CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS - V. THE CHURCH OF THE SERVILE STATE
The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use its
own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very
completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the
enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved.
It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman's horse and all
his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without
visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this
enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or,
rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics.
The Eugenists get the ear of the humane but rather hazy cliques by saying
that the present "conditions" under which people work and breed are bad
for the race; but the modern mind will not generally stretch beyond one
step of reasoning, and the consequence which appears to follow on the
consideration of these "conditions" is by no means what would originally
have been expected. If somebody says: "A rickety cradle may mean a
rickety baby," the natural deduction, one would think, would be to give
the people a good cradle, or give them money enough to buy one. But that
means higher wages and greater equalisation of wealth; and the plutocratic
scientist, with a slightly troubled expression, turns his eyes and
pince-nez in another direction. Reduced to brutal terms of truth, his
difficulty is this and simply this: More food, leisure, and money for the
workman would mean a better workman, better even from the point of view of
anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure, and money would also
mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent fire and a full
pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend a clock in, even
from the customer's point of view, than a hovel with a leaky roof and a
cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full pantry would also
be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock--a
much better house to do nothing in--and doing nothing is sometimes one of
the highest of the duties of man. All but the hard-hearted must be torn
with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the
poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to
do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky roof and the rickety cradle in a
pensive manner, there one day came into his mind a new and curious
idea--one of the most strange, simple, and horrible ideas that have ever
risen from the deep pit of original sin.
The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended much,
without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion in
society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that extent
his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock easier, or,
at least, not much easier, without strengthening the hands of the poor
household, for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--to that
extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one sort of
furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and wife could
be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and such
old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating a
strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates
himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to prefer.
Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines of
heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral, political,
or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong
and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent conditions. As the
mill-owners use the wind and the water to drive their mills, they would
use this natural force as something even cheaper; and turn their wheels by
diverting from its channel the blood of a man in his youth. That is what
Eugenics means; and that is all that it means.
Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become us
to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one: of
whether their calculations are well founded, and whether the men of
science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties.
Fortunately, it becomes clearer every day that they are, scientifically
speaking, building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves
breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men, but which
even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity of men.
That is, that though it is not true that all men are normal, it is
overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common Eugenic
arguments are drawn from extreme cases, which, even if human honour and
laughter allowed of their being eliminated, would not by their elimination
greatly affect the mass. For the rest, there remains the enormous
weakness in Eugenics, that if ordinary men's judgment or liberty is to be
discounted in relation to heredity, the judgment of the judges must be
discounted in relation to their heredity. The Eugenic professor may or
may not succeed in choosing a baby's parents; it is quite certain that he
cannot succeed in choosing his own parents. All his thoughts, including
his Eugenic thoughts, are, by the very principle of those thoughts,
flowing from a doubtful or tainted source. In short, we should need a
perfectly Wise Man to do the thing at all. And if he were a Wise Man he
would not do it.
I have never understood why it is that those who talk most about evolution,
and talk it in the very age of fashionable evolutionism, do not see the
one way in which evolution really does apply to our modern difficulty.
There is, of course, an element of evolutionism in the universe; and I
know no religion or philosophy that ever entirely ignored it. Evolution,
popularly speaking, is that which happens to unconscious things. They
grow unconsciously; or fade unconsciously; or rather, some parts of them
grow and some parts of them fade; and at any given moment there is almost
always some presence of thc fading thing, and some incompleteness in the
growing one. Thus, if I went to sleep for a hundred years, like the
Sleeping Beauty (I wish I could), I should grow a beard--unlike the
Sleeping Beauty. And just as I should grow hair if I were asleep, I
should grow grass if I were dead. Those whose religion it was that God
was asleep were perpetually impressed and affected by the fact that he had
a long beard. And those whose philosophy it is that the universe is dead
from the beginning (being the grave of nobody in particular) think that is
the way that grass can grow. In any case, these developments only occur
with dead or dreaming things. What happens when everyone is asleep is
called Evolution. What happens when everyone is awake is called
Revolution.
