- •An Englishman Looks at the World
- •I do not think that the arrival of m. Blйriot means a panic resort to
- •Imminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about
- •In immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
- •Immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of
- •Inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately
- •Is to be no rфle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
- •Into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?
- •In blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its
- •Irksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if the
- •In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled card
- •It meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lie
- •In the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of
- •In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
- •Indiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in social
- •It prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried
- •If those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
- •Is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive
- •Independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the
- •In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
- •Is the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.
- •Illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he
- •In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,
- •Is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who
- •If we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgent
- •It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
- •Impossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;
- •Imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it is
- •View. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long
- •It hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitive
- •Immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our official
- •Its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference
- •1800! "No current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no
- •Is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion
- •It is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more
- •Insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for
- •Impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism,
- •In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to
- •Individuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic
- •Intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and
- •Intermarries within its limits.
- •It at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
- •Inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
- •Innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
- •Intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
- •In his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
- •Imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
- •Influence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people
- •Its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the
- •Is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite
- •Intelligent science of economics should afford standards and
- •Vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep
- •Impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,
- •In the present armament competition there are certain considerations
- •I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and
- •Industrious increase of men of the officer-aviator type, of the
- •India resuming its former central position in our ideas of international
- •Impulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and
- •It is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly
- •Is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of
- •Intellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that
- •Very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
- •Is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are
- •I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in
- •Indeed, is why I am giving them this library."
- •Visitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
- •It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
- •In charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
- •In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
- •Incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
- •Individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and
- •If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
- •Is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
- •Is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that,
- •In discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is it
- •Infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife,
- •Is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
- •Is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in
- •Interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
- •In our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
- •Income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an
- •Increase the inducement until it sufficed.
- •Instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
- •Is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
- •If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation
- •In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
- •Is there a people?
- •Is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
- •In Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
- •India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our
- •Instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve
- •Voters who would have voted for a if they had a chance vote instead for
- •I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
- •I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative"
- •Impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies,
- •I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates
- •Is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify
- •Individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen
- •It will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
- •1840 Has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
- •If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
- •It followed the normal development of the middle class under Progress
- •Is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and
- •Is a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is
- •In due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at
- •In jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry
- •In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
- •Is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an
- •Is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a
- •Violence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. This
- •Irresistible movement for secession between west and east. That is
- •View of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
- •In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
- •Increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
- •Individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists
- •Is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York
- •Voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may
- •Into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
- •It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
- •Interests which legitimately belongs to it.
- •Indigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant
- •It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier
- •Its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
- •Invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
- •It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
Interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious
trick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from the
decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be
lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondary
schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous
and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is,
converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of
positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his
rule of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate
truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to
cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual
consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, he
hates and dreads it. I find him perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear
that boys will "do something," and in his terror seeking whatever is
dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, clipping their
reading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating their classics,
substituting the stupid grind of organised "games" for natural,
imaginative play, persecuting loafers--and so achieving his end and
turning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, apathetic,
obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark of
initiative at all, quite safe not to "do anything" for ever.
I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it is
not the way to make masters in the world. If we English believe we are
indeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children to
more and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free,
bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks in
the doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fine
artist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price of
shocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificent
compromise, the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his
Catholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties and
collars. Boys who are to be free, masterly men must hear free men
talking freely of religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must have
heard men of this opinion and that, putting what they believe before
them with all the courage of conviction. They must have an idea of will
prevailing over form. It is far more important that boys should learn
from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from
perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice
men. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster is
whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not
whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen
wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he
doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any
disgraceful thing like that, so many years ago. It is that sort of thing
"Kappa" must invert if he wants a change in our public schools. You may
arrange and rearrange curricula, abolish Greek, substitute "science"--it
will not matter a rap. Even those model canoes of yours, "Kappa," will
be wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters. So long as we
require our schoolmasters to be politic, conforming, undisturbing men,
setting up Polonius as an ideal for them, so long will their influence
deaden the souls of our sons.
THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in
keeping English Socialism to the lines of "artfulness and the
'eighties," refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of
Motherhood. Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic
pamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising
furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. These Fabian
Socialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they are
supposed to be, are really in many things twenty years behind the times.
There need be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowment
of Motherhood. There is nothing shameful about it. It is a plain and
simple idea for which the mind of the man in the street has now been
very completely prepared. It has already crept into social legislation
to the extent of thirty shillings.
I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades
more than any other it is this: that the supply of children is falling
off in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality
births, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly
the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.
If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President
Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth.
Every civilised community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as Rome
drifted into "race-suicide" at the climax of her empire.
Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling
supply of babies in the cradles--and these not of the best possible
sort--and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the
English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible
remedy--from the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of
the periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.
The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious enough. It is a
necessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life.
People talk of modern women "shirking" motherhood, but it would be a
silly sort of universe in which a large proportion of women had any
natural and instinctive desire to shirk motherhood, and, I believe, a
huge proportion of modern women are as passionately predisposed towards
motherhood as ever women were. But modern conditions conspire to put a
heavy handicap upon parentage and an enormous premium upon the partial
or complete evasion of offspring, and that is where the clue to the
trouble lies. Our social arrangements discourage parentage very heavily,
and the rational thing for a statesman to do in the matter is not to
grow eloquent, but to do intelligent things to minimise that
discouragement.
Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young woman