Walled towns
Date: 2025-12-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Civilization; Medieval; Culture; Progress; Social history

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Title: Walled towns

Author: Ralph Adams Cram

Release date: December 11, 2025 [eBook #77444]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1919

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALLED TOWNS ***

WALLED TOWNS

By

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

LITT.D., LL.D.

BOSTON

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

M D CCCC XX

Copyright, 1919
By Marshall Jones Company

All rights reserved

First Printing, September, 1919
Second Printing, February, 1920

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

WALLED TOWNS

PROLOGUE

The stone-flagged path on the top of the high walls winds along within the battlemented parapet, broken here and there by round turrets, steeple-crowned barriers of big timbers and, at wider intervals, great towers, round or square or many-sided, where bright banners blow in the unsullied air. From one side you may look down on and into the dim city jostling the ramparts with crowding walls and dizzy roofs, from the other the granite scarp drops sheer to the green fields and vari-coloured gardens and shadowy orchards full forty feet below.

Within, the city opens up in kaleidoscopic vistas as you walk slowly around the walls: here are the steep roofs of tall houses with delicate dormers, fantastic chimney stacks, turret cupolas with swinging weather vanes; here the closed gardens of rich burgesses, full of arbours, flowers, pleached alleys of roses, espaliers of pear and nectarine; here a convent or guild chapel, newly worked of yellow stone and all embroidered with the garniture of niches, balustrades, pinnacles. Here, under one of the city gates, opens a main street, narrow and winding but walled with high-gabled houses, each story jutting beyond the lower, carved from pavement to ridge like an Indian jewel casket, and all bedecked with flaming colour and burnished gold-leaf. Below is the stream and eddy of human life; craftsmen in the red and blue and yellow of their guild liveries, slow-pacing merchants and burghers in furred gowns of cramoisy and Flemish wool and gold-woven Eastern silks; scholars in tippet and gown, youths in slashed doublets and gay hose, grey friars and black and brown, with a tonsured monk or two, and perhaps a purple prelate, attended, and made way for with deep reverence. Threading the narrow road rides a great lady on a gaily caparisoned palfrey, with an officious squire in attendance, or perhaps a knight in silver armour, crested wonderfully, his emblazoned shield hanging at his saddle-bow,—living colour mixing and changing between leaning walls of still colour and red gold.

Here a stream or canal cuts the houses in halves, a quay with gay booths and markets of vari-coloured vegetables along one side, walls of pink brick or silvery stone on the other, jutting oriels hanging over the stream, and high, curved bridges, each with its painted shrine, crossing here and there, with gaudy boats shoving along underneath. Here a square opens out, ringed with carved houses,—a huge guild hall on one side, with its dizzy watch-tower where hang the great alarum bells; long rows of Gothic arches, tall mullioned windows, and tiers and ranges of niched statues all gold and gules and azure, painted perhaps by Messer Jan Van Eyck or Messer Hans Memling. In the centre is a spurting fountain with its gilt figures and chiselled parapet, and all around are market booths with bright awnings where you may buy strange things from far lands, chaffering with dark men from Syria and Saracen Spain and Poland and Venice and Muscovy.

And everywhere, tall in the midst of tall towers and spires, vast, silvery, light as air yet solemn and dominating, the great shape of the Cathedral, buttressed, pinnacled, beautiful with rose windows and innumerable figures of saints and angels and prophets.

There is no smoke and no noxious gas; the wind that sweeps over the roofs and around the delicate spires is as clean and clear as it is in the mountains; the painted banners flap and strain, and the trees in the gardens rustle beneath. There is no sound except human sound; the stir and murmur of passing feet, the pleasant clamour of voices, the muffled chanting of cloistered nuns in some veiled chapel, the shrill cry of street venders and children, and the multitudinous bells sounding for worship in monastery or church and, at dawn and noon and evening, the answering clangour of each to all for the Angelus.

And from the farther side of the walls a wide country of green and gold and the far, thin blue of level horizon or distant mountains. There are no slums and no suburbs and no mills and no railway yards; the green fields and the yellow grain, the orchards and gardens and thickets of trees sweep up to the very walls, slashed by winding white roads. Alongside the river, limpid and unstained, are mills with slow wheels dripping quietly, there where the great bridge with its seven Gothic arches and its guarding towers curves in a long arc from shore to shore. Far away is perhaps a grey monastery with its tall towers, and on the hill a greyer castle looming out of the woods. Along the road blue-clad peasants come and go with swaying flocks of sheep and fowl and cattle. Here are dusty pilgrims with staff and wallet and broad hats, pursy merchants on heavy horses with harness of red velvet and gold embroidery; a squadron of mounted soldiers with lances and banners, and perhaps my Lord Bishop on his white mule, surrounded by his retainers, and on progress to his see city from some episcopal visitation; perhaps even a plumed and visored knight riding on quest or to join a new Crusade to the Holy Land.

Colour everywhere, in the fresh country, in the carven houses, in gilded shrines and flapping banners, in the clothes of the people like a covey of vari-coloured tropical birds. No din of noise, no pall of smoke, but fresh air blowing within the city and without, even through the narrow streets, none too clean at best, but cleaner far than they were to be thereafter and for many long centuries to come.

Such was any walled town in the fifteenth century, let us say in France or England or Italy, in Flanders or Spain or the Rhineland. Carcassonne, Rothenbourg, San Gimignano, Oxford, ghosts of the past, arouse hauntings of memory today, but they tell us little, for the colour is gone, and the stillness and the clean air. Ghosts they are and not living things; and life, colour, clarity, these were the outward marks of the Walled Towns of the Middle Ages.

“It was not a pretty station where McCann found himself, and he glared ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls, the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, “Gents,” “Ladies,” “Refreshment Saloon,” the rough raftered roof over the tracks,—everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between his teeth.

“Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled and scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a five-year-old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough, who answered in kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows flaunted on the cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana skins, cigar butts, and saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the scuffling mob. Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere—in the unhappy people no less than in their surroundings....

“The prospect was not much better outside than in. The air was thick with fine white dust, and dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side was a wall of brick tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries, and a fish-market below, all adding their mite to the virulence of the dead, stifling air. Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out of the grimy windows, where long festoons of half-washed clothes drooped sordidly. On the other side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly repairing the ravages of a fire that evidently had swept clear a large space in its well-meant but ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt black chimneys wound with writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of wall blistered white on one side, piles of crumbling bricks where men worked sullenly loading blue carts, mingled with new work, where the walls, girdled with yellow scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier than before; the plain factory walls with their rows of square windows less hideous by far than those buildings where some ignorant contractor was trying by the aid of galvanized iron to produce an effect of tawdry, lying magnificence. Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled or scurried along in the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars jolted over the granite pavement with a clanging, clattering din that was maddening. In fact, none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far as one could see....

“The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles, passing the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards, through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green, stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and purples where the water had dried under the fierce sun. All around lay piles of refuse,—iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans, old leather stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere escape-pipes vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of industrial civilization. McCann cast a pitying look at the pale, dispirited figures passing languidly to and fro in the midst of the din and the foul air, and set his teeth closely.

“Presently they entered that part of the city where live the poor, they who work in the mills, when they are not on strike, or the mills are not shut down,—as barren of trees or grass as the centre of the city, the baked grey earth trodden hard between the crowded tenements painted lifeless greys, as dead in colour as the clay about them. Children and goats crawled starvedly around or huddled in the hot shadow of the sides of the houses. This passed, and then came the circle of “suburban residences,” as crowded almost as the tottering tenements, but with green grass around them. Frightful spectacles these,—“Queen Anne” and “Colonial” vagaries painted lurid colours, and frantic in their cheap elaboration. Between two affected little cottages painted orange and green and with round towers on their corners, stood a new six-story apartment-house with vulgar front of brown stone, “Romanesque” in style, but with long flat sides of cheap brick. McCann caught the name on the big white board that announced “Suites to let.” “Hotel Plantagenet,” and grinned savagely.

“Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end, giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as they left the town far behind. McCann’s eyebrows were knotted in a scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing solemnly the town he had left: ‘I hope from my soul that I may live to see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl though the ruin of that “thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis”; when the very name it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for horror and despair!’ Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and felt better.”[A]

[A] “The Decadent,” 1893.

I

What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war, “How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be solved—if only we knew the way! There can be no going back, of that we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended the work of four centuries and—there is no going back. “Finis” has been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return nor remain but—would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement.

It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: “Either you will take this or you must have that,” the starling-cry of partizan politics by which “democracies” have lived. In all human affairs there are never only two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which “carries the election,” and it does not appeal to a public that prefers the raw obviousness of the extremes. Yet it is the third alternative that is always the right one, except when the God-made leaders, the time having come for a new upward rush of the vital force in society, put themselves in the vanguard of the new advance and lift the world with them, as it were by main force. Reactionism or Bolshevism: “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” We are told that the old world of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how fragile, artificial and insecure is civilization, how instantly and hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy are put in practice, and we do not like it. We have seen Russia, Germany, Hungary, and sporadic but disquieting examples in every State, no matter how conservative it may be or how successful in a first stamping out of the flame. On the other hand, we saw the triumph of “Modern Civilization” in the twenty-five years preceding the Great War, and as we realize now what it was, through the revelations it has made of itself during the last five years, we like it quite as little as the other. We see it now as an impossible farrago of false values, of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o’er with the pale cast of smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or reality in practice; imperialism, materialism and the quantitative standard. Is there no alternative other than this, restored in its unvarying ugliness of fact and of manifestation, or the imitative era of a new Dark Ages which will be brought to pass by the new hordes of Huns and Vandals that again, after fifteen centuries, menace a greater Imperialism than Rome with an identical fate? There is a third alternative; there may be more, but the one which makes its argument for acceptance on the basis of history and experience is here put forward for consideration.

In three books already published in this series which has been issued from time to time during the Great War—“The Nemesis of Mediocrity,” “The Great Thousand Years” and “The Sins of the Fathers”—I have tried to determine certain of the causes which led to the tragical débâcle of modern civilization at the very moment of its highest supremacy; and now while mediocrity pitifully struggles to meet and solve an avalanche of problems it cannot cope withal, and anarchy, like Alaric and Attila and Genseric at the head of their united hosts, beat against the dissolving barriers of a forlorn and impotent and discredited culture, I would try to find some hints of the saving alternative, and if possible discover some way out of the deadly impasse in which the world finds itself.

