Title:      On the Rocks
Author:     George Bernard Shaw
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0300561.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          March 2003
Date most recently updated: March 2003

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      On the Rocks
Author:     George Bernard Shaw





ON THE ROCKS:
A POLITICAL COMEDY




CONTENTS


Preface

ON THE ROCKS

Period--The Present.

  ACT I. The Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street, London, S.W.1.
         July.

  ACT II. The Same. 10 November, 9.30 a.m.

Shaw Answers Some Questions





Preface

  Contents

  Extermination

  Killing as a Political Function

  The Sacredness of Human Life

  Present Exterminations

  Previous Attempts miss the Point

  King Charles's Head

  Right to Exterminate conferred by Private Property

  Disguises under which Private Extermination operates

  Private Powers of Life and Death

  Cruelty's Excuses

  Leading Case of Jesus Christ

  "Crosstianity"

  Christianity and the Sixth Commandment

  The Russian Experiment

  Inadequacy of Penal Codes

  Limited Liability in Morals

  Natural Limit to Extermination

  Incompatibility of Peasantry with Modern Civilization

  A Peasant Victory is a Victory for Private Property

  Preventive Extermination: its Difficulties

  Temperamental Difficulties

  Importance of Laziness for Fallowing

  Standard Religion Indispensable

  Eclectic Religions

  Importance of Free Thought

  Toleration Mostly Illusory

  Leading Cases: Socrates and Jesus

  The Case of Galileo

  Figment of the Selfregarding Action

  Incompleteness of the Great Trials

  A Modern Passion Play Impossible

  Difference Between Reader and Spectator

  The Sacredness of Criticism



EXTERMINATION


In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the
political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing
to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that
nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it
directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to
practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single
murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons.
Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and
celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing
or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital
punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient
verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a
dirty job.  These childish evasions are revolting.  We must strip
off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it.
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be
carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.


KILLING AS A POLITICAL FUNCTION


That killing is a necessity is beyond question by any thoughtful
person.  Unless rabbits and deer and rats and foxes are killed, or
"kept down" as we put it, mankind must perish; and that section of
mankind which lives in the country and is directly and personally
engaged in the struggle with Nature for a living has no sentimental
doubts that they must be killed.  As to tigers and poisonous
snakes, their incompatibility with human civilization is
unquestioned.  This does not excuse the use of cruel steel traps,
agonizing poisons, or packs of hounds as methods of extermination.
Killing can be cruelly or kindly done; and the deliberate choice of
cruel ways, and their organization as popular pleasures, is sinful;
but the sin is in the cruelty and the enjoyment of it, not in the
killing.


THE SACREDNESS OF HUMAN LIFE


In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-
human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes.  This was founded
on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes
none.  Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this
distinction.  They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life
to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute,
because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst
others refuse to believe that the physical materializations
and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves
everlasting.  In either case the mystic distinction between Man and
Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit
should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared
because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as
hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy.
When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as
it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and
a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a
minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him
at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.

The political necessity for killing him is precisely like that for
killing the cobra or the tiger: he is so ferocious or unscrupulous
that if his neighbors do not kill him he will kill or ruin his
neighbors; so that there is nothing for it but to disable him once
for all by making an end of him, or else waste the lives of useful
and harmless people in seeing that he does no mischief, and caging
him cruelly like a lion in a show.

Here somebody is sure to interject that there is the alternative of
teaching him better manners; but I am not here dealing with such
cases: the real necessity arises only in dealing with untameable
persons who are constitutionally unable to restrain their violent
or acquisitive impulses, and have no compunction about sacrificing
others to their own immediate convenience.  To punish such persons
is ridiculous: we might as reasonably punish a tile for flying off
a roof in a storm and knocking a clergyman on the head.  But to
kill them is quite reasonable and very necessary.


PRESENT EXTERMINATIONS


All this so far is mere elementary criminology, already dealt with
very fully by me in my Essay on Prisons, which I recommend to those
readers who may feel impelled to ramble away at this point into the
prosings about Deterrence beloved by our Prison commissioners and
judges.  It disposes of the dogma of the unconditional sacredness
of human life, or any other incarnation of life; but it covers only
a corner of the field opened up by modern powers of extermination.
In Germany it is suggested that the Nordic race should exterminate
the Latin race.  As both these lingual stocks are hopelessly
interbred by this time, such a sacrifice to ethnological sciolism
is not practicable; but its discussion familiarizes the idea and
clears the way for practicable suggestions.  The extermination of
whole races and classes has been not only advocated but actually
attempted.  The extirpation of the Jew as such figured for a few
mad moments in the program of the Nazi party in Germany.  The
extermination of the peasant is in active progress in Russia, where
the extermination of the class of ladies and gentlemen of so-called
independent means has already been accomplished; and an attempt to
exterminate the old Conservative professional class and the kulak
or prosperous farmer class has been checked only by the discovery
that they cannot as yet be done without.  Outside Russia the
extermination of Communists is widely advocated; and there is a
movement in the British Empire and the United States for the
extermination of Fascists.  In India the impulse of Moslems and
Hindus to exterminate one another is complicated by the impulse of
the British Empire to exterminate both when they happen to be
militant Nationalists.


PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS MISS THE POINT


The novelty and significance of these instances consists in the
equal status of the parties.  The extermination of what the
exterminators call inferior races is as old as history.  "Stone
dead hath no fellow" said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the
Irish.  "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" say the Americans
of the Ku-Klux temperament.  "Hates any man the thing he would not
kill?" said Shylock naively.  But we white men, as we absurdly call
ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard
all differently colored folk as inferior species.  Ladies and
gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin.  The Dominicans,
the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of
God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God.
All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a
growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization
and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit
into it.  There is a difference between the shooting at sight of
aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the
massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign
attacks on the French Revolution.  The Australian gunman pots the
aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man
with uncut hair.  But nobody in the French Republic had this
feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way
about Einstein.  Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has
had to fly for his life from Germany.  It was silly to say that the
Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his
party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist
Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists.
The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews
(Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a
modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as
distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed
by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to
invent it.


KING CHARLES'S HEAD


It was, by the way, the English Revolution which introduced the
category of Malignant or Man of Blood, and killed the King as an
affirmation that even kings must not survive if they are malignant.
This was much more advanced than the execution in the following
century of Louis XVI as an ordinary traitor, or of the Tsar in our
own time to prevent his being captured by the Tchekoslovakian
contingent and used as a standard to rally the royalist reaction.
Charles affirmed a divine personal right to govern as against the
parliament and would keep no bargain with it.  Parliament denied
his right, and set up against it a divine right of election winners
to govern.  They fought it out; and the victorious election winners
exterminated the king, very logically.  Finding that their
authority still needed a royal disguise they drove a hard bargain
for a crown with his son, and, after ejecting the next king who
broke it, a still harder one with his Dutch grandson before they
allowed the title of king, with nine tenths of the meaning knocked
out of it, to be used as a matter of convenience again in England.
Nobody had a word to say against Charles's private character.  It
was solely for incompatibility of politics that he was eliminated,
or "liquidated" as we say now.  There was a real novelty in the
transaction.  The Church had for centuries before compelled the
secular State to liquidate heretics; and the slaughter of rebels
who tried to substitute one dynasty for another, or to seize the
throne for themselves, was common routine.  But Charles was neither
a heretic nor a rebel.  He was the assertor of a divine right to
govern without winning elections; and because that right could not
co-exist with the supremacy of a much richer and more powerful
plutocracy off went his head.

Charles was only the first victim.  After Culloden the defeated
Highland chiefs and their clansmen were butchered like sheep on the
field.  Had they been merely prisoners of war, this would have been
murder.  But as they were also Incompatibles with British
civilization, it was only liquidation.


RIGHT TO EXTERMINATE CONFERRED BY PRIVATE PROPERTY


Having disposed of the divine right of kings the political
liquidators turned their attention slowly to its derivatory the
divine right of landlords, which had gradually disguised itself as
private property in land.  For when a tract of land becomes the
private property of an individual who has to depend on it for his
subsistence, the relation between him and the inhabitants of that
tract becomes an economic one; and if they become economically
superfluous or wasteful, he must exterminate them.  This is
continually happening wherever private property in land exists.  If
I possess land and find it profitable to grow wheat on it, I need
many agricultural laborers to enable me to do it; and I tolerate
their existence accordingly.  If I presently find that it is more
profitable to cover my land with sheep and sell their wool, I have
to tolerate the existence of the sheep; but I no longer need
tolerate the existence of the laborers; so I drive them off my
land, which is my legal method of extermination, retaining only a
few to act as shepherds.  Later on I find that it is more
profitable to cover my land with wild deer, and collect money from
gentlemen and ladies who enjoy shooting them.  I then exterminate
my shepherds and keep only a few gamekeepers.  But I may do much
better by letting my land to industrialists for the erection of
factories.  They exterminate the sheep and the deer; but they need
far more men than I needed even when I grew wheat.  The driven-offs
crowd into the factories and multiply like rabbits; and for the
moment population grows instead of diminishing.  But soon machines
come along and make millions of proletarians economically
superfluous.  The factory owner accordingly sacks them, which is
his legal method of extermination.  During these developments the
exterminated, or, as we call them, the evicted and sacked, try to
avoid starvation partly by emigration, but mostly by offering
themselves for all sorts of employment as soldiers, servants,
prostitutes, police officers, scavengers, and operators of the
immense machinery of amusement and protection for the idle rich
classes created by the private property system.  By organization in
trade unions, municipal and parliamentary Labor Parties, and the
like, and maintaining a sort of continual civil war consisting of
strikes and riots, they extort from the proprietors enough to
reduce the rate of extermination (shewn by the actuarial
expectation of life of the unpropertied) for periods described as
progressive, until the proprietors, by engaging in suicidal wars,
are forced to intensify their economies, and the rate of
extermination rises again.


DISGUISES UNDER WHICH PRIVATE EXTERMINATION OPERATES


Note that during all this the Registrar General's returns do not
give us the deaths of the exterminated as such, because the
exterminated do not starve as lost travellers starve in the desert.
Their starvation is more or less protracted; and when the final
catastrophe arrives, it is disguised under an imposing array of
doctors' names for moribundity.  The victims die mostly in their
first year, and subsequently at all ages short of the age at which
properly nourished people die.  Sometimes they are starved into
attaining an age at which people with well filled pockets eat
themselves to death.  Either way and all ways the extermination is
a real and permanent feature of private property civilization,
though it is never mentioned as such, and ladies and gentlemen
are carefully educated to be unconscious of its existence and
to talk nonsense about its facts when they are too obvious or
become too scandalous to be ignored, when they often advocate
emigration or Birth Control or war as remedies.  And against the
facts there is a chronic humanitarian revolt expressing itself
either underground or overground in revolutionary movements;
making our political constitutions very unstable; and imposing
an habitual disingenuousness on conservative statesmen.


