CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter;
and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed
the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree.
But these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position
of the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat
within small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points
on which she really misunderstands the man's position, it is almost
entirely in order to preserve her own. The two points on which woman,
actually and of herself, is most tenacious may be roughly summarized
as the ideal of thrift and the ideal of dignity
Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these
two qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man.
But if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly,
all males must make an imaginative attempt to enter into
the attitude of all good women toward these two things.
The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in the thing called thrift;
we men have so much encouraged each other in throwing money
right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort
of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence.
But on a broader and more candid consideration the case
scarcely stands so.
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic
than extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly
in the matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever
since I was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood,
is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative;
waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw
money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away;
it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is,
it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about
the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new
fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such
a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house.
If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin
he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science
began to use by-products; when science found that colors could
be made out of coaltar, she made her greatest and perhaps
her only claim on the real respect of the human soul.
Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or,
in other words, to rummage in the dustbin.
A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke
or expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private
house on a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally
run with such rigid convenience of modern science that thrift,
the picking up of potential helps here and there, has almost
become unmeaning to him. He comes across it most (as I say)
when he is playing some game within four walls; when in charades,
a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a tea-cozy just do
for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber and cardboard,
and the house has just enough firewood and just enough bandboxes.
This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of thrift.
But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day
with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean,
but on the contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she
wishes her creative mercy to be over all her works, that not one
sardine should be destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void,
when she has made the pile complete.
The modern world must somehow be made to understand
(in theology and other things) that a view may be vast,
broad, universal, liberal and yet come into conflict with
another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also.
There is never a war between two sects, but only between two
universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision
is the collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller
way it must be first made clear that this female economic ideal
is a part of that female variety of outlook and all-round
art of life which we have already attributed to the sex:
thrift is not a small or timid or provincial thing; it is part
of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all
the windows of the soul and being answerable for everything.
For in the average human house there is one hole by
which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out;
man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred.
But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her
spiritual breadth, it is none the less true that it brings her
into conflict with the special kind of spiritual breadth that
belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into conflict
with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic feasting
and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section.
The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings
them the more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal
vigilance and the other for an almost infinite output.
Partly through the nature of his moral weakness, and partly
through the nature or his physical strength, the male is
normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity;
he always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night;
and he always thinks of a night as lasting forever.
When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors
of the public houses and try to get their husbands home,
simple minded "social workers" always imagine that every husband
is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint.
It never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under
coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does
when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come
and gossip over the teacups. These women are not exasperated
merely at the amount of money that is wasted in beer; they are
exasperated also at the amount of time that is wasted in talk.
It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but what cometh
out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man.
They will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks)
the ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it;
as if a man wanted to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had
played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point
is not without a basis; the real feeling is this, that the most
masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess
may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace.
A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer?
The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her,
to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another
coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once
the sound of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions
and the sense of masculine society. There is this element
of a fine fruitlessness about the male enjoyments; wine is poured
into a bottomless bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless abyss.
All this has set woman against the Public House--that is,
against the Parliament House. She is there to prevent waste;
and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of waste.
In the upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that makes
no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme.
High and low, the woman's objection to the Public House is
perfectly definite and rational, it is that the Public House
wastes the energies that could be used on the private house.
As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste,
so it is about feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness.
The woman has a fixed and very well-founded idea that if
she does not insist on good manners nobody else will.
Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity,
and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that
there are many very polite men, but none that I ever heard
of who were not either fascinating women or obeying them.
But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the female ideal
of thrift, lies deeper and may easily be misunderstood.
It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual isolation;
the same that makes women religious. They do not like being
melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob That anonymous
quality we have remarked in the club conversation would be common
impertinence in a case of ladies. I remember an artistic
and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing-room whether
I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and why not.
I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer
"Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade
you would turn me out of the house." The only certain rule on
this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women.
"Women" is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in
this chapter; but it always has a blackguard sound. It smells
of oriental cynicism and hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen.