From “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” it should be sufficiently clear that I do not believe that any mechanical devices whatever will serve the purpose: neither the buoyant plan to “make the world safe for democracy,” nor any extension and amplification of “democratic” methods onward to woman’s suffrage or direct legislation or proletarian absolutism through Russian soviets, nor socialistic panaceas varying from a mild collectivism to Marxism and the Internationale, nor a league of nations and an imposing but impotent “Covenant,” nor even a world-wide “League to Enforce Peace.” We have heard something too much of late of peace, and not enough of justice; peace is not an end in itself, it is rather a by-product of justice. Through justice the world can attain peace, but through peace there is no guaranty that justice may be achieved. There must always be the material enginery through the operation of which the ideal is put into practice, but in the ideal lies the determining force, whether for good or evil, and by just so far as this is right in its nature will the mechanism operate for good ends. The best agent in the world, even the Catholic Church or the American Republic, may be employed towards evil and vicious ends whenever the energizing force is of a nature that operates towards darkness and away from the light.

I have tried in “The Sins of the Fathers,” to prove that the marks of degeneracy and constructive evil in the modernism that went to its ruin during the Great War, and is now accomplishing its destiny in the even more tragical epoch of after-the-war, are its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard—that is to say, its acceptance of the gross aggregate in place of the unit of human scale, its standard of values which rejected the passion for perfection in favour of the numerical equivalent, and its denial of spirit as a reality rather than a mere mode of material action—while the only salvation for society is to be found in the restoration, in all things, of small human units, the testing of all things by value not bulk, and the acceptance once more of the philosophy of sacramentalism.

It would be possible, I suppose, to develop a detailed scheme for the reconstruction of the world along certain definite lines that would be in accordance with these principles, but the question would at once arise, How could it be made to work? Frankly, the question is unanswerable except by a categorical negative. The nineteenth-century superstition that life proceeds after an inevitable system of progressive evolution, so defiant of history, so responsible in great degree for the many delusions that made the war not only possible but inevitable, finds few now to do it honour. The soul is not forever engaged in the graceful industry of building for itself ever more stately mansions; it is quite as frequently employed in defiling and destroying those already built, and in substituting the hovel for the palace. It is not even, except at infrequent intervals, desirous of improving its condition. As a whole, man is not an animal that is eager for enlightenment that it may follow after the right. At certain crescent periods in the long process of history, when great prophets and leaders are raised up, it is forced, even against its will, to follow after the leaders when once the prophets have been conscientiously stoned, and great and wonderful things result—Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Sicily, the cities of the Middle Ages, Flanders, Elizabethan England—but the untoward exertion is its own executioner, and always society sinks back into some form of barbarism from whence all is to be begun again.

Nor is education—free, universal, secular and “efficient”—an universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history, initiated by the most highly and generally educated of all peoples, by them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but for the omnipresent horror. And the same is true both of industrialism and democracy, for both have belied the promises of their instigators and have brought in, not peace and plenty and liberty, but universal warfare, outrageous poverty, and the tyranny of the ignorant and the unfit.

Before the revelations of war, while the curious superstitions of the nineteenth century were still in vogue, it was widely held that evolution, education and democracy were irresistible, and that progress from then on must be continuous and by arithmetical if not geometrical progression. When the war came and the revelations began to unfold themselves, it was held with equal comprehensiveness that even if our civilization had been an illusion, our trinity of mechanistic saviours but a bundle of broken reeds, the war itself would prove a great regenerative agency, and that out of its fiery purgation would issue forth a new spirit that would redeem the world. It is a fair question to ask whether those that once saw this bow of promise in the red skies have found the gold at the rainbow’s end or are now even sure the radiance itself has not faded into nothingness.

Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism and self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation developed during the fight, and the emergence sooner or later of isolated personalities who have retained the ardour of spiritual regeneration, who seem indeed to epitomize it within themselves, and who struggle, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure, to bring the mass of people back to their lost ideals and embody these in a better type of society. Apparently success or failure depends on whether the particular war in question came on the rise or the fall of the rhythmical curve that conditions all history.

At the present moment the first of these two phenomena has shown itself. Whether it is in Russia or in the fragments of the despoiled Central Empires where the ominous horror of Bolshevism riots in a carnival of obscene destruction, or in the governments and “interests” and amongst the peoples of the Allies, there is now, corporately, no evidence of anything but a general break-down of ideals, and either an accelerating plunge into something a few degrees worse than barbarism, with the Dark Ages as its inevitable issue, or an equally fatal return to the altogether hopeless, indeed the pestilential, standards and methods of the fruition of modernism in the world-before-the-war. The new warfare is between these, the malignant old Two Alternatives; fear of one encompasses the other, and in each case all that is done is with the terror of Bolshevism conditioning all on the one hand, terror of reactionism on the other. Expediency, desperate self-preservation, is the controlling passion, and the principles of justice, right and reason are no longer operative.

As this is written there is no sure indication as to which of these alternatives is to prevail, but it is for the moment quite clearly indicated that it will be the one or the other,—either the tyranny of the degraded, Bolshevism, universal anarchy, with the modernist reversal of all values succeeded by the post-modernist destruction of all values, or the triumph of reaction, with a return to the world-before-the-war for a brief period of profligate excess along all materialistic, intellectual and scientific lines not unlike the Restoration period of Charles II, with the same ruin achieved in the end though after a certain interlude. And yet the third alternative is theoretically possible: escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of error through the opportune development of the second phenomenon, the reasonable certainty of which is indicated by history—the appearance of those leaders of vision and power who had been generated through the alchemy of war.

That in the end they will come we need not doubt, but in the meantime an errant world, leaderless and ungoverned, is urged swiftly on towards catastrophe of either one sort or another, nor will it wait the coming of the indispensable leaders. It is not from the men whose potential greatness was perfected and revealed by war, Cardinal Mercier, for example, or Marshal Foch, great leaders absolutely of the first class, that solution is to be sought, for in their age is sufficient inhibition. It is rather from those whose character has actually been made by war, youths perhaps, who have fought and found, either in the armies or the navies or in the air, or even in some of the non-combatant branches of the Service. Boys they are now, perhaps, in years, but into them has been poured the energizing power that leads to mastership; to them is given the first fire of progressive revelation. Somewhere, in the still active units, on the way back to their homes and to civil life, or already mingled in the activities from which they were called for their great testing, are those who sooner or later will find themselves the leaders of the quest for a new life for the world. The Divine finger-touch has been granted them, the spark of inspiration has lightened in their souls, but seldom is the generation swift; it may be years before it is effected, and meanwhile only the Two Alternatives remain.

For my own purpose in this book, perhaps indeed so far as society itself is concerned, it is a matter of indifference which is the victor in the fight for supremacy; the ultimate issue will be the same though the roads are various. Universal beastliness issuant of Russia, or universal materialism redivivus, the conditions of life will be intolerable, and in the end a new thing will be built up as different on the one hand to anarchy as on the other it is different to the industrial-democratic-materialist régime of the immediate past. With the former we are assured some five hundred years not unlike those that followed the fall of Rome; with the latter we at least are given the respite of a brief Restoration, during which the war-bred potencies may mature, and at the end of the few gross years which would be allotted to this status quo ante-civilization, become operative to avert the horror of a recrudescent Bolshevism. At least so we may hope; on the other hand it may be doubted whether, after all, a revived and intensified materialism such as that which the reactionary element is attempting, would not afford an even less favourable and stimulating soil for fostering the possible war-potentialities than would red anarchy, for the suffocating qualities of gross luxuriance are sometimes more fatal than the desperate sensations of danger, adversity and shame. In any case, the immediate future is not one to be anticipated with enthusiasm or confidence and we shall do well to consider the course to be followed by those who reject the Two Alternatives and refuse to have any part in either.

II

It is not my intention to write another in the long list of Utopias with which man has amused himself, from Plato to H. G. Wells. Where the preceding volumes in this series have been frankly destructive, I would make this volume constructive, if only by suggestion. It is in no sense a programme, it is still less an effort at establishing an ideal. Let us call it “a way out,” for it is no more than this; not “the” way, nor yet a way to anything approaching a perfect State, still less a perfect condition of life, but rather a possible issue out of a present impasse for some of those who, as I have said, peremptorily reject both of the intolerable alternatives now offered them.

What I have to propose is based on acceptance, at least substantially, of the criticisms of modernism that appear in “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” and in “The Sins of the Fathers”; it also assumes the general accuracy of the interpretation of history attempted in “The Great Thousand Years,” and the estimate of certain historic religio-social forces therein described. To those who dissent from these opinions this volume will contain nothing and they will be well advised if they pursue it no further. Since it is written for those who have done me the honour to read these previous books, I shall not try to epitomize them here, assuming as I do a certain familiarity with their general argument. All that it is necessary to say is that the assumption is made that “modern civilization” was essentially an inferior product; that it could have had no other issue than precisely such a war as occurred; that its fundamental weaknesses were its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard; that the particular type of “democracy” for which the world was to be made safe was and is a menace to righteous society, since it had lowered and reversed all standards, established the reign of the venal, the incapable and the unfit, and had destroyed all competent leadership while preventing its generation, and that the only visible hope of recovery lay in a restoration of the unit of human scale, the passion for perfection, and a certain form of philosophy known as sacramentalism, with the precedents of the monastic method used as a basis of operation, and the whole put in process through the leadership of great captains of men such as always in the past have accomplished the building up of society after cataclysms similar to that which during five years has brought modernism to an end.

Society is no longer to be dealt with as an unit, nor even as a congeries of units; it is a chaos, both as a whole and in each moiety thereof. The evolutionary process, if it ever existed, is now inoperative, and something more nearly approaching devolution has taken its place. As under the earlier assault of the everlasting barbarian the great, imperial unity of Rome broke up into minute family fragments, and as the pseudo-unity of the Holy Roman Empire broke up into a myriad of heterogeneous states, so our own world, both political and social, is deliquescing into its elements, and no ingenious mechanism, however cleverly devised, can arrest the process for more than the briefest of periods. When the mechanism breaks down, whether it is a year or ten years hence, the interrupted process of disintegration will continue to its appointed end.