PRIVATE POWERS OF LIFE AND DEATH


Now the central fact of all these facts is that the private
proprietors have irresponsible powers of life and death in the
State.  Such powers may be tolerated as long as the Government is
in effect a committee of private proprietors; yet if such a
committee be widened into or superseded by a Government acting in
the interest of the whole people, that Government will not suffer
any private class to hold the lives of the citizens at its mercy
and thereby become their real masters.  A popular Government,
before it fully grasps the situation, usually begins by attempting
to redistribute property in such a manner as to make everyone a
petty proprietor, as in the French Revolution.  But when the
impossibility of doing this (except in the special case of
agricultural land) becomes apparent, and the question is probed to
the bottom by unpropertied political philosophers like Proudhon and
Marx, private property is sooner or later excommunicated and
abolished; and what was formerly called "real property" is replaced
by ordinary personal property and common property administrated by
the State.

All modern progressive and revolutionary movements are at bottom
attacks on private property.  A Chancellor of the Exchequer
apologizing for an increase in the surtax, a Fascist dictator
organizing a Corporate State, a Soviet Commissar ejecting a kulak
and adding his acres to a collective farm, are all running the same
race, though all of them except the Commissar may be extremely
reluctant to win it.  For in the long run the power to exterminate
is too grave to be left in any hands but those of a thoroughly
Communist Government responsible to the whole community.  The
landlord with his writ of ejectment and the employer with his sack,
must finally go the way of the nobleman with his sword and his
benefit of clergy, and of Hannibal Chollop with his bowie knife and
pistol.

Let us then assume that private property, already maimed by factory
legislation, surtax, and a good deal of petty persecution in
England, and in Russia tolerated only provisionally as a
disgraceful necessity pending its complete extirpation, is finally
discarded by civilized communities, and the duty of maintaining it
at all costs replaced by the duty of giving effect to the dogma
that every ablebodied and ableminded and ablesouled person has an
absolute right to an equal share in the national dividend.  Would
the practice of extermination thereupon disappear?  I suggest
that, on the contrary, it might continue much more openly and
intelligently and scientifically than at present, because the
humanitarian revolt against it would probably become a humanitarian
support of it; and there would be an end of the hypocrisy, the
venal special pleading, and the concealment or ignoring of facts
which are imposed on us at present because extermination for the
benefit of a handful of private persons against the interests of
the race is permitted and practised.  The old doctrine of the
sacredness of human life, which in our idiot asylums at Darenth and
elsewhere still terrifies us into wasting the lives of capable
people in preserving the lives of monsters, was a crude expedient
for beginning civilization.  At present we discard it in dealing
with murderers, heretics, traitors, and (in Scotland) vitriol
throwers, who can be legally killed.  A runaway convict can also be
summarily shot by a warder to save the trouble of pursuing and
recapturing him; and although the convict is not under capital
sentence and the case is therefore clearly one of wilful murder,
coroners' juries persist in treating it as a harmless and necessary
incident in prison routine.

Unfortunately the whole question is bedevilled by our anti-
Christian vice of punishment, expiation, sacrifice, and all the
cognate tribal superstitions which are hammered into us in our
childhood by barbarous scripturists, irascible or sadist parents,
and a hideous criminal code.  When the horrors of anarchy force us
to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for
sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals
outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts
content.


CRUELTY'S EXCUSES


There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like
Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors,
have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most
painless manner known to their judges.  But from that summit there
was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.  For Wallace, whom
the Scots adored as a patriot and the English executed as a
traitor, the most cruel and obscene method of killing that the
human imagination could conceive at its vilest was specially
invented to punish him for being a traitor (or "larn him to be a
toad"); and this sentence has been passed, though not carried out,
within the memory of persons now living.  John of Leyden, for being
a Communist, was tortured so frightfully before being hung up in a
cage on the church tower to starve to death in sight of all the
citizens and their little children, that the bishop who was
officially obliged to witness it died of horror.  Joan of Arc, for
wearing men's clothes and being a Protestant and a witch, was burnt
alive, after a proposal to torture her had been barely defeated.
The people who saw her burnt were quite accustomed to such
spectacles, and regarded them as holiday attractions.  A woman's
sex was made an excuse for burning her instead of more mercifully
hanging her.  Male criminals were broken on the wheel: that is,
battered to death with iron bars, until well into the nineteenth
century.  This was a public spectacle; and the prolongation of the
victim's suffering was so elaborately studied and arranged that
Cartouche, one of the kings of scoundrelism, was bribed to betray
his accomplices by the promise that he should be killed by the
sixth blow of the bar.  The wheel and the stake have lately gone
out of use; but the Sadist mania for flogging seems ineradicable;
for after a partially successful attempt to discard it in Victorian
times it has revived again with redoubled ferocity: quite recently
a criminal was sentenced to a flogging and ten years penal
servitude; and although the victim escaped his punishment and gave
a sensational advertisement to its savagery by committing suicide,
nobody protested, though thirty years ago there would have been a
strenuous outcry against it, raised by the old Humanitarian League,
and voiced in Parliament by the Irish Nationalists.  Alas! the
first thing the Irish did when they at last enjoyed self-government
was to get rid of these sentimental Nationalists and put flogging
on their statute book in a series of Coercion Acts that would have
horrified Dublin Castle.  In a really civilized state flogging
would cease because it would be impossible to induce any decent
citizen to flog another.  Among us a perfectly respectable official
will do it for half a crown, and probably enjoy the job.


LEADING CASE OF JESUS CHRIST


I dislike cruelty, even cruelty to other people, and should
therefore like to see all cruel people exterminated.  But I should
recoil with horror from a proposal to punish them.  Let me
illustrate my attitude by a very famous, indeed far too famous,
example of the popular conception of criminal law as a means of
delivering up victims to the normal popular lust for cruelty which
has been mortified by the restraint imposed on it by civilization.
Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ.  No doubt there
was a strong case for it.  Jesus was from the point of view of the
High Priest a heretic and an impostor.  From the point of view of
the merchants he was a rioter and a Communist.  From the Roman
Imperialist point of view he was a traitor.  From the commonsense
point of view he was a dangerous madman.  From the snobbish point
of view, always a very influential one, he was a penniless
vagrant.  From the police point of view he was an obstructor of
thoroughfares, a beggar, an associate of prostitutes, an apologist
of sinners, and a disparager of judges; and his daily companions
were tramps whom he had seduced into vagabondage from their regular
trades.  From the point of view of the pious he was a Sabbath
breaker, a denier of the efficacy of circumcision and the advocate
of a strange rite of baptism, a gluttonous man and a winebibber.
He was abhorrent to the medical profession as an unqualified
practitioner who healed people by quackery and charged nothing for
the treatment.  He was not anti-Christ: nobody had heard of such a
power of darkness then; but he was startlingly anti-Moses.  He was
against the priests, against the judiciary, against the military,
against the city (he declared that it was impossible for a rich man
to enter the kingdom of heaven), against all the interests,
classes, principalities and powers, inviting everybody to abandon
all these and follow him.  By every argument, legal, political,
religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of
the society of his time ever brought to the bar.  He was guilty on
every count of the indictment, and on many more that his accusers
had not the wit to frame.  If he was innocent then the whole world
was guilty.  To acquit him was to throw over civilization and all
its institutions.  History has borne out the case against him; for
no State has ever constituted itself on his principles or made it
possible to live according to his commandments: those States who
have taken his name have taken it as an alias to enable them to
persecute his followers more plausibly.

It is not surprising that under these circumstances, and in the
absence of any defence, the Jerusalem community and the Roman
government decided to exterminate Jesus.  They had just as much
right to do so as to exterminate the two thieves who perished with
him.  But there was neither right nor reason in torturing him.  He
was entitled to the painless death of Socrates.  We may charitably
suppose that if the death could have been arranged privately
between Pilate and Caiaphas Jesus would have been dispatched as
quickly and suddenly as John the Baptist.  But the mob wanted the
horrible fun of seeing somebody crucified: an abominably cruel
method of execution.  Pilate only made matters worse by trying to
appease them by having Jesus flogged.  The soldiers, too, had to
have their bit of sport, to crown him with thorns and, when they
buffeted him, challenge him ironically to guess which of them had
struck the blow.


"CROSSTIANITY"


All this was cruelty for its own sake, for the pleasure of it.  And
the fun did not stop there.  Such was and is the attraction of
these atrocities that the spectacle of them has been reproduced in
pictures and waxworks and exhibited in churches ever since as an
aid to piety.  The chief instrument of torture is the subject of a
special Adoration.  Little models of it in gold and ivory are worn
as personal ornaments; and big reproductions in wood and marble are
set up in sacred places and on graves.  Contrasting the case with
that of Socrates, one is forced to the conclusion that if Jesus had
been humanely exterminated his memory would have lost ninetynine
per cent of its attraction for posterity.  Those who were specially
susceptible to his morbid attraction were not satisfied with
symbolic crosses which hurt nobody.  They soon got busy with "acts
of faith" which consisted of great public shows at which Jews and
Protestants or Catholics, and anyone else who could be caught out
on a point of doctrine, were burnt alive.  Cruelty is so infectious
that the very compassion it rouses is infuriated to take revenge by
still viler cruelties.

The tragedy of this--or, if you will, the comedy--is that it was
his clearness of vision on this very point that set Jesus so high
above his persecutors.  He taught that two blacks do not make a
white; that evil should not be countered by worse evil but by good;
that revenge and punishment only duplicate wrong; that we should
conceive God, not as an irascible and vindictive tyrant but as an
affectionate father.  No doubt many private amiabilities have been
inspired by this teaching; but politically it has received no more
quarter than Pilate gave it.  To all Governments it has remained
paradoxical and impracticable.  A typical acknowledgement of it was
the hanging of a crucifix above the seat of the judge who was
sentencing evildoers to be broken on the wheel.


CHRISTIANITY AND THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT


Now it is not enough to satirize this.  We must examine why it
occurred.  It is not enough to protest that evildoers must not be
paid in their own coin by treating them as cruelly as they have
treated others.  We still have to stop the mischief they do.  What
is to be done with them?  It is easy to suggest that they should be
reformed by gentleness and shamed by non-resistance.  By all means,
if they respond to that treatment.  But if gentleness fails to
reform them and non-resistance encourages them to further
aggression, what then?  A month spent in a Tolstoyan community will
convince anybody of the soundness of the nearest police inspector's
belief that every normal human group contains not only a percentage
of saints but also a percentage of irreclaimable scoundrels and
good-for-noughts who will wreck any community unless they are
expensively restrained or cheaply exterminated.  Our Mosaic system
of vindictive punishment, politely called "retributory" by Prison
Commissioners, disposes of them temporarily; but it wastes the
lives of honest citizens in guarding them; sets a horrible example
of cruelty and malicious injury; costs a good deal of money that
might be better spent; and, after all, sooner or later lets the
scoundrel loose again to recommence his depredations.  It would be
much more sensible and less cruel to treat him as we treat mad dogs
or adders, without malice or cruelty, and without reference to
catalogues of particular crimes.  The notion that persons should be
safe from extermination as long as they do not commit wilful
murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol,
is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to
privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies
outside them, but to divert attention from the essential
justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible
social incompatibility and nothing else.


