From H. G. Wells’ Anticipations, 1901,
pages 303-343.
THE FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC
POLICY OF THE NEW REPUBLIC
IF the surmise of a developing new republic—a republic
that must ultimately become a world state of capable, rational men, developing
amid the fading contours and colors of our existing
nations and institutions‑be, indeed, no idle dream, but an attainable
possibility in the future‑and to that end it is that the preceding
Anticipations have been mainly written—it becomes a speculation of very great
interest to forecast something of the general shape and something even of
certain details of that common body of opinion which the new republic, when at
last it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we have supposed
this new republic will already be consciously and pretty freely controlling
the general affairs of humanity before this century closes, its broad
principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine that still ampler
future of which the coining hundred years is but the opening phase. There are many,
processes, many aspects that are now, as it were, in the domain of natural laws
and outside human control, or controlled unintelligently and superstitiously,
that in the future, in the days of the new republic, will be definitely taken
in hand as part of the general work of humanity, as indeed already, since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, the control of pestilence has been taken
in hand. And in particular, there are certain broad questions much under
discussion to which, thus far, I have purposely given a value
disproportionately small While the new republic is gathering itself together
and becoming aware of itself, that great element, which I have called the
people of the abyss, will also have followed out its destiny. For many decades
that development will be largely or entirely out of all human control. To the
multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations there will have
been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, and collectively
these masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with
us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the new republic
emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into
existence by the passes this sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results
of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing, the
human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with
irresponsible wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work
out, so long as there is such a thing as irresponsible wealth pervading the
social body. That, too, the new republic must in its very development
overcome. In the preceding paper it is clearly implicit that I believe that the
new republic, as its consciousness and influence develop together, will meet,
check, and control these things; but the broad principles upon which the
control will go, the nature of the methods employed, still remain to be
deduced. And to make that deduction it is necessary that the primary conception
of life, the fundamental, religious, and moral ideas of these predominant men
of the new time should first be considered.
Now, quite inevitably, these men will be religious men.
Being themselves‑as by the nature of the forces that have selected them
they will certainly be‑men of will and purpose, they will be disposed to
find, and consequently they will find, an effect of purpose in the totality of
things. Either one must believe the universe to be one and systematic, and held
together by some omnipresent quality, or one must believe it to be a casual
aggregation, an incoherent accumulation, with no unity whatsoever outside the
unity of the personality regarding it. All science and most modern religious
systems presuppose the former, and to believe the former is, to any one not too
anxious to quibble, to believe in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of
the future, like many of the saner men of today having so formulated their fundamental
belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no possibility
of' knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive definition
of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not
ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined), or any defective
claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self‑contradictory
absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology[1],
they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the
sufficient revelation of God to their souls, and they will set themselves simply
to that revelation, seeking its meaning towards themselves faithfully and courageously.
Manifestly the essential being of man in this life is his will; he exists
consciously only to do; his main interest in life is the choice between alternatives;
and, since he moves through space and time to effects and consequences, a
general purpose in space and time is the limit of his under standing. He can
know God only under the semblance of a pervading purpose, of which his own
individual freedom of will is a part, but he can understand that the purpose
that exists in space and time is no more God than a voice calling out of
impenetrable darkness is a man. To men of the kinetic type belief in God so
manifest as purpose is irresistible, and, to all lucid minds, the being of God,
save as that general atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended purpose in which our
individual wills operate, is incomprehensible. To cling to any belief more
detailed than this, to define and limit God in order to take hold of Him, to
detach one's self and parts of the universe from God in some mysterious way in
order to reduce life to a dramatic antagonism, is not faith, but infirmity.
Excessive strenuous belief is not faith.
By faith we disbelieve, and it is the drowning man. and not the strong
swimmer, who clutches at the floating straw. It is in the nature of man, it is
in the present purpose of things, that the real world of our experience and
will should appear to us not only as a progressive existence in space and time,
but as a scheme of good and evil. But choice, the antagonism of good and evil,
just as much as the formulation of things in space and time, is merely a
limiting condition of human being, and in the thought of God as we conceive of
Him in the light of faith, this antagonism vanishes. God is no moralist; God is
no partisan; He comprehends and cannot be comprehended, and our business is
only with so much of His purpose as centres on our individual wills.