Man has always nursed the dream of corporate regeneration, of the finding or devising of some method or mechanism whereby society as a whole could be redeemed en bloc. The dream has engendered many revolutions but the results have been other than those anticipated, and even these unexpected happenings have proved evanescent, with a constant return to the old evils and abuses. Persistently the world as a whole refuses regeneration. Latterly the ingenious device has somewhat superseded the violent changing of things, and democracy with its miscellaneous spawn of doctrinaire inventions, industrialism with its facile subterfuges of political economy; evolution, education, socialism, each in turn has offered itself as the sovereign elixir. The war has quashed the major part, the following “peace” is dealing with the remainder. The last device of all, socialism, whether of the Marxian variety or of the Fabian sort, is now the most discredited of all, for Bolshevism on the one hand, state ownership, control, or management of industry on the other, have both proved, the one intolerable, the other a bloody synonym for social extinction.

Yet the way out must be found by those for whom the present scheme of existence is not good enough; for those who refuse to go back to the pre-war régime or on to the predicted era of anarchy. The way may be found, but it will reveal itself not through wide and democratic social processes but through group action in which the units are few in number. The process will be one of withdrawal, of segregation, at first even of isolation; but if this really proves to be the right way, the end may be, as so often in the past, a centrifugal action developing from one originally centripetal, with an ultimate leavening of the whole lump.

It may be remembered that in “The Great Thousand Years” I endeavoured to demonstrate the vibratory theory of history, whereby the life of society is conditioned by a rhythmical wave motion; curves rising and descending, inflexibly though with varying trajectories, the falling curve meeting at some point the rising curve of a future coming into being, the crossing points forming the nodes of history, and spacing themselves at five-century intervals either side the birth of Christ, or the year 1 A.D. In the same place I called attention to the correspondence in time (since the Christian era) between certain periodic manifestations of spiritual force, identical in nature though somewhat varied in fashion, and these nodal points; that is to say, the monastic idea as this showed itself in the first, sixth, eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This synchronism may be graphically explained thus, the thin line indicating the approximate curve of social development, the shaded line the monastic manifestation:

A THE CURVE OF CIVILIZATION  B THE CURVE OF MONASTICISM

It would appear from this that now, while the next nodal point is possibly seventy-five years in the future, the next manifestations of monasticism should already be showing itself. The curve of modernism is now descending as precipitously as did that of Roman Imperialism, but already, to those who are willing to see, there are indisputable evidences of the rising of the following curve. Whether this is to emulate in lift and continuance the curves of Mediævalism and of modernism, or whether it is to be but a poor copy of the sag and the low, heavy lift of the Dark Ages, is the question that man is to determine for himself during the next two generations.

Now as a matter of fact the last thirty years have shown an altogether astonishing recrudescence of the monastic spirit, while already the war has added enormously to its force and expansion. Thus far it has been wholly along old-established lines, which was to be expected; but as we approach nearer and nearer to the next nodal point of the year 2000, we are bound to see a variant, a new expression of the indestructible idea. This has always been the case. At the beginning of the Christian era the impulse was personal, the individual was the unit, and the result was the anchorites and hermits, each isolating himself in a hidden mountain cave, a hut in the desert or, if his fancy took this eccentric, on the top of a lonely column, like St. Simon Stylites. With St. Benedict the group became the unit, a sort of artificial family either of men or of women, as the case might be. He himself began as a hermit in the cleft of a far mountain, but within his own lifetime his original impulse was overridden and the new communal or group life came into being, though each monastery or convent was quite autonomous and self-contained. Five centuries later (or four, to speak more exactly) began the Cluniac reform, which was followed by the Cistercian movement, and here, though the old Benedictine mode was followed at first, in a brief time came the differentiation, for now all the houses of one order were united under a centralizing and coördinating force. Here we have the State as the parallel of the new scheme. Latest of all, in another five centuries, came still a new model, the army, with the Society of Jesus as its perfect exponent. So we have at almost exact five-century intervals four models of monasticism: the individual, the family, the State and the army. A fifth is now due; what will be its form?

It will, I think, be one in which the human family is made the unit. It will not supersede the older modes but supplement them, for the monks, canons-regular and friars, of the old tradition and the old line, will be as necessary then as ever; instead it will be an amplification of the indestructible idea, fitted to, and developing from, the new conditions which confront society. In addition to the groups of either men or women, living in a community life apart, and vowed to poverty, celibacy and obedience, there will be groups of natural families, father, mother and children, entering into a communal but not by any means “communistic” life, within those Walled Towns they will create for themselves, in the midst of the world but not of it, where the conditions of life will be determined after such sort as will make possible that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modern civilization.

Let me explain at once that I have nothing in mind resembling in the least the communistic schemes of Fourier, Owen, George; of the Shakers, the Concord enthusiasts or their ilk. In these cases it was always the unnatural element of communism that was their undoing, and in the Walled Towns of the new era the preservation of individuality, of private property, of family integrity, would be of necessity a fundamental principle. Many evils and abuses have grown up around all these, but I cannot claim that I am one of those (in spite of its wide popularity and almost universal acceptance) who hold tenaciously to the belief that the only way to get rid of the dust is to burn down the house, or that the only way to correct a child’s faults is to kill it. Rather I incline to the somewhat outworn method of reform without destruction, and I lean to the opinion that there are enough others of like convictions to make possible the creation of a certain number of Walled Towns that the experiment may be put into effect, since manifestly it is no longer possible in society as a whole.

The method would be simple, the process carried out quietly, and preferably in several places at once. A certain community of interest must be presupposed, but this would hardly extend beyond substantial unity in religion, in philosophy and in a revolt against the industrial-democratic-imperialist scheme of society which has dominated Europe and America since the beginning of the nineteenth-century. There can be no sane and wholesome society in the future where there is not an universally accepted religion of perfectly definite form, a clear, logical and convincing philosophy of life, and a social system diametrically opposed to that which was current before the war and is now striving desperately for a restoration. As the unity of religion has been shattered since the sixteenth century, the creators of the Walled Towns may very well be divided into individual groups, so far as religion is concerned. I can imagine Roman Catholics forming the nucleus of one, Episcopalians another, and it may be there are among the Protestant denominations those who would be led along the same lines. The essential point is the fundamental necessity for a vital and common religion among those who go forward to the building of the new social units. The same is true of philosophy, for this and religion can never be separated except under pain of the results that have followed the severance in the fifteenth century, and the workings of a world void of any real philosophy ever since. If there is any philosophy except sacramentalism which is at the same time intellectually satisfying in a perfectly complete degree, consonant with the proved results of scientific investigation and thought, and sufficiently dynamic as a controlling force in life, I am not acquainted with it. If such a thing exists, it might serve its turn, but false philosophies such as materialism, evolutionism, Christian Science and pragmatism are not working substitutes for a real philosophy such as that of Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus or St. Thomas Aquinas. As for the social vision, there must be not only the negative quality of revolt but the positive quality of construction. It is not sufficient to hate the tawdry and iniquitous fabrications of the camp-followers of democracy; the gross industrial-financial system of “big business” and competition, with the capital versus labour antithesis it has bred. It is not enough to curse imperialism and materialism and the quantitative standard. There must be some vision of the plausible substitute, and while this must determine itself slowly, through many failures, and will in the end appear as a by-product of the spiritual regeneration that must follow once the real religion and a right philosophy are achieved, there must be a starting somewhere.

Personally, I should say that for this starting point we might fix on Justice (whichever way the sword cuts) as the first consideration; Charity (or rather Caritas—the Latin is more exact) follows close after, or even goes side by side. So do the other Cardinal Virtues; but who has not invoked them in support of every reform, whether it was of God or the devil? They fall as lightly from the lips of Marat or Lenine as from those of Plato, Dante or Sir Thomas More; they may be assumed. There are, however, certain less abstract propositions which it seems to me must serve at least as a trial basis; these, for example:

Power is Divine in its origin, since it is an attribute of Divinity, and its exercise is by Divine permission. It follows, therefore, that, as was held during the Middle Ages, no man or group of men, neither king nor boss nor parliament nor soviet, has any authority to exercise power after a wrong fashion or to govern ill.

Society exists through coöperation, not through competition; the latter must therefore be abolished, though this does not imply the destruction of emulation, which is quite a different thing.

All men are equal before God and the Law but not otherwise. Privilege, in the sense of immunity or of special opportunity without corresponding obligations is abhorrent, but justice, self-interest and the common good demand that those who can do a thing well should do it, those who cannot should be debarred. This applies to government or legislation or the exercise of the electoral franchise, as well as to education, medicine or the arts.

In industry of all kinds, production should be for use, not profit. The paying of money for the use of money is questionable, both from the standpoint of morals and of expediency. It may prove that the Church was right during the Middle Ages in calling it all usury, and that John Calvin, when he declared in its favour, was guilty of a crime. In any case, the return on capital should be the fixed charge and small in amount; the margin of profit belongs to those who produce, whether they work with their brains or their hands. The holding of land for dwelling and cultivation is essential for every family in any wholesome society; this land should be sufficient to support the family at necessity. Land belongs to the community, but tenure thereof on the part of families or individuals is perpetual, and the land may be bequeathed or transferred so long as the rent or taxes are duly paid.

Every community is in duty bound to guard its own integrity by determining its own membership, but none once admitted can be expelled except by process of law.

No society can endure when a false standard of comparative values exists. At the present time about half the working male population in Europe and America is engaged in producing or marketing things which add nothing to the virtue, the real welfare, or the joy in life of man, and for the most part he would be better off without them. There are as many directly or indirectly engaged in getting rid of these essentially useless products as there are in their manufacture. None of these men produces anything, and they must be fed, housed and clothed by those who do. It costs as much to market the surplus product as it does to bring it into existence, and the consumer pays. The result is that “labour-saving” machines have vastly increased the burden of labour; the surplus product demands markets, and exploitation both of labour and of markets becomes the foundation of industrial civilization. The modern world has become a perfectly artificial fabric of complicated indebtedness, the magnitude and ramifications of which are so enormous that nothing preserves it but public confidence. Were this removed, or even shaken seriously, the whole fabric would collapse in universal bankruptcy, a situation even now indicated for all Europe, as may be seen in Mr. Vanderlip’s remarkable book “What has Happened to Europe.” It is to correct this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous, wrong-headed and insecure way of life, that sooner or later men, women and children will seek refuge in the Walled Towns they will build, as they have gone, time out of mind, into the monasteries and convents of religion which they built for their earlier refuge.