But every crowd of women is only a harem broken loose.
I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly
all the women I have known. It is quite unfair to say that
a woman hates other women individually; but I think it would
be quite true to say that she detests them in a confused heap.
And this is not because she despises her own sex, but because she
respects it; and respects especially that sanctity and separation
of each item which is represented in manners by the idea of dignity
and in morals by the idea of chastity.
We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham
and what is real. But it is worth while to remember that with
unfamiliar things we often mistake what is real for what is sham.
It is true that a very young man may think the wig of an
actress is her hair. But it is equally true that a child
yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig.
Just because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems
to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed
the same thing in the fixed and almost offensive color
of all unfamiliar things, tropic birds and tropic blossoms.
Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a toy-shop. Tropic flowers
simply look like artificial flowers, like things cut out of wax.
This is a deep matter, and, I think, not unconnected with divinity;
but anyhow it is the truth that when we see things for the first
time we feel instantly that they are fictive creations;
we feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used
to them and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild
and objectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the shifting cloud.
It is the design in Nature that strikes us first; the sense
of the crosses and confusions in that design only comes
afterwards through experience and an almost eerie monotony.
If a man saw the stars abruptly by accident he would
think them as festive and as artificial as a firework.
We talk of the folly of painting the lily; but if we saw
the lily without warning we should think that it was painted.
We talk of the devil not being so black as he is painted;
but that very phrase is a testimony to the kinship between
what is called vivid and what is called artificial.
If the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky,
he would say that grass was not as green as it was painted;
that sky was not as blue as it was painted. If one could see
the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy,
just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy.
And so they are--both of them, I mean.
But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of
artifice about all strange objects that I meant to deal.
I mean merely, as a guide to history, that we should not be surprised
if things wrought in fashions remote from ours seem artificial;
we should convince ourselves that nine times out of ten
these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest.
You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille
or of the powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century,
but all these phrases are very superficial. There never was
an artificial epoch. There never was an age of reason.
Men were always men and women women: and their two generous appetites
always were the expression of passion and the telling of truth.
We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of expression,
just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint
in our coarsest slum sketch or our most naked pathological play.
But men have never talked about anything but important things;
and the next force in femininity which we have to consider can
be considered best perhaps in some dusty old volume of verses
by a person of quality.
The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality,
in externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that.
In modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort
of deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive.
It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art.
Its fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice;
as in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with
the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility
that concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride
that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people
did not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old.
The same applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions;
they were freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may
not be as red as she is painted, but plainly she was not so black
as she was patched.
But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older
and franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a
moment with a certain element which is very common in the decoration
and literature of that age and of the two centuries preceding it.
It is necessary to mention it in such a connection because it
is exactly one of those things that look as superficial as powder,
and are really as rooted as hair.
In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find
a perpetual reproach against woman in the matter of her coldness;
ceaseless an stale similes that compare her eyes to northern stars,
her heart to ice, or her bosom to snow. Now most of us have always
supposed these old and iterant phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words,
a thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets
who wrote about the coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological
truth missed in nearly all the realistic novels of today.
Our psychological romancers perpetually represent wives as striking
terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth,
throwing about the furniture or poisoning the coffee; all this upon
some strange fixed theory that women are what they call emotional.
But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer to the vital fact.
Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would agree that the most
terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage,
was not so much being emotional as being unemotional.
There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection
of a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological
explanation there can surely be no question of the fact.
The instinctive cry of the female in anger is noli me tangere.
I take this as the most obvious and at the same time the least
hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition,
which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood,
both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists.
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age
of prejudice and must not call things by their right names,
we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
Whatever else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and
a million lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin
to the classical, and is at least the opposite of the grotesque.
And since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols,
perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may
be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt.
It is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes
everywhere for emancipation, that a little while ago it was common
for an "advanced" woman to claim the right to wear trousers;
a right about as grotesque as the right to wear a false nose.