So, or in some such phrases, I believe, these men of the
new republic will formulate their relationship to God. They will live to serve
this purpose that presents Him, without presumption and without fear. For the
same spacious faith that will render the idea of airing their egotisms in God's
presence through prayer, or of any such quite personal intimacy, absurd, will
render the idea of an irascible and punitive Deity ridiculous and incredible.
The men of the new republic will hold and understand
quite clearly the doctrine that in the real world of man's experience there is
free will. They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his
existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a conflict
between motives that have different moral values constantly arises. That
conflict between predestination and free will, which is so puzzling to
untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know that. in the real
world of sensory experience will is free, just as new‑sprung grass is
green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In the abstract world of
reasoning science there is no green, no color at all,
but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certain reaction of
molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecular consequences in the
nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In the abstract world of reasoning
science, moreover, there is a rigid and inevitable sequence of cause and
effect; ever act of man could be foretold to its uttermost detail, if only we
knew him and all his circumstances fully. In the abstract world of reasoned
science all things exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite
time. But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasoned
science, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinate
scheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this world of men
and women, in this world where the grass is green and desire beckons, and the
choice is often so wide and clear between the sense of what is desirable and
what is more widely and remotely right. In this world of sense and the daily
life these men will believe, with an absolute conviction, that there is free
will and a personal moral responsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen
purpose which is the sufficient revelation of God to them.
The conception they will have of that purpose will
necessarily determine their ethical scheme. It follows manifestly that if we do
really believe in Almighty God, the more strenuously and successfully we seek
in ourselves and His world to understand the order and progress of things, and
the more clearly we apprehend His purpose, the more assured and systematic will
our ethical basis become.
If, like Huxley, we do not positively believe in God,
then we may still cling to an ethical system which has become an organic part
of our lives and habits, and finding it manifestly in conflict with the purpose
in things, speak of the non‑ethical order of the universe. But to any one
whose mind is pervaded by faith in God, a non‑ethical universe in
conflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the agnostic is as
incredible as a black‑horned devil, as an active material anti‑god
with hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan‑scorched
nose complete. To believe completely in God is to believe in the final
rightness of all being. The ethical system that condemns the ways of life as
wrong, or points to the ways of death as right, that countenances what the
scheme of things condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is
now revealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice upon which
it was originally based. If the universe is non‑ethical by our present
standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstruct our ethics. To
hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with old habits and traditions
and sentiments may be, is to fall short of faith.
Now, so far as the intellectual life of the world goes,
this present time is essentially the opening phase of a period of ethical reconstruction,
a reconstruction of which the new republic will possess the matured result.
Throughout the nineteenth century there has been such a shattering and
recasting of fundamental ideas. of the preliminaries to ethical propositions,
as the world has never seen before. This breaking down and routing out of
almost all the cardinal assumptions on which the minds of the eighteenth century
dwelt securely, is a process akin to, but independent of, the development of
mechanism, whose consequences we have traced. It is a part of that process of
vigorous and fearless criticism which is the reality of science, and pf which
the development of mechanism and all that revolution in physical and social
conditions we have been tracing, is merely the vast imposing material by-product.
At present, indeed, its more obvious aspect and ethical side is destruction; any
one can see the chips flying. but it still demands a certain faith and
patience to see the form that ensues. But it is not destruction, any more than a
sculptor's work is stone‑breaking.
