Democracy—false or true?
Date: 2026-03-05T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Great Britain -- Social conditions; Labor -- Great Britain

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Title: Democracy—false or true?

A prologue and a dream

Author: Sir W. B. Richmond

Release date: March 5, 2026 [eBook #78117]

Language: English

Original publication: London: The Morland Press Ltd, 1920

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78117

Credits: Carol Brown, Lukas Bystricky and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY—FALSE OR TRUE? ***

DEMOCRACY—
FALSE OR TRUE?

A Prologue
and Dream

BY
SIR WILLIAM BLAKE RICHMOND
K.C.B., R.A.

London  -   -   - Cecil Palmer

Oakley House Bloomsbury Street WC1

Printed at
The Morland Press Ltd
190 Ebury Street
London
SW1

Dedicated to the honest working classes of
England, rich and poor, by one of
themselves

FIRST
EDITION
1920
COPY
RIGHT

DEMOCRACY

§ 1

It is a dangerous, but agreeable, game to play the prophet, perhaps unwise; but while admitting that, I am going to do so, not because I feel sure, but because I want to sift my own thoughts. I may be told “why not do so in private?” I’ve done that already. Probably it does not matter what an old man says, “He is a weather beaten block waiting for axe or fire.” Whatever Ideals are mine, there are few which are in agreement with the fashion of to-day. Still I am capable of looking forward. I’ve looked back a great deal in my life, and been a humble student of “Cause and Effect.” Young enough to believe, even though it lies distant from hence, in Utopia, and I make bold to say so. I still believe in the human race. I still believe in a capacity for repentance and change of direction from bad to a better state of things. It is likely that the desirable, according to my philosophy, would be the undesirable to many, perhaps, just now, most people! Nevertheless I mean to state it.

William Morris made a delightful story, “News from Nowhere”; he thought that Socialism would realise his Ideal, perhaps it might; anyway Socialism is a pleasanter word than Individualism, it suggests “Thou,” the other cries “I.” Thou has not been in the air of late. I has been so, and prominently; of this, more presently!

Some great and wise men have spent considerable energies in building Utopia. Jesus Christ, Moses, Hamurrabbi, and Mohammed, Plato, Sir Thomas More, and, when I come to think of it, all leaders of thought have played with the bricks of that entertaining place. I imagine that the folk, who think at all, form a picture of their preference, which includes the future with the present. Seemingly, the future has a habit of taking care of itself; that is possibly a fatalistic fallacy! What will be done in the future is in the making of the present. The flower is forming out of sight. We have no reason for knowing what kind of being the man of the future, even of the near future, is to be. One thing, however, is pretty certain; he will be as good or evil, ignorant or learned, as he chooses. We might reason together for a year as to the meaning of Good and Evil. To clear the way I will state now that I am a firm believer in Free Will, in as far as conduct is concerned. We have to die; that is a physical law as that we live is; but we can retard even the supreme victor, death, by effort of Will. To wish ardently is half way to obtaining.

If we wish wickedly we are on the road to wickedness. For those who thus wish I have no words but these, “It is a bad habit, reverse it.” The foundation of good is to wish Well and nobly, and Will strongly by action. Belief in Free Will is an incentive to industry, courage and stability. It includes Hope, the sister of Faith and Charity and courage to proceed through the thorny way of Life; Industry to make life happy; and Stability to maintain effort however adverse circumstances may be to it, and Hope to make us cling to the dream and to realise it in Vision if not yet in fact, which urged us at the outset. Did “Free Will,” in the abstract, exist before we came hither and will it continue after we go hence? I suggest that Free Will is eternal, that God is All Free Will; when He breathed His spirit into man’s body He imparted it to him. Plato’s sublime allegory of the soul driving her chariot, directing her horses antagonistic Eros and Himeros, proclaims the potentiality and immortality of the Soul. If matter does not die but is converted into other matter, can the Soul, created before matter, die? What the conversion of matter and Soul is, is beyond our thinking. But what does concern us is how we use the soul during its pilgrimage within the body! Its temporary home must be split up to effect an escape for the eternal organism. Perhaps death is really Life! Is it reasonable to believe that a live thing contains a dead one? If it is not so the soul was alive before it was environed by matter, and continues to live after its temporary shell is broken up and its particles are driven by Time hither and thither in dust.

The brain is matter, it is as wax, impressionable. From the first instant of its creation to its last effort it is receiving impressions. It dies as all matter dies. But do the impressions die? Instinct and reason say Nay. As far as they have exercised authority for good or evil upon the individual they do so reflectively upon a generation and progressively to succeeding generations. Philosophy tells us there is no waste in nature. If there is none as regards matter, is there likely to be as regards the soul which has been pre-existing and will be post-existing? If that is so and Free Will accepts and acts, brain impressions are immortal! Did the soul enter the body unasked? Does it leave unasked? A child under reprimand said, pathetically “I did not ask to be born,” that child was obviously alluding to her inclination. The child inadvertently spoke as a fatalist; it was a way of saying “I could not help what I did.” Before the soul enters the body is it an individual or only an atmosphere? Had it experience or not? Where has it been before? Has the soul a memory? These questions we all know have received answers from metaphysical and philosophic minds.

From the dawn of man’s intelligence, whenever that was, until to-day, mankind has yearned for an answer. A great philosopher and friend of mine, the Bishop of Durham, Dr. Westcott, said to me “Now-a-days there is nothing more difficult than to say bravely I do not know.” Yes, I accept that modest statement from a great man but I cannot help casting about for an answer! The Truth is somewhere, perhaps in Utopia, even at the bottom of a well. There is something on a different plane than sophistry, poetical rhapsody. There is a great deal to be said for emotion, it is our strongest instinct. Reading Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Christian philosophy are we not drawn into the atmosphere of Rhapsody and Fancy? Even into a land of dreams if so we please to call Ideals. However they may urge Reason against Emotion, none of the great philosophers succeed in doing it themselves. If they did they would fall quite flat, because we who read are creatures of emotional instincts. All the great philosophers, though they wrote in prose, were poets, not by choice but necessity. Absolutely materialistic philosophy is, happily, rare. It may lay hold of certain minds for a time, but being contrary to our higher instincts its grip is only partial, unsatisfying and ephemeral. The great philosophers live in a land of Dreams or Ideals, a land from which mankind is always as substance. We want the dreams to come True as children do after hearing a fairy story. Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Aristotle, Paul, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, even Comte were idealists, builders of Utopia. They tried their minds in a furnace of difficulties, their chief effort was to reconcile emotion and reason.

They tried to account for Feeling by Reason. However far Reason may travel, there is a point where it is arrested; speculation starts afresh. It is the poetry in all mythology, not its probability, which is neither here nor there, which touches the human heart; it is that which detains us and holds us fast. It is the poetry of Love that underlies the exquisite verse of Apulius. The story of the Soul of Love it is. French novels, marvellously clever, tell us the other side. I back Apulius’ story of Cupid and Psyche to outlive most of them. It is the abstract poetry of the wanderings of Osiris, not the philosophy built upon it, that engrosses us. The myth of the Delphic oracle, an inspired pastoral, clings when the Delphic oracle is no more. Goats and sheep skipping in rhapsody, their shepherd afterwards giving way to the mania of prophecy, enchanted by the voice of Apollo from a bubbling stream, have more to say for us than the oracle said to the Greeks afterwards in a stately temple. There is something instinctively true in the first emotion, something untrue in the political use made of it by priests and politicians. It is not the political use made of Nature myths which we admire, but the imagination of a highly endowed temperament from which they sprang in the golden age of emotional invention, unrestrained by reason, yet having at the root a True Ideal. Psyche personated the soul! The poets have answered our question more simply than the philosophers, who have ploughed over the ground already sown with beautiful flowers, and not seldom have sown weeds on it.

The Churches have added nothing to the beauty of the Christian story. In their efforts to codify it and convert its simplicity into dogmatic and puzzling creeds, upon acceptance of which or not depends the salvation or damnation of the human race, they have not improved or better interpreted the amazing mystery which threads its way in and out among a tapestry of exquisite design. In their effort to materialise the spiritual or Ethos of the story they have often played havoc with it. As a wondrous story full of humanity it has passed through the fire of sophism, politics and Churchcraft, and remains as it was—a product of simple poetical mystical inspiration, and as such it will always touch the world. Whoever wrote the first chapter of Genesis was a great poet who has inspired multitudes, not by his science, which was nil, but by a poetic truth incomparably delightful and mythically true, It inspired M. Angelo, Raphael, and a host of great artists. Milton expanded and retold it in his immortal verse. It has supplied inspiration to musicians, and scientific men have done battle among themselves and over a Poem. Thus have they done it honour. If in details what is related breaks down under the cold light of science, what does that matter? The soul survives. The allegory is complete, the parable is untouched. If the mighty scenes portrayed with simple dignity and unapproachable reserve do not accord with the teachings of science, does that matter? Not one whit! The story is the same, as Homer’s tale of the Siege of Troy is the same, whoever wrote it or when it was written. Whether the “Iliad” was put together by travelling minstrels’ stories edited by Homer or his invention has nothing to do with its value as a poem. The history of the Jews, as related in the Bible, is full of strange and direct dealings with miraculous events which no science or sense can accept. What does it matter that the historian made a blunder in astronomy? It was not his business. We all know that the sun did not stand still for Joshua. The historian wrote for patriots, not for astronomers. To him the earth was stationary and flat, the sun rising and setting each day. Even now, with all our science, we talk of the setting and rising of the sun because it looks like that. To the people of that time the stars were as lamps slung from the blue vault of heaven, not at all a bad figure of the truth, they look so to us, and to-day Arabs speak of them as “lamps.”

§ 2

A new star, the story of the birth of Christ tells, guided the kings to the manger, where lay a girl-mother and her newborn child. She, one “of the people,” her reverent custodian a carpenter. That was what they went to see, and the new star was their guide. We need not take that literally; it is far more beautiful symbolically, figuratively, poetically: a new light was dawning upon a worn out faith, a new symbol of the Spirit of God arose, and not out of a palace or as a child of kings, but from a manger, from a straw bed, from a girl of the people and a craftsman. Not only did the three kings come thither guided by light in their hearts, but simple mountain shepherds too from their sheepfolds came. An angel of the heavenly host, three Oriental kings, a few shepherds, a maid, a carpenter, and a little child were the first actors in a great drama that has moved the world for two thousand years.

A shepherd, a flock of goats, a bubbling fountain form the dramatis personæ of the myth of Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. From that sprang the Pithea and the thousands of votive statues for which Delphi became famous. Its temples and universities, its priests and politicians degraded the myth to a level of lies and deceit. “God set a bow in the sky for a sign.” How does it affect the promise that we know how the bow came there? We remember the promise in the poem. We are not concerned with the structure of the bow. Even now in these materialist days wherever we see the rainbow we recall God’s promise which, made or not made to mankind in fact, is so told in the poem.

Plato’s allegory in the “Phædrus” of the chariot of the soul, the antagonistic steeds Love and Desire, Eros and Himeros, struggling for supremacy, taken literally or judged from a scientific aspect, is nonsense; as a parable it is one of the truest, as a poem one of the most beautiful in Greek literature.

Apollo came over the mountains. The singer, minstrel, and healer came, bringing music from Olympus. We picture the Sun God lighting up the dense forests as he journeyed through them on the crests and edge of a mountain range. We can hear in our spiritual ears sweet music from his golden lyre, see the rivers as the Sun God passes over them, sparkling with amethyst diamond and silver as the light from him, the giver of light, kisses their surface. This is the figure of the Dorian invasion that the poets, not the scientists, present!

We still think of Apollo as the primitive author and forerunner of all that Greece became. When the Persians were on their way to invade Greece, Datis, the admiral of the great fleet, steered clear of the island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, for fear of vengeance from the God of Light, whom they worshipped. Even to-day Delos is a sacred island where once a year Christian Mass is said by Roman and Greek priests upon an ancient altar to Apollo that I myself have seen. The myth of Apollo is still alive in poetry if it is dead in prose! The imagination still responds to it if reason does not accept it as a literal truth.

It surely was not the reverberation of the trumpets’ blasts from the hosts of Joshua which overthrew the walls of Jericho. Taken literally it is a ridiculous statement; figuratively, a very impressive one. The power of martial music is great; it stimulates courage, quickens the pulse, and inspires mad valour, which it urges until every obstacle in the way of a triumphant army is overthrown: an impressive metaphor so taken, but taken as a literal fact it is silly.

The power of music as an influence to calm a people maddened by lust of war is told by the poet. It is related by a Greek historian that one hundred harpists were sent to Sparta from Ionia to make gentle, seductive, sedative music to a wild people who knew it not, knowing only war. It prevailed! Their war instincts slept under the calming influence of Apollo’s art.

Strictly speaking, the event related may never have happened. As a poetical presentation of the power of music it is true! Was not the madness of Saul temporarily abated by the harpist David? The foregoing illustrations illustrate the range of art as a direct influence upon men in diametrically opposite directions.

That the Divine Spirit is very near, is even in our midst, is related in Genesis. “God walked in the garden in the cool of the day,” so sang the poet. The idea of God as subject to heat or cold is almost comical. The poet has anthropomorphised a mystery. To God he gives the feelings of the thing he has created, that is the way he presents God—God as very near to man and sharing his comforts and discomforts. The primitive poet made nonsense poetic sense.

The nearness of the spiritual world has been well said by a spiritual poet, “Heaven is only a foot above our heads.” How near, after all, is the Ideal to the Real, if we could only see; and yet we can feel it in our subconscious state to be so.

Now let us see for a moment how closely in touch Divinity is with agricultural life, how much it was in favour of it, how the gods were close to it, becoming even a part of it, not only by the benediction of it, but unison with it. Obviously, the gods thought well of labour and the labourer both loved and feared the gods.

As, to the Hebrew poet, God walked in the garden in the cool of the day, so to the Greek, “Speak low in the noontide, for then the gods sleep.” The mythical instances presented are only a few of many which occur in classical mythology. And be it remembered that we inherit Greek mythology. It is far nearer than we are apt to think to what are still primitive instincts, and specially so to those who till and sow the land, follow the plough, who guard our flocks, and being an out-of-door-living people are (may be mysteriously) in touch with mother Nature and the gods who watch over her.

Æneas, the father of the Latin races (and as such not so distantly related to the British) was the son of the herdsman Anchises, whom Venus chose to be the father of her son. The goddess chose her lover from the fields; not from a palace. Goat-footed Pan, the god of all, is the shepherds’ god, who initiated beautiful Paris, the chosen judge of beauty. Paris, a shepherd in the Italian upland, was the lover of beautiful Ænone, whom he deserted for licentious Venus. He did himself no good by casting off Ænone, his companion. Venus made game of him! Demeter, one of the most ancient of the circle of deities of Olympus, saved a child’s life from the fire; he was Triptolemus, afterwards the inventor of the plough. Demeter was the goddess of corn, the protectress of agriculture. Her child Persephone, carried away to the shades, where she was protected in winter, rose from thither as the almond blossoms heralded the approach of spring. Persephone was goddess of springtime, of its blossoms and flowers. The soul of the Greeks is read in their mythology. It is read also in her history. Athena was the protectress of Attica, and specially of Athens. It was she that brought the olive there, the origin of much wealth to the people, and it still is. When Paul preached from the “Areopagus” he faced the Acropolis of Athens, half a mile away. Over the top of the wall which contained the sacred buildings Paul saw the head of the golden spear of Athena gleaming from the bronze statue by Phidias of the virgin goddess, a beacon for ships as they passed the dangerous coast of Sunium to make for the harbour of Phaleron. Within that bronze effigy was a soul of the Athenian people as the statue was a symbol of it. Paul was not preaching anything new; he was concentrating a worship whose expansion, having left much of original simplicity behind, was giving way. Another primitive form of belief was taking root in monotheism, in which both shepherds and kings had taken a leading part. Apollo the Healer was to give way before the child of a Nazarene peasant and a humble carpenter. The Cross was to be the future beacon for a while until a new faith shall grow out of the old again.

§ 3

Wisdom was symbolised by the owl, which crowned the helmet of the goddess Wisdom worshipped by the Greeks in the effigy of their protectress. The little Athenian owl still haunts the Acropolis. I have seen and heard it often there, and never without a thrill. Its plaintive cry proclaims the eternity of things and the never-changing voice of nature. As the owl hoots there so sings our nightingale in England’s woods. We too are reminded of the immortality of the soul of nature, perhaps also of the soul within us, and of its importance as the only part we can call immortal. Nearer to God are the songs of birds, the voices of the winds, even the wild utterances of beasts of the forest than the shrieks of machinery of which industrialism is so proud. Yes! All human makings are subject to destruction. The bronze Athena has gone. The golden and ivory statue of Athena is gone with the effigy of the owl. The shell has been broken, its parts are scattered, but the primitive faith within them lives although it has undergone change. Athens is not dead, saved from the brutal Turk she may become regenerate, she may again shine as a light to Europe, but if not that exactly, the light she shed may fix upon another city and shine there, so strange and mysterious are the comings and goings of nations! Recent discovery in Crete goes far to prove some fountain-head of truth in every ancient myth. Old Minos speaks! The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur is explained. The labyrinth he made is there now, and a Cretan civilization of 4,000 years ago has been revealed, and what a Civilisation! a very noble art going hand in hand with “modern” economies and created in a primitive age, as we call it. Knossos was well drained by drainpipes almost the same as would be turned out by a “company” to-day. Alas, the multitudes of inscriptions discovered in Crete have not yet been read. A key to the script has not yet been found. It may appear at any moment, and then who shall say what marvels it may tell us! Our much-praised civilisation may be found to be but a feeble echo of a past one. We are mighty clever, we moderns, not seldom in making unpleasant discoveries and using useful ones to the annoyance of many and destruction of better things. We have electric light, great scientists have given it us, but the keenest witted have not yet discovered how the tombs of the kings in Egypt were lit. We know that neither oil or tallow provided light in those dark miles of caves and chamber walls covered with pictures in delicate relief and exquisitely coloured.

Fresh as the day they were finished, these monuments to the skill, industry and genius of Egyptian craftsmen 4,000 years ago stand as an example to us moderns, who at present show no signs of handing their genius down even to a dozen generations. Had they electric light? It is quite possible. It is evident whatever artificial light they used was smokeless, because the ceiling and walls are not discoloured. What was the meaning of all this superb beauty of labour and craftsmanship? It was not to gain applause, because after years of labour each tomb was hermetically sealed and a stone was placed at the entrance. Their labour was an expression of their noble religion. Their respect for the great dead who must find silence in their tombs while their souls reached higher and higher levels in their spiritual kingdom till such time as, purified, they were to be one in the soul of Osiris. These people worked for a great Ideal, for the Utopia they ever held in view, without advertisement, probably with little reward. To them the soul grew always in dignity and beauty, visiting the body from time to time in silence.

Silence is the note struck by the Great Pyramids of Geza. A national religion, profoundly spiritual, which in the service it demanded from Art and Craftsmanship must BE PERFECT. Their art and craftsmanship tell us this. They were content to give the best only. They worshipped the Great Spirit by matter. They made their arts to sing of the noble elevation of the soul from sphere to sphere till it became perfected. Therein is the soul of the ancient Egyptians, which they imparted to the Greeks, and which Moses learned and tried to hand on to the Hebrews. We modern workmen will do well to ponder on these things awhile, and to take many a lesson from “the poor pagans.” Poor pagans? Rather were they a most enlightened people, with whom, by comparison, we moderns are barbarians. They may have had all, or at least the greater part of what science has given to us. It is an ignorant cry that calls them Poor Pagans. There was more soul in ancient Egypt than in Europe to-day! We worship matter, very often very nasty matter, so long as it provides wealth which we are not yet civilised enough to know how to use. What England needs is a little more soul, not less! A great deal more faith, a great deal more belief in the dignity of labour, a great deal more will to choose the best and discard the worst, a higher Ideal of honour, and a deeper sense of responsibility to after-coming generations. Much more widespread and intensified determination to leave behind us things so noble that they may bear some comparison with the labour of the poor Pagan! The spirit of which I write was here once. We need not cross the Channel to find it. Wiltshire contains it. The soul of our ancestors is in the very stones of the great monoliths of Stonehenge, the primitive British temple to the sun, which, alas, we do not worship but wipe out in material progress of crude industrialism.

§ 4

Our primitive ancestors were driven by an ardent worship of the Power within the Sun. Like the Greeks they must set up a great temple to the Giver of Life, who made their crops ripen, who was to them an ocular vision of an unravelled mystery, the Prime Author of All! of Him who holds our destinies, our life and death in the palm of His hand! That is what urged them. No commercial spirit came between them and a great Ideal for which to labour and make manifest.

They fetched huge monoliths from Normandy. Frail crafts bore them over the rough sea to the shore of England, whence they were dragged to their destination. Do we think that such a tremendous, so dangerous an enterprise as this, was carried out under no higher motive than an industrial company?

There probably was some Oriental blood in this ancient folk of England. All Art, indeed all Science, had its birth place in the land of the “Rising Sun.” Like the Chaldeans, the race that made Stonehenge were astronomers. Upon a certain morning and at a certain hour of the year they knew the rising sun would hit a certain spot. They knew the exact direction of the ray that would do so. There they placed their altar to the God of Light, the All Beneficent One! We know now that some centuries before the Roman conquest of England the south of the island was highly civilised, but who by is not clear. They must have been a highly artistic people, possibly Kelts, possibly a race which had been or was in touch with Mykene, because the metal work that has survived time partakes of the character of both Keltic and Mycenian craftsmanship. Whoever they were, they brought art to savage islanders; hence they sowed the seeds of their ideals and of perfect craftsmanship, to fructify in those days of England’s greatness before the weed of Industrialism and the darkness it shed over the country had become a poisonous fetish. Of that grim subject more presently. The Mithra myth came here from the East and nearly won as a religion of blood sacrifice. But a stronger prevailed—the first created thing, Love. The Jews and Romans crucified Jesus Christ. They thought thus to obliterate His teaching, to wipe out the Ideal He taught, the Utopia He would erect—a kingdom of the soul that He would revive in the materialistic Roman decay. They did kill His body, but His immortal soul survives. They killed Him as King of the Jews, but left Him living as Monarch of the human race. The eggshell may be broken without killing the embryo within it. Love, pure love, so sought for in religions, so nobly conceived by the “poor pagan” Socrates, took hold of the hearts of primitive Christians, as the Delphic myth of Apollo of the primitive Greeks, and God’s forgiveness of man’s rashness and brutality when He set the bow in the sky as a sign of mercy, not only to Hebrews but the whole world. Salvation by blood sacrifice is a crude idea; Salvation through Love is a noble one.

§ 5

The Germans in the late war thought to destroy the soul of France by battering down the precious casket whose every stone was a living symbol of her chivalrous, kingly history. Brute force, employing every engine of industrialism, every energy of materialistic science, was to prevail. The noblest craftsmanship employed in the flowering time of French history and for generations, being the expression of a sensitive people deeply attached to Beauty, was shivered to atoms recklessly and triumphantly by the cannon of a hypocrite nation which claimed the first place in the history of the modern world. If Matter could ever overcome Soul, Germany would have succeeded; Germany would have broken the pride of Flemish commerce and her traditions as an organiser of it by the destruction of Ypres. The priceless books in Louvain, written and illuminated by pious scholars and patient craftsmen, the brutes burnt or stole with as ignorant a rapacity as a herd of monkeys. Again, they sought to destroy the soul of France by turning thousands of acres of productive country and fruit gardens so essentially a vital part of the commerce of France, making a fruitful land a desert. They tried (but in vain) to kill the soul of France by subjecting villagers, men, women and children to torture; like wild beasts to smash the modesty of pure women, even those dedicated to spiritual lives; then, the lust satisfied, they slaughtered them.

The clumsy minded Teuton misjudged its prey. They judge according to their own low standard of honour; force, brute force, as against strength of character, chivalry and patriotism: a standard fit only to be carried in the ranks of savages, but this time carried under the disguise of “Kultur,” a word which now is a stigma, one which includes all that is most vile and reprehensible in a people who employed fine natural faculties to invent every possible device for the destruction of life. Not a stone did Germany’s scientific men leave unturned to discover the earth’s hidden sources of destructive elements. They abused their fine faculties, they perverted their invention, Industrialism ran riot. Scientific force was used in full measure by the Germans for annihilation. The Emperor—the worst of the horde of savages—gave his encouragement to every bestial act committed by his depraved people. If such depravity was to succeed or could succeed, Germany would have done so. First in science, first in organisation, she seemed invincible. Her Industrialism was perfected, her system organised with the precision of clockwork. If materialism at the expense of every other consideration can succeed, Germany would have done so. But no! A nation may kill its own soul, but God will not permit it to kill another. It is indeed a lesson. Germany had killed its soul. It had set up Moloch where God had been. Iron, steel, explosives, every poison upon the Pharmacy List, every evil pulsation of the heart were German weapons. The countries she laid waste will revive, their soul has been strengthened by tribulation, and the would-be conqueror will lick the dust for a century. France will grow strong again, she will recultivate her fields and orchards, and rebuild her villages, towns and churches.

§ 6

In their vulgar vanity the Germans said: “What would matter the destruction of Rheims Cathedral, of Ypres Town Hall, of Laon, indeed, of all that the world esteems as Art in France? We, the only nation of Kultur, can build better. What does the destruction of the library of Louvain matter? We can create a fresh one; anyhow, we can steal all the best books therefrom.” Poor deluded people! A people without taste, possessed of no artistic genius, devoid of the sense of beauty! All the cathedrals in Germany put together are not worth one bay of Chartres, one tower of Rheims, or one arcade of Ypres Town Hall. German architecture is as hard as steel, as unemotional as iron, and, like her people, dull and soulless. Art is the mirror of a nation. German Art at its best is brutal as her people have been. The nineteenth century Minotaurs are in a direct line from the hordes of barbarians who laid Italy waste, who burned Rome, and spread horrors wherever their footsteps trod. William II. hates England more than France. As long as England holds the sea Germany cannot master the world. After France, England’s turn would have come had German materialism succeeded.

§ 7

Think of it, craftsmen and builders, and all of us who value the soul of England! Think of it, farmers, agricultural labourers, and all who live on and by the land! Your cities would be desolate wastes, your land poisoned, your women ravished, your children spiked by bayonet thrusts, your old men and women shot or tortured. That is what would have happened had Germany’s materialism prevailed! Having done this, would the soul of England been slain. No!! No conqueror ever killed the soul of a country conquered. A country commits suicide, that’s the way its soul is killed, and that is the way Germany destroyed herself.

A country may poison itself, degrade itself by self-indulgence and greed to the lowest level; it may kill in itself every good for which it has been favoured, and so kill its soul; but slain by a foreign power—never! The thought of what might have happened to us, and which was nearer happening than many of us will allow, should set us thinking of England’s mighty past. Setting the success of her commerce aside, do we quite value at their true value the legacy of riches which our ancestors have bequeathed? Do we esteem as we should the builders of our cathedrals, the unrivalled beauty of the English parish and village church? Do we esteem at their due English craftsmen (the first in the world) and what noble work they left us? Do we value the great creative minds of our predecessors? I sometimes wonder if we are forgetting the very things which illustrate the beauty of the English soul in a rush after materialism, which seems to pay a momentary interest. Are we travelling, or have we been travelling along a road which has proved the road to ruin of Germany? I think sometimes we have been. Are we permitting Industrialism to kill our souls? I am not sure we are not! But more of that presently. What saved England in the four years of her great danger and trial? Her Government did not. It was not officialdom that prevented our ruin, it was that the heart of England was still sound, notwithstanding grievous temptations to break it. Notwithstanding false doctrines of Equality taught by ignorant extremists, our workmen still saw straight according to their ancient traditions as yet unbroken, as yet deaf to “catch words” from noisy rhetoric out of the mouths of ignorant and mischievous leaders inflated by vanity and rendered blind by egotism and desire for power over a more ignorant but clear-thinking workman.

§ 8

The English workman is still “au cœur” honest; he cannot help it; tradition of honesty flows in his veins still. If he is ignorant, the direction of his instincts is honest. He was the best and most highly respected workman in Europe; other nations envied him. An English cabinet, an English knife, English cloth, English needlework were the envy of every foreigner. Why was the praise of English workmanship so highly praised and prized by other nations? Because her workmen were the most honest and skilled in Europe. I say “were.” Are they so still? No! But they may again become so if they are true to their noble tradition and to themselves, and no longer permit evil counsel to draw them away by specious and plausible promises.

The noble instincts of the English craftsman I am old enough to remember. Once, and not so long ago, his work was his conscience, he believed in it and did it with all his might. It was a habit of mind which ruled him and made him free. Why do I write “free”? Because being an honest workman, he did not fear competition. He had an ideal, which was to give the best labour for a good wage. He was simple, he took pride in his work. He had his Utopia, which was to labour to the enth of his power to do honour to himself, his family and country. Good work was encouraged then and commanded the market of the world! Economically, irrespective of honour, the workman was right. The best work will always command the best market in the long run. Honesty was the motto on the standard of the Englishman. He had an image in his mind and up to it he strove to arrive. He liked perfection and strove to reach it. In that sense he was an artist plus craftsman, an imaginative worker distinct from a machine. To have told a bricklayer he must only lay a given number of bricks a day, or that doing bad work was good for all-round trade, would have been to insult him. So his work had a soul in it; the pleasure he took in its doing was reflected. It was a pleasure to regard it. I remember hundreds of workmen like that when I was a boy, men with whom one could make friends, in whom there was good fellowship and no mistrust. There was a bond of union. We were workmen; he and I were only differentiated by the nature of Trade; he of the plough, the shovel, the saw or what not, I of the pencil, brush or scalpel, that was all.

We had the same soul and sense of honour, he to drive a straight furrow, dig a good trench, I to do a good drawing or picture. My fellow-workmen, if they think for themselves, and they are quite capable to do that, will recognise that to preach “equality” is one thing; it sounds attractive; it is, in fact, a mare’s nest, a will-o’-the-wisp; it is unreachable, in the first place; in the second, if it were reached, to-morrow would provide inequality. Were the scales of Fate adjusted every morning, in the evening they would be unbalanced. If it were possible to attain equality it would ruin the world; it would paralyse effort; it would reduce mankind to a system of self-indulgence, lassitude, and, finally, to imbecility. Giving up that word as hopeless, we will retain one of the popular triad—“Liberty,” as including “Fraternity.” Yet while we urge “liberty” we must beware of its caricature, “licence,” the arch-enemy of Fraternity and Liberty. Licence is, in fact, the grossest form of tyranny. We might, indeed, exclude the term “liberty,” which includes Fraternity, which excludes Licence.