III

In the vision that I see of the coming Walled Towns, they may rise anywhere, given only that there is sufficient arable land near by, a river that will afford power, and a site with some elements of natural beauty. They will grow from small beginnings,—a few families and individuals at first, though the number must be sufficient to establish the identity and the autonomy of the group. The members will be those for whom the present type of social life is not good enough, either in fact or in promise; men and women who think alike on a few essential matters, who still maintain the standard of comparative values of the world before modernism, and who wish to live simply, as happily as possible, and to restore the lost ideals of justice, honour, chivalry and brotherly coöperation. While fulfilling all their obligations to government as it is now established—paying taxes, rendering military service and jury duty, and voting in those occasional cases when there is a remote chance of its doing any good—they will yet set up for themselves a community, self-supporting in so far as this is possible, with its own government, its educational system, its social organism and its regulations controlling the mode of life of its members to the extent that is necessary to carry out the fundamental principles of the association.

The phrase “Walled Towns” is symbolical only; it does not imply the great ramparts of masonry with machicolated towers, moats, drawbridges and great city gates such as once guarded the beautiful cities of the Middle Ages. It might, of course; there is no reason why a city should not so protect itself from the world without, if its fancy led in this pictorial direction; and after all, anyone who has been so fortunate as to live for a time in an ancient walled town, even under modernism, knows how potent is the psychological force of grey, guarding walls, with the little city within, and beyond the gates not only the fields and orchards and vineyards as they were in the old days, but also, and kept aloof by the ancient walls, the railways and factories of an inclement modernism. No, the adjective is symbolical merely, and indicates the fact that around these communities there is drawn a definite inhibition that absolutely cuts off from the town itself and “all they that dwell therein” those things from the assault of which refuge has been sought. I could easily imagine that these inhibitions might vary more or less as between one Walled Town and another, although certain general principles would be preserved everywhere, since these would be implied in the very movement itself.

Here are certain examples of what I mean. The antithesis between capital and labour would be impossible. Some form of a restored guild system would be the only workable basis. Production would be normally for use, not profit; and advertising or exploitation of any kind, or any other form of “creating markets,” would be rigidly tabooed. Every family would hold land sufficient for its own maintenance so far as possible farm and garden products are concerned. Certain large, expensive machines, by their nature not always in use, would be owned by the community, while the transportation of surplus produce to outside markets, the maintenance of a dairy and a canning plant, possibly also a mill and bakery, would be communally undertaken. As joyful living through that simplicity which follows from the elimination of unwholesome desires is a fundamental principle, it follows that in every case there would be a revival of the old principle of sumptuary laws, certain things being excluded as vicious in themselves, others as poisoning in their influence. Of course there is great danger here, since there is the constant menace of a pernicious infringement on that personal liberty which is an essential of all right living. The fact is incontestable, however, that our present intolerable social condition which seems to focus at one point in the “high cost of living” is due to two things: first, the multiplication during the last forty years of an incalculable number of foolish luxuries and “amenities of life” we were far happier without, but which now through familiarity we look on as indispensable; second, the fact I already have referred to that more than half the labour expended today goes to produce utterly useless, grossly ugly, or vitiatingly luxurious commodities, while half the cost of this ridiculous mass of superfluities goes to the tout, the drummer, the tradesman and the advertiser. In some way the balance must be restored, and this can be accomplished partly by regulations formally set forth, partly by the moral force of a better type of life actually put in process and exerting its silent influence over the people themselves. To a great extent it would be a case of “local option” extended to more than the question of drink. It would be neither useful nor wise (indeed it might be actionable) for me to attempt a list of the things we should be better off without. Each one can make his list to suit himself, and he will be surprised, if he deals with the question frankly, at the length of the schedule.

There is no way in which life can be brought back to a sane and wholesome and noble basis except through the recovery of a right religion and a right philosophy, the establishing of a new industrial and commercial system as radically opposed to the insanities of Bolshevism as it is to the sinister efficiency of the capitalist-proletarian régime, and by the elimination of the useless and crushing impedimenta that have been heaped upon us by “labour-saving” machines, the craft and ingenuity of misguided inventors, and the monumental ability of the system of advertising. Within the deadly coil of life as it is now irrevocably fixed by the society of today, there is no possibility of escape (barring the threatened success of Marxian socialism as this has taken shape in internationalism and Bolshevism), for the individual is helpless, bound hand and foot by the forces of custom, public opinion, lethargy and luxury, and by what Dr. Jacks so well calls “the tyranny of mere things.” So the real men felt in the time of St. Benedict, and of St. Odo of Cluny and St. Robert of Molesmes, of St. Norbert and St. Francis and St. Dominic and St. Bruno. They left the world in order that they might regain it, even though their eyes were fixed on a heavenly country. For themselves and their followers they gained a better type of life than the world could then offer, and their deeds lived after them in centuries of a regenerated life.

It is our habit of mind to think of the period of decline and catastrophe that intervenes between one era and the next as something awful and ominous, when the whole world realizes the horror of change and is sunk in black despair. In this we are undoubtedly as wrong as we are in the case of our interpretation of history. St. Augustine and St. Jerome saw the significance of the fall of the Roman Empire, but such other documentary evidence as exists would indicate that the Romans as a whole took it much as a matter of course, with little sense of the vastness of the catastrophe and the plenitude of the humiliation. In the ninth century men were so steeped in the universal sin and corruption they ceased to retain any perspective whatever. Very likely while Marozia and her clan were turning Rome and the Church into a monstrous offence against decency, the general public, as well as the world-wide corrupting influences themselves, thought that their “civilization” was really not so bad after all. The same is true of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the beginnings of the Renaissance dazzled man’s eyes to the tragedy of the ending of Mediævalism and the fast growing profligacy in act and thought. We ourselves are in similar case. We are so near the events that are bringing modernism to an end that we can estimate them not at all in their true nature. Read any newspaper of today, talk with any “practical business man,” or indeed almost any clergyman, educator or professed “philosopher,” and you will find the attitude of mind that looks on the war and the current beginnings of social revolution as untoward episodes, the insane creations of froward men, that only need time and patience for the crushing, to permit the world to go on again just as before, only faster and more gloriously, towards the iridescent apotheosis of democratic politics, imperial business, scientific acquisition, and the reign of reason. The incubus of the thing-that-is cannot be shifted and, as so many times before, it is only ruthless catastrophe that can bring it to an end.

Similarly we do not realize how new a thing is this tyranny of the material product, this obsession of the machine and the things it produces, the ideas and habits and superstitions it generates. I am not so old a man, as lives run, but I can still remember the old patriarchal life of the New England countryside before the juggernaut that crushed wholesome society and sane living had begun its fatal course. In the year 1880, when I first knew a great city, there were only three forces then in operation which differentiated its growth that had not existed in the time of Cæsar—steam as power, the electric telegraph and the elevator, the last a novelty of less than ten years’ existence. The great forces that were to transform society had been in existence for varying periods: some from the Renaissance, some from the Reformation, some from the Civil Wars in England, some from the French Revolution, some from the mechanical discoveries between 1767 and 1830, some from our own Civil War. It is not until the latter date, however, that they became fully operative; and the incubus we would now remove, if we could, and if we fully realized its nature, is actually the creation of the last fifty years.

I have said above that I clearly remember the old régime as it stood at the opening of this fifty-year period of monstrous aggregation, exaggeration and acceleration, and this memory, together with some thirty years of study of Mediæval civilization, has much to do with the conviction that man cannot be free or sane or reasonably happy until he forcibly tears himself (or forcibly is torn) from the deadly evil of modernism in which he is enmeshed. The positive memory may help to show something of that to which I conceive we must return.

In the year 1870 my grandfather’s place was to all intents and purposes what it had been since the first portion of the old house was built during the reign of William and Mary. He was “The Squire” in his family and over the community, as his fathers had been before him for two centuries. If wills were to be drawn, land surveyed, property transferred, family quarrels adjusted, the duty fell upon him. From a material point of view the house and the farm and the way of life were as they had been. There was, I think, a mechanical corn-sheller, but I remember no other new-fangled mechanical device. The wheat for flour was grown on the place and ground at a near-by mill. Until but a few years before, the wool and flax for clothing and linen were also of home production, while the great loom was still in its place in the dim attic with its odour of thyme and beeswax. In addition to all the necessary fruits and vegetables, all the butter, cheese, bacon, hams came from the estate. So of course did the honey and the metheglyn, or honey-wine as you read of it in Chaucer, which, I verily believe, was made there last of all places in the world. To a great extent the life was still communal. For mowing, planting, harvesting, shearing, husking, the farmers came together to work in common, while the disability of one brought the others together to do his work. Communal also in a sense was the household. Many a time have I awakened as a boy, between lavender-scented homespun sheets, and beneath a wonderful woven coverlet, to dress in the early dawn and go down to the long kitchen with its eight-foot fireplace, to find all the feminine portion of the household preparing such a breakfast as the present day cannot afford; and later I have watched the neighbors gathered in the “east room” ingeniously “drawing in” rugs and mats of marvellous (if not strictly artistic) design and colour. As was the custom in that country, the house was double, the eldest son occupying the new wing until in time he removed to the old part and his son in turn took the new. It was a place of tradition, of immemorial custom, of self-respecting because arduous life, and every inch of ancient house, of vast and rambling barns, even of the fields and pastures, gardens and orchards and woodland, was redolent of old history, of permanence, of stability, of dignity and of a vivid liberty.

Here was no telephone, no automobile, no elaborate collection of complicated and costly machines, no flood of cheap newspapers, magazines or other “literature,” no weekly expedition to the “movies,” no ready-made clothes that must be constantly replaced or that annually went out of fashion, no pianola or graphophone, no “art-furniture,” no candy and cheap drinks and fruit out-of-season. Neither was there any labour problem, or strikes or poverty or high-cost-of-living.