THE RUSSIAN EXPERIMENT


The only country which has yet awakened to this extension of social
responsibility is Russia.  When the Soviet Government undertook to
change over from Capitalism to Communism it found itself without
any instruments for the maintenance of order except a list of
crimes and punishments administered through a ritual of criminal
law.  And in the list of crimes the very worst offences against
Communist society had no place: on the contrary they were highly
honored and rewarded.  As our English doggerel runs, the courts
could punish a man for stealing the goose from off the common, but
not the man who stole the common from the goose.  The idler, that
common enemy of mankind who robs everybody all the time, though he
is so carefully protected from having his own pocket picked,
incurred no penalty, and had actually passed the most severe laws
against any interference with his idling.  It was the business of
the Soviet to make all business public business and all persons
public servants; but the view of the ordinary Russian citizen was
that a post in a public service was an exceptional stroke of good
luck for the holder because it was a sinecure carrying with it the
privilege of treating the public insolently and extorting bribes
from it.  For example, when the Russian railways were communized,
some of the local stationmasters interpreted the change as meaning
that they might now be as lazy and careless as they pleased,
whereas in fact it was of life-or-death importance that they should
redouble their activity and strain every nerve to make the service
efficient.  The unfortunate Commissar who was Minister of Transport
found himself obliged to put a pistol in his pocket and with his
own hand shoot stationmasters who had thrown his telegrams into the
dustbin instead of attending to them, so that he might the more
impressively ask the rest of the staff whether they yet grasped the
fact that orders are meant to be executed.


INADEQUACY OF PENAL CODES


Now being Minister of Transport, or Minister of any other public
service, is a whole time job: it cannot be permanently combined
with that of amateur executioner, carrying with it the reputation
in all the capitalist papers of the west of being a ferocious and
coldblooded murderer.  And no conceivable extension of the criminal
code nor of the service disciplines, with their lists of specific
offences and specific penalties, could have provided for instant
exemplary exterminations of this kind, any more than for the
growing urgency of how to dispose of people who would not or could
not fit themselves into the new order of things by conforming to
its new morality.  It would have been easy to specify certain
offences and certain penalties in the old fashion: as, for
instance, if you hoard money you will be shot; if you speculate in
the difference in purchasing power of the rouble in Moscow and
Berlin you will be shot; if you buy at the Co-operative to sell at
the private trader's shop you will be shot; if you take bribes you
will be shot; if you falsify farm or factory balance sheets you
will be shot; if you exploit labor you will be shot; and it will be
useless to plead that you have been brought up to regard these as
normal business activities, and that the whole of respectable
society outside Russia agrees with you.  But the most elaborate
code of this sort would still have left unspecified a hundred ways
in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without
ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your
weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are
worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized
community?  That is why the Russians were forced to set up an
Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the
Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate"
persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.  The security
against the abuse of this power of life and death was that the
Cheka had no interest in liquidating anybody who could be made
publicly useful, all its interests being in the opposite direction.


LIMITED LIABILITY IN MORALS


Such a novelty is extremely terrifying to us, who are still working
on a system of limited liability in morals.  Our "free" British
citizens can ascertain exactly what they may do and what they may
not do if they are to keep out of the hands of the police.  Our
financiers know that they must not forge share certificates nor
overstate their assets in the balance sheets they send to their
shareholders.  But provided they observe a few conditions of this
kind they are free to enter upon a series of quite legitimate but
not the less nefarious operations.  For example, making a corner in
wheat or copper or any other cornerable commodity and forcing up
prices so as to make enormous private fortunes for themselves, or
making mischief between nations through the Press to stimulate the
private trade in armaments.  Such limited liability no longer
exists in Russia, and is not likely to exist in the future in any
highly civilized state.  It may be quite impossible to convict a
forestaller or regrator under a criminal code of having taken a
single illegal step, but quite easy to convince any reasonable body
of judges that he is what the people call "a wrong one."  In Russia
such a conviction would lead to his disappearance and the receipt
by his family of a letter to say that they need not wait up for
him, as he would not return home any more.*  In our country he
would enjoy his gains in high honor and personal security, and
thank his stars that he lived in a free country and not in
Communist Russia.


* Note, however, that a sentence of extermination should never be
so certain as to make it worth the delinquent's while to avoid
arrest by murdering his or her pursuers.


But as the new tribunal has been forced on Russia by pressure of
circumstances and not planned and thought out at leisure, the two
institutions, the Ogpu and the ordinary police administering the
criminal code, work side by side, with the odd result that the
surest way to escape the Ogpu is to commit an ordinary crime and
take refuge in the arms of the police and the magistrate, who
cannot exterminate you because capital punishment has been
abolished in Russia (liquidation by the Ogpu is not punishment: it
is only "weeding the garden"); and the sentence of imprisonment,
though it may seem severe to us in view of the cruelty of our
treatment of criminals, will be carried out with comparative
leniency, and probably, if the culprit behaves well be remitted
after a while.  As four years imprisonment is considered enough for
any reasonable sort of murder, a cornerer who finds himself in
imminent danger of detection and liquidation by the Ogpu would be
well advised to lose his temper and murder his mother-in-law,
thereby securing a lease of life for at least four years.

Sooner or later this situation will have to be thoroughly studied
and thought out to its logical conclusion in all civilized
countries.  The lists of crimes and penalties will obsolesce like
the doctors' lists of diseases and medicines; and it will become
possible to be a judge without ceasing to be a Christian.  And
extermination, my present subject, will become a humane science
instead of the miserable mixture of piracy, cruelty, vengeance,
race conceit, and superstition it now is.


NATURAL LIMIT TO EXTERMINATION


Fortunately the more frankly and realistically it is faced the more
it detaches itself from the associations with crude slaughter which
now make it terrible.  When Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman
Empire (as far as anyone can be said to have founded it) he
postulated that all its subjects must be Catholic Christians, and
made an amateurish attempt to secure this condition of social
stability by killing everyone who fell into his power and refused
to be baptized.  But he cannot ever have got very far with it,
because there is one sort of bird you must not kill on any pretext
whatever: namely, the goose that lays the golden eggs.  In Russia
the Soviet Government began by a Charlemagnesque attempt to
exterminate the bourgeoisie by classing them as intelligentsia,
restricting their rations, and putting their children at the foot
of the overcrowded educational list.  They also proscribed the
kulak, the able, hardheaded, hardfisted farmer who was richer than
his neighbors and liked to see them poorer than himself.  Him they
rudely took by the shoulders and threw destitute into the lane.
There were plausible reasons for this beginning of selection in
population; for the moral outlook of the bourgeoisie and the kulaks
was dangerously antisocial.  But the results were disastrous.  The
bourgeoisie contained the professional class and the organizing
business class.  Without professional men and business organizers
nothing could be done in the industries; and the hope that picked
members of the proletariat could take up professional and
organizing work on the strength of their native talent in
sufficient numbers was crushingly disappointed.  When the kulak was
thrown out of his farm, and his farming ability paralyzed, food ran
short.  Very soon the kulak had to be thrown back into his farm and
told to carry on until his hour had come; and a pleasant convention
was established whereby all educated persons, however obviously
ladies or gentlemen, who were willing to assure the authorities
that their fathers had "worked on the land with their hands" were
accepted as genuine proletarians, and transferred from the infamous
category of intelligentsia to the honourable one of "the
intellectual proletariat."  Even Lenin and his colleagues, all
ultra-bourgeois (otherwise they would never have so absurdly
overestimated the intellectual resources of the proletariat and
been so contemptuous of the pretension of their own class to be
indispensable), allowed their parents to be described as
hornyhanded cultivators of the soil.  The pretence has now become a
standing joke; but you will still come up against it if you accuse
any Russian of being a lady or gentleman.


INCOMPATIBILITY OF PEASANTRY WITH MODERN CIVILIZATION


These, however, are merely expedients of transition.  The Russian
proletariat is now growing its own professional and organizing
class; and the ex-bourgeois is dying out, after seeing his children
receive a sound Communist education and being lectured by them on
his oldfashioned prejudices.  And the planners of the Soviet State
have no time to bother about moribund questions; for they
are confronted with the new and overwhelming necessity for
exterminating the peasants, who still exist in formidable numbers.
The notion that a civilized State can be made out of any sort of
human material is one of our old Radical delusions.  As to building
Communism with such trash as the Capitalist system produces it is
out of the question.  For a Communist Utopia we need a population
of Utopians; and Utopians do not grow wild on the bushes nor are
they to be picked up in the slums: they have to be cultivated very
carefully and expensively.  Peasants will not do; yet without the
peasants the Communists could never have captured the Russian
Revolution.  Nominally it was the Soviets of peasants and soldiers
who backed Lenin and saved Communism when all Western Europe set on
him like a pack of hounds on a fox.  But as all the soldiers were
peasants, and all the peasants hungry for property, the military
element only added to the peasants' cry of Give us land, the
soldiers' cry of Give us peace.  Lenin said, in effect, Take the
land; and if feudally minded persons obstruct you, exterminate
them; but do not burn their houses, as you will need them to live
in.  And it was the resultant legions of petty landed proprietors
that made Lenin's position impregnable, and provided Trotsky
and Stalin with the Red soldiers who defeated the counter-
revolutionists of 1918.  For the counter-revolution, in which we,
to our eternal shame, took part (England sets the example of
revolution and then attacks all other countries which presume to
follow it), meant bringing the old landlords back; and the peasant
fought against that as the mercenaries and conscripts of the
Capitalist armies would not fight in favour of it.


A PEASANT VICTORY IS A VICTORY FOR PRIVATE PROPERTY


So far so good for Lenin; but the war against the counter-
revolutionists, when it ended in victory for the peasant
proprietor, was really a victory for private property, and was
therefore succeeded by a fiercer struggle between the fanatically
Communist Government and the fiercely individualist peasant
proprietor, who wanted the produce of his plot for himself, and
had no notion of pooling it with anybody, least of all with the
urban proletarians who seemed like another species to him.  Left
to themselves the moujiks would have reproduced Capitalist
civilization at its American worst in ten years.  Thus the most
urgent task before the victorious Communist Government was the
extermination of the moujik; and yet the moujik, being still the
goose that laid the golden eggs, could not be exterminated
summarily without incidentally exterminating the whole Russian
nation.

The way out of this deadlock was obvious enough, though very
expensive and tedious.  You can exterminate any human class not
only by summary violence but by bringing up its children to be
different.  In the case of the Russian peasantry the father lives
in a lousy kennel, at no man's call but his own, and extracts a
subsistence by primitive methods from a strip of land on which a
tractor could hardly turn even if he could afford such a luxury,
but which is his very own.  His book is a book of Nature, from
which all wisdom can be gathered by those who have been taught to
read it by due practice on printed books; but he has not been so
practised, and for cultural purposes has to be classed as ignorant,
though he knows things that university professors do not know.  He
is brutalized by excessive muscular labor; he is dirty; his freedom
from civilized control leaves him so unprotected from the tyranny
of Nature that it becomes evident to his children that the highly
regulated people in the nearest collectivist farm, where thousands
of acres are cultivated by dozens of tractors, and nobody can put
his foot on one of the acres or his hand on one of the tractors and
say "This is my own to do what I like with," are better fed and
housed, nicer, and much more leisured, and consequently free, than
he ever is.


PREVENTIVE EXTERMINATION: ITS DIFFICULTIES


In short, you exterminate the peasant by bringing up his children
to be scientifically mechanized farmers and to live a collegiate
life in cultivated society.  It sounds simple; but the process
requires better planning than is always forthcoming (with local
famines and revolts as the penalty); for while the grass grows the
steed starves; and when education means not only schools and
teachers, but giant collective farms equipped with the most
advanced agricultural machinery, which means also gigantic
engineering works for the production of the machinery, you may
easily find that you have spent too much on these forms of
capitalization and are running short of immediately consumable
goods, presenting the spectacle of the nation with the highest
level of general culture running short of boots and tightening its
belt for lack of sufficient food.