The first chapter in the history of this intellectual
development, its definite and formal opening, coincides with the opening of the
nineteenth century and the publication of Malthus's Essay on Population. Malthus is one of
those cardinal figures in intellectual history who state definitely for all
time things apparent enough after their formulation, but never effectively
conceded before. lie brought clearly and emphatically into the sphere of
discussion a vitally Important issue that had always been shirked and tabooed
heretofore, the fundamental fact that the main mass of the business of human
life centres about reproduction. He stated in clear, hard, decent, and
unavoidable argument what presently Schopenhauer was to discover and proclaim,
in language, at times, it would seem, quite unfitted for translation into
English. And, having made his statement Malthus left it, in contact with its
immediate results.
Probably no more shattering book than the Essay on Population has ever been, or
ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile liberalism of the deists and
atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as daylight that all forms
of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly golden ages. must be either futile
or insincere, or both, until the problems of human increase were manfully faced.
It proffered no suggestions for facing
them (in spite of the unpleasant associations of Malthus's
name); it aimed simply to wither the rationalistic utopias of the time, and, by
anticipation, all the communisms, socialisms, and earthly paradise movements
that have since been so abundantly audible in the world. That was its aim and
its immediate effect. Incidentally it must have been a torturing soul‑trap
for innumerable idealistic but intelligent souls. Its indirect effects have
been altogether greater. Aiming at unorthodox dreamers, it has set such forces
in motion as have destroyed the very root‑ideas of orthodox righteousness
in the western world. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almost simultaneously
in the minds of Darwin and Wallace that train of thought that foand expression and demonstration at last in the theory of
natural selectioryAs that theorv
has been more and more thoroughly assimilated and understood by the general
mind, it has destroyed, quietly but entirely, the belief in human equality
which is implicit in all the "liberalizing" movements of the world.
In the place of an essential equality, distorted only by tradition and early
training, by the artifices of those devils of the liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft"
and "priesteraft," an equality as little
affected by color as the equality of a black chess‑pawn
and a white, we discover that all men are individual and unique, and, through
long ranges of comparison, superior and inferior upon countless scores. It has
become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior
in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities
or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their
characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing
fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong.
To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is
to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic radicalism of
the earlier nineteenth century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of
liberalism, have bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The
socialist has shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism
is a thing of the past, with nothing left but leaders. There must follow some
new‑born thing.
And as effectually has the mass of criticism that
centres about
And men's concern under this ampler view will no longer
be to work out a system of penalties, but to understand and participate in this
great development that now dawns on the human understanding. The insoluble
problems of pain and death, gaunt, incomprehensible facts as they were, fall
into place in the gigantic order that evolution unfolds. All things are
integral in the mighty scheme; the slain builds up the slayer, the wolf grooms
the horse into swiftness, and the tiger calls for wisdom and courage out of man
All things are integral, but it has been left for men to be consciously
integral, to take, at last, a share in the process, to have wills that have
caught a harmony with the universal will, as sand‑grains flash into splendor under the blaze of the sun. There will be many who
will never be called to this religious conviction, who will lead their little
lives like fools, playing foolishly with religion and all the great issues Of
life, or like the beasts that perish, having sense alone; but those who, by
character and intelligence, are predestinate to
participate in the reality of life, will fearlessly shape all their ethical
determinations and public policy anew, from a fearless study of themselves and
the apparent purpose that opens out before them.
Very much of the cry for faith that sounds in
contemporary life so loudly, and often with so distressing a note of sincerity,
comes from the unsatisfied egotisms of unemployed, and therefore unhappy, and
craving people; but much is also due to the distress in the minds of active and
serious men, due to the conflict of inductive knowledge, with conceptions of
right and wrong deduced from unsound but uncriticised
first principles. The old ethical principles, the principle of equivalents or
justice, the principle of self ‑ sacrifice, the various vague and
arbitrary ideas of purity, chastity, and sexual "sin," came like rays
out of the theological and philosophical lanterns men carried in the darkness.