“A hard life”? Yes, in a way, but its hardness was more than balanced by what it gave: self-respect, liberty, freedom from the tyranny and oppression of outside forces; above all, character, and of a strength and simplicity and fineness it would be hard to match today. I do not doubt that country and village life as it was then in the North, and had been in the South until ten years before (not as it had become in another twenty years when the new forces had begun to seep in), was more productive of real happiness and of sterling character than has been any form of life that has developed since.

Of course there was the other side to the case. Life then, good as it was, lacked some of the qualities that existed in the Middle Ages, the loss of which was a serious handicap. There was a hard and unlovely religion, the arts had wholly disappeared, and the exquisite environment man had always made for himself had vanished from life. The stimulus and the vital communal sense of the old guilds, the games, the merrymaking, the living religious practices, had faded into a colder and more austere neighbourliness. The comradeship of pilgrimage and common adventure and “church ales” had vanished utterly, and in every way life was becoming more drab and colourless. Much remained, however, though in a vanishing estate, of the clean and simple and wholesome life of a dead past, and in comparison with the common life of today, on the farm, in the factory, in village or great city, it must commend itself in such degree that many sacrifices are worth while if we can win it back. Win it back, but not as it stood then. Out of a farther past must come many things to enrich its content and make more beautiful its condition. Out of the present must come much also. An archæological or artificial restoration would be as undesirable as it is impossible. What modernism has given—or sold—that is in itself good, must be retained, and this is much. The trouble is the good is so intricately mixed with the bad that the untangling seems almost hopeless. Since our standard of comparative values is so distorted we have no sound basis from which we can set to work. Only through the process of what is really a new spiritual enlightenment, manifesting itself through both religion and philosophy, can the task be accomplished, for no ingenious engine, no clever device, no political panacea will prove even of temporary value. Probably the control of this spiritual stimulus is out of our hands; it usually is, being granted to men at times, at other times withheld. While we await the issue we can at least try humbly, and perhaps doubtfully, if we cannot take the first steps towards earning the indispensable boon, and it may be the first step will be into Walled Towns.

IV

Beaulieu is a Walled Town and it lies about forty miles from one of the largest cities of New England. The forty-mile road is in all things about what such a road is today; the same industrial suburbs, with the further fringe of slate-grey tenements in their dreary and dirty yards, then the subsidiary towns of dull or flamboyant cottages, barren railway stations, third-rate shops, harsh factories, each separated from the next by marshes or barrens where refuse is dumped, and speculative roads and house-lots cry their unsavoury wares. Little by little decent residences crop up and so the ring of reasonable opulence is reached,—now as then good so far as nature is let alone, bad where the architect and landscapist and gardener exercise their ingenuity. Farms follow, and pasture and woodland, unkempt but inoffensive, sometimes even beautiful when the hand of man has been withheld. Three or four ambitious and growing towns break the good country, each contributing of its own in the shape of mills, slums, wastes, commercial architecture, gaudy signs, hurry, noise, dust and bad smells. After the last there is an interval of comparative quiet and decency while the road runs through a respectable forest, rising as it enters among low hills, with a glimpse of water here and there, a small lake, a brook, and at last a fairly wide view.

On the bridge the view changes. There is something different in the lands beyond, though the difference is at first intangible. It is farming land for some two or three miles in front and reaching in a wide sweep right and left, while beyond the land rises swiftly with a rather thick growth of large trees above which lift two or three grey stone towers, and a silvery spire, very delicate and lofty; a view that might be in any English county or in France or the Rhineland. The farms are evidently under high cultivation, divided into rather small fields by hedgerows marked by an unusual number of well-kept trees. There are few farmhouses but many large barns of stone somewhat suggesting those of western Pennsylvania. Such houses as there are, are also of stone in great part, with brick here and there and considerable white plaster. The well-built road is, as before, crowded with motor vehicles, but two things have wholly ceased at the river—advertising signs and smoking factory chimney; as far as the eye can see neither is visible.

The zone of farms is quickly passed and then comes a space of orchards and vineyards; the highway divides, one branch to the right, another to the left, and at the fork stands a stone shrine with the figure of St. Christopher; practically all the motors go to the right, but we take the road to the left, which curves sharply after a few hundred yards, crosses a stone bridge of a single arch over a narrow but swift river, and is intercepted by a long, irregular mass of stone buildings with many mullioned windows, and a lofty tower something like that of St. John’s College in Cambridge, with a broad, high, pointed arch, and a chain reaching from side to side, blocking the way to all wheeled traffic. This is the Bar Gate of the Walled Town of Beaulieu, and here all automobiles must stop, for they are not permitted within the town. There is a good garage on one side; a sort of inn and a livery stable on the other, where one may hire a carriage or saddle horses, which alone are allowed inside the gates.

The rambling grey-stone building, which in parts rises sheer from the river’s edge and is not unlike Warwick Castle, serves many purposes. The octroi is strict and all goods brought into the town for sale must pay a varying ad valorem tax, while the “liberty of the town” is granted to outsiders only on payment of a small fee. No one can sell in the town without a license, while some things are wholly prohibited, such, for example, as those things that would compete with native products, whether of food-stuffs, manufacture or artisanship, and those articles which the town has prohibited as deleterious or as “useless luxuries.” A bailiff and council of three sit here in a fine stone-vaulted room opening off the great gate, for three hours each morning, to issue their licenses or prohibitions. Here also are the town telephones and telegraphs, for while these as well as motor cars are recognized as necessities on emergency occasions, they are held to be “useless luxuries” as private possessions and are forbidden within the walls. There is nothing to prevent a townsman owning and using a motor car or private telephone beyond the town walls, if he likes, though this is looked on with disfavour, and as a matter of fact is unusual. In the early days of this, as of all Walled Towns, and to some extent thereafter, those who became townsmen continued their business or professions “in the world outside the walls,” that is to say in some neighboring city, and the jurisdiction of the Walled Town did not extend beyond its own precincts and lands. Usually in a few years’ time these men adapted themselves to the town life and law, giving up their outside interests and becoming “Burgesses of the Free City” with their interests and material activities concentrated within its limits. Conduct of government is wholly within the hands of these burgesses. As for the town telephones and motor cars, their use is free to all townsmen in cases of illness or other recognized emergency.

Over the gate-tower floats the big banner of the town, above the arch is its coat of arms emblazoned in colour and gold, and within the gate are always two halberdiers on guard. This is not affectation or a wilful mediævalism, but because all the Walled Towns know the value of symbolism and use it universally and intelligently. All civic ceremonials, indeed all the common acts of the town officials, are carried out with much show and dignity and magnificence. There are fine robes of office, precise etiquette, elaborate functions; nothing is done casually or haphazard, but with dignity, beauty and a real pride in the nobility of the communal life. Long before the founding of the first Walled Town it was generally known that the depravity, or at least the incompetence, that had become chronic in civic life, was partially due to the false “democracy” which had shorn it of every vestige of dignity, of ceremonial, of difference from the common affairs of business life, and the potency of symbolism was one of the original elements in the great revolution which brought the Walled Towns into existence.

Passing now under the great echoing vault of the Bar Gate, we come at once into the town itself. There is first of all a small square or market-place with rather thickly set, stone-built and gabled house, with glimpses between, and through occasional archways, into gardens behind. On one side is the Exchange, a considerable building with an open arcade along its front; it is here that the surplus products of the town are sold—grain and farm produce, cloth, or whatever it may be that is paid through the tax in kind or placed in the hands of the Exchange officials for sale outside the community. The main street leads from the square and curves up a slight grade. Here the houses are well separated, with garden walls between, sometimes pierced by grated openings that give more glimpses of gardens around and behind. As in the old days, these houses are mostly workshops and salesrooms as well as residences, for this is the street of craftsmen of all sorts—workers in metals, wood, leather; potters, embroiderers, tailors; carvers in stone, painters, makers of musical instruments. Every craft and art that is needed by the townspeople is found here, for one of the foundation stones of the Walled Towns is self-sufficiency; that is to say, everything ordinarily needful is produced by the town for the town, the necessities that cannot be furnished because of physical and climatic difficulties being reduced to the smallest number. Coffee and tea, a few spices, tropical fruits, rice, tobacco, cotton, silk and certain wines are beyond the contriving of a Walled Town in the north temperate zone and must be imported; but this is done by town officials, who are paid salaries, and the goods are resold at a standard advance on the wholesale cost. Everything that is possible is produced within the town itself, and either by individual craftsmen or, where bulk products are necessary, in the workshops maintained by the community under the charge of a special and salaried group of officials.

The specialization and localizing of industries and the division of labour were two of the causes of industrial civilization—and still are in “the world without.” That one town or district should be given over to the weaving of cotton or the spinning of wool; that shoes should chiefly be produced in Lynn, furniture in Grand Rapids, glass in Pittsburgh, beer in Milwaukee, hams in Chicago; that from all over a vast district the raw material of manufacture should be transported for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles, to various howling wildernesses of highly specialized factories, only to be shipped back again after fabrication to be used or consumed by many of the original producers, was and is one of the preposterous absurdities of an industrial system supported on some of the most appalling sophistry that ever issued out of the Adullamite caves of political economy.

In the Walled Towns all this is changed. In the first place no man is a free burgess unless he is a land-holder, and the minimum is garden land sufficient to supply all the needs of his family that can be satisfied from this source; the maximum is that amount of farm land that he can maintain at a minimum standard of productivity. So far as I know every family also keeps as many cows and poultry as will furnish the normal requirements in the shape of dairy products, eggs, and fowl for eating. The farms, which lie outside the walls and quite surround the town, do more than this, and much produce finds its way to the communal dairy, which is used for the production of butter and cheese for the townspeople, and also for sale outside the walls. As each town has its own special products, maintained always at the highest standard, the market never fails.

