Joseph McCabe

“ 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. ”

“ The soil of the planet is wet with blood and tears, and a great part of this inhuman rain might be arrested. Much has been done: it is just that which stings. You cannot look back on the darkness from which the race has issued without perceiving that man has the power to transform the face of the earth: without entertaining a reasoned and coldly intellectual conviction that a day will yet dawn on this planet when laughter, as of children on May morning, will ring from pole to pole, and life, for all its work, will be a holiday. ”

“ Surely those old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation? And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome and Bagdad, of Venice and Genoa and Florence, pass before their anxious eyes. In each case, they remind us, this same moral, social, and intellectual restlessness preceded death.
The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than sectional. ”

“ Those of us who have lost nothing can most sincerely salute both the men who exposed their lives in a just cause and the women who endured as women do. The soldier’s trade is an honourable trade while the need for it lasts, and at such a time it calls for respect and gratitude. But how stupid and brutal in the last degree is the system that imposes these sacrifices, when we reflect that the honour or the rights of any nation could have been vindicated without the darkening of a single home or the loss of a single citizen. ”

“ But a blind and undiscriminating devotion to flag or king, a glorification of our national family above others in the roystering fashion of the Middle Ages, a refusal to ask if the demands of our rulers are just or if the interests we are pressed to support are sound and equitable, an obstinate pride in a thing because it is British or German, whether it be wise or no—these are sentiments entirely at variance with the best spirit of our age. We may recognise that even the crude old patriotism has contributed much to the advance of civilisation. ”

“ Ten thousand million sterling, perhaps, poured into the sea in eighteen months: ten million men, perhaps, prematurely blasted off the earth or stricken for life: and a trail of blood and tears and misery that all the mighty fertility of the earth will take a generation to obliterate! Nor does this outpour of horror merely mean that one feature of our life needs reconsideration. We could not have retained this military machine, with its ever-present danger of an appalling calamity, if our minds were generally sane, alert, unclogged by shams. ”

“ But it is better for the moment to confine ourselves to that pitiful fourth of the community which lives in degrading poverty because it has only irregular or wretchedly paid employment. Is it an exaggeration to suspect that this vast acreage of poverty will make the future historian hesitate to class us as civilised?
Our social structure is of the nature of a pyramid. At its apex, glittering in the sun, calling forth our pride and praise, are culture and wealth and power, and all the fine things they bring into existence. ”

“ The old faith is growing dim in our minds, and we have a suspicion that the thousands of men and women who, each night, terminate a life of pain or struggle or burden, will never see the sun rise again, on this or any other planet. We know that every decade in which we put off, with worn and hollow phrases, the abandonment of old errors, sees another generation pass away with just the same scars and traces of pain as those which scored the hearts of the dead two, and four, and six thousand years ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is sometimes said in their favour that they employ labour with their wealth. I have heard bishops give them this foolish consolation. As if the wealth would cease to exist, and to employ labour, if it were in the pockets of a thousand men, instead of the pockets of one Duke of Norfolk or Duke of Westminster! The only difference would be that this wealth, instead of paying a thousand servants and trades-people to work for the comfort of one family, would pay a thousand men, who would lose nothing by the change of employment, to produce comfort for a thousand families. ”

“ But I say that, in this military system, we are enthroning the hollowest and most ghastly sham that ever deluded humanity: that, when we have the courage or wisdom to strip it of its tinselled robes, we will shudder at sight of the gaunt frame of death which has ruled civilisation for so many thousand years: that nothing is wanting but the general will to dethrone this mockery of a god: and that, when we have abolished militarism and war, we shall advance along the way of social improvement with far lighter steps and vastly increased resources. ”

“ One is, indeed, tempted sometimes to wonder whether there was not more zeal for culture among the workers half a century ago than there is to-day. When you listen to a conversation, of workers or of average middle-class people, on politics or theology or some other absorbing topic, you are astounded at the slender amount of personal thinking and the slavery to phrases which they have heard. Their minds seem to resemble the screen of a kaleidoscope, on which the coloured phrases they have read in journals or cheap literature weave automatic patterns. ”

“ It is obviously true that these empires became big, powerful, and wealthy by war; and if any nation candidly confesses that it relies on war to increase its territory, its power, and its wealth, its argument is unanswerable. But there is now no nation in the world that professes to maintain an army and a navy for the purpose of aggression and expansion. Even Germany, which undoubtedly did construct its massive armament for that purpose, had not the audacity to admit it. Defence is the justifying title and, in so far as it is sincere, it is a just title. ”

“ It remains true that our race owes the position it occupies entirely to mind: that our civilisation owes its ascendancy over barbarism to mind: and that we rely entirely on the further cultivation of mind—of intelligence, will, and emotion—to destroy those shams which impede our progress and curtail our prosperity and happiness. It is ludicrous to say that we cannot thus cultivate mind unless we believe it to be an indivisible and incomprehensible and indefinable something. ”

“ It is dreadful materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice to refuse it. ”

“ Your predominant feeling, when you round the globe and see with your own eye its limitations, is one of power. This sphere, you feel, is the principality of man; and there never was a power so despotic and far-reaching as the power of a united race would be. You feel as if the earth could be embraced in the arms of a giant, and humanity is the giant. If men were agreed in their designs, the earth would be as clay in the hand of the potter. ”

“ Blind to this ghastly tragedy of history, we have maintained and cherished militarism until it has brought on us in turn the greatest catastrophe that a single year ever embraced. Probably our grandchildren, probably many a child that gazes now with wide eyes on our troops and banners, will look back on our civilisation with amazement. They may smile at a drill-sergeant like Count von Moltke telling illiterate rustics of the glorious moral qualities which war develops in—the men who traversed Belgium! But we civilians will honestly puzzle them. ”

“ Most of us will admit that in a social order at all resembling our own—and I do not care to speculate about Utopian or imaginable orders—the power to win advantages for one’s children as well as for oneself is a sound incentive to work. But the wish to relieve one’s descendants of the need to work, to make them for ever a burden on the community, is a perverse ideal. It is one of those unsound primitive traditions which we detect in the actual stream of our ideas and sentiments, and instances are not unknown in our time of such holders of hereditary wealth revolting against the tradition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the first founding of civilisation in the valley of the Nile, ten thousand years ago, war has brooded over its cities and cornfields, and has time after time blighted its achievements and its hopes. It is as though some god were jealous of the advance of man, and maintained on the earth this corroding pest to eat into the life of each successive empire, and, by destroying it, to interrupt the progress of the race. ”

“ Over the whole of Europe the vampire still brooded, fastening on each young nation that advanced beyond its fellows. The medieval republics of Italy were wrecked by war. Holland and Portugal, once the most promising powers of Europe, were exhausted by it. Not vice, not enervation, not a dwindling birth-rate,—which are rather consequences than causes,—but the incessant exhaustion of their resources on the seas and the battlefield condemned them to decay. ”

“ The more serious feature is that they help to make so many people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which clogs and dulls the fire of the nation’s life. The nineteenth century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. ”

“ And, if it be true, as I think, that these people, once dead, are dead for ever, and that the tradition of a hundredfold reward in heaven for their privations on earth is an illusion with which pastors and masters have reconciled them to their burdens, I would, if I could, send that assurance like a trumpet-blast through the slums of the world and make this vast army of the stricken summon us, the intelligent minority, to a tardy judgment. ”

“ If we can abolish and dispense with the military system, our retention of it in the twentieth century is the most appalling sham and anachronism of which we are guilty. I do not enlarge on the cost of war. No one to-day can be insensible of it or suggest that any but the most imperious needs would justify us in retaining it. I assume also that, after the lamentable behaviour of Germany, none will question that there will be wars as long as militarism lasts, and that the cost and carnage will increase prodigiously. ”

“ We need to conduct our national and international life on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform. Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers will, in most countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. ”

“ Many will advise me, too, that a man would do well to conceal the more offensive of his heresies, in order to gain a more patient hearing for the others. That is the usual and prudent practice, no doubt; but this book has been written in a mood of fiery impatience with untruth, and this has forbidden compromise. Night by night, as I sit on the deck of the ship, I watch the dark purple pall drop swiftly over the last flush of the tropical sky; and I know that, each night, it shrouds the faces of thousands of men, women, and children whose chance of happiness is gone for ever. ”

“ I do not, as will appear later, advocate the equal distribution of wealth. I do assuredly not plead that one who has wealth should give it to the poor: to see it gather again, perhaps, in less worthy hands. I add the contrast of wealth at this point only in order to make quite sensible the darkness of the life of millions. One’s first task is to establish, with what faint power the pen has, the appalling magnitude of the evil. ”

“ The future of the family seems not obscure. Malthusian and Eugenic proposals will alter much of the crudeness and stupidity of the old family ideal, and ease of divorce will remove the blight it has put on many a home. Hundreds of thousands bless marriage with gratitude and sincerity: tens of thousands curse it with equal sincerity. Let there be liberty and life for all. For a modern legislature to ignore a vast amount of vice and misery, and be guided by the ancient formula of a celibate priesthood, is one of the most lamentable features of our civilisation. ”

“ Then comes the period of expansion, when, as we admit, greater power and wealth and territory are undoubtedly won by the sword. This is the seductive phase of history, leading astray men like Ruskin as well as men like Mommsen and Niebuhr. Let us admit all its glories. Moral and humanitarian excesses are just as mischievous as immoral excesses. As a result of this successful war and expansion, the older empires were enabled to foster art, to protect their growing culture, to civilise vast stretches of the earth that might otherwise have lain uncivilised for ages. ”

“ THE EDUCATION OF THE ADULT
If it be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of our children will, without regard to their private resources, be promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. ”

“ We writhe and groan under the terrible burden it lays on us, and we shrink from contemplating the future; yet we might cast off the burden and rid the future of peril when we will. We disavow the buccaneering spirit, and protest that we arm only in defence against each other; and one wonders whether to smile or weep at the obtuseness which prevents us from adopting a simple and humane means of defence instead of this exhausting barbarism. We “humanise” war, yet cling needlessly to the whole inhuman business. ”

“ Time after time the race turns to examine the tradition which has been so deeply impressed on it, and kings and gods are cast from their thrones; but new dynasties always arise. Of Rome, no less than of Thebes or Nineveh, it is the monuments of kings and gods that survive. Only a few centuries ago the European city consisted mainly of two institutions: the palace and the cathedral. The bulk of the citizens huddled in squalid fever-stricken houses beyond the fringe of the estates of their secular and priestly rulers.
The modern age, with its inconvenient questions and its bold speech, arrives. ”

“ In attacking almost every other evil—industrial injustice, say, or cruel sport, or a stupid penal code—we have to deal only with our own nation. We can carry the reform within our own frontiers, whatever other nations do. In the case of militarism we cannot. All the Great Powers, at least, must advance simultaneously. We have not to educate a nation, but a planet. Pacifists have at times given the impression—generally a wrong impression—that they forgot this; that they advocated disarmament or relaxation of armament in our own nation, whether other nations disarmed or no. ”

“ When we realise that this inherited wealth means, in plain terms, the right to have a hundred or a thousand fellow-men working for us or our descendants in perpetuity, for no merit or service on our part, and when we consider the folly and waste which so commonly follow large inherited fortunes, we must regard this tradition as evil and indefensible. One wonders how long the working community is going to sustain this burden, and how long refined men and women will imagine that they have a right to live like Oriental potentates because they had a shrewd or a gifted ancestor. ”

“ We should continue to suffer the disadvantage of an imperfectly organised industrial system; each new enlistment of the great forces of nature or of the cunning of science in the service of man would enrich a few and impoverish many. In order to meet all these grave difficulties—in order to do more than secure certain advantages for the better equipped workers—a Labour Power would be forced radically to alter its principle and undertake the organisation of employment.
This organisation of industry seems to be the only device which will gradually restrict, and finally abolish, poverty. ”