The ray of the lantern indicated and directed, and one followed it as one
follows a path. But now there has come a new view of man's place in the scheme
of time and space, a new illumination‑dawn; the lantern rays fade in the
growing brightness, and the lanterns that shone so brightly are becoming smoky
and dim. To many men this is no more than a waning of the lanterns, and they
call for new ones, or a trimming of the old. They blame the day for putting out
these flares. And some go apart out of the glare of life, into corners of obscurity,
where the radiation of the lantern may still be faintly traced. But, indeed,
with the new light there has come the time for new methods; the time of
lanterns, the time of deductions from arbitrary first principles is over. The
act of faith is no longer to follow your lantern, but to put it down. We can
see about us, and by the landscape we must go[2].
How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men
of the new time and in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose
that these men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their
own? Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer, I
believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin, that the
scheme
of being in which we live is a struggle of existences to
expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and to propagate and
increase themselves. But, being men of action, they will feel nothing of the
glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexually vitiated share‑holder,
Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. The final object of this struggle
among existences they will not understand; they will have abandoned the search
for ultimates; they will state this scheme of a
struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote and spacious to enclose and
explain all their possible activities. They will seek God's purpose in the
sphere of their activities, and desire no more, as the soldier in battle
desires no more than the immediate conflict before him. They will admit
failure as an individual aspect of things, as a soldier seeking victory admits
the possibility of death; but they will ref use to admit as a part of their
faith in God that any existence, even if it is an existence that is presently
entirely erased, can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the
existences that survive; it will be justified forever in the ‑modification
it has produced in them. They will find in themselves‑it must be remembered
I am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as a
whole‑a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in
order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will all be
artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness and an
impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame of their
ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape the schemes of their
individual wills, will be the elaboration of that future world state to which
all things are pointing. They will not conceive of it as a millennial paradise,
a blissful, inconsequent stagnation, but as a world state of active, ampler
human beings, full of knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and
limitations, the needless pains and dishonors of the
world‑disorder of to‑day, but still struggling, struggling against
ampler but still too narrow restrictions and for still more spacious objects
than our vistas have revealed. For that as a general end, for the special work
that contributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and the
limiting rules of their lives.
It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system,
reconstructed in the light of modern science and to meet the needs of such
temperaments and characters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together
and develop, will give very different values from those given by the existing
systems (if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of
conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very clearly
shown to be two‑birth and death. All life is the effort of the thing
born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade death, to
evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping or restriction, and to
attain to effective procreation, to the victory of another birth. Procreation
is the triumph of the living being over death; and in the case of man, who adds
mind to his body, it is not only in his child but in the dissemination of his
thought, the expression of his mind in things done and made, that his triumph
is to be found. And the ethical system of these men of the new republic, the
ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to
favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient
and beautiful in humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful
minds, and a growing body of knowledge and to check the procreation of base
and servile types, of fear ‑ driven and cowardly souls, of all that is
mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the
latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that
nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was
prevented froni propagating weakness, and cowardice
and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method
that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be
called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable
horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of
all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful
obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a
responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void;
and the alternative in right conduct between living fully beautifully, and
efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly
creatures, fear‑driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully
happy in the midst of squalid dishonor, feeble, ugly,
inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying
through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the new republic will have
little pity and less benevolence, To make life convenient for the breeding of
such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in the
world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominable proceeding.
Procreation is an avoidable thing for sane persons of even the most furious
passions, and the men of the new republic will hold that the procreation of
children who, by the circumstances of their parentage, must be diseased bodily
or mentally — I do not think it will be difficult for the medical science of
the coming time to define such circumstance is absolutely the most loathsome
of all conceivable sins. They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion
of the population — the small minority, for example, afflicted with
indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders,
with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication — exists
only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that
they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they
will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the
plea and proof that a grave criminal is also insane will be regarded by them
not as a reason for mercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how
they can think otherwise on the principles they will profess.