§ 9

And now we come to an important point of our argument. Labour has permitted itself to become a slave. Individual workers are not FREE. They have given their souls, or shall we say their freedom, to men of their own class, who, having a smattering of education, assume power as their leaders. Anyway, so they began, but time has shown them more drivers than leaders. Trade union leaders make a show of fraternity. One asks, for information: Is coercion a sign of it any more than a sign of liberty? Obedience to national law is one thing, to class law is another. Having gone far, class leaders assume the right to absorb capital, i.e., to hand it over to Labour. Were that to arrive would the nation as a whole be in a better way? Surely the same difficulty would occur which distresses advanced democrats. Capital would be still a bugbear to extremists, but in the hands of a class that has had no experience of its use, that has no traditions of expenditure. In the period of exercise to gain some experience capital would be wasted; it might be gambled away or spent in hours of idle self-indulgence. Where, then, would Labour be? Doubtless starving. Ignorant but ambitious leaders, to please their followers whom they have coerced, would advocate a purely class and selfish policy which might lead to civil war, of all wars the one which is certainly soul-killing. When brothers fall out and set to kill each other, where is Fraternity, where is the human family, private as well as public, concentrated or extended? It is lost! A nation is but a family on an enlarged scale.

In the concluding years of the 18th century France groaned under civil war, and came very near ruin. What followed upon the French Revolution? Autocratic government under Napoleon! It was the only way out of a grievous mess of anarchy, rapine and chaos. Most of the authors of the Revolution sooner or later suffered as they had made others suffer, under the guillotine. The most prominent agitators fell as victims to their cruelties and misdeeds. The people sacrificed those who were once their adored leaders. They suffered the death penalty from the very people that had inflamed the party of disorder. Anarchy never succeeds. Its leaders always suffer in the end, and by the hands of their dupes whom they pretended to benefit; justice invariably follows injustice; that is a law as certain as that to-morrow succeeds to-day.

§ 10

If the French Revolution does not teach us the inevitable punishment for anarchy, Russia’s débâcle surely should. Militarism has only changed places there. Having been in the hands of one party, it is now in another. Tyranny has changed places, that is all! Educated men, that is to say, men who have studied cause and effect through the teaching of past history, know that certain results follow action. That is to say, situations change places. The student of history, like a chess player, is aware that the move of a pawn may be the turning-point in a game. Anarchy is a monster that breeds quickly; her whelps carry the poison of rabies which, after infecting a small circle, increases by leaps and bounds. When it has become unmanageable, when men’s passions have led them out of the bounds of reason, militarism must be resorted to. When reason and peaceful persuasion cease to avail, powder and shot have to be used, and sometimes unmercifully! Uneducated men are led by passion, educated by reason. Are we sure that anarchy is not being bred here? If so, has it shown itself? Trades unions were useful in times past, they sought for justice, they achieved something, and up to a point it was good. Like many movements beginning well and founded upon justice, it has overstepped the mark. That which began justly is ending unjustly. Peaceful order has grown to tyranny. Is it consonant with the English character to be told how much or how little our workman may labour? The workmen of England who have given themselves over to the tyranny of trades unions are rendered slaves to them.

Leaders of trade unions encourage dishonesty, but that is not all, they encourage a small output when a large one is an absolute necessity if England is to retain her place as a leading country in Europe. An “output” scrapped will mean treasure to Germany. If English labour declines, German labour will gain ascendancy here; that is certain. After the financial strain to which England has been subjected by the war, increased production is imperative. Strikes arrest production, and thus are harmful to the whole community. If they are permitted ad lib., what will be the result? Each strike costs millions to trade. What must the end be? Bankruptcy of the nation! Who will suffer? Labour will suffer first, because if capital is unobtainable labour cannot be paid for.

§ 11

If wages reach an extravagant sum, capital will not find the money to pay them. Again, who then will suffer? Labour, of course. These are truisms, but, being so, have they reached the ears and minds of Labour? Trades union leaders keep from the sheep they drive the knowledge of the butcher’s knife; they only tell their dupes what they (ignorant of the first laws of political economy) wish to hear. They flatter them with the hope that capital will finally be in their hands, that they are to govern the country, which is only to move while it drags the chariot of Labour. Our workmen are not prepared to rule, they are not mentally equipped to do so; their outlook, at present, is far too narrow. They see in government good only when it legislates for the advantage of their class, forgetting that there are other and equally important classes to be considered. And when speaking of Labour there is only one which appears to dominate in their minds, Industrialism as separate from Agriculture. The spread of Industrialism has pushed Agriculture aside; it has done even more, it has destroyed it in many parts of England. Agriculture must take precedence of Industrialism if we are to live on our own produce. The war ought to have taught us that, but has it? I have lived long enough to have seen the agriculture of our dear country productive and the people, relatively to now, content; when squalor was a far rarer spectacle than now. In great cities, alas, it must always be, for cities are artificial monstrosities where both wealth and poverty thrive in extremes, where idlers congregate and vice expands. But in country towns of reasonable dimensions and villages squalor had no abiding place when agriculture was the employment of the majority before the Juggernaut of Industrialism had begun its disastrous progress. There was work for all on the land.

§ 12

I remember the arrival of a threshing machine into “the street” of one of the most attractive villages in Kent, Otford. It was greeted with stones; the people did not want the noisy, smoking monster which was to take pleasant and healthy labour from so many. And they were right! The flail no longer threshes, reapers no longer reap, the sickle and scythe are rarely seen in the fields now, the plough is rarely drawn by oxen and horses. Machinery does it all now, and hundreds of thousands of agricultural labourers have had their work grabbed from them. Who can wonder, then, that Agriculture is understocked while Industrialism is overstocked? Hundreds of miles of corn-growing land are in disuse, waste land, once glowing with golden corn; a land of ashes and unproductive has taken its place. Where orchards stretched for miles once, flowering and fruiting abundantly, hideous factories have risen, belching out foul smoke destructive to man, beasts and vegetation. Where once copses, even small forests were, now a few skeletons, black and blasted, remind us of the beauty that was and the devastation that is. Rivers and lakes which once sparkled with clean water under a bright sun, whose pools were filled with salmon and trout, have become little better than sewers. A greasy scum thickens the once glittering surface, and not a fish can live in its natural element, and, moreover, the water is poisoned, so we may not drink it. The spread of Industrialism means the spread of poison—poisoned land, water, and air, which, if not checked now, will cause serious deterioration of the health of England. When England was mainly agricultural, rosy-cheeked maidens and well-bronzed youths attested a healthy, vigorous life. Now, under Industrialism, the girls and youths are pale, sad-looking, and unhealthy. Why? Agricultural life is natural, industrial life is artificial! Of what use is money to a nation deprived of vigour and health? Rather is it an incubus than an incentive to real progress. Ill-health means idleness, slackness and inefficiency. Nothing can compensate for its departure.

But it is not the body only that suffers; it is the soul of the nation that is in danger. Discontent is caused by mental distress, unsatisfied and perfectly justified longings which are inherited or spontaneous are blunted. Be the purse full of gold, be every physical sense gratified thereby, the hunger of the soul for more enlightenment, for more joy, for higher enterprise will continue, and the whole being, even that part which is physical, will suffer. The atmosphere of factory life is bleaching bodies and souls wherever it is in the ascendant; the people become hollow-cheeked, their manners surly, their wits atrophied. They are not free, they are slaves to Plutus. So sensitive to environment is the mind of man, even at the simplest and least initiated, that it grows in harmony with its employment. In constant touch with machinery a man becomes like his machine! Iron enters in his soul. He becomes a kind of bolt or screw, a wedge or wheel. No wages, however high, can compensate for what industrial life has robbed. The greater cities and towns hardly know of the fields of Enna or the paradise that God made. They think, if they think at all, that the filthy air they breathe, the hideous smoke under whose canopy they exist but don’t live, is “alright,” and that there is nothing else.

And yet somehow, although perhaps they cannot define it, they feel a want, a yearning for something better, and it is that which makes their souls discontented, hard, and unsympathetic. Their souls are caged as the soaring eagle is caged in a menagerie. Cinders, refuse, evil smells, foul air; instead of flowers, the life-giving sun, pure air, and sweet scents of spring. God made these, the descendants of Tubal Cain made the others. Their birthright has been seized by jerry builders, exploiting companies, who care just about as much for the people as a butcher cares for the animal whose throat he is about to cut. To keep the industrial slave in a good humour he is treated to unhealthy excitement of cinema shows, which to “catch on” must partake of the Newgate Calendar, or if any Art is presented to him it must be “of his level.” Of his level?

Is that the attitude to be assumed by those who should know better? It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to kill a soul, but it can be wounded and degraded till it is seemingly dead, has lost all power of progression, and, like a wingless bird, can only creep on the earth. And that is what an artificial life does, first to an individual, then, in time, to a whole nation.

§ 13

It is dangerous to gamble with instinct. It is impossible to wholly destroy man’s instinct, which is essentially as well as hereditarily opposed to the artificial life of Industrialism. He is an outdoor animal, he scratches the earth instinctively. It may be through ignorance, but so it is; he will stick a dead shrub in the ground, thinking it will grow. Kill Agriculture and in its place erect Industrialism, and you have killed all that is best, indeed all that really matters in the human race!

Before the war what were called civilised countries, our own included, had reached a point of artificial living as disastrous to them as it had been to Rome and Byzantium in their decadence. We, the English, were growing idle, neglecting agriculture, buying from foreign markets instead of creating our own. We were ceasing to be a productive nation. Whatever we could borrow we borrowed. We propped up Germany, who grew rich out of our lack of foresight and imagination. Ideals were laughed at and Plutus was the god worshipped; never mind how wealth was gotten or spent, wealth was all in all. Education, notwithstanding half-hearted and ill-digested Bills passed through Parliament, was neglected save in so far as it might be money-providing. It is out of such a degenerating state of things that we must be dragged if we cannot be drawn. Artificial life as made by Industrialism must be rectified if England is to make intellectual progress and take again the honourable and respected place she held. What are we making to show to generations to come? Nothing as compared to what the past has left for us! A few iron and steel bridges which time will destroy, a few exceedingly hideous railway stations, a great many railway tracks, a vast amount of “rolling stock,” which will presently be of the value of scrap iron.

Herds of motor cars and new flights of aeroplanes; monstrous ironclads which are no sooner completed than they become out of date; a partial and growing destruction of agriculture; and, in the meantime, necessary expenses of even a rigid economist are trebled, if not more, and wages rise to a point where it seems unlikely that resources will be able to meet them, profiteering by tradesmen has become the habit. If this be so, instead of leaving on our tracks a well-organised road, we shall leave debts and a desert. Shall England be turned into an ash heap? If so, the reason for doing so must be better explained than hitherto.

§ 14

Science and industry misapplied may prove to be a curse! They are misapplied when used for purposes of destruction. What folly it is when it is regarded coolly, rationally and with common sense! Millions upon millions of money are wasted, which, if spent in the construction of national intellectual stability, upon education and all that education would provide, would ennoble the nation. The great war, made by politicians, by egoists, has been the most devastating in the history of mankind. Science has been applied to it with acrid avidity. Without the misapplication of scientific inventions the disasters caused by the war would have been impossible. Science wrongly applied, facilities invented as aids to peaceful transport and international as well as national contact abused, have worked havoc. The age of iron and steel, of cheap and accessible fuel, coal and oils, of easy communication between races instinctively and by tradition antagonistic, has said its say in something very near the destruction of Europe. Every discovery made to be used to promote prosperity and peace has been used for the destruction of both. Terrible things science has done during the last five years. Without railways, without motors, without factories, without aeroplanes, without chemistry, each in its way desirable, if used for construction, the great war would have been impossible; impossible as it has been enacted. Wars will be as long as man remains foolish. As yet it appears the folly of men is more potent than their wisdom. They invent for peace, they use for war. What a contradiction this implies! They are answerable for this misapplication of science.

§ 15

When wisdom is uppermost war will cease. Governments will not influence one way or another when the democracy is educated and so has become wise, when it declines to use genius in an evil direction, when, having learnt to use well and for national good the facilities for it which inventive genius has provided, democracy will see straight. Governments are at a discount just now. Looking over the world as it is at this moment it is difficult, perhaps impossible, so far to find one which is stable or wise. Wisdom must be born out of the people. Wisdom can only be gained by education, which means discrimination. The free will of a people can only serve for good when it is guided by right, not wrong, when people have been so mentally trained as to be able to discriminate between ephemeral and permanent welfare. If democracy is not to be a deadly failure and a deadly curse the people must retain their soul, their honesty, their good fellowship established upon intellectual more than emotional fellowship.

If good is to prevail over evil the working class, the noblest of England’s product in the past, must be led into the path which leads to Freedom by a sense of duty owing to the whole community which it is bound to be called upon to exercise, and to the full, in the future. It is for “the People” to make the final choice upon which the future of England depends—peace and prosperity or war and anarchy! When the people are educated to see straight agitators may roar themselves hoarse, may tell lies under cover of specious argument, but they will not prevail.

§ 16

Agitators have never led a country as a whole, they have infected the less enlightened members of it with discontent, perhaps with imitable frenzy, but never have they turned the course of the stream of progress permanently.

Agitators ruffle the surface of the waters as little boys blow upon it, thinking they are creating a storm, which, however, is only severe enough to upset toy ships; only so far are they really dangerous. Agitators may roar against capitalists, but they cannot do without them; indeed, their Utopia would be to become capitalists. When capital says, “I will not be wasted,” and Labour says, “My work shall not be destroyed because it is part of my best self which I reverence,” we shall be on the high road to national and international peace.

§ 17

Politicians may dabble in “Leagues” (we all know what they mean, to be broken when conditions appear which seem against their continuity). Statesmen may try to make up for previous mistakes by twisting arguments to suit new methods, but as long as it does not come right home to the people that war and internal dissension spells destruction to Labour as to Capital, in the long run war, within and without, is certain to occur again. And the next war! Every effort made by science, plus the experience of the last five years, will be used to destroy that which it set out to preserve.

The more splendid the services of science the more terrible will, and must be their misapplication. Nothing that has happened in Europe, Russia or the East, however cruel and terrible it has been, will compare with the horrors of the next war. Cities, entire districts, fleets and armies will cease to exist in moments, not even in days. God’s sky will be full of destroying agents against which every defence will be in vain. We are only out of the last great war by the skin of our teeth. Shall we profit by the lessons it has offered or shall we forget? That is the question.

§ 18

Shall we draw closer together as a people whose motto is “Fraternity,” or drift apart? We can draw closer if we choose and each one of us resolves to do “the utmost for the highest.” Civil dissension can be as morally destructive as military rule. It sets every instrument of the orchestra out of tune; it creates a hideous discord and chaos which can only be resolved by the greatest enemy to democracy—a military Government. The very thing we have been fighting to expel from Germany may have to be enacted here in free England if anarchical methods prevail, and there is danger (we do not say probability) that they may if the heart of the country becomes rotten. The heart of the country is Labour, but labour not selfishly, graspingly, and tyrannically used, but as the bulwark of protection to the community in part and as a whole. If Labour is to take a prominent part in the affairs of the country, in legislation, for example, its votaries must be educated; at present they are not, and therefore had they the power they seek or that is demanded for them by agitators who are only less ignorant than they, it is impossible to gauge the difficulties and dangers into which the country would be plunged. Before Labour is fit to govern it must learn how to use leisure. The shorter the hours of labour the more imperative will become education. Are our working men prepared to use the leisure they demand for the good of the community or only to please their, as yet, primitive instincts? From a class which is idle or mischievous during leisure hours we can expect no wisdom, and without wisdom no man can rule himself, much less his fellows. From rulers we expect wide wisdom, not class prejudice. The former is impossible, the latter certain, without education.

One hears an answer to the assertion we have made: “Give us power and see how we use it!” That is all very well, but before power is added to that already in possession we must be sure that the best is being made of what has been already attained. If the workmen of England or of any other country are to hold offices of State in which ripe judgment, experience and knowledge of the world, of the complications to which it has been subjected from the earliest times, are required, they must have a very different Utopia in the back of their minds to that which is evident as yet. They will have to learn that to legislate entirely in the interests of Labour (and that is what Labour would do now) would be tantamount to the ultimate destruction of the very thing they wish to promote—the wealth of Labour as opposed to that of the capitalist. Before power, and such power, is granted to a class which has had no experience of its exercise we must be certain that their previous use of their higher energies has justified their demands, namely, that they have fulfilled the demands which their work should have made, well and honestly. First of all, the workman must have given his best work to his employer, and, having done that as the first duty to his neighbour and to himself as an honourable man, he must have proved by the good use of his hours of leisure that he is in earnest, that he desires not only to become a decent citizen but a capable one.

Now, the best instructed of us and the most intellectually endowed know by experience how difficult it is to so train the mind to be ready and prompt to employ leisure to the best advantage, that is to say, in such a manner that is useful and ennobling, not detrimental and decadent! This is a matter which hinges on principle as well as choice. Industry is engendered by effort as well as by theory. If a man is industrious he has trained himself to be so by acting upon a theory which he has found to be advantageous. Advanced democrats will tell us: “You have no right to interfere with the hours of leisure of a citizen. If he elects to get drunk, why not? If he gambles, why not? If he prefers dog fighting and the prize ring to improving his mind; if he prefers to beat his wife to treating her decently, why not? She does not mind it. If he prefers to spend his money in travelling about to see football matches to taking his earnings home to his family, why not?” Yes, Mr. Democrat, but by doing so is your pet working man even on the road to be a worthy ruler or responsible statesman, or even in a minor degree to take part in framing laws, or seeing that when made they are put into action? If your working man spends his leisure in barbarous pursuits he is still, by preference, a barbarian! If he wastes his earnings, taking little of them home to provide for and educate a family, in the first place, does he deserve higher wages, while those he is already receiving he uses ill? Is a man that acts so fit to rule? Certainly not! If he abuses his own wages, do you think he will not waste or abuse the use of public money? Of course he will! The democrat who has added the sauce of anarchy to his favourite dish, whose logic is framed upon assertion unjustified by reasoning, will tell you: “You let him alone. He fills the pockets of the big pots. If he likes to get drunk, why not? I likes liberty, I does.” And yet the fool who says this will be the first to urge class tyranny and claim for the idle workman a place in a Ministry, perhaps the first place. Good God! No; before the working classes are granted grave responsibilities they must prove they are worthy of them by exercising a firm purpose, doing what they are already called to do honourably and well, and show signs by industry during leisure hours that they are men, not barbarians, and good citizens, not anarchists!

They must prove by their private lives that their public acts will not be a disgrace, that a high principle has been their guide, that their souls are straight and active for good, and that a true Fraternity, wide and embracing, has finally ruled out selfish class prejudice. They must prove that they are in no humour to be levelled down by their noisy leaders. They must prove their higher ambition by not listening to the cry, “Strike again, Bill! Force the governor if ’e won’t give in! The Government is weak: force it to a decision in your favour! You ’ave the power to starve the country if you choose. Don’t yer see yer power? Why, then, man, use it!”

§ 19

Wise people do not wish to give added power to a class that listens to and acts upon such folly. They know if they did that the country would suffer as a whole and become the prey to a tyranny, and a mob tyranny, the most dangerous of all.

Before they are granted new powers we want to see the British workman doing his work as well as he used to do it, to see him an honest man by giving his best work for good pay.

§ 20

Paying a bad or indolent workman the same wages as an efficient and industrious one is to put a tax on skill; it discourages the good workman and encourages the idle one in his idleness. To forbid a bricklayer to lay more than a minimum number of bricks per hour is to encourage the lazy and discourage the honest workman; therefore to curtail the production of work in quantity and quality is directly injurious to the needs of the country and indirectly to the progress of trade; moreover, it is unfair to the good workman as it places him on a level with the inferior or bad one, which is not only morally wrong but economically silly. Trades union laws have grown to be tyrannical. They contradict what was good in their initiative. As at present enacted they prove their authors to be ignorant men, ignorant of the first principles of political economy and of the results which must inevitably follow upon their acceptance. If an honest workman has the will to lay as many bricks per hour (so he does it well) it is tyranny to forbid him. It is neither to his interest nor of the trade he represents to coerce him. For the reason he does better and more work than his idle or incompetent fellow he has a right to a higher wage; to deny him that right is to lower the standard of workmanship generally and particularly. To oblige men to down tools at the command of leaders against their will is tyranny! So we find after all that grandiloquent talk about Liberty is gas. Trades union leaders are tyrants; even more, they are slave drivers! Labour would do well to strike against them instead of striking against doing their duty and being honourable members of society. Indeed, they would do well to duck them in the nearest pond as enemies, not friends, to their cause. The fact is that as soon as the workmen find out they have been misled retribution is likely to follow and quickly. When the honest workman sees clearly that a false position has been pressed upon him he will resent it and drastically. The last railway strike is a black spot in the history of generous and liberal England. The majority of the railway men did not wish it. It was forced on them by the audacity and ambition of their leaders. That statement is proved by the avidity of their return to work. Perchance they thought it was just possible that while they were starving others, and the helpless, they themselves would suffer with them. An empty belly is a very valuable medicine.

Englishmen of whatever class, rich or poor, would never consent to starve out their comrades, their children, their old fathers and mothers. Our workmen are, au fond, too good fellows to do that, even to descend to threaten it. The threat to starve the country was not made by them but by their leaders, who, if they do not know better how to conduct men only a little less ignorant than they, will have to be taught to do so, and quickly.

§ 21

British workmen laboured like men to win the war. Once or twice signs were evident that arrogant leaders were trying to seduce them, but they failed in the long run. But after the immediate danger zone was past, with reprehensible persistency the same leaders shook off their reserve forced upon them by a perilous situation and started a new war cry of class against class which the war and all the suffering it caused should have killed. But no! While we were all admiring the straightforward patriotism so tried by grave danger, anarchical leaders were considering the steps they would take to achieve an end by brutal force, thereby copying the tyrannical Germany that was being thrust from civilised companionship with the rest of the world. These are but mimics of a fallen power which had killed its soul, killed every instinct of justice, all pity and human kindness to bring about an end to gratify lust of conquest and overwhelming tyranny under the mark of Kultur. Trades union leaders threatened to starve London. Unable to coerce a none too strong Government by specious proposals and platform oratory, their threat was, happily, taken seriously, and the Government, in this instance, gave evidence of a power of forethought which it had too often neglected in the past. Those leaders were cheated of their prey of dead children and old people starving for want of milk. It is difficult to abstain from stronger words than are here used, difficult not to permit harsh words, so dastardly cowardly was the attempt which, although it failed, was made with a coldbloodedness that was more German than English. That it failed to succeed was not the fault of the authors of the scheme, who intended it to force the pace, intimidate the people and the Government, and establish trades union leaders as rulers of the country. In point of fact, it was blackmail! On the contrary, they have secured obloquy from every decent man and woman, and have happily placed themselves in a position of disorder which we hope will continue. If they try the same game again, if they are not met with physical resistance, they ought to be, and if the leaders of what is in reality “conspiracy” are not “doing time,” the Government will have to answer some not pleasant questions from a majority of orderly citizens which is resolved not to be set out of order by a minority of exploiters entirely out for their own interests and self-aggrandisement. If the Government had shown weakness, as it so often has done in somewhat similar circumstances, its doom would have been sealed. It has too often tried the patience of the country by unfulfilled promises and shifting ground when obstacles were obstinate, and an entirely reprehensible policy of compromise. This time it surprised the country by being prepared to deal with a crafty trap. It caught the vermin in the trap they had set to intimidate the country. That strike has gone far to prove that Labour, as at present led and organised, is no more fitted to rule than a naughty, ill brought up child is to rule its parents. We believe the soul of the British workman is still clean, au fond; it has been tempted to be otherwise by bad guides, taught to be dishonest by them, to be selfish, hard, even brutal, but enough of the old stamina has survived to encourage the belief that, under good, wise and sympathetic, but at the same time strong leadership, the British workmen will regain the confidence they have lost and the position of respect which has been compromised for them.

§ 22

They deserve good wages, that is to say, wages which enable them to lead decent lives under decent environment. They deserve a better education than they get, and, above all, better guides in their early school days, guides who shall furnish the sensitive period of the first stages of youth with first principles of conduct; taught that they are citizens of no mean country, hence that a grave responsibility is theirs, not only to themselves but to their neighbours. Taught that thou as well as I is an essential pronoun; that civilisation is based upon Fraternity, not Equality, because there is no such thing and never can be. That one’s neighbour is a bit of oneself is a moral truth beyond question. It is a truth that is in the very foundation of society. It is the root of the tree of all progress, it is as the water that feeds it, and as the sun which ripens its fruit. Duty to God is implied in duty to the neighbour. God made the neighbour, the thou as well as the I is His design; the two are really inseparable. This principle, driven home in the earliest years, will form a guide for life, because the mental impressions then received are never wholly eradicated. “I must take care of myself to take care of you” is a truism. But “I must prop you in failure, stand by you in trouble, and joy in your joy” is surely a higher form of ethics! This simple principle of life is the summing up of Christian teaching, and not only of that, but of the writings of such great pagan philosophers as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, to name only two of many. To be able to read is one thing, what is read is another. Bad books are more detrimental than no books, as bad education is worse than none. To know one book well is better than to have superficially read a hundred. There are essential and not essential as well as positively destructive books; plenty, indeed, of the last named, and they grow like weeds! Only two or three of the best books should be set before children. “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and carefully selected portions of the Bible would not be a bad selection. Teachers must not be hacks or machines, but wise and sympathetic guides. History is a complicated study, and one which the busy worker, agricultural or craftsman, has not time to master. But the chief events, those which have moulded social life and profoundly led progress, can be tabulated and learned by heart. The young should be taught that presently they will be called to make history, and that in its making absolute honesty is the first condition of success. The agricultural labourer is helping to feed his country, the craftsman is making desirable and durable goods for his own as well as foreign markets, and they must be the best he can turn out to his honour!

§ 23

Ancestors of the craftsman of to-day erected and adorned the monuments we now prize; it is the business of the modern craftsman to make such as will be reverenced and esteemed by-and-bye. Ancient craftsmen loved their work, that we can see at a glance. Are the modern craftsmen taught or encouraged to do so by their leaders? No! They are taught to grab high wages for bad work as good for trade, a lamentable fallacy which could only have been framed by ignorant men, and unprincipled to boot. As the duty to a neighbour should be instilled, as it were, with mother’s milk, so to do good and only good work should be the mainspring of a boy-craftsman guidance. The habit of doing good work must be acquired in youth! It must be begun early and continued as a habit to the end of it. Duty to our neighbour and duty to our employers are synonymous. Pride in turning out good and shame in turning out bad. Do Labour leaders teach that? No! They advocate the reverse. They would have it that while labour is essential it is derogatory to freedom, to insist on good work for good pay is tyranny, but to demand high wages for bad work is justice. They teach “As little effort as possible to attain the highest level of wages.” Is this wise? No, it is the height of folly.

The true answer to those false leaders is to tell the workmen that all work is honourable when well done, dishonourable when ill done. When primary education is conducted upon the simple lines above indicated we shall be on the road to supply the best possible education to the greater number. It is worse than useless to cram young minds with facts before the first principle of selection has been instilled. Much, indeed most, of England’s foundation of greatness was laid when the majority could neither read nor write. It was character, not education in facts, that made England great. Honesty, not grasping, was the watchword which guided the deeds of our great ancestors. Soil must be prepared before it is ready to receive fruitful seed. We do not plant lilies on dustheaps or corn on the ashes of factories’ furnaces. Honourable dealing with the neighbour, honourable quid pro quo are, as it were, the bricks of which a nation is built, and without them as primaries no nation has been or will bequeath a noble heritage. What are we making for the future? To what end is the intelligence of craftsmanship directed with all the facilities at their hands? To get enormous wages with the least possible effort. These are hard words, but they are true. The welfare of the neighbour is not in the calculation, and honesty of work has taken a back seat. That is what is the matter with England! It is a malady which affects the commercial attitude of to-day from bottom to top. Under so depressing a social atmosphere is it a matter for wonder that we are creating so little that will be a joy or stimulus to aftercomers? Work in which joy has not taken part will never provide pleasure to the doer or receiver. A creator who slaves as a drudge, is unwilling and discontented, is a neuter; he will neither derive nor breed pleasure.

§ 24

The war compelled Labour; without it it would have been lost. But are there signs that Labour will work for Peace? What ideal has it? What stimulus is being provided for Labour and by Labour to make England rich in intellect, purer in heart, more fertile of ideas, less materialistic and more spiritual?

§ 25

The spirit giveth life! Matter is like an eggshell. We have gone round in a circle in the later pages, and come back to the point of starting. The soul of a country is what matters; it and it alone can control the matter of it! We have seen a great country break down under the curse of materialism. Explosives, foul gas, and every instrument of destruction have been the gods of the Germans, and they have ruined them. Germany sold her soul to the Devil to attain her lust, the conquest of the world. She failed because she killed the spirit of God in her, setting in His place monsters of iron, steel and poison. If matter divorced from spirit can win, Germany would have won. Is England going to imitate Germany, the country that is fallen from a high estate to an abject condition of failure? Or are we to be influenced by Russian disorder and anarchy? Both are bad, and neither should influence us except to avoid the grievous errors which have led to such disaster. Anarchy, as every plague, is catching. It seems to promise to uneducated and undisciplined minds a panacea. It may offer that, but it grants only additional miseries. Over and over again it has been tried and has invariably failed!

So let us not repeat a blunder, but shape a new course upon ground which has never revealed pitfalls, which is not subject to earthquakes, that is on rock, not sand, that is productive, not sterile, fruitful, not destructive. Let us see that the Great Spirit which inspired England is with us still, but in a wider measure than heretofore—the spirit that gave her Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning and Morris in poetry; in science, Harvey, Bacon, Locke, the Herschells, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley and Lister, to mention only a few great names in occult and humane science. The spirit which inspired our great artists—Reynolds, Wren, Chambers, Blake, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Wilson, Alfred Stephens, Rossetti, Hunt, Millais, Leighton and Watts. For music we cannot claim so many, but in folk song England has been rich, perhaps richer than any other country, while her stately Church music has been quietly developing from Purcell to Sam Wesley, the last of the severe Church composers. Of novelists, Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, Thackeray, Dickens, the five kings of that art; while in the second order Meredith, G. Eliot and Charlotte Brontë are eminent. Let us emulate the builders, craftsmen and decorators who made our cathedrals, which we now see denuded of much of their wealth of beauty by wrong-headed Puritans and religious faddists who have worked so much mischief to the country in too many directions.

