Ploughshare and Pruning-hook/Preface
PREFACE
These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the solution of the social or political problems with which they are concerned. They indicate rather a certain standpoint or attitude of mind from which these and like questions may be viewed, one which may find acceptance with only a few of my readers. Even those who are friendly may consider it too idealistic; those who are adverse will employ other and harder terms.
With regard to that standpoint, while not wishing to avert criticism, I would like to secure understanding; and if a few words of general application can make that more possible it may be well to offer them here.
Whether these lectures were primarily intended for the pulpit or the platform it would be hard to say. Most of them have been given in both places: and their drawback to some who heard them in the former was (I have been told) their occasional tendency to make the congregation laugh. That in itself is no special recommendation; it takes so much less to make a congregation laugh than an audience. Between the pulpit and the platform there is bound to be a difference; even the fact that the preacher is normally immune from interjection or debate tends to give to his statements a complacency which is not always intellectually justified. And I remember well that two of these lectures, after having been accepted in a church with only momentary breaches of decorum, aroused elsewhere a storm of criticism and rebuke which taught me, if I did not know it before, that a preacher occupies a very privileged position, and can turn a church, if he chooses, into a place of licence which elsewhere will not be accorded him.
But there is one point of difference between the pulpit and the platform, between the exposition of religion and politics, which I have never been able to understand. After all, in both cases, you are dealing with and making your appeal to human nature; you may be inciting it to virtue, you may be exposing its imperfections and its faults. Why is it, then, that in the religious appeal "conversion"—change of heart—stands for almost everything, whilst on the political platform it is hardly reckoned with? It is so much easier and safer to tell a congregation that they are "miserable sinners," and even to get them (perhaps conventionally) to say it of themselves, than to tell it, or to extract a like confession from a political audience. In a church we allow ourselves to be taken to task for "hardness of heart and contempt of God's word and commandments"; at a political meeting it is only our opponents whom we so take to task, while of ourselves and our party we have nothing but praise. It is on these lines that a general election is run—revivalist meetings are held throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results?
Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel—or without making the application very direct and personal. There is no institution in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools, prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies—all those things on which we most pride ourselves—are just as liable, perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God's word and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right over conscience—that if it has established order it has established virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary—not virtue but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our hearts into a State-regulation, there we have vice enthroned; and the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has become identified with law and authority.
A very good (or bad) example of this was provided by the conduct of the Bishops in the House of Lords a few years ago, when, to provide the Government with a short cut out of its difficulties in dealing with political prisoners (mainly caused by its refusal to treat them as political prisoners) they allowed the rules of the House to be suspended for the passing through all its stages in twenty-four hours of the "Cat and Mouse Act." Before long its operations horrified them, and they signed (or some of them did) letters and memorials of protest to the Government, asking for those operations to be stopped. But not one of them would make a motion in the House of Lords for the suspension or repeal of that Act for which, in so special a way, they had made themselves responsible. By allowing it to become law they had passed on the responsibility to others; and being thus quit of it, the last thing probably that occurred to any of them was that they themselves needed "a change of heart" in order to recover moral integrity, or even political honesty.
And so, in these pages, law and authority are just as much questioned as any other of our social features, on the direct assumption that like produces like, and that a form of society which establishes, encourages, or condones as "necessary" such defilements of human nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings, vengeful and unreformative punishment—having its heart so hardened as to tolerate these—is not likely in its institutions and government departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution of the social problem.
The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not think worth while—because its heart was not in them. It has had the heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely controlled, on the lines of love.
In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive, jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong, or consent to think that a change of its own heart was necessary. And as the very crown and apex to that mountain of self-deception, stood the ministerial bench in Parliament. When blunders had been perpetrated and became too obvious for concealment, we might occasionally be told that to make mistakes was human, and that government did not claim immunity from the operation of that law; but ministers would dodge, and shuffle, and lie—suppress, or even falsify information to which only they had access, rather than admit that they had "done wrong," or open their eyes to the fact that what they mainly needed was a change of heart.
And as with ministers as a whole, so as a whole with people. Those elements of our national and international relations which were leading steadily on to the great conflagration wherein we were all presently to be involved, were those in which (our pride being implicated) we stubbornly denied that any change of heart was necessary. The State would not admit that its exaltation of the Will to Power over the Will to Love was morally wrong; it would not admit that the alternative came within the scope of practical politics; such teaching it left to the advocacy of the Churches; and how half-hearted that advocacy had become under pressure of the surrounding atmosphere of national self-sufficiency was revealed when the war came upon us. Christianity became almost mute; the one form of prayer, special to the occasion, which the Church could not or would not use was that which alone is truly Christian—prayer in identical terms both for ourselves and our enemies. To pray that spiritual strength and moral virtue might be given equally to us and them was beyond us—though in the granting of it war would have ceased. We were not content to pray merely that right should prevail—right, that most difficult of all outcomes to secure when once, even for a just cause, nations embark on war—we insisted on praying that we should prevail: and so (praying for things materially established) not that we should prevail by a clean adherence to the principles of democracy, but by the instrumentality of a corrupt and secret diplomacy. And so before long—knowingly or unknowingly—we were praying for the success of the secret treaties, for the successful repudiation of the very principles for which we had set out to fight, for the suppression of Ireland's right to self-determination, for the downfall of the Russian Revolution, which was insisting so inconveniently on a belated return to first principles, and for other doubtful advantages not at all synonymous with the coming of Christ's Kingdom. And we were praying for these things—just as really, though we did not mention them by name—because our hearts were not set on praying for the well-being of all nations and all governments alike. Had we been capable of so praying, it would have meant that a real change of heart had come to us, and that we were offering that changed heart to all the world alike for the establishment of the new International.
But to such change of heart we could not attain—could not even consent; for it would have implied that there was something morally wrong in our national institutions, in our government and our whole social structure, which we would not admit. We would not admit that the chemic elements of our own national life had conduced to war in common with the chemic elements of the nation whose flagrant violation of treaties had given us the immediate materials for a good conscience. We fattened our hearts for war on the immediate material thus provided us, ignoring those other materials which lay behind, and which we and all other nations shared alike—though not necessarily in equal degrees.
And here we have the essential and fundamental difference between the genuine profession of Christianity and the profession of Cæsarism. For the follower of Christ to confess that he has done wrong, that he needs a change of heart, redounds to his honour—he goes down to his house justified. But when a nation has given itself to Cæsar, its main idea of "honour" is to refuse to admit it has done wrong, or to accept punishment; it may be beaten, crushed, but you cannot extract from it a confession of moral wrongdoing; a sense of sin is the negation not only of the German State system, but of all. A "proud nation" will not own that it has been in the wrong, least of all when it embarks on war; if it did it would go down to its house in dust.
Now that being, as I see it, the moral product of Cæsarism, in all its degrees and kinds—whether autocratic or democratic Cæsarism—of the setting up of the Will to Power over the Will to Love—it follows that the change of heart which I predicate in these pages for the solution of our social and international problems, is almost a Tolstoian negation of the principle upon which the modern state system stands. As such, it will be very unwelcome to many of my readers; but I hope that, as here set down, I have made my standpoint plain. The ploughshare and the pruning-hook are not mine to wield; I only point in the direction where I think they are to be found.