The Future of England/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
OUR DOMESTIC FUTURE
As the afternoon made progress, the light haze that had tended to obscure the details of the landscape began to thin and lift. For miles every house and roof stood revealed in clearer outline, wherever an angle could meet the eye in that close forestry. As they advanced more definitely into view, they, the homes of the people, could not fail to carry their own special suggestion and to impart their own significance. They prompted the thought that England, having become free, and having utilised that freedom in industry, was in turn employing the resources thus created to build the home, breed the family, strengthen the race, guarantee the future. The care of the race, or, if the term may be used, racialism that, after freedom and industrialism, is the next watchword of the coming time. Hitherto, our zeal for the goodness of the English stock, our study of the native breed, our thought for the child and the woman, have been backward and amiss. Alike in the country and the town we witness the bad result of past negligence and want of knowledge. This must be so no longer, or else our whole future will be invalidated. So, beyond the day when industry will be far more fruitful than at present, there will be another day and a better, when the race will be far stronger too.
Thus, as the young man's first object is to be free to go his own way, and his next is to earn for himself, and then to provide his own home, so it is with nations, or at any rate with England. In the seventeenth century she attained to freedom; in the eighteenth and nineteenth she addressed herself to industrialism; in the twentieth she will consummate these two achievements by establishing the family on the basis of health and strength.
The writers who, from Plato to Locke, and thence onwards, have discoursed upon the family, have esteemed it as the central pivot in human affairs, yet perhaps these thinkers have alike failed to lay sufficient emphasis upon two important features in what may be termed its unwritten constitution or natural structure. The first of these is that, as the family consists normally of a man in his prime and of a woman and children, the balance of sheer power inclines in favour of the man. By consequence, throughout many epochs the temptation and the tendency has been for an autocracy to arise within the bosom of this tiny state. Of this the Romans furnish the classic example, where the patria potestas, the authority of the father, reached at one time to abnormal heights. It must be confessed that a similar ascendency, though, of course, in an entirely mitigated form, prevailed at one time among ourselves, with whom, for instance, the married woman was deprived, until quite recently, of some of the most essential rights of property, while the child, far into the nineteenth century, was a person scarcely known to the law. For our fathers, in winning freedom at Naseby or Worcester, forgot to bring it home.
The other flaw inherent in the human family concerns the child and the woman rather than the man. The human mammal is peculiar and perhaps unique in the unusual length of its period of childhood or dependence. The reason for this may be the complexity and potential excellence of our capacities, which need an excessive time for development and co-ordination; at any rate, we commence our lives with a period of helplessness which is abnormally long. The parent, on the other hand, has, to some degree, lost the instinct for dealing adequately with childhood, acquiring instead, in the long ascent of humanity, the compensating gift of intelligence. For instinct knows, but can learn nothing; whereas intelligence knows nothing, yet can learn all. The loss of instinct is the price which man has had to give for mind, the premium which this mortal has had to pay for immortality.
In a word, nature has left a definite gap, a wide hiatus, between infantile needs and parental knowledge.
It is evident, then, that the family possesses, as it were, an unstable constitution. For it inclines to be upset from within, and it tends to display some incompetence in its domestic economy.
It was upon this organism, the family, that our industrial revolution fell, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with destructive force. The chief sufferer was the weakest unit of the family, that is, the child. Those who may doubt this should read that series of blue-books on the children of England, which, beginning with the report of 1817 on chimney-sweeps, may be said to have reached its climax in the report of 1867 on the abuse of children in agricultural gangs. That sequence of official documents is perhaps our most sensational literature.