But, we shall be asked, “Is it possible to work our several faculties simultaneously in opposite directions: those which are seeking utility, facilities for still more rapid translation from place to place, for a restless life which leaves few moments for thought, but which do not conduce to wealth inasmuch as money can give it, but which must, if they are further developed, stultify other faculties which, to reach their highest point of excellence, demand concentration, leisure and peace?” Yes, it is possible; it has been done, but it cannot be done if the point is overstrained, which is to say, if wealth, as applied to money, means that money only matters, if to get rich is the ideal towards which the whole nation strains. Money is only a means to an end. Like labour, it is mischievous when wrongly applied, and it is so wasted upon implements of destruction, gambling and coarse pleasures which poison or atrophy the higher senses and nobler ambitions. It is wasted also when spent upon idle officials, unnecessary committees, the fetish of politicians when they have got themselves into a muddle. Before spending money surely the first question should be: “Is the object of lasting or purely ephemeral importance? Will it return an interest commensurate to the expenditure pro bono publico, i.e., a national more than individual interest?” Thousands upon thousands of public money were wasted in war time to support political or party schemes for which we pay dearly now. Money is being wasted upon extravagant wages in all directions and at this moment when the nation is deeply in debt. Taxes and rates are at a fabulous premium, raised to pay for experiments, mistakes and reckless extravagance, and have to be met by increased taxation which is impoverishing enterprise of every description, so much so that no surplus is left to meet demands that are necessary for the intellectual progress of the country. Does any one suppose that the Labour leaders are doing their mischief unpaid? They are living (on the contrary) on the fat of the land. Their salaries are large and are taken from their followers, who claim to be in such straits. These mischievous agents of Anarchy are better off quâ money than thousands of their betters, than men whose education has been expensive and who are the intellectual bulwarks of Britain.

§ 26

Scholars, every form of research in the arts, science, literature and education are suffering from want of means to do justice to their studies and to keep up the level of intellectual attainment to a point of excellence necessary to the welfare and progress of England. The so-called idle rich (a term of obloquy justifiable to a small section) came out well during the war; they sacrificed their wealth and energies for the public good. How could the huge sums of money have been collected and dispensed without capital? It was capital which came to the rescue in those dark hours. Had capital been less, how could the huge wages have been paid to war workers? Increase of wages necessitates larger not smaller capital. Breaking up capital and distributing it in sections, giving it to a class which has had no experience of its value and uses, would be to commit social suicide! Upon the whole, Labour behaved well in the war. It was not unnatural that the rise in prices of the necessities of life (leaving out luxuries which can easily be dispensed with) raised discontent sometimes, but by no means justifiable. That certain foodstuffs became expensive was inevitable. The war, unprepared for by short-sighted politicians, took the majority by surprise, although a more thoughtful minority had seen it approaching for years. The stores of food were small. Insistence upon the prominent pre-eminence of the Juggernaut of Industrialism had caused agriculture to fall away, or so to decrease as to form a secondary (whereas it should be the first) consideration of an island that should be (as far as possible) self-supporting, save for such luxuries which our climate is unable to produce. But that the prices of food necessary to life—meat, bread, and milk—went up to excess has been the fault of grasping, selfish, unpatriotic tradesmen, who, seeing the opportunity of their neighbours’ distress, the moment to put money in their purses, did so, utterly regardless of the suffering such action must entail. Not all, but the majority of tradesmen, behaved ill while their country was on the road to starvation, so ill as to command a decision that, as a class, tradesmen, unchecked, are not fit for prominent posts in the Government, national or municipal. They proved that they are egoistic and selfish, a character suspected, and not without reason, but perhaps never brought so prominently into the light before.

It would be tedious did we give a list (it would be a long one) of necessary foodstuffs refused to applicants excepting at a price they could ill afford or could not afford to pay at all. It was a system of blackmailing wholly discreditable to a class which, having power, exercised it with a cold-blooded arbitrariness that was, to say the least, unmanly; the worst, cowardly and criminal. To hit a man when he is down and unable to protect himself is the act of a coward; to cause, for selfish reasons, suffering to the neighbour is criminal. We cannot refrain from the hope that the dark side of tradesmen’s morality, so distinctly pronounced during the late war, will result in an abstention in granting them powers, national or municipal, which will offer them chances for extended jobbery in the future. That, having become aware of their disposition, tradesmen will never again be allowed a free hand in any form of Government. That to them is largely due the rise in wages which is straining the capital of England is unquestionable, therefore they belong to a class which needs careful watching in the future. If, instead of striking at the whole nation, trades unions had struck against the prices demanded by tradesmen, they would have had right on their side in that they struck against an initial cause. It has been said just now that money is well spent when dedicated to causes that are permanent, not ephemeral. Wealth is a necessity for a nation, and wealth without capital is out of the question.

§ 27

Athens at her great time was rich; Egypt, when the city of Memphis covered four times the area of London, was rich. Rome was rich, first by her agriculture; she began to decline when she ceased to grow corn, getting it from her colonies. Byzantium was full of gold when she enriched herself still more by the buildings she erected that live among the most treasured possessions of to-day. When Venice was producing her great architects and painters, her consummate builders and craftsmen, her merchants were rich, proud, too, of making their city as we now see it and know it, one of the most beautiful in the world. Florence and Genoa were rich when they took a high place in the arts and intellectual culture of all kinds. France was rich when she built her unsurpassed cathedrals; so was England at her prime when she gave us much more than has survived destruction of the beauty her artists and craftsmen created. Surely wealth was then used as a permanent means for a permanent supply of honour to which we bow now in the beauty that remains of the noble labours of great peoples. The men who acquired the means to do so spent money for national honour with the ambition to make their city or cities as attractive and beautiful as possible. They employed the greatest creators of their generation to leave their mark not only on the present but the future. The labours of the great spirits of the past are a heritage than which nothing can be greater or more valuable. Bad men as many of the Roman Pontiffs were, they used the wealth (not always honestly attained) with distinction, whether for the exaltation of the Church or not does not matter to us; they made Rome as we see it now (deducting the abominations of industrialism which deface the grand old city).

What do we go to Italy for? Not to hear discourses of politicians or to listen to Socialists talking about what they do not understand, or to see tramways blocking up narrow and picturesque streets. We have enough of those restless, fugitive obstacles here. We go to study the immortal works of art of all the centuries from Romulus to the 16th century of our era; a pretty wide field of interest and instruction, so richly provided is that highly endowed country. What do we go to Egypt for? Surely not to see the havoc Western ambitions in commercialism is causing, with very doubtful results upon the prosperity of the fellah; nor only to bask in her glorious sunshine, her pure air, not yet poisoned by the atmosphere of industrialism in promotion there and quite out of keeping with the distinction of that great country and the transcendent interests of its history; but to study, admire and learn from her remote past, that had so much to do with the formation of intellectual energy which gave birth to so much that is no less valuable now than it was in the past.

To us, overtaken by an artificial life, by a destructive force called Utilitarian, indiscriminating and reckless, the past has much to teach. It is all very well to sweep away traditions which the labours of our forefathers provided, under specious excuses, under plausible arguments; but what we destroy is irrevocable, and cannot be replaced. The mad course pursued by Industrialism has had disastrous effects; it has absorbed land that was under cultivation, it has broken up priceless records of the past by destruction of noble buildings, it has turned thousands of acres of valuable land into deserts, filled the air with poisonous fumes, darkened the face of the sun; it has sown squalor where once was order, and, above all, it has hardened our people, who have been on the verge of soul starvation; it has been turning them into machines. Industrialism has not forwarded Liberty, it has retarded it. Its tendency has been to make all men alike, to, as it were, take moulds of their minds, and sell the casts to the highest bidder. It has encouraged avarice on the one hand and extravagance on the other. Industrialism carried to excess is an incentive to war. It bears no relation to the Arts of Peace. It is a tyrant; wherever it goes it leaves a track of destruction as an invading army does. It has created a spirit of unrest, hence it is the enemy of research, of the arts, and of those faculties of a nation which make them intellectually great. By providing machinery it has crippled craftsmanship. While, in a narrow sense, it has provided occupation (and that word is used advisedly), industrialism has damped the spirit of creative labour. By turning out thousands of articles exactly alike its handmade machinery has almost swept the board of creative instincts, of good and discriminating taste, thereby leaving in its tracks little indeed of æsthetic value and rarely, perhaps, any work of craftsmanship in whatever trade that will be an honour to our generation in the judgment of the future. What the craftsman makes with his finely trained hand, inspired by a creative instinct which is his distinction, the machine can only copy badly. The man who made it had a soul which he used in his production which fulfilled it, gave it shape, made it interesting always, even if the workmanship were rough and ready; it reflected its producer, and so a work of art is produced and not the product of a dead machine.

To sum up (and they are hard words that are used) Industrialism is the enemy of the soul of a nation en masse; in particular of man, by killing his individuality, his productive genius, his observation, his loyalty to himself, his ambition for fame as a craftsman, the civilised progress of his country and last, not least, his liberty. To succeed (and who does not wish it success?) democracy depends upon the Demos. An unenlightened, self-indulgent, ignorant, uninspired, misdirected Demos must ruin the chances of a successful Democracy!

§ 28

What is “of the people” must come “from the people.” If the people represent the roots of a nation they must be pruned, nourished, and kept clear of poisonous weeds; if not, their product will be sterile. If a fruit tree bears ill the fault is to be found in the roots and in the soil that surrounds them. The embryo of its fruit is in the roots of a tree. Labour is numerically superior, and rightly, because no country can exist without it. It is imperative, therefore, that if Labour is finally to rule it must prepare itself to do so, not by making itself a nuisance and a danger by striking work, by shirking effort, by giving the minimum of its energy to do its share of work for the community, but by strenuously following the old maxim: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” To take part in the rule of the community is a more complicated affair than to rule a household; it follows logically that the man who fails in the latter will do so in the former. Unable to rule himself, to be his own conscience guide, how can he be accepted to rule over his fellows? A man, be he who he may, rich or poor, who uses the leisure he has ill, brutally or wastefully, has not yet qualified himself for more. If the ideal of such a one is dog fighting, man fighting, gambling or any other brutalising sport, his is not likely to be an ideal of the use of leisure serviceable to himself and his family, nor is it one which justifies his voice to be heard or his deeds to influence the affairs of his country, for which he has shown neither interest or inclination. Among intelligent and instructed men as colleagues he would find himself quite out of place, and rightly. A limited outlook upon life is one of the penalties which untrained, undisciplined minds have to pay. The narrow mind is a selfish one almost always. It is egoistic, it places the social class to which it belongs in a position of importance far above its merits, for whose well being, in a material sense, it would legislate to the disadvantage of every other class.

§ 29

If there is one lesson pre-eminently prominent taught by the experience of the Great War it is the absolute necessity for a revival of agriculture in the British Isles. And more than that, viz., that the growth of grain, fruit and vegetables should no longer be permitted to be crushed by an increase of industrialism. Further, that forests should be planted wherever possible, that we may in a large measure derive our wood from our own land. Our people need work, they need to be encouraged to hand labour, to an outdoor, healthy life. Every machine made to hasten results, while it provides work for mechanics, takes away from agricultural labourers. One man employed to drive a corn-reaping machine is enough to reap three or four acres in a day. How many does this mean thrown out of work? Thirty or forty and more. It is true the machine does the job quicker, but is rapidity of execution overwhelmingly important? There is a boot-making machine we hear of which can turn out dozens of finished boots in a day. If this is used what is to become of the bootmakers? They must either starve or take to another trade!

And so, instance after instance might be quoted to prove the narrowing effect produced by industrialism upon labour when carried to such an extent as to absorb the majority of the energies and activities of a people. Although the author has visited many industrial towns where he must confess to have been received with kindness, and from a section of their inhabitants sympathy, he wished to improve his acquaintance and go to one which shall be nameless to have a good look round. Before he relates the story of his impressions and paints a picture of them he wishes to preface it with a few words. In his opinion, which has been formed upon experience, there are undoubtedly great efforts made to render industrial life possible. There is in all industrial cities a small coterie of enlightened men who, as manufacturers, are powerful, and who are making an effort to achieve better conditions of life. There are art galleries, there are museums, there are mechanics’ institutes, schools, and many appliances for a better education. But as far as the author has seen, the people who should be influenced are not reached, they remain outside; they remain a class apart, not perhaps ungrateful for their chances, but indifferent to them; they are suspicious. Civilising influences rarely reach them; if they do, they are disregarded.

In point of fact, the Demos of “labour” is distinct from the Demos of intellectual culture. Intellectual culture and Labour are out of touch. Labour seems to belong to another world, to live another life, to have no need for what is put for them to take. That is surely because classes are too abruptly divided, they do not mix enough; hence each class mistrusts the other! Labour mistrusts the Capitalist, and the Capitalist mistrusts Labour. Each is apt to regard the other as of a different species of humanity and one that is inevitably in antagonism, forgetting that no labour means no capital and the reverse. It is unfortunate that there is a gulf between the classes where there should be neutral ground on which they could meet. Coercion will never create that meeting ground, neither will continued suspicion and unrest. High wages even will not tend to reconstruction as long as there is no intellectual basis of sympathy and desire. The working class (I dislike the term) must make an effort to rise, it must desire acquisitiveness, and I believe many of it do desire it. It is very little use to place advantages before people who do not want to use them. They must be taught or guided to want them, and by degrees to use them. The middleman is an atrocious invention. The agitator is a middleman. He keeps up friction. He is neither the “boss” nor the workman; he fiddles for his own dancing. It is not impossible that he is responsible for the absence of touch between employed and employer. Trades Unions widen the differences.

The middleman thrives on labour of all kinds. He is represented in the arts by the dealer, who, in most instances, secures a larger share of profit than the producer. The musical middleman (or agent) takes a large profit from the composer; the singer and executant are alike sufferers. This constitutes a difficulty by no means easy to get out of. As long as “advertisement” holds such a sway as it does now, the wrong men make the chief profit, which is an entirely unnatural state of things, demonstrating something wrong in the relations existing between the public and the producer. “The State” has not the power, inclination, or capacity to deal with what is, after all, authorised blackmail. It is only by force of public opinion that a change in economics is likely to come about! By public opinion we do not mean unenlightened, unskilled, ill-disciplined agitation, but one arrived at by a better tone generated by ethical as well as practical education, and a closer touch between teachers and taught. Justice is not likely to be delivered by a class which holds that its own interests are paramount; and that undoubtedly is the present attitude of the class called Labour, which is apt to forget that we are all, or ought to be, labourers, from the King to the humblest peasant. Now let us move our ground. I ask my readers to accompany me on a journey and share with me my observation while reading the thoughts it has given rise to, and afterwards to the Dream consequent, I suppose, upon those thoughts.

§ 30

I travelled in a not too clean third-class carriage from London, which I left in a not uncommon black drizzle. Although it was morning and a summer day, according to the calendar, the station was partly lit by electric light which only seemed to accentuate the smoky gloom within and without. It was depressing, passengers looked depressed, porters were irritable, everybody seemed to be in everybodies’ way. There was the impression of Pandemonium in this specimen of civilization. I wondered at all the pains that had been taken over the strange medley of squalor, convenience and inconvenience. It presented one vast, ugly muddle. This, then, is the chief railway station in the, supposed to be, most civilized city in the world. I looked forward to getting out of the noise, the smoke, and the mud, away from the mad hurry of a people with no time to think, so bent are they in pushing their fellows out of the way. I knew I was going from bad to worse. Curiosity was taking me to a manufacturing town in the north. I should have said City, for it possesses a Lord Mayor, Corporation, and Cathedral, and other conventional essentials.

The journey was uneventful, nobody spoke to his neighbour, babies howled, buns and oranges galore, and the floor was well littered with slippery débris; I was not sorry to reach my destination. I had resolved to leave the train at a station some three miles from the City—a dirty little station it was—that I might walk thither. A hot, damp atmosphere, charged with sulphuric acid, greeted me. The land was undulating. What had once been beautiful has been rendered a poisonous desert; the country surrounding the emporium of nastiness, a capital of Industrialism, was a wreck. Occasionally a white circle appeared and disappeared behind clouds of smoke and mist, beaten up into a greasy black soup. It was the sun, but never a shadow did it cast. The atmosphere, rendered solid by dirt, was heated as in a furnace. Oxygen was at a minimum; hydrogen, in plenty, played its part entirely up to date according to modern ideas of civilization.

Leaving the dirty station, I made my way over fields, or apologies for them, not by the road which was ankle-deep in black mud. A few thin cattle were feeding off patches of ill-nourished grass growing unwillingly from cinders, mixed with poor and thin soil. Groups of black sheep hurried from patch to patch of sapless grass to find nourishment. Mostly wool these half-starved sheep were. Four tumble-down stone walls served as boundaries, which they only indicated. Straggling thin hedges there were making mourning black fringes to the desolate fields unpruned and almost leafless. Although it was July scarce a leaf remained on tree or shrub, none green, few even brown, being mostly crinkled up and black, poisoned in their early youth, but making a brave fight for existence in what should have been their prime. A few broken down buildings appeared as apologies for what had once been a considerable farmhouse in better times. A few blackened haystacks only served to deepen the sense of degradation. About these buildings, instead of flowers and shrubs, was heterogeneous rubbish. Broken saucepans, smashed crockery, tin boxes, glass bottles, rags, bits of old garments and soiled scraps of newspapers. I noticed some garments, men’s and women’s, hanging out to dry. I wondered how long it would take to do so, and what the colour of them would be presently. A few dirty hens were scratching among the débris. A pig or two, none too fat, were turning over rubbish with their snouts. There was a kind of farm yard, which stank of rotten wet straw, soaked in microbic poisons. Near by lay a pool, coated with black slime through which a duck or two pushed their way.

A dirty woman came out of a broken down doorway carrying a still dirtier child. She was pale—she looked permanently sad. Set, even resentful, was her countenance, as she glanced a moment at me—a stranger. What windows her hovel once had, now mostly broken, were patched with bits of newspaper. Three or four men languidly worked or lounged about. Every action pointed to ineptitude and indecision—out of their element, evidently they were. Walking on, I came to a knoll crowned with black, dead trees, once, perhaps, a sacred primitive burying place. I could see the City now, grim in wreaths of black smoke, now looming out as a cold metallic half-light, from what was the sun, struck for an instant upon the gloomy pile of factories. It was as a city of the dead from this distance, silent and grim, hideous, forlorn, and even menacing. There seemed to spread over it an awful silence, broken only now and then, as a light wind carried a dull thud of the throbbing pulse of machinery doing its monotonous task. I came nearer, even to the environs of this terrible place of slavery and black life to the thousands of human beings created to breathe the fresh air of God’s creation, now condemned to evil fumes and soul-killing labour—the offspring of a monotonous, poisonous existence. Hoarse voices, using not too choice language, made discordant music, the like of which I do not wish to hear again. It was now 12 o’clock. Hooters brayed, a cracked bell or two told the hour in mournful tones.

I made my way to the heart of the City. Its narrow, dirty streets, winding, serpentlike, among the black buildings. A slowly moving crowd came along. It moved automatically, just mechanically, like the revolving wheels it had just left. The men had no joy before them, they were just going to eat, to grease the wheels of their machine-made bodies, to return in an hour to resume the same soul-killing toil. Their faces were all alike—very pale, very dirty, very neutral. I thought to myself, this then is civilization, and these are the slaves to the much vaunted Industrialism which has gone to kill agriculture and stifle natural life wherever it is planted. This is the life the people choose to live with an occasional strike, and who can wonder? whose leisure is spent at football matches, too often in dog-fighting, man-fighting and gambling; and who can wonder!

In this stifling place, this kind of systemised Hell, wages are high, and rightly. The loss of the soul of living should be paid for at a high price in money, it pays a high price for suffering. It is some comfort to think that the majority of slaves to Industrialism are unconscious of what they lose in life. But that ought not to be a consolation; it should stimulate desire and determination to change it. I thought of the health and happiness that had been here in one of the most beautiful and fertile districts of England. The contrast seemed terrible. Nothing can compensate for such a change. Health, free agricultural life, invaded, ravished, and slaughtered by the horrors, inevitable (apparently) horrors, which are part and parcel of Industrialism. I thought of the silver streams once merrily flowing, now sluggishly creeping, half-solid with filth and poison, of the rich produce from a land of farms, of happy country festivals, of content, of the prosperity of England; how she fed herself from her own land, and in her craftsmanship was a leader of Europe. I seem to hear a hard voice saying, “That’s all very well, these people don’t know any other life than the one they live in and are used to.”

That may be true, but it only makes their case a sadder one. To lose sensibility, to be ground down to the level of an automatic machine, is an indignity. Man is an outdoor animal, not made to live the Artificial life of huge, unhealthy cities. Nothing can make up for the loss inflicted on man’s soul by depriving him of Light, by forcing him to live in smoke, squalor, and foul air. Habit does go a long way, no doubt; they do get used to it, but that does not lessen the evil that the life is doing to the best part of every man and woman who lives it. I hear another voice say, “But they don’t care for the sun, or beautiful landscape, for flowers, for the things we care for,” as if these toilers were of a different race! “They have lost touch with what you call Nature, and of God they know nothing but as a kind of head of a rich firm who is autocratic and hard, if he pays any attention to them.” “It is no use to put sentiment into this class,” said the hard voice in my ear, “it would be dangerous if they cared for all you want for them. They would be discontented and cease work. Perhaps they would want to go back to the land, to Freedom; that would not suit us at all. It is only because they are ignorant of any other life that we get work out of them—machines they are, machines they must remain.”

This was true Industrial talk, and exactly typified the mind of the Arch-Priests of Industrialism. “Well, you must remember,” spoke the same voice, “they have their own pleasures, fitted for them and their condition, they like their bit of sport—prize-fights, dog-fighting and gambling—they can go to a ‘cinema,’ there are several here, where they can see the things they understand—stories of vice, of murder, a complete list from the Newgate calendar, that’s what they like.”

“But look,” said I, “at the little box outside that dirty window there; it has fading geraniums in it. Do you mean to tell me that the hand that tries to tend them, and the eyes that enjoy their colour, are yet quite paralysed?” “Oh, yes,” was the answer, “they do like a bit of greenery, of course, but it’s mostly the women that are sentimental.” At that moment a rough-looking fellow went by. “Look at that,” said I, “he has a geranium flower in his button-hole.” There was no answer! I thought that geranium was a symbol of the life of that man’s soul, and reflects the Garden of Eden, and an instinctive desire to be there again. “Granted,” I went on to say, “that Industrial life is a necessity, do you think that it need be squalid, that the homes of these people should not be bettered, and their self-respect encouraged thereby?” “They do not want to be interfered with,” was the answer. “If they were given greater comfort, better dwellings, and little gardens, as sentimentalists desire, the dwellings would become squalid and dirty in a week, and the garden would yield nothing; they’ve lost all touch with such matters, they are grown to be of a different race; they like their condition as long as they have plenty of beer, and may do a little amateur prize-fighting and dog-fighting, and spend a good bit of their week’s money in journeys to football matches.”

“Do you think, then, that their life is the best imaginable for them? Is there no Ideal behind it?” “Yes, it is the best for them. As to Ideals, I don’t know what you mean; they’ve got to take life as it is, there is no room in it for fanciful experiments! They are well paid; for the rest, leave them alone in their ‘squalor,’ as you call it; they like it, and would resent being made ‘respectable.’ Besides, if they were, they would get out of hand.” I saw it was no use to argue with the voice that came from a big, fat man, as hard as nails, and as prosperous as a fatted pig! I went to see the “Mechanics’ Institute.” There were a few billiard tables, a strong smell of stale tobacco and beer; a quantity of newspapers littered the tables, dirtily thumbed on the pages relating to sport and “all the winners,” the last prize fight, murder and burglary. Sport and crime appeared the favourites of the moment. Could this be bettered? I thought. Yes, was the answer from my better self, but it will not be if men of the type of him who talked just now lead public opinion.

§ 31

I went to the theatre, the play was not invigorating; it provided rotten food—money jugglery, a low love affair, and success of a villain, were the parts. What was not immoral was vulgar. What was neither, was dull. I venture to imagine whoever was there came away a little more debased than he went. I found my way to the Cathedral, a fine 15th century edifice. The stone (local and hard) was fast being pulverised by acid fumes. Black deposit filled every crevice of what once had been exquisite carving. The loving work of ancient craftsmen was being rapidly destroyed by the “necessities” (?) of Industrialism. An attempt was in progress to reface a portion of the exterior—far better have left the noble old work decay than replace it by commercial carving at so much a foot. It had been a noble building. Standing high, it dominated, by a survival of dignity, the hideous black factories. It was like a still small voice, speaking out of a great past to a people who, if they heard it, could not understand. Its chimes (eight bells) once echoing the hours to the hills, were silent—better so, perhaps. I did not stay long in the interior. It made me sad to think of the enlightened people who had worshipped there, for it was a Benedictine Abbey Church of the monastery hard by where was preserved all the learning of the times, and where men led “creative and industrious lives.”

A pure unsullied sun had glowed through glorious glass, of which fragments remained, but mostly had been replaced by commercial attempts at so much a foot—commercial, indeed, it was. On the very rock where stood the monastery—the place of scholarship, of art, a home for exquisite craftsmanship—is now a huge manufactory, belching out wreaths of black smoke, like serpents encircling shaft and building, writhing in poison even along the cobbled ways deep in black slush. Civilisation, so called? Here, are forged cannon to kill human creatures. A very apotheosis of hideous war, and one of the many homes of its implements. When will men be wise and see that war is not only a hideous crime, a recognised murderer of millions, an authorised waste of money and energy, but a folly as well? What waste, cannon to destroy, and to be destroyed after a few hours of vicious mischief! Oh, the foolishness of such a parody on Ambition, on Statesmen, on the whole world’s Progress!

§ 32

Men, human beings, brothers, as they ought to be, earning their livelihood in making engines of Destruction. “Ypres,” “Louvain,” and “Rheims,” came into my mind, with the devastation of hundreds of square miles of fair agriculture in France and Belgium, and for what? That a materialistic nation, clever and unprincipled, and lost to all moral restraint, audacious and mendacious, might govern the world under the sovereignty of the mad egoist, William II. But Britain had to fight. Her honour would have been stained for ever, had she broken faith with Belgium in her extreme agony. Whether it is desirable to make implements of destruction in the abstract, is a question; during the war they had to be made and with all possible speed, and British factories played an honourable part in saving Britain, as her soldiers did who shed their blood for their country. Is it indeed, Utopia, that place where men may come to regard war as a folly, and where, being taught a better and higher Ideal than quarrelling, is a reality? I like to think the time will come when our greatest minds are concentrated on contributing to all that Peace designs, and our skilled labour and craftsmen are employed on things permanent. They will be things that last into the ages to come, that ennobled the men who designed and made them, and bring a pride for them in the making, and an honour gained in the estimation of them in the future. The abolition of War might depress the purse of Industrialism, but it would endow the country with riches that money cannot purchase. Enormous, scarcely calculable, sums of money now spent on “preparations” to kill our neighbours, would be converted to create things enduring and elevating. Perhaps it may never be, but why not dream of it and work for it as a possibility? There is an Ideal somewhere. Why not reach after it? There is so much that needs doing for Education, for Beauty, provision of healthy work for every one, and healthier lives for every one.

We ought to have no time for war. The late struggle for Freedom has supplied Europe and Britain with the rest. Somehow or other, a change must come. If we are to prosper, aye, to exist, pre-war conditions cannot be renewed. We have to make a new start, to obtain a greater simplicity of life. If you like, more primitive. Many good old customs and systems may well be revived. We were in such a hurry to coin money. We forgot that what we were leaving behind was better than what we were recklessly trying to meet. We thought that money was the “Summum bonum” of existence, to buy transient pleasure, to gratify our lower instincts, to feed ourselves with luxuries, to be victims to Vanity Fair, and slaves to it; to eclipse the sun the giver of physical needs, the symbol of Eternal God, the Giver of Light; hence, Life, has been as great a folly as War. It is, indeed, a kind of war to do so, a war against Nature and her manifold gifts through the Spirit of God, which were visible in the Sun. To live under gloom, being poisonous to the body, is likewise poisonous to the Soul, which, in time, it must injure, if not destroy, for it paralyses Hope; it paralyses everyone of our finer sensibilities and aspirations. It blinds us to Beauty, it hardens the heart, destroys graceful sympathy, engenders selfishness, and, in time, it annihilates Love, because absence of Light is enervating to manhood.

And that is what a few have been doing to the many under promise that they shall be enriched. Enriched with what? Money paid for bad work? And when the money is there, how have they been taught to use it? Palliatives in plenty have been offered them. More excitements for leisure hours, which devitalise, have been sown broadcast; and why? because, pandering to human weakness, it paid to keep the people quiet. We have reaped that which has been sown. The people have become restive, they want more wages, not for the purpose of uplifting their finer sensibilities, but to gamble with first one then another amusement. Instead of providing, for leisure hours of our workmen, stimulus to educate themselves to be provident, to be industrious, we have led them by promises to the silly idea that they are the right class to govern the country!

§ 33

The precious gift of leisure, in which our working class might acquire more funds, we have not taught them to use; on the contrary, their leaders have taught them that they have a right to be idle, to obtain high wages for bad work, and in their leisure do whatever they like. This is something very near to Anarchy; any way, it is a principle which, if persisted in, will ruin England. No! The thing to do them good is to teach high principles and lead them on to be useful citizens. And that must be done, unless Democracy is to prove a disastrous failure! We have got to begin again, to start from the bottom—that is the clear duty for the future, and the only one that will succeed in the long run. If Democracy fails, it will be through apathy in the conduct of our systems, of leaving them to chance, and bad organisation. We have got to bring classes together, not separate them. Working men have to bring their share of labour into the halls of Democracy. An educated class has to bring its share, and the rich class, in its own sphere, has to bring its share. The rich have to supply means for labour, the labourer to do his labour up to the highest point of honour. The Educated Class has to seminate from the flowers ripened by study, and so each class, working out its own destiny hopefully and earnestly will contribute to general progress, which is the end to which democracy, to succeed, must strive. One class must not try to supersede another. That would only mean some form of Tyranny. There can be Tyranny from democracy, but only through Anarchy, which is as destructive to one class as another. To put down Anarchy, Force has to be resorted to. Anarchy is quite as great an enemy to Freedom as Autocracy. It calls out the worst form of human passion, resulting in civil war, the greatest evil that any nation can encounter. Russia is going through it, poor Russia, perhaps presently to become a victim to godless Germany! France went through the fire. France, for a time, lost her soul. The most delicately organised people in Europe turned themselves into brutes for a time.

What came after? The great conqueror, Napoleon. What did he conquer? Practically all Europe, save England! What remains to-day of his conquests? Nothing! Had Napoleon used his genius, which was second to none other in history, in consolidating France, in putting her intellectually as well as conventionally at the head of nations, which, by her innate genius she might have been, Europe would be a different place to-day. Napoleon failed, not because he was a conqueror, but because he tried to conquer wrongly. He threw away his force in War, he might have spent it in Peace. The French Revolution was the parent of his egoistic ambition, as Tyranny is the child of Tyranny. A revolution in England—by that is meant a War of Classes—would certainly give rebirth to Military Rule. This has been said before; it needs to be enforced by reiteration.