Whether female liberty is much advanced by the act of wearing
a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish women might
offer some information on the point. But if the western woman
walks about (as it were) trailing the curtains of the harem
with her, it is quite certain that the woven mansion is meant
for a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison.
It is quite certain that the skirt rneans female dignity,
not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests.
No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters
of a slave; no judge would appear covered with broad arrows.
But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges,
priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes
of female dignity The whole world is under petticoat government;
for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.
We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two
pillars of civilization; we say also that she could do neither,
but for her position; her curious position of private omnipotence,
universality on a small scale. The first element is thrift;
not the destructive thrift of the miser, but the creative
thrift of the peasant; the second element is dignity,
which is but the expression of sacred personality and privacy.
Now I know the question that will be abruptly and automatically
asked by all that know the dull tricks and turns of the modern
sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to argue
about whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable
in woman or whether they are merely prejudices produced
by her history and education. Now I do not propose to discuss
whether woman could now be educated out of her habits touching
thrift and dignity; and that for two excellent reasons.
First it is a question which cannot conceivably ever find
any answer: that is why modern people are so fond of it.
From the nature of the case it is obviously impossible
to decide whether any of the peculiarities of civilized
man have been strictly necessary to his civilization.
It is not self-evident (for instance), that even the habit
of standing upright was the only path of human progress.
There might have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city
gentleman put on four boots to go to the city every morning.
Or there might have been a reptilian civilization, in which
he rolled up to the office on his stomach; it is impossible to say
that intelligence might not have developed in such creatures.
All we can say is that man as he is walks upright; and that woman
is something almost more upright than uprightness.
And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather
prefer women (nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much
of our noble lives in inventing any other way for them to walk.
In short, my second reason for not speculating upon whether woman
might get rid of these peculiarities, is that I do not want her to
get rid of them; nor does she. I will not exhaust my intelligence
by inventing ways in which mankind might unlearn the violin or
forget how to ride horses; and the art of domesticity seems to me
as special and as valuable as all the ancient arts of our race.
Nor do I propose to enter at all into those formless and floundering
speculations about how woman was or is regarded in the primitive
times that we cannot remember, or in the savage countries which we
cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their women
for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons barbaric;
and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these people's
feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as ours.
Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across
an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man
is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere
lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember
that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton,
merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient,
while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure.
It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is,
the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys.
On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man
to work and he hasn't obeyed. I do not affirm that this
is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have too little
comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it is untrue.
It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface science,
with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find all
over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects some
sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from him.
The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival
of Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil
thrown over the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether
women ever were married by capture I think they pretended to be;
as they do still.
It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities
of thrift and dignity are bound to come into collision
with the wordiness, the wastefulness, and the perpetual
pleasure-seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women allow
for the thing; foolish women try to crush it; but all women try
to counteract it, and they do well. In many a home all round
us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed.
The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money.
The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey.
But it must be strictly understood that the king has captured
the honey in some heroic wars. The quarrel can be found
in moldering Gothic carvings and in crabbed Greek manuscripts.
In every age, in every land, in every tribe and village, has been
waged the great sexual war between the Private House and the
Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval English poems,
divided into sections such as "Religious Carols," "Drinking Songs,"
and so on; and the section headed, "Poems of Domestic Life"
consisted entirely (literally, entirely) of the complaints
of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the English
was archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same
as those which I have heard in the streets and public houses
of Battersea, protests on behalf of an extension of time and talk,
protests against the nervous impatience and the devouring
utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say, is the quarrel;
it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the aim of all morals
and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.
But in this corner called England, at this end of the century,
there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all
appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended;
one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last
few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man.
She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been
right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really
more important than the private house; that politics are not
(as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer,
but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel;
that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable
but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore
(as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money.
All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers,
and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of
contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics.
And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes,
owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right;
humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court,
from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits
which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.
Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us.
Males, like females, in the course of that old fight between the public
and private house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance,
feeling that they must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told
our wives that Parliament had sat late on most essential business;
but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it.