I must not suggest that this has occurred all over Russia; for I
saw no underfed people there; and the children were remarkably
plump.  And I cannot trust the reports; for I have no sooner read
in The Times a letter from Mr Kerensky assuring me that in the
Ukraine the starving people are eating one another, than M.
Herriot, the eminent French statesman, goes to Russia and insists
on visiting the Ukraine so that he may have ocular proof of the
alleged cannibalism, but can find no trace of it.  Still, between
satiety and starvation mitigated by cannibalism there are many
degrees of shortage; and it is no secret that the struggle of the
Russian Government to provide more collective farms and more giant
factories to provide agricultural machinery for them has to be
carried on against a constant clamor from the workers for new boots
and clothes, and more varied food and more of it: in short, less
sacrifice of the present to the future.  As Stalin said quaintly
"They will be demanding silver watches next."  The constant
correction of the inevitable swerves towards one extreme or the
other, analogous to the control of the Bank rate by the Bank of
England (only enormously more laborious), strains all the wit and
industry of the Russian rulers; and occasional sideslips must be
inevitable during these years when the ablest and oldest Communists
are still learners.


TEMPERAMENTAL DIFFICULTIES


Even when the extinction of the bourgeoisie and the kulaks and the
old aristocracy is complete, and the Russian population consists of
citizens educated as Communists, there will still be questions to
settle which are bottom questions as to the sort of civilization
that is desirable; and this involves a decision as to the sort of
people that are desirable and undesirable.  Some of us, believing
that a more primitive life than ours would be happier and better,
advocate "a return to nature."  Others dream of a much more
mechanized, specialized, and complicated life.  Some of us value
machinery because it makes a shorter working day possible for us:
others value it because it enriches us by increasing the product
per hour.  Some of us would like to take things easy and retire at
60: others would like to work their utmost and retire at 40.  Some
of us will say Let us be content with £200 a year: others No: let
us live at the rate of £20,000 a year and strain every faculty to
earn it.  Some of us want a minimum of necessary work and a maximum
of liberty to think and discover and experiment in the extension of
science and art, philosophy and religion, sport and exploration:
others, caring for none of these things, and desiring nothing more
than to be saved the trouble of thinking and to be told what to do
at every turn, would prefer thoughtless and comfortable tutelage
and routine, not knowing what to do with themselves when at
liberty.  A life filled with scientific curiosity would be hell for
the people who would not cross the street to find out whether the
earth is flat or round; and a person with no ear for music would
strenuously object to work for the support of municipal bands,
whilst people of Shakespear's tastes would agitate for the
extermination of the unmusical.


IMPORTANCE OF LAZINESS FOR FALLOWING


Some of these differences could be settled on give-and-take lines.
The division of society into classes with different tastes and
capacities--different natures, as folks call it--would not shake
social stability provided everyone had an equal share of the
national dividend.  It is not true that it takes all sorts to make
a world; for there are some sorts that would destroy any world very
soon if they were suffered to live and have their way; but it is
true that in the generations of men continuous high cultivation is
not expedient; there must be fallows, or at least light croppings,
between the intense cultivations; for we cannot expect the very
energetic and vital Napoleon to be the son of an equally energetic
father or the father of an equally vital son.  Nobody has yet
calculated how many lazy ancestors it takes to produce an
indefatigable prodigy; but it is certain that dynasties of geniuses
do not occur, and that this is the decisive objection to hereditary
rulers (though not, let me hasten to add, to hereditary figure
heads).  There is a large field for toleration here: the clever
people must suffer fools gladly, and the easygoing ones find out
how to keep the energetic ones busy.  There may be as good
biological reasons for the existence of the workshy as of the
workmad.  Even one and the same person may have spells of intense
activity and slackness varying from weeks to years.


STANDARD RELIGION INDISPENSABLE


Nevertheless there will be conflicts to the death in the creation
of artificial humanity.  There is nothing that can be changed more
completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early
enough.  Such artificial products as our agricultural laborers and
urban mechanics, our country gentlemen and city plutocrats, though
they are from the same human stock, are so different that they
cannot live together without great discomfort, and are practically
not intermarriageable.  It is possible to get rid of their social
incompatibility by giving them all the same education and income,
and ranking them all in the same class.  For example, Lord Lonsdale
is not in the least socially incompatible with Dean Inge, though a
really critical naturalist would as soon class Shetland ponies with
zebras as lump these two gentlemen under the same heading.  But the
question remains, what is this same education to be?  The training
of the scholar and the sportsman may split and diverge as they
adolesce; but they must start from a common training and a common
morality as children.  And when the state has to prescribe a
uniform moral curriculum the variety of our temperaments makes it
impossible to please everybody.  The Quaker and the Ritualist, the
Fundamentalist and the Freethinker, the Vegetarian and the flesh
eater, the missionary and the cannibal, the humanitarian and the
sportsman-hunter, the military terrorist and the Christian, will
not agree as to the faiths and habits to be inculcated upon the
children of the community in order that they may be good citizens.
Each temperament will demand the extermination of the other
through the schools and nurseries, and the establishment of its
temperamental faith and habits as standard in these factories of
future citizens.  All will agree to exterminate illiteracy by
compulsory reading, writing, and arithmetic: indeed they have
already done so.  But all will not agree on a standard religion.
Yet a standard religion is indispensable, however completely it may
shed the old theologies.  Every attempt to banish religion from the
schools proves that in this respect Nature abhors a vacuum, and
that the community must make up its mind, or have its mind made up
for it by its official thinkers, as to what its children are to be
taught to believe and how they should be trained to behave.
Compromise is ruled out by the nature of the case.  What compromise
is possible between myself, for instance, who believe in the
religion of Creative Evolution, the economics of Socialism, and a
diet from which the dead bodies of men, fish, fowls, and animals
are rigidly excluded, and my Fundamentalist neighbors who believe
that all Evolutionists go to hell; that children languish and die
without beefsteaks; and that without private property civilization
must perish?  We cannot exterminate oneanother at present; but the
time cannot be very far off when the education authorities will
have to consider which set of beliefs is the better qualification
for citizenship in Utopia.


ECLECTIC RELIGIONS


They will probably pigeon-hole both, and proceed eclectically to
compile several creeds suitable to the several capacities and ages
of the children.  For there is clearly no sense in offering the
religion of a mature and scholarly philosopher to a child of five,
nor attempting to bring the cosmogonies of Dante and Aquinas, Hegel
and Marx, within the comprehension of a village dunce.  Nurses rule
their little charges by threatening them with bogies in whose
existence no nurse believes, exactly as Mahomet ruled his Arabs by
promises of a paradise and threats of a hell the details of which
he must have known to be his own invention even if he did believe
generally in a post mortem life of rewards and punishments for
conduct in this world.  Therefore I do not suggest that the
education authorities in Utopia will seek for absolute truth in
order to inculcate it though the heavens fall.  Nor do I advise a
return to Queen Elizabeth's plan of 39 Articles to please everybody
by alternately affirming and denying all the disputed beliefs.  The
likeliest outcome is an elaborate creed of useful illusions, to be
discarded bit by bit as the child is promoted from standard to
standard or form to form, except such of them as adults may be
allowed to comfort themselves with for the sake of the docility
they produce.

There would be nothing new in this: it is what our authorities
do at present, except that they do it unsystematically and
unconsciously, being mostly more or less duped themselves by the
illusions.  Unfortunately they allow the illusions to fall behind
the times and become incredible, at which point they become
exceedingly dangerous; for when people are brought up on creeds
which they cannot believe, they are left with no creeds at all, and
are apt to buy pistols and take to banditry bag snatching and
racketeering when employment fails and they find themselves short
of money.  It is the importance of keeping our inculcated illusions
up to date that throws our higher professional classes into wild
alarm when the individual liberty of thought, speech, and
conscience which they think they possess (this is one of their
inculcated illusions) is threatened by the dictatorships which
are springing up all over the world as our pseudo-democratic
parliamentary institutions reduce themselves more and more
disastrously to absurdity.


IMPORTANCE OF FREE THOUGHT


Let me try to straighten this out for them.  It was very generally
believed as lately as in Victorian times that religious education
consisted in imparting to children certain eternal, final, and
absolute truths.  I, for instance, being the son of an Irish
Protestant gentleman, found myself, at the dawn of my infant
conscience, absolutely convinced that all Roman Catholics go to
hell when they die, a conviction which involved not only a belief
in the existence of hell but a whole series of implications as to
the nature and character of God.  Now that I am older I cannot
regard this as anything more than a provisional hypothesis which,
on consideration, I must definitely reject.  As the more pious of
my uncles would have put it, I have lost my religious faith and am
in peril of damnation as an Apostate.  But I do not present my
creed of Creative Evolution as anything more than another
provisional hypothesis.  It differs from the old Dublin brimstone
creed solely in its greater credibility: that is, its more exact
conformity to the facts alleged by our scientific workers, who have
somehow won that faith in their infallibility formerly enjoyed by
our priests.  No future education authority, unless it is as badly
educated as our present ones, will imagine that it has any final
and eternal truths to inculcate: it can only select the most useful
working hypotheses and inculcate them very much as it inculcates
standard behaviour throughout that vast field of civilized conduct
in which it does not matter in the least how people act in
particular situations provided they all act in the same way, as in
the rule of the road.  All the provisional hypotheses may be
illusions; but if they conduce to beneficial conduct they must be
inculcated and acted on by Governments until better ones arrive.


TOLERATION MOSTLY ILLUSORY


But, cry the professors, are the hypotheses never to be questioned?
Is disillusion to be punished as a crime?  That will always depend
a good deal on circumstances.  One of the best religious brains in
England has said that the war of 1914-18 was foolish and
unnecessary; and nobody now dreams of prosecuting him; but he would
not have been allowed to go through the trenches from platoon to
platoon saying so just before zero hour, with or without the
addition "Sirs, ye are brethren: why do ye wrong one to another?"
I have no illusion of being free to say and write what I please.  I
went round the world lately preaching that if Russia were thrust
back from Communism into competitive Capitalism, and China
developed into a predatory Capitalist State, either independently
or as part of a Japanese Asiatic hegemony, all the western States
would have to quintuple their armies and lie awake at nights in
continual dread of hostile aeroplanes, the obvious moral being that
whether we choose Communism for ourselves or not, it is our clear
interest, even from the point of view of our crudest and oldest
militarist diplomacy, to do everything in our power to sustain
Communism in Russia and extend it in China, where at present
provinces containing at the least of many conflicting estimates
eighteen millions of people, have adopted it.  Now I was not
physically prevented from saying this, nor from writing and
printing it.  But in a western world suffering badly from
Marxphobia, and frantically making itself worse like a shrew in a
bad temper, I could not get a single newspaper to take up my point
or report my utterance.  When I say anything silly, or am reported
as saying anything reactionary, it runs like wildfire through the
Press of the whole world.  When I say anything that could break the
carefully inculcated popular faith in Capitalism the silence is so
profound as to be almost audible.  I do not complain, because I do
not share the professorial illusion that there is any more freedom
for disillusionists in the British Empire and the United States of
North America than in Italy, Germany, and Russia.  I have seen too
many newspapers suppressed and editors swept away, not only in
Ireland and India but in London in my time, to be taken in by
Tennyson's notion that we live in a land where a man can say the
thing he will.  There is no such country.  But this is no excuse
for the extravagances of censorship indulged in by jejune
governments of revolutionists, and by Churches who imagine they
possess the eternal truth about everything, to say nothing of
hereditary autocrats who conceive that they are so by divine right.
Our papers are silent about the suppression of liberty in
Imperialist Japan, though in Japan it is a crime to have "dangerous
thoughts."  In my native Ireland, now nominally a Free State, one
of my books is on the index; and I have no doubt all the rest will
follow as soon as the clerical censorship discovers their
existence.  In Austria my chronicle play St Joan had to be altered
to please Catholic authorities who know much less about Catholicism
than I do.  In America books which can be bought anywhere in Europe
are forbidden.  The concentration of British and American attention
on the intolerances of Fascism and Communism creates an illusion
that they do not exist elsewhere; but they exist everywhere, and
must be met, not with ridiculous hotheaded attacks on Germany,
Italy, and Russia, but by a restatement of the case for Toleration
in general.