§ 34

Germany knows that, and nothing would please that rapacious nation so much as England’s failure to make Democracy a success. The success of Democracy in Britain depends upon the British, not only on how they choose their leaders, but on the direction taken by the people as a whole. These, then, are the reasons that I have written and published this “Book.” I want Democracy to succeed, and I see only one way to it; Perfect Unanimity, a perfect system of education, simple, not complicated, large-minded, generous rule, without weakness, all embracing without being overbearing. I cannot see it arrive through class warfare. I see it in wise concessions, in whole-hearted justice; in general, not particular rule; in the cultivation of the whole human machinery of our country, not in parts only; of the soul of England as well as her physical needs; in Industry of all kinds duly guided, duly answered; of the needs special to every district, each performing its part in a national enterprise. In that way, each man and woman can find a place, a usefulness, and position as citizens of “no mean country.” That is my Ideal for England of the future.

As I write, I know that professional politicians will sneer, that miles of red tape have to be unwound before what is now bad is made better, that extremists of every party will abuse me. I know I shall be called an unpractical dreamer. For these I care not one jot, having little, if any, respect for professional politicians, having an abhorrence of red tape and the jobbery it wraps up. For extremists I have pity more than scorn, as I know their tenets are but as grains of sand blown by the winds. That agitators, as a class, are wholly unreliable, being, au fond, mostly out for themselves, and that is the reason I warn the workers against them. I have chosen the form of a Dream to tell my story for several reasons. Some of the finest literature has been given in the form of Parable or Allegory! which is as illustrative to-day as it was in any period of History.

§ 35

The wanderings of Osiris, told in ancient Egyptian mythology, are ethically as beautiful as their progress is enchanting. The most beautiful and instructive passages in Christ’s teaching are in parable, as all Oriental disquisitions are. The story of Buddha is a poetic allegory affecting the lives of millions to-day. The Divine Comedy of Dante is in allegory, and our own great writer, Bunyan, the Bedfordshire tinker, chose a dream in which to relate his Christian progress. Bacon’s New Atlantis is a species of allegory interwoven with the science of his period. The first three chapters of Genesis, whoever written by, are in allegory. I know that the form I have chosen is not one in fashion. I am old-fashioned, and prefer the example of the greatest minds to those which, on a lower level, in my opinion, are, just now, uppermost. Imagination is at a discount; materialism is paying interest on Industrialism; but I believe in the Triumph of Imagination and the defeat of Materialism. This late war has cemented that faith in me which William Blake taught me, when he saw trees at Dulwich filled with angels, and his beautiful mind was filled with enthusiasm by vision of a more perfect existence than a mundane one.

Imagination is the torch that lights the intelligence of man. It is of the Spirit which God breathed into the mythical Adam, as he rose physically out of the newly created soil. Without Imagination the world would soon drift into a desolate chaos. Imagination is somewhere in the British character, else how came about our literature, second only to the Greek? Materialism created by Industrialism has sought to push it out as a vague and idle gift of no service in the acquisition of wealth. Plutus has been on the throne of Zeus, but only temporarily. Olympus will be peopled again, for the gods never die. Another Parnassus, with Apollo and the Muses, will be here again, and great god Pan will come into his own when Agriculture is restored in the grand simplicity of its initial purpose, and Industrialism is organised so as not to be a nuisance and a curse, which it has been unquestionably, not because it is bad in the abstract (for nothing which includes labour is that), but because it has gone a ruthless way unchecked. Industrialism became a “Fetish” before which every one must bow. It has destroyed what and where it wished! Without discrimination it has acted the part of a Juggernaut by trampling down better things than it can show, which stood in the way of its tyrannical progress. It has darkened the face of fair England by smoke, poisoned its rivers, turned good land into ash heaps. Lowered the vitality of men, of animals, trees and plants wherever its autocratic will has prevailed.

Worse even than this it has done, it has created a false creed: “I believe in gold.” It helped to make the late war the most horrible in History. It has tended, wherever it has planted its foot, to urge that Might is Right. Without the abuses of Industrialism, the late war could not have been. Germany trusted to her Industrialism to win. She felt certain that she could turn out a hundred destroying machines to the Allies’ thirty. That the force created by her Industrialism was invincible. There was once a Soul in Germany—the worship of Industrialism killed it. Germany lost the war because she had first sold her soul. The Allies won it because, though sorely wounded, their souls were still alive, and their honour mostly unscathed.

§ 36

Man was not made to be a machine; Industrialism would make him one; man was created for a fair open-air life to be a healthy hearty animal under the sun. Into him had been breathed something God-like, if he chose to use it; to create a new Eden, not a new Hell. We have had enough of his creative powers for the latter, we mean to use them for the former! It’s just a matter of choice, that is all. We have only to change the direction of creative impulse from sources of destruction to sources which will insure construction and preservation of the fittest. It is by that habit of mind and direction of effort we shall fall again into the footpaths of our noble predecessors, and create in them new departures, which, not being ephemeral and time-serving, will act as sign-posts for those to come; because, surely we are not responsible for a temporary success, but for the fields we leave to be gleaned when we have passed! These thoughts took hold of me and held me tight, as I walked to and fro in the City, watching all and talking to some of its inhabitants, some of keen intelligence, more of sullen discontented demeanour, a few but little above animals; not their fault, but of the misdirection of their lives, the unwholesome teaching of their leaders (a little more intelligent than they, a good deal more self-seeking and artful), and generally, if not universally, defective in sound early education and example. Tired with the fatigues of the day, and passionately longing for better things, I found an inn, and went to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream.

A DREAM OF ENGLAND

§ 1

My body lay asleep. My Spirit was free! Unconscious cerebration led it where it willed. Free as a bird, my winged soul made its way with no impediment. Without ears I heard, without eyes I saw, without hands I touched, without restraint I observed. My Spirit created images—it was an absolute monarch! Nothing denied its progress, no walls forbid entry, and nothing clouded its vision. More real, not less, than before, was every scene presented in the journeys of my Spirit. Is this real Life? Is this unreality Reality? It seemed so to be. Innumerable impressions on a long life become facts. The dream of sixty years was being realised every moment. What I saw and touched was tangible. Nothing was vague. It was a lifetime concentrated into a moment. “A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing they pass as a thief in the night.” Time was obliterated. Each of my senses was acute. I enjoyed beauty with a vivacity I had only dreamed of, the scent of flowers as I had not known before. I loathed the stenches of man’s making, for there was pain as well as pleasure to my acute sensibilities; in this state the Spirit is in a kind of Purgatory, half in, half out, of the world! half in Heaven, a bit in Hell. Dante tells it all. Virgil, Homer and Milton sang of it; the Golden Age lived it. Mankind has longed for it. To satisfy the longing man has created an Ideal existence the other side of the Grave. Not satisfied with that which is uncertain, we desire the Ideal life here, and as my Spirit gathers intimacy with what I see, hear and feel, the Ideal is dawning! “There is more in dreams than we wot of.” How can we tell that Truth is not the master of dreamland? “Hypnos” and “Somnos” may be brothers who conduct us into a land of accomplishment. Are they prophets? I hope so, when they lead where they lead me. Maybe such a dream as mine may come to be an abiding reality; that is why I tell it? England would be better and happier if it did. If there were no such place as Utopia, should we want to get there?

The money-grabbers have theirs, an unlimited supply of gold; the sensualists theirs, unlimited, unrestrained sensuality; the realist his, and what a tiresome place it would be; the idealist seeks his. Utopia is a real place, not in the clouds, but here, somewhere, if we choose to recognise it. If it were not so, the soul, created before the body, would not seek it. When we give a party we do so to please our friends, and doing so to gratify ourselves. The Idealist casts the seeds of live ideas. He knows they will fall on sterile as well as productive soil. The Idealist is an optimist. Having tested his ideal, probably through suffering, he believes in its efficacy. May be he believes in its general acceptance finally, because he is confident of the ultimate conquest of “the best!”

§ 2

Now to my dream! A moment I hovered over my sleeping body: I left it to travel on the wings of my soul. In front of me is a City. A part of it—the most elevated—is enclosed by a high wall, pierced for eight gates, closed at night. Its plan is octagonal. Within it there rise high buildings and towers. They are constructed of stone and brick, mostly of stone, for the region is volcanic. The slopes of the hill descending to the undulating ground are richly furnished with fruit trees, and ample vegetable gardens. It is spring time! Rich is the blossom whose scent the sweet pure air brings to me. The air is as clear as crystal. As I hovered over the enclosed part of the City, I heard a hum, pleasant to the ear as that of bees; it proceeded from within the stately buildings. Yes! It was machinery, complex and wonderful. How is it that those vast wheels, those intricate valves and long straps spreading as spider’s web, are moved, and so silently? Science has discovered how to convert noise to silence. Science had been practical, she had set herself a problem, and she had solved it! What appeared to be inevitable had been conquered.

But how is generated the power to propel this gigantic movement—and silently? Science had discovered how to collect and use electric currents, whose power is greater than steam, to move, in perfect rhythmical order, the heaviest, most complicated machinery. I searched for, but found no ash-heaps. How can this be? Science had discovered how to separate heat-giving properties of all fuel from the waste. Where is the smoke? There was none! What, then, are those noble towers for? Partly for ventilation, partly as store rooms. Science had said: “It is time I set to work to use the forces of Nature with discretion. I have discovered many useful things, but, being in too great a hurry, have made much havoc with them; I have destroyed much that was lovely in the world in my haste to provide ‘facilities.’ I have been very clever and very stupid. It is time I made a new departure. I must no longer be a nuisance. I must set to, to order my going, that in my track I create blessings, not curses. I see it now. It is in my power, if I exert it, to render unpleasant things pleasant. In my mad zeal for discovery, I forgot adaptation. I forgot that it lay in my genius to use it unharmfully. Now I set to work and try to make the world pleasant again, much as it was before I became too proud, too inconsiderate and dominating.

Alone I cannot do this! I have been too long separated from Art, too closely wedded to utility, which, though I do not divorce, I make obedient. Indeed, I rather scorned Art, and ridiculed those who stood in the way of my reckless march! I know now that I am responsible in a measure for the soul of Man, as well as the use of nature’s forces. ‘Only I matter’ has been my motto. I take Art to me, which, more than all else, presents the Soul of Man, and say we must be sisters, not antagonists. That I have brought evil into dominion I now know. From me, have been born hideous means to destroy life, property, and the gentler happiness of mankind. Foul gases to suffocate, explosives to be a curse to humanity to facilitate destruction in War-time. I have been a kind of earthquake, indiscriminating and cruel! I have destroyed more than preserved! What an odd creature I am!! I make wounds, then I heal them. I mangle bodies, and set them together again. With one hand I cut the world to pieces, with the other heal the wounds I’ve made. I have torn out eyes and replaced them as well as I could, with blind ones. Queer creature that I am. In making artificial light, I hid the sun. I subverted the natural order by turning day into night and night into day. I invented all kinds of implements for agriculture while I was killing vegetable life. I have been unguided by Art, yet I am entirely artificial! It is true that man has used me foolishly. He would have me to be Peace Maker and War Lord. He has abused my genius because he fancied that I only could satisfy his material ambitions and bring him wealth. What I made for his service he has used for murder and suicide! It is plain to me now! The blinkers are off and I see the right way.”

I listened while Science spoke, and gathered that she had become wise! Will men grow wiser with her? What I see here seems to promise it! I went on with my invisible peregrinations. The people of the City have not their homes where their daily labour is; after that is finished they go to their homes below the gardens, which entirely encircle the acropolis of Labour and the City. Hours for Labour are sufficient for all purposes not extreme. Eight hours do they labour, eight hours they sleep, eight hours for pastime and home industries. Home industries are many. Eight hours’ factory labour leave the men still fresh, because where they labour the air is pure; change of work is pleasant to them, be it cultivating their bit of the public gardens or in craftsmanship enjoyed in their homes, for it is becoming a habit to be craftsmen here, and to give out no work which can be performed at home; in this way the middle man, that raker-in of the gold of others’ labour, is mostly done away with. Work is not held to be a mark of slavery, but of Freedom. While the labourer is working for his commune, which gives him good wage, he is performing one duty; while he is working in his home or garden he is a home craftsman. And many and desirable are his productions: good, simple furniture, which only costs him the material, and gives him continual pleasure in the making. He who was an idler, or worse, is now an industrious artist in his long hours of recreation.

§ 3

There are pleasant places for refreshment, games, and the like, but, as far as I can see, they are not abused. Time is too fully occupied by duty and absorbing labour of craftsmanship to admit of drunkenness. I see none of that which was so killing a vice when men’s hours of leisure were poisoned by inertia. Now they do not want to drink; they are keen, not listless men. They are too busy to grumble, too happy to listen to agitators, who, if they began again to sow discontent, would be met by corporal punishment, so determined is this new race of workmen to be Free! What is the government under which this new City prospers? It is Home Rule! Each county governs itself! Imperial Parliament has no power to control their liberty. London is the seat of Imperial Parliament, which is represented by one member from each county, selected as a wise and educated man by the Communes which represent their inhabitants; but they cannot hold their office for more than five years. Imperial Parliament is confined to Foreign affairs of State, having in it a representative from each of our Colonies. Imperial Parliament, of which the King is Prime Minister, is composed of learned and efficient citizens who are Privy Councillors, not because they are rich men (for the party chest and the jobbery it caused is a thing of the past), but because they are wise and learned. It meets at stated times which are subject to emergency. The King and his closest Ministers have the power to call it together. London is subject to the same rule as the counties; but London is no longer the centralised authority—she rules herself, but as yet this huge monster is chaotic. Being heavily populated, although the population of it has largely decreased owing to the abolition of slums, and a larger proportion of it than hitherto being under cultivation, Greater London is broken up, into Boroughs, which have powers of local Government, carried on by better educated men than heretofore. Their councils, composed exactly as those of the Counties, are represented by reliable men who are above profiteering. Each important trade is represented by one representative; this rule prevents any trade from working its own interests to the damage of another. Lawyers are used for reference, but are not allowed to initiate. Lessons from the past have taught that the legal mind is a zig-zag puzzle. Imperial Parliament has done away with Free Trade, except with British Colonies, which pay no entrance fee to our coasts.

Each Commune guards itself and people from excessive taxation, and wisely, because heavy taxation is a clog in the wheel of production, for not unnaturally industry is averse to giving a large portion of the results of labour to bolster up the extravagance and want of foresight committed by Party Politicians who, after all, are, far more eager for the success of that miserable little idol, “Party,” than for the higher welfare of the people they are supposed to govern. Party Politics reflect the worst sides of Tory as well as Radical government. It is now accepted that excessive taxation is against the first principles of political economy. Care is taken that taxes shall be borne mostly by those who can best bear them. Trade is more taxed than Professions.

§ 4

Machinery of all kinds is taxed higher than the handicrafts, because it produces more swiftly, if less enduringly. Everything that tends to higher mental development is only nominally taxed. The Arts are not considered luxuries, but necessities; hence, instead of contributing to the purse of the country, they are recognised as contributing to its mental growth, its refinement, as well as strength, and are taxed as lightly as may be.

Unproductive land is taxed, but since much more of it is under cultivation than formerly, and Industrialism is no longer permitted to play the Juggernaut, since Agriculture and Arboriculture have been energetically pursued, waste land is an exception; even the least productive is used in some way or other for national benefit. A small voluntary army is kept in efficiency, but not extravagantly. It is supplied from training corps established in each county. The education of every boy includes military drill; in that way classes mix, under the same discipline. This method induces good-fellowship and promotes education; because the better educated, teach the less fortunate, by example. It is found to be a great factor in promoting peace, and conduces to good manners and courtesy. The boy scouts are in full swing.

Britain can provide almost all necessities of Life. Foreign goods, of whatever kind, are sufficiently taxed, but not so excessively as to prevent entrance. It has been found that unlimited free imports from foreign sources tended to limit local production; hence, labour suffered, and supervened. A habit in England had grown to pay for, rather than labour for, even the necessities of Life. It has been shown in the reconstruction, that if Britain and her Colonies cannot, inclusively, provide all, they can provide the greater part of the countries’ needs. The following out of this principle in practice has arrested the growth of discontent so prevalent a while ago.

§ 5

The great war provided proof that military discipline, which means obligation of the items of a system to work for the success of the whole, did not unfit men for peaceful labour, but rather the contrary; because a habit of self-control in combination strengthens the fibres of individual physical and mental activity. So far advanced is the system of units in combination under the flag, that at any moment mobilisation can be effected, and in a time of necessity practically the whole male portion of the nation can be under arms. Industrialism provides arms which in time of peace need not be overwhelmingly costly to taxpayers, because in a moment of emergency war material can be produced with almost miraculous rapidity. It is not the intention of those who are organising reconstruction to be caught napping again. The nation, as a whole, being more intelligently equipped than it was, sees ahead, and mistrusting politicians, it follows the lead of good sense and keener intellects than those who are under the spell of party politics possess.

But I am moving too quickly, a habit which the mind has when it is keen and full of ideas. Government is on the basis of Home Rule, with some of the restrictions as well as advantages of the old Saxon Heptarchy. Imperial Parliament holds no sway over the Communes, which are governed by a Mayor selected not on account of his wealth, but his wisdom. He is elected for three years, and by the voice of the Commune. His Council is representative of each necessary trade and profession, hence it is truly democratic. Men of the law are used as referees (but are not except as such) allowed to be active members, the legal mind being held to be limited, and narrow, by its training to delay, and dangerous by its sophistry.

Not more than one representative of each trade is permitted. This wise proviso has been accepted to prevent jobbery, for which the old Borough and Town Councils were renowned. Each representative, while his first duty is to look after the trade he represents, has a vote upon all subjects.

In order that the Council of the Commune shall be in a position to look after the interests of the entire community, what used to be called “country gentlemen” form a feature. All honest tradesmen are respected; dishonest ones and profiteers are held in no respect, but are considered aliens and unworthy of any responsible place in the State.

The House of Commons, as it was called, no longer exists. It was considered a clumsy assembly, and one out of touch with realities. It ceased to exist because the people became weary with too much talk, too many promises, and of muddle at every turn; so they ceased to vote for M.P.’s to sit at Westminster. It died quite a natural death, the country at large being scarcely aware of the moment of its demise which no one regrets. It has come to be borne into the minds of the honest democrat that too many laws framed by lawyers were every year passed, not one of which was sincerely intended to be applied, but were passed as sops to public opinion upon some more or less burning question of the moment. Imperial Parliament, which we have stated is under the presidency of the King, is composed of Privy Councillors selected from the County Communes as the wisest men of the moment, not necessarily rich, but trustworthy, and such as have proved to have no personal axes to grind. This implies that the King’s Councillors are men of learning and character, and are not likely to commit banalities in their dealing with foreign affairs, for which reason it is found desirable that they are travelled and not insular men, accustomed to meet foreigners and to speak their language, as well as to be conversant with their habits of thought and institutions.

§ 6

The Aristocracy of Learning takes a high place in the new democracy. We have seen that a party chest no longer exists, so men poor in purse, but rich in wisdom and understanding, if not called “Peers of the Realm,” have become so by their outstanding merits. Hereditary titles are the exception. The ancient titles and families go on, but it is an exception when they are added to. It is agreed that opportunists and place hunters were numerically increased by the facilities provided for the purchase of honours. In the new State no honours can be purchased, but they can be won! Money may make a prominent man, but not a great one. By making the King President of the Privy Councillors it was thought that the grave responsibility carried with it would strengthen the monarchy, and, holding on to the fine tradition of kingship, the country would benefit more than under repeated elections consequent upon a shifting Republic, meaning that stability is more likely to be reached under a Constitutional Monarch than under a vacillating Republic.

To sum up this portion of my dream. Centralisation is a thing of the past! Each county governs itself; and this plan has been thought to be wise because every county has its own idiosyncracy, its own needs, and its own powers of production, some Industrial, some Agricultural, but each one must, to be well governed, be represented by the most varied and highly trained minds. So each intellectual class is called upon to administer, which system prevents the commercial element from overriding the intellectual; hence a better balance is maintained than under the old system, which pushed into the background some of the best minds in the community, who, not being commercial, but taking another view, undoubtedly a higher one, were regarded as fanatics, their ideas being received with a shrug of the shoulders as a gesture of contemptuous pity.

But a wider education, hence better manners, has altered all this, and members of a class that held in contempt any intelligence applied other than to commerce have learnt that there are many sides to a nation’s greatness, none of which can be neglected without detriment to the whole. Besides the Mayor each Commune has its Minister of Public Health, who must be a capable authority not an amateur but an expert, who has under him a staff of officers ever on the watch for the good of the people. Next to him is the Minister for Agriculture. In industrial centres a Minister for Industrialism is at work, whose duty it is to see that all factories are sanitary, the workmen neither overcrowded or overworked. There is a protecting Minister of all rivers and lakes, into which no refuse from factories is permitted to drain. This law, if not obeyed, the factory can be immediately shut up. All coal smoke is forbidden, whether from factories or private houses. This law at first was resented, and until fines for its non-observance were heavy, was not obeyed. As soon as offenders found there was no way to avoid smoke, they applied science and now the evil never occurs. Electricity is used as energising power as well as for heat giving, all engines are driven by it, hence in the whole of England the scandal of a smoking chimney of any sort or kind is never presented.

“We are wiser now,” said a scientific man. “We know it to be not only folly to waste coal, but wrong to smirch the sky, hide the sun, and poison trees and vegetables with evil fumes—it can be prevented.” As I hovered over a part of England, not long ago blasted and blackened, where not a tree would grow, where the sun rarely penetrated through the evil clouds of unconsumed fuel, I wondered how it was we permitted that miserable state of things to go on. Now the country smiles under the sun; what was a desert is a garden, and what were pale, sad people are now sunburnt, merry and strong folk, as the British race was before the artificial tyrant Industrialism began to bleach them. The climate of the British Isles is not genial, we all know that, but the difference since coal smoke has ceased to darken the sun is so great as to provide another climate. Fogs there are and always will be in our Island, but smoke fogs are no more, hence an outdoor life is led which was impossible under the circumstances of the past. If the Communes had only effected that change they would have benefited the human race quite incalculably. Each Commune has its Minister of Education assisted by a staff of competent superintendents, who visit local schools and issue reports that are laid before a Council elected from chosen men of character and distinction. Each Commune has a Minister of Arts and Crafts, for music and the drama, including dancing, which I notice has become an art and an essential one, in the training of the young in good manners and graceful demeanour.

§ 7

The Mayor or Lord Mayor is elected from any class; preferably he is not a tradesman, but a man of wide learning and experience, hence he is not prejudiced in favour of any trade or profession. Lawyers are not eligible as Mayors, nor is it thought desirable that so dignified an office should be held by auctioneers or house agents. Indeed, the further the chief officer of the Commune is removed from temptations of class jobbery, the better is the service he renders to the community at large.

Prices of bread, meat and milk, the three absolute necessities, are regulated by the commune. They vary as little as possible, and being essential to the carrying on of life, fortunes are not made from their sale. The law at the root of this wise decision is the result of the profiteering of tradesmen during the late war, which became so serious a scandal that the people suffering from it endeavoured to make it impossible to be repeated.

The Council does its work in the capital of each county, but the smaller cities, townships and villages are permitted to act independently, as their several interests demand, so long as in the main features of policy they subscribe to the intention the Chief Council has in view. Once a year the heads of each country department meet in the capital and make their reports. The Conference lasts for one week, and is the occasion of a general holiday. The Conference is open to all comers, who, while it sits, have an opportunity of expressing their opinion upon questions of public interest. This system seems to be working well; the discontented can air their discontent and the contented their approval. It works well, because all discussion is open, none taking place under closed doors; that fact alone is conducive to confidence, by implying it and receiving it. Where there is honesty there is no need for secrecy. “Do nothing with closed doors,” said M. Aurelius. The whole system of government is in the best sense Socialistic, as opposed to Individualistic the mark of the Radical. “Every man out for himself” is a destructive policy. While this form of Socialism makes for order, it does not discourage individual enterprise. Opinions may be stated under a reasonable check by minds skilled in government, which, being open to new ideas as long as they are proved to promote public good, learn by listening.

§ 8

If occasion demands it, each Commune throughout the country is empowered to send its chief and such officers as he may select to meet together in conference in any one of the chief cities of Britain. This extreme measure would probably only apply in times of a national crisis, such as possible war or unruly conduct as strikes or other disorder imperilling the well-being of a peaceful and industrious majority. Everything that works for unanimity, but without weakness, seems to be becoming natural. The artificial conditions, most disastrous in their effect, of tyrannical Trades Unions, have given way under a return to Guilds. The painters, craftsmen of all descriptions, and the best class of tradesmen are under certain elastic laws appertaining to their profession or business. There are no such mischievous people as Strike Leaders; long ago they proved failures, and the workmen became aware of the damage they had done to their reputation and threw them over. They did so directly it was brought home to them that their leaders were really tyrants. The Guilds encourage good work, as the Trades Union leaders of the past encouraged bad; indeed, they have it in their powers to impose a fine on bad work, if continued to be issued after warning has been given or a fine paid. The guilds can expel an idle delinquent as an unworthy citizen. As far as one could learn, that punishment, so far, has had to be carried into effect very rarely, because workmen and craftsmen of all kinds now recognise the wisdom of being honest in their own interest, i.e., for good pay to give good work.

§ 9

Being better educated or, shall we say, more widely informed and more wisely led, craftsmen in every branch of industry are better citizens, regarding their work as a contribution valuable to the Commune and to the country at large. By degrees it is becoming a habit of mind to regard all labour as noble, if executed honourably. Every man, whatever his calling may be, takes a pride in doing it well. Indeed, as my spirit wandered from place to place watching and listening, I gathered that idleness and slackness, encouraged as they were by the Trades Unions, are now despised. For idle workmen of any sort or in any sphere of life, in trade, profession or craftsmanship, is not only a useless but mischievous item in the social system. The pride engendered by honest labour is the cause of healthy competition. Emulation is a quality which has grown to be a habit; emulation, not envy or jealousy, which are mean. When men grow wise they discard smallness. They do not begin every sentence with the first person singular, but with the second or first person plural; therefore, being inside and a part of the community, the co-worker is an essential link in the chain which binds an entire system and renders it strong.

This is the reverse of Radical tenet, which proclaiming the creed of the Jew Fagin, in his discourse with Noah Claypole, “Look after number one, my dear”—an admirable doctrine for thieves, but the reverse for the welfare of an honest community.

§ 10

Dreams are queer things, very illogical, and not restrained by formulæ. In dreams, Q.E.D. does not come in at all. The charm of a dream is that it is suggestive, not conclusive. It is like a kind of Inspiration: gaps have to be filled up; sequences are indefinite. All manner of odd situations jostle one another. An instant of time is as a thousand years. The ancients, in their wisdom, in their contemplative abstraction, may not have been far off the mark when they regarded dreams as omens, having the nucleus of some abstract truth. Swifter than any train or aeroplane can travel, as swiftly as a ray of light reaches the earth from the sun, the spirit, free of the body, moves in a dream. It can inhabit Mars awhile and be back in Piccadilly in less than a fraction of a minute divided into sixty pulsations. The spirit has to take no ticket to travel, to pay no price for a long journey. It has no aims, it only obeys impulse. There being no method in a dream removes it from actualities, which it only pictures. These being the chief characteristics of Dreamland, in the relation of a dream, which is automatic impression, a certain irregularity in the position of subjects to which it relates is not only permissible, but necessary to the picture it may be destined to paint. Having so far preserved a kind of sequence of ideas suggested as the teller of my dream, I obey the volatile journeys into all manner of crannies. No brain is so closely locked up that it can prevent the great inquisitor from entering. While they are free, dreams are tyrants over reason, to which they bear no relationship. The interpretation of a dream must be left to the listener of the tale it tells who can form whatever conclusion he pleases. The rationalist will probably only see folly; the mathematician, chaos; the unimaginative, nonsense. Probably the dreamer dreams in close relationship to his habit of mind. He may be an optimist at one moment a pessimist at another. He accentuates his likes and dislikes, hence through the relation of his dream he exposes himself, and gives himself over to every kind of criticism. To some he appears the reverse of veracious, to others a lunatic, but to a few he may appear in the nature of a prophet.

Having apologised to my readers, I propose now to allow my dream to lead me, as it most certainly will do, how and where it likes, to obey its impulses even though they are disconnected. To do otherwise would tend to muddle up dreams with realities, or such realities we see in waking hours. And now, feeling free, I can continue with the story in all its oddities of arrangement, because this is not a philosophical treatise, although it might be construed into one. It is not my business as a dream teller to reason, but to leave that to my readers.

In the pursuit of largeness of Vision, breadth of Faith, development of Charity, and strengthening of Hope, the new world formed in my dream recognises all religions, or rather their creeds, with their differences of approach towards a great mystery, and places them upon an equality of ministration. Church and State are separated. The Hebrew, Roman, Anglican, and Presbyterian Churches are, if not numerically equal, equally respected. The grand mystical tenets of the Hebrews, the loneliness of the Divine Spirit worshipped, its nearness as well as its aloofness from what it has created, its complete unchangeable supremacy associated with its antiquity, are respected and admired as sincere emotions of one prominent part in the mind of man. The grave simplicity of the Hebrew ritual is accepted as an expression of mysterious faith. Having travelled so far into man’s mind, it was arrested before any explanation of mysteries arrived to drag the incomprehensible into the region of logic. No longer despised, the Hebrew faith is as the Father of many children. Differing from it in detail, the Moslem faith is the elder child of pure Deism. Mahommed is to his followers what Moses is to the Hebrews and Jesus Christ to Christians. We, who have to govern so large a portion of the Moslem world, belong to a nation which of necessity must come into constant contact with a Faith which (having its defects, according to Western thought) is to the people who follow it the fountain of Wisdom and the well of Truth; a Faith, indeed, from which the most ardent Christian can learn many lessons of sobriety and reverence. God the all powerful is the unapproachable Spirit; only by prayer, praise and entire trust are we brought spiritually near to Him.

The Roman Catholic community of thought is, in a sense, nearer to Western life and ideals than the Hebrew or Moslem, but the element from which it sprang is the same. The One Supreme God, the Father of His creation, and the mystical spirit which contains all. Differences are only matters of words, they are additions which in no wise touch the root of the matter. God Almighty is still the root from which springs the Tree of Life and all its branches. Deus and Zeus are the same word. All the pagan gods emanate from the Divine centre, be it Olympus, Rome, or Jerusalem. The Roman Church saw fit to construe pagan mythology in a new vernacular. Its saints and holy men became the lesser gods, but no less or more were they, or are they, absolutely dependent upon the all powerful Deity, the final author of all, the dispenser of all, the father of all.

The Anglican Church is the child of the Roman and grandchild of pagan mythology, the great grandchild of the Hebrew Faith. The metal of which the chain is formed is gold forged by the Divine Spirit. Probably the break between the Anglican and Roman Church was a political, more than a religious, evolution. The English never liked submission to Rome. England has always been a friend to liberty, an enemy to tyranny, and long may it so remain, be it either religious or political.

Nonconformity, especially that branch we call “Presbyterian,” came from an attempt to simplify ritual, as far as possible, to reconstruct allegiance with primitive worshippers. The root of belief the reformers did not touch. The Deity remained pre-eminent. The new world, that of my dream, while admitting differences, recognises essential similarities. Hence all denominations are held equal—equal as regards the respect due to them, and equal in the intention which dominates differences of detail. Was it not Augustine who said: “There is no religion which has not something of the Spirit of God in it”? Sectarianism takes no part in the new world. I saw in my dream that the cathedrals and churches of England are open to all religions. To the Hebrews the altars there are as the ark presided over by the shining cherubims. To the Moslem as a symbol of the nearness of the Divine Being; to the Catholics as the symbol of self sacrifice; to the Presbyters as symbols of Divine Hope and assistance. In them the ancient Psalms of David are sung by Hebrews, whose incense carries prayers of the faithful up to their roofs and far above them again. Jesus Christ worshipped in the Synagogue—why should not the Hebrews worship in His Temples? I saw in my dream that the Roman Mass, in all its splendour of detail, its imagery, its exuberance of symbolism, is celebrated in the cathedrals and churches once reserved as Temples of Protestantism. The simpler ritual of the Anglicans is also reverently administered, and the almost entirely bald ritual of Presbyters finds its place within the historic walls of the churches of Liberal England.

The breadth of sympathy thus shown to all religious denominations my spirit saw had nothing but a good result. It is a form of departure which is catching; it engenders peace; it breaks up animosity; it extends mental outlook from small to great things. Without temporising differences it permits them, it places them as small matters by the side of big essentials, hence the charity to which a broad view of religion has given rise is spreading and seems to enter into the spirit of a new and larger life. Hence religion appears to me to coalesce with a spirit of fraternity which, obviously, is growing, not sentimentally, but as a social and indispensable fact.

The cathedrals and churches are adorned with pictures, not necessarily sectarian or of what are called religious subjects. Prominent features of the History of the World are presented, but I do not remember to have seen any pictures in which war is figured. The new world abominates war, and while it is in a measure prepared for such a foolish experiment as war is, it is not considered worthy of handing down by the Arts of Peace, which are and must be constructive.

It is recognised that while mankind is selfish, grasping and cruel, wars will occur. The ideal is, of course, general disarmament, but that is unlikely. Still, it is thought that the more widely and constantly the Arts of Peace are sown, and the greater interest taken in life, not as a dissipation, but as concentration of energy used on things that matter, the less likely war will intervene and shatter, for perhaps a century, all peaceful intellectual progress.

War may bring out fine qualities, but experience has told us, in a minority. War is brutalising to those engaged in it, even to the atmosphere near and far from its centre. War, when the lust for it has entered, degrades a people. Bloodshedding is a form of madness. When the spark is kindled, a flame soon grows, which is fanned by lunatics, and one fears, sometimes by adroit commercial schemers who see in devastation a chance to enrich their pockets. When once greed takes the place of contented energy, avarice, dishonesty and self-seeking enter and shatter national progress. Indeed, there is no end to the mischief war may encourage. The seeds of avarice are sown early in life. Victims to it become unconscious of the rapidity of its growth, its poison spreads indefinitely, and what is in reality vice is excused by the plausible word “business,” which, if laid bare to its root, means tripping up the neighbour, and, if possible, without being found out. It is because tradesmen behaved so ill during the period of their country’s danger that, the eyes of the people are now opened, they are watched, hedged in by honest men, that they shall have no opportunity in the new Commune to rob their fellow citizens of food again. In my dream, by listening and observing, I saw that all classes were bent upon the same conclusion, to attain much for all! This has led to a great reform in the education of the young in their tender and malleable years.

§ 11

The public schools are not only in name public; they are open to all without distinction of class. The peer’s son will sit on a school bench beside the peasant’s. The only difference being that the richer pay higher fees. All classes pay something for education; what is got for nothing no one values, but the education given is identical. Upon the whole it is desirable that all students live in their homes. Day scholars are encouraged more than boarders; and, as we shall presently see that home life is in every respect more refined than it was. Under the old system, “squalor” was more the rule than the exception; it is so no longer. Home life, if properly conducted, is dignified. Every home should be a miniature State, and it is becoming so here. Wealth is not necessary to make a worthy home; it is the atmosphere of industry, amity, and union there which constitute the best school in which to rear a good citizen. The enormous and unprecedented rise in wages, largely caused by the rapacity of tradesmen as well as Government waste of public money, has indirectly promoted industry (not industrialism). Even the better off folk do not send out work which can be done at home. Tradesmen have defeated themselves in a large measure. The best provided citizens are craftsmen, who can use their hands for any manual work, rough or fine. If a chair is broken, no “gentleman” will send it to be mended, he mends it himself.

Experience is fast teaching everybody that a day is long, not short, and that unlimited specialisation is neither good for soul or body, rich or poor. The close student of art or letters needs recreation. He finds it in the new order in manual work, in craftsmanship which detaches the mind from pursuits necessarily sedentary, and which, if continued for too many hours a day, are detrimental to health and vigour. In my wanderings I noticed that one of the chief changes in or differences from the old life is that every man, woman and child is at work, rich or poor. Hence games and sports of all kinds, while they take a rational place in life, are not now its main object. In the public schools every student has to learn some handicraft. I see the peasant boy sawing away at one end of a log, while the peer’s son is sawing at the other. It is recognised, of course, that equality of power is out of the question. Few are born to rule, but all can serve their country. Endowments are different in quantity and quality. There are fingers so made as to be bad instruments for performing delicate tasks, as there are minds incapable to lead men. A skilled craftsman—skilled, I mean, in the delicate handling of material—is one thing, the doing rougher work (quite as useful) is another, and more easily obtained. Young fellows soon find out what, and what not, they can accomplish. The outcome of this is energy extended, and if the professional tradesman or craftsman find himself boycotted, he has only to thank his greed and his overweening selfishness during hard times for now being hit with the same weapon he employed on his fellows. Not overmuch attention is given to BOOKS. The first principle initiated is “good citizenship,” honest dealing, and the carrying out of the ancient saying, “Whatsoever thou findest to do, do with thy might.”

§ 12

Business on shifty lines or vicious principles may bring a temporary fortune, but honest dealing will make good and useful members of society, who will last out the former, who, in all higher walks of life, are not seldom mental bankrupts. Music, especially concerted and vocal, forms a part of general education, and in like manner, drawing, but music takes a prior place. Like physical drill, music is useful in training concerted action. Obedience to a leader is a necessary discipline. Some silly people used to think the study of music enervating; the wise know it is otherwise.

But more on that subject when my spirit has travelled further and become more intimate with the great changes that are taking place in this young and wonderful new world. So far as I have travelled, watched and listened, I am certain that concerted action, mental and physical, is good—even necessary! Boys teach one another. The peer’s son can teach the peasant, the peasant the peer’s son. Mixing together of the classes in work as well as play makes for unity, cohesion and strength.

§ 13

A bird’s-eye view of the new world has been indicated. By this time who read what my dream relates so far will know that the principles which guide the new worlds are socialistic, that the establishment of Fraternity is the first object. Inequality is recognised. Equality is impossible. Liberty is subject to obedience. Tyranny under licence is certain, under good fellowship is impossible. The most dangerous of all tyranny is that which is disguised under the cloak of Freedom. Before any class can rule efficiently it must have learnt to obey. Bad leaders are worse than none at all.

My dream had hardly taken any shape when the eyes of my spirit were first awakened. There is a moment between sleep and waking that is neither one thing or another. At its start, my dream revealed an indefinite sketch. I must travel back and hover again over the new city, to see it in detail and work my silent invisible way among the new things being slowly revealed as my spiritual sense acquires power. I am in the new city again, and am full of keen watching.

§ 14

There is one railway station, but, unlike those the other world made, it is clean, orderly, dustless and smokeless. Electric power drives the trains, which in some subtle way are provided with noiseless wheels, which run as smoothly as on ice. When, in my dream, I first saw the railway station, I was sorry. My spirit had been hoping that the world would be content to travel slower. But when it gave no evidence of squalor in its neighbourhood or smoke in its vicinity, my spirit was quieted. Nevertheless, it has not been drawn thither again. When the new city was laid out, a boundary was fixed, and no extension is permitted within prescribed limits. One of the great curses of the old world was the inordinate size of cities. Impossible to govern well, certain to create squalor and be refuges for the idle and dissolute, they were intractable. First comes the open country, freely cultivated, then the city, then a highly cultivated garden of fruit and flowers on the gradual slope of the Acropolis, upon which stand the factories, simply and grandly designed, with no pretence of architecture. What look like broad chimney stacks, reminding one of the towers of some Italian city, are storehouses as well as shafts in which fans are constantly working to take pure air into the factories and workshops. No one but caretakers and watchmen lives on the Acropolis.

As we have seen, the City is surrounded by a wall. There are four entrance gates, which are closed at night, when no work is permitted by the Commune.

More and more interested my spirit became as it made its unseen journey. The houses of the city are erected upon the flat land, and entirely surround the Acropolis. They begin in something over a mile from the Acropolis walls. The circumference of the gardens is two to three miles. They provide a considerable portion of the fruit and vegetables for the city inhabitants. They are tended not only by special gardeners, but any capable citizen is welcome to work in them in spare time under certain restrictions. A beautiful walk indeed it is from the city up to the Acropolis, shaded in summer by luxury of growth (for there is sun now that the smoke fiend has been slain). It was midday, a bell rings, reminding me by its majestic tone of the “Vacca,” in Florence. No ear-distracting hooters are permitted or hellish shrieks of discordant whistles, which in the old factory towns were so nerve-racking. As the sound of the bell filled the air, out of the city came its crowd of workers to make their dinners in their homes. They are a healthy, happy-looking crew. Life shines her best light upon them. They are cared for; they are good citizens, content, honest, and industrious. If the climate is not the best, what is good of it is no longer spoiled. What has become of “strike leaders” and suchlike misleading and “out for themselves folk,” I did not hear for certain. But I did hear one man say to another, “We are well rid of them,” and upon another occasion, pointing to a pond, a man said, “That’s where we ducked him, he wasn’t straight.”

How solid and compact the city appeared, how sensible its houses, how clean and orderly. What a change from the old dreary rows of boxes called houses, slate roofed, almost windowless, more fit for pigs than human habitations. These being novel in construction, and with no pretence to be “architecture,” are quite interesting. It appears that the original soil has been dug out, probably a foot and a half of it, a solid mass of concrete run in, framed by four courses of damp-proof bricks; thus is the floor made and a foundation for walls established. Piers of concrete are erected, from which the roof springs. The ends of timbers are imbedded in these piers, which are thereby strengthened. The intervals between the timbers are filled with strong laths, well bedded in tenacious plaster. Upright posts are placed between the horizontal timbers, which prevent the longer ones from sagging and firmly bind together the intervals of lath and plaster. The roofs are timber covered with red tiles. The colour effect is very pleasing. The ground plan is oblong, formed of two cubes. To avoid monotony, the houses are grouped in four, six and two. Each house measures 40 feet in length and 20 feet in depth. What would be called the ground floor is open to the height of 7 feet. Here are kept household implements. The space serves also as a play-place for children, and in winter can be used by members of the household for skittles, bowls, and other pleasant games. Rising from the centre of the ground plan is a shaft showing at regular intervals pigeon-holes. These shafts contain heat generated in the neighbourhood by electricity. Instead of wasting energy upon the discovery of poison gas to slaughter fellow-beings, science has found means to collect and generate electricity as an agent not only for movement but for heating, and without the expenditure of coal. At intervals stand towers, which have a fine effect among the houses. Within them are the electrical generators.

The houses are composed of two floors, one forming the upward boundary of the ground floor, the other eight feet above that, forming the ceiling of the first floor and the floor of the upper chambers, which are immediately under the roof. To save space, the stairway to the upper chambers is in the form of a ladder with hand rails. The largest room is that occupied by the women, where are their looms and all other implements belonging to their home trades, which are several. The kitchen is a walled off space within the foundation level; from it, the upper floor is reached by a ladder and handrail. The entrance to the first floor is by a stairway parallel with the elevation.

§ 15

The furniture is of simple construction, home made, for, as we have seen, the householders take pleasure in craftsmanship. In the long winter evenings neighbours drop in, giving a helping hand to one another. It has been found to be far cheaper to make at home than to buy of profiteering tradesmen; it only means a little more industry, a good deal less drink, and a pleasure in making and creating innate in all creation, but which so-called civilisation has done much to crush. Since the prices demanded by labour became impossible, profiteering labour has been to a large extent boycotted. Now that economy has to be practised, working men as well as women have grown to be industrious. Each house is a little centre of industry, and great pleasure is evidently derived from following an instinct definite and surviving, that of creating and making all household implements at home. Since shops are rarer than they were, the home is a creating centre, a very home of industry. Hence the look of the people is content, it has something of proudness in its freedom of aspect. They have come into their rights by Industry, by Fraternity. Agitators who would renew disturbances are treated with contempt. The happiness created by productive labour has concentrated the people, given them health and manly independence, besides adding to their incomes. The unmanly vice of drunkenness is rare. When it is in evidence it is punished as an insult to the dignity of the citizen and a crime against the Commune. From its earliest years the child is taught that to be a good citizen is a virtue, and to live by labour a necessity. To give good work for good wage is held to be a virtue which, if proceeded with through life, makes a good man and woman. I was so interested in what my dream was revealing that I made more intimate observation. Upon the partition walls of the houses I noticed pleasant and quaint designs, childlike and barbaric, if you like, but gay, and evidently done by someone who wanted to express a pleasure in making nice shapes and bright colour.

§ 16

The sound of the loom working was music accompanied by singing as the women and maidens plied their home trades. Evidently the garments of these are home made—they look too “good” to be bought at high prices of profiteers. Kaleidoscopic coloured quilts such as I remember in my childhood made the beds look warm and snug, and curtains of bright tints gave a generous feeling of warmth where doors are not needed. By the way, heating is provided by the Commune at a nominal rate, not subject to variation. As far as I could see, gas is of the past; hence houses are cleaner than heretofore, and the air is not vitiated by the fumes of that abominable product. Factory labour is limited to seven hours. In summer it starts at 5 a.m., in winter at 7 a.m. In summer it is all over by 12 p.m., in winter by 2 p.m. The remainder of the days are free, to be enjoyed in garden cultivation or home labour, other pleasures, and games.

Now that workers are really leading lives in which they take a personal interest, and are regarded and regard themselves, not as slaves, but as kings over their own lives, gambling is rare, and distasteful sports such as dog fighting and prize fights and other depressing so-called sports are not in vogue. In their leisure the people are Artists, taking a pride in their homes and competing whose shall be the most attractive. As yet I had not travelled about sufficiently to know whence came the wood so much used in the new Commune, but presently I shall know. Extensive use of lime is accounted for—it is a local product. To avoid unnecessary expense and to encourage local labour, the neighbourhood provides material, for as little foreign material as possible is imported. Water is plentiful, a good river meanders in the valley not far from the city, there are pleasant meadows of fine grass that feeds a goodly number of cattle, whose milk is pure. Adulteration of milk is treated as a crime! Bad people who for profiteering purposes adulterate milk or bread are put to prison at once on conviction as criminals.

§ 17

Pollution of rivers, lakes or ponds is absolutely forbidden; hence there is a constant supply of fresh water fish, which forms an important feature in the food of the city. Rivers, lakes and ponds are stocked with fish and fry every year, and close times are respected. The sale of fresh water fish is the outcome of a recognised trade which is conducted by experts, and woe betide the poacher, or still more the factory owner, who steals or poisons them. Preserves for the private pleasure of fishermen or other sportsmen are not forbidden, but are out of fashion: Fraternity has overcome Egoism to a large extent. Inasmuch as honesty is regarded as a virtue and dishonesty a vice (not the case under Trades Unions) it has spread from large to smaller issues. A factory owner who polluted a river, besides being punished by the Commune for so doing, would be regarded a CAD by the public at large, and would find rough handling unpleasant. For a moment my attention is again called to education, for my spirit has been listening. Truthfulness, absolute and pure, is inculcated from tenderest years at home and at school. It is involved in the duty to the neighbour as to God, it is the foundation of Wisdom, Justice and Fraternity. Faith in the good faith of the neighbour has become a habit. To override, cheat or deceive a neighbour is an unmanly act. The Communes seek to make men, men who are responsible, not only to their own dignity, but to the Commune, and this is the first clause of the creed in which there are but two commands—Duty to the neighbour and to God, the one includes the other. Fringes to this simple creed there are no doubt, but those two clauses are essentials on which all addenda hangs. Besides teaching a craft, scholars are initiated into the works of the great English poets. Young people are taught to recite passages from Shakespeare, Milton and other great poets, and they are encouraged to act the part they recite, because, as we shall presently see, the Drama takes a prominent place in the mental development of the new Communes.

§ 18

Caligraphy is taught as an Art. It is pleasant to look over the pages of children’s writing, so different to the scrawls which were called writing a while ago. Drawing comes under the section of caligraphy, to which it belongs. Making nicely shaped lettering means drawing letters. A child who has learned to draw letters well will soon learn to copy other forms.

Dancing (not romping) but the good old English dancing, so graceful and dignified, is part of the curriculum of education. It engenders good manners, elegant deportment, and self-control, besides being an extremely beneficial exercise. There is no folk music more lovely than the old English, and it is being revived, that one knows, for familiar old songs are heard in the fields now almost as constantly as Italian folk songs are heard in Italy. The people have lost the stiff, morose manner they had; while they work they sing. Their health is better now that they are more in the open air, and being engaged in open air pursuits their spirits have gained in elasticity and freedom of expression. The invention of new tunes is encouraged; hence there is quite a little school of modern and simple folk song growing which is pleasant, uncomplicated, and melodious.

Before learning foreign tongues our own is better taught now. Dialects are not discouraged; indeed, the reverse, the dialect of a county is encouraged as an indisputable characteristic of the people. There is only one dialect that is hateful (Cockney), and every effort is being made to eradicate that. Our own splendid language is great in poetry, from Chaucer to Wordsworth; to teach it through the works of the poets is to get it at its best. In Italy, where the craftsman class is far more cultivated than it has been in England, her great poets are common property; one hears Dante quoted constantly, as well as Tasso and minor poets. Under the new order in England there is reason to hope that ignorance of our great poets will give place to a general acquaintance with them. An individual who can speak and write his own language decently is not ill educated. If he has acquired facility in the language of his birthplace, diligence will soon give him some in foreign tongues. Those young people who show an aptitude for languages have the opportunity of qualifying in them, but the general run of labour and craftsmanship has no need of them. To fill the mind and memory with too many subjects at once is to dilute all. A sound knowledge of craftsmanship is what is wanted, and that is evidently being supplied by practice, a thousand times better system than by theory. Constant occupation, not excitements, create content. Excitements produce reaction. Occupation, varied in kind, steadies the character. It is with a view to that that the Communes do not overwork their workers. Energy is left to them after their hours of labour for which they are well paid, and to use it either physically or mentally, out of doors working in gardens or fields, or in their homes upon all such things which tend to make the home a happy and profitable little city in itself. A grumbler is voted a nuisance, an agitator an obstruction. Loiterers and loafers who would live on the earnings of honest citizens are held to be mean unproductive weeds for which the Communes have no use. For agitators there is no room now, the democratic howler at street corners or on common land finds no listeners; he is treated as a windbag since it has become known to the community at large that in the past he was a well-paid mischief-maker, who did far more harm than good to a cause which he pretended to advance.

§ 19

Dreams are vagarious, they are not restricted to times or seasons. Night appears during midday hours. The paradox is lively, often very humorous, but by no means ill fitting. From summer to winter is like the winking of an eyelid. In my dream the shades of a winter evening arrived. Factory working hours were over. My spirit was transported within the walls of one of the houses recently described. Well placed electric lights made the home as bright as day. A pleasant warm air gently circulated in the rooms from the pigeon-holes in the heating shafts. What we used to call England’s sun, the open fire, with all the smoke and dirt it made, its extravagance of fuel and insufficient warmth it provided, is no more. Since the abolition of the use of coal as a speed and warmth producer, sunshine in England is more than doubled and there is much less rain and mist; so, even in winter, the air is warmer, while it is clear and clear of particles which robbed us of light and rendered a clean house almost an impossibility in the barbarous past.

A family is busy. The head of it, a fine type of workman, clean and appropriately dressed as a workman should be, is occupied in making a table. His wife is busy at her loom. Two daughters are sewing together strips of strong woollen stuff which are to form by no means inelegant frocks. The stuff is dyed a pleasant blue. They are not using sewing machines, but ply the needle with patient hands; a strong thread well waxed is inevitable. Hand sewing being more durable than machine is, in the long run, more economical. Two sons are helping their father. In the corner of this bright sitting and working room, a table is laid for supper, covered by a spotless cloth. Pewter plates and jugs glisten with their bright polish. Large loaves of wholemeal look fat and desirable, while a big cheese fresh from a dairy is appetising and tempting. Hard by is a barrel of ale, real ale, made of hops and malt, wholesome and invigorating. No shams enter into its making; no poisonous chemicals destroy its purity. One or two neighbours have dropped in, and pleasant talk is in progress. When supper is finished work is suspended, some simple glees echo pleasantly from the walls, or a story is read aloud and commented upon. How thrifty it all looks, how homeful, how quietly gay is the atmosphere of this modestly provided household; what a contrast it presents to the old squalor, absence of order and often low dissipation of past times, and not so far off, which were called civilised and free, but were indeed barbarous and tyrannical.

The streets are quiet, most of the inhabitants are occupied in a manner similar in motive, if different in the matter of it. At an early hour, before midnight, the big bells of the Commune ring, when it is expected that the people will go to rest. Soon after the whole city is asleep, resting after a day of rich labour.

§ 20

It is midsummer again; my dream is again vagarious! I find my way to the Market Place. In its centre stands the Town Hall. Now that the smoke fiend is slain and outdoor life in cities is pleasant, markets, which fell into disuse owing to grasping profiteering tradesmen, who put what price they pleased upon indifferent goods, robbed honest folk right and left, did not like the restraint which markets put upon unreasonable profits. A weekly market is a wholesome and sensible institution. It fosters an influx of fresh goods, it tends to economy and providence, in that the people reckon up their weekly requirements and purchase them at a price which, if not absolutely uniform, varies little compared with the chaotic licence permitted in the less well regulated communities of the past. On every Monday the market opens early and continues through hours of daylight. Pretty well any useful article is found there, from reels of cotton, pots and pans, good woven stuffs, boots and shoes, groceries also, which under old conditions were the means of elaborate swindling, are to be bought in all their varieties. Market days bring into contact town and country folk; their existence is one of the chief causes of the departure of that expensive nuisance, the middleman. Markets discourage fluctuation in prices and encourage the sale of fresh, in place of stale goods. The weekly held market lessens weekly expenditure by something like half of what it was when tradesmen charged what they pleased for even stale goods. The middleman was a rascal, he was the “Muck Rake” in the Pilgrim’s Progress, he grabbed money earned by his betters, he was a kind of cuckoo laying eggs in other birds’ nests, he was sharp, not clever, and as unprincipled as constructively idle. As a social pest the middleman is now being dealt with by wiser economic measures. Probably the lessening in the numbers of small tradesmen has tended to speed agriculture. Unable to build up small fortunes by dishonest trade proceedings, the class which was pre-eminent in that respect is tending toward land labour, which, under the new conditions of life, is numerically larger than it was.

On market day all the classes meet. Owing to the high price demanded by domestic servants in the past, ladies of high rank are their own housekeepers. The most wealthy keep few servants; hence the young ladies of noble families are converted into economic housewives, and setting themselves to their task, do it well; being better educated now, whatever they set out to do they do with forethought. Thus they make good wives, daughters, and mothers, and are spending far less time than formerly upon idle amusements.

The foregoing is a sketch of what the weekly open market is doing for the community by bracing it up and giving it backbone, eradicating spineless self-indulgence and a mischievous system of profiteering.

The Town Hall is the most ample building outside the factories. It is the centre of INTELLECTUAL as well as COMMERCIAL life. While it belongs to the people it represents also a kind of University. No pedantic teaching goes on there, but lectures upon all branches of knowledge are delivered by chosen experts, to which the public are admitted free. These lectures are delivered voluntarily by good and cultivated citizens, whose pride it is to give their knowledge without fees. Chiefly these are delivered in the winter months, because most of the people’s spare time in summer is spent, not within, but outdoors. Socrates found wisdom in the Agora, and wise men of to-day search in the market for the same. Hence there is constant touch of intellectual as well as commercial interests between class and class. This is leading to a surprising unity of conception and practice. Within the walls of the Town Hall is the large concert room, where the best music is given, and as far as possible by local talent, which does not mean only of the cities, but coming out of the population of the county inclusive. This concentration gives a chance to local success which importation in the days of centralisation never achieved, when native talent was overlooked.

§ 21

There is also a picture gallery conducted under an analogous scheme. Italy has owed (in the past) everything great in its Art to Decentralisation. The variety, hence the interest, of the great schools of painting in Italy is due to the independent expression of emotion as the property of the race. In Italy, the art of Venice, of Rome, Florence, and Siena, to mention only many of the great schools of painting that flourished there, identified itself with the idiosyncracy of each community. Why should not the same apply to England? The man of Devonshire is as different in mental construction to the man of Yorkshire as the Florentine is from the Roman. Why then should not each express himself in the vernacular of his locality? Time will show that there is far more artistic talent in England than has been supposed. Give it a chance of having its say, and an admirable result is certain. Let us become something higher in the intellectual scale than a race of shopkeepers!

Town Councils, being here composed of a much more cultivated class than before, Commerce and Art are no longer antagonistic. On the contrary, they appear to be becoming indispensable to each other. The tradesmen no longer having matters all their own way, and being checked by the stronger minds encircling them, are taking their place, not as tyrannical class rulers, but as useful items in communal interests and progress. In my dream, I noticed that the walls of the public rooms in the Town Hall are not bare, or that the only so-called decoration on them has been restricted to whole-length portraits of weird Mayors, with an occasional bad picture of the reigning monarch. There is in progress a scheme of History pictures. The subjects for them are chosen by a committee of painters and literary men. So far as this scheme has developed, I saw the products of it; varied in merit they are, which goes without saying, but a certain sincerity of aim and approach seemed to distinguish them from the tiresome and commonplace; anyway, they express a good intention. There certainly is an absence of “academic prescription”; they are hopeful efforts. A variety is maintained, the reverse of monotonous, showing individuality of approach, which may in time lead to greater things.

A really intellectual life seems to be growing here, but not of hot-house breed only accessible to a few, but one which is slowly permeating the people, which I hold to be due to the commingling of all the classes produced by an increased desire to do more than fill pockets (too often by ill-gotten gold), but by a growing elevation of the plane of thought brought about by unity of purpose and rejection of class prejudice. Given that home life is ambitious of industry, municipal life is certain to follow suit. A great change must come from the bottom. It is no use to clear the surface of a pond of slime unless the base of it is clean and fresh. It is no use to cut the heads from weeds if the roots are left in the ground, or to achieve good fruit from a tree whose roots are unpruned. And surely the root of a great nation is represented by the industrious attitude taken by the people at large. That is the essential to a Democracy that is workable. A Democracy which is only one in name is an anomaly, and is quite certain to be ephemeral.

§ 22

In my dream I had heard talk that once, not far from the river, was a Benedictine Monastery, and attached to it an Abbey. Save for a few remains of its cloisters, its kitchen, and a portion of its great dining hall, the monastery is gone. But the Abbey remains, as we have seen. Although vulgarised to a certain extent by barbarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it retains much of the simplicity and grandeur of the work of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its nave now belongs to the people. It is there that the Hebrews and Moslems conduct their religious services. The chancel, its sanctuary and aisles are retained for Christian worship. In the nave, old mystery plays are reverently acted, and such noble old dramas as “Every Man” are produced. At Christmas, the incidents in the birth of Jesus Christ are acted, and many a primitive song of the shepherds is heard. These presentations keep that beautiful story vivid by bringing before the eyes of the people the mysterious events of 2,000 years ago. They form a tangible and visible link between those old days and these more complicated and less simple times.

A form of monasticism disconnected from hard and fast dogma is growing. Not ascetic, it is educational; in which it resembles the earlier forms of the old Benedictine orders. But as yet my spirit has only heard of this; presently it will be given access to its principles and working.

§ 23

It has been previously intimated that the Drama takes a prominent place in the intellectual and emotional substance of the people’s training, plus its delights. An open air theatre was proposed, but the conclusion arrived at was that the climate (although much bettered by the death of the smoke fiend) is too unstable to ensure success.

The chief theatre of the city is large, capable of holding a thousand people. It is not conducted on private enterprise, but by a council of the best local minds, which, while occupied in supplying the best, are wise enough not to dismiss pleasurable and light comedies so long as they are “clean.” Declamation, the first essential of the actor’s craft, is taught in every school. Dancing, which we have seen to be part of a liberal education, provides an elasticity of deportment and freedom of manner but not undisciplined, which goes far towards the creation of a good player. The plays of Shakespeare are prominent, but to their list are added many of the fine Elizabethan plays, Marlow’s and others. Modern drama, so long as it is wholesome, is readily admitted, while the old and so entirely English Pantomime and Extravaganza of other days have been revived, and very jolly they are and entirely in place at certain merrymaking seasons of the year. There is no priggishness in the management, only care is taken that no play is produced which is undesirable for the young to witness.

§ 24

Within the walls of the Town Hall is the School of Music, where instrumental and vocal music are taught, and where the elements of opera training can be learnt. The Town Hall is at once the seat of government, not only commercial but artistic. A great proportion of work done in it is voluntary, being conducted by men and women who have time and energy to spare, and is leading more and more to what has been called, the upper class taking part in general progress. Time gone by, and not so long, that class was idle as regards local affairs. Thus they got into the hands of ill-equipped tradesmen, who were out for their own advantages, and misconducted local affairs to a deplorable extent. I reiterate, that, being held in check, the more or less ignorant and selfish class no longer rides roughshod, but is held in a leash by better equipped citizens; and so there is hope for them to mend their manners, and in time to become useful members of Home Rule.

The theatre is not open all the year round, but only at times of festival, hence the pleasure and instruction it provides is always fresh.

§ 25

In my dream I became aware that the cinema, which had become an abuse and a positive mischief, is under strict regulations. It catered to the lowest taste and became a very dangerous implement. Now, being under strict control of the same committee which manages the Communal theatre, it has become free of vice, and is not only a pleasant but instructive institution, and a picture palace is by no means an undignified place in which to pass an hour. There is plenty of fun there, but clean fun, and plenty of exciting situations are presented, but, while humour and wit are present, whatever might tend to decadence is absent. Individualists, who regard with suspicion any form of legislation which in pompous terms they call “interference with the liberty of the subject,” will be up in arms at the restrictions applied by a wise Government, forgetting, or perhaps never having read, in Plato’s “Republic” that the wise philosopher would protect the community from degradation created by exploiters out for themselves at the expense of a moral tone essential to stability and real progress. These will call the care of the people, implied by restrictions, “grandfatherly government,” forgetting that an ignorant crowd has to be guided to abstention from any poison in their midst, which may in time kill the soul of a nation.

§ 26

It is the aim of the Commune to ally, as far as possible, agricultural and industrial pursuits. With a view to that, every house has a garden which the householder is expected to cultivate. Waste land is nowhere permitted within the city or its environs. I find as my spirit travels hither and thither that the “entirely leisured gentleman” hardly exists. If a man of means is not using his leisure, and, in some instances, all his time, for the public good, he is using it to be his own servant. I saw a man, called rich, putting in a pane of glass, adroitly manipulating the putty with the skill of an expert. Another I observed sawing up blocks of wood, another cutting down trees in his garden, another pruning fruit and rose trees, and in the country, not far distant from the city, another cultivated scholar ploughing a furrow on his estate. The great war taught these admirable habits, which profiteers now regret, because “the gentleman” prefers to mend his own belongings to paying a king’s ransom to a fellow who did it ill in obedience to his iniquitous leaders. Shortly, he prefers to do honest work for himself than to pay for dishonest.

Throughout the community, rich or poor delegate no manual labour which can be done at home. Every girl of every class is a good needlewoman and dressmaker. Every boy is trained to be a skilful carpenter and is not ashamed of sewing on his buttons or darning his socks. Industrious habits, habits of making use of odd moments in practical home work, enter into every sphere. The great war taught the wiser how much outdoor assistance could be dispensed with. The colossal rise in wage obliged even the well-to-do to learn to turn their hands to the simplest duties connected with home. In time this beneficial result will become automatic, and a far simpler as well as more dignified life is certain to result from it. Of scholars, artists, writers and musicians there is a goodly number, which is increasing, owing to less hurry and more concentration, the result of better physical conditions. Men of the highest attainments, who are following the professions, inspired by peace and moderate expenditure of money, keep their minds fresh by light labour on the land, which they prefer to SPORT; indeed, SPORT, once made a business, is rather despised. It is thought to be enervating, and an idle, unproductive way of “getting through time.” Mental vitality is increased by labour which became necessary to men of small means through the rise of wages and reckless increase of rates and taxes. It now seems to permeate the richest as well as the poorest classes, so men are becoming more dignified and self-helpful.

§ 27

Theoretical politics and party conventions are ruled out by strenuous practical occupations. Instead of being the last subject for action, useful citizenship is the first. Politics used to be abstractions put into phrases by doctrinaires. The text completed, its result was pigeon-holed, under the fallacy that the object was attained when, indeed, it had only been talked about. People are now united, hence can govern themselves. There is no need for sermons upon thrift and economy; they are practised. Politicians have been taught that their words formed easy back-doors for the exit of action. The people are interested now from top to bottom in deeds. Theories which do not lead to action represent waste of energy; energy displayed in every section of the community is in demand.

Some return to more primitive social conditions is evidently an invigorating process. An easy way of getting through life by facilities which militated against effort was unstiffening the back of the English character. Instead of saying to himself, “How much can I do myself?” the majority was saying, “How much can I delegate?” “We were on the look-out for a very beneficent fairy who would perform miracles, and so, instead of effort, we were trusting to ease. Now, we are sweeping our own floors instead of wasting our little savings upon paying for the doing of it. We were thinking that sweeping our houses clean was a tax upon time, an exhausting expenditure of physical energy. Experience is telling us the opposite.” “Mental energies are revived, even stimulated, by automatic industry which is a rest to them. While a man is sweeping his house or garden, he can think, and think well. He can organise his work.” These words I heard from the mouth of a scholar. I heard the same thought expressed by a skilled craftsman, differently, but analogous. “The lack of domestic servants is proving a blessing to us all,” I heard a woman say. “We did not know, under the old self-indulgent system, how long a day was, and what a lot of time we wasted. We had forgotten we had hands, strong muscles and vigorous aptitudes. We paid a high price for the neglect to which we had submitted our physical energies. We suffered from ‘boredom’ and other evils consequent upon indolence. Now, we do not ask ourselves how we shall dispose of the day. That question is answered before it is asked. We have our duties to perform to the Commune, as members of it, to our homes as sacred trusts as our palaces of pleasure as well as duty. We know what are our responsibilities. We accept and use them, in the city and home.” As my spirit grew in experience and closer observation, I noticed that in matters of dress or costume there was little difference between the classes. Constant changes of fashion created to supply the tradesmen when novelties were so constantly demanded from them, are out of date. The garments of the rich may be more elaborately adorned, be more sumptuous, more composed of silk than wool, but in their simple cut they are not differentiated from those of the poorer classes.

“We do not make them all at home,” I heard an elegantly attired lady of high rank say. “That would be unfair; because we can afford to give employment, expensive though it is. At the same time, quite half is made at home. Even in houses of the rich the peaceful sound of the loom prevails. Our daughters are all taught to use it, for who knows when they may be compelled to do so. It is wise to instruct the young in occupation which they may be called upon to use in darker times. Besides,” the lady added, “girls need quiescent employment to establish character. It is not that the arts are ceasing to flourish or the elegancies of mental cultivation are curtailed; it is only,” as the lady went on to say, “now that we are more busy we have more time. A girl can study a language while she works her loom, or another can read to her.” This led me to wonder if peripatetic teaching was usual? It is, for, in schools young people are encouraged while learning by heart, reciting or reading aloud, to personate, by action the drama or tale they are telling. This habit, no doubt, has arisen from the high position the drama and all that belongs to histrionic training takes in the new life. Artists and such who are called by their genius to create are not a set apart, nor are they regarded any longer as harmless lunatics. Being, by the nature of their calling constructors, they are expected to help in the affairs of the Commune, not only as specialities but as intelligences well adapted to other forms of construction than those demanded from their own work. The mind of an artist of any kind, in letters, graphic or plastic arts, or music, is a well tuned instrument. It must be so, or success is out of the question.

§ 28

Being imaginative, a follower of any of the Arts sees miles ahead of the less endowed crowd. Besides being a useful person in that respect, it is good for his temperament to be called away from a groove wherein, if he allows himself to remain, he becomes a machine, and his art suffers. The strongest faculty for creation cannot be used for many hours daily, it cannot keep up the tension of creation as a machine. A mind demands repose by change of work, which can be obtained in serving upon councils where special aptitudes of foresight and imagination are useful. Thus, coming into contact with other minds, the individual is broadened. He is not an ascetic except in his study; outside of that he is a man of the world and capable of dealing with what are called “plain men,” which does not always mean wise ones. It is related of an Italian philosopher that he spent his days with the peasants on his little estate, the evenings in his study. Not a bad division of the day Socrates would have told us. In the Agora of Athens, wise men found both folly and wisdom: folly to refute, wisdom to encourage. Plato’s Republic is an effort to show that a democracy, under restraint, is the fairest form of government. First, the conception of the scheme founded upon the greatest good for the greatest number, to be followed by activity in its promotion. Experience is gained as activity proceeds, discussion follows experience. The bud is before the blossom. The fruit is selected; what is rotten is thrown away. It is futile to discuss a question, and tear it into rags before it has been set in motion. There is a point in progress when not to start the top spinning is folly. The top, when once started, must be whipped continually. It stops spinning as soon as the strokes of the whip subside. The great fault of the late administration was the policy of “Wait and see.” A blind man may wait; doing so will not help him to see! To imagine that committees, based only on theories, have settled all the pros and cons, is to put the cart before the horse. Committees can do no more than propose such and such starting points for action. The rest must be left to the executive. Too often, no action follows the sittings of an elaborate scheme.

§ 29

To delay action is as ineffectual as to hurry it. The great war taught that the complete preparation of Germany failed of success because the moral element at the bottom of extreme diligence and multifarious ingenuity was rotten. The Allies were unprepared, England most so of all (notwithstanding some historians). England was not prepared for the great struggle, but she and her Allies had justice on their side, hence they won. After the war reconstruction should have started at once, which means that abuses which the war has brought into prominence should have been stopped or England would suffer permanently. It appears that politicians narrow and personal in their ambition were unable to effect the change. They delayed action even at moments of serious danger, lest their party should suffer defeat. Now, no one cares twopence about “Party,” the question before Democracy is, What is to be done in spite of Party Government? A democracy, to be enduring, must govern itself. No party must be in the ascendant, except the one which is in combination with all parties, e.g., the unity not the equality, of classes. The Agora was a place in disorder, where every man’s hand was against his neighbour. The crowd was led by unwise agitators. Ignorance and unwisdom are nearly related. We were tired to death of theories, of Government promises, of its failure to keep them, of leaders who were broken reeds, who, under pretence of giving Freedom exercised Tyranny. So we listened to wiser men than they, we resolved no longer to be ignorant, and becoming convinced that, as ignorant, we are not fitted to take part in Government, we would pull ourselves together and once more be men and work as good citizens.

These latter words and the statements which precede them formed the substance of a lecture delivered in the Town Hall by a factory worker this very evening. And what a contrast in tone it exhibits to that truculent one which disfigured whatever hidden justice there might have been in similar and dissimilar orations emanating from the same source. This one was as wise as the other was foolish. Like Socrates, we may now go to the Agora and find wisdom.

“Plato’s Republic aimed at completeness in Theory and discipline in Action. The New Democracy aims at making itself aristocratic in practice. It aims to promote activity in every corner and enterprise of life. We do not pretend that our class is the only one necessary to welfare. It was ignorance that in past times made us think that; bad guidance as well. We recognise ourselves to be branches of the great Tree of Life, whose roots are embedded in the soil of Truth. We recognise ourselves to be as waves in a great stream progressing, meandering, ever moving on from its source to the sea. We recognise the sea to be as a deep scheme which nature has provided, subject to storm, stress, and calm; we bring to its salt waters invigorating drops of freshness from the hills and collected in the plains. We are not at work alone, now, whatever our work be. We are brothers in a great family, not jealous egoists. Time was when we thought of little else than money. We thought that the educated, the refined and learned class was made up of enemies who would make us slaves. We see we were wrong. They are our real friends. Our enemies they are who we thought were our friends, we see that now. Our friends will give us a real democracy, in which we may have a voice if we please. The others would give us a sham one, and rule not only our theories but our actions and with a tyranny as ruthless and obstructive to progress as any autocracy.”

From the Agora wise words come now, from which all can learn. The people were becoming corrupted, they have been too wise to become corrupt. I think that most of us who have given ourselves the trouble to think knew that good leadership was what was wanted. First convincing, then leading, not looking back, but going to the root of things which were discordant and pruning them away, that is what was wanted.

They, of the past, wanted an “Ideal,” but they did not know it. Indeed, they scorned the idea of something that was like religious sectarian dogma. It was to them something hopeless and abstract, and quite outside “Life,” with which it had no touch. They thought high wages, wealth, indeed Mammon in any form, was the god they needed, and to that they made their way, growing more and more discontented, cynical, envious and suspicious. That was the matter with the people who had once been patterns to all Europe as honest workmen. England once simple, happy, industrious (not industrial) had become complicated, discontented, IDLE.

§ 30

In my peregrinations, which became more and more absorbing as my spirit grew more bold, I listened eagerly, not as an eavesdropper, but as one keen to learn. One evening, it was winter—I heard a discourse on “Happiness” by a craftsman, one of those living in the new houses I have visited. He was an old man who had lived in the dark, narrow dogs’ kennels of the dark, dirty city which is no more—the city of discontent, of bad government, of callousness. He spoke earnestly, but not with rhapsody. What he said was convincing from the cool sincerity of his diction and manner. “Happiness,” he said, “is rooted in the soil of LABOUR; in doing, not theorising. In being so occupied as to leave no time for a morbid outlook. The old saying, which I did not, and few seemed to understand, ‘Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might.’ We were taught not to do that. We were taught to work as little as possible, to receive much, and give almost nothing. Good workmen were under a ban. If some of us wished to do our utmost we were bullied and suspected. The industrious of us were pushed aside by the idle. Bad, dishonest workmen were applauded, they lived on the labour of their fellows. We were taught to make other nations labour for us—to sell bad goods for large prices.

“The standard of work was lowered. Cheap German goods were encouraged in the markets. A balance of our wages (a large one) went to support trades unions. The good workman grew poor, the bad grew rich. It was a state of things which took all the strength of an honest man to combat. Honest men grew rare and more rare. Dishonesty flourished. Leaders became fanatics. They were of our class. Ignorant of cause and effect we were, but they were noisy, they spoke platitudes, their arguments (if arguments they could be called) were founded upon catch words which sounded wise, but were foolish. They pretended to work for the great cause of Liberty and Equality. They did nothing of the kind. They feathered their nests from our labour and grew rich. They were well paid for the cause they preached. Liberty was dragged more and more into the far distance. We thought we had been slaves; we found we had been free. We found we were being mastered by unscrupulous men. We grew more and more suspicious, more and more hostile. We thought revolution would put things straight. Taught, that the Government was weak (which was not far wrong), that anarchy would give us what we wanted, that if we defied the Government, if we used German methods of might against right, we must win. To starve our country into submission was a method preached to us which, in our hearts, we were unwilling to believe. If we did not obey we were threatened. Those of us who would not stood the chance of starvation. The great railway strike of 1919, wicked as it was, because it very nearly approached attempted murder of innocent people, failed. That strike it was that opened our eyes. Surely we were being led on the wrong road! Faith in our leaders left us. They began to hedge. We saw that. Then we knew they were false and untrustworthy and we broke loose from them, which, having done, we began to find who were our friends. We came to the conclusion that we must get to work again and be honest once more. We did so, and on every side found helping hands. Hence the city of Liberty and Peace in which we live now. We know we were ignorant, we resolved to learn. We knew we had been idle and greedy. We knew the life we had led could not make good citizens or happy ones. We resolved to labour, to give up coarse excitements in leisure time.

“We tried it. We formed our own Union, which had for its motto, ‘All Labour is dignified,’ but it depends upon the labourer to make it so. ‘Help yourselves and you will be helped,’ is such a truism it seems needless to quote, but there are many truisms of which we need to be often reminded. We know now that reform must come from the bottom. If the foundations are rotten the veriest palace will fall. We know that in us lies the foundation of the State. Before the State is reformed we must reform ourselves, and this we are doing. When it is accomplished we shall be fit to take part in the rule of our country, and we are on the road to do it, in the meantime we are learning the difficult task of Self Rule, and in that, even if it be labour to do it, it is lightened by the vision it provides, and the happy conscience it engenders. Now, we are children of Liberty, before we were cripples and chained to doctrinaires and wind-bags.”

The tone of this discourse, of which is given only an epitome is, as it were, the text of all that is working its way, and the means employed in its success my dream will go on to relate.

§ 31

An important neglected industry is revived. I noticed many men with deeply stained arms and hands; they were the dyers. It did not much matter that coal-tar dyes slipped through English fingers and were developed in Germany, because the colours they made were vulgar and discordant, far more in harmony with Teutonic taste than English. Many years ago the author of these pages was in Algiers and heard of local dyers there, some Arabs, but mostly Moors they were. A black Soudanese servant of his told him of them. At once he took advantage of this and put into their hands fine muslin strips, which they converted into colour as exquisite as possible. Now rags, the remnants retain their freshness. A yellow like crocus, a pink rose, a lustrous black shot with copper, a green like fresh ivy leaves, an iris purple, and a blue like the sea at Malta. He tried to get the colour copied—there were no dyers with the skill to do it. Since those days (50 years ago), and quite recently, I hear that enterprising people from the New City have learnt many a secret from Eastern dyers. In this instance, instead of spoiling oriental taste for colour, alas! a habit of the commercial English, they are learning from them. India is helping England out of her bad taste. More beautiful tints I never saw than those in my dream. The sight of them made my spirit think how much we might learn from the East of value instead of pushing our tasteless goods where for centuries beauty has prevailed. The eye is pleased now in the New City, instead of displeased. Beautiful colour seems to grow naturally, the streets and gardens are full of it.

Every garment gives a lively note which is the key to interchanges of harmonies of colour only to be compared with exquisite music. The trade of the dyer has become an Art which creates pictures at every turn of the road and field.

§ 32

Why is the New City so orderly and yet so free? How is it that life seems to run so smoothly, and yet without monotony? Trades are located as they were in Ancient Greece and Rome, in a measure also in Europe and England in better times than ours were a while ago. Chaos is no more. The hundred headed hydra, personified in “the middle-man,” that robber of the earnings of labour, is becoming extinct, owing in large measure to the more extended use of the market, where as we have seen practically any article can be purchased at a reasonable price which leaves a reasonable profit for the producer. This has led to a diminution of shops, which are no longer heterogeneously planted in residential quarters. Every tradesman has to take out a licence for which he pays, the money going to the Commune. There is the Butchers’ Quarter, a blessing indeed. No longer are wayfarers offended by the barbarous sights of bleeding corpses, of blood sprinkling the footways. If such horrors must be, they are hidden. No butcher is permitted to make a public display of his bloody trade. Meat, when not sold in the Market, is found in a district set apart for a necessary, if disgusting, trade, but its products are not before the public eye. The shop is not on the street, it is located behind it. The same law applies to poulterers, indeed, to all trades which, of necessity, contain objectionable matter. A large, but not universal, part of the fish trade is carried on by the weekly market; but, owing to the swift destruction of freshness, and fish being a health-giving food (besides being cheap) there is a considerable demand for fresh as well as salt water fish, therefore shops for its sale are a necessity. Fishmongers alike with butchers have their locality.

Those trades which are disconnected with unpleasant associations are not excluded from public gaze. Only those of them which produce litter are restricted in residential quarters. Silversmiths, and all shops associated with handicrafts, are permitted on the public streets, of which they are ornaments, but these also take out a licence, but the tax is smaller than for objectionable trades. The order thus established is in no sense inconvenient. Electric tramways (only one line is permitted) run in the broad streets. They are not allowed in the narrow. The lovely city of Florence has been well nigh spoiled by liberty to run trams in streets not more than 25 feet wide. The English Communes took note of that. When facilities for quick locomotion are not regulated, they constitute a nuisance, are destructive of peace, and become a tyranny. “Companies” pretended to study the convenience of citizens, in reality studied their own financial success, and let other considerations take their chance.

All foreign goods of whatever kind, save those provided by British Colonies, are taxed. Free trade is only permitted to the colonials. Since this has been a law of all the Communes, British trade has increased, British output is larger, and greater activity of production has proved the wisdom of a law which encourages local enterprises. Every householder is bound to keep clean the footway immediately touching his habitation, but the cleanliness of the roadway is under the direction of the Commune. Wandering over every portion of the city in my dream I have seen no squalor. Poverty there is and always must be, but squalor, the result of want of self respect and bad early training, no! The people have risen above it. Where industry is (not industrialism) squalor can find no place. A man who keeps the tools of his trade in good order, who is proud of the work of which they are the implements, and who respects his home, is particular about “appearances.” So is a good wife, so are good sons and daughters.

§ 33

Home life is but a little picture of the extended scene outside. Disorder in smaller matters leads to disorder in greater. While the Commune is responsible for order on a large scale, every citizen is responsible on a smaller scale. The half is greater than the whole! Order must be a first principle of the home, as it must be of the Commune, which is but an extended home. The new city being small compared to the monstrous, heterogeneous places of muddle in the past, and leisure greater, there is less call for swift locomotion. The new people walk more, and are, consequently, more healthy. So the streets are not congested by traffic, and people are not all in the muddle-minding strain of “hurry.” Where order is, leisure is certain. Busy, or rather, industrious people always find time, it is only an ill-regulated day that produces “hurry-scurry.” Outside my dream, I never knew an industrious man complain of want of time. William Morris, as industrious a man as ever breathed, never complained of interrupters. After a visit from a friend, and none took greater pleasure than he in giving him welcome, Morris was at his work again in a “twinkling.” The man who orders his day wisely is alert, ready at any moment to concentrate his energy. The idle, not the industrious, grumble about want of time. The real question, and one that is serious, is the use to which leisure is subjected. The so-called working class (by the way, every man worth his salt is a working man) is coming to know that, and that ill-used leisure is a sin against order, and here in the new life he has set his mind against it. From what has been recounted of my dream the reader already knows that, but as it proceeds, my dream will show how order, punctuality, and reverence for the uses which leisure should breed is permeating the entire community and becoming a habit, hence idle folk are in the minority, indeed, they are despised.

§ 34

It has been read from my dream, so far, that, while material welfare of the people is one object, and a prominent one, the Commune, as the guiding spirit of the new life, is fully conscious of the wise saying of Jesus Christ, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the Spirit of God.” We had eyes and saw not, ears and heard not; noble intuitions we repulsed, aspirations we neglected, and we were taught elaborate creeds out of touch with realities. Blind, too often, to the beauties of nature and its sisters “The Arts,” we had grown deaf to the songs of birds, to music of the winds moaning, or joyfully singing, among forest trees. We had ceased to sing as we worked. Indeed, the natural joys granted us to receive have ceased to please, ceased to be a part of life. To the arts, which seek to crystallise visions inspired by God’s gift of exquisite nature, we had become blind and deaf. They had ceased to move us, ceased to inspire us, ceased to raise us from the mire of money grabbing. So eager we were for wealth that we pursued it blindly as the only object of our energies. We had lost touch with half, and the better half, of life, and the soul of England was becoming hardened, insensitive, and ANIMAL. Good, in some ways the hard Puritan was dead to the beauty of God’s work. He thought he was spiritual. He did not know that there is soul in all matter. In this respect he was more unchristian than a pagan, who, at least, saw the gods and recognised them in the movement of the stars, in the dawn, in the shining midday, and the splendour of sunset time. The old pagan found God in all nature, as he found him in great art. He saw into the very heart of the marble from which Phidias carved Olympian Zeus. He saw the spirit of Pallas Athene under the ivory and golden statue in the Parthenon.

The Puritan cut himself off from All Beauty. Instead of seeing good in God’s greatest works and in man’s most inspired creations, he saw evil. His mind was distorted, a cripple; and little did he dream that his spiritual nature was really a material one. To his narrow and crooked creed much of the apathy of the modern mind is to be traced. “As it was wicked to see beauty, to worship it as God made it, let us make ourselves rich.” What a Creed?

With the neglect of agriculture came the Tyranny of industrialism. With an apathy towards Art, towards its great mission to display the beauty of the soul in the array of material presentation, the soul of England was growing degenerate. It was becoming German, and what lower place than that can be found for a country so great as England has been! We have to remake England, and we mean to do it. We mean to learn from the Pagans, to reinstate much of their teaching. We mean to cultivate the teaching of Jesus Christ, who drew a lesson from the “lilies of the field,” the death of a sparrow, His generosity to the mistake of a troubled woman. Who, from the Cross blessed a thief, who, dying in agony, forgave his enemies, who taught the gospel of thou more than I, who would give to Cæsar as well as to God, and, above all, whose noble life was pressed on by human as well as Divine love. Jesus Christ was a poet and artist as well as a prophet and reformer. The life of the soul was everything to Him. Wealth for wealth’s sake is a phantom, a chimera. We mean to go back to find a fairer road to happiness than the modern world would give us. While we accept facilities for greater comfort, we mean to use them wisely, not to overwhelm us, but to help us. We wish to help the people to see beauty, and in their lives to live up to the vision. To live, not as a preparation for another and happier life, to reward in a future state, but to live and see with clear eyes the one which is now ours to make or mar it. Every man and woman who labours is praising God, so long as the labour is not from greed, but from a fixed principle to enrich the soul of the people by first enriching our own.

§ 35

These words and a great many more I heard said, not in a church, but in the Town Hall by a great artist, and they led me to search. In my dream I had seen how the principles he dwelt upon were already at work in the homes of the people in municipal government, which was seeking Justice and Fraternity. So I extended my travels and observations.

The walls of the churches are growing busy with beauty. The fear of idol worship is no more. Men know now, being better instructed, that it was not the wooden effigy but the soul it put into a shape, that was worshipped. It was a symbol, sometimes an ugly one, but still a symbol of Divine Power. The crafts are symbols of industry, of faithfulness to an ideal that only the best work counts for good, hence underlying their technical merit is a great truth that the people are understanding, and of which they are conscious, so they have pride in the ethic as well as æsthetic quality of what they are doing; but in no spirit of priggism or sermonising is this, just simply it is a pleasurable sensation added to the fulfilment of duty. For what a man does unwillingly will be bad, what he does pleasurably will be good and impressive.

Many of the pictures are strange, some would call them childish. Perhaps they are childlike because they express intensity without rhetoric. To affect to be what one is not is humbug. Every “primitive” did his best. He tried hard to make his pictures look like nature. His hand was not so cultivated as his imagination. The image he formed in his mind was more complete than his power to portray it. Looking at works of art by “a primitive,” if we have the discriminating sensibility, we see what he saw and follow his mental effort, which compensates for technical shortcomings. To affect childishness is to prove imbecility. What we like in the new world pictures is their real naïvete. That the authors of them are untaught is obvious, but there is that in them which compensates. They are done by men who believe in what they are doing and are feeling it with intensity. An academic critic can find plenty to criticise, but nothing to laugh at. The simplicity evinced comes from the fact that their authors ARE primitive. I heard said they are mostly by peasants, who, like the noblest of French artists, J. François Millet, saw simply. Even when the subjects are biblical or so-called “religious,” the artist has used modern costume, which, seeing in an abstract, not photographic, manner, he has invested with poetical interest. A return to agricultural life is everywhere evident. It is producing, or reinstating, a healthy mental temperament which industrialism was well-nigh killing. This natural aptitude to create in art and to do so sincerely is not only prominent among the people, whose chief labour is agricultural, it is shown in the design of “industrials” also, who, not wholly emancipated by the artificiality of their labour earning hours, “let themselves go” in their leisure time and show by what they produce that even their straightforward simplicity has not been killed by the monotony of their wage-earning hours. They are not machines in their off hours, but human beings who have something to say for themselves which may be uncultured, but is a spontaneous expression of something they like to think of and enjoy making.

§ 36

Machinery can never be made to feel, the hand can do nothing worth having without “feeling.” A bit of craftsmanship, like a building, a statue, a picture, a song, or a tale, gives itself away at once. If the impulse was artificial or insincere, it is at once obvious that the man who made it was not an artist; he might be anything else, but not that. The exact quantity of pleasure taken in the creation of a work of art is visible at once, in that sense the maker of it exposes his soul. The revival of craftsmanship is evident everywhere in the new city. The best designers are the best workmen. We never hear it said, “Oh, yes, he can design, but cannot make.” The craftsman makes well what he has well designed. Being simple, he asks himself, “What is the object for? What is it intended to do when it is made?” Having made up his mind to solve that question, the first in good design, he proceeds to make it answer that purpose, and something good and interesting is the result. The artist has used his intelligence from first to last, so what he makes is something that has life in it, because it is a reflection of the life of its creator. As craftsmanship grows in estimation, machinery is delegated to do what it can do well, not ill. Furthermore, the extension of the demand for craftsmanship provides occupation which may be entirely thus occupied, or only in leisure hours, and leisure hours so occupied are educational, and not only that, they are productive, inasmuch as their authors sell their productions and so add to their earnings in a manner that is useful to them and beneficial to the community.

As with the churches, so with all public buildings, which are (by the way) not made to “pattern” in accordance with this or that “style”—Gothic, Classic, Renaissance, or what not. The art they exhibit rises out of the “plan.” They are not “faced” with a skin of stone or stucco to look what they are not. The outside does not conceal but expresses the “plan.” Construction is not hidden, but revealed. Ornament is not “stuck on,” it is a growth out of construction. To an eye artificially accustomed to “shams” the new buildings look austere. They seem to reflect a serious people who want to tell the truth. Should it be necessary to erect them in steel or iron, the metal is treated against the action of weather, but is not concealed. If it forms the skeleton, the skeleton is visible, and so all through the construction. Stone looks like stone, wood like wood, and metal like metal. This principle carried out does not make for monotony, but for the reverse. These serious and impressive public buildings are, as it were, the picture galleries of the city. Not executed in a hurry, the subjects of the wall paintings are well thought out by a select committee of learned men and artists. They are proceeding. As yet some are incomplete, but enough are finished to demonstrate the care taken in their subject matter, which is not only local, but embodies episodes of English history. While being pleasant to the eye, they tell pleasant and noble tales of the lives of our ancestors who made England great. Again here, as we noticed in the churches, there is much original simplicity, which does not ape archæology, or rather does not make that valuable science the first necessity. Looking at them one feels they could only have been done to-day. The impress of what is best in the modern mind is there, not artificial, but sincere and vital. Presently we shall leave the city to see what agriculture is doing.

§ 37

We have seen that the Fine Arts are not commercial incidents in the life here, they are part of the scheme of it. The Drama is also not only a source of pleasure or, of momentary emotion. It is held to be a prominent factor in education, whose mission it is to elevate intelligence, encourage noble ardour, stimulate heroism and provide beauty. Under the old system the Drama was too often used ill. The play played down to the people, often exciting the lower passions. To be made familiar with vice is, in a measure, to take part in it. To sow vice on the boards of the stage is to make it popular. The idea that vice is romantic is combated now. Vice is ugly, as virtue is lovely. Art has no business with ugliness except it be used as a contrast to beauty. To perpetuate ugliness by Art is like encouraging the durance of the plague. Higher intelligence verified by education should be employed to uplift, not depress, choice. Lower intelligence must be guided by the higher!

What is being done by Art in the churches, in public buildings, gives evidence that the people are regarding it as essential, not as a thing to be played with. Our city, not being large, is manageable. Being near the country, every citizen is in touch with country life. Indeed, there are few who do not labour on their own bit of garden in however small a way. Country life is not foreign to the artizan or to the factory worker. Squalor, that curse of big cities, the result of ignorant and debased people herding together, is unknown here. Poverty there is, of course, that must be everywhere, but it need not be debasing. So much that was degrading has gone. Sloth is no more. What was useless is purged away, and what were positive scandals of misrule have been replaced by order, sobriety and uplifting. It is recognised that while a city must be a centre of commerce it need not be that of greed, and need not be divorced from country life. Hence the gardens provide for the people adequate means of employment in such matters; so that while the city is commercial, it is not out of touch with many forms of agriculture; and the blanched, hopeless faces in the past too prevalent, are replaced by bronzed faces and the open happy countenances of a contented industrious people.

