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35 VIII THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION
After all, the progress illusion is not so very subtle. We begin
by reading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude
(usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things
of the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently
produced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors
to oppressed. The poor man is given a vote by the Liberals in the
hope that he will cast it for his emancipators. The hope is not
fulfilled; but the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men for debt
ceases; Factory Acts are passed to mitigate sweating; schooling
is made free and compulsory; sanitary by-laws are multiplied; public
steps are taken to house the masses decently; the bare-footed get
boots; rags become rare; and bathrooms and pianos, smart tweeds
and starched collars, reach numbers of people who once, as "the
unsoaped," played the Jew's harp or the accordion in moleskins
and belchers. Some of these changes are gains: some of them are
losses. Some of them are not changes at all: all of them are merely
the changes that money makes. Still, they produce an illusion of
bustling progress; and the reading class infers from them that the
abuses of the early Victorian period no longer exist except as amusing
pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment we look for a reform
due to character and not to money, to statesmanship and not to interest
or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, we remembered the
maladministration and incompetence revealed by the Crimean War as
part of a bygone state of things until the South African war shewed
that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbons who
have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, had
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly recovered from
the fruitless irritation of this discovery when it transpired that
the officers' mess of our most select regiment included a flogging
club presided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked
some disgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but
no surprise at the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor
and virtue, of personal courage and self-respect, in the front rank
of our chivalry. In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy
and idolatry which encouraged Charles I. to undervalue the Puritan
revolt of the XVII century had been long outgrown; but it has needed
nothing but favorable circumstances to revive, with added abjectness
to compensate for its lost piety. We have relapsed into disputes
about transubstantiation at the very moment when the discovery of
the wide prevalence of theophagy as a tribal custom has deprived
us of the last excuse for believing that our official religious
rites differ in essentials from those of barbarians. The Christian
doctrine of the uselessness of punishment and the wickedness of
revenge has not, in spite of its simple common sense, found a single
convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing to the masses
but a sensational public execution which is made an excuse for other
executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief's life minute
by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed
imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber
clipped the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated
the remains of the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and
mutilated the remains of Cromwell two centuries ago. We have demanded
the decapitation of the Chinese Boxer princes as any Tartar would
have done; and our military and naval expeditions to kill, burn,
and destroy tribes and villages for knocking an Englishman on the
head are so common a part of our Imperial routine that the last
dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as can be counted
on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to extort confession
is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst these pages
are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to twenty
years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence
will be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden
the notes he forged. And no comment whatever is made, either on
this or on a telegram from the seat of war in Somaliland mentioning
that certain information has been given by a prisoner of war "under
punishment." Even if these reports are false, the fact that
they are accepted without protest as indicating a natural and proper
course of public conduct shews that we are still as ready to resort
to torture as Bacon was. As to vindictive cruelty, an incident in
the South African war, when the relatives and friends of a prisoner
were forced to witness his execution, betrayed a baseness of temper
and character which hardly leaves us the right to plume ourselves
on our superiority to Edward III. at the surrender of Calais. And
the democratic American officer indulges in torture in the Philippines
just as the aristocratic English officer did in South Africa. The
incidents of the white invasion of Africa in search of ivory, gold,
diamonds, and sport, have proved that the modern European is the
same beast of prey that formerly marched to the conquest of new
worlds under Alexander, Antony, and Pizarro. Parliaments and vestries
are just what they were when Cromwell suppressed them and Dickens
derided them. The democratic politician remains exactly as Plato
described him; the physician is still the credulous impostor and
petulant scientific coxcomb whom Molière ridiculed; the schoolmaster
remains at best a pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac;
arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist
is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles
of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because
they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors;
witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic
inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer powerful
enough to; set the mantrap of Rhampsinitis improves on it by barbed
wire; the modern gentleman who is too lazy to daub his face with
vermilion as a symbol of bravery employs a laundress to daub his
shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; we shake our heads
at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy with soot and
foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water,
in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used and
believed in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go
through incantations with burning sulphur (which they know to be
useless) because the people believe in it as devoutly as the Italian
peasant believes in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius;
and straightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments,
there being nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket
at the police station and the minister on the treasury bench, the
editor in the newspaper office, the city magnate advertizing bicycle
tires that do not side-slip, the clergyman subscribing the thirty-nine
articles, and the vivisector who pledges his knightly honor that
no animal operated on in the physiological laboratory suffers the
slightest pain. Hypocrisy is at its worst; for we not only persecute
bigotedly but sincerely in the name of the cure-mongering witchcraft
we do believe in, but callously and hypocritically in the name of
the Evangelical creed that our rulers privately smile at as the
Italian patricians of the fifth century smiled at Jupiter and Venus.
Sport is, as it has always been, murderous excitement; the impulse
to slaughter is universal; and museums are set up throughout the
country to encourage little children and elderly gentlemen to make
collections of corpses preserved in alcohol, and to steal birds'
eggs and keep them as the red Indian used to keep scalps. Coercion
with the lash is as natural to an Englishman as it was to Solomon
spoiling Rehoboam: indeed, the comparison is unfair to the Jews
in view of the facts that the Mosaic law forbade more than forty
lashes in the name of humanity, and that floggings of a thousand
lashes were inflicted on English soldiers in the XVIII and XIX centuries,
and would be inflicted still but for the change in the balance of
political power between the military caste and the commercial classes
and the proletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still
an institution in the public school, in the military prison, on
the training ship, and in that school of littleness called the home.
The lascivious clamor of the flagellomaniac for more of it, constant
as the clamor for more insolence, more war, and lower rates, is
tolerated and even gratified because, having no moral ends in view,
we have sense enough to see that nothing but brute coercion can
impose our selfish will on others. Cowardice is universal; patriotism,
public opinion, parental duty, discipline, religion, morality, are
only fine names for intimidation; and cruelty, gluttony, and credulity
keep cowardice in countenance. We cut the throat of a calf and hang
it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may
be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because
we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate
our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at
all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive
at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some
magical cure for our own diseases by them.
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-- "It's organic!"