In the matter of cloth and clothing, wool and flax are grown both by individuals and by the community, and the spinning and weaving are done in the town mills. These are built and equipped at the common charge and managed by officials who serve for fixed salaries. A certain percentage on the value of all raw material brought in for working up into the finished product is assessed on the owner, and this may be paid in cash or in kind. No raw material is ever acquired from outside the community; all internal surplus is purchased and made up into cloth, which is sold first to any townspeople who wish to buy, or second to outside purchasers, the profits going to defray the running expenses. As a matter of fact, there is always a large surplus of wool and flax over and above the normal needs of each producer, and the mills not only run at a profit but pay well on the original investment. In these mills highly perfected machinery is used, for while the Walled Towns were formed partly for the elimination, so far as possible, of machines in the affairs of life, it is realized that they may be used as actual labour-savers, and without serious injury to the workman, where they are employed on bulk-production such as cloth, and where the element of competition is eliminated. Since in manufacture of this kind division of labour is unavoidable and the work is mechanical and akin to drudgery, the wages paid are high, while the hours of employment never exceed thirty a week. Practically all the employees are able to take care of their own gardens and many have small farms as well. During the seed-time and harvest periods the mills are shut down. When it happens (as it often does) that a mill shows a profit, all in excess of three per cent on the value of the plant is divided between the employees and the clerical force, for one of the established laws of all Walled Towns is that capital is entitled only to a fixed return, the surplus belonging to the labour, both mental and physical, that produces the results. Stock companies as such are strictly prohibited and it is unlawful to pay money for the use of money furnished by inactive investors. The mills are of course not large; they are pleasantly situated, not without architectural quality, and they are always run either by water-power or by electricity hydraulically generated. Steam is not used in any case.

The restoration of real crafts has resulted in reducing the use of machinery to the lowest terms. Handicraft has been restored, in wood, metals, all fancy weaving, glass making, pottery, leather-work, and to a certain extent in printing, not only because the results are in every way finer and more durable, but because labour so employed is intelligent, mentally stimulating and physically satisfying, while by so much the production of coal, the mining, smelting and forging of iron ore, and the fabricating of articles of iron and steel are reduced. The Walled Towns hold that such labour is mentally stultifying if not actually degrading, and it is with them a point of morals that they should make it necessary to the smallest degree possible.

The main street leads into the central square of the town, a spacious open place of great dignity and beauty, surrounded by admirable buildings of public character, where the simplicity of the houses and shops gives place to considerable richness both in design and in colour. On one side is the parish church, in this particular case not unlike St. Cuthbert’s, Wells, only half hidden by fine trees and surrounded by a green and shady churchyard. On another side is the Town Hall, also with a lofty tower flying the great flag of the city, while the other sides of the square are filled with the rich façades of the Guild Halls. Opening out of this central square is the Market Place, entered through a noble archway between two of the Guild Halls, and in this square is the Market House and several more Guild Halls. Opposite, a street connects after some few hundred feet with a third open place, in this case a pleasure garden, and here are the theatre, the concert hall, the public baths, the principal inn and several cafés and shops, the latter being more especially devoted to those things which are associated with the lighter side of life.

Beyond the immediate vicinity of these squares come the dwelling-places, each a separate house with a garden never less than an acre in extent. No multiple houses of any sort are permitted and each family must maintain a separate house and garden. The roads here wind pleasantly and are well shaded by trees; niched statues, both secular and religious, and shrines, are quite common. Here also are the several conventual establishments belonging to various orders, and varying much as between one town and another, but there is always a house for men and one for women. In the particular town we are considering, the chief monastic institution is Benedictine, and it stands on higher land than the rest of the town and is a true abbey both in size and in its official status. There is also a house of Dominican Sisters and one of Canons Regular of St. Augustine. Where the land begins to drop down again towards the river as it curves around on the side of the town opposite that at which we entered, is the college, with very spacious grounds, groves and gardens, the whole commanding a wide view out across the zone of farms and so to the low hills on the horizon to the west.

Let us now retrace our steps to the group of squares and see something of the significance of the various buildings and the part they play in the life of the Walled Town. We will interrogate some citizen in each case who can best explain that portion of the polity with which he is associated. The first shall be the parish priest, and he shall talk to us as we sit in the lych-gate with the silvery grey church behind, and in front the square where people are constantly passing back and forth,—not the dull, drab throng of men in ugly “sack-suits” and “derby” hats of the cities of the outer world, and women in fantastic finery or sordid, sad-coloured gowns, but a self-respecting people with some sense of beauty and a manifest delight in colour.

“There is,” says the parson, “as you will see, only one parish church, though as the town has grown other chapels have been added in other quarters, each of which is under a vicar who is one of the general body of parish clergy. The whole town forms one parish and the whole body of parochial clergy sit together to deal with the spiritual affairs of the town, while all the free burgesses meet in common to deal with the temporal interests of the parish. No, there are no denominational divisions. Each town as it is founded is made up only of those of the same religious convictions, and thereafter none is added who is not of the same belief. Denominationalism is inconsistent with unity of action, coöperation and true democracy, and however much the laws and customs of the Walled Towns may vary (and there is no little diversity) in this there is complete unanimity. No one is of course constrained to go to church or accept the ministrations of the clergy, although refusal is practically unheard of. There have been cases of those who have lost their faith, but sooner or later this means their withdrawal from the town itself. The parish church is actually the centre of spiritual life of the community. Its services are very numerous, particularly on Sundays and holy days, and it is, as you have seen, a sort of synthesis of all the arts raised to the highest attainable level. Each guild has either its own chapel or altar, and once a year it holds a great service at which its members are bound to be present.”

“The relationship between the Church and civic life is, I suppose, about what it was before the Reformation. Religion enters into all the affairs of life as it did then, and the visible manifestations are pretty much the same. You will have noticed the many shrines and statues in all parts of the town, and you can also see within a few days’ time one of the many festival processions through the streets. In the Walled Towns religion is not a hidden thing, nor is it segregated in a few places and confined to one day in the week. In the world outside the walls, where the old sectarian divisions still continue, this realization of religion would be impossible; but within the walls, because of the unanimity of conviction on the part of those that are drawn to any particular town, it is not only possible but inevitable.”

We cross the square and enter the Town Hall with its shady arcades and its painted and gilded statues like those on the Hôtel de Ville of Bourges. We go up a broad stone stairway and enter the anteroom of the Provost, who is the head of the government. The room has fine tapestries on the walls, with much well-carved furniture, and the guards and ushers suggest neither by their costumes nor their manners the familiar police officers on duty in the ordinary city hall. The building and the officials and the grave and rather stately ceremonial all convey the impression that a Walled Town is both a City State and a Free State, and that its formal and personal expression is a matter of dignity, reverence and self-respect. Once, not long ago, being in a large city of the North-West, I was invited to address the Mayor and Aldermen on certain matters pertaining to that department of my own city government of which I happened to be the head. The corridors were crowded with dirty or sinister loafers interspersed with burly policemen. There were spitoons everywhere which served only a part of their purpose. The Mayor’s reception room was not unhandsome, but it was full of knots of whispering and sly-eyed political hangers-on, reporters, and more loafers, while the air was rank with tobacco-smoke. Presently the Mayor and Aldermen strolled in, hailing various individuals by nicknames and slang phrases, and disposed themselves at ease around a long table; some were in their shirt-sleeves, for it was a hot midsummer day. I was listened to politely enough, and the questions asked were not unintelligent; it was the attitude, the form, that was at fault. The whole thing was more like a social meeting of commercial travellers in the office of a country hotel than a session of the governing body of a great city.

After this digression let us return to our Walled Town. From the anteroom we are conducted to the state reception room, and here we are received by the Provost in his long, furred gown and his gold chain of office. He is an old man, grey-bearded, and his courtly manners indicate at once his breeding, his self-respect and his sense of the dignity and significance of his position. From him we learn that only land-holders are burgesses of the town and that no others possess a vote or may hold office; the distinction is less invidious than it might appear, for land-holding is so fundamental a principle in the Walled Towns that there are almost none who cannot qualify. Government is in the hands of the Provost and Council, with a small group of department heads who with the Provost form the executive. Any hundred burgesses may unite for the purpose of choosing one of their number to the Council, and as this particular town contains about three thousand burgesses the Council consists of thirty men who are chosen annually, while the Provost, who is elected by the Council, holds office for ten years. There would appear to be very little legislation; each year the Provost presents, with the financial budget, a programme of legislation, and until this is disposed of, private legislative bills may not be considered. A further guard against the universal curse of democracy, reckless and ill-digested legislation initiated by single individuals, is the provision that any private bill must be indorsed by one fifth of all the Councillors before it can be introduced.

Taxation is almost wholly in the form of rent of land, and here the scale is fixed from the moment the land is taken over, while it varies as between arable land, forest, orchard, pasture, garden and “tenement,” i. e. land on which is a dwelling. If through his own industry a land-holder improves any portion of his holding, he receives a rebate on his taxes; if he allows any land to degenerate, his tax is increased. The tax revenue is supplemented by various fees, small in amount and not numerous, and by the “gate tax” imposed on those from outside who are admitted to buy or sell within the walls. Public indebtedness is prohibited by law, the revenue must always meet the annual expenditure, and no bonds secured by public credit may be issued.

The Walled Towns have definitely abandoned the nineteenth century theory that the vote is a “natural right.” As said before, this privilege is exercised only by land-holders (the great majority of citizens) but it may be withdrawn for long or short periods and for reasons specified in the charter. Any man found guilty of a crime or misdemeanour forfeits the franchise, and for periods varying from one year to life, dependent on the gravity of the offence. The burgesses vote only through their “hundreds” and solely for the choosing of Councillors, but the election of a Provost must be confirmed by a mass-meeting of all burgesses, and any change in the charter must be submitted for the same approval.

The Law Courts of a Walled Town offer many points of difference to those of “the world without.” In the first place, it is a fundamental principle that the object of a Court of Law is the administering of justice, the defence of right, and the punishment of wrong. An appeal to technicalities is therefore prohibited, and any advocate who makes such an appeal is promptly disbarred. Normally all cases are tried and determined by a bench of judges, though in certain cases the plaintiff or defendant may demand a jury trial. Of course all Judges are appointed by the Provost for life. In addition to the regular municipal courts there is a Court of Conciliation. Under the oath of each citizen to obey and support the charter, every case must be taken to the Court of Conciliation before recourse is had to the regular courts of law, the result being that very few cases fail of adjustment without formal legal process. The Law Courts themselves are housed in a building of a degree of beauty unusual even in a Walled Town where ugliness is unknown, while the form and ceremony reach the final height of grave majesty.