Probably, however, the report and evidence issued in 1842 and 1843 by the Commission appointed to inquire into the physical and moral condition of the children and young persons employed in the mines and manufactures of this country, is on the whole the most representative and the most instructive of these documents. It appeared that an immense number of children had been drafted into industry. As regards mines, the Commissioners found that eight and nine was the ordinary age at which employment commenced, though it was frequently six and seven. Underground, girls and boys, young men and young women, and married women, worked mingled together, commonly almost naked and in the grossest degradation. The work as regards the children was mostly for twelve hours a day, while night-work for the infants was usually part of the ordinary routine. It was found that a peculiarly stunted and debased race was thus in process of production on a wide scale, utterly uneducated, and not only immoral but with no conception of Christianity or morals. In calico-printing, the report found, children of five or six were usually kept at work fourteen hours consecutively in all the districts. In the Wolverhampton region there was a "general and almost incredible abuse" of the children. At Birmingham vice prevailed almost universally from a very early period of life, accompanied by child drunkenness on a wide scale. At Sheffield, too, there was a prevalence of the same evil. In the lace business of Nottingham it was customary for children to begin at five or six, and to be called up to work at all hours of the night with disastrous results. All this was exceeded by what went on in the millinery establishments of the metropolis. In Lancashire the parents were in the habit of "sacrificing their children without hesitation" for what they could earn. The Commissioners concluded that, over great portions of the country, the natural parental instinct was wholly extinguished by the pressure of industrialism, "the order of nature being reversed." Thus the children in the industrial regions of this country were being widely manufactured into the degenerate, the idiot, and the criminal.
The specific nature of the forces thus let loose against the child, and therefore against the future, by the industrial revolution, deserve notice for the reason that they are not yet in abeyance. They are fourfold now. Factory life of necessity separates the woman from the child, and with the improvement of machinery the demand for women's labour is becoming accentuated in many departments. Secondly, the change whereby about three-quarters of our people have removed to towns, operates to the prejudice of the health of children. So far, then, the tendency has been for great numbers of our children to need more care than formerly. Thirdly, in the increasing strain of the industrial struggle the woman knows that it is vital to maintain the strength of the bread-winner, even at the expense of the child, and every economic investigation reveals this tendency. Fourthly, a strong motive has been brought into play inducing the parents to despatch the children at the earliest possible age into economic employment, in order to add to the family budget. The deleterious effects of this common procedure are universally recognised. Thus, the family, the factory which makes the future, is still thrown out of gear by the industrial revolution.
Looking backwards, we may recognise that the five volumes of the Commission of 1842-43 initiated the first stage of a social transformation. This primary epoch may be said to have lasted until 1889, and during the years of its currency, I have counted no less than eighty public statutes dealing mercifully with children, so deeply was the nation's conscience stirred with our domestic evils.
Nevertheless, all this legislation up to 1889 was to some degree experimental and preliminary, and failed to reach the evil deep down. It was the act of 1889 for the Protection of Children which definitely marked a new stage, and which, with its progeny of consequential statutes, will, if properly administered, be fruitful for coming generations.
Prior to that act a child had no legal right to proper treatment, to due care, to cleanliness, or to any of the conditions most essential to its life. The act accorded those rights. Hitherto there had been no such offence as ill-treatment or neglect. The act created those offences. Till then, however brutal or unendurable its treatment at home, the child must bow its head in submission. The act abolished that misuse and violation of authority. Before it passed, the English home could be the unassailable castle of an unnatural parent and the prison of a victimised child. The act swept away that heinous prescription. Till then, the law only provided homes for the destitute child: henceforth it provided prisons for the criminal parent. Hitherto the parent had owned the child as his property: for the future the child had the privileges of a citizen. Hitherto the child had received the necessaries of life as matters of parental grace: henceforth it could claim these rights lawfully.
Following closely upon the act of 1889 came a series of important statutes dealing with the same subject. They culminated in the Children's Act of 1908 with its 133 clauses, and thus altogether, during the last seventy years since 1840, some 110 statutes have been carried to mitigate our reproach.
With the act of 1908 the second stage of this long process approached its apogee, and is giving way to the third. It is with this third stage that the future is more closely concerned.
This third stage, which promises to be a very long one, was perhaps definitely inaugurated in 1908, by the report of the Committee on the school attendances of children below the age of five. This body, composed of twenty-one of our gravest experts, in a parliamentary report of 350 pages boldly entered the precincts of the nursery with a temerity unknown till then. They patronised net-beds. They tabulated the respective merits of black-boards and gold-fish. They acquiesced in the existence of Noah's Ark. They passed the rocking-horse. They descended as deep as sand troughs. They even authorised the unequal combat to continue between the spade and the sand-pie, on the one hand, and the ocean, on the other. Is the nursery to be revolutionised? For perambulators were not specified, and will the go-cart go?
