T. Baron Russell

“ The most devout of the intending worshippers was a woman of, perhaps, no more than fifty, who alone took no heed, kneeling already with a rapt, ecstatic gaze that made her face almost "eerie." She was, I learned, hopelessly imbecile, and had to be led into and out of church, the only incident of her life. An appalling amount of tribulation seemed to be collected here and personified in these old women. One felt a more instinctive sympathy somehow for them than for the men, poor fellows. ”

“ We may examine, we may reason, we may reckon up almost anything; but athwart all our conjectures, charm we never so wisely, comes genius, and revolutionises everything! It is the one thing which no formula can embrace. Not in the realms of literature and art alone will it break in and stultify our best prevision. In every department of life we must tread cautiously, aware that no one who would forecast the future can afford to neglect its disturbing possibilities. ”

“ It has often been argued that epochs of high civilisation are unfavourable to poetry and the fine arts, and a well-known passage of Macaulay argues the point at some length. Whether such an epoch as that of a hundred years hence be probably fertile in art or no, assuredly appreciation of the fine arts will be widespread and acute. Of course you can never account for the extraordinary phenomenon called genius, and while it is no doubt true that genius, like everything else, is the product of its age, yet genius consistently transcends its age. ”

“ The organ, unscreened, stood in a corner, facing the congregation. An old, grey man, in spectacles, sat at the side, leaning on the bellows handle, ready to perform his duty when the Organist should give the sign.
She pulled out a few stops and uncovered the single manual. The paupers moved in their seats, leaning forward, anticipant. It was easy to gather that the air was a familiar one. At the first notes, nods and smiles of delighted recognition were exchanged. The unmusical mind only takes kindly to tunes that it knows. ”

“ The ultimate source of power is always either a steam-engine or a waterfall. A few lecture-table toys and the like are the only existing examples of machinery in which the actual source of power is electricity. Even here, it may be objected, the actual source of power is not electricity, but chemical action in the battery. But no contrivance of man is an ultimate source of power. Even a steam-engine is only a device for utilising the stored solar energy of coal. Of course man can no more create power than he can create matter: the stock of each in the universe is a fixed quantity. ”

“ As the public for fine literature decently printed becomes gradually larger, there will no longer be any object in accentuating popular ignorance by withholding from the greatest part of the public the opportunity to possess and to enjoy the best work in letters that the age is producing, and it will be possible for the poet of delicate imagination, the essayist of subtle insight, and the story-teller of restrained and modest genius, to be as well paid as the inventors of nightmare horrors and the biographers of impossibly ingenious detectives apparently are to-day. ”

“ There are no changes of ministers to nullify each other’s work and to encourage the diplomatists of other nations to procrastinate and shilly-shally over negotiations in the hope that a general election will bring in a new set of statesmen, easier to deal with. And Russia can herself procrastinate, prevaricate and play all sorts of tricks, neglect her promises, ignore her pledges, and prosecute her cryptic aims, without the smallest fear of a question in Parliament to spoil her game by letting all the world into her dark and devious secrets. ”

“ That the man who brings successfully an action at law, or successfully defends one, should be able to do so only at an expense to himself, is against public policy: and there are even now numerous cases every year in which even the unsuccessful party in a lawsuit is really doing the public a service. In a perfect state of public morality he would always be doing so: and in a hundred years’ time he will certainly be more often worthy of public thanks than he is now—he will be less often seeking to impose or defend a wrong. ”

“ It is quite evident, in addition, that the fatuous and unreasonable mystery with which for centuries the natural facts most liable to be important in adult life have been made inevitable subjects of unholy curiosity, will be swept away, to the great enhancement of sane and clean thought in girls as well as in boys, in young women even more than in young men: while the tragedies which knowledge can avert, hidden horrors of our own day that we are too sentimental to envisage, but that everyone must now and then have met with a hint of, will happily exist no more, or occur but rarely. ”

“ And the development and circumstances of very elaborate civilisation do not wholly favour the spiritual. But to conclude from this that great poetry will never again be written would be to overlook one of the disturbing, the cataclysmal factors of human life. This factor is one of the greatest pitfalls of the would-be prophet. By examining the past, one could predict almost unfailingly the future, if there were not always, and in every department of life, the strange, incalculable thing which, for want of a better name, we call genius, to be reckoned with, to be almost alarmed by. ”

“ Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manufactures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages ”

“ What we have to look for is a steady enlightenment of public ideals, issuing in the triumph of wisdom over folly, of virtue over laxity, of progress over reaction and inertia. Always there will be differences of opinion, exercising a salutary check upon hasty public action, and giving time for the establishment of harmony between the spirit of the age and the new institutions which mark its progress. ”

“ There will be no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable of. The actor’s art will be immensely elevated, not only by his relief from the drudgery of repeated performance and by the leisure thus afforded him for study and reflection, but also by the removal of what is keenly felt by all players of sensibility and ambition as one of the greatest drawbacks of the stage. ”