What has been gained? Fraternity. A clean atmosphere and more sun, more leisure and more work, a broader outlook on the life of a city, expanded agriculture and education, greater variety of pleasures, a more human as well as humane ideal, and an equable government covering a great variety of interests, with absence of class legislation, death to profiteering, and education in honesty for tradesmen. What has been lost? Squalor, trade tyranny, jobbery, pollution of rivers, smoke, drunkenness, bloodless bodies and ill-nourished souls, and, above all, selfish class egoism. Government is carried on with less talk and more action. There is not less but more money in the country, which is more distributed. Agriculture pays sufficiently. The middleman having found his match, tradesmen can no longer extort from workers prices they cannot afford to pay. Politicians have not the opportunity of getting the country into a muddle and then muddling their way out of it by false promises to whichever class is for the moment uppermost. The people, better educated, are not easily led by windbags. They see that the whole nation counts before the individual, that a nation which, for temporary wealth, neglects to till the land to (as far as possible) produce, but purchases from foreign countries its food, is neglecting the first duty to the community. It has come to them to know that the success of agriculture is the first necessity to be secured. The people are being taught that a country which in an emergency cannot feed itself off its own land may be at the mercy of its enemy at any moment. The great war taught them that the weakest spot was not to be found in difficulty to make guns and shells and even an army in a hurry, but in providing them and the people at home with food. Empty bellies are bad generals! And so the people have turned to, and resolve that their country shall never again be exposed to the risk of a great débâcle, which was nearer than politicians desire them to know. While our cities are better organised, more healthfully disposed, they are smaller in area; hence congestion which produces squalor, is no more. A large proportion of what were useless folk, undisciplined, and a drag upon the State, as well as a shame to it, are performing the first duty of man, the tillage, the care of, and the provisioning of the land in all matters connected with agriculture. Agriculture being first now, industrialism second, the cities are released from over-population, and the countryside is adequately populated. Owing to the growth of an agricultural population, more small towns and villages are growing up all over England. Much of what was not a relative but positive scandal is no more. There is plenty of work for everybody who chooses to find it and take it. It is considered unmanly to live on doles.

Cities are not less but more successful commercial centres. But the influx is native, not foreign. England supplies herself out of the exertions of her people, for she is no longer buying necessities from foreign markets, but from her own. The country is the source of the wealth of the towns. The great war taught that in the future England must be self-providing. She must grow her own timber, her own fruit and corn, provide her own meat and, as far as possible, in case of another naval war, provide her own fish from inland sources as well as from the sea. Her fine rivers, her lakes, her ponds must be kept stocked with fresh water fish. To do this, the pollution of all inland waters is absolutely, not relatively, forbidden, not forbidden by an Act of Parliament which is quite a negligible affair when made by lawyers who leave open a back door for the escape of a rich delinquent, who will pay a nominal fine over and over again if it suits his purpose to destroy valuable fish by the thousand. What does the payment of a nominal fine mean to a rich manufacturer? Nothing. The pollution of rivers as of the air has been stopped by the people, who very rightly say, “We will not be deprived of the food provided for us by our rivers, and we will not be deprived of a grain of corn unnourished by the sun, or a blade of grass for the cattle poisoned by deleterious acids from factories.” “We have a right,” they say, “to pure water, to pure air, and all the benefits from life-giving rays of the sun essential in a country placed as England is in the centre of the sea, where clouds must always hide a considerable portion of sunlight.” The people are learning from science that light is essential to life, that darkness is a symbol of death.

§ 38

A few sentences back, arboriculture has been mentioned. Let us see how in the new England, it has become a factor in the wealth of the country, how, once almost wholly neglected, it has become an industry at once profitable, engaging and health-giving. It takes time to grow a forest. Time will come when coal gives out, of that there is no doubt, so the sooner we set to work to provide wood for burning as well as for building the better. It is clear, then, that England must provide wood. A war which would prevent influx of wood into England might happen at any moment. Millions a year are spent on a navy to protect commerce, but that navy may be rendered powerless by mine-sowing, by stealthy under-water craft which, with one torpedo, can sink the biggest ship ever constructed, or by a bomb from an aeroplane, become a wreck in a moment. If that be so, it is obvious that to neglect provision for such a fatality would be the height of folly, which even a party politician cannot fail to acknowledge. It is clear, then, that Britain must have wood, and wood of her own growing. I gather from my travels that this is at last being accomplished. Wherever, in the length and breadth of Britain, Forests can be planted and trees grown, the Communes see to it. Some counties lend themselves to the form of industry which forestry implies more than others. Certain trees suffer from situations where storms of wind prevail, some do not suffer. The fir tribe will flourish well in windy districts, but sand is necessary for their root nourishment. This is proved by the miles of fir forests grown on the flat lands between the Carrara Mountains and Leghorn, and on the damp but still sandy districts around Ravenna. Most trees, to flourish, need drainage, but some will flourish where there is none. So now, in Britain, forests are being planted wherever possible, so long as they do not interfere with open land necessary to the growth of corn.

To one of these forests I made my silent, unseen way, and it was a revelation. Thousands of hands were occupied. Forest life is primeval, it is dignified; it is a life by itself quite away from the distractions of city life; it breeds a hardy race. A self-contained life, it is pre-eminently health producing. The settlers live in wooden huts built by themselves in glades cleared for the purpose. In a measure the people are supported with food, for game is plentiful, and fish from lakes and ponds made for the purpose and constantly restocked are sufficient to supply nourishing food. Game laws are no more. There is no stoppage in production. Fresh stocks of game and fish are constantly coming in, and this is an industry by itself, which provides labour, ingenuity and expert technical knowledge.

The people have made their own “close time” in breeding seasons, and have learnt not to consume more than they can breed. I heard it said that mistakes were made at first, which experience rectified. Laws followed the dictation of necessity. Wages are low but sufficient, as the greater part of food is provided by nature. One law is obligatory. When a tree is cut down, another small one is immediately planted in its place, so there are no gaps and no waste. For this purpose there are nurseries managed by experts in the growing of young saplings from seed. This industry is a specialised one, needing great skill. It is pleasant to hear the merry sound of the axe, the music made by wind among the branches, and the sound of singing as the people work is a sign of their health and happiness. The huts built of wood are erected upon posts driven deep into the ground. Their habitable parts above the ground are reached by an open stairway. The ground floor, well concreted, is the receptacle for forestry implements.

The forest is warm in winter, cool in summer. Wood only is permitted as fuel; it would cost too much to get coal there; besides, the people would object to the smoke of that bituminous and blackening product. From what I hear said, colliery owners disliked the innovation; it would reduce their profits. They considered that they, and they only, held rights on fuel to provide warmth, but public opinion obliged them to stop their class prejudice in their own favour. Every block of buildings has its vegetable and fruit gardens for whose well-being, for light and air, spaces are cleared of trees.

§ 39

Never were seen healthier children or more honest countenanced people—the men at the labour, the women at their looms. The men are hunters, too. They employ the ancient bow and arrow, so the sweet silence is not spoiled by the irritating sound of firearms so closely connected with war and all its abominations. The skins of stags and roe deer form winter garments made at home, for there are no shops here. Every household provides its own needs. Here and there are artificial lakes where the people bathe and swim. After all, a primitive life is the natural one, to which we soon revert when the artificiality of life in cities is far distant.

There are millions of acres of these forests growing up in Britain now. There is a population growing thereon second to none in the country for healthy manhood and industrious, thrifty womanhood. Two generations of such a healthy state of things is enough to eliminate the supineness of so-called civilised life. I saw no complicated machinery. The axe and double-handed saw does well, if leisurely, all necessary work for a generation that is learning that speed is not essential to good workmanship or sustained trade! Light railways driven by electricity take the timber to its destination, but I noticed that few people travel in them. They have lost a restless spirit, being content with the interests provided by their environment. Learned in their craft and entertained by the practice of it, these foresters have little need for books, but I did hear that story-tellers visit them in winter time, and that they act plays among themselves, and well can I imagine the big log fires, the warm ale, the venison and fish suppers and the story-telling, delightful and simple, of these forest folk. I imagined that a new folklore was dawning and new poets might come out of this natural life. One thing we may be sure of. A new life will set in motion a new set of ideas; new, anyway, to modern minds, but ancient in their simplicity and growth under identical circumstances. I heard it said that this new life is productive of Romance, and is very satisfying to that part of the human that asks for it. There is a great deal left still in us which is closely allied to the instincts of our forefathers. The temptation to roam is less acute now. Romance, badly needed by all of us, is found in the new life. What a contrast this is to the impositions of ruthless industrialism, that Juggernaut, that tyrannical destroyer of agricultural life, that brutalising devastator of Beauty, that cold but systematised muck rake, which, while it pretended to give liberty, was making slaves, which, while it was providing a Health Minister, was destroying health, and while providing artificial wealth was destroying the soul of the people, because it was withdrawing them from simple and leading them to artificial pleasures, and so was breeding discontent. What is necessary for the future of England is industry less concentrated in cities, more extended over the whole country, and this industry of Forestry is one act in the new drama that is doing it.

The new life is recreating honesty and straight dealing. Once corrupt, Borough and County Councils are composed of honourable men, not of selfish class legislators. Jobbery, that fatal failing among tradesmen who formed the majority in the old system of municipal rule, is at a minimum, it was in a maximum. Unscrupulous agitators have been found out and given a dismissal. Trades unions, not in principle bad, only bad as far as they became decadent, played an artificial game, have been broken up by the people, who discovered before it was too late that a tyranny of the gravest character was being enacted and growing stealthily was ruining a class under the pretence of giving power to it. The great war proved that as a class tradesmen are untrustworthy; as individuals there is good in them, but the nature of their education being, “Get all you can, at whatever cost to your neighbour,” is a policy the reverse of a good one. As soon as these things were realised by the people they began to see straight. Blinkers were withdrawn from their eyes and they looked right and left for the cause of impending disaster. The people, led now by honesty and intelligence in place of crafty subterfuge, know that industry, not industrialism, is the key to happiness. By largely extended agriculture, the necessities, indeed, most of the luxuries of life, can be secured. More grass, more beasts, more cows, sheep and goats, more milk, more wool, more hides, more grain, more bread, more cheap and good houses for workmen and craftsmen. No smoke, more sun, hence a quicker ripening of grain and fruit. Hence finer energies, more vitality, and less discontent. The invasion of industrialism has been the creation of an enemy to light, to joy, to freedom. To turn a man into a machine is to contradict the first elements of his creation. To put him on a level with a screwdriver, a hammer, a grease-pot, is to lower him all round. Why does it lower him? Because it kills his individuality, blunts his ambition, and destroys his creative faculty. Hand labour is dignified, but a man reduced to the level of a machine is a cripple.

The industrious class, of which happily many remained, even under depressing environment and determined to earn honest money, emancipated themselves from their evil leaders who would, but for the remnant of honest men left, have destroyed their freedom. Never in the ugly history of agitators did they give themselves away more successfully than when they threatened to starve England by direct action to gain an addition to already good wages. At once, this was a little too much for the people. “If England starves, we shall,” was their logical conclusion. If production is strangled by unreasonable wages, the time will come when there is no money left to pay a reasonable wage. In revolution, it always happens that extremists break the bank they sought to enrich. The good sense at the bottom of the English character prevailed; and even if slowly, it overcame. The people began to see that once loosened from the chain their mischievous leaders had wound round them that antagonism between class and class is fatal to peace and progress, to realise that the rise in prices was the work of profiteering tradesmen, and to them the onus of the necessity for a rise in wages was chiefly due. The profiteering tradesman was their enemy, not the capitalist. Then they said among themselves, “We must get to work like honest men and give the best that is in us. We must improve and not strangle British trade, if we do we shall be the first to suffer.” We must not trust to foreign countries to produce for us, but produce for ourselves. He who trusts to purchase the necessities of life from foreign neighbours may some day find they have nothing to sell.

There is nothing in this that is new or original, it is the commonest common sense. It was by trying to escape labour and to put it into foreign hands and secure profit that England was growing idle. Trade was given over to the Germans, who, seeing they could produce more cheaply than the English because they paid lower wages, grew rich at the expense of England. England had the most industrious workmen in Europe, and the best, but by teaching them to shirk work, trades unions gave them away. In the new order this is changed. The workmen know now that to labour honestly brings not only pleasure but profit. The idle inherit poverty and discontent. The Germans said to themselves, “British labour in a state of unrest brings profit to us. Britain poor means Germany rich.” Germans are cunning.

§ 40

In a northern county, I heard the following talk. A group of typical blue-eyed artizans were sitting under an oak, enjoying their smoke after a hearty midday meal. The day was glorious; this English climate was at its best. One of them, evidently rather a leader of the others, was recounting memories. He was a fair old man, with something of the Dane in appearance, the kind of strong-spirited sensible character that the North supplies, a type of the men that made England strong. He said, speaking with a broad, pleasant North Country accent which I will not attempt to imitate: “The strikers were foolish fellows. I was a boy at the time. My father was dead against them. We had good wages, but we wasted them in selfish pleasures. We thought more about amusing ourselves than doing our duty, that is true. We had leisure, which we used badly. If we had chosen to do so, we could have got on quite well, but we were got hold of by unprincipled fellows a little more learned than we. They led us astray with promises to be rich without work. They turned our heads. It is true that food was dear by way of the rascal tradesmen—a lying lot they were. They hid behind their counters rabbits and such-like food because the Government was making them lower their prices when food got scarce.

“Now I see straight. Instead of striking we ought to have gone for the tradesmen. It was they who sent up the prices to profit by it while we were getting hungry. The lists of strikers the leaders published were all ‘bunkum,’ the majority did not want to strike. Now we have got rid of strike leaders, we see what they were—just men who wanted to get power to be in the House of Commons and play the gentleman at our expense. Now I know the difference between an honest master and the swaggering tyrants who pretended to be our friends. Give me for a master an educated gentleman, not a howling agitator, who out of our money built themselves fine houses. If we had known then what we know now, wild horses would not have made us ‘down tools.’ I see now, no capital, no labour. We had got into idle habits. Now we have changed, and see that honest work brings honest reward. Instead of dog-fighting, drinking, and low sports, in off times we do a bit of gardening, grow our own vegetables, and our missus and girls make their own frocks and weave the stuff on the old-fashioned looms I often heard my grandmother talk about. We are twice the men we were. A football match now and again is all very well, but making a business of games and gambling is ROT. And the best of it is that Parliament, where there was more talk than doing, didn’t work the change, we did it ourselves, setting to work like men, and gave up whimpering and grumbling like silly girls. I guess we took the wind out of the sails of the Germans and the rascally Bolsheviks. What the high up in authority were playing for was our votes, that’s all. We see straight through the politicians now, and don’t give them a vote, so the Talking House, I hear, is shut up, and a good thing too. We can keep some restraint over the chaps we have now at hand, and good ones they are. They pull the strings of the Commune effectually, where the tradesmen and suchlike folk out for themselves played what games they liked with us. There are good honest citizens on the Councils with no axes to grind, and they keep the axe-grinders straight. The Union leaders went too far for us when they threatened to starve England and tried to prevent milk from reaching our children. That was too much for us! We’ve got hearts and now we have got heads, and see through humbug like through a pane of glass. Since food is a reasonable price, we are satisfied with reasonable wages, and we have plenty of leisure, which we use profitably. Instead of only thinking of ourselves, we give a thought to the other chap, and that makes for union and fraternity.” These remarks, spoken with conviction, were received with applause. The man was the spokesman of the thought in the minds of his fellows. “That is Democracy.”

The English County Communes did well when they taxed the entrance of foreigners into local trades, and taxed all foreign goods (save Colonial) before permitting them to enter the country. Now there is plenty of work for all Britons, agricultural and industrial, and it will take a long time before the artificial liberty (so-called) has power again, because “The People” know their way about, and are no longer led by schemers and well paid “windbags.”

Before the change, which grew out of honest guiding, public opinion and education in its best sense was coming to a standstill. Parliament played with it in committee, the usual course when Ministers do not know what to do. New schemes for education wasted a lot of paper and ink, and cost the nation more than it could afford. Schemes which only played into the hands of the place-hunters came to little. Guidance is better than legislation, and immediate touch of class with class will do more to mend matters than a plethora of work of committees. The working class (inclusive) claimed a right to govern, and it is doing so now that it is learning to rule itself. All men, in whatever station, from the King to the humblest peasant, should be working men—anyway, the State demands that of them and rightly. The greatest crime to the State is indolence and idleness. The state has no need for them, or for those who, being so, are living on the earnings of their betters. Under the tyranny of commercial unrest every honest profession and trade was suffering (save the profiteers). The arts were suffering. A publisher had to think twice before he published a good book, a painter before he started a picture. The initial expenses had grown so large that under the best conditions only a very small margin of profit was left, scarce enough to keep body and soul together. Science was suffering because research can make no progress without capital. The expense of living to the most moderate consumer was becoming intolerable.

Ministers played cup and ball with legislation by first attempting to exercise control over prices, then withdrawing control, thereby leaving a new muddle to be dealt with. We all know Æsop’s satiric fable of blowing hot and cold with the same breath, but that is exactly what Government did. Who, putting two and two together, could, with the most kindly feeling, respect a weak policy which so well imitates the first Fable of Æsop, “The Man, the Boy, and the Ass”? wherein first the man was criticised for riding, then the boy for doing the same, then both for carrying the ass, which finally, was cast into a river and so disposed of. Compromise followed compromise, until the whole country lost confidence in their rulers, who, without a policy, were always watching which way the cat would jump. During the war we were better off than after it. After it was over the curtain had to be pulled up and the players to come forward, but no cheers for them. We saw the men who had made the muddle, which they were trying by every compromise to clear up. “The People,” seeing the paralysis of Government, took the matter into their hands and set to work to clear the situation by restoring industry, and they set to reform themselves by a sensible mode of living, not in sections only, but as a part of a great scheme in which everybody, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, was individually concerned. No amount of legislation made in the talking house, could reform a people unwilling for reform. “The People” saw their mistakes and set themselves to rectify them. The rich resolved to use their wealth for the public benefit; the leisurely their leisure to instruct, or, I like better the word, to guide the less cultivated minds; and young men on whose education large sums of money had been expended, instead of wasting energies on sport and a lazy club or society life, turned to make themselves factors of usefulness in a great national cause. Thus, the general tone of the nation rose rapidly from apathy to activity, from selfishness to altruism.

§ 41

Heavy taxation and inflated rates were telling upon production, and it was said, not once, but very generally: “We do not care to give away 50 per cent. of our earnings and hard-earned interest on a little money put by for old age and study, to a wasteful, shuffling Government, for whose follies in the past we are called upon to pay. We want, and mean to have, a real Democracy, not sham bureaucratic Government pulled by red tape and the impulses of impetuous politicians, who rush their fences when mounted upon lame hacks, trusting to Providence to land them on the other side, if possible, without a scratch. It has been known that riders have lost their seats in this proceeding.” The foregoing are not opinions created by the relator of this Dream, but constantly heard expressed by all sorts and conditions of men and spoken in public as well as in private; as such, together with more, equally trenchant and sensible, they represent the public opinion of the new Communes.

Dreams, like life, have distasteful moments. Even in them there are degrees of interest, commonplace situations, truisms, and paradox. But one has no choice, things are chosen for one, and in the sequence provided. Sometimes a very disorderly sequence! Subjects in a dream are arranged with anything but mathematical precision. Perhaps that constitutes half their charm. Everybody knows that the unexpected happens in life, as in dreams. The unexpected is, in this case, that the intellectual level in Britain rises higher and higher. The arts and sciences are taking their place in the new kingdom, and this, if it be true, is not an unnatural evolution, but a movement in the direction of survival of the fittest. The barbarous period of the near past was, in a sense, an accident. If, for a while, the influence of mental morphia prevailed, instincts were too strong to be permanently dulled. The spirit that was in the men who made our great cathedrals, who furnished our country with the most beautiful and desirable parish and village churches in all Europe, if unproductive, was not dead. The labours of generations of scholars, if put into the background in times of hurry-scurry, of facilities of swift locomotion, hence of restlessness, have not been thrown away. We were in such a desperate state of going to and fro that few found time to pause and think, to ask themselves the question if it were all worth while? If man, as a creative creature with a lot of the Angel in him, was mistaking Means for Ends? Means there were, and coming so swiftly that they jostled one another. So swiftly was every facility absorbed and made use of to acquire wealth (honestly or dishonestly didn’t matter) that the people were swept off their balance and became as atoms driven hither and thither in chaos. They mistook chaos for kosmos, licence for liberty, astuteness for intellect, the transient for permanency, and small things for great ones. The cry was, Agriculture does not pay. Of course it did not under the unnatural conditions of the time. Once upon a time 3 or 5 per cent. was good interest. When 10 per cent. was demanded, and much more hoped for, only gambling could provide it. Agriculture, the first need to be demanded, was pushed out of the field by Industrial Gambling. Ignorance of cause and effect, of the lessons to be got from History, blinded the eyes of gamblers to the fact that the fall of Roman power, while becoming almost universal, can be traced to the cessation of corn growing in the Agro Romano. Trusting her Colonies to provide grain led to idleness. A people, in the first place agricultural, released from an effort of their genius, became dilapidated and political; they exchanged Labour for luxury, easy getting for dignified control, and Rome became extravagant, and so, by degrees, she fell a victim to barbarians. She fell from a high to a low estate. Once a victor, and then a victim to the worst plague from which a nation can suffer: Idleness and greed for money without paying the price for it, Labour!

§ 42

If Rome thus suffered, why should it be impossible or even unlikely that a modern nation following the same road would not pay the penalty! The desire to get rich at all costs did not only endanger internal commerce and growth, but, affecting the whole soul of the nation, blinded to all other matters. Literary standards were lowered, Research was starved for want of funds; discoveries of the power and mightiness of the Past were known only to a comparatively few, rather held in contempt as Faddists, or, at the best, harmless lunatics who grasped at a shadow and lived in a Phantom world of their own making. Hence, compared with the great nations of antiquity, Britain was providing little or nothing by which future generations could gauge her creative intelligence or weigh it against her ephemeral conquests. There is no surer sign of the decadence of a nation than the cessation of Artistic activity. Politicians are but “will o’ the wisps” in comparison with creative Artists. They are but makeshifts, come to-day, gone to-morrow. What care we for the Politics of Bacon, or whether Shakespeare was a Liberal or Conservative? We know Milton was a Puritan; that does not matter, because he was a Poet.

§ 43

Where are the law givers of the Elizabethan period? Dead letters. That period is known and loved for the Poets it made, as well as for discoveries by travellers and men of science. It was a time of great craftsmanship also. It was a period of refined taste, when people were not aware of the Treasures they were making for the future to enjoy. The ambition to do that was quite outside the calculation of the recent Philistines. “It is good enough for me.” “It will last my time.” “It serves my purpose.” “I am a plain man!” Well, we all know that you are a plain man, and a selfish, stagnant man as well, and a person that leads to nothing, a brick wall at the end of the narrow footway on which you press your unprogressive feet; your only use is that you provide a subject for satire which Carlyle and Ruskin knew so well how to employ.

§ 44

Trade is much but not everything; it is noble when honestly pursued, but may be entirely the reverse. Trade is for the provision of food, clothing, warmth and sanitation. The service of Science is to protect Health, to soften suffering, to add to our knowledge of the wonders of the world we live in, to use its genius for construction, not destruction, to, if possible, prolong life, not destroy it, to make it happier, not sadder, to reveal the mysteries of Movement, of Light, of Force, to tell us, however little, of the Heavens and the Treasures still concealed in the little globe on which we stand. This is much, and would seem to be enough to occupy Science day and night. But there is another side to Science which is deplorable.

To invent engines, gasses, and substitutes for nature’s products from poisonous chemicals, is to abuse her genius, to fructify misery and accelerate pain. When doing these things Science brutalizes herself, distorts herself and renders herself a nuisance. By inventing engines to destroy, Science encourages mankind’s worst instincts, and by doing so is not advancing but delaying progress. Science can be every bit as harmful as beneficial; she can be as great a curse as a blessing. If the Great War did not teach that it has failed to teach one of its profoundest lessons.

§ 45

The Germans, through the aid of their scientific men, carried War to a depth of horror never before known. God help the world if Science is again so employed next time, maybe, to the extinction of the human race, certainly it will be to the extinction of all loveliness that God and man have created. A few days ago I read noble words of Anatole France to a teachers’ union: “Arouse the hatred of hate,” “glorify Love and Work,” “Burn all books that teach Hate.” “The hour has come for us all to be citizens of the World, but first of our own land, or to see civilization perish.” “Train intelligent workers, experts in the Arts they practice, knowing what they owe to the community of the nation and to the World. Teach Reason, Intelligence, Wisdom; the teachers of the future must teach the Love of Peace and the Hatred of War.” These are strong words from a great man.

By ingenious invention of destructive agents Science has been glorified by War. Why? Because she has lined pockets with ill-gained wealth; but, in reality, Science has debased herself. I would go a step further. I would, if I could, destroy every tradition which could prop up Science to do the like again. I would teach children that when Science misconducts herself she is on the side of an evil, not good, power.

§ 46

If a League of Nations is to succeed, the wings of Science must be cut, her reckless flight, curtailed. Science has, by adaptation of peaceful to aggressive purposes, committed a crime against herself. She has used her children to be poisoners and murderers. Germany set the example, under the title “Kultur,” a wolf in sheepskin. Science, perverted from her noble initial intentions, became popular; she became the means for fabulous fortunes; piles of money was the price paid for her ghastly cleverness. A not very enviable class wore diamonds, drove expensive cars and clad themselves in costly furs; that is how they went into mourning for the slain. Science, pressed on by commercial greed, lost a friend when War ceased. What hideous contemplation; the slaughter of our children paying a hundred per cent. profit.

Politicians may plan elaborate games. Complicated moves may look as if checkmate was certain. No legislator, singular or plural, will stop War. All Wars come from the commercial element in the first place. War is made now for a purpose, and if we look that purpose straight in the face it is “More money.” Plutus has been the god of the modern world. As long as he reigns Wars will be. Politicians and lawyers may try to wriggle out of it, but The Truth has a disagreeable habit of cropping up. Sophistry may do its best to hide it or drown it; it may be hidden but not destroyed. There is only one way to stop War; to make people abominate it, scorn it as a stupid reckless destroyer. Once there was chivalry, even a kind of noble beauty in its conduct, which, superficially, redeemed it. The South African War was a war to acquire diamonds; it was purely commercial, hidden by sophistry under a garb of protection of public interest. It was not public, but private commercial success which produced a shameful disaster which came near to wreck England. When we are really civilized and are engrossed in the Arts of Peace, when we are all bent upon making the world a desirable place by making Life growingly attractive, growingly efficacious for all the classes, War will cease to have any attractions. When the beauty quite possible to life is insisted upon by the exerted will of an entire people united in Fraternity, united in schemes for the betterment of moral status, of honour and of industry, War will cease, and not till then. When we would clean out a pond, it is no use to scrape its surface of slime; slime on the surface is only a superficial sign of trouble. The bottom must be cleansed, that is where the real trouble is. It is of little use to adorn a chair with fanciful design when its legs are rotten, they must be made strong. The mass of the people is as the clean bottom of a pond is to its surface, the chair to its legs. They must be strengthened and purified by education, which is not arrived at by a parrot-like repetition of facts or theories, but which teaches the whole duty of man to man, hence to God. That is what our new Education is trying to do. The child being father to the man, we try to take him in hand at once, and through him re-establish honour, sobriety, industrious habits which will lead his highest instincts and teach him that he must be master of himself, to which, having attained, he will be a guide, philosopher and friend to his and after generations. Make the people love Beauty as a sign to goodness, ugliness as a signpost to Evil. If that education fails none will succeed.

This discourse was delivered by an Expert. He was no amateur in Science; it was only that his fine mind was free from disillusion. Right and wrong are on different planes. They are disconnected, and he, being honest as well as gifted, had no intention of making a compromise between them! He has a great following in the New Life, and is a progressive power not only in his own but in all the Communes of England.

§ 47

We have seen that Forestry has been reinstated, and under what pleasant, profitable circumstances it grows. Now my dream takes me on, and my spirit peregrinates in other localities and seeks enlightenment. Windswept moors, and places where bogs are prevalent, prove difficult antagonists to agriculture as generally practised. It is true that what the Italians call “terra ingrata,” literally translated, “unyielding soil,” is in England as well as in Italy an obstinate problem, which it will take time to solve. In such counties where there is much of this unyielding soil, science is trying to find remedies or uses to which it can be put. Science is busy with experiments. Effort is being made to discover what trees (if any) can be planted with advantage in such districts; so far, the pine is in favour. In the meantime, much more use is made of peat for many purposes, as fuel for instance, and manure for gardens and the growth of flowers and shrubs, which answer at once to its fructifying influence. Extending my spirit flight through the length and breadth of the land, I see that no land capable of growing grain is out of service. Grain for bread, grass for cattle and sheep, unpolluted rivers where ample supplies of fish are obtainable, and the nation is provided against starvation, even in time of another War.

§ 48

“We are looking ahead now,” said one to another. “We are facing, not avoiding, the consideration of anxious possibilities.” “Each Commune of Britain is busy with problems to solve which will make us safe in emergencies; the policy of ‘Wait and See,’ than which none could be more dangerous to welfare, is treated (as it should be) with contempt. ‘Up and doing’ has taken its place; we have had enough of fallacious epigrams as catch words for opportunists.” The River Severn, one of the most productive in England, has been taken from German hands and is producing a goodly yield of food. There was a prejudice against “coarse fish as an article of food; we are returning to an old English habit of using it.” In old days most of the monasteries were erected near a river; where that was not possible, lakes were dug out and plentifully supplied with fish. We have returned to use an important and nourishing food in localities where it can be employed, and a great and growing industry is proving a success, it is feeding a large section of the people. Sea fishermen did not like it at first; it appeared to be an innovation of their right, but since it has proved not to interfere with their business it is accepted.

§ 49

There are many “practical” schemes being initiated. My dream leads me now into matters not generally called “practical,” but are necessary to a great nation. We all know (any way), who have read History what we owe to-day to the Monastic system, which, with all its abuses, did save learning. Monasteries were the Cabinets of tradition, without which we might now be barbarians, and it was by no means all for good they were suppressed. To Henry VIII. is not due all the mischief which Cromwell completed. The lands belonging to the Church were regarded with envy by the State before the coming of those two powerful autocrates. Every one knows that, but every one does not realise the debt we owe to a concentrated life going on amid war and rapine. Good things, if once they have been proved good and useful, are apt to crop up again. If not used exactly as they were, if the principle which started them no longer prevails, if their recurrence is not on the lines of what was called the “religious life,” the results they achieved may be copied in a New Age and under a fresh inspiration.