But the Committee touched upon matters weightier and wider even than these. They laid it down that the first three years of a child's life are the most critical of all, and they pointed out logically that if the State acknowledges, as it does, the duty of training children after the age of three, there is even greater reason for extending that care to those below that age. They were convinced that the improved treatment of the children depends almost entirely upon the improved condition of their homes, and urged that, as the best place for all children under five is a good home, the State, in improving the condition of the children, should work in unison with the home. These principles mark a new departure. We are boldly to co-operate with the family, handling the raw material of our future, and adjusting it to the loom of the coming time.
It is sometimes said, and more often thought, that this is folly, that it is infinitely better for the weaklings to die rather than be coddled into a miserable existence, and that there are far too many as it is. But such a policy is unpractical. That thousands of infants should perish outright might be tolerable enough, were it not that the hundreds of thousands, who would muddle and worry through, would be so invalidated by the initial struggle as to grow up weaklings, and physical and mental degenerates. Therefore, a high infantile mortality rate inevitably connotes a far higher infantile deterioration rate. Hence, if the policy of neglect were adopted, the national physique would be endangered or doomed. Besides, modern science has indicated that not far from 90 per cent of our infants are born healthy, and are thus given a fair start by nature, so that to maintain them in health is by no means a hopeless task. Lastly, the argument that there are already too many is founded on erroneous economics. The true position is that each sound unit, instead of detracting from, adds to, the sum of human happiness, wealth, and efficiency, and is urgently needed to strengthen the scanty numbers of the imperial race.
It may be answered in reply that, though all this may be so in the abstract, there is no concrete proof, and can be no proof, that the family is now incapable on any broad scale, that therefore the call for outside interference is unwarrantable, and that the long roll of statutes already passed in favour of the young should now suffice. Yet there are overwhelming facts to be put honestly upon the other side.
For instance, there was published in 1910 the result of an inquiry, organised by the Board of Education, into the physical condition of our children as a whole. This was an undertaking unique in our history, and contained for the first time irrefragable evidence of the true condition of affairs affecting the six million children in the public elementary schools of England and Wales. The state of the children was shown to indicate a lamentable submission on the part of the parents throughout the country to filth and sluttishness absolutely incompatible with decency or selfrespect in the homes. That dirt and disease are congeners seemed utterly unknown or completely neglected. In July 1911 it was officially stated in Parliament that the "vast majority" of parents are utterly "surprised" when the actual illness of their children is brought home to them. Or again, an official inquiry recently conducted into the persons blind from childhood has established that from 50 to 60 per cent of this evil is solely due to the utter ignorance and incapacity displayed in the home. Such statements might be multiplied without end. Taken together they confirm the view almost universally expressed by those best qualified to express an opinion, that the incompetence displayed in the nurseries and homes of this country is profound. This, then, is one of the reasons why, in the words of Mr. John Burns, "we are beginning to concentrate on the child."
These views can be verified if we consider the recent history of infantile mortality in this country, which is, perhaps, one of the most compendious tests of health. The law here has been that, while for the half century from 1860 up to 1908 the annual death-rate of all persons in England and Wales fell rapidly, that of infants under one year of age fell much more slowly. In fact, the latter rate in 1895 and 1899 stood actually at its highest level. The reason for this divergence between the two rates appears to have been that, while public energy in sanitation, and so forth, favourably affected the seniors, it was not able to exercise a correspondingly beneficial effect on the nursery, owing to the invincible inability and prejudice displayed in that department of our social system. Now, however, that outside influences have begun, in 1909, to penetrate successfully into the homes we may expect an eventual response of the infantile death-rate, which, indeed, in 1909 fell from the 1901-8 average of 133 per thousand to the unprecedentedly low figure of 109, and again in 1910 to 106. The fivefold influence of teachers, health visitors, inspecting officers, care committees, and medical officers, of whom to-day there are nearly a thousand, has now at last been mobilised against parental inefficiency and in favour of the child. The work of rebuilding the national physique has at last been initiated, and must for many generations to come call forth our energies. If Comte said rightly that the first seven years of life are the most decisive, it is in the family that the national existence is primarily at stake.
After the nursery, the school. The school is the next stage of human life, and here too the family has shown itself quite unable to satisfy the call of the future.