“ I do not for an instant believe that the actual horrors of war are the likely or possible source of peace; on the contrary, war always tends to breed war, partly through international exasperation, partly through the unashamed and cynical self-seeking of professional warriors. Peace hath her outrages no less severe than war. It is against the preparation for war, rather than against war itself, that we shall revolt. ”

“ Thus by telephone, by phonograph, and by teleautoscope, a wireless conversation will combine all the advantages of a personal interview and a written correspondence.
No doubt the post-office system of this country, despite occasional lapses, is as nearly perfect as any human institution, in the present state of society, can be reasonably expected to be. But it is equally certain that in so far as postal communication is required at all in the new age it will have to be vastly improved both as to speed and precision, compared with what we now, sometimes rather thanklessly, enjoy. ”

“ The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the [52] workers will receive. No man will be able to grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither will the present degrading temptation for every workman to perform his task as perfunctorily and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not get dismissed from work altogether, survive this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly worth every man’s while to do his work as well as he possibly can. The dignity of labour—a phrase now justly mocked—will become an elevating and delightful practicality. ”

“ We might perhaps fear that vice—either the extension of existing vices or (if that indeed be possible) the invention of new ones—might be a terrifying problem of the next century, if we had not foreseen, concurrently with the other developments anticipated, a marked moral improvement in human nature. There is in the calculations of the pessimist and the reactionary no fallacy more mischievous than the oft-recited aphorism that human nature is the same in all places and at all times. ”

“ It is always presumed that new laws can reform abuses, without changes in the spirit of the age, which gives rise to the abuses. One class of thinkers, despairing of moral improvement, considers that, immorality being irremediable, the only thing to be done is to give it sanction; as it must exist, it must be made respectable and unscandalous. Another set of reformers would penalise immorality by forbidding the guilty party in a divorce suit to re-marry, just as there are people who would prevent the physically unfit from marrying at all. ”

“ War has been alluded to above. War is too wasteful, as well as too imbecilely uncivilised, to survive this century. It may be well to inquire as to the manner in which its abolition is most likely to be brought about. We may take it for granted that no sudden political or revolutionary movement will abolish the physical conflict of peoples. “All the arts which brutalise the practical polemist” will not be abandoned at a moment’s notice on the bidding of any potentate or combination of potentates. ”

“ Literature has become, and will no doubt continue to be, increasingly self-conscious. Happy effects are deliberately sought for. Felicity of phrase is no longer a matter of unconscious, almost accidental, accomplishment; it is purposefully and deliberately obtained. We no longer expect inspiration from the Muses, but climb Parnassus with arduous consciousness of our meritorious pedestrianism. The methodical, scientific orderliness of modern thought has, in short, invaded even the field of art, and we have sometimes an air of trying to make of literature an exact process. ”

“ This terse, quick language will, after a period of reprobation, be adopted even by the less progressive newspapers, at first shocked to tears of indignant printer’s ink by the defilement of the mother tongue, and it will accelerate vastly the task of “running through the paper,” a task which must, even in the less hurried manners which I foresee for the future, be made as speedy as possible by the newspaper that would thrive and increase its circulation. Thus literature, already restive in an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain divorce from daily journalism. ”

“ People who are crowded into towns, where they are out of constant touch with Nature and the immensities of space, and lead a hurried, busy existence unfavourable to deep thought and mysticism, are much less liable to yearn for some explanation of the vast incomprehensible universe, the profound misgivings of the soul, than people who have other opportunities, who know the massive face of solitude and have lain under the inscrutable stars. ”

“ Looking, as everyone not hidebound by pessimism must look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving class when the system of party politics, already beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we have every reason to expect that the true uses of education will be perceived and attained long before the end of the period contemplated when we speak of the new age. ”

“ Religion having been declared to rest upon the irrefragable rock of Holy Scripture, there appeared to many excellent people an urgent necessity that science should be set right, that the theory of Evolution (by which was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must be disproved: otherwise all faith must go by the board, and the world must descend into pure materialism. The Biblical criticism produced in Germany, and apparently received in the very heart of the Christian camp, seemed to plain men not merely to assail this irrefragable rock but to strike at the roots of religion itself. ”

“ What is currently called the growth of sentimentalism in modern life is really the development of modern conscience. No doubt the abolition of judicial torture was at one time regarded as a mark of absurd sentimentality; and the opinion has already been expressed that a vast amelioration of public morality is in store for the new age. A great element in the conflict between comfort on the one hand and competition on the other will be economy of means. That is why the new age will, among other things, be an age of economy. ”

“ Most likely it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been, that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-civilised ages are in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic splendour and popular misery. ”

“ Not because they will be “short” of time will our descendants thus arrange their lives, but because they wish to reserve as much time as possible for culture (physical as well as intellectual) and for thought; which the better distribution of wealth and labour will facilitate; while labour itself, everywhere performed intelligently and with interest, will be no longer irksome. The working man will ply his trade with zest—working for himself and family—instead of seeking every opportunity to shirk and evade it. ”