There was once an honest man, whose name I never knew, but whose face I
can almost see (it is framed in Victorian whiskers and fixed in a
Victorian neck-cloth), who was balancing the achievements of France and
England in civilisation and social efficiencies. And when he came to the
religious aspect he said that there were more stone and brick churches
used in France; but, on the other hand, there are more sects in England.
Whether such a lively disintegration is a proof of vitality in any
valuable sense I have always doubted. The sun may breed maggots in a
dead dog; but it is essential for such a liberation of life that the dog
should be unconscious or (to say the least of it) absent-minded. Broadly
speaking, you may call the thing corruption, if you happen to like dogs.
You may call it evolution, if you happen to like maggots. In either case,
it is what happens to things if you leave them alone.
Now, the modern Evolutionists have made no real use of the idea of
evolution, especially in the matter of social prediction. They always
fall into what is (from their logical point of view) the error of
supposing that evolution knows what it is doing. They predict the State
of the future as a fruit rounded and polished. But the whole point of
evolution (the only point there is in it) is that no State will ever be
rounded and polished, because it will always contain some organs that
outlived their use, and some that have not yet fully found theirs. If we
wish to prophesy what will happen, we must imagine things now moderate
grown enormous; things now local grown universal; things now promising
grown triumphant; primroses bigger than sunflowers, and sparrows stalking
about like flamingoes.
In other words, we must ask what modern institution has a future before
it? What modern institution may have swollen to six times its present size
in the social heat and growth of the future? I do not think the Garden
City will grow: but of that I may speak in my next and last article of
this series. I do not think even the ordinary Elementary School, with its
compulsory education, will grow. Too many unlettered people hate the
teacher for teaching; and too many lettered people hate the teacher for
not teaching. The Garden City will not bear much blossom; the young idea
will not shoot, unless it shoots the teacher. But the one flowering tree
on the estate, the one natural expansion which I think will expand, is the
institution we call the Prison.
If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive capitalist
community, I speak quite seriously when I say that I think Prison will
become an almost universal experience. It will not necessarily be a
cruel or shameful experience: on these points (I concede certainly for the
present purpose of debate) it may be a vastly improved experience. The
conditions in the prison, very possibly, will be made more humane. But
the prison will be made more humane only in order to contain more of
humanity. I think little of the judgment and sense of humour of any man
who can have watched recent police trials without realising that it is no
longer a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime; but, now,
solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an
imprisonment. It was so with Tom Mann; it was so with Larkin; it was so
with the poor atheist who was kept in gaol for saying something he had
been acquitted of saying: it is so in such cases day by day. We no longer
lock a man up for doing something; we lock him up in the hope of his doing
nothing. Given this principle, it is evidently possible to make the mere
conditions of punishment more moderate, or--(more probably) more secret.
There may really be more mercy in the Prison, on condition that there is
less justice in the Court. I should not be surprised if, before we are
done with all this, a man was allowed to smoke in prison, on condition, of
course, that he had been put in prison for smoking.
Now that is the process which, in the absence of democratic protest, will
certainly proceed, will increase and multiply and replenish the earth and
subdue it. Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little time: it will
be difficult to make it disgraceful when men like Larkin can be imprisoned
for no reason at all, just as his celebrated ancestor was hanged for no
reason at all. But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the
meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace: and it will still
go on imprisoning for no reason at all. Or rather for that rather simple
reason that makes a cat spring or a rat run away.
It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the
form that every prison should be a school; or in the more candid form that
every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their
servile principle in the case of the schools. Everyone goes to the
Elementary Schools except the few people who tell them to go there. I
prophesy that (unless our revolt succeeds) nearly everyone will be going
to Prison, with a precisely similar patience.
If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have the
right and habit of beating the grocer's assistant with a stick, or that
shop girls might be flogged, as they already can be fined, many would
regard it as rather a rash remark. It would be a rash remark. Prophecy
is always unreliable; unless we except the kind which is avowedly
irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy. But relatively to nearly
all the other prophecies that are being made around me to-day, I should
say my prediction stood an exceptionally good chance. In short, I think
the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to see than
the Superman or the Samurai, or the True Model Employer, or the Perfect
Fabian Official, or the citizen of the Collectivist State. And it is
best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which is
passing over our Society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image at
the end of it. The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history, have
always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled while
Rome was burning, but he probably really paid more attention to the fiddle
than to the fire. The Roi Soleil, like many other soleils, was most
splendid to all appearance a little before sunset. And if I ask myself
what will be the ultimate and final fruit of all our social reforms,
garden cities, model employers, insurances, exchanges, arbitration courts,
and so on, then, I say, quite seriously, "I think it will be labour under
the lash."
Let us arrange in some order a number of converging considerations that
all point in this direction. (1) It is broadly true, no doubt, that the
weapon of the employer has hitherto been the threat of dismissal, that is,
the threat of enforced starvation. He is a Sultan who need not order the
bastinado, so long as he can order the sack. But there are not a few
signs that this weapon is not quite so convenient and flexible a one as
his increasing rapacities require. The fact of the introduction of fines,
secretly or openly, in many shops and factories, proves that it is
convenient for the capitalists to have some temporary and adjustable form
of punishment besides the final punishment of pure ruin. Nor is it
difficult to see the commonsense of this from their wholly inhuman point
of view. The act of sacking a man is attended with the same disadvantages
as the act of shooting a man: one of which is that you can get no more out
of him. It is, I am told, distinctly annoying to blow a fellow creature's
brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember that he was the only
person who knew where to get the best Russian cigarettes. So our Sultan,
who is the orderer of the sack, is also the bearer of the bow-string. A
school in which there was no punishment, except expulsion, would be a
school in which it would be very difficult to keep proper discipline; and
the sort of discipline on which the reformed capitalism will insist will
be all of the type which in free nations is imposed only on children.
Such a school would probably be in a chronic condition of breaking up for
the holidays. And the reasons for the insufficiency of this extreme
instrument are also varied and evident. The materialistic Sociologists,
who talk about the survival of the fittest and the weakest going to the
wall (and whose way of looking at the world is to put on the latest and
most powerful scientific spectacles, and then shut their eyes), frequently
talk as if a workman were simply efficient or non-efficient, as if a
criminal were reclaimable or irreclaimable. The employers have sense
enough at least to know better than that. They can see that a servant may
be useful in one way and exasperating in another; that he may be bad in
one part of his work and good in another; that he may be occasionally
drunk and yet generally indispensable. Just as a practical school-master
would know that a schoolboy can be at once the plague and the pride of the
school. Under these circumstances small and varying penalties are
obviously the most convenient things for the person keeping order; an
underling can be punished for coming late, and yet do useful work when he
comes. It will be possible to give a rap over the knuckles without wholly
cutting off the right hand that has offended. Under these circumstances
the employers have naturally resorted to fines. But there is a further
ground for believing that the process will go beyond fines before it is
completed.
(2) The fine is based on the old European idea that everybody possesses
private property in some reasonable degree; but not only is this not true
to-day, but it is not being made any truer, even by those who honestly
believe that they are mending matters. The great employers will often do
something towards improving what they call the "conditions" of their
workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully arranged as a
racehorse has, and still have no more personal property than a racehorse.
If you take an average poor seamstress or factory girl, you will find that
the power of chastising her through her property has very considerable
limits; it is almost as hard for the employer of labour to tax her for
punishment as it is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax her for
revenue. The next most obvious thing to think of, of course, would be
imprisonment, and that might be effective enough under simpler conditions.
An old-fashioned shopkeeper might have locked up his apprentice in his
coal-cellar; but his coal-cellar would be a real, pitch dark coal-cellar,
and the rest of his house would be a real human house. Everybody
(especially the apprentice) would see a most perceptible difference
between the two. But, as I pointed out in the article before this, the
whole tendency of the capitalist legislation and experiment is to make
imprisonment much more general and automatic, while making it, or
professing to make it, more humane. In other words, the hygienic prison
and the servile factory will become so uncommonly like each other that the
poor man will hardly know or care whether he is at the moment expiating an
offence or merely swelling a dividend. In both places there will be the
same sort of shiny tiles. In neither place will there be any cell so
unwholesome as a coal-cellar or so wholesome as a home. The weapon of the
prison, therefore, like the weapon of the fine, will be found to have
considerable limitations to its effectiveness when employed against the
wretched reduced citizen of our day. Whether it be property or liberty
you cannot take from him what he has not got. You cannot imprison a slave,
because you cannot enslave a slave.
(3) Most people, on hearing the suggestion that it may come to corporal
punishment at last (as it did in every slave system I ever heard of,
including some that were generally kindly, and even successful), will
merely be struck with horror and incredulity, and feel that such a
barbarous revival is unthinkable in the modern atmosphere. How far it
will be, or need be, a revival of the actual images and methods of ruder
times I will discuss in a moment. But first, as another of the converging
lines tending to corporal punishment, consider this: that for some reason
or other the old full-blooded and masculine humanitarianism in this matter
has weakened and fallen silent; it has weakened and fallen silent in a
very curious manner, the precise reason for which I do not altogether
understand. I knew the average Liberal, the average Nonconformist
minister, the average Labour Member, the average middle-class Socialist,
were, with all their good qualities, very deficient in what I consider a
respect for the human soul. But I did imagine that they had the ordinary
modern respect for the human body. The fact, however, is clear and
incontrovertible. In spite of the horror of all humane people, in spite
of the hesitation even of our corrupt and panic-stricken Parliament,
measures can now be triumphantly passed for spreading or increasing the
use of physical torture, and for applying it to the newest and vaguest
categories of crime. Thirty or forty years ago, nay, twenty years ago,
when Mr. F. Hugh O'Donnell and others forced a Liberal Government to drop
the cat-o-nine-tails like a scorpion, we could have counted on a mass of
honest hatred of such things. We cannot count on it now.
(4) But lastly, it is not necessary that in the factories of the future
the institution of physical punishment should actually remind people of
the jambok or the knout. It could easily be developed out of the many
forms of physical discipline which are already used by employers on the
excuses of education or hygiene. Already in some factories girls are
obliged to swim whether they like it or not, or do gymnastics whether they
like it or not. By a simple extension of hours or complication of
exercises a pair of Swedish clubs could easily be so used as to leave
their victim as exhausted as one who had come off the rack. I think it
extremely likely that they will be.
The chief aim of all honest Socialists just now is to prevent the coming
of Socialism. I do not say it as a sneer, but, on the contrary, as a
compliment; a compliment to their political instinct and public spirit. I
admit it may be called an exaggeration; but there really is a sort of sham
Socialism that the modern politicians may quite possibly agree to set up;
if they do succeed in setting it up, the battle for the poor is lost.
We must note, first of all, a general truth about the curious time we live
in. It will not be so difficult as some people may suppose to make the
Servile State look rather like Socialism, especially to the more pedantic
kind of Socialist. The reason is this. The old lucid and trenchant
expounder of Socialism, such as Blatchford or Fred Henderson, always
describes the economic power of the plutocrats as consisting in private
property. Of course, in a sense, this is quite true; though they too
often miss the point that private property, as such, is not the same as
property confined to the few. But the truth is that the situation has
grown much more subtle; perhaps too subtle, not to say too insane, for
straight-thinking theorists like Blatchford. The rich man to-day does not
only rule by using private property; he also rules by treating public
property as if it were private property. A man like Lord Murray pulled
the strings, especially the pursestrings; but the whole point of his
position was that all sorts of strings had got entangled. The secret
strength of the money he held did not lie merely in the fact that it was
his money. It lay precisely in the fact that nobody had any clear idea of
whether it was his money, or his successor's money, or his brother's money,
or the Marconi Company's money, or the Liberal Party's money, or the
English Nation's money. It was buried treasure; but it was not private
property. It was the acme of plutocracy because it was not private
property. Now, by following this precedent, this unprincipled vagueness
about official and unofficial moneys by the cheerful habit of always
mixing up the money in the pocket with the money in the till, it would be
quite possible to keep the rich as rich as ever in practice, though they
might have suffered confiscation in theory. Mr. Lloyd George has four
hundred a year as an M. P.; but he not only gets much more as a Minister,
but he might at any time get immeasurably more by speculating on State
secrets that are necessarily known to him. Some say that he has even
attempted something of the kind. Now, it would be quite possible to cut
Mr. George down, not to four hundred a year, but to fourpence a day; and
still leave him all these other and enormous financial superiorities. It
must be remembered that a Socialist State, in any way resembling a modern
State, must, however egalitarian it may be, have the handling of huge sums,
and the enjoyment of large conveniences; it is not improbable that the
same men will handle and enjoy in much the same manner, though in theory
they are doing it as instruments, and not as individuals. For instance,
the Prime Minister has a private house, which is also (I grieve to inform
that eminent Puritan) a public house. It is supposed to be a sort of
Government office; though people do not generally give children's parties,
or go to bed in a Government office. I do not know where Mr. Herbert
Samuel lives; but I have no doubt he does himself well in the matter of
decoration and furniture. On the existing official parallel there is no
need to move any of these things in order to Socialise them. There is no
need to withdraw one diamond-headed nail from the carpet; or one golden
teaspoon from the tray. It is only necessary to call it an official
residence, like 10 Downing-street. I think it is not at all improbable
that this Plutocracy, pretending to be a Bureaucracy, will be attempted or
achieved. Our wealthy rulers will be in the position which grumblers in
the world of sport sometimes attribute to some of the "gentlemen" players.
They assert that some of these are paid like any professional; only their
pay is called their expenses. This system might run side by side with a
theory of equal wages, as absolute as that once laid down by Mr. Bernard
Shaw. By the theory of the State, Mr. Herbert Samuel and Mr. Lloyd
George might be humble citizens, drudging for their fourpence a day; and
no better off than porters and coal-heavers. If there were presented to
our mere senses what appeared to be the form of Mr. Herbert Samuel in an
astrakhan coat and a motor-car, we should find the record of the
expenditure (if we could find it at all) under the heading of "Speed Limit
Extension Enquiry Commission." If it fell to our lot to behold (with the
eye of flesh) what seemed to be Mr. Lloyd George lying in a hammock and
smoking a costly cigar, we should know that the expenditure would be
divided between the "Condition of Rope and Netting Investigation
Department," and the "State of Cuban Tobacco Trade: Imperial Inspector's
Report."
Such is the society I think they will build unless we can knock it down as
fast as they build it. Everything in it, tolerable or intolerable, will
have but one use; and that use what our ancestors used to call usance or
usury. Its art may be good or bad, but it will be an advertisement for
usurers; its literature may be good or bad, but it will appeal to the
patronage of usurers; its scientific selection will select according to
the needs of usurers; its religion will be just charitable enough to
pardon usurers; its penal system will be just cruel enough to crush all
the critics of usurers: the truth of it will be Slavery: and the title of
it may quite possibly be Socialism.
We watched you building, stone by stone,
The well-washed cells and well-washed graves
We shall inhabit but not own
When Britons ever shall be slaves;
The water's waiting in the trough,
The tame oats sown are portioned free,
There is Enough, and just Enough,
And all is ready now but we.
But you have not caught us yet, my lords,
You have us still to get.
A sorry army you'd have got,
Its flags are rags that float and rot,
Its drums are empty pan and pot,
Its baggage is--an empty cot;
But you have not caught us yet.
A little; and we might have slipped
When came your rumours and your sales
And the foiled rich men, feeble-lipped,
Said and unsaid their sorry tales;
Great God! It needs a bolder brow
To keep ten sheep inside a pen,
And we are sheep no longer now;
You are but Masters. We are Men.
We give you all good thanks, my lords,
We buy at easy price;
Thanks for the thousands that you stole,
The bribes by wire, the bets on coal,
The knowledge of that naked whole
That hath delivered our flesh and soul
Out of your Paradise.
We had held safe your parks; but when
Men taunted you with bribe and fee,
We only saw the Lord of Men
Grin like an Ape and climb a tree;
And humbly had we stood without
Your princely barns; did we not see
In pointed faces peering out
What Rats now own the granary.
It is too late, too late, my lords,
We give you back your grace:
You cannot with all cajoling
Make the wet ditch, or winds that sting,
Lost pride, or the pawned wedding rings,
Or drink or Death a blacker thing
Than a smile upon your face.
The two kinds of social reform, one of which might conceivably free us at
last while the other would certainly enslave us forever, are exhibited in
an easy working model in the two efforts that have been made for the
soldiers' wives--I mean the effort to increase their allowance and the
effort to curtail their alleged drinking. In the preliminary
consideration, at any rate, we must see the second question as quite
detached from our own sympathies on the special subject of fermented
liquor. It could be applied to any other pleasure or ornament of life; it
will be applied to every other pleasure and ornament of life if the
Capitalist campaign can succeed. The argument we know; but it cannot be
too often made clear. An employer, let us say, pays a seamstress twopence
a day, and she does not seem to thrive on it. So little, perhaps, does
she thrive on it that the employer has even some difficulty in thriving
upon her. There are only two things that he can do, and the distinction
between them cuts the whole social and political world in two. It is a
touchstone by which we can--not sometimes, but always--distinguish
economic equality from servile social reform. He can give the girl some
magnificent sum, such as sixpence a day, to do as she likes with, and
trust that her improved health and temper will work for the benefit of his
business. Or he may keep her to the original sum of a shilling a week,
but earmark each of the pennies to be used or not to be used for a
particular purpose. If she must not spend this penny on a bunch of
violets, or that penny on a novelette, or the other penny on a toy for
some baby, it is possible that she will concentrate her expenditure more
upon physical necessities, and so become, from the employer's point of
view, a more efficient person. Without the trouble of adding twopence to
her wages, he has added twopenny-worth to her food. In short, she has the
holy satisfaction of being worth more without being paid more.
This Capitalist is an ingenious person, and has many polished
characteristics; but I think the most singular thing about him is his
staggering lack of shame. Neither the hour of death nor the day of
reckoning, neither the tent of exile nor the house of mourning, neither
chivalry nor patriotism, neither womanhood nor widowhood, is safe at this
supreme moment from his dirty little expedient of dieting the slave. As
similar bullies, when they collect the slum rents, put a foot in the open
door, these are always ready to push in a muddy wedge wherever there is a
slit in a sundered household or a crack in a broken heart. To a man of
any manhood nothing can be conceived more loathsome and sacrilegious than
even so much as asking whether a woman who has given up all she loved to
death and the fatherland has or has not shown some weakness in her seeking
for self-comfort. I know not in which of the two cases I should count
myself the baser for inquiring--a case where the charge was false or a
case where it was true. But the philanthropic employer of the sort I
describe is not a man of any manhood; in a sense he is not a man at all.
He shows some consciousness of the fact when he calls his workers "men" as
distinct from masters. He cannot comprehend the gallantry of
costermongers or the delicacy that is quite common among cabmen. He finds
this social reform by half-rations on the whole to his mercantile profit,
and it will be hard to get him to think of anything else.
But there are people assisting him, people like the Duchess of Marlborough,
who know not their right hand from their left, and to these we may
legitimately address our remonstrance and a resume of some of the facts
they do not know. The Duchess of Marlborough is, I believe, an American,
and this separates her from the problem in a special way, because the
drink question in America is entirely different from the drink question in
England. But I wish the Duchess of Marlborough would pin up in her
private study, side by side with the Declaration of Independence, a
document recording the following simple truths: (1) Beer, which is largely
drunk in public-houses, is not a spirit or a grog or a cocktail or a drug.
It is the common English liquid for quenching the thirst; it is so still
among innumerable gentlemen, and, until very lately, was so among
innumerable ladies. Most of us remember dames of the last generation
whose manners were fit for Versailles, and who drank ale or Stout as a
matter of course. Schoolboys drank ale as a matter of course, and their
schoolmasters gave it to them as a matter of course. To tell a poor woman
that she must not have any until half the day is over is simply cracked,
like telling a dog or a child that he must not have water. (2) The
public-house is not a secret rendezvous of bad characters. It is the open
and obvious place for a certain purpose, which all men used for that
purpose until the rich began to be snobs and the poor to become slaves.
One might as well warn people against Willesden Junction. (3) Many poor
people live in houses where they cannot, without great preparation, offer
hospitality. (4) The climate of these picturesque islands does not favour
conducting long conversations with one's oldest friends on an iron seat in
the park. (5) Halfpast eleven a.m. is not early in the day for a woman
who gets up before six. (6) The bodies and minds of these women belong to
God and to themselves.
CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS - V. THE CHURCH OF THE SERVILE STATE