As with so much else, it was at Athens that the theory of elementary education was first formulated. For Socrates, on his visit to the Athenian workshops, laid it down that though the artisan, in virtue of his technical skill, has an advantage over the thinker, what he needs is culture after all. That proposition, after twenty-three centuries, was not accepted practically in England until the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Although we have been so backward in this department, it must be remembered that there have been, nevertheless, two remarkable periods of educational activity in our annals. The first had its flowering time in the thirteenth century, when the mediæval mind was more alert than before or later, and Oxford could rival Paris itself. The second came to a head from the time of Henry VIII. to that of our Civil War, during which epoch nearly eight hundred grammar schools were founded for the public benefit. And yet it happened that both these extraordinary efforts seemed in course of time to yield relatively poor fruit.
The reason of this strange weakness in the intellectual organisation of the most vigorous of peoples has called forth the speculations of thinkers, who, however, may not yet have touched the truth. Perhaps the real reason was our neglect of the education of women. Mediaeval pedagogy looked to the male rather than to the female, for the end of its instruction was the Church, and the highest purpose of its chantry and cathedral schools, those cradles of elementary education, was to produce clerics. Similarly with the second movement initiated at the Renaissance. In all the deeds of gift and statutes of founders instituting those eight hundred grammar schools, scarcely one can be found which allows girls to be educated. The object of the pious founders was almost wholly to teach boys Greek and Latin, together with religion.
But if the women of a nation are practically uneducated, the educational system of that people is insecure. If the man vetoes the education of the woman, the ignorance of the woman forbids the education of the child. If the child has not that home education which, as Plato said, is of all things most valuable, the vicious circle of ignorance is complete. Does that account partly for the past of our educational deficiencies?
At any rate, whatever the explanation, the history of our education up to the closing decades of the nineteenth century is not merely a record of stagnation but even of lamentable and painful decline. That statement is not speculative or hypothetical. It can be proved to the hilt by a perusal of the conclusions of the Commissions which sate in the 1860's, and reported respectively on our elementary and secondary education. Altogether, these documents stand to the pedagogic world as the report of 1843 stands to the industrial. They revealed a deplorable condition of ignorance, chaos, and decay.
As touching elementary education at that date, it was required for 4,300,000 children. Of these no less than 2,000,000 were not at school at all; while another 1,000,000 were at schools of utter inefficiency. The rest were distributed among institutions of varying degrees of merit. And this in a country whose American offspring had instituted a sound system of general education since the time of Cromwell, and whose Scotch neighbours had organised the same since the days of William III.!
But if the elementary system was bad, the secondary system was really pathetic in its decrepitude; and the ponderous tomes of the Commission which inquired into the state of our grammar schools and other institutions of secondary teaching, constitute one of the most melancholy chapters in the history of the English mind. The body of Commissioners was moved to propound the thesis that girls should have full participation in any such system as could be set on foot.
It had therefore become evident that the State must henceforth abandon its immemorial policy of abstaining almost totally from interference with education. It had relied on the family, and the family had failed it. Parents had not seen fit to insist on the education of their children, so the State must reluctantly adopt the imperative mood, effecting forcible entry into the family precincts and possessing itself of the child. In the words of the minister who introduced the Education Act of 1870, "England must now make up for the smallness of her numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual."
During the period of nearly half a century since that time the efforts of statesmen have been directed, of course, principally to establishing a satisfactory system of elementary education. To test the enlightenment of our day, it is possible to put in percentages the education of an average boy, say in a London school. It would seem from this calculation that his time is allotted as follows: 45 per cent to reading and writing English, and to arithmetic; 15 per cent to the threefold study of geography, history, and nature; 18 per cent to the artistic pursuits of drawing, handicraft, and singing; 12 per cent to physical exercises and recreation; 10 per cent to religion. It should be added that the work of a girl is somewhat differently distributed, as she has to give much time to domestic economy and housewifery. A mediæval schoolmaster who taught the seven sciences would have been little edified on hearing of this procedure, and might even have been aghast.
The instruction thus given to the 700,000 children of London, to take them as a sample, may be viewed in another light. They spend twenty-eight hours a week continuously during nine years under fairly satisfactory conditions of air, warmth, and light, engaged in wholesome and stimulating pursuits. Considering what their homes often are, this itself must be reckoned an immense benefit.
It would be an error to conclude from all this that the problems of our elementary education have even yet been solved by the administrative energies of half a century. The warring claims of humanism and industry still jar. The Poor Law Commissioners of 1909 found among almost all their witnesses a strong feeling that the system is still unsuited to practical needs. Or again, that the distaste of the parents for education is still decided may be judged from the fact that, though they can claim gratuitous elementary education for their children up to the age of fifteen, the vast proportion withdraw their children from school on the earliest possible opportunity, at the age of fourteen, thus rupturing their scale of instruction at the most critical point. Or again, many listen to the advice of Tolstoi, the Rousseau of our time, like him a revolutionary and like him an educationalist, urging that children should not be burdened with books at all, that all boys and girls should be trained mainly to work with their hands at domestic duties, that all the school systems of modern states instil false statecraft and inspire wrong jingo ideals, and that disorder, or free order as he called it, should be encouraged to evoke individuality at all costs. Nevertheless, in spite of such moot issues or deficiencies, our elementary system may be pronounced to be taking shape on set lines, so that it can no longer be said to the English educationalist, in the matter of elementary instruction: "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep."
The main educational issue of the coming time centres, then, not so much in elementary, as in that vague and vast field known as secondary, education. It is in this region that the battle of England's commercial supremacy may be lost, and must be won.
Those who would try to define the secondary education of this country, will not succeed, or, if they do survive and reach the other shore, will emerge from their Odyssey as exhausted as the much-travelled and much-troubled Ulysses. The French, very logically, have their primary, secondary, and tertiary, education; we call the first and last by the terms Elementary and University, though still, with disregard of coherence, retaining the second name.
Writing in 1887 amid the torrent of Jubilee, Matthew Arnold sounded an emphatic warning. Our secondary education, he said, is a chaos. He pointed out that the bulk of the middle class of this country were worse educated than the corresponding class either in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, or the United States; the reason being, he explained, that our upper class do not want to be disturbed in their preponderance, or the middle class in their vulgarity. Let us have, he cried, good elementary schools taking our youth to thirteen, and good secondary schools taking them to sixteen, together with good technical and special schools parallel with the secondary schools proper. As yet, nothing really substantial or adequate had been achieved; we had indeed broken up the old type of secondary instruction, but had not yet founded a new one of any soundness or worth.
It must be confessed that, up till 1902, which dated a new epoch in this connection, little clear response came to the objurgations of our English Jeremiah. This branch of instruction continued to grow haphazard, unpruned, and at its own sweet will.
Yet secondary education is vital to our ultimate prosperity, since it undertakes to guide youth at its most uncertain hour, when it enters, or ere it enters, the real business of industrial life.
The cause of our tardy action has been that in this country the function of secondary instruction is complicated by special embarrassments. The precise nature of the difficulty may be stated to be that while, on the one hand, compulsion by the State ceases abruptly at the elementary age, on the other, nearly two-thirds of the boys leaving the elementary school select a form of occupation where there is little initial call for skill, no provision for training, and small prospect of a permanent position when the boy becomes a man, so that they feel no reason to pursue their education further than the primary stage. The individual needs to be shepherded towards aptitude and efficiency, and this, next to our care for the physique of the race, is the other main problem which for many decades far into the future, if we are to judge from the analogous history of our primary education, must exercise us most.
A reference to the example of Germany may serve to clear our views as to the office of secondary education. The 9,000,000 school children of Germany are compelled to attend up to the age of fourteen, and after that age must, as a rule, attach themselves to an evening continuation school for three years longer. Here actual compulsion ends, but indirectly it is made difficult for them to dispense with secondary education. For a pupil, by obtaining a satisfactory certificate from a secondary school, can by this means secure entry into certain University courses, and thereby into some important professions, and can also in this way procure exemption from one year's military service. Hence, elementary and secondary education are closely affiliated in the fatherland. These secondary schools are either classical (Gymnasien), or modern (Realschulen), the former usually preparing scholars for the University, and the latter for the Technical High Schools. Secondary schools altogether educate nearly 400,000 scholars under about 20,000 teachers, and furnish instruction of the most advanced type.
On leaving the secondary school the German youth passes either into one of the Universities, of which the purport is pure culture, or into one of those Technical High Schools, of which the recent growth has been so conspicuous and formidable. It is in these latter that the qualities of Teutonic thoroughness are best displayed, and most unerringly applied to the triumphs of industry. These High Schools are nothing less than the headquarters of modern science, where a staff, comprising the most renowned scientists, plan, from the retorts and microscopes of their laboratories, campaigns against nature and the conquest of the commercial world.
Nevertheless, though Germany may be said to have outdistanced us at several points in this department, we need not definitely adopt sackcloth, or pour ashes too indiscriminately upon our head. Since 1902 we have begun to wrestle with our own problem, and there is no doubt that we are making considerable way. The main necessity of the time is not merely to organise secondary education as a thing apart, but to link it to primary education by some device which will induce our youth to remain within the circuit of instruction, instead of abruptly quitting it. To the achievement of this end something has been already contributed. One of the more hopeful innovations of our time has been the remodelling of our secondary schools, together with the provision by local authorities of organised scholarships. Schemes, enabling promising pupils from public elementary schools to proceed to the next stage of instruction, are backed by the regulations of the Board of Education, making it a condition of increased grants offered to secondary schools that a proportion of free places, ordinarily one - quarter, should be reserved in each school for pupils from elementary schools. Thus the bulk of the State-aided secondary schools are now under effective control, and are open, as regards a certain number of places, without payment of fee, to children from the public elementary schools. There are now few populous areas in which there is not some suitable secondary school accessible to all classes, and there is a tendency of public opinion to regard a complete national system of secondary schools as, at all events, a desirable ideal.
And yet, in spite of these cheering considerations, our secondary education is in germ only, and is utterly incomplete as yet. At the present date we have only 161,000 scholars in secondary schools, and even these, in most cases, according to the statement of the Minister of Education in July 1911, "come in too late and go out too early." Besides, the nature of the teaching in these schools has been hitherto, and is still, unsatisfactory, for, in the words of the same authority, "there are far too few of the teachers in secondary schools who have had anything in the nature of training."
In a perfect system the next stage for our youth would be to proceed regularly from secondary to what may be termed tertiary, or University, instruction. But of course, in our present stage, such an idea is out of court, and in August 1911 the minister responsible has drawn due attention to "the apathy of the public at large" to this branch of education. Indeed, it is beyond the present hopes of practical men that the generality of our youth should even proceed so far as to attend secondary schools proper. Let us be more modest and more sober in our immediate aspirations. At present, our best efforts are directed to organising schools of a humbler quality than the secondary schools, where boys and girls, immediately after leaving the elementary school, may be trained practically in their future businesses, or to instituting evening schools, which may present some useful education after industrial life is already begun, or art schools, where the young may be taught to apply art to mechanical processes, or, again, technical institutions proper.
Here, again, even the most pronounced optimist must realise our painful deficiencies. The minister explains that in technology, as compared with the Continent, "we have most leeway to make up." And indeed, if, to the full-time students in our eleven modern Universities, be added the undergraduates and post-graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, it will be found that England and Wales possess 16,600 students only, against the army of 63,000 students possessed by Germany in similar institutions.
Thus, is it too much to say that our system is still inchoate after the efforts of fifty years? Let us believe that in another fifty years a definite organisation will have finally won its way amid the press of educational controversies. Growth is slow; prejudice and counter-interests are oppressive; the calls of life are insistent; and this powerful race has some innate and profound distrust of knowledge for its own sake, agreeing with Epictetus that education is a surgery to which we go not for pleasure, but for pain. Will not the future take a wider view, and form a more generous conception? For the true object of education is that each body should have its own hygiene, and each mind its own Renaissance, and each soul its own Reformation.
Racialism, then, or the culture of the race, and the care of the individual—this, before all! Such, above all things else, will be the domestic business of us in the twentieth century. As we judge the seventeenth century by its work for freedom, and as we test the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the value of their industrialism, so, domestically, the England of the twentieth century will largely stand, or fall, in the estimation of the future by its success, or failure, in dealing with the health and physique, bodily and mental, of the English race.