§ 50

Action and reaction are inevitable. Extended activities lead to complications and concentrated action to simplicity. Thus men, inclined towards quiet more than to jostle in the crowd, find it necessary to retire to find peace to work out their destinies, and in groups—in groups because continued solitude is paralysing, as much to mental as physical activity. There be men who are born in scholarship whose intuition is to research, they are the vessels that hold learning, but not seldom they pour it out with difficulty. They give it out drop by drop; they are to a nation what foundations are to a building. In a sense they are passive. History, Archæology, indeed, all the ologies, Art in its various branches, and Science in hers, cannot get along without silent strenuous workers who are as disinterested a race as our social system provides. Mostly poor, they live in solitude, receiving little encouragement. If they happened to have a small steady income it was heavily taxed. What with income, super-taxes and rates, what remained of small income, at the best, was reduced to less than that of an unskilled labourer. The New Communes seek these valuable men, who, when found, are presented with a “living wage.” Thus, some of the most valuable servants of the State are, at least, placed upon a financial basis with unskilled labour.

§ 51

There is another group of indispensable servants to the State which was neglected, whose wages were less than the modern menial—the teachers. They are men whose education has been costly to their parents, who, in more cases than not, could ill afford the drain upon their resources. While miners, servants, even ignorant boys employed by publishers to wrap up books for distribution, were getting wages out of all proportion to the work they were doing, these “teachers” went quietly on with their useful labour, unnoticed and ill-paid. They formed a large class of intelligence and usefulness which constituted The New Poor!!! While the Government was conceding principle after principle to “strikers” and to a whole army of unreasonable discontent, the men who were working quietly for the cause of Education remained outside the sympathy of Government “Officials.” Under the New Commune a better and more just system is at work. They are treated, having been chosen and selected with care, as public servants, and as such they are paid; at least, they are now upon a scale of pay equal to the scullery maid of the past. “The profiteers,” often as ignorant as grasping, drove about the country in expensive motor cars, while the makers of England, from an intellectual point of view, were disregarded, even treated with contempt, because the balance at their bankers was small, probably nil, while that of Profiteers was such that their ladies were in diamonds and furs, and Borough Councillors thrived upon the Rates.

Now, let me remember and state what, in my dream, such men are doing, as public servants, for the previously unestimated value of education for that part of the community which is called Labour. In one of the most beautiful parts of Kent, once “the Garden” of England, under the slope of its backbone, on which is the Pilgrims Way, the road from London to Canterbury, is to be seen a straggling group of buildings, evidently erected gradually as accommodation demanded. The starting place was an old barn, one of those magnificent but simple buildings which were next to the church in importance and only second to it in noble proportions and dignified aspect. In a way, those old Tythe barns represented the people and their agriculture as faithfully as the churches their reverence and sacred traditions.

§ 52

Once the storehouse for grain, the Tythe barns were the meeting place for landlords, their tenants, and country folk; the flail made delightful music at threshing time. In them county dances were held and seasons celebrated. Before the Town Hall was, they were. In the new life the Tythe barn was used, in the first instance as a dwelling place for a kind of Franciscan order, not bound by an oath or dedicated to any sectarian creed; it is a place of retirement for scholars as well as for communal activity. By degrees the little community grew. New buildings, inexpensive but sanitary, have been added; surrounding land purchased and cultivated with the specialties common to the soil of Kent—Fruit and Hops. Hops especially, because the New World repudiates “Kultur,” and no longer substitutes for that fragrant and desirable fruit deleterious chemical products which agents interested in a “Company” exploited against the original article. The noisy, smoky threshing machine does not visit here; grain is threshed by the flail. The occupiers of these buildings subsist upon their own land; cows and goats give them milk; they make their own bread, and brew their own light beer, and wines got from the elder, the pear, apple and some sweet grapes grown and flourishing well in sunny aspects.

§ 53

The community established here is voluntary, mostly composed of men of small incomes, large intelligence, and varied pursuits. Being in a sense public servants, they only pay a nominal tax to the Commune for the use of the land, and no income tax is levied from them. Intellect contributes what money cannot buy.

So interesting was the appearance of this little nest of disinterested men, so lively in surroundings, so snug in its suggestion of quiet concentrated life, that my spirit sought to examine it. It is high summer; the corn and fruit are ripening; the hop gardens are laden with fragrance. It is that time of year when repose seems to take the place of agricultural activity; the sun is hot, the air full of the hum of bees. It is the midday of the year when, as the old pagans told, the gods sleep. The sun, no longer hidden by smoke, is doing his work, preparing for the gathering time, fruitful autumn! Something after an old monastery it is. A refectory, and a kitchen built after the plan of that at Glastonbury, denote a goodly company to feed. Every member of the order has his sleeping cell. Those whose avocations are primarily studious have a study to themselves. It is noon, a bell rings. Soon the refectory is full, accommodated to hold fifty or sixty men of different ages and occupations. One could easily pick out the scholars from the active workers. There appeared to be no servants, so called; the cook was of the order; they waited upon themselves. What is the main business of the Order? It is “teaching.” The Prior, or he in priority, is a distinguished old man. I noticed or learnt by listening, that sectarian creeds did not exist here. They were just Christians, i.e., who work for others, give of their experience and knowledge freely and abundantly. The Athenic academy must have been something like this modern adaptation of Plato’s republic; who knows if there be not a Socrates among them?

There are artists and craftsmen as well as historians, and music plays its part, for in the refectory is an organ. Sweet music came from its pipes during dinner. The number I saw was not inclusive; many of the order were away in different parts of the county teaching. I heard that every county in Britain contains a similar Order of Teachers. The subjects taught, answer to the needs of the County. The Prior has power to choose from and send teachers where he pleases; in this sense he is an autocrat. The object is to instil Agricultural peasants with high Ideals of their life as such, and to enlighten Industrial districts by History. So much of the old agitation and mistrust on the part of the people was the result of ignorance. It was to combat ignorance and to place high ideals before the people that the Order was founded. Within an easy walk for the pedestrian, my spirit flew the distance in less than a second. I found myself in a village. It reminded me of one that in my waking youth I remember before the giant Industrialism had sprawled his uncouth body there, and with his great ungainly feet had trodden down grass, corn and fruit trees, pulled down ancient buildings to erect factories, and turned a place of gardens into ash heaps. The horrid remnants of his invasion have been eradicated. Everything seemed to record peace. The country at peace, the people at peace. I went into the village school; there I saw one of the order instructing. No birch rod was suspended on its whitewashed walls; I looked for it, remembering Dr. Johnson’s homage to the Rod, but saw none. The boys and girls were being led, not driven; interested, not forced; they were being taught the dignity of Labour and the criminality of laziness. Taught self-respect they were, and to abominate not only low actions, but dishonest impulses. From every cottage I heard the music of the loom. In the fields the sound of happy song prevailed. They rivaled the thrush and the blackbird, did those merry workers. They were merry with the birds, joining them in song.

§ 54

In dreams, seasons change places. Suddenly it is autumn, harvest time, a festival time when people are gay as they set out to gather the fruit of their ploughing and sowing.

It is the same village, but the aspect is in a degree changed. The repose of summer has given way to the activity of autumn, or rather to the approach of it. The harvest is in full swing. The male population is busy with Sickle and Scythe. I did not see the mechanical cutter; the New Communes find that the old system provides more work for the agricultural class, which has grown numerically since it became evident that Britain must feed itself with its own products as much as possible. This has led to greater importance being attached to agriculture than to industrialism, which is now an aid, not an obstruction to agriculture. The village forge is busy; scythes and sickles are being ground, new ones are in the making, fresh shoes are preparing for farm horses; wheels, of great carts to carry the grain and straw, are being set in order. A merry place is the forge, with its lusty bellows, bright fire and brilliant sparks like stars, dancing up the chimney. Everybody is alert. The parson, the schoolmaster, the doctor and land owner will take part in the great event of cutting and storing the precious products of the soil. I noticed several of “The Order” have come up to lend a hand. The great Barn is prepared to receive the golden result of a fine harvest. It has been a summer of sun; the corn is so ripe it shines like copper. The straw is strong, good for hat makers and those occupied in the use of that precious material.

How they work, the strong fellows; with what a heart they gather their own from the beneficent earth; it shall not be sold elsewhere until enough has been stored for the use of the Parish. The New Communes have an excellent habit of looking after their own people first, a bad commercial economy, according to old habits, but it answers well because it is just. Plenty of pure light beer is brewed, and pure because brewers are not permitted to adulterate it (if they did so here they would be punished as “forgers”); casks of this, and of home-made cider, have been carted to the cornfields. If the workers do stagger a bit no one blames them; anyhow, they have not been drinking poison, as they did in the past. When the golden harvest moon rises full in a purple sky, they fall to dancing and merriment, and sing folk songs, but before midnight they are at rest, for at daylight they must be up and at it again.

When the corn harvest is reaped and stored, the English vintage begins. Hop gardens in plenty are cultivated here. Every woman and child, besides all grown ups, who can be spared from the farms, are engaged in gathering the lovely green fruit. Hop gathering is one of the pleasantest of all agricultural operations. The scent of the fruit produces a charm as the scent of poppies does, a lotus-eating charm of quiet not excitement. The alleys between the stately hop poles bending under the weight of fruit are dotted with tints as of flowers, for the women’s and children’s garments are bright coloured, woven at home and dyed by the village dyers. Here is seen the natural life, for which man was created, from the labour of whose hands bread shall be eaten. No pale, sickly faces are seen here, no discontented looks, no morbid longings for a rich idle life prevail; instead of that are ruddy cheeks, beaming smiles, neighbourly greetings and happy songs are heard “through daylight hours.” Winter comes, no less beautiful than summer, only different. Work changes its character. The fruitfulness of summer depends upon winter labour. Not only labourers plough, the parson, clerk and “Gentlemen” plough. This reminds me that in this Dream of a purified and clean England there is no class of “Gentlemen,” because all who labour are such. A man who did not take part in the manual labour (in some measure, at least) would not be regarded with respect. Even those whose occupations demand care of their hands put in a certain amount of hard labour. Practice being better than precept, and fraternity being best of all, this habit succeeds.

§ 55

Now, winter is in full swing, the days are short, evenings long, but not dull. The Village Church, well warmed, is used for concerts, when not for them educational addresses are given by members of “The Order.” The big schoolroom is used for dances and play acting. It is considered by Village Communes that their duty is to help recreation as well as encourage labour. Concise little plays have been written by scholars of “The Order.” They make no fuss about scenery; what they do take pains with is the playing, which, in winter, forms a conspicuous item of education. It has been deemed wisest that the plays shall be simple and, above all, CLEAN minded. It is the object of the Village Communes that their people remain simple, which means not stupid, but innocent. As far as I have travelled I have been made aware that “Cinemas” are under strict control. It has been argued and decided that amusements may prove fatal to development. In no sense of priggishness, but as a proper protection. Cinemas are not permitted to show crime; they are used, as other enjoyments are, to excite the nobler not ignoble features of life.

We need not go to Germany now for basket-weaving, straw-plaiting and so on. That ancient industry is restored to England, which had let it slip, with too many others, into the hands of the Teutons an industrious people when the English were getting idle and were trying to live on other people’s earnings and labour, and more shame to them for it. It is the object of the Community so to conduct affairs that the idle are the exception, not the rule as they were growing to be some time ago. While those occupied in the affairs of the Communes are strict (for what is the use of Government if it is ductile, compromising and weak?), they are not autocratic, save in the sense that having framed laws, with consideration they carry them into effect. They do not make a law until they are sure it is a just one, and one which is necessary for the good of the people as a whole, not only for a section of it.

§ 56

This principle has done away with Class Legislation, which was proving a grave danger to the well being of England. Of course, it stands for sense that every County is not ruled alike. There must be Industrial districts as well as Agricultural, but they are not permitted to invade each other. As far as possible Industrial districts are not divorced from Agriculture. Now that the smoke fiend is no more Industrial districts can have their gardens, and the people can grow their vegetables and fruit with security. This has been made possible, as we have seen, for each person is master of his own little bit of land, which he is taught to cultivate, and which if he does not it is taken away from him and given to someone else who will use it. Once a year (if necessary more often) the leaders of Communes meet in conclave somewhere in the centre of England. There they consider the laws. In that way conditions are kept clear from becoming stereotyped. Men of various adaptabilities shake brains with each other. This becomes a habit and prevents isolation, because the national interest is the County interest extended. If Agriculture is to be the first consideration the main essential without which the nation might starve, Industrialism had to be checked, but not destroyed. It had to be put in its proper place, not as an autocratic ruler, but a useful servant.

Nuisances produced by Industrialism are sternly dealt with. No factories are permitted in Agricultural districts or to be planted in the centre of towns among dwelling houses or where they might be a nuisance. There is no hardship in that decision, it is just, that is all. Borough and Village, as well as City Councils, are now so represented that jobbery is put out of court. Not only is the body of the people considered, but the soul of the Nation is encouraged to enlarge and expand. Men have got to see that, and to act on it. All forms of religion are equally regarded. There is no State Church or State monopoly. It was a blow to the narrow brain, this was; it wrenched power from inquisitors and took the wind out of the sails of doctrinaires. But it is proved to have been wise, because there is more, not less, religion than there was. It is simplified on the broad basis of belief in God. The Devil gets a poor look in now. Religious persecution was one of his choicest allies. The Devil found in it admirable matter for his schemes, for it promoted hate, not love. The noblest Greek philosophy teaches that love was the first created abstract power, and what philosophy is better calculated to make men of us than that is? The story of the Garden of Eden teaches us that God made perfect beauty, which, by folly, man, in his inquisitive, greedy pursuit of wealth, attempted to destroy.

He had to become poor to buy back what he had lost; he had to labour to create a new Garden, and that is what the New Life is struggling to do. Not a less, but a more beautiful Garden than the first is being created. Now it is to be made for the many. We have history to teach us what to avoid, and what to cling to, and it is one of the chief duties of men versed in history to teach it to their less favoured fellows, and that the New Order is striving to do.

Christ’s disciples were few, but by their earnestness and belief in the truth they wrought a great change. Perhaps, in their enthusiasm, they broke away from things that were beautiful and useful; but one prominent good they did: they promoted a spirit of fellowship; of fraternity which, if not new in theory, was new in practice. The Franciscan Order began in spite of the Church. St. Francis was, in a sense, a revolutionary. While the Church was preaching wealth he preached poverty. While the Church was systematically conservative he was progressive. And with what swiftness his teaching moved. Beginning in a little company of followers in Assisi, the Order spread over Europe, almost as a flash of lightning. All the greatest things start small. It is enthusiasm that really moves the world; to use enthusiasm wisely comes afterwards. Who shall say how far or how beneficially the new lay Order in Britain will go? It may become the ruling factor of modern democracy; it may turn a paper democracy into a living one. Movements of less moment than this one have changed the destinies of nations, and such changes have always come about after great upheavals. After the terrible strain of War people looked about them and began to wonder if what led up to the War was not (even if it made wealth) destroying our spiritual nature. I like better, our instinctive Ideals. It surely made the wise think more deeply and the less wise wonder what was the matter. It was evident that a mood was about beyond the power of politicians to tackle. No red tape could do it; it could only wrap it up and put the bundle away in a pigeon-hole. Was it all a chimera in which we were living? Extended luxuries, ridiculously high wages, penalising taxes, were all artificial and demonstrated an entirely artificial life. Constant demand for excitement, if prolonged, must ruin a nation. The preachments of equality were vain; there is not such a thing and never can be. The only approach to equality can be found in equality of honour; each man working his best, giving the best for decent wages, and the noblest of all giving their best for no wages at all.

§ 57

What was the matter with England? Too rich! Too self-indulgent, growing idle and becoming dishonest! An enormous population of so-called Labour, led by ignorant, headstrong agitators. A weak Government, carrying on the tactics of promise and no performance, tactics of sops to agitators, of declining to face realities. A Government which was losing whatever respect it might have had, even from the Party in the Country which it had pampered and spoiled, and what for? To gain their votes at a general election. Tradesmen who could charge what they pleased, and a Government that one moment held them in check, the next gave way. Growing blindness to everything that makes a great nation, Honesty, Industry, Thrift and a high Ideal for the future welfare of their country, and entire apathy as to the judgment which history will pass upon the Tone of the People. In fact, something so like Anarchy as to be practically, if not theoretically, Anarchy.

Even if the Government saw the danger it did not face it. It dared not do so because its very existence depended upon a class, and that one the least provided with education sufficient to put it into a position of clear thinking and sound judgment. “The idle” rich were pointed at as the first offenders; Capital was destructive to Labour interests, was the foolish cry, as if a country could exist without Capital! The fact being that the higher wages the greater the capital will have to be to meet them. To achieve capital all must work!

In my dream just now I heard a workman say, “Never again will we cry out against Capital; we see now that without it we should be paupers! And who, after all, came forward in the extreme moments of stress during the War? Surely that part of Society dubbed ‘The Idle Rich.’ How was the cost of five millions a day met? By Capital, of course. How were we paid for making munitions? By Capital, of course. And (he went on to say), from our own point of view, in our own interests, indeed, discounting all others for the sake of argument, our enemies were not the rich or the refined and cultivated classes, they were the men who pretended to lead us, and, alas! they did so, almost to our undoing; but rid of them we are now, and will never again accept them.” New ideas, or old ones revived are catching, and if formed on the highest motives, will prevail as long as a good humour towards them is in favour. “The Lay Order,” which we have watched and found entirely sincere, is working a great change. Extending from villages to cities, from the fields to factories, from public to private life, the Lay Order finds respect from the peasant, the agricultural and the industrial classes. Its influence is felt in every form of social life, from the Lord Mayors to the humblest commoner. The peasant finds wisdom in these men! He saw them at the plough, he found them companions as well as leaders.

We hear him say, “What they teach they do.” At first they marvelled. “Why do gentlemen do this? We thought ‘gentlemen’ loved ease now we know that the real gentleman is a hard handed man with a gentle heart, and he knows more than we do, so we listen to him! The Order has done wonders in breaking down class distinction. Instead, fervent fraternity is taking root. “We have given up the fetish of equality; we know it is a broken reed that is quite untrustworthy, even to a drowning man.” We know, whatever station of life is ours, that we can dignify it or defile it.”

§ 58

Dignify it by exertion, defile it by apathy or worse. The churches looked upon the Lay Order with suspicion at first. Inclined to question their Dogmas, they called them “Socinians,” Atheists and even harder names we know of, triumphantly adopted by Dogmatists. The Cardinals of Rome mistrusted St. Francis and his little following, who cut at the root of their wealth. The Cardinals drove about in splendid carriages, were attended by gaily dressed footmen, of whom they demanded servility. The Franciscans walked, footsore in snow and hail, were exposed to scorching sun, were hungry, were beggars, but inside them they felt the warmth of the Love of God, and a burning love for their fellow-men. The Order has something of Monasticism, and why not? It is Monasticism purged of its morbidity. It is not eager to save souls for the next world, but to nourish them for their progress in this which is, after all, the only one that can be demonstrated and dealt with with certainty. They do not ask for joy after death, but before it; and they find it in labour, in labour for the less instructed, in the Doctrine of THOU more than of I. They remember a fine ancient saying, “Love enters the soul when self has evacuated the fortress of the heart.”

The word soul has been often used in this story of my dream. What do I mean by it? I mean that part of a nation and individual that is immortal! Not longing to escape damnation or to attain Joy hereafter, but escape it here, and realise it here. They teach the Art of living, “Ars Vivendi,” and it is followed with honesty and just pride, “The Art of dying, Ars Moriendi,” will take care of itself. They do not preach the joys of a life to come, but of this one which we can make joyful if we please. They are Idealists who are, at the same time practical; Rationalists, if you like so to call them. They accept matter, not as a check or obstacle to the conduct of an Ideal, but as inseparable from it. They teach Free Will, and have nothing to say to Predestination. The former is certain, the latter is supposition. It is the common sense which pervades their work that is making it respected. They teach an Ideal that can be touched if not entirely reached: that an Ideal is not a phantom.

Education is spreading persistently, not by leaps or bounds, but systematically and surely. Facts are taught, but not as a parrot is. Then cause and effect, of which the parrot, as far as we know is ignorant, is the very kernel of History. Young people are led to reason, to obey their instincts so far as they are justified. Facts are useful, but too many piled together puzzle more than invigorate the mind. If we try to hold too many seeds in our hand some must escape through the fingers. Young people are led, not driven, and with discretion. They are not crammed with useless facts. Every child, rich and poor, is initiated to a handicraft. In that there is no distinction; this was forced upon us when it became certain that we should have to be in a measure our own craftsmen and our own servants. The rise in wages made that a sine quâ non, and it has been met. The class that served as household domestics is doing now a work much more serviceable to the country; it is working on the land, both men and women are.

Performing our own jobs of mending, we have released a whole army of small hand-to-mouth trades. This is economical; indeed, at the price “little labour” demanded it was imperative, and since it has become a habit nobody grumbles. Home exercises of prudence and economy fill up moments which grow to be hours otherwise wasted. An effect this has had is remarkable; it has been the cause of greater, not less independence of self-reliance which tells upon character. We are very wary of men of law like Napoleon; we mistrust them as we mistrust all sophists. We do not care for them as members of our Councils; we use them as referees, not as helmsmen. The man of law goes round and round in a circle in equal distance from the centre, he avoids the centre. We like the guilty punished, but we do not like that he gets off on a point of law when the man who got him off knows perfectly well he is guilty, this is playing with Justice, not administering it.

§ 59

“We admit that a reasonable profit is justifiable on the sale of all goods, but the Great War taught us that tradesmen profited enormously upon our evil times. We might grow hungry, but they must profit by it; and it was men of our own class who did this mercilessly. This has made us beware of tradesmen, so we have put spokes in their wheels which they do not like, and finding they can ‘rook’ us no longer, they have gone to work on the land, which is better for their health and morals and for the country at large.” So spoke a workman—mind, a workman, not a capitalist!!

Another said, “Directly we saw straight, and viewed the horizon clearly, we knew we had power, and we set ourselves to use it rightly, and chose leaders who would help us. We do not intend to go back, we mean to go forward, and show the country that it may have confidence in us. We are learning to rule ourselves, hence we may claim a place among legislators. We know that a bad servant cannot make a good master. The old Trades Union masters could not become statesmen because they taught that “bad work is good for Trade,” than which nothing can be a greater fallacy.”

§ 60

A nation progresses, even survives, only on good work. It is ruined by bad! Since we are rid of bad leaders, the outlook on life is extended fourfold. The new Lay Order, being composed of a great variety of minds, some passive (as scholars and teachers must be, in a measure) active and alert, physically and mentally, leaves no subject of education, high as well as simple, untouched. Among this disinterested community there exists no struggle for precedence. Each man regards himself as an item of the nation’s wants, and strives to advance them in due order and without prejudice. Hence we have the men of letters, the Artist (inclusive) and Scientist working under the banner of Justice, hand-in-hand with the ploughman. The order is coming to be the root of all education.

§ 61

It is referred to by Village as well as City “Teachers.” It has become a kind of university, a source from which spring many small streams irrigating deserts that were unproductive. When started, the scheme was considered Utopian; a mere fad, and the men who framed its first principles were “Dreamers”—Poets, if you like, but unpractical. In a short time it became evident that far from being unpractical they were the reverse. They, seeing chaos, sought to achieve Kosmos. Success, hitherto gained, has been due to the touch created with an almost infinite variety of occupations and interests, which, while being local, are also national. They came at exactly the right moment, when a great upheaval threatened the very existence of England. By personal influence, direct and circumspect, they are doing for the country what the politician can never do, or statesman achieve, even if they are gifted with “Imagination.”

§ 62

Theories were abundant, practice now prevails. So sure is the growth of practical education that those who thought in grooves, now think broadly; hence they are not easily misled. The effort of each Commune is not to make new laws, but to enforce a few already made which, protecting every class, are not limited to one pre-eminently. It is said, “We got tired of Government which, to save their seats, listened to the last popular clamour, and toyed with transient public needs and opinions; which listened to the discontented and tried to appease them by promises which they knew they could not fulfil. We see through that paradox! We were tired to death of ‘The Plain Man,’ the obstinate ignorant utilitarian. We don’t want the kind of man who prevailed, who, to lay a B line of tramways, would, if he could, pull down the sacred trusts left to us by creative master minds. We do not want the kind of man who, for the sake of ‘Rents,’ would build factories or cheap houses on every open space, the ‘lungs of our Cities.’ We do not want the man who looks upon every fair garden to destroy it and erect ‘Flats’; who would float a company with promises of 10 per cent. when the capital is mostly on paper.”

§ 63

Once upon a time an ex-Lord Mayor was surprised to hear an expression of disgust at a proposal to convert Westminster Abbey into a railway terminus. “We don’t want that kind of Mayor or ex-Mayor; we regard him as a savage.” Excellent John Bright! Your study of the style of the Bible and Milton made you an orator, but not a wise man when you expressed a hope that Industrialism would so prevail that smoky chimneys should be everywhere as a sign of Wealth! You saw as a sectarian, narrowly and ill! The beauty of our English lake scenery would no longer exist if “The Plain Man” had had his way. The banks of the Thames near to Chiswick, that precious bit of rural Suburban London, was saved from destruction, but only just saved.

The promoters of the scheme held out plausible hopes to “The People,” but were outwitted, thank Heaven, and the King’s Meadows were saved. Had it succeeded Chiswick would have been under a smoke cloud, and we should have said good-bye to the health and beauty of what is still the most charming suburb of our grim, chaotic, dirty Metropolis. How to treat London as a whole, is under consideration. It will probably be broken up into self-governing sections. Much of it will have to be pulled down and rearranged. Open spaces will be increased. Public opinion will not, in these days of its greater enlightenment, be the slave of Jerry-builders or Companies that, for the sake of high interest, erected Pig-styes and called them dwellings. It is proposed to break London up, to equalise the number of the population in every district, and not to permit their extension in the future. One scheme I heard in my dream is to divide Central London from its suburbs by a zone, entirely free of buildings, which shall be one vast productive garden. It is thought to be a practicable scheme, in point of fact, the simplest yet suggested. The total abolition of the Smoke Fiend and the consequent clean and healthy air now enjoyed, and the quantity of sunlight being doubled, experts say there is no reason to doubt the healthy growth of fruit and vegetables in the proposed rural zone. Within Central London only such factories will be permitted which are entirely free from nuisance, disorder, bad smells or smoke of any kind whatever. A plan is being thought out to heat Central London by electricity upon the same system so successfully applied to the New City.

§ 64

It is determined already that from London Bridge to Richmond Bridge no factories will be permitted on the banks of our splendid river. Imagination will supply a vision of what our river might be then. Clear water, heaps of good fish, even salmon and trout, a place for pageants, a healthy playground for the people and as beautiful a river as any in Europe.

Centralization has received its death blow. Home rule, including all responsibilities, has taken the place of a gigantic mistake. Each County now rules itself. Only the best and most reliable men are in a position of power. Class legislation is at an end. The rich have no more power than the poor. The great or main effort of New England is to level up. That desirable object, indeed more than desirable, indispensable object, can only be attained by extending enlightenment, and to do so the whole nation is now of one voice. To sharpen our wits, as well as our tools, to enlarge the boundaries of our outlook, and to maintain simplicity. Not to be time-servers, but to recognise the debt we owe to aftercomers, and never to forget that we are trustees, not only of the moment, but for the future. To put big things before small. To realise, and profoundly, that every poor as well as rich man is a responsible agent; that responsibility is equal if different; the rich to use their money well, the poor to earn honourable wages for honourable toil. Never to forget that all labour is honourable, if well and honestly executed; and that idleness and living upon the savings of our neighbours is a crime against Society. Above all, to bear in mind that the Soul of a Nation must not be forgotten. Upon the purity of its conduct, the elevation of its Ideals, carried into effect by constant and the highest efforts, a nation keeps itself on the high road to dignity and prosperity. To do this we must choose our guides, not from platforms on Clapham Common, but from every class which, having learnt the lesson of “Self-Rule,” is in a position to lead others to attain it, and so to proceed with the delicate task of ruling others.

The foregoing statements are becoming truisms, so universal are they becoming. And hence a Democracy is a possibility, even a probability, as it is certainly the most consistent form of Government. To attain it discord must cease! The discord which followed the Great War was more dangerous to Britain than its great enemy, Germany. But, if that discord is resolved into a concord, deplorable as it seemed to be, it will have worked for good. The motto of the New England is an ancient Benedictine proverb:—

“Laborare est Orare.”

And so ends my Dream, which, when I woke, I thought might some day grow to be a Reality.

§ 65

I can find no nobler words in all literature with which to end than the prayer of Socrates, spoken at the end of the “Phædrus”:—

“Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be one. May I reckon the Wise to be the Wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can bear and carry. Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me. Let us go.” (From Jowett’s Translation.)

THE END.

Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Eight misspelled words were corrected.

Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters, were corrected. Duplicate punctuation was deleted. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. One missing section (§) symbol was added. Redundant word ‘thousand’ following ‘4,000’ was deleted.

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Table of Contents

DEMOCRACY— FALSE OR TRUE?

DEMOCRACY

- § 1
- § 2
- § 3
- § 4
- § 5
- § 6
- § 7
- § 8
- § 9
- § 10
- § 11
- § 12
- § 13
- § 14
- § 15
- § 16
- § 17
- § 18
- § 19
- § 20
- § 21
- § 22
- § 23
- § 24
- § 25
- § 26
- § 27
- § 28
- § 29
- § 30
- § 31
- § 32
- § 33
- § 34
- § 35
- § 36

A DREAM OF ENGLAND

- § 1
- § 2
- § 3
- § 4
- § 5
- § 6
- § 7
- § 8
- § 9
- § 10
- § 11
- § 12
- § 13
- § 14
- § 15
- § 16
- § 17
- § 18
- § 19
- § 20
- § 21
- § 22
- § 23
- § 24
- § 25
- § 26
- § 27
- § 28
- § 29
- § 30
- § 31
- § 32
- § 33
- § 34
- § 35
- § 36
- § 37
- § 38
- § 39
- § 40
- § 41
- § 42
- § 43
- § 44
- § 45
- § 46
- § 47
- § 48
- § 49
- § 50
- § 51
- § 52
- § 53
- § 54
- § 55
- § 56
- § 57
- § 58
- § 59
- § 60
- § 61
- § 62
- § 63
- § 64
- § 65
- Transcriber’s Note:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE