.

He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.

Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler.

The great lords will refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds.

They will deny him the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.

Gladstone, a Mr. Wyndham, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, a Buxton. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Wyndham, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Buxton.

If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.

The explanation is simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong.

Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions; it does not preserve anything except game.

Who would dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition.

So whenever a seventeenth-century noble was caught pulling down a peasant’s fence and stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and thus diverted the simple peasant’s attention.

The great Puritan lords created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land.

They saved their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money, by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit—

But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace.

Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live tomorrow.

Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home.

He asked for so little, and he has been offered so much.

He has been offered bribes of worlds and systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.

The purpose of this chapter is sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pis aller, a desperate second best—like teetotalism.

I do not propose to prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that it is a medicine and not a wine.

The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind.

The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate.

But the world will be like a brokenhearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world’s deliverance, but it is not the world’s desire.

Therefore, both Emily and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them with no conceivable cause, except the climate.

The tragic woman becomes contented, and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.

To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only objection is that it is an illusion of comfort;

It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which it can only share.

It is a love of living with one’s inferiors.

The notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and conservative people;

No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties begins.

The materialists analyse the easy part, deny the hard part and go home to their tea.

It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room song of my youth which began “In the gloaming, O my darling,” was vulgar enough as a song;

The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real human enigma. Comic Cuts deals with the difficulty wrongly; but it would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty rightly.

The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.

But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it “the very nadir and scoff of good conversationalists.”

a charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with the sharing of something in a simple style.

Two men should share an umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.

“For He maketh His sun to shine. …” This is the second element in the weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe.

Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation.

Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

Briefly, in the mere observation “a fine day” there is the whole great human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those broad and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it;

Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars.

It is the dreadful voice of Love, seeking to destroy Comradeship.

All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasising that we are all under the same cosmic conditions.

It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic.

Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word “affinity.” There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members, men and women, call each other “Comrade.” I have no serious emotions, hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit:

The old writers were entirely wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poetical seesaw.

There are only three things in the world that women do not understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

But men (a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the breath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool camaraderie.

only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common sense of the other sex.

There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.

it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these things so long as it is honourable; comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the smell of abominable things.

Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean.

It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honourable cure; and that is the strict discipline of a monastery.

People who hold these views are not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observe before any newcomer in a tavern—that is the real English law.

The first man you see from the window, he is the King of England.

The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality.

It is worth while to mention that one name especially, because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was “harsh and despotic.” It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic.

Johnson was not in the least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting crowd.

The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that of football.

The philosophic opponent of democracy would substantially sum up his position by saying that it “will not work.” Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the assumption that working is the one test of humanity.

Heaven does not work; it plays.

Men are most themselves when they are free; and if I find that men are snobs in their work but democrats on their holidays, I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays.

The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men.

Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility.

Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all.

It is simply the remains of a military organisation, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam.

The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief.

The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, which merely means officers in the European army against the contemporary Yellow Peril.

Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong.

This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul.

If soap boiling is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civilisation really cannot get on with democracy, so much the worse for civilisation, not for democracy.

Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern.

I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.

Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred.

You can only knock off the King’s head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times.

Destruction is finite; obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever.

It is only with great difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has four or five legs to stand on.

Almost all the old institutions are quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.

Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six purposes; everywhere now there are six small things;

But it has also decided, among other things, that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism shall be divided between the sexes.

Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad and certain things.

But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common sense) must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality.

She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women.

Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad.

The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs.

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe?

How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?

No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

But though the essential of the woman’s task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity;

we men have so much encouraged each other in throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance.

Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a halfpenny ever since I was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative;

Thrift is not a small or timid or provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for everything.

For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred.

But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe.

The only certain rule on this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. “Women” is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter; but it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of Oriental cynicism and hedonism.

Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of women is only a harem broken loose.

I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women individually;

No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be stately, impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity

The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.

The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival of Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over the bride is really a net.

I gravely doubt whether women ever were married by capture. I think they pretended to be; as they do still.

It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to crush it;

while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even admiration.

To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully was unpardonable.

The most barefaced duelist might almost brandish his weapon. But the executioner was always masked.

This is the first essential element in government; coercion; a necessary but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicisms of modernity.

Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.

A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the belief is his only sanction.

In this sense each citizen has the high responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal.

In a republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.

All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government which is not only coercive, but collective. There are only two kinds of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.

Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective kind of riot, a riot of the rich.

The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy, sophists like Disraeli and Nietzsche, have never claimed for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental virtues, courage, variety and adventure.

To her, almost certainly, are due all those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking for being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty.

This unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever called it fatherwit.

Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy when it works well. And we ought to realise that in one half of the world—the private house—it does work well.

This unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever called it fatherwit.

Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy when it works well.

And we ought to realise that in one half of the world—the private house—it does work well.

There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de-lis, the turnkey’s chains or the hangman’s halter. You need not strangle a man if you can silence him.

The branded shoulder is less effective and final than the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can lock him out.

The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes.

Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tomboy; but every boy is brought up like a tame girl.

The flesh and spirit of femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanised by being born.

If they are unmarried they must be commercial; if they are commercial they must be political. We must have new rules for a new world—even if it be not a better one.” I said to a Feminist once: “

The question is not whether women are good enough for votes: it is whether votes are good enough for women.

” He only answered: “Ah, you go and say that to the women chain-makers on Cradley Heath.”

But if these things are unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each other. I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must have unwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs.

Industrial soot and political printer’s ink are two blacks which do not make a white.

Most of the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy the womanhood. That is the only difference.

Industrial soot and political printer’s ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Most of the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills.

But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy the womanhood. That is the only difference.

Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower with many windows, the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the specialists, go forth;

But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing.

They are engaged in a very widespread and flourishing industry of the present age. They are making chains.

Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in chains.

To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is the epilogue.

Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things clear.

Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about it. The thing is always a new colour; a strange star.

Every birth is as lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.

On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that is, that one could calculate on them beforehand.

only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that make life whole.

The only essential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly.

But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in the madder novels of Zola (such as that called The Human Beast;

When all such deductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship, not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt.

We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy.

But we shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under the vengeance of the flesh.

that men of prominence and position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather alike; but they really mean quite different things.

Faith and creed do not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to be the Latin for faith.

Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether hygiene was …

… about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively late in life that I saw the main fact about it.

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.

It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things.

it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other as a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison.

Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain.

but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology; it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.

Theology and education are to each other as a love-letter to the General Post Office.

Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

Education is not a thing like theology; it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other as a love-letter to the General Post Office.

Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational.

It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike; the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education.

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

we can create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good until we have conceived it.

It is odd that these people, who in the matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of environment seem almost to believe in miracle.

They insist that nothing but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of the children.

that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom.

Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?

Thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men;

Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence.

Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human.

It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is: it is an interference with life and growth.

Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human.

It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.

In short, it is what all human action is: it is an interference with life and growth.

But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children.

Today we all use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.

The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less.

he claims the right to make his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call civilisation wavers and falls to pieces.

Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men.

I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is (of course) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe.

I am entirely on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against this almost bestial ignorance about boys.

But I do think it a little unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers, should denounce them for playing at robbers.

I do think that those who understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To sum it up in one sentence:

In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is as high.

The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are forbidden; there is no pretence, there can be no pretence, that the boy would think so.

But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of the House of Lords: it does not pretend to be representative. These innovators are always talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy.

I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are; but I am sure she is more humble.

But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity. Light (he says) should be brought into darkness;

We may now say that if education is an abstract expansion, there is no lack of it. There is far too much of it. In fact, there is nothing else.

There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most people are educated wrong.

The state schools were not the first schools, but among the last schools to be established; and London had been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error is a highly practical one.

This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd.

They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at.

All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times—it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can.

The school, in fact, has the responsibility of universal rivalry. We need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness.

But here we demand a light that can conquer light.

It lies in the fact that the colours are presented in the wrong connection, on the wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive.

It is not colours he lacks, but a philosophy of colours.

In short, there is nothing wrong with Reckitt’s Blue except that it is not Reckitt’s. Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss.

It lies in the fact that the colours are presented in the wrong connection, on the wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colours he lacks, but a philosophy of colours.

In short, there is nothing wrong with Reckitt’s Blue except that it is not Reckitt’s.

Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very large scale.

it would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they have to teach people to relish colours like liqueurs.

They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters.

If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the twelfth.

The point is not that we have lost the material hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint box and are left alone with a gray lead-pencil.

We are like children who have mixed all the colours in the paint box together and lost the paper of instructions.

Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.

for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools.

I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public.

I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property;

In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality.

It would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn.

It is incontrovertibly true that to medievalize the public schools would be to democratise the public schools. Parliament did once really mean (as its name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk.

The aristocratic educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen; and they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning out citizens.

I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the citizens?

I know that the boy in “Etons” is stiff with a rather silly and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that is called being a citizen.

Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters are teaching only the narrowest code of manners.

Let it be granted that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being learnt.

It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never fulfil their visions or satisfy their souls.

Perhaps the old public schools are (as I personally think they are) ultimately weakening the country rather than strengthening it, and are therefore, in that ultimate sense, inefficient.

But there is such a thing as being efficiently inefficient.

You can make your flying ship so that it flies, even if you also make it so that it kills you. Now the public school system may not work satisfactorily, but it works;

So I think it will generally be with the creator of social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his concessions will be useless.

He must brace himself to bear his fate; he shall have nothing but his heart’s desire.

Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same sort of success and solid splendour as the French democratic politics.

I believe there is a real sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue.

By a strange inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants.

The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he thought so practical.

John M. Robertson, should be opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical party.

Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat is Greek?

A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of the English public schools.

it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this stage the bully is not a braggart.

The proverb says that bullies are always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy.

As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public schools, I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a double implication.

The nice gentleman never refers to anyone else’s father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own. That is the only difference, the rest is the public school manner. But Eton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because they consist so largely of parvenus.

The public school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats, like an asylum, a place where they go in and never come out. It is a factory for aristocrats; they come out without ever having perceptibly gone in.

The poor little private schools, in their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, “For the Sons of Gentlemen only.” If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed “For the Fathers of Gentlemen only.”

It is a factory for aristocrats; they come out without ever having perceptibly gone in. The poor little private schools, in their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, “For the Sons of Gentlemen only.”

If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed “For the Fathers of Gentlemen only.”

In two generations they can do the trick.

He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that Charles I is a matter of what did happen—or did not.

He is Liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race.

He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a notion that politics should deal with the known.

I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment.

Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing.

I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man’s coat, steal another man’s wit, apostatise to another man’s creed, or poison another man’s coffee, all without ever telling a lie.

I only say it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity.

The public school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable; but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.

This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the English political system, and to some extent in the English character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual self-indulgence.

But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off) the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor.

For a duty is a virtue that one can’t do.

And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public school tradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it is pleasant.

They say (if I remember right) that a public school man is clean inside and out.

As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean.

As if everyone did not know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business to clean.

They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating.

Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform.

They never reform the reform which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have votes;

But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform which is often very much wanted.

Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance.

Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o’clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o’clock;

and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible. As Mr. Blatchford says, “The world does not want piety, but soap—and Socialism.”

Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.

These “healthy” ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an impoverished democracy.

A gentleman is expected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to be wet.

A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot than Michelangelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he is covered with blood.

Nor have these extenders of the public school tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the poor;

I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast clothes of the rich.

One man moves into another man’s clothes as he moves into another man’s house.

No wonder that our educationists are not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat’s secondhand trousers, when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat’s secondhand ideas.

The poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men.

The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it.

The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilisation;

In the lower classes the schoolmaster does not work for the parent but against the parent.

Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority.

Instead of their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich.

There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humour and heart of the populace in the popular education.

There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation.

And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman.

All the educational reformers did was to ask what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young chimney sweeps.

What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong place.

Boys play football, why shouldn’t girls play football; boys have school-colours, why shouldn’t girls have school-colours; boys go in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn’t girls go in hundreds to day-schools;

And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her watercolours, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable.

She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity.

Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run.

To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep …

… the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever.

This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity.

And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her watercolours, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable.

it is not their fault if they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution.

Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel.

The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” And Burke, the iron evolutionist, essentially answered, “No;

There has risen high in recent history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the future—which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who live in the future.

It is typical of our time that it has to look for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite adoration of the insect.

Like most things we call new, of course, it is not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes bees seriously, but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as he wrote about them.

But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down at the insects, but looks up at the insects; that asks us essentially to bow down and worship beetles, like the ancient Egyptians.

Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always carries a magnifying glass.

In the terrible crystal of his lens we have seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies and hierarchies of warriors and queens.

With the state they are doing this: they are sharpening its machinery, they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before.

While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially the stings.

Indeed, some schemes of Labour and Poor Law reform recently advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Apparently, progress means being moved on—by the police.

because it might seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar things. I wish specially to insist on the fact that mending and ending are opposite things.

You mend a thing because you like it; you end a thing because you don’t.

To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do believe in the family;

But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is a convenience, like a door scraper.

An umbrella is a necessary evil. A walking stick is a quite unnecessary good.

This, I fancy, is the real explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of people losing walking sticks. For a walking stick is a pleasure, a piece of real personal property; it is missed even when it is not needed.

it is missed even when it is not needed. When my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he has stood up in out of the rain.

Anybody can forget a necessary thing.

If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking stick.

I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile.

A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand.

Yet they are as different as a battle-axe and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and, partly, attack.

The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked.

Cooking is an art; it has in it personality and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.

I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to rags.

… told pretty sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and try to equalise property.

The overwhelming mass of the English people at this particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic.

They are as domestic as they can manage, they are much more domestic than the governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough money.

for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism.

If we are to save property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionise the nation.

I think the latter solution the finer and more fully human, because it makes each man (as somebody blamed somebody for saying of the Pope) a sort of small god.

A man on his own turf tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than is required.

But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this vista of argument, instead of opening it.