The men of the new republic will not be squeamish either
in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities
of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth
the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith to kill, and they will have
no superstitions about death. They will naturally regard the modest suicide of
incurably melancholy or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous
act of duty rather than a crime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men
raised above a brutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as
infinitely worse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added
to its natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of a man's
actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seems to prove
him unfitted for free life in the world, consider him carefully, and condemn
him, and remove hini from being. All such killing
will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful
or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent punishments are
used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death, nor
mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the life by imprisonment, nor any
horrible things like that, but good, scientifically caused pain, that will
leave nothing but a memory. Yet even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort
of mutilation of the soul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely
in an orderly world state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the
use of deterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children or
women, perhaps, or for very cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, the men of
the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least during the ages of
transition while the brute is still at large. But since most acts of this sort
do, under conditions that neither torture nor exasperate, point to an
essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am inclined to think that even in
these cases the men of the coining time will be far less disposed to torture
than to kill. They will hive another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction
of pain, for the sake of the pain, is
against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe and demoralizing for any one
to undertake this duty. To kill under the seemly conditions science will afford
is a far less offensive thing. The rulers of the future will grudge making good
people into jailers, warders, punishment‑dealers, nurses, and attendants
on the bad. People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without
spoiling the lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment
even to‑day, but the men of the new republic will have the courage of
their opinions.
And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the
coming years will deal simply and logically not only with the business of
death, but with birth. At present the sexual morality of the civilized world is
the most illogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insane
prohibitions.' foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possible to
imagine. Our current civilization is a sexual lunatic. And it has lost its
reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth of things, largely
through the difficulties that have stood in the way, and do still, in a
diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sane discussion of the matter as a
whole. To approach it is to approach excitement. So few people seem to be
leading happy and healthy sexual lives that to mention the very word "
sexual” is to set them stirring, to brighten the eye, lower the voice, and
blanch or flush the check with a flavor of guilt. We
are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and hiding our shames. One of the most
curious revelations of this fact occurred only a few years ago, when the
artless outpourings in fiction of certain young women who had failed to find
light on problems that pressed upon them for solution (and which it was
certainly their business as possible wives and mothers to solve) roused all
sorts of respectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now,
there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the preservation of
decency, and for a far more stringent suppression of matter that is merely intended
to excite than at present obtains, and the chief of these reasons lies in the
need of preserving the young from a premature awakening, and indeed, in the
interests of civilization, in positively delaying the period of awakening, retarding
maturity and lengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as
possible. But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; Innocence is
really no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and the
bashfulness that hampers this discussion. that permits it only in a furtive,
silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames and cruelties, in
miserable households and pitiful crises, in the production of countless,
needless and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry our decency so far as
to make it suggestive and stimulating in a nonnatural
way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with a mystic, religious
quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakedness could possibly be.
The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business
of the sexual relations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people
of the emergent new republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value of
sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will
constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can
dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions become of
no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at chess, or the
general morality of out‑door games. Indeed, then the question of sexual
relationships would be entirely on all fours with, and probably very analogous
to, the question of golf. In each an entirely different complexion directly we
face known, if indelicate, facts. Most of the human types, that by civilized
standards are undesirable, are quite willing to die out through such suppressions
if the world will only encourage them a little. They multiply in sheer
ignorance, but they do not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily
be made to dread it. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that
the men of the 'new republic will deliberately shape their public policy along
these lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all places
where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land legislation
that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean‑white squatter on the move;
they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out of a child, so that
child‑bearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation for the unemployed
poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child the first charge upon the
parents who have brought it into the world. Only in this way can progress
escape being clogged‑by the products of the security it creates. The
development of science has lifted famine and pestilence from the shoulders of
man, and it will yet lift war — for some other end than to give him a spell of
promiscuous and finally cruel and horrible reproduction.
No doubt the sentimentalist, and all whose moral sense
has been vigorously trained in the old school, will find this rather a dreadful
suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the abyss to become a " hot‑bed
" of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the
ruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating evil.
At present the abyss is a hot‑bed breeding undesirable and too often
fearfully miserable children. That is something more than a sentimental
horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to‑day, the spectacle
of a mean‑spirited, under‑sized, diseased little man, quite
incapable of earning a decent living for himself, married to some under‑fed,
ignorant, ill‑shaped, plain, and diseased little woman, and guilty of the
lives of ten or twelve ugly, ailing children, is regarded as an extremely
edifying spectacle, and the two parents consider their reproductive excesses as
giving them a distinct claim upon less fecund and more prosperous people.