We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our
wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing room.
In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much,
but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that
Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country.
We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country
except that the men should be men and the women women.
We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly;
and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning,
the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves
hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics;
the necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity
of Buggins; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips
of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose in every fight,
however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but we never
wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected
that they might leave us a little more margin for our nonsense;
we never expected that they would accept it seriously as sense.
Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation;
I scarcely know whether to be relieved or enraged by this
substitution of the feeble platform lecture for the forcible
curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and candid
Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate
and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modem woman
has taken us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause
a moment, and collect our wits about what she is really saying.
As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;
these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand
of the modern women. This fact is important to a democrat;
but it is of very little importance to the typically modern mind.
Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government
by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative
few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps,
by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other
in any minority that is mad. But in this state of things the democratic
argument obviously falls out for the moment; and we are bound
to take the prominent minority, merely because it is prominent.
Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the thousands of women who
detest this cause, and the millions of women who have hardly heard of it.
Let us concede that the English people itself is not and will not
be for a very long time within the sphere of practical politics.
Let us confine ourselves to saying that these particular women want
a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. If we ask these
ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a very vague reply.
It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not prepared.
For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere fact
that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement,
it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut of
the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep
of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning
of this odd business called voting.
Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments;
and all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly
fallacious than to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling,
judging and punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified.
These things were always regarded as the penalties of the Fall;
as part of the humiliation of mankind, as bad in themselves.
That the king can do no wrong was never anything but a legal fiction;
and it is a legal fiction still. The doctrine of Divine Right was not
a piece of idealism, but rather a piece of realism, a practical way
of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very pragmatist piece of faith.
The religious basis of government was not so much that people
put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust
in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions
which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked
of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils.
A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business
man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very horrible;
but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic regarded
the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern
business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:
"It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?"
It is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without
the question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire.
It is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society
may reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot.
The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague
savor of science, a method which it calls "the third degree."
This is simply the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue;
which is surely uncommonly close to their extortion by bodily pain.
And this is legal and scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America,
of course, simply burns people alive in broad daylight, as they
did in the Reformation Wars. But though some punishments are more
inhuman than others there is no such thing as humane punishment.
As long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to take
hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable,
so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating one for all concerned.
And the proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact
that the headsman and the hangman, the jailors and the torturers,
were always regarded not merely with fear but with contempt;
while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights and swashbucklers
and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even admiration. To kill
a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully was unpardonable.
The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his weapon.
But the executioner was always masked.
This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people
say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance
of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does
not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a
conception of justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing
to be abnormal, evil, uses the general strength to crush it out;
the strength is his tool, but the belief is his only sanction.
You might as well say that glass is the real reason for telescopes.
But arising from whatever reason the act of government is coercive
and is burdened with all the coarse and painful qualities of coercion.
And if anyone asks what is the use of insisting on the ugliness
of this task of state violence since all mankind is condemned
to employ it, I have a simple answer to that. It would be
useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to it.
But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
of humanity is kept out of it
All government then is coercive; we happen to have created
a government which is not only coercive; but collective.
There are only two kinds of government, as I have already said,
the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy is not a government,
it is a riot; that most effective kind of riot, a riot
of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy,
sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot,
the accidental virtues, courage, variety and adventure.
There is no case anywhere of aristocracy having established a universal
and applicable order, as despots and democracies have often done;
as the last Caesars created the Roman law, as the last Jacobins
created the Code Napoleon. With the first of these elementary
forms of government, that of the king or chieftain, we are not
in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned. We shall return
to it later when we remark how differently mankind has dealt with
female claims in the despotic as against the democratic field.
But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion.
The abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million
fists and kicked by a million feet. If a man is flogged we
all flogged him; if a man is hanged, we all hanged him.
That is the only possible meaning of democracy, which can give
any meaning to the first two syllables and also to the last two.
In this sense each citizen has the high responsibility of a rioter.
Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms.
Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic
all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - III: THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY