What’s Wrong with the World is a work of social and political criticism written by G. K. Chesterton in the early twentieth century. The book is presented as a diagnosis of the fundamental errors in modern social thought and political practice, arguing that contemporary society has lost sight of the ideals that should guide human life. The work is structured as a series of essays that combine philosophical argument, social commentary, and literary criticism, all unified by Chesterton’s distinctive prose style that mixes paradox, humor, and moral seriousness.
The book opens with a dedication to C. F. G. Masterman, a Member of Parliament and friend of the author. In this dedication, Chesterton explains that he originally intended to title the work “What is Wrong,” a phrase that caused considerable misunderstanding—a lady visitor reacted with alarm to his remark about “doing ‘What is Wrong,'” and a minister of religion moved sharply when told Chesterton had to run upstairs to do what was wrong. Chesterton confesses that he has written a “shapeless and inadequate book,” but he defends the dedication to Masterman on several grounds: politicians need “inconvenient ideals,” Masterman will recognize their shared arguments, and the thread of comradeship and conversation must be protected because it is so frivolous. Chesterton distinguishes comradeship from friendship, calling friendship “an agreement under all the arguments.”
The work is divided into five major sections. The first, “The Homelessness of Man,” addresses the fundamental errors in modern social inquiry and the loss of the ideal of the home. The second, “Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man,” examines the errors of imperialist thinking and the misunderstanding of human nature it represents. The third, “Feminism, or the Mistake About Woman,” critiques the modern feminist movement and its rejection of traditional feminine ideals. The fourth, “Education, or the Mistake About the Child,” addresses errors in modern educational theory. The fifth, “The Home of Man,” returns to the central theme of domesticity and the proper human dwelling. The book concludes with “Three Notes” on female suffrage, cleanliness in education, and peasant proprietorship.
Context
The book emerges from the intellectual and political ferment of early twentieth-century England, a period marked by intense debate over imperialism, the woman question, social reform, and the direction of modern civilization. Chesterton positions himself against several dominant intellectual currents of his time: evolutionary materialism, scientific sociology, imperialist ideology, and the feminist movement. He writes against the backdrop of the Boer War and its aftermath, the rise of the Suffragette movement, and ongoing debates about social reform and the condition of the poor.
Chesterton engages directly with the leading intellectual figures and movements of his day. He references Mr. Bernard Shaw and his views on property, Lord Milner and his admiration for German efficiency, Dr. Saleeby and his advocacy of Eugenics, and Mr. Cadbury and his temperance work. He discusses the educational bills that were a subject of contemporary political controversy, the writings of Rudyard Kipling, and the philosophy of Nietzsche as mediated through aristocratic apologists like Burke. The book reflects the anxieties of a society grappling with rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the perceived decline of traditional institutions and values.
The work also participates in ongoing debates about democracy and its meaning. Chesterton distinguishes between the spirit and the letter of democracy, arguing that true democracy rests not on majority rule but on “arbitrament by anybody”—the assumption that certain things are inevitably common between any two human beings. He contrasts this with the aristocratic and imperialist tendencies of his age, which he sees as undermining genuine democratic participation. The book is thus both a product of its specific historical moment and a broader meditation on the perennial questions of human nature, social organization, and the good life.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized into five major parts, each addressing a distinct but related error in modern thought. The first part, “The Homelessness of Man,” opens with a critique of the sociological method that begins with analysis and statistics and ends with a chapter called “The Remedy.” Chesterton argues that this method ensures the remedy is never found, because in social matters we must find the cure before we find the disease. He then develops his positive ideal of the home and domesticity, arguing that the private house is “the shell and organ of the family” and that property is “merely the art of the democracy.” This section includes the parable of Hudge and Gudge, two reformers whose conflicting approaches to housing the poor both fail because neither begins with the ideal of what sort of house a man might actually like for himself.
The second part, “Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man,” examines the errors of imperialist thinking. Chesterton distinguishes between popular Imperialism, which he sees as an illusion of comfort springing from English softness and kindness, and what he calls “Caesarean Imperialism,” a deeper and more sinister phenomenon. He discusses the sentimental reasons for believing in Australia and British Columbia, the unreality of the endings of Dickens’s novels that ship characters to vague colonies, and the dream of restoring the Roman Empire that has haunted every Christian nation as a snare. This section also contains his famous discussion of the custom of talking about the weather, which he defends as a gesture of primeval worship and an expression of the elementary idea of equality.
The third part, “Feminism, or the Mistake About Woman,” critiques the modern feminist movement and its rejection of traditional feminine ideals. Chesterton argues that women stand for “the idea of Sanity”—the intellectual home to which the mind returns after excursions into extravagance. He discusses the “coldness of Chloe,” the perpetual poetic reproach against women for their unemotional quality, which he sees as an “awful armor of ice” protecting a more delicate organism. He defends thrift and dignity as the two pillars of civilization upheld by women, and he critiques the Suffragette movement for its lack of true militancy and its capitulation to masculine values.
The fourth part, “Education, or the Mistake About the Child,” addresses errors in modern educational theory, though the notes provide less detail on this section. The fifth part, “The Home of Man,” returns to the central theme of domesticity and the proper human dwelling, developing the ideal of the private house and the family as the foundation of a healthy society.
The book concludes with “Three Notes” on female suffrage, cleanliness in education, and peasant proprietorship, which address specific contemporary controversies in light of the general principles developed throughout the work.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that modern social and political thought has made a fundamental methodological error: it begins with analysis of what is wrong rather than with a vision of what is right. Chesterton argues that in social matters, “we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.” The sociological method of dissecting poverty or cataloguing prostitution is useless because we all dislike abject poverty but might disagree about “independent and dignified poverty,” and we all disapprove of prostitution but “we do not all approve of purity.” The only way to discuss social evil is to get to the social ideal. “What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.”
This methodological error stems from what Chesterton calls “the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors.” Speaking of the “Social Organism” is like speaking of the “British Lion”—Britain is no more an organism than a lion. “Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede.” This produces absurd talk of “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if Spain could lose her teeth or Canada grow a moustache. In bodily illness, doctors agree on the normal human body and seek to restore it, but social science offers “fancy souls for sale”—people say “I am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan.” No one says “I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache.” Yet in public problems, “some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies.”
The quarrel in modern social discussion is “not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim.” We agree about evil, not about good. We all dislike a lazy aristocracy, but not all would like an active one. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood, but some would “go mad with disgust” at a religious one. Everyone is indignant if the army is weak, including those who would be more indignant if it were strong. Mr. Cadbury and Chesterton would agree about the bad public house, but would quarrel “precisely in front of the good public-house.”
Chesterton argues for the importance of ideals and the need for “unpractical men”—theorists who can articulate what things are for. Efficiency is futile because it deals only with actions after they are performed. “An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over.” There is no backing a winner before the race. If an aeroplane is seriously ill, an “absent-minded old professor with wild white hair” must be dragged from a college to analyze the evil. In extreme cases, only the man “probably insane” who invented the flying-ship can say what’s wrong.
The book also argues against the modern tendency to replace dogma with prejudice. Chesterton claims that there are only two things for the human mind: a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were rational, an age of doctrine; our age is poetical, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten but a man should not is a doctrine; that as little as possible should be eaten is a prejudice. A direction is more fantastic than a plan. Straight lines that are not parallel must meet; curves may recoil forever. Modern vagueness loses and separates men as in a mist.
Chesterton argues that creeds unite while prejudices divide. A clear difference unites—a boundary unites. A magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader, both dogmatists, were nearer to each other than two homeless agnostics. “I say God is One” and “I say God is One but also Three” begin a good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age turns creeds into tendencies: the Trinitarian follows multiplicity as such and ends with 333 persons in the Trinity; the Moslem becomes a Monist, admitting there is nobody else besides one God. Against the great impersonal prejudice, only “rigid and steely sanity” works.
The book argues for the freedom to restore as well as to revolutionize. Moderns say “You can’t put the clock back.” The answer is “You can”—a clock, being human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure. Society, being human construction, can be reconstructed on any plan that has ever existed. The proverb “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it” is “simply a lie.” We could restore the Heptarchy or stage coaches if we chose—it might take time and be inadvisable, but not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible.
Chesterton argues that “the lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.” If a man says the Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer; if anyone says the Georges made England happy, we know what to answer. “That which was prevented is always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered.” Because Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure; because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say it collapsed as a system.
The book argues for the ideal of domesticity and the private house. The home is “the one anarchist institution”—older than law, standing outside the State. The State has authority in abnormal cases, but in normal family joys and sorrows “the State has no mode of entry.” The law cannot interfere because it cannot. “Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones.” The family is happy or unhappy under the republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam; “Even a republic in Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.”
Chesterton argues that marriage is a bond that must survive the breaking point. The problem is in sex, not marriage. Mankind has believed in a “more or less lasting tie.” The principle resembles “the second wind in walking”: in everything worth having there is “a point of pain or tedium that must be survived.” The joy of battle comes after fear of death; reading Virgil after learning him; sea-bathing after the icy shock; “the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon.” Vows, laws, and contracts are ways of surviving “this breaking point.” The essential element is security, not duration. “Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice.” Coercion is encouragement; anarchy is oppressive and discouraging. “I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.” The aim of marriage is to survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. “For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”
The book argues against the errors of both Hudge and Gudge—the collectivist and the individualist—because neither thought about what sort of house a man might actually like for himself. They did not begin with the ideal and therefore were not practical politicians. A house of one’s own is the obvious ideal for every man. Chesterton quotes Burke’s saying that “an Englishman’s house is his castle,” calling it entertaining because the Englishman is “almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle.” Peasant proprietorship exists nearly everywhere except England. Man has always lost his way since Eden but always knew what he was looking for—every man has a house somewhere. Under skepticism, however, man has begun to doubt not just his hopes but his desires themselves: “He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.”
Chesterton argues that England is governed by an oligarchy, evidenced by the same family names appearing in newspapers thirty years apart: Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Lyttleton, Churchill, Chamberlain, Trevelyan, Acland—identical in both papers. “If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is.” The aristocracy’s power lies not in preserving traditions but in always being on the side of “Progress.” Aristocrats keep up with fashion, not custom—”Only the mob has customs.” They were on the side of the Reformation against the Church, the Whigs against the Stuarts, Baconian science against old philosophy, the manufacturing system against operatives, and today the increased power of the State against individualists.
The book argues against Imperialism in both its popular and its Caesarean forms. Popular Imperialism is an illusion of comfort that consoles men for England’s ugliness with legends of distant heroism. Kipling, a man of real but decadent genius, threw a glamour over the Colonials that is fading. Imperialism in common patriotic pretensions is weak and perilous: it attempts to create a sham Europe one can dominate instead of the real Europe one can only share—a love of living with inferiors. The dream of restoring the Roman Empire has haunted every Christian nation as a snare.
Chesterton argues for the importance of equality and the democratic spirit. Democracy in its human sense is not rule by majority or even by everybody, but “arbitrament by anybody”—resting on the club habit of taking a total stranger for granted, assuming certain things are inevitably common between oneself and him. The test of universal democratic dogmas is what one would observe before any newcomer in a tavern—”that is the real English law.” The first man seen from the window is “the King of England.” Equality is essential to conversation; the most famous man would wish obscurity in tavern argument so his brilliance might shine. In sports, emulation is “an ardent sort of equality”—games are competitive for excitement, but the existence of handicaps proves men seek “struggle of equals,” not triumph of superiors. Handicap arrangers are “abstract and even severe republicans.”