Benevolent persons throw themselves with peculiar ardor
into a case of this sort, and quite passionate efforts are made to strengthen
the mother against further eventualities and protect the children until they
attain to nubile years. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is
presently distracted by a new case. . . . Yet so powerful is the suggestion of
current opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what a horrible and
criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point of view of social physiology,
appears.
And directly such principles as these come into
effective operation, and I believe that the next hundred years will see this
new phase of the human history beginning, there will recommence a process of
physical and mental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the
average man, that has virtually been in_,,,3uspense
during the greater portion of the historical period‑ It is possible that
in the last hundred years, in the more civilized states of the world, the
average of humanity has positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our
religious teachers, seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an
atmosphere of mystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of the
irresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide of
miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half the
population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or tempted to
evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is
possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes
of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in
the future it will be planned and achieved.
If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men
of the future, on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under
no circumstances find the birth of the child, healthy in body and brain, more
than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only, the beginning, the raw
material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is not only a sound,
strong body, but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a fabric of moral
suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of more or less systematized
ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training and an aesthetic culture. He is the
child not only of parents but of a home and of an education. He has to he
carefully guarded from physical and moral contagions. A reasonable probability
of insuring home and education and protection without any parasitic dependence
on people outside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a
moral birth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, this sweeps
out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the late Mr. Grant
Allen is supposed to have advocated — but, so far as I can understand him, did
not. But whether it works out to the taking over of the permanent monogamic
marriage of the old morality, as a going concern, is another matter. Upon this
matter I must confess my views of the trend of things in the future do not seem
to be finally shaped. The question involves very obscure physiological and
psychological considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally
pries into these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often
hard to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired
off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic homes
for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain freedom of regrouping
were possible within a time limit, this might be so. But I am convinced that a
large proportion of married couples in the world to‑day are not
completely and happily matched, that there is much mutual limitation, mutual
annulment, and mutual exasperation. Home with an atmosphere of contention is
worse—than none for the child, and it is the interest of the child, and that
alone, that will be the test of all these things. I do not think that the
arrangement In couples is universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by
sterile vice) should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of
two childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit an
ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economic
disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminine profession,
while only for an incidental sort of man is marriage a source of income, and
further by the fact that most women have a period of maximum attractiveness
after which it would be grossly unfair to cast them aside. From the point of
view we are discussing, the efficient mother who can make the best of her
children is the most important sort of person in the state. She is a primary
necessity to the coming civilization. Can the wife in any sort of polygamic arrangement, or a woman of no assured status,
attain to the maternal possibilities of the ideal monogamic wife? One is
disposed to answer, No. But then, on the other hand, does the ordinary
monogamic wife do that? We are dealing with the finer people of the future,
strongly Individualized people, who will be much freer from stereotyped moral
suggestions and much less inclined to be dealt with wholesale than the people
of to‑day.
I have already shown cause in these Anticipations to
expect a period of disorder and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am
inclined to think that, when the new republic emerges on the other side of this
disorder, there will be a great number of marriage contracts possible between
men and women, and that the strong arm of the state will insist only upon one
thing‑the security and welfare of the child. The inevitable removal of
births from the sphere of an uncontrollable
And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality
of human birth, the new republicans will see to it that the children who do at
last effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. The half‑educated,
unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds and propounding ridiculous
curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to‑day must needs intrust the intelligences of their children—these heavy‑handed
barber‑surgeons of the mind, these school‑masters, with their rag‑tag
and bob‑tail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will be succeeded by
capable, self‑respecting men and women, constituting the most important
profession of the world. The windy pretences of "forming character,"
supplying moral training, and so forth., under which the educationalist of to‑day
conceals the fact that he is incapable of his proper task of training,
developing, and equipping the mind, will no longer be made by the teacher. Nor
will the teacher be permitted to subordinate his duties to the entirely
irrelevant business of his pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine
his moral training, beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of
a capable person doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that
his utmost province is only a part of the educational process, that equally important
educational influences are the home and the world of thought about the pupil
and himself. The whole world will be thinking and learning; the old idea of “completing"
one's education will have vanished with the fancy of a static universe; every
school will be a preparatory school, every college. The school and college will
probably give only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or
so, thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide and
reasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a training in
the use of those stores of fact that science has made. So equipped, the young
man and young woman will go on to the technical school of their chosen
profession, and to the criticism of contemporary practice for their special
efficiency, and to the literature of contemporary thought for their general
development.