It may be said in reply that other internal issues much more vital and much more moving fill the air and will engage the energies of men. The battle of liberty, it may be argued, is never won, and the social forces wage a warfare for predominance which can never cease. True,—yet, in sum, the classic time of freedom is in the past not the future, and, were it needful to revive the battles of liberty in the face of new oppression, the refurbished armour of those old days would suffice.
Or again, it may be thought that the reorganisation of our industrial system should be the main goal of our future efforts, and that it is here that we shall witness the most momentous transformation. True, again, partially—for evidently, even after the labour of generations, it is as yet half-way. Yet here, too, the main line of progress is well foreshadowed.
But the really vital and momentous thought, only now beginning to dawn upon the public mind, is that in all the catalogue of her achievements England has neglected her own breed of men. Walk through the streets of Gath or of Ascalon, where three-quarters of our populace are now gathered together, and see if that be not true. The cause of their condition is the physical breakdown of the family over large areas before the pressure of industrialism.
Five proofs of that truth are available, and cannot be too much laid to heart. Parents, under the stress of the industrial struggle, have not been able to resist the temptation of sacrificing the health and strength of their children for the sake of the money which the latter can earn. Next, the State, which deliberately, and of set policy, had left to the family the task of educating its offspring, found that such a task and duty had been hopelessly neglected by the mass of our families, and that education must, in consequence, be made obligatory upon them, if this country were not to be distanced by its rivals, and if its freedom were not to be a broken reed. The third proof has been found in the figures of infantile mortality, furnishing evidence of parental indifference or incompetence to a serious extent. And then, too, the recent investigation into the cleanliness and habits of the children, as they appear at school fresh from their homes, has revealed an astonishing mass of ignorance, and a marked neglect of the most elementary precautions against disease upon the part of the parents.
The fifth proof is not less cogent than these. If we look at the class of the casual labourers of this country, calculated at somewhat under two millions in number, these often fail to get a full week's work, and their average earnings for the year are so low that, even with careful management, they are frequently unable to procure for themselves and their families the necessaries of healthy life. It is these men who, with their families, fill the hospitals and infirmaries, and burden the community in so many ways, while the hundreds of thousands of their children share the demoralisation of their parents. It is largely the offspring of these casual labourers who grow up so under-nourished, and poorly clothed, and degenerate in physique, and who lack not merely food and clothes but even a minimum of home care. Thus the children recruit the ranks of casual labour, follow the parental example, decline to work regularly or learn a trade, and breed families prone to an early degeneracy.
It is difficult then, after weighing all these reasons soberly, to deny that this widespread weakness of the family, the oldest, and most powerful, and best of human institutions, is the gravest evil, the most urgent domestic problem, which we have still to face and overcome.
Therefore, a touch of gloom, a wave of shadow, seems to overcloud the future here. What bad ingredients in the glory of England! What errors we may perpetrate, what delays we shall undergo, ere we feel our way to the desired end of recuperated family life and revivified personality!
But a further thought suggests itself. This racial evil has been on the increase for several generations, having grown with the growth, and strengthened with the strength, of the industrial revolution. What, then, is the fundamental reason why, for so long a time, our administrators sate inert in face of the progress of this malady? In the name of what principle did they abstain from grappling with it? That question cannot be put aside lightly. For, if the same cause be now operative and applicable, it might be calculated to tie our hands too.
The true answer goes down to the crucial subject of the relationship of religion and the State, and the proper functions of each.
Statesmen are those, doubtless, who, by business methods and practical expedients, seek to realise materially the ends and ideals of the governed. But that which ultimately provides the ends and ideals of any people, and thus regulates from outside the scope of statesmanship, without interfering in its methods and internal economy, is religion. Therefore, the State is, as it were, the adjutant, the bailiff of religion, the general manager of mysticism. It receives its highest ideals from across the religious borderland.
It so happened that, in the Middle Ages, religion was pushed forward by the aspirations of Italian statesmanship and by the mental energy of the Scholastics far beyond this, its constitutional boundary and term. In plain words, religion strove to lift even administrative and executive government out of the hands of secular practitioners, thus exceeding its office. St. Augustine, in early days, had indeed countenanced the conception of a Church purely spiritual, in contact with a worldly state. His great mind, however, had recognised the difficulty, or, more strictly, his consummate wisdom had assigned to each its place. But what was given to the founder of medieeval theology was not accorded to his successors; his greatness was taken: his weakness left. These latter, in their speculative imprudence, ran violently down the slope avoided by the Fathers, and thus the Church bade fair to be dragged to the lower level of mere statesmanship by the juristic dialectic of the Roman canonists. The result of all this was the Reformation.
Just as, doctrinally, the Reformation strove to replace the mediatorial priesthood of the clergy by the spiritual priesthood of all believers; so, politically, it consisted in the emphatic, and even violent, assertion by the State of its power over the Church. Hence the absolutism with which modern times opened, when statesmen, turning the tables on ecclesiasticism, attempted to penetrate far into its precincts.
This counter-attack by the State had proved a failure, in England at least, by the eighteenth century. For the English people declined, with their usual stubbornness, to be carried too far in either direction, and would no more consent to a strict political, than to a strict ecclesiastical, control, evicting the Stuarts on the one hand as they had repudiated Rome on the other.
With the eighteenth century, therefore, a novel situation arose. Church and State alike had gone under in turn. Each had definitely failed to assert its ascendency in a sphere not properly its own. The mediæval edifice which, mingling truth with beauty, had been the common shrine of sixty generations, was a dismantled wreck. Correspondingly, the State, now aloof from religion which it had tried in vain to dominate, had nowhere henceforth to apply for its higher inspiration, and there was nothing to make the dry bones live.
This was the cause why our State in the eighteenth, and through much of the nineteenth, century proved itself so unfitted to meet those needs of England now under review. For when, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, our materialistic and industrial expansion began, and active measures became then, if ever, necessary to solve the domestic issues opening up, we merely floated along. From whatever angle the statesmanship of that period, so far as it had to do with the health or happiness of the people, be considered, an emphatic condemnation must be pronounced. As a legislator of that time said, legislation really proceeded on the principle that life had grown cheap. Parliament's constructive social legislation was practically confined to multiplying capital offences, which, at the Revolution of 1688, were about fifty in number, and, at the opening of the nineteenth century, had risen to about two hundred. The penal code, presently to be transformed by Sir Robert Peel, was the standard of our legislative bankruptcy.
Then arose a school of thinkers who made it their business to find principles for our social negligence, and to propound theories to correspond with our administrative futility. In default of religion, which had definitely abjured leadership, they substituted a formal political agnosticism. They pushed confidently across the shoals of human nature laid bare by the religious ebb. They brought to birth the economic man! On that view, our species is chiefly animated by the pursuit of profit, and from that hypothesis they extracted the laws of politics. Man became the premiss of a deductive syllogism. There was an iron logic, a faultless sequence, an invulnerability in their conclusions, as they rolled them down from the height of this inexorable postulate. It was the gospel of the manufacturer-take-the-hindmost. Such, originating in the divorce of the State and religion, was the Arctic habit of mind, the polar view of citizenship, which led us so deep into the dangers entangling us to-day.
Nevertheless, this was an artificial and unstable condition of affairs, as appeared every year more obviously with the progress of the nineteenth century. The State and religion began presently to live on better terms with one another, working co-operatively, the one to formulate ideals and the other to fulfil them.
There can be no doubt as to the general influence which this change must tend to exercise upon the commonwealth; for, in the words of Edmund Burke, "Christ appeared in sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government." However, in the perversity of human affairs, there is some danger attending us even here.
That danger is sentimentalism. The risk of sentimentalism is that, whereas, in the past, we have suffered from the conception of the economic, we may, in the future, suffer from the reality of the uneconomic, man. So we shall regret it, if we shed too abruptly our utilitarian skin.
But, on the other hand, and on the whole, we may welcome this new integration, for the fruit of better lives that it will yield us, and for the cure which it will apply to the weaknesses of the race. And besides, there is another danger which it can avert. Since democracy ever opens itself to more numbers, its authority tends in a like ratio to slide into autocracy. Therefore, the old balances and checks, the counter-weights and counter-checks, of the constitution of our fathers stand in danger of the judgment, so that, however much we prize them, we must not pin all our political faith to these. Only where policy rests on an eternal code, can freedom find sanctuary, whence to say usque huc venies to despotism itself.