The book argues against the Suffragette movement on the grounds that it is not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing with military virtues, chiefly that it comes to an end. The aim of civil war is peace. Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this decisive sense because they are women and, secondly, because they are very few women. Instead, they create anarchy, not revolution. The difference is not violence but fruitfulness and finality. Revolution produces government; anarchy produces more anarchy. You can knock off the King’s head once, but you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite.
Chesterton argues that women should be excluded from the collective act of coercion—the act of punishment by a mob. The tradition says that if twenty men hang a man from a tree or lamp-post, they shall be twenty men and not women. This exclusion might be maintained as “a protection as well as a veto.” Voting ultimately means “branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant.” It is not irrational if men decided a woman, like a priest, must not be “a shedder of blood.”
The book argues for the value of the universal over the special. A knife, a stick, or a fire are ancestral things that are universal, not special, serving many needs. Modernity proposes substitutes that answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten—cigarettes instead of sticks, pencil-sharpeners instead of knives, hot water pipes instead of fires. Religion has been a maid-of-all-work, providing theoretic laws and practical rules, teaching logic and fairy tales. Its uses have been broken into specialities: ritual and colored emblem taken over by modern art, conscience dried up into the science of ethics, and the cry to dim gods become Psychical Research. The power of answering many purposes should not die out.
Key Concepts
The Medical Mistake: Chesterton’s term for the sociological method that begins with analysis of disease and ends with a chapter called “The Remedy,” ensuring the remedy is never found. In social matters, “we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.”
The Social Organism fallacy: The error of speaking of society as if it were a biological organism. “Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede.” This produces absurd talk of “young nations” and “dying nations.”
The New Hypocrite: A novel kind of hypocrite who has genuinely religious aims while pretending to be worldly and practical. The old hypocrite (Tartuffe or Pecksniff) had worldly aims while pretending religious ones; the new hypocrite conceals his theology “like a sin.” It is “a fight of creeds masquerading as policies.”
Dogma versus Prejudice: There are only two things for the human mind: a dogma and a prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. The Middle Ages were rational, an age of doctrine; our age is poetical, an age of prejudice. Creeds collide and unite; prejudices diverge and divide.
The Unfinished Temple: The presence in the past of huge ideals that remained unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. Moderns find these “splendid failures” melancholy and maintain a “strange silence” about them. “The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.”
The Clock Metaphor: Moderns say “You can’t put the clock back.” The answer is “You can”—a clock, being human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure. Society, being human construction, can be reconstructed on any plan that has ever existed.
Property as the Art of the Democracy: The average man cannot cut clay into a man but can cut earth into a garden; he cannot paint the sunset but can paint his house—even pea green with pink spots—and remains an artist because he has chosen. “Property is merely the art of the democracy.”
The Free Family: The family is “a necessity for mankind” and “a trap for mankind.” “Free love” is hypocritical—love is not an episode like lighting a cigarette. A man cannot be a free lover; “he is either a traitor or a tied man.”
The Anarchist Institution: The home is “the one anarchist institution”—older than law, standing outside the State. The State has authority in abnormal cases, but in normal family joys and sorrows “the State has no mode of entry.”
The Second Wind principle: In everything worth having there is “a point of pain or tedium that must be survived.” “The success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon.” Vows, laws, and contracts are ways of surviving “this breaking point.”
Hudge and Gudge: Two reformers whose conflicting approaches to housing the poor both fail because neither began with the ideal of what sort of house a man might actually like for himself. Hudge becomes a collectivist defending ugly tenements; Gudge becomes a Tory romanticizing slums.
The Homelessness of Jones: The ordinary Englishman who has married for love and built a small house, only to be turned out repeatedly by passing philosophers who explain his new situation is for the best. Jones asked for so little and was offered so much—”Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem”—but only wanted a house, which was refused.
The Charm of Jingoism: Popular Imperialism as an illusion of comfort that consoles men for England’s ugliness with legends of distant heroism. The end of “David Copperfield” is unreal because it is Imperialistic: Emily and Micawber are shipped to a vague colony where changes come over them with no cause except the climate.
Wisdom and the Weather: The custom of talking about the weather is a gesture of primeval worship—the sky must be invoked. It also expresses politeness’s elementary idea—equality. Good manners begin with sharing something simply: two men should share an umbrella, or share the rain.
Arbitrament by anybody: Democracy in its human sense is not rule by majority or even by everybody, but “arbitrament by anybody”—resting on the club habit of taking a total stranger for granted. The first man seen from the window is “the King of England.”
The Universal Stick: A knife, a stick, or a fire are ancestral things that are universal, not special, serving many needs. Modernity proposes substitutes that answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. Old methods have four or five legs to stand on; old institutions are quadrupeds, some centipedes.
The Trimmer: An honorable term wrongly used in the opposite sense. A Trimmer is not a coward who goes over to the stronger side but a chivalrous person who goes over to the weaker side, like one who trims a boat by sitting where few people are seated. Woman is a trimmer; it is a “generous, dangerous and romantic trade.”
The Coldness of Chloe: The perpetual poetic reproach against women for their unemotional quality. The most terrible quality in women is being unemotional—”an awful armor of ice,” possibly protecting a “more delicate organism.” The female cry in anger is noli me tangere (touch me not).
The Romance of Thrift: Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance. Women uphold thrift as creative, not miserly.
The Higher Anarchy: Woman stands for anarchy in the sense of having no rules for one’s mind. She treats each person as a peculiar person. “Anarchy is only tact when it works badly; tact is only anarchy when it works well.” In the private house it works well.
The Brand: Voting ultimately means “branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant.” The tradition against Female Suffrage keeps women out of “the collective act of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob.”
The Heresy of Precedent: The Feminist argument that modern conditions demand new arrangements because women now have trades and work in factories. Chesterton’s imagined Feminist protests that “we must have new rules,” a position Chesterton critiques throughout.
Themes
The Primacy of Ideals: The book’s central theme is that social and political thought must begin with a vision of the good, not with an analysis of the bad. Chesterton argues that “what is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.” This theme unifies all five parts of the book, from the critique of sociology in the opening chapters to the defense of domesticity in the closing ones. The failure of modern reform movements—whether Imperialism, Feminism, or Collectivism—is traced to their common refusal to articulate a positive ideal of human flourishing.
The Critique of Modernity: The book presents a sustained critique of modernity’s characteristic assumptions and tendencies: its faith in efficiency, its biological metaphors for society, its replacement of dogma with prejudice, its narrow specialism, and its worship of progress. Chesterton argues that modernity has lost the ability to ask fundamental questions about what things are for. The modern man is “heir of all ages” in name only; in reality, he has passed the saint without bowing and would run away from the warrior. Modern prophetic idealism is narrow through “persistent process of elimination”—we must ask for new things because not allowed to ask for old things.
The Value of Tradition: Against the modern worship of novelty, Chesterton defends the wisdom embedded in traditional institutions and
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The Medical Mistake
Chesterton begins by attacking the foundational method of modern social inquiry. He observes that it starts with analysis, statistics, and tables of population, only to conclude with a chapter called “The Remedy.” This scientific approach, he argues, guarantees that the remedy is never actually found. The fundamental blunder of sociology is to state the disease before seeking the cure; in social matters, we must find the cure before we can even identify the disease. This fallacy stems from a modern obsession with biological metaphors. Speaking of the “Social Organism” is as nonsensical as speaking of the “British Lion,” for while every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This leads to absurd talk of “young nations” and “dying nations,” as if a country could lose its teeth or grow a moustache.
In bodily illness, doctors agree on the nature of a healthy body and work to restore it. Social science, however, offers “fancy souls for sale,” where people claim to be tired of being a Puritan and wish to be a Pagan. No one wishes to trade a headache for a toothache, yet in public problems, some aim for cures that others would consider worse maladies. For Mr. Belloc, property is as essential as his teeth, while for Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is a toothache. The quarrel in modern social discussion is not about difficulties but about the aim itself. We agree on what is evil, but not on what is good. Everyone dislikes a lazy aristocracy, but not everyone would like an active one. The sociological method of dissecting poverty or cataloguing prostitution is useless, for while we all dislike abject poverty, we might disagree about the value of independent and dignified poverty. The only way to discuss social evil is to first establish the social ideal. “What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.”
Wanted, An Unpractical Man
Chesterton turns to the chicken-and-egg joke to illustrate a deeper philosophical point. Evolutionary materialists see all things coming from a dim, monstrous oval germ, while the supernatural school sees the world as an egg brooded upon by a sacred, unbegotten bird. The bird must be at the end of our mental chain; the egg exists to produce the chicken, but the chicken does not exist merely to produce another egg. The chicken may exist to amuse itself, to praise God, or to suggest ideas to a dramatist. Modern politics forgets this, treating chickens only as things that lay more eggs. “Our politics are rotten eggs.”
Idealism means considering everything in its practical essence. Lord Rosebery represents a school that substitutes “efficiency” for moral ideals, which means discovering everything about a machine except what it is for. When things go wrong, we need an “unpractical man”—a theorist. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome burns, but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning. If an aeroplane is seriously ill, an absent-minded old professor must be dragged from his college to analyze the evil. Efficiency is futile because it deals only with actions after they are performed; an act can only be judged successful or unsuccessful when it is over. There is no backing a winner before the race.
The New Hypocrite
Chesterton uses the analogy of a pirate forcing a victim to walk the plank to illustrate the failure of compromise. Offering a “common-sense compromise” to walk a reasonable distance is futile because the pirate and victim differ precisely over what constitutes a “reasonable distance.” The tipping point is as hard as a geometrical diagram, as abstract as theological dogma. The old English compromise has been destroyed by a new, cloudy political cowardice. People now fear improvement merely because it is complete, calling it utopian. Compromise once meant half a loaf beats no bread; modern statesmen seem to think half a loaf beats a whole loaf.
This has given rise to a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite had worldly aims while pretending religious ones, but the new hypocrite has genuinely religious aims while pretending to be worldly and practical. A Wesleyan minister claims to care only for education, not creeds, while wild Wesleyanism tears his soul. A Church of England clergyman speaks of school efficiency while the evil passions of a curate roar within him. It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. Theology is not expunged as error but concealed like a sin. Chesterton respects another’s faith but not his worldly hesitations and fictions. Nonconformists could admire the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop; it is when he plays the rational British statesman that they are annoyed.
The claim that creedless vagueness saves us from fanaticism is false; it creates fanaticism with peculiar force. There are only two things for the human mind: a dogma and a prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. A direction is more fantastic than a plan, for straight lines that are not parallel must meet, while curves may recoil forever. Modern vagueness loses and separates men as in a mist. A clear difference unites, for a boundary unites. A magnanimous Moslem and a chivalrous Crusader, both dogmatists, were nearer to each other than two homeless agnostics. A creed is collective, its sins sociable; a prejudice is private, its tolerance misanthropic. Unless we have a doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them to uses. The scientific plutocrat will say humanity adapts to any conditions, and a workman may come to want no more space than a snail or no more light than an owl.
The Unfinished Temple
The past is marked by huge ideals that remained unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned, which moderns find melancholy and keep out of their histories. Moderns predict a United States of Europe but omit that we are moving away from one, as such a thing existed in Roman times and essentially in mediaeval times. They predict a great rising of the poor against the rich but never mention that France made that attempt unaided and was allowed to be trampled out. Nothing is so marked in modern writing as predicting ideals in the future while ignoring them in the past. The past shows splendid but unfinished cities, unfinished not always through enmity but through fickleness and mental fatigue. We have left undone not only things we ought to have done but things we wanted to do.
The claim that modern man is the heir of all ages who has extracted good from all past experiments is false. We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The need is for complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution. There is no courage in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The truly courageous man defies tyrannies young as the morning. The only true free-thinker’s intellect is as free from the future as from the past. Moderns say “You can’t put the clock back,” but the answer is “You can”—a clock, being a human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure. Society, being a human construction, can be reconstructed on any plan that has ever existed. The author claims the freedom to restore the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan or the complete independence of small Greek or Italian towns. He does not propose these things; he merely declares his independence and claims choice of all tools in the universe.
Modern idealists are taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved, but logically the case is the other way: “The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.” Because Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure; because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say it collapsed as a system. When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury, they wished for his blood but even more for his brains. Becket’s brains were thinking about the mediaeval conception that the church is the judge of the world.
The Domestic Ideal as Test
The author proposes to examine one old ideal—domesticity: “the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of history.” This ideal, like the church and the republic, is chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they never knew it in practice. The poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. The cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home while the working class is shouting to be let into it.
The Parable of Hudge and Gudge
The narrator opens with a hypothetical case: a filthy, disease-ridden rookery in Hoxton, rife with crime and promiscuity. Two noble young men of pure intentions—Hudge and Gudge—seek to remedy this situation. Hudge, bustling and practical, collects money and builds tall, bare tenements resembling beehives, housing the poor in little brick cells that are weatherproof, ventilated, and supplied with clean water. Gudge, more sensitive, objects to these boxes, issues the “Gudge Minority Report” against the “celebrated Hudge Report,” and eventually claims the people were happier in their original slums. The narrator notes that since the people maintain the same dazed amiability in both places, it is difficult to determine who is right—though no one ever liked stench or starvation as such.
Gudge degenerates into defending slums and slum-landlords, romanticizing sleeping fourteen to a room and open drains as essential to England’s greatness. Hudge degenerates too, coming to view his ugly buildings, common kitchens, and asbestos stoves as sacred, defending them with Socialist pamphlets—calling the inability to keep strangers out of one’s bedroom “Brotherhood” and climbing twenty-three flights of stairs “Effort.” Ultimately, Gudge becomes a corrupt, apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club who roars “Do ’em good!” at mentions of poverty, while Hudge becomes a lean vegetarian with a gray pointed beard living in a Garden City, advocating that “we shall all sleep in one universal bedroom.” The narrator introduces this as a type of endless and exasperating misunderstanding in modern England. Both men erred because neither thought about what sort of house a man might actually like for himself—they did not begin with the ideal and therefore were not practical politicians.
The Ideal of Home and Its Loss
The narrator asserts that a house of one’s own is the obvious ideal for every man, and asks why he hasn’t got it, suggesting it is in a philosophical sense his own fault—specifically, the fault of his philosophy. He quotes Burke’s saying that “an Englishman’s house is his castle,” calling it entertaining because the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Peasant proprietorship exists nearly everywhere except England. The narrator notes that man has always lost his way since Eden but always knew what he was looking for—every man has a house somewhere, waist deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Under skepticism, however, man has begun to doubt not just his hopes but his desires themselves: he has always lost his way, but now he has lost his address.
Under upper-class philosophies (Hudge and Gudge), the average man’s simple notion of a home is derided as bourgeois, sentimental, or despicably Christian. He is recommended to go to the streets (called Individualism) or the workhouse (called Collectivism). The governing class will use modern phrases to cover ancient predominance—denying the peasant “three acres and a cow” on grounds of State Ownership or humanitarianism.
The Oligarchy and Its Names
The narrator argues England is governed by an oligarchy, evidenced by the same family names appearing in newspapers thirty years apart: Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Lyttleton, Churchill, Chamberlain, Trevelyan, Acland—identical in both papers. “If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is.”
Oppression by Optimism
The aristocracy’s power lies not in preserving traditions but in always being on the side of “Progress.” Aristocrats keep up with fashion, not custom—only the mob has customs. They were on the side of the Reformation against the Church, the Whigs against the Stuarts, Baconian science against old philosophy, the manufacturing system against operatives, and today the increased power of the State against individualists. The narrator recounts how the Englishman was told each dispossession was for the best: the abolition of public inns and sanctuaries was for “the religion of the future”; Puritan lords created the Commonwealth while destroying common land; a rhyme is quoted about prosecuting the man who steals the goose from the common while leaving “the larger felon loose who steals the common from the goose.” In the nineteenth century, mine-owner and railway-director nobles cited “newly discovered Economic Law.” Current politicians introduce bills preventing poor mothers from carrying their own babies and forbidding tenants to drink beer in public inns—rebuked gently as Socialism, not feudalism.
The Homelessness of Jones
The narrator presents Jones, an ordinary Englishman who has married for love and built a small house, only to be turned out repeatedly. Each time, a passing philosopher (who happens to be the one who turned him out) explains his new situation is for the best: living in the front garden is “the bold life upon the bounty of nature”; mean lodgings represent “mercantile endeavor” and economic struggle; the workhouse is the “golden republic” of the sublime future. Jones asked for so little and was offered so much—Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem—but only wanted a house, which was refused. The narrator insists this is no exaggeration: the rich literally turned the poor from guest houses onto the road of progress, forced them into factories and wage-slavery, promising streets of London paved with gold as they had promised heaven’s streets paved with gold. The poor went from prison to prison, with Calvinism opening one small window upon heaven. Now they are asked to accept yet another dispossession.
The Charm of Jingoism
The author begins by explaining his choice of title for this section. He admits “Imperialism” is a clumsy term for his meaning, but alternatives are worse: “Militarism” would mislead, and “The Superman” makes nonsense of any discussion. He suggests “Caesarism” might have been better but wants a popular word, and Imperialism covers most of the men and theories he means to discuss. He clarifies that he does disbelieve in popular Imperialism as a mode of English patriotic sentiment, but distinguishes it from the “Caesarean Imperialism” he wishes to sketch. He differs from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes and Kipling but does not think it an insolent creation of English harshness—rather, it springs from English softness and kindness.
He argues that reasons for believing in Australia are sentimental, like reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales is regarded as a paradise for dishonest uncles and tired nephews; British Columbia is a fairyland where magical luck attends youngest sons. This optimism is an English weakness, shared by Charles Dickens. The end of David Copperfield is unreal because it is Imperialistic: Emily and Micawber are shipped to a vague colony where changes come over them with no cause except the climate—the tragic woman becomes contented, the comic man responsible, from a sea voyage and sight of a kangaroo. His objection to light political Imperialism is that it is an illusion of comfort. An Empire with a failing heart being proud of its extremities is like an old dandy with a gone brain proud of his legs. It consoles men for England’s ugliness with legends of distant heroism. A man in Seven Dials can feel life is godlike in the bush or veldt, just as he might feel it in Brixton and Surbiton—but the objection is factual: Brixton’s young men are not young giants, nor are Colonials pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys who lost the sound of Bow Bells. Kipling, a man of real but decadent genius, threw a glamour over them that is fading. Kipling has imagination of an oriental, cruel kind because he grew up in the oldest country on earth—an Asiatic past—and might never have written “Kabul River” if born in Melbourne.
He states frankly that Imperialism in common patriotic pretensions is weak and perilous: it attempts to create a sham Europe one can dominate instead of the real Europe one can only share—a love of living with inferiors. The dream of restoring the Roman Empire has haunted every Christian nation as a snare. The Spanish embodied it in dynasties; the French conquered it twice by arms; the English, poetical and optimistic, have an Empire vague yet sympathetic. This dream is a weakness—more than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If England collided with real brothers, fancy would be left aside; one would no more pit Australian armies against German than Tasmanian sculpture against French.
Woman as Sanity and the Trimmer
Chesterton argues that woman stands for the idea of sanity itself—the intellectual home to which the mind returns after its excursions into extravagance. The poet’s mind finds its way to wild places, but the lunatic’s mind never finds its way back. Every machine must have a part that moves and a part that stands still; everything that changes must have a part that is unchangeable. The phenomena that moderns hastily condemn are parts of woman’s position as the center and pillar of health. Her subservience and pliability are like those of a universal remedy—she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She must be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-go-lucky husband. She prevents the Quixote from being put upon and the bully from putting upon others.
The French King wrote that woman always varies and foolish is he who trusts her, but Chesterton argues that woman always varies, which is exactly why we trust her. Correcting every adventure with common-sense antidotes is not being a spy or slave but being in the position of Aristotle or Herbert Spencer—a universal morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete moralist rebukes. This is to be a “Trimmer” in the true sense—an honorable term wrongly used in the opposite sense. A Trimmer is not a coward who goes over to the stronger side but a chivalrous person who goes over to the weaker side, like one who trims a boat by sitting where few people are seated. Woman is a trimmer; it is a generous, dangerous and romantic trade.
Two gigantic facts of nature fixed the line of cleavage along sex: first, the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; second, the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need to be introduced to a world, not taught a trade. Woman is shut up in a house with a human being when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. If anyone says this duty of general enlightenment is too exacting and oppressive, Chesterton can understand—but our race has cast this burden on women to keep common-sense in the world. When people call domesticity “drudgery,” a double meaning arises. If drudgery means dreadfully hard work, he admits the woman drudges as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means the work is trifling, colorless, and of small import to the soul, he gives up—he does not know what the words mean.
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes, books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, hygiene—this might exhaust the mind but cannot narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? A woman’s function is laborious because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. He will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task, never for its smallness.
Though woman’s task is universality, she has one or two severe though wholesome prejudices. She has been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity, but has expressed it by getting her teeth into the two or three things she thinks she stands for. Recent official trouble about women arises from transferring to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness proper only to primary things. One’s own children, one’s own altar ought to be matters of principle or prejudice. But who wrote Junius’s Letters ought to be a matter of free inquiry. An energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius will believe it in three months out of loyalty to employers. Modern women defend their office with the fierceness of domesticity, fighting for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, developing “wolfish wifehood” on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well—and why they ought not to do it.
The Romance of Thrift
The larger part of womankind have fought for things more intoxicating than desk or typewriter. Women’s prejudices fortify her position as general overseer, an autocrat within small compass but on all sides. The two points on which woman is most tenacious are the ideal of thrift and the ideal of dignity. The book is written by a male, and these qualities are hateful in a man. Men have encouraged each other in throwing money about, creating a chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance. Chesterton speaks disinterestedly—he cannot remember saving a half-penny since birth. Thrift is poetic.
The Coldness of Chloe
Chesterton challenges the common characterization of the eighteenth century as artificial. The eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive—it practiced an art that openly displayed itself as art. Its fashions revealed nature by allowing artifice, as with the powdered wigs that frosted every head with the same silver. This was not a pride that conceals old age but rather a collective agreement to appear old rather than young. The fashions were freakish, but they were not false. He introduces this atmosphere to discuss a recurring element in the literature and decoration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the perpetual poetic reproach against women for their coldness. Love songs compared women’s eyes to northern stars, their hearts to ice, their bosoms to snow. These phrases, often dismissed as dead conventions, actually contain a psychological truth missed by realistic novels of Chesterton’s day. Modern psychological novelists depict wives terrorizing husbands through emotional outbursts—rolling on floors, gnashing teeth, throwing furniture, poisoning coffee—based on the theory that women are “emotional.” But the old poets were closer to the truth: the most terrible quality in women is being unemotional.
Chesterton calls this an awful armor of ice, possibly protecting a more delicate organism. The female cry in anger is noli me tangere—touch me not. He names this quality modesty, but yields to modern nomenclature and calls it dignity. It is what poets called “the coldness of Chloe.” As an embodiment, he offers the skirt: the “advanced” woman claiming the right to wear trousers is as grotesque as claiming the right to wear a false nose. The skirt means female dignity, not submission—proven by the fact that judges, priests, and kings wear long, trailing robes when they wish to be impressive. The whole world is under petticoat government.
The Pedant and the Savage
Women uphold two pillars of civilization: thrift, which is creative rather than miserly, and dignity, which expresses sacred personality and privacy. Chesterton refuses to debate whether these instincts are inherent or merely products of education, for two reasons. First, the question cannot be answered: one could imagine a quadrupedal or reptilian civilization, but man as he is walks upright. Second, he prefers women to keep these qualities; he will not invent ways for mankind to unlearn the violin or forget horseback riding, and domesticity is as valuable as any ancient art. He also declines to speculate about primitive or savage societies. A trader or missionary seeing a squaw digging while a man plays a flute assumes tyranny, but the same sight appears in Brixton back gardens—women are more conscientious and more impatient, men more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. In Hawaii as in Hoxton, the woman works because she told the man to work and he didn’t obey. Regarding bride-reluctance ceremonies, professors call them survivals of Marriage by Capture; Chesterton doubts women were ever captured—he thinks they pretended to be, as they do still.
Thrift and dignity collide with masculine wordiness, wastefulness, and pleasure-seeking. The nursery rhyme is reversed: the queen is in the counting-house, the king in the parlor eating bread and honey—though the king captured the honey in heroic wars. The great sexual war is between the Private House and the Public House. A collection of medieval English poems divided into “Religious Carols,” “Drinking Songs,” and “Poems of Domestic Life”
The Slogan and the Father
Chesterton attacks the cry “Save the children” as a foolish and wicked symptom of modern confusion. This slogan, he argues, treats the State—the “home of man”—as a desperate expedient for panic situations, akin to Socialist schemes that would collect and share food as in a famine or divide children from fathers as in a shipwreck. The implication he rejects is that fathers cannot be saved, that millions of grown-up, sane, responsible Europeans would be dismissed as dipsomaniacs, unemployables, dullards, or loafers. He insists that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens, nor free others if we have forgotten freedom’s appetite. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; we cannot pass on truth we never possessed. It is vain to save children, for they cannot remain children; we are teaching them to be men, yet cannot find ideal manhood for ourselves.
The “Educere” Fallacy
Chesterton addresses “crazy pedants” who claim education is not instruction by authority but “drawing out” dormant faculties from within the child. He satirizes this: the boyish soul supposedly contains primordial yearning for Greek accents and clean collars, and the newborn babe holds intrinsic secrets about asparagus-eating and the date of Bannockburn. He doubts the derivation—suggesting “educator” for a Roman schoolmaster merely meant “taking out little boys for a walk”—but more firmly rejects the doctrine. It would be as sane to say the baby’s milk comes from the baby as to say its educational merits do. Education means producing faculties in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes. You may draw out squeals and grunts by poking the child, but you will never draw out the English language—that you have got to put into him.
Authority the Unavoidable
Authority in education cannot be destroyed, only preserved. Chesterton cites Mr. Bernard Shaw’s hatred of “forming a child’s mind,” suggesting Shaw should hang himself, for he hates something inseparable from human life. The educator drawing out is as arbitrary as the instructor pouring in—he draws out what he chooses, not the faculty of forgery or a talent for torture. The distinction means merely that the instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Education is violent because it is creative—as reckless as fiddle-playing, as dogmatic as drawing, as brutal as building. Man claims the right to control mother Nature and make his child the Superman, in his image. Modern freedom is at root fear—timidity before responsibilities. The one eternal education is to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. Chesterton criticizes modern schools where the State, controlled by the few, lets cranks and experiments reach the schoolroom without passing through Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. The flopping infant of four has more experience than the dogma to which he submits. He wishes “Popular Education” meant education by the people, not of the people.
The New Educationists vs. Old Schoolmasters
The expansive educators avoid authority no more than old masters—perhaps less. The old village schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar, then let him play anything. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him into the playground and makes him play cricket for health. The free educationists forbid more than the old-fashioned ones. Chesterton mentions Puritans destroying images, Rationalists forbidding fairy tales, and educationists forbidding tin soldiers. He recalls a “meek little madman” at a Socialist soirée asking him to oppose adventure stories for boys. He notes a recent case: a poor boy sentenced to flogging and five years’ imprisonment for picking up coal valued at 5d. He sides with humanitarians protesting this, but finds it unfair to excuse boys for being robbers yet denounce them for playing at robbers. “There is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.”
The Humility of Mrs. Grundy and No Uneducated People
The new education is as harsh as the old. The difference: the “heavy father” is a democrat—he claims “Everybody does it”—while the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan forbidding soldiers on Sunday expresses Puritan opinion; the new educationist’s veto does not pretend to be representative. Innovators talk of Mrs. Grundy’s modesty, but she is more humble than they. If education is abstract expansion, there is no lack of it—there are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most people are educated wrong. London had been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The gutter-boy is already educated, even over-educated. Schools should restore simplicity, making war on the poor’s knowledge, not ignorance.
The Philosophy of Colors
Chesterton uses color as a symbol and example. He refutes the “realists” who call poor streets “gray,” arguing they are actually motley, striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not monochrome. A London gutter-boy walks among vivid colors—against glowing green, black against burning blue. Specific brands are named: Reckitt’s Blue, Day and Martin’s blacking, Colman’s Mustard. The boy’s lack of art-intoxication is not due to grayness or starved senses, but because colors are presented in the wrong connection, scale, and motive. He lacks “a philosophy of colors.” Blue belongs to the sky, not Reckitt; black to the abyss, not Day and Martin. Advertisements of mustard are irritating because mustard is a small luxury, not to be taken in quantity—seas of yellow are like swallowing gallons of mustard. The author contrasts these “gigantic trivialities” with mediaeval pictures where blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire and judgment fires are a pigmy patch of gold. The old artist conveyed colors as significant and precious things, like jewels and talismanic stones—arbitrary but authoritative. This spirit—”fiery thrift”—the schools must recover. Educationists must teach people to relish colors like liquors, turning drunkards into wine tasters. If the twentieth century succeeds, it will catch up with the twelfth.
The Need for Narrowness
The task of culture is selection and rejection, not expansion. The educationist must find a creed and teach it—fastidious and firm as theology, orthodox. He must choose between the faith of Kipling and Shaw, whether a child is brought up by Harmsworth or Pearson, whether he reads Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy. Creeds may be crumbling, but sects are increasing; education must be sectarian. Out of the throng of theories, it must select a theory, hear a voice, trace a star. The author urges positive, “optimistic” solutions against negative, abolitionist ones. He would teach the poor man to drink, not not to drink. He would not abolish public schools but make them public; not stop Parliament but make it work; not shut churches but open them. Going back to the old ideal is going back to old reality: the gin shop returning to the inn. To mediaevalize public schools would democratize them.
The Case for the Public Schools
Success has two senses: serving an immediate purpose or adding to general welfare. Old public schools may be ultimately weakening the country, but they are “efficiently inefficient”—you can make a flying ship that flies even if it kills you. The public school system works; it achieves its aim. On athletics, the author argues brutality in the immoral sense is not a vice of English public schools. There is “much moral bullying” due to lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These schools encourage physical courage but forbid moral courage. Physical courage is “a magnificent fundamental.” The author attacks the “Tolstoian and Kiplingite” for both maintaining courage is connected with cruelty—one saying courage must be abandoned for this connection, the other that cruelty is charming as part of courage. Both are wrong: bodily energy does not make a man spiteful. If aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has it and public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families, England lacks it and public schools destroy it. The public school is “a factory for aristocrats.”
The School for Hypocrites
The ultimate objection to English public schools is their “utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth.”
The Insect Idea and the Soul of the Hive
The author begins by dismissing the claim that no evolutionist asks humans to become unhuman or to copy animals. He insists that both wild and tame evolutionists urge exactly this. A recent cultus, the religion of the future for the weak-minded, is the adoration of the insect, discovered through a microscope. This is not new as an idea, only as an idolatry. Virgil took bees seriously, but likely would not have kept them as carefully as he wrote. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant—a charming occupation for a sluggard. Now, great men suggest we study the insect because we are his inferiors. Old moralists distributed man’s virtues among animals decoratively—the ant for industry, the lion for courage, the pelican for charity—and if a lion were not courageous, they would drop the lion and keep the courage. But a new sect looks up at insects, bowing down to worship beetles like the ancient Egyptians.
Maurice Maeterlinck, a man of genius, carries a magnifying glass. Through his lens, bees appear as golden armies and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination peers down science’s tubes, imagining the earwig striding like an elephant or the grasshopper roaring like an aeroplane leaping from Hertfordshire to Surrey. One enters a dream temple of enormous entomology, with ribbed columns like caterpillars and a dome like a starry spider. The Twopenny Tube underground railway gives this nameless fear—squat archways without upright lines, as if tunneled by huge worms. It is the underground palace of the Serpent, the enemy of man.
Maeterlinck’s ethical influence is an admiration, even envy, of bees’ collective spirituality—living for the “Soul of the Hive.” This communal morality appears in Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s theory of living for the evolutionary future, and in Socialists’ interest in ants, which they prefer because ants are not brightly colored. Evidence of this insectolatry includes flattery of the energetic Far Eastern nation of which it is said “Patriotism is its only religion”—living only for the Soul of the Hive. When Christendom grows weak and Asia moves westward, invasions have been compared to plagues of lice or locusts. Eastern armies are like insects in blind destructiveness, black nihilism, indifference to individual life, belief in numbers, pessimistic courage, and atheistic patriotism. But never before have Christians called a Turk a locust as a compliment. Now we worship as well as fear, tracing with adoration the form out of Asia—Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.
In resisting the Soul of the Hive, Christendom stands for all humanity: one good and happy man is an end in himself, a soul is worth saving. We stand as chiefs of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose cognizance is the backbone—for the milk of the individual mother, the courage of the wandering cub, the chivalry of the dog, the humor of cats, the affection of the horse, the loneliness of the lion. The glorification of society in social insects is a transformation and dissolution of the symbols of man. The idea of the human family is disappearing. The hive has become larger than the house; the bees are destroying their captors; what the locust left, the caterpillar hath eaten; the little house and garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way.
The Fallacy of the Umbrella Stand
Lord Morley said the House of Lords must be either mended or ended. The author insists mending and ending are opposite: you mend what you like, end what you don’t. He disbelieves in oligarchy, so would not mend the House of Lords; he believes in the family, so would mend it like a chair—the modern family is a chair wanting mending. Anarchists disbelieve in both family and state. Socialists believe in the state but are not specially engaged in strengthening the family. They sharpen the state’s machinery, making government stronger and harsher, while leaving the home in ruins and restoring the hive, especially the stings. Some labor and Poor Law reform schemes by distinguished Socialists amount to putting people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Progress means being moved on—by the police.
Socialists are conscious of the line between state things and chaotic nature; they may force children to school before sunrise but will not force the sun to rise; they will not banish the sea, only sea-bathers. But inside the state’s outline, their lines are confused. They have no firm sense of one thing being private, another public. Personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen as personal land has been stolen since the sixteenth century.
A Socialist thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack. An umbrella is breadth and protection; a stick is slenderness and attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella the shield against the hostile universe. The umbrella is the roof, a collapsible house. The umbrella is a shield against an actual enemy; the stick is a sword against imaginary enemies—a court sword, purely ceremonial swagger. A man feels more like a man with a stick. Nobody has swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is a convenience, a necessary evil. A walking-stick is an unnecessary good. This explains the losing of umbrellas—one does not hear of losing walking sticks. A stick is a pleasure, real personal property; anybody can forget a necessary thing. The Collectivist error says that because two men can share an umbrella, they can share a walking-stick.