And while the emergent new republic is deciding to
provide for the swarming inferiority of the abyss, and developing the morality
and educational system of the future in this fashion, it will be attacking
that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and so threatening
under present conditions. The attack will, of course, be made along lines that
the developing science of economics will trace in the days immediately before
us. A scheme of death duties and of heavy graduated taxes upon irresponsible
incomes, with perhaps, in addition, a system of terminable liability for
borrowers, will probably suffice to control the growth of this creditor
elephantiasis. The detailed contrivances are for the specialist to make. If
there is such a thing as bitterness in the public acts of the new republicans,
it will probably be found in the measures that will be directed against those
who are parasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic, upon the social body, either
by means of gambling, by manipulating the medium of exchange, or by such
interventions upon legitimate transactions as, for example, the legal trade
union in Great Britain contrives in the case of house property and land. Simply
because he fails more often than he succeeds, there is still a disposition
among sentimental people to regard the gambler or the speculator as rather a
dashing, adventurous sort of person, and to contrast his picturesque gallantry
with the sober certainties of honest men. The men of the new republic will be
obtuse to the glamour of such romance; they will regard the gambler simply as a
mean creature who hangs about the social body in the hope of getting something
for nothing, who runs risks to filch the possessions of other men, exactly as
a thief does. They will put the two on a footing, and the generous gambler,
like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectual provision for his
little weakness, will cease to complain that his worst enemy is himself. And,
in dealing with speculation, the new republic will have the power of an
assured faith and purpose, and the resources of an economic science that is as
Yet only in its infancy. In such matters the new republic will entertain no
superstition of laissez faire. Money and credit are as much human contrivances
as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of
prevalent but imperfect machine.
And how will the new republic treat the inferior races?
How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will
it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly
not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though
probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a
common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards,
its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the
multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social
efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will have cast aside any coddling
laws to save adult men from themselves.[3]
It will tolerate no dark corners where the people of the abyss may fester, no
vast, diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant plague‑preserves.
Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come‑white,
black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test. And the Jew also it
will treat as any other man. It is said that the jew
is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If there are parasites on
the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the
apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for the special treatment of the Jew.
If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make
social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and, if he has not,
there is no need to abolish the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have
abolished the Caucasian solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional
attitude people take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about
many Jewish faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The
Jew asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular
tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews are
intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and cunning
and base in method, but not more so than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and
physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than the average European,
but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he is simply on all fours with
the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with those of his own nation, and favors them against the stranger, but so do the Scotch. I
see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to deride dislike. He is a
remnant and legacy of medievalism a sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive
plotter against the present progress of things. He was the medieval liberal;
his persistent existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the
days of their ascendancy, and to‑day he gives the lie to all our yapping
"nationalism," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of
the world‑state. He has never been known to burke a school; such a
malicious plot as that associated with the name of Lord Hugh Cecil, to rob the
struggling adolescents of the poorer middleclass of their chance of an
education by burking the higher grade board schools, would certainly be
beneath the mental level of the average Whitechapel Jew. Much of the Jew's
usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably lose much of
his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and
cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so.
But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. And for the rest,
those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty‑white, and yellow people, who
do not come into the new needs of efficiency?
Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution,
and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world,
as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous,
and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their
portion to die out and disappear.
The world has a purpose greater than happiness; our
lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end,
but works through him to greater issues. . . . This, I believe, will be the
distinctive quality of the new republican's belief. And, for that reason, I
have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief in human immortality
or no. He will certainly not believe there is any post‑mortem state of rewards
and punishments because of his faith in the sanity of God, and I do not see how
he will trace any reaction between this world and whatever world there may be
of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession
to‑day tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality
altogether. So, to a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time.
We may find that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at
present we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the
relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality of our
egotisms, but covergently and overpoweringly to the
future of our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious Anticipations
are, as it were, in dim reflection seen in a shallow and troubled pool. For that
future these men will live and die.
THE END
[1] As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is the
last vestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a vigorous but
uncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust for praise and
propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more logical than the one it
has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and wills; it passes from phase to
phase, thinking and willing are a succession of mental states which follow and
replace one another. But omniscience is a complete knowledge, not only of the
present state, but of all past and future states, and, since it is all there at
any moment, it cannot conceivably pass from phase to phase; it is stagnant,
infinite, and eternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore, as an
omnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by faith can we
attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render clearer His
inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way up in a scale of
existences that may, indeed, point towards him, but can never bring Him to our
scope. As the fullness of the conscious mental existence of a man stands to
the subconscious activities of an amoeba or of a visceral ganglion cell, so our
reason forces us to admit other possible mental existences may stand to us. But
such an existence, inconceivably great as it would be to us, would be scarcely
nearer than a transcendental God in whom the serious men of the future will, as
a class, believe.
[2]
It is an interesting by-way from our main thesis to speculate
on the spiritual pathology of the functionless wealthy, the half-educated,
independent women of the middle class, and the people of the abyss. While the
segregating new middle class, whose religious and moral development forms our
main interest, is developing its spacious and confident theism, there will, I
imagine, be a steady decay in the various Protestant congregations. They have
played a noble part in the history of the world; their spirit will live
forever, but their formulae and organization wax old like a garment. Their
moral austerity--‑that touch of contempt for the unsubstantial aesthetic
which has always distinguished Protestantism‑--is naturally repellent to
the irresponsible rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face
of Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the self‑indulgent,
the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich as a class and the people
of the abyss, so far as they move towards any existing religious body, will be
attracted by the moral kindliness, the picturesque organization, and venerable
tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. We are only in the very beginning of a
great Roman Catholic revival. The diversified country‑side of the coming
time will show many a splendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace,
towering amid the abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving
platforms of the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that will
adorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, all glorious with banners and
censer‑bearers, and the meek, blue‑shaven priests and barefooted,
rope‑girdled, holy men. And the artful politician of the coming days,
until the broom of the new republic sweep him up, will arrange the miraculous
planks of his “party, always with his eye upon the priest. Within the ample
sheltering arms of the
Except for a few queer people,
nourished on Maria Monk and such‑like
anti‑papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants left
among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will
probably take up with weird science‑denouncing sect of the faith‑heating
type, or with such pseudo‑scientific gibberish as theosophy. Shintoism and either a cleaned or, more probably, a scented
Obi, might in vigorous hands be pushed to a very considerable success in the
coming years; and I do not see any absolute impossibility in the idea of an
after‑dinner witch‑smelling in Park Lane with a witch‑doctor
dressed in feathers. It might be made amazingly Picturesque. People would
attend it with an air of intellectual liberality, not, of course, believing in
it absolutely, but admitting “ there must be something in it.‑‑‑
That‑---something in it! The fool hath said in his heart there is no God '
and after that he is ready to do anything with his mind and Soul. It is by
faith we disbelieve.
And, of course, there will be much
outspoken atheism and anti‑religion of the type of the Parisian devil‑worship
imbecilities. Young men of means will determine to be “wicked.” They will do
silly things that strike them as being indecent and blasphemous and dreadful --‑black
masses and such‑--like nonsense‑and then they will get scared. The
sort of thing it will be to shock orthodox maiden aunts and make
I