Let us now visit one of the guild halls, for it is in the guild that we may find the root of the entire economic system which so sharply differentiates society within the walls from that without. We may take any one of the half-dozen or more, for all are practically the same except in the design of their buildings and the decoration, the liveries of the members and officials, and the guild banner.

All society is organized under the guild system, and every man must be a registered member of one guild or another. The guild of the farmers is the largest, and usually it is to this that those citizens belong who are officials or professional men. Then there are guilds of metal-workers of all kinds, cloth-makers, builders, artists, etc. When a Walled Town is founded with small numbers the list of guilds is very small, but as the town increases so do the guilds, and the different industries organize their own groups. A guild is an artificial family made up of all those of a common interest. Its objects are: human fellowship, coöperation, mutual aid in illness or misfortune, the maintaining of the highest standard in the product of all its members, prevention of inordinate profits, regulation of the relationship between masters, journeymen and apprentices, the standardizing of wages and profits, craft training and education, the maintenance of and common participation in religious services, and finally the purchase of raw materials and the ownership and maintenance of large and costly machinery in the few cases where that is employed.

In the Walled Town the division between capital and labour does not and can not exist. Since production is for use, not profit, since competition is impossible under the guild system, and since no advertising is permitted beyond a sign-board (and they are sometimes most notable works of art, these painted and gilded and carven signs), exploitation, whether of labour or markets, is unknown. One of the fundamental points in the town charters is the definite prohibition of the “unearned increment.” Money may not be taken or paid for the use of money, except within each guild, and here only under what are practically emergency conditions, the rate of interest never exceeding three per cent. Every guild has its own fund, made up from dues, bequests, and a percentage of profits on the sale by the guild of such surplus products as may be handed over to its officers for disposal; but this fund cannot be invested at interest outside the walls nor is any portion available for other than guild members, except that the town may use it for current expenses in anticipation of the regular land-taxes (or rent), paying three per cent therefor, and returning it within the space of a year. The system is practically a restoration of the guild system of the Middle Ages, and any one may find for himself further details by referring to the many books on the subject; e. g. those of William Morris, Arthur Penty and Prince Kropotkin. It is the precise antithesis of collectivism, socialism and trades-unionism of whatever form.

Within the Walled Towns the educational system shows few points of resemblance to the standards and methods still pursued outside. It is universally recognized that the prime object of all education is the development of inherent character, and for this reason it is never divorced from religion; the idea of a rigidly secularized education is abhorrent, and the dwellers in the Walled Towns rightly attribute to its prevalence in the nineteenth century much of the retrogression in character, the loss of sound standards of value, and the disappearance of leadership which synchronized with the twentieth century break-down of civilization even if it were not indeed its primary cause. Neither is there any false estimate of the possibilities of education; it is held that while it can measurably develop qualities latent in the child by reason of its racial impulse, it cannot put in what is not there already. The old superstition that education and environment were omnipotent, and that they were the safeguards as well as the justification of democracy, since given an identical environment and equal educational opportunities an hundred children of as many classes, races and antecedents would turn out equal as potential members of a free society, has long since been abandoned. It is impossible to enter into this question at length, but the chief points are these.

Education is not compulsory, but parents are bound to see that their children can “read, write and cipher.” Primary schools are maintained by the town and are conducted largely along the lines first developed by Dr. Thomas Edward Shields in the early twentieth century. Beyond primary grades the schools are maintained by various units such as the guilds, the parish and the monasteries and convents. While considerable variation exists as between one school and another, they are all under the supervision of the Director of Education in order that certain standards may be maintained. Variety both in subjects taught and in methods followed is held to be most desirable, and complete freedom of choice exists between the schools, though a parent wishing to send a child to some school other than those maintained by his own guild pays an annual fee for the privilege. Beyond reading, writing, arithmetic and music, which are common to all, the curriculum varies widely, though history, literature and Latin are practically universal. In some schools mathematics will be carried further than in others, in some natural science, while elsewhere literature, history, modern languages will be emphasized. There is no effort to subject all children to the same methods and to force them to follow the same courses,—quite the reverse; neither is the object the carrying of all children through the same schools to the same point. It is held that beyond a certain stage most children profit little or nothing by continued intensive study. On the other hand, there are always those whose desires and capacities would carry them to the limit. These are watched for with the most jealous care, and if a boy or girl shows special aptitude along any particular line he becomes an honour student, and thereafter he is in a sense a ward of the community, being sent without charge to the higher schools, the college, and even on occasion to some university beyond the limits of the Walled Town if he can gain there something not available within the walls. Of course any student may continue as far as he likes, or is able, but this is not encouraged except in the case of the honour student, and he must himself meet his own expenses. The authorities are particularly careful to discover any special ability in any of the arts, literature and philosophy, and it is the boast of the Walled Towns that no one who gives promise along any one of these lines need fail of achievement through lack of opportunity. In the case of the various crafts also the same care is exercised, and a boy showing particular aptitude is at once given the opportunity of entrance into the proper guild as an apprentice, after he has been prepared for this by a modified course of instruction adapted to his particular ability.

The college has something the effect of a blending of New College, Oxford, and St. John’s, Cambridge. It is perhaps the most beautiful element in the Walled Town, and here every intellectual, spiritual and artistic quality is fostered to the fullest degree. The college is a corporation under control of the alumni and the faculty, not in the hands of trustees, as was the unfortunate fashion amongst American universities in the nineteenth century. There are many fellowships granted for notable achievements along many lines, and a Fellow may claim free food and lodgings for life, if he choose, the return being certain service of a limited nature in the line of instruction, either as lecturer or preceptor. A few students are received from without the walls, but the number may not exceed five per cent of the student body, and high fees are charged for the privilege. There are no regular courses divided into four years. An honour student must take his Bachelor’s Degree within six years, his Master’s Degree in not less than two years thereafter, and his Doctorate in another four years, otherwise his privilege lapses and he must pay as other students, in which case there are no limits whatever and a man may spend a lifetime in study if he desires—and can pay the price. All the regular members of the Faculty must be burgesses, but many lecture courses are given by visiting professors from all parts of the world. Latin is a prerequisite for the Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, and Greek for a Doctorate, whatever the line that may be followed.

As has been said above, the recreation quarter of the town is around a square or garden a short distance from the central square. Here are to be found the public baths and gymnasium, together with a number of gay and attractive cafés and restaurants, the theatres, concert halls, etc. To a very great extent all the music and drama are the product of the people themselves. As has been said, music is almost the foundation of the educational system, therefore trained as they are from earliest childhood, good music, vocal, instrumental, orchestral, even operatic, is a natural and even inevitable result. The same is true of the drama, and nightly plays, operas, concerts are given by the townspeople themselves which reach a standard comparable with that of professionals elsewhere. Now and then, as a mark of special commendation, actors, singers and musicians are invited by the Provost and Council to visit the town, but as a general thing all is done by the people themselves. The moving picture show is prohibited.

With all the rich pageantry of life in a Walled Town, the magnificent church services, where all the arts assemble in the greatest æsthetic synthesis man has ever devised, the religious and secular festivals with their processions and merrymaking and dancing, the form and ceremony of ecclesiastical and civic life, and the unbroken environment of beauty, the craving for “shows” which holds without the walls and must be satisfied by tawdry and sensational dramatic performances, professional entertainers and the “movies,” is largely absent here where all life is couched in terms of true drama and living beauty. Here is no hard line of demarcation between a drab and sordid and hustling daily life on the one hand, and “amusement” on the other. All the arts are in constant use, and music and drama are merely extensions of this common use into slightly different fields. The same holds good of the other arts. An “art museum” is unknown, for it is a contradiction in terms. The Walled Town is full of pictures and sculpture and all the products of the art-crafts; but the latter are in every household, while the pictures and sculptures are in all the churches and public buildings, where they belong, and are constantly and universally visible. If an old picture is obtained, or a Mediæval statue or a tapestry, it is at once placed in a position similar to that for which it was originally intended. It would be perfectly impossible for the authorities to put a Bellini altar-piece in a yawning museum, jostled by crowded others and visible on week-days on payment of an admission fee, “Saturday afternoon and Sunday free.” Instead it is placed over an altar in the parish church or in some chapel. There are museums of sorts, but they are connected with the guild halls and contain only models for instruction and emulation.

And what of the social organism as it has developed under these definite modes of action? In the first place there are certain explicit inhibitions, as has already been indicated, the elimination of many details of luxury and artificial desires which tend to turn much human energy to futile ends, to raise the cost of living to abnormal heights, to establish false levels between those that have and those that have not, and that defeat every sane effort towards a simplification of life and its maintenance in accordance with right standards of comparative value. Desires have not been reduced in force, but they have been vastly cut down in number and turned towards real values. Owing to the ban on usury and the unearned increment, and the restoration of production for use in place of production for profit, wide variations in wealth no longer exist, although there are still differences due to thrift, more intelligent or prolonged work, and above all to superiority in the thing produced. Variations in social status still exist; indeed they are fostered, as a matter of fact, but they are no longer based either on money or on power. A Walled Town is at the same time individualist, coöperative and aristocratic, so far more closely resembling Mediæval society than any other that has existed, and therefore sharply differentiated both from society as it had become in the nineteenth century, and as it was aimed at by the socialists, the anarchists and the democrats of the same period. As all society is organized in guilds, and as in each there are the three classes of apprentices, journeymen and masters, so while each class has its own recognized status, there is an equally recognized difference between them. An apprentice may not hold land, therefore he cannot be a burgess of the free city, while a journeyman or master may not become a burgess unless he does hold land, and only burgesses participate in the civic duties and privileges of the town. There are certain offices which only a master may hold, and there are others which are open only to those masters who have become members of one of the Academies, or who belong to the Order of Knighthood. The Provost, for example, may be chosen only from amongst the knights. These highest ranks of dignity are constituted as follows:

In each Walled Town there are several Academies, each made up of those masters in the several guilds who have achieved the highest eminence. There is one Academy of Science and Craft, an Academy of Arts and Letters, an Academy of Philosophy, etc. Entrance into this circle of supreme achievement is effected either by direct choice of the members of the Academy, in which case the guild from which the candidate is chosen must ratify the choice, or by nomination on the part of the guild, when the recommendation so made must be sanctioned by the members of the Academy. Only high proficiency in some specified direction is ground for election to these Academies, and membership is an honour of the greatest distinction. The Order of Knighthood, however, is conferred rather for high qualities of character and for public service; any man, apprentice, minor official, servant, may be made a Knight if he demonstrates some high quality of honour or service. Here the power to nominate lies in the hands both of the Provost and of the knights themselves, but the latter have the right to confirm or reject the nominee of the Provost, while he has the same power if the nomination comes from the knights. Both the Academies and the knights have the right to degrade and expel a member of their own order; but when this is done it must be as the result of an open trial, if the accused so demands. Conviction of certain crimes and offences works degradation automatically.

The object of these higher circles of specially chosen individuals is the official recognition of character and achievement and the constituting of certain groups of distinguished men whose duty it is to guard the highest ideals, not only of their own crafts, but of society itself through the free city which embodies their communal life. The Walled Towns know well that, while all men are equal in the sight of God and before the Law, there is otherwise no such thing as equality, that it would be fatal were it ever achieved, and that the efforts at its accomplishment have undermined such society as we once had until it has crumbled and crashed into the unhandsome débris of its own ruin. The determination of inequalities by false standards of comparative value is almost as ill-favoured a thing as a doctrinaire equality; between the cash values of the bourgeois nineteenth century and the crazy overturnings and levellings and topsy-turvydom of twentieth century “democracy,” or Bolshevism, there is little to choose. High values, few, cherished, recognized and honoured, are one great end of society, of life itself, and it is in these crowning marks of distinction and achievement that humanity finds its best expression as well as its safe guides and sure leaders. In the Walled Towns is always the ardent quest for something to honour, whether it is some concrete product of art, science, letters, craftsmanship, or whether it is a citizen, an ideal, a memory of the past, a figure in history, a saint—or God Himself. Honour, service, loyalty, worship,—these things have wholly taken the place of an insolent assurance of equality, a bawling about rights, a denial of superiority, a proclaiming of the omnipotence of men “by virtue of their manhood alone.”

V

It will be evident at once that the Walled Towns are founded in deliberate opposition to nineteenth century democracy as well as to its bastard issue, its Mordred and its Nemesis, anarchy and Bolshevism, and to its inevitable but blood-kin enemy, socialism. Through state socialism, communism or internationalism a fool-hardy and illiterate democracy, surrendering at discretion to the materialism of industrial civilization, has striven to maintain the thing itself in all its integrity and its wealth-producing potency while turning its products into the hands of the many rather than the few. Even now, with the myrrh of war still bitter on the lips, the dim visions of greater things are fading away, and only one cry goes up for ever greater production, for more intensive effort, in order that the material losses may be retrieved.

Neither by state-socialism nor by soviets nor by any other ingenious device can wholesome social conditions be brought out of a thing unwholesome in itself; neither can a new control, a new basis of production and distribution, or new laws, compacts and covenants, take the place of a new spiritual energy, a new vision of ultimate values and their relationships. That communism, collectivism and social democracy have all gone bankrupt during and following the war is one truth at least we have learned. The methods were foolish enough but the object aimed at, the preservation and redemption of modern industrialism, was worse.

The impulse and incentive towards Walled Towns, whenever it comes, will be primarily social, the revolt of man against the imperial scale, against a life of false values impregnably intrenched behind custom, superstition and self-interest, against the quantitative standard, the tyranny of bulk, the gross oppression of majorities. It will echo a demand for beauty in life and of life, for the reasonable and wholesome unit of human scale, for high values in ideal and in action, for simplicity and distinction and a realization of true aristocracy. Engendered of a new spiritual outlook, it may be fostered by the compulsion of circumstance, for in spite of the brave front assumed by those who even now are looking towards a future, it becomes daily more apparent that the war has destroyed modern society and that in spite of all the best intentions in the world it can never be restored. The whole fabric of industrial civilization, already rotten at heart, has collapsed; it could not save the world from universal war and it possesses no power to enforce its own recuperation. In five years the potential in men has been cut down by millions, an enormous amount of machinery for production and transportation has been destroyed, together with much arable land and many mines. The birth-rate steadily decreases all over the world and with no evident prospect of a reversal of the process. The debts of all the warring nations have reached a point where in some cases the interest charges alone will almost amount to the whole pre-war budget. The entire system of credit and of international finance has become hopelessly disorganized and no one has yet suggested any way in which it may adequately be restored. Neither armistice nor peace has brought about even the beginnings of industrial recovery; the demand is fabulous and acute, but the problems of raw materials, transportation, credits, and of markets that will not only take but also pay, are apparently unsolvable; meanwhile national debts are still increasing through the payment of enormous amounts to the unemployed.

To meet the crisis there is an unanimous cry for a resumption of production, and for a vastly augmented output through increased efficiency and more intensive methods, but the crying is in vain, for meanwhile the working element has entered on a course of restriction that will inevitably nullify every effort at increasing the output. Partly through its pre-war victories in the contest with capital, partly through the abnormal wage returns brought into being through the desperation of the managers of the war, labour is now successfully engaged in the work of cutting down production far below what it was even ten years ago, both by reducing the hours of work and by vastly augmenting the wage. The actual productivity of a “labour unit” today is less than at any time since industrialism became the controlling element in life, and in many categories it is less and less productive of satisfactory results. Under these conditions it is hard to see just how the reconstructionists expect to obtain that greatly increased output they admit is the only visible hope of saving the world from bankruptcy, chaos and barbarism.

The contest is an unfair one, for the entrance of Bolshevism has added a new factor hitherto unknown. Enraged by the failure of strikes and other war measures to improve their condition, labour is increasingly turning to the small minority of avowed revolutionists who proclaim the rather obvious fact that so long as industry is engineered by the two antagonistic forces of capitalism and proletarianism, no permanent improvement in the state of the latter is possible. Every increase in wages is followed automatically by a greater increase in the cost of living, and the ratio today between a wage of eighty cents an hour and the cost of food, clothing and shelter, is less advantageous than was the case when this sum represented not a wage per hour, but per day. The reason for this state of things is not thought out with any particular degree of exactness, and the leap is made in the dark to revolution, confiscation and, of late, to Bolshevism. The ease with which an insignificant, alien and unscrupulous minority has succeeded in destroying society in Russia and Hungary, and the apparent ease with which the same theory has almost been carried out in Germany, and may be carried out in France and Italy—not to speak of North Dakota—has aroused all the latent savagery and the impulse to revolt in large sections of the working classes, but it has also completely terrorized the politicians if not the capitalists themselves, and the menace of anarchy is met cringingly and half-heartedly. It has even acquired a strong if somewhat veiled defence among contemporary directors of human destiny.

Were it not for the results of Bolshevism wherever it is being tried, the situation might appear hopeless, for it begins to look very much as though the attitude of labour, now apparently fixed, would make impossible the industrial restoration on which statesmen, captains of industry and high financiers count for the saving of the situation. If this fails then there appears no escape from international bankruptcy and a complete breakdown of the modern social system, with all this implies of poverty, unemployment and even starvation. This is the breeding-ground of Bolshevism, but the hope lies in the fact which is becoming more apparent every day, that the thing is even worse for the proletarian than for the capitalist or the man of culture and education, the criminal being the only one that derives any profit from the adventure. A few months more of Lenine, Trotsky and Bela Kun, and the danger of Bolshevism will have passed, so far certainly as the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy are concerned.

Yet with the removal of this peril the possibility of a social and industrial breakdown still remains, and whether in anticipation thereof, or as a forced expedient under sudden catastrophe, the Walled Town offers itself as a means of solution, since it does not depend for its existence on the maintenance or recovery of the pre-war industrial system—rather on its rejection and reversal—while equally it is the prophylactic against Bolshevism and its entire reversal.

And so the Walled Towns go back to an earlier age before modernism began; back to the dim cities, the proud cities, the free cities of centuries ago. They wall themselves against the world without, and build up within their grey ramparts, and guard with their tall towers, a life that is simpler and more beautiful and more joyful and more just than that they had known and rejected because of its folly and its sin. As, long ago, when the world became too gross or the terror of its downfall too ominous, cell and hermitage, convent and monastery grew up now here, now there, in secluded valleys, on inaccessible mountains, in the barren and forgotten wilderness; as the solitary drew around him first a handful, then a horde; as the damp cave or the wattled hut gave way to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and the tall towers of enormous churches, so now, when time has come full circle again, is all to be done over once more though after a different fashion.

Men have despaired of redeeming a crumbling or recalcitrant world and have gone out into the desert for the saving of their own souls, and lo, the world followed and by them was saved. From each centre of righteousness and beauty and salvation radiated circle after circle of ever widening influence; the desert and the waste became orchard and garden, the ribald and the lawless and the insolent came knocking at the gates; soldier and bravo and king humbled their heads before tonsured monk and mitred abbot. Ever wider waxed the increasing circles until they touched, merged,—and the wonder was accomplished; ill had come to an end and good had come into being.

So the Walled Towns, now when the need is clamorous again. Evil imperial in scale cannot be blotted out by reform imperial in method. The old way was the good way, the way of withdrawal and of temporary isolation. “To your tents, O Israel!” Gather together the faithful and them of like heart, building in the wilderness sanctuaries and Cities of Refuge. The old ideals are indestructible; they survive through the scorching of suns and the beating of tempests and as ever they are omnipotent when they are rightly used. Not for long would the Walled Towns stand aloof, and rampired against an alien and unkindly world, for more and more would men be drawn within their magical circuits, greater and ever greater would become their number, and at last the new wonder would be accomplished and society once more redeemed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Obvious typos corrected, where they are supported by the same word in the rest of the book. Note that there are several archaic terms used that are not actually typos e.g. alarum, froward.

Apparent inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.

“in other” corrected to “in another” on page 35.

Missing comma added on page 35: “the individual, the family, the State”.

Missing quotation mark added on page 74: “are bound to be present.”

“belongs” corrected to "belong" on page 92.

Excerpts of The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction are quoted in the Prologue, after the thought break. The presentation of the excerpt has been left unchanged from the original scan.

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Table of Contents

- WALLED TOWNS
- PROLOGUE
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE