2: The Home

THE HOME AS THE HIGHEST POINT YET REACHED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD

The Advance on Material Lines

I CANNOT deny the truth of what you have told me," she said. "I can see clearly the different steps up which the world has come, but does it not seem that this new universal mind which is the latest great stage in the advance of the world has, according to you, been produced by purely material causes? It is as much as to say that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have created Good—that they, surely, never could do?"

"They have not; they have only circulated thought; they have only created the platform for thought to spread on. They have only created conditions favourable to collective thinking. Collective thought, infinitely more powerful and complex than individual thought, has worked purely on the material given to it by individual brains. It had no other origin or food. Had that material been essentially evil, or if the evil in it had been excessive in comparison with the good, the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine would have increased the evil in the world.

"But you have indicated one point I would like to dwell on. The absolute essentiality of material objects and conditions now in the advance of the ‘spiritual’ and intellectual world, and the absolute necessity of discarding dreams and fallacies. In the last great advance, Hoe’s machine has done what all the doctrines could never have done, yet Hoe’s object was not to construct a machine for the improvement of ethics. He was, in his labours, a materialist, pure and simple; his object was the improvement of a machine for the rapid production of printed stuff. He did not work at all in the matter with an eye to great and abstract improvements. He just did his little job well and with all his energy.

"Stephenson, Watt, Wheatstone,—and ten thousand of others, including the whole army of Science, Invention, and Labour—whose combined work has produced the Universal Mind, who have, in fact, created Man, each one of these had only one object: the extension of material knowledge and the improvement of certain material objects and conditions. They were not idealists, they were not teachers; they laboured to produce no doctrines or airy formulæ. They were honest workmen in the cause of material progress, each with his eye fixed on his job.

"Contrast with these the preachers and teachers—all excellent, mind you, and making, in their way, for good, yet all, by their combined efforts, useless for the great uplift that was coming and that could only come through the work of Scientific men in the field of Science, and Mechanicians in the field of material improvement.

"And this fact is a perfect lamp for all who would join in the work of world development. He who would assist in the development of the world must work not in the field of dreams and theories, but in the field of matter. That is the doctrine of the spirit of the world whose great hands laboured to make the hills and seas, and flung the moon to the skies for a lamp and a tide-maker, who moulded the chimpanzees into men, and men into civilised men. Dreams and theories and doctrines, preachers, transcendental philosophers and teachers, and even priests—we want all of them, but they are by-products. The work of the world remains the essential thing, and the pioneers of the world are the workers, not the dreamers.

"For, though the universal brain has subordinated the individual, as the whole organism subordinates the cell, the universal brain lives, alone, by the individual, and can only grow through material means. And though the universal brain is better, infinitely, than the individual, it can only exercise its power for good on the individual through material means.

"That an individual brain may participate in the life and light of the brain universal and feed on and increase with that life, and feed and increase that life, it must first of all receive that light and life; and, secondly, it must be in a condition to receive it, and this can only be done by material means. And I will show you what I mean by an instance. The man who is crushed beneath ruinous labour, the man whose poverty condemns him not to think, the man who shivers without a fire, who goes with an empty stomach—all of that vast crowd of what we call the Poor—each one of these is cut off, more or less, from the mind universal and can never receive its light except through material means. Preaching and teaching, dreams and theories are useless to these. To participate in universal thought—which is universal good—they must first have the time to think in, they must be defended from the wolves that prey on thought, Cold and Hunger; they must be preached to practically by the two great Apostles, Wheat-flour and Firewood; they must be treated as Hoe treated the dull steel that made his press—lifted materially.

"Having lifted them thus with food and firewood, let Education have its say, and Eugenics, up to a certain point. But education is as useless to a work-broken or starving man as algebra to an ass. Since Man has awakened to life, he has begun to recognize this. The old religions of men looked on the poor as a necessary evil. "The poor are always with us." But man, though still only a hundred years old, perceives that the Poor are his disease, that the criminals are his disease, and that the idle are his disease.

"The universal mind rejects Poverty just as it has rejected Hate, and Lust, and Intolerance; and its teaching in this respect is, ‘The poor shall not be always with us.’ That is one of the greatest triumphs of the great good giant born of the fusion of intelligences; even though, as yet, the means toward this great end have not been discovered."

Socialism

"What about Socialism?"

"Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism are as yet the most obtrusive results of this universal-mind disturbance, due to recognition of the evils that affect the body of Man. The giant, on opening his eyes, is furious at his rags and tatters, and the sores which they disclose. Man, newly awakened, is disgusted at his general condition—and that disgust is at the bottom of all the ‘revolutionary’ unrest which we see to-day in the western world.

"I spoke to you of set-backs. Should that unrest develop into a storm, the progress of the world would receive one of the set-backs it is well accustomed to."

"What do you mean by a storm?"

"I mean a revolution. An attempt by sudden and violent means to tear up the rags and heal the ulcers of Man. For instance, were Socialism in its extreme form to become the directing power of Man to-morrow, were every man in the world to be equalized materially, the world would be put back on its path of progress immeasurably."

"Why?"

"Because the Socialists’ plan is constructed on a fallacy, and were it to be followed by Humanity, it would mean utter disruption of all social communities."

"What is the fallacy?"

The Fallacy

THE fallacy is this: The idea that the individual is the essential cell of the community, and that the energy and life of any community spring from the individual. This is not so. The essential cell of the community is the Family, or, in other words, the Home, and all the energy and life of the community spring from the Home.

"The reason of this is simple. The Home is bisexual, the individual unisexual.

"All the vitality of a community arises from the interplay of the two sexes one upon the other, and this interplay, to be productive of communal life and good, must take place in the Home. Individual men and individual women utterly divorced from a home of any sort lose force and deteriorate, and become warped and dwarfed.

"Sexual force, that is to say, the force that draws man to woman, that produces Love and Children, and love of children, and the love of children for their parents and for each other—sexual force, the fiery grandfather of affection and filial love, can only be developed as a force for communal good and individual good in the Home.

The Home Is Everything

"The Home is everything.

"It is the foundation of the community, it is the essential cell of the world. You cannot injure the community without injuring the home, and you cannot injure the home without injuring the community. You cannot improve the condition of the community radically by pooling all the money and distributing it among the homes, or by pooling all the means of production and wealth creation and distributing work tickets to the Home-makers. Such a distribution of the means of living would leave utterly untouched the diseases that prey on the homes of the nation and would touch with a killing hand the vitality of the Home."

"What do you mean by that?"

Its Construction

"Simply this. Every home is a tiny nation built exactly on the plan of the big nation, of which it forms a unit and which, in fact, is its counterpart in large.

"The home has its head, just as the nation has its head. Like the nation, it is bisexual; it has its exchequer, its fighting force, its ethical laws, its ambitions, its alliances, and its frontiers. It trades with other homes and combinations of homes just as the nation trades with other nations. It has its imports and its exports. It has its foreign loans and national credit. It has its internal and external politics. It has all these, whether it be a man and wife living in rooms or a family of twenty, and it is the facsimile of the nation simply because the nation is not a differentiation of it but an aggregation of it. What is done to the nation is done to the home.

Its Power

"A home, or a family, if you like the term better, is a ganglion of forces. Love and Pride, Economy (or the saving instinct) and Ambition, not to speak of Affection, are the best of these forces, just as the best forces in the nation are Love, Pride, Ambition, not to speak of Patriotism.

"Inseparably connected with these fine forces are other most powerful forces: Greed, Ostentation, Chauvinism (for a family can be Chauvinistic as well as a nation), Love of Domination, etc.

Its Death Blow

"Now, the forcible toeing the line by each family to a fixed income and ambition would hit the life of the home a death blow.

"I will give you one instance. Ambition would be tom up by the roots. God only knows all the fine things that are clinging to the roots of Ambition. Man knows a few of them. Fathers of families deny themselves and work hard that they may see their sons and daughters advance in the world; knowing, as they do, that material advance is bound up with good conduct, they look to their own conduct and the teaching of their children. Mothers do the same.

"Look at life as you know it, and tell me frankly, is not this true? That the destruction of Ambition in the family would tend largely to destroy the energy and life of the family and its power as a centre of force."

"It is true."

"Yet your Advanced Socialist, with his eyes fixed on what he calls ‘the State,’ does not reckon on this, and his theory, were it turned to practice, would destroy Ambition.

"Then, again, Pride, not pride in high deeds, but pure, low-down, material pride—how nasty it is, but what a tremendous force it is! From the cock that crows to the State that prospers, it is ubiquitous as sodium. It is purely human and animal, yet it is one of the major forces that hold the family together and make it living.

"Yet, if Ambition goes, material Pride must go—absolutely. Then take the Hoarding Instinct. This would be absolutely destroyed by your Advanced Socialist, yet without the Hoarding Instinct, which, in a more or less attenuated form, is the Saving Instinct, family morality would cut a poor show. Self-denial would vanish and that demi-virtue, Carefulness.

"You will notice that I am keeping entirely to material instincts and things, and I will rise to the height of saying that the teaching of the destruction of the Hoarding Instinct by Socialists is a blasphemous teaching, and the blasphemy is against the Holy Spirit of Good. I have left the individual for the family, but the destruction of this instinct would wreck the individual as well as the family.

"Ambition, Pride, the Hoarding Instinct, are not passions; they are Laws that govern the growth of life, and they are as immutable as the laws of gravity.

"Without going further, I shall content myself with the destruction of Ambition, Pride, and the Hoarding Instinct, and leave the family robbed of them by the Advanced Socialist—and withered in its growth. I shall come back to the point I started from—the Home. Your Socialist talks of the State.

"I say again—There is absolutely no such thing. There is only a collection of homes.

"Behind the word State he hides his absolute ignorance of fundamentals. He fancies, as I said before, that the nation is an aggregation of individuals, and on that assumption he concludes that each individual should be tuned to the pitch of the mass, so that all should sing in harmony.

"But the nation in reality is not an aggregation of individuals at all; it is an agglutination of Families or Homes.

"The word State, as implying a homogeneous and isolated power, is philosophically meaningless. The State is not a separate entity from the Home. It is only, in the administrative sense, a name for the common executive which the homes of the nation have created to conduct their external affairs individually as between themselves, and collectively as between other common governments or executives.

"When the Advanced Socialist talks of the welfare of the State he is talking of the welfare of the majority of individuals. When he talks of the State seizing the common wealth, he means that the majority of individuals will seize it and distribute it among themselves and the minority. He has absolutely forgotten those separate hives of sex life, industry, ambition, antagonism to other hives, and energy, which are the real units of the nation, the Families, which are by their constituent vices and virtues the breeding-grounds of all social energy and virtues.

"And he would advance the world on its progress by seizing with the brute force of individuals dominion over the homes of the nation. He would allow an executive created by force to dictate to each home its foreign and domestic policy; he would limit its imports and exports, destroy its ambitions, plunder its hoard, and make slaves of its individuals.

"That is Socialism pure and simple. Arsenic could not be simpler or purer as a poison to the common good and the vitality of any social community."

Building, Not Breaking

AND you?"

"I would push the world on, as I said before, by building from below and by purely material means. Instead of hitting the family a blow in its vital part, I would foster its wellbeing. I would give it drains and ventilation; I would, from the common fund that all the families have pooled in the taxes, make better the houses; I would even call upon the more prosperous families to help the poorer, but my one aim and object would be the protection of the family in all that makes for its vitality.

"I would foster family ambition and the saving and hoarding instinct, and cooking and household management and everything that would keep heads of families by the hearth instead of talking Syndicalism in pot-houses and scandal in clubs. I can not say all I would do, but broadly I would do everything possible for material betterment and everything possible for the betterment of Family Life.

"And that is what will happen, Socialism or no Socialism. We began by talking of the world as a globe of fire; we went on to hills and seas, saurians, animals, men, civilised men, Man with a universal mind.

"We have reached the world as it is—a collection of families or molecules, constituting Man with a universal mind.

The Danger of Dreams

"That mind, new-born, is filled with dreams and illusions: Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, and so forth.

"Let Man remember this: He was built out of facts, not theories; matter, not fancies; families, not individuals; and that to grow in the fashion that these new theorists would have him grow, he would have to destroy the molecules that constitute him and resolve himself into his original atoms."

"What is a molecule?"

"A molecule is a family of atoms."

The Human Equation

YOU are, then, opposed to any fixed plan for the betterment of the world. You would simply work by bettering material conditions?"

"I am not opposed to any fixed plan. I only say this, that all the fixed plans I have seen are unworkable, and from one cause."

"What is that?"

"The framers of them have forgotten that any plan for betterment of the world is absolutely unworkable that leaves out the Human Equation.

"That is not a saying of mine. It is a Law. And, what is more, it is part of a universal law. You cannot improve the condition of vegetation unless you allow for the weakness as well as the virtues and strength of vegetable life, nor can you improve the condition of mankind unless you allow for its weaknesses and sins and follies as well as for its virtues and its strength.

"What I have said to you about Socialism is not an ex-parte statement by a man opposed to Socialism. I am opposed to nothing but error, and when I see Laws as fixed and as immutable as Bode’s Law or the law of gravity disregarded by men who are proposing to reform the world, and when I point out these fatal flaws in their reasoning, that does not mean that I am opposed to all plans for reforming the world, but it does mean that I would test by everyday logic any plan for everyday use.

"Will it work? Will it perform the work for which it was invented as a kinetic engine?

"Those are the two questions on which the capitalist satisfies himself first before he invests his money in any invention in mechanics.

"Then he asks, will it wear without undue destruction of parts?

"Then he satisfies himself as to its economics. Any plan of world reform which leaves out the Human Equation is equivalent to an engineering plan which leaves out of consideration details like the Law of the Dead Centre or the Law of Expansion and contraction of metals.

"If you will examine any great engineering plan, whether it be the plan for a bridge or a marine engine, you will find that it is a simple bouquet of natural laws, all brought together by the engineer for a definite purpose, and every law is stamped with the + or - stamp of nature. They are the laws of weakness and the laws of strength, and these wonderful laws that preside over matter so interpenetrate one another that you cannot divorce them one from the other. They may be said to form alloys. Thus the law that rules over the breaking strain is at once the law of strength and weakness. The giant that lives in water springs into steam under the conditions of the + law that gives him strength, but never for a moment does he escape from the - law of condensation which is ever ready to reduce him to water again in a twinkling. And so on.

"Now, the task of the engineer is not to eliminate the - laws from nature, but to account for them, and, if possible, to make them, by a trick of genius, work for him. The engineer does not attempt to destroy Inertia, the weakness that lives in the dead centre of things; he counteracts the idleness of inertia by means of the fly-wheel.

"The weakness of Steam under the law of condensation becomes in the hands of the engineer the strength of the steam-engine. The bursting power of steam, which is ever at war with the weakness of the boiler metal, he counteracts by the safety-valve. He must allow for everything, or his machine either will not work or bursts into a thousand fragments.

"And do you imagine for a moment that human passions and energy, strength and weakness, are less potent than the forces and weaknesses which the engineer has to account for in his plan? Do you fancy that Inertia is confined to metals, and friction to working parts of machinery? Do you fancy that the social engineer, dealing with powerful and explosive forces, can plot out a social machine without taking into consideration the weaknesses which are complementary to the forces with which he has to deal?

"Yet, in all the plans I have examined, from Socialism to Syndicalism, not one engineer has submitted to me a plan in which human passions and energy, strength and weakness, are allowed for.

"That is a fact.

"I shall give you just one little instance, taken from Syndicalism.

"We shall destroy all businesses, says the Syndicalist, by vexatious strikes. The capitalist, having vanished (struck out), the hands will work the business.

Syndicalism

"Just so. But he forgets that all businesses, like all men, die in time. Suppose all businesses were converted into Syndicalist businesses worked by all the hands, in a world of Syndicalist businesses—they would not escape from the law of decay and death which hangs over everything material. Businesses would die, and new businesses would have to be born under Syndicalism, just as in our world. The competition would be just as keen and the factors of death just as potent. But the factors of life would not be as potent. How would a new business be born to live under Syndicalism?

"Let us suppose that six men, by energy, hard work, a little money, and self-denial (all necessary), found a small business. It grows and prospers, and in a year’s time they find that they must introduce new labour to cope with the work. But the new hands are all Syndicalists. They don’t want wages, they must have their share in the business. They are taken on, six of them.

"We now have twelve men working a growing and prospering concern. Unless they are absolute fools, they must recognize that expansion to them means simply more danger and worry, for expansion is impossible without more labour, and all the new labour introduced only sops up the profits like a sponge, and even were the profits to increase out of proportion to the total labour employed, that increase of individual profit would in the majority of businesses be small—in numerous businesses it would be non-existent. Why should they expand and risk what they have got—for all expansion in business means risk—simply to benefit potential labourers?

"The law of Inertia comes at once into play, without any flywheel to counterbalance it. The business ceases to grow, and, a hundred to one, dies.

"That is only one of the flaws in the Syndicalist’s design. His machine has not been constructed with a view to this and other human weakness. In a world of automata it might work; in a world of flesh and blood it wouldn’t. In short, Syndicalism could destroy all the businesses of the world quite easily, but it could not build them again.

The Theories

"Syndicalism, Socialism, Anarchism cannot stand for a moment under the eye of analysis without tumbling to pieces as practical inventions.

"They seem daring and ingenious, but they are dishonouring to virile thought.

"Let us change for a moment and ask ourselves, not what we would say to the engineer who disregarded natural laws, but what would we say of a playwright who proposed to present life to us in a play constructed without a proper view to human passions, weaknesses, and fallibility, as well as to human virtue, altruism, etc.?

"We would say at once: It is not possible. He may write such a play, but it would have this fault: it would represent no society that ever lived in the world, and in a thousand years hence it would be as valueless as it is to-day.

"And that is, in fact, what you might say of all the Theorists in Humanity I know. They have written plays for men to act in that are quite valueless to-day, would have been quite valueless a thousand years ago, and will be quite valueless a thousand years hence.

"They have left out Human Nature."

The Laws of Nature

THE Statesman who would leave the world better than he found it must take Human Nature as it is, and, instead of attempting to make it grow in direct violation of the laws that rule it, he must assist it to grow in accordance with those laws.

"Those laws are in the main good.

"As I have pointed out to you, they are the laws that cultivated crocodiles so that at last they became men, that cultivated a hell of fire until it became a habitable world, and that will cultivate men until they become better than present-day men.

"The Reformer must study those laws. He must look at the world generously and widely, and from the very beginning of things. He must have communion with the great earth spirit which has brought all of us to where we are, and, humbling himself to the dust, study the working of that spirit through the ages.

"He will, unless he is blind, inevitably see one truth: that this great spirit has never meddled with the growth of life and thought, but has laboured Titanically to prepare the conditions favourable to that growth.

"It led life by the fin and claw till life developed hands and a mind wherewith to develop its own conditions favourable to growth. And all the improvements of the world since then have followed that law, the Law of Improvement of Conditions, not any vague Law for the Improvement of Life.

"When Life left the trees and found or dug caves to live in, it left behind it, as a record of its first shelter and home and improved condition, the first vague scratchings of Art. You may be sure that could it have found a record we would discover also in those caves some sign of the first glimmer of Love.

"The cave was the first home of the germ of civilisation, and the man who built the first hut laid the foundations of all the palaces and cathedrals of earth.

"The man who improved the condition of the first square yard of land laid the foundation of all worldly prosperity, and the man who made the first hinge of hide for the first door destroyed a barricade and laid down the first condition for hospitality.

"Whenever man has fallen away from the teaching of this law, he has always fallen.

Athens, Egypt, Rome

"Athens rose to the heights of the Acropolis, but she failed in the furtherance of those conditions necessary for the development of the world—witness her streets. Rome rose to splendour and fell in ruins simply because of her failure in the development of material conditions to feed and foster Progress—witness her roads—made for armies to march on. Egypt destroyed herself with dreams of mysticism and power useless to the development of life—witness the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

The Work of the Barbarians

"All these so-called civilizations failed because they were inhuman in the path of progress.

"They were not developments, but essays in development. Their civilizations had no relation to the broad Human Family, and gave no platform for that family to develop on. Athens, Rome, Egypt carried Arts, Power, Mysticism to the heights, while down on the plains the tillers of the soil, the serfs, and the barbarians carried on Human Nature.

"Athens, Rome, and Egypt, like some modern philosophers, took no account of human weaknesses. Examine their laws and codes, their policy, and their view-points, and you will at once see that their platform was so narrow that only a class could stand on it, and that their atmosphere was stifling to Man. Human nature could not develop in it. There was no liberty for growth. Human nature had reached a certain point; it made blind attempts to rise higher. It rose to heights of Egyptian power and mysticism, and fell; to heights of Athenian art and philosophy, and fell; to heights of Roman splendour, and fell. It was like an animal trying to leave a sea, and falling back at each attempt by reason of the crumbling of the shore under its weight.

"It had not found the resting-place of solid rock. The hard rock of Liberty and material good and material Reason and material development.

Bacon

"At last it found the rock by the man’s hand that could only find and cling to that rock. That hand was Bacon’s. It was so essentially material and human that it could distinguish rock from friable sand, and so powerful that, having found a hold, it never let go.

"Bacon was the first modern man to seize the earth spirit’s law that development is only possible when conditions for development have been already prepared.

"His ‘Fruit’ was another word for conditions.

"His genius recognized intuitively that the only way to develop Man is to let Man develop, and the only way to let him develop is to give him liberty, mentally and physically, and a safe and sheltered platform.

"Better his material conditions."

"You asked me, was I opposed to any ‘plan’ for the Development of Humanity, and I replied, and reply, in effect, that I am not, always providing that it allowed for human development along human lines.

"That is the sum total of the matter, and the first essential of Man in his relation to the world."