LEADING CASES: SOCRATES AND JESUS


It is a historical misfortune that the most world-famous victims of
persecution made no valid defence.  Socrates and Jesus are the most
talked of in Christian countries.  Socrates at his trial was in
full possession of his faculties, and was allowed to say everything
he had to say in his defence; but instead of defending his right to
criticize he infuriated his accusers by launching at them a damning
contrast between their infamous corruption and mendacity and his
own upright disinterestedness and blameless record as citizen and
soldier.  Jesus made no defence at all.  He did not regard himself
as a prisoner being tried for a vulgar offence and using all his
wit to escape condemnation.  He believed that he was going through
a sacrificial rite in which he should be slain, after which he
should rise from the dead and come again in glory to establish his
kingdom on earth for ever.  It does not matter to our present
purpose whether this was the delusion of a madman or a hard and
holy fact: in either case the question of toleration was not at
issue for him; therefore he did not raise it.


THE CASE OF GALILEO


In the epoch which Jesus inaugurated, or at least in which his name
was habitually taken in vain, we have Joan of Arc and John of
Leyden, Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Servetus and John Hus and the
heroes of Foxe's Book of Martyrs standing out in our imagination
from thousands of forgotten martyrdoms.  Galileo is a favoured
subject with our scientists; but they miss the point because they
think that the question at issue at his trial was whether the earth
went round the sun or was the stationary centre round which the sun
circled.  Now that was not the issue.  Taken by itself it was a
mere question of physical fact without any moral significance, and
therefore no concern of the Church.  As Galileo was not burnt and
certainly not abhorred, it is quite credible that both his
immediate judges and the Pope believed with at least half their
minds that he was right about the earth and the sun.  But what they
had to consider was whether the Christian religion, on which to the
best of their belief not only the civilization of the world but its
salvation depended, and which had accepted the Hebrew scriptures
and the Greek testament as inspired revelations, could stand the
shock of the discovery that many of its tales, from the tactics of
Joshua in the battle of Gibeon to the Ascension, must have been
written by somebody who did not know what the physical universe was
really like.  I am quite familiar with the pre-Galileo universe of
the Bible and St Augustine.  As a child I thought of the earth as
being an immense ground floor with a star studded ceiling which was
the floor of heaven, and a basement which was hell.  That Jesus
should be taken up into the clouds as the shortest way to heaven
seemed as natural to me as that, at the Opera, Mephistopheles
should come up from hell through a trap in the floor.  But if
instead of telling me that Jesus was taken up into the clouds and
that the disciples saw him no more, which still makes me feel quite
holy, you tell me that he went up like a balloon into the
stratosphere, I do not feel holy: I laugh obstreperously.  The
exalting vision has suddenly become a ribald joke.  That is what
the Church feared; and that is what has actually happened.  Is it
any wonder that the Pope told Galileo that he really must keep his
discoveries to himself, and that Galileo consented to deny them?
Possibly it was the Pope who, to console him, whispered "E pur se
muove."


FIGMENT OF THE SELFREGARDING ACTION


St Joan did not claim toleration: she was so far from believing in
it that she wanted to lead a crusade of extermination against the
Husites, though she was burnt for sharing their heresy.  That is
how all the martyrs have missed the point of their defence.  They
all claimed to possess absolute truth as against the error of their
persecutors, and would have considered it their duty to persecute
for its sake if they had had the power.  Real toleration: the
toleration of error and falsehood, never occurred to them as a
principle possible for any sane government.  And so they have left
us no model defence.  And there is no modern treatise known to me
which quite supplies this need.  Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty
satisfied the nineteenth century, and was my own first textbook on
the subject; but its conclusion that selfregarding actions should
not be interfered with by the authorities carries very little
weight for socialists who perceive that in a complex modern
civilization there are no purely selfregarding actions in the
controversial sphere.  The color of a man's braces or a woman's
garters may concern the wearers alone; but people have never been
burnt for wearing black underclothes instead of white; and the
notion that preaching a sermon or publishing a pamphlet can be
classed as a selfregarding action is manifestly absurd.  All great
Art and Literature is propaganda.  Most certainly the heresies of
Galileo were not selfregarding actions: his feat of setting the
earth rolling was as startling as Joshua's feat of making the sun
stand still.  The Church's mistake was not in interfering with his
liberty, but in imagining that the secret of the earth's motion
could be kept, and fearing that religion could not stand the shock
of its disclosure, or a thousand such.  It was idiotic to try to
adapt Nature to the Church instead of continually adapting the
Church to Nature by changing its teaching on physical matters with
every advance made in our knowledge of Nature.  In treating the
legend of Joshua's victory as a religious truth instead of
insisting that it did not make the smallest difference to religion
whether Joshua was any more real than Jack the Giant Killer, and
that Galileo might play skittles with the whole solar system
without moving the Eternal Throne and the Papal Chair which was its
visible tangible symbol on earth a single inch, it lost a great
opportunity, as it has since lost many others, leaving itself open
to the reproach of stupidity in not understanding Galileo's
argument, of pride in not having humility enough to admit that it
had been wrong in its astronomy, and of feebleness of faith and
confusion of the temporal with the spiritual as aforesaid, laying
itself open to much damaging Protestant and scientific disparagement,
both mostly open to precisely the same reproaches.


INCOMPLETENESS OF THE GREAT TRIALS


No doubt Galileo missed the real point at issue as completely as
Socrates or Jesus.  For this we need not blame him: he was a
physicist and not a politician; and to him the only questions at
issue were whether the earth moved or not, and whether a ten pound
cannon ball would fall twice as fast as a five pound one or only
just as fast and no faster.  But Socrates was by vocation and habit
a solver of problems of conduct, both personal and political; and
Jesus, who had spent his life in propounding the most staggering
paradoxes on the same subject, not by any means always in the
abstract, but as personal directions to his followers, must, if he
had any sense of moral responsibility, have been challenged by his
own conscience again and again as to whether he had any right to
set men on a path which was likely to lead the best of them to the
cross and the worst of them to the moral destruction described by
St Augustine.  No man could expressly admit that his word would
bring not peace but a sword without having satisfied himself that
he was justified in doing so.  He must have been told as frequently
as I have been told that he was giving pain to many worthy people;
and even with the fullest allowance for the strain of impishness
with which the Life Force endows those of us who are destined by it
to épater le bourgeois, he cannot have believed that the mere
satisfaction of this Punchesque Schadenfreude could justify him in
hurting anyone's feelings.  What, then, would have been his defence
if, at his trial, he had been his old self, defending himself as an
accused man threatened with a horrible penalty, instead of a god
going through an inevitable ordeal as a prelude to the establishment
of his kingdom on earth?


A MODERN PASSION PLAY IMPOSSIBLE


The question is of such importance at the present crisis, when the
kingdoms are breaking up, and upstart rulers are sowing their wild
oats by such grotesque persecutions that Galileo's great successor
Einstein is a plundered fugitive from officially threatened
extermination, that I must endeavor to dramatize the trial of Jesus
as it might have proceeded had it taken place before Peter uttered
his momentous exclamation "Thou art the Christ."  I have been asked
repeatedly to dramatize the Gospel story, mostly by admirers of my
dramatization of the trial of St Joan.  But the trial of a dumb
prisoner, at which the judge who puts the crucial question to him
remains unanswered, cannot be dramatized unless the judge is to be
the hero of the play.  Now Pilate, though perhaps a trifle above
the average of colonial governors, is not a heroic figure.  Joan
tackled her judges valiantly and wittily: her trial was a drama
ready made, only needing to be brought within theatrical limits of
time and space to be a thrilling play.  But Jesus would not defend
himself.  It was not that he had not a word to say for himself, nor
that he was denied the opportunity of saying it.  He was not only
allowed but challenged to defend himself.  He was an experienced
public speaker, able to hold multitudes with his oratory, happy and
ready in debate and repartee, full of the illustrative hypothetical
cases beloved of lawyers (called parables in the Gospels), and
never at a loss when plied with questions.  If ever there was a
full dress debate for the forensic championship to be looked
forward to with excited confidence by the disciples of the
challenged expert it was this trial of Christ.  Yet their champion
put up no fight: he went like a lamb to the slaughter, dumb.  Such
a spectacle is disappointing on the stage, which is the one thing
that a drama must not be; and when the disappointment is followed
by scourging and crucifixion it is unbearable: not even the genius
of our Poet Laureate, with all the magic of Canterbury Cathedral
for scenery, can redeem it except for people who enjoy horror and
catastrophe for their own sake and have no intellectual
expectations to be disappointed.


DIFFERENCE BETWEEN READER AND SPECTATOR


It may be asked why the incident of the trial and execution must
fail on the stage, seeing that the gospel narrative is so pathetic,
and so many of us have read it without disappointment.  The answer
is very simple: we have read it in childhood; and children go on
from horror to horror breathlessly, knowing nothing of the
constitutional questions at issue.  Some of them remain in this
condition of intellectual innocence to the end of their lives,
whilst the cleverer ones seldom reconsider the impressions they
have received as little children.  Most Christians, I suspect, are
afraid to think about it critically at all, having been taught to
consider criticism blasphemous when applied to Bible stories.
Besides, there are a thousand things that will pass in a well told
story that will not bear being brought to actuality on the stage.
The evangelists can switch off our attention from Jesus to Peter
hearing the cock crow (or the bugle blow) or to Pilate chaffering
with the crowd about Barabbas; but on the stage the dumb figure
cannot be got rid of: it is to him that we look for a speech that
will take us up to heaven, and not to the weeping of Peter and the
bawling of the mob, which become unbearable interruptions instead
of skilful diversions.

For my part, when I read the story over again as an adult and as a
professional critic to boot, I felt the disappointment so keenly
that I have been ever since in the condition of the musician who,
when he had gone to bed, heard somebody play an unresolved discord,
and could not go to sleep until he had risen to play the resolution
on his piano.  What follows is my attempt to resolve Pilate's
discord.  I began with the narrative of St John, the only one of
the four which represents Jesus as saying anything more than any
crazy person might in the same circumstances.

PILATE.  Are you the king of the Jews?

JESUS.  Do you really want to know? or have those people outside
put it into your head to ask me?

PILATE.  Am I a Jew that I should trouble myself about you?  Your
own people and their priests have brought you to me for judgment.
What have you done?

JESUS.  My kingdom is not of this world: if it were, my followers
would have fought the police and rescued me.  But that sort of
thing does not happen in my kingdom.

PILATE.  Then you are a king?

JESUS.  You say so.  I came into this world and was born a common
man for no other purpose than to reveal the truth.  And everyone
capable of receiving the truth recognizes it in my voice.

PILATE.  What is truth?

JESUS.  You are the first person I have met intelligent enough to
ask me that question.

PILATE.  Come on! no flattery.  I am a Roman, and no doubt seem
exceptionally intelligent to a Jew.  You Jews are always talking
about truth and righteousness and justice: you feed on words when
you are tired of making money, or too poor to have anything else to
feed on.  They want me to nail you up on a cross; but as I do not
yet see what particular harm you have done I prefer to nail you
down to an argument.  Fine words butter no parsnips in Rome.  You
say your vocation is to reveal the truth.  I take your word for it;
but I ask you what is truth?

JESUS.  It is that which a man must tell even if he be stoned or
crucified for telling it.  I am not offering you the truth at a
price for my own profit: I am offering it freely to you for your
salvation at the peril of my own life.  Would I do that if I were
not driven by God to do it against all the protests of my shrinking
flesh?

PILATE.  You Jews are a simple folk.  You have found only one god.
We Romans have found many; and one of them is a God of Lies.  Even
you Jews have to admit a Father of Lies whom you call the devil,
deceiving yourselves with words as usual.  But he is a very potent
god, is he not?  And as he delights not only in lies but in all
other mischief such as stonings and crucifixions of innocent men,
how am I to judge whether it is he who is driving you to sacrifice
yourself for a lie, or Minerva driving you to be sacrificed for the
truth?  I ask you again, what is truth?

JESUS.  It is what you know by your experience to be true or feel
in your soul must be true.

PILATE.  You mean that truth is a correspondence between word and
fact.  It is true that I am sitting in this chair; but I am not the
truth and the chair is not the truth: we are only the facts.  My
perception that I am sitting here may be only a dream; therefore my
perception is not the truth.

JESUS.  You say well.  The truth is the truth and nothing else.
That is your answer.

PILATE.  Aye; but how far is it discoverable?  We agree that it is
true that I am sitting in this chair because our senses tell us so;
and two men are not likely to be dreaming the same dream at the
same moment.  But when I rise from my chair this truth is no longer
true.  Truth is of the present, not of the future.  Your hopes for
the future are not the truth.  Even in the present your opinions
are not the truth.  It is true that I sit in this chair.  But is it
true that it is better for your people that I should sit in this
chair and impose on them the peace of Rome than that they should be
left to slaughter oneanother in their own native savagery, as they
are now clamoring to me to slaughter you?

JESUS.  There is the peace of God that is beyond our understanding;
and that peace shall prevail over the peace of Rome when God's hour
strikes.

PILATE.  Very pretty, my friend; but the hour of the gods is now
and always; and all the world knows what the peace of your Jewish
God means.  Have I not read it in the campaigns of Joshua?  We
Romans have purchased the pax Romano, with our blood; and we prefer
it as a plain understandable thing which keeps men's knives off
oneanother's throats to your peace which is beyond understanding
because it slaughters man woman and child in the name of your God.
But that is only our opinion.  It is not yours.  Therefore it is
not necessarily the truth.  I must act on it, because a governor
must act on something: he cannot loaf round the roads and talk
beautifully as you do.  If you were a responsible governor instead
of a poetic vagrant, you would soon discover that my choice must
lie, not between truth and falsehood, neither of which I can ever
ascertain, but between reasonable and well informed opinion and
sentimental and ill informed impulse.

JESUS.  Nevertheless, opinion is a dead thing and impulse a live
thing.  You cannot impose on me with your reasonable and well
informed opinion.  If it is your will to crucify me, I can find you
a dozen reasons for doing so; and your police can supply you with a
hundred facts to support the reasons.  If it is your will to spare
me I can find you just as many reasons for that; and my disciples
will supply you with more facts than you will have time or patience
to listen to.  That is why your lawyers can plead as well for one
side as another, and can therefore plead without dishonor for the
side that pays them, like the hackney charioteer who will drive you
north as readily as south for the same fare.

PILATE.  You are cleverer than I thought; and you are right.  There
is my will; and there is the will of Caesar to which my will must
give way; and there is above Caesar the will of the gods.  But
these wills are in continual conflict with oneanother; therefore
they are not truth; for truth is one, and cannot conflict with
itself.  There are conflicting opinions and conflicting wills; but
there is no truth except the momentary truth that I am sitting in
this chair.  You tell me that you are here to bear witness to the
truth!  You, a vagrant, a talker, who have never had to pass a
sentence nor levy a tax nor issue an edict!  What have you to say
that I should not have the presumption scourged out of you by my
executioners?

JESUS.  Scourging is not a cure for presumption, nor is it justice,
though you will perhaps call it so in your report to Caesar: it is
cruelty; and that cruelty is wicked and horrible because it is the
weapon with which the sons of Satan slay the sons of God is part of
the eternal truth you seek.

PILATE.  Leave out cruelty: all government is cruel; for nothing is
so cruel as impunity.  A salutary severity--

JESUS.  Oh please!  You must excuse me, noble Governor; but I am so
made by God that official phrases make me violently sick.  Salutary
severity is ipecacuanha to me.  I have spoken to you as one man to
another, in living words.  Do not be so ungrateful as to answer me
in dead ones.

PILATE.  In the mouth of a Roman words mean something: in the mouth
of a Jew they are a cheap substitute for strong drink.  If we
allowed you you would fill the whole world with your scriptures and
psalms and talmuds; and the history of mankind would become a tale
of fine words and villainous deeds.

JESUS.  Yet the word came first, before it was made flesh.  The
word was the beginning.  The word was with God before he made us.
Nay, the word was God.

PILATE.  And what may all that mean, pray?

JESUS.  The difference between man and Roman is but a word; but it
makes all the difference.  The difference between Roman and Jew is
only a word.

PILATE.  It is a fact.

JESUS.  A fact that was first a thought; for a thought is the
substance of a word.  I am no mere chance pile of flesh and bone:
if I were only that, I should fall into corruption and dust before
your eyes.  I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word
made flesh: that is what holds me together standing before you in
the image of God.

PILATE.  That is well argued; but what is sauce for the goose is
sauce for the gander; and it seems to me that if you are the Word
made flesh so also am I.

JESUS.  Have I not said so again and again?  Have they not stoned
me in the streets for saying it?  Have I not sent my apostles to
proclaim this great news to the Gentiles and to the very ends of
the world?  The Word is God.  And God is within you.  It was when I
said this that the Jews--my own people--began picking up stones.
But why should you, the Gentile, reproach me for it?

PILATE.  I have not reproached you for it.  I pointed it out to
you.

JESUS.  Forgive me.  I am so accustomed to be contradicted--

PILATE.  Just so.  There are many sorts of words; and they are all
made flesh sooner or later.  Go among my soldiers and you will hear
many filthy words and witness many cruel and hateful deeds that
began as thoughts.  I do not allow those words to be spoken in my
presence.  I punish those deeds as crimes.  Your truth, as you call
it, can be nothing but the thoughts for which you have found words
which will take effect in deeds if I set you loose to scatter your
words broadcast among the people.  Your own people who bring you to
me tell me that your thoughts are abominable and your words
blasphemous.  How am I to refute them?  How am I to distinguish
between the blasphemies of my soldiers reported to me by my
centurions and your blasphemies reported to me by your High Priest?

JESUS.  Woe betide you and the world if you do not distinguish!

PILATE.  So you think.  I am not frightened.  Why do you think so?

JESUS.  I do not think: I know.  I have it from God.

PILATE.  I have the same sort of knowledge from several gods.

JESUS.  In so far as you know the truth you have it from my God,
who is your heavenly father and mine.  He has many names and his
nature is manifold.  Call him what you will: he is still Our
Father.  Does a father tell his children lies?

PILATE.  Yes: many lies.  You have an earthly father and an earthly
mother.  Did they tell you what you are preaching?

JESUS.  Alas! no.

PILATE.  Then you are defying your father and mother.  You are
defying your Church.  You are breaking your God's commandments, and
claiming a right to do so.  You are pleading for the poor, and
declaring that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle than for a rich man to enter your God's paradise.  Yet you
have feasted at the tables of the rich, and encouraged harlots to
spend on perfume for your feet money that might have been given to
the poor, thereby so disgusting your treasurer that he has betrayed
you to the High Priest for a handful of silver.  Well, feast as
much as you please: I do not blame you for refusing to play the
fakir and make yourself a walking exhibition of silly austerities;
but I must draw the line at your making a riot in the temple and
throwing the gold of the moneychangers to be scrambled for by your
partizans.  I have a law to administer.  The law forbids obscenity,
sedition, and blasphemy.  You are accused of sedition and
blasphemy.  You do not deny them: you only talk about the truth,
which turns out to be nothing but what you like to believe.  Your
blasphemy is nothing to me: the whole Jewish religion is blasphemy
from beginning to end from my Roman point of view; but it means a
great deal to the High Priest; and I cannot keep order in Jewry
except by dealing with Jewish fools according to Jewish folly.  But
sedition concerns me and my office very closely; and when you
undertook to supersede the Roman Empire by a kingdom in which you
and not Caesar are to occupy the throne, you were guilty of the
uttermost sedition.  I am loth to have you crucified; for though
you are only a Jew, and a half baked young one at that, yet I
perceive that you are in your Jewish way a man of quality; and it
makes me uneasy to throw a man of quality to the mob, even if his
quality be only a Jewish quality.  For I am a patrician and
therefore myself a man of quality; and hawks should not pick out
hawks' eyes.  I am actually condescending to parley with you at
this length in the merciful hope of finding an excuse for
tolerating your blasphemy and sedition.  In defence you offer me
nothing but an empty phrase about the truth, I am sincere in
wishing to spare you; for if I do not release you I shall have to
release that blackguard Barabbas, who has gone further than you and
killed somebody, whereas I understand that you have only raised a
Jew from the dead.  So for the last time set your wits to work, and
find me a sound reason for letting a seditious blasphemer go free.

JESUS.  I do not ask you to set me free; nor would I accept my life
at the price of Barabbas's death even if I believed that you could
countermand the ordeal to which I am predestined.  Yet for the
satisfaction of your longing for the truth I will tell you that the
answer to your demand is your own argument that neither you nor the
prisoner whom you judge can prove that he is in the right;
therefore you must not judge me lest you be yourself judged.
Without sedition and blasphemy the world would stand still and the
Kingdom of God never be a stage nearer.  The Roman Empire began
with a wolf suckling two human infants.  If these infants had not
been wiser than their fostermother your empire would be a pack of
wolves.  It is by children who are wiser than their fathers,
subjects who are wiser than their emperors, beggars and vagrants
who are wiser than their priests, that men rise from being beasts
of prey to believing in me and being saved.

PILATE.  What do you mean by believing in you?

JESUS.  Seeing the world as I do.  What else could it mean?

PILATE.  And you are the Christ, the Messiah, eh?

JESUS.  Were I Satan, my argument would still hold.

PILATE.  And I am to spare and encourage every heretic, every
rebel, every lawbreaker, every rapscallion lest he should turn out
to be wiser than all the generations who made the Roman law and
built up the Roman Empire on it?

JESUS.  By their fruits ye shall know them.  Beware how you kill a
thought that is new to you.  For that thought may be the foundation
of the kingdom of God on earth.

PILATE.  It may also be the ruin of all kingdoms, all law, and all
human society.  It may be the thought of the beast of prey striving
to return.

JESUS.  The beast of prey is not striving to return: the kingdom of
God is striving to come.  The empire that looks back in terror
shall give way to the kingdom that looks forward with hope.  Terror
drives men mad: hope and faith give them divine wisdom.  The men
whom you fill with fear will stick at no evil and perish in their
sin: the men whom I fill with faith shall inherit the earth.  I say
to you Cast out fear.  Speak no more vain things to me about the
greatness of Rome.  The greatness of Rome, as you call it, is
nothing but fear: fear of the past and fear of the future, fear of
the poor, fear of the rich, fear of the High Priests, fear of the
Jews and Greeks who are learned, fear of the Gauls and Goths and
Huns who are barbarians, fear of the Carthage you destroyed to save
you from your fear of it and now fear worse than ever, fear of
imperial Caesar, the idol you have yourself created, and fear of
me, the penniless vagrant, buffeted and mocked, fear of everything
except the rule of God: faith in nothing but blood and iron and
gold.  You, standing for Rome, are the universal coward: I,
standing for the kingdom of God, have braved everything, lost
everything, and won an eternal crown.

PILATE.  You have won a crown of thorns; and you shall wear it on
the cross.  You are a more dangerous fellow than I thought.  For
your blasphemy against the god of the high priests I care nothing:
you may trample their religion into hell for all I care; but you
have blasphemed against Caesar and against the Empire; and you mean
it, and have the power to turn men's hearts against it as you have
half turned mine.  Therefore I must make an end of you whilst there
is still some law left in the world.

JESUS.  Law is blind without counsel.  The counsel men agree with
is vain: it is only the echo of their own voices.  A million echoes
will not help you to rule righteously.  But he who does not fear
you and shews you the other side is a pearl of the greatest price.
Slay me and you go blind to your damnation.  The greatest of God's
names is Counsellor; and when your Empire is dust and your name a
byword among the nations the temples of the living God shall still
ring with his praise as Wonderful! Counsellor! the Everlasting
Father, the Prince of Peace.


THE SACREDNESS OF CRITICISM


And so the last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must
stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I
makes a better job of it.

Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization
cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save
itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for
criticism.  This means impunity not only for propositions which,
however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable,
but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene,
seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.  That sound
Catholic institution, the Devil's Advocate, must be privileged as
possibly the Herald of the World to Come.  The difficulty is to
distinguish between the critic and the criminal or lunatic, between
liberty of precept and liberty of example.  It may be vitally
necessary to allow a person to advocate Nudism; but it may not be
expedient to allow that person to walk along Piccadilly stark
naked.  Karl Marx writing the death warrant of private property in
the reading room of the British Museum was sacred; but if Karl Marx
had sent the rent of his villa in Maitland Park to the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, and shot the landlord's agents when they came to
distrain on his furniture or execute a writ of ejectment, he could
hardly have escaped hanging by pleading his right to criticize.
Not until the criticism changes the law can the magistrate allow
the critic to give effect to it.  We are so dangerously uneducated
in citizenship that most of us assume that we have an unlimited
right to change our conduct the moment we have changed our minds.
People who have a vague notion that Socialism is a state of society
in which everyone gives away everything he possesses to everybody
else occasionally reproach me because I, being a Socialist, do not
immediately beggar myself in this fashion.  People who imagined,
more specifically, that a Socialist could not consistently keep a
motor car, almost succeeded in making a public question of the
possession of such a vehicle by a Prime Minister who at that time
professed Socialism.  But even if these idiots had really
understood what they were talking about, they would have been wrong
in supposing that a hostile critic of the existing social order
either could or should behave as if he were living in his own
particular Utopia.  He may, at most, be a little eccentric at the
cost of being indulged as slightly cracked.

On the other hand the Government, too, has not only a right but a
duty of criticism.  If it is to abandon once for all its savage
superstition that whoever breaks the law is fair game for the
torturers, and that the wrong wrought by the evildoer can be
expiated and undone by a worse wrong done to him by judges and
priests: if it is to substitute the doctrine of Jesus that
punishment is only a senseless attempt to make a white out of two
blacks, and to abolish the monstrous list of crimes and punishments
by which these superstitions have been reduced to practice for
routine officials, then there must be a stupendous extension of
governmental criticism; for every crime will raise the essential
critical question whether the criminal is fit to live at all, and
if so whether he is fit to live under more or less tutelage and
discipline like a soldier, or at normal liberty under an obligation
to make good the damage he has cost.

For such functions as these we shall need critics educated
otherwise than our judges of today; but the same may be said of all
whose public functions transcend the application of a routine.

I have no doubt that the eradication of malice, vindictiveness, and
Sadist libido on these terms from the personal contacts of citizens
with their rulers, far from having a reassuring effect, is likely
to be rather terrifying at first, as all people with any tenderness
of conscience will feel the deepest misgivings as to whether they
are really worth keeping alive in a highly civilized community; but
that will wear off as standards of worth get established and known
by practice.  In the meantime the terror will act as a sort of
social conscience which is dangerously lacking at present and which
none of our model educational establishments ever dreams of
inculcating.


AYOT ST LAWRENCE, 22nd October, 1933




ON THE ROCKS


ACT I


The Cabinet Room in number ten Downing Street, Westminster, the
official residence of the British Prime Minister.  The illustrious
holder of that office, Sir Arthur Chavender, is reading The Times
on the hearth under the portrait of Walpole.  The fireplace wall is
covered with bookshelves; but one bit of it, on Walpole's right, is
a masked door, painted with sham books and shelves, leading to the
Minister's private apartments; and in the end of the same wall, on
Walpole's left, is a door leading to the office of Sir Arthur's
private secretary Miss Hilda Hanways.  The main door is in the side
wall on Walpole's right.  In the opposite wall on his left are the
spacious windows.  Everything is on an imposing scale, including an
oblong table across the middle of the room, with fourteen leather
upholstered chairs, six at each side and one at each end, pushed in
all along it.  The presidential chair is the central one next the
cold fireplace (it is mid-July); and there is a telephone and a
switchboard on the table within reach of it.

Sir Arthur has pulled it round and is making himself comfortable
in it as he reads.  At the end of the table nearest the window a
silver tray, with coffee and milk for one person, indicates Sir
Arthur's unofficial seat.  In the corner farthest from Walpole, on
his right, is a writing bureau and chair for the secretary.  In the
corresponding corner on his left, an armchair.  There is a bluebook
lying, neglected and dusty, on a half empty shelf of the bookcase
within reach of the Prime Minister's seat.

Sir Arthur can hardly be much less than fifty; but his natural
buoyancy makes him look younger.  He has an orator's voice of
pleasant tone; and his manners are very genial.  In oldish clothes
he has the proper aristocratic air of being carelessly but well
dressed, an easy feat for him, as he is so trimly built that any
clothes would look well cut on him.  On the whole, a very engaging
personality.

He reads The Times until his secretary hurries in from her office,
with her notebook and a sheaf of letters in her hand.  Her age is
unknown; but she is made up to pass as reasonably young and
attractive.  She looks capable; but she does not carry the burden
of State affairs as easily as the Prime Minister.  Both are
worried; but with a difference.  She is worried not only by an
excess of business but a sense of responsibility.  He is equally
worried by the excess of business; but in him enjoyment of his
position leaves no doubt in his mind as to his own entire adequacy
to it.


HILDA.  I hear you have been asking for me, Sir Arthur.  I'm so
sorry to be late; but really the streets are becoming quite
impassable with the crowds of unemployed.  I took a taxi; but it
was no use: we were blocked by a procession; and I had to get out
and push my way through.  [She goes to her bureau].

SIR ARTHUR [rising]  What on earth good do they think they can do
themselves by crowding aimlessly about Westminster and the public
offices?

HILDA.  Thank Goodness the police wont let them into Downing
Street.  [She sits down].  They would be all over the doorstep.

SIR ARTHUR.  It's all so foolish--so ignorant, poor chaps!  [He
throws The Times on the table and moves to the end chair, where his
coffee is].  They think because I'm Prime Minister I'm Divine
Providence and can find jobs for them before trade revives.  [He
sits down and fidgets with his papers].

HILDA.  Trafalgar Square's full.  The Horse Guards parade is full.
The Mall is full all the way down to Marlborough House and
Buckingham Palace.

SIR ARTHUR.  They have no right to be there.  Trafalgar Square is
not a public place: it belongs to the Commissioner of Woods and
Forests.  The Horse Guards parade is reserved for the military.
The Mall is a thoroughfare: anyone stopping there is guilty of
obstruction.  What are the police thinking of?  Why dont they clear
them out?

HILDA.  I asked the policeman who got me through to the gates why
they didnt.  He said "We're only too glad to have them where they
cant break any windows, and where the mounted men can have a fair
whack at the Hooligan Fringe when they get too obstreperous."

SIR ARTHUR.  Hooligan Fringe!  He got that out of the papers.  It
only encourages them to write them up like that.

HILDA.  Sir Broadfoot Basham has come over from Scotland Yard.  He
is talking to Lady Chavender.

SIR ARTHUR [rising and making for the telephone]  Yes: I telephoned
for him.  He really must do something to stop these meetings.
It was a mistake to make a man with a name like that Chief
Commissioner of Police.  People think him a trampling, bashing,
brutal terrorist no matter how considerately the police behave.
What we need is a thoroughly popular figure.  [He takes up the
telephone]  Ask Sir Broadfoot Basham to come up.

HILDA.  I dont think any chief of police could be popular at
present.  Every day they are bludgeoning deputations of the
unemployed.  [She sits down and busies herself with letters].

SIR ARTHUR.  Poor devils!  I hate that part of the business.  But
what are the police to do?  We cant have the sittings of the local
authorities threatened by deputations.  Deputations are frightful
nuisances even in the quietest times; but just now they are a
public danger.

The Chief Commissioner of Police enters by the main door.  A
capable looking man from the military point of view.  He is a
gentleman: and his manners are fairly pleasant; but they are not in
the least conciliatory.

Hilda rises and pulls out a chair for him at the end of the table
nearest to her and farthest from Sir Arthur; then returns to her
work at her desk.  Sir Arthur comes round to his side of the table.

SIR ARTHUR.  Morning, Basham.  Sit down.  I'm devilishly busy; but
you are always welcome to your ten minutes.

BASHAM [coolly, sitting down]  Thank you.  You sent for me.
[Anxiously]  Anything new?

SIR ARTHUR.  These street corner meetings are going beyond all
bounds.

BASHAM [relieved]  What harm do they do?  Crowds are dangerous when
theyve nothing to listen to or look at.  The meetings keep them
amused.  They save us trouble.

SIR ARTHUR.  Thats all very well for you, Basham; but think of the
trouble they make for me!  Remember: this is a National Government,
not a party one.  I am up against my Conservative colleagues all
the time; and they cant swallow the rank sedition that goes on
every day at these meetings.  Sir Dexter Rightside--you know what a
regular old Diehard he is--heard a speaker say that if the police
used tear gas the unemployed would give old Dexy something to cry
for without any tear gas.  That has brought matters to a head in
the Cabinet.  We shall make an Order in Council to enable you to
put a stop to all street meetings and speeches.

BASHAM [unimpressed--slowly]  If you dont mind, P.M., I had rather
you didnt do that.

SIR ARTHUR.  Why not?

BASHAM.  Crowd psychology.

SIR ARTHUR.  Nonsense!  Really, Basham, if you are going to come
this metaphysical rot over me I shall begin to wonder whether your
appointment wasnt a mistake.

BASHAM.  Of course it was a mistake.  Dealing with the unemployed
is not a soldier's job; and I was a soldier.  If you want these
crowds settled on soldierly lines, say so; and give me half a dozen
machine guns.  The streets will be clear before twelve o'clock.

SIR ARTHUR.  Man: have you considered the effect on the bye-
elections?

BASHAM.  A soldier has nothing to do with elections.  You shew me a
crowd and tell me to disperse it.  All youll hear is a noise like a
watchman's rattle.  Quite simple.

SIR ARTHUR.  Far too simple.  You soldiers never understand the
difficulties a statesman has to contend with.

BASHAM.  Well, whats your alternative?

SIR ARTHUR.  I have told you.  Arrest the sedition mongers.  That
will shut old Dexy's mouth.

BASHAM.  So that Satan may find mischief still for idle hands to
do.  No, P.M.: the right alternative is mine: keep the crowd
amused.  You ought to know that, I think, better than most men.

SIR ARTHUR.  I!  What do you mean?

BASHAM.  The point is to prevent the crowd doing anything, isnt it?

SIR ARTHUR.  Anything mischievous: I suppose so.  But--

BASHAM.  An English crowd will never do anything, mischievous or
the reverse, while it is listening to speeches.  And the fellows
who make the speeches can be depended on never to do anything else.
In the first place, they dont know how.  In the second, they are
afraid.  I am instructing my agents to press all the talking
societies, the Ethical Societies, the Socialist societies, the
Communists, the Fascists, the Anarchists, the Syndicalists, the
official Labor Party, the Independent Labor Party, the Salvation
Army, the Church Army and the Atheists, to send their best tub-
thumpers into the streets to seize the opportunity.

SIR ARTHUR.  What opportunity?

BASHAM.  They dont know.  Neither do I.  It's only a phrase that
means nothing: just what they are sure to rise at.  I must keep
Trafalgar Square going night and day.  A few Labor M.P.s would
help.  You have a rare lot of gasbags under your thumb in the
House.  If you could send half a dozen of them down to the Yard, I
could plant them where they would be really useful.

SIR ARTHUR [incensed]  Basham: I must tell you that we are quite
determined to put a stop to this modern fashion of speaking
disrespectfully of the House of Commons.  If it goes too far we
shall not hesitate to bring prominent offenders to the bar of the
House, no matter what their position is.

BASHAM.  Arthur: as responsible head of the police, I am up against
the facts all day and every day; and one of the facts is that
nowadays nobody outside the party cliques cares a brass button for
the House of Commons.  [Rising]  You will do what I ask you as to
letting the speaking go on, wont you?

SIR ARTHUR.  Well, I--er--

BASHAM.  Unless you are game to try the machine guns.

SIR ARTHUR.  Oh do drop that, Basham [he returns to his chair and
sits moodily].

BASHAM.  Righto!  We'll let them talk.  Thanks ever so much.  Sorry
to have taken up so much of your time: I know it's priceless.  [He
hurries to the door; then hesitates and adds]  By the way, I know
it's asking a lot; but if you could give us a turn in Trafalgar
Square yourself--some Sunday afternoon would be best--it--

SIR ARTHUR [springing up, thoroughly roused]  I!!!!

BASHAM [hurriedly]  No: of course you couldnt.  Only, it would do
such a lot of good--keep the crowd quiet talking about it for a
fortnight.  However, of course it's impossible: say no more: so
long.  [He goes out].

SIR ARTHUR [collapsing into his chair]  Well, really!  Basham's
losing his head.  I wonder what he meant by saying that I ought to
know better than most men.  What ought I to know better than most
men?

HILDA.  I think he meant that you are such a wonderful speaker you
ought to know what a magical effect a fine speech has on a crowd.

SIR ARTHUR [musing]  Do you know, I am not at all sure that there
is not something in his idea of my making a speech in Trafalgar
Square.  I have not done such a thing for many many years; but I
have stood between the lions in my time; and I believe that if I
were to tackle the unemployed face to face, and explain to them
that I intend to call a conference in March next on the prospects
of a revival of trade, it would have a wonderfully soothing effect.

HILDA.  But it's impossible.  You have a conference every month
until November.  And think of the time taken by the travelling!
One in Paris!  Two in Geneva!  One in Japan!  You cant possibly do
it: you will break down.

SIR ARTHUR.  And shall I be any better at home here leading the
House? sitting up all night in bad air listening to fools insulting
me?  I tell you I should have been dead long ago but for the relief
of these conferences: the journeys and the change.  And I look
forward to Japan.  I shall be able to pick up some nice old bric-a-
brac there.

HILDA.  Oh well!  You know best.

SIR ARTHUR [energetically]  And now to work.  Work! work! work!
[He rises and paces the floor in front of the table].  I want you
to take down some notes for my speech this afternoon at the Church
House.  The Archbishop tells me that the Anglo-Catholics are going
mad on what they call Christian Communism, and that I must head
them off.

HILDA.  There are those old notes on the economic difficulties of
Socialism that you used at the British Association last year.

SIR ARTHUR.  No: these parsons know too much about that.  Besides,
this is not the time to talk about economic difficulties: we're up
to the neck in them.  The Archbishop says "Avoid figures; and stick
to the fact that Socialism would break up the family."  I believe
he is right: a bit of sentiment about the family always goes down
well.  Just jot this down for me.  [Dictating]  Family.  Foundation
of civilization.  Foundation of the empire.

HILDA.  Will there be any Hindus or Mahometans present?

SIR ARTHUR.  No.  No polygamists at the Church House.  Besides,
everybody knows that The Family means the British family.  By the
way, I can make a point of that.  Put down in a separate line, in
red capitals, "One man one wife."  Let me see now: can I work that
up?  "One child one father."  How would that do?

HILDA.  I think it would be safer to say "One child one mother."

SIR ARTHUR.  No: that might get a laugh--the wrong sort of laugh.
I'd better not risk it.  Strike it out.  A laugh in the wrong place
in the Church House would be the very devil.  Where did you get
that necklace? it's rather pretty.  I havnt seen it before.

HILDA.  Ive worn it every day for two months.  [Striking out the
"one child" note]  Yes?

SIR ARTHUR.  Then--er--what subject are we on?  [Testily]  I wish
you wouldnt interrupt me: I had the whole speech in my head
beautifully; and now it's gone.

HILDA.  Sorry.  The family.

SIR ARTHUR.  The family?  Whose family?  What family?  The Holy
Family?  The Royal Family?  The Swiss Family Robinson?  Do be a
little more explicit, Miss Hanways.

HILDA [gently insistent]  Not any particular family.  THE family.
Socialism breaking up the family.  For the Church House speech this
afternoon.

SIR ARTHUR.  Yes yes yes, of course.  I was in the House yesterday
until three in the morning; and my brains are just so much tripe.

HILDA.  Why did you sit up?  The business didnt matter.

SIR ARTHUR [scandalized]  Not matter!  You really must not say
these things, Miss Hanways.  A full dress debate on whether Jameson
or Thompson was right about what Johnson said in the Cabinet!

HILDA.  Ten years ago.

SIR ARTHUR.  What does that matter?  The real question: the
question whether Jameson or Thompson is a liar, is a vital question
of the first importance.

HILDA.  But theyre both liars.

SIR ARTHUR.  Of course they are; but the division might have
affected their inclusion in the next Cabinet.  The whole House rose
at it.  Look at the papers this morning!  Full of it.

HILDA.  And three lines about the unemployed, though I was twenty
minutes late trying to shove my way through them.  Really, Sir
Arthur, you should have come home to bed.  You will kill yourself
if you try to get through your work and attend so many debates as
well: you will indeed.

SIR ARTHUR.  Miss Hanways: I wish I could persuade you to remember
occasionally that I happen to be the leader of the House of
Commons.

HILDA.  Oh, what is the use of leading the House if it never goes
anywhere?  It just breaks my heart to see the state you come home
in.  You are good for nothing next morning.

SIR ARTHUR [yelling at her]  Dont remind me of it: do you think I
dont know?  My brain is overworked: my mental grasp is stretched
and strained to breaking point.  I shall go mad.  [Pulling himself
together]  However, it's no use grousing about it: I shall have a
night off going to Geneva, and a week-end at Chequers.  But it is
hard to govern a country and do fifty thousand other things every
day that might just as well be done by the Beadle of Burlington
Arcade.  Well, well, we mustnt waste time.  Work! work! work!  [He
returns to his chair and sits down resolutely].  Get along with it.
What were we talking about?

HILDA.  The family.

SIR ARTHUR [grasping his temples distractedly]  Oh dear!  Has Lady
Chavender's sister-in-law been making a fuss again?

HILDA.  No, no.  The family.  Not any real family.  THE family.
Socialism breaking up the family.  Your speech this afternoon at
the Church House.

SIR ARTHUR.  Ah, of course.  I am going dotty.  Thirty years in
Parliament and ten on the Front Bench would drive any man dotty.
I have only one set of brains and I need ten.  I--

HILDA [urgently]  We must get on with the notes for your speech,
Sir Arthur.  The morning has half gone already; and weve done
nothing.

SIR ARTHUR [again infuriated]  How can the busiest man in England
find time to do anything?  It is you who have wasted the morning
interrupting me with your silly remarks about your necklace.  What
do I care about your necklace?

HILDA.  You gave it to me, Sir Arthur.

SIR ARTHUR.  Did I?  Ha ha ha!  Yes: I believe I did.  I bought it
in Venice.  But come along now.  What about that speech?

HILDA.  Yes.  The family.  It was about the family.

SIR ARTHUR.  Well, I know that: I have not yet become a complete
idiot.  You keep saying the family, the family, the family.

HILDA.  Socialism and the family.  How Socialism will break up the
family.

SIR ARTHUR.  Who says Socialism will break up the family?  Dont be a
fool.

HILDA.  The Archbishop wants you to say it.  At the Church House.

SIR ARTHUR.  Decidedly I am going mad.

HILDA.  No: you are only tired.  You were getting along all right.
One man one wife: that is where you stopped.

SIR ARTHUR.  One man one wife is one wife too many, if she has a
lot of brothers who cant get on with the women they marry.  Has it
occurred to you, Miss Hanways, that the prospect of Socialism
destroying the family may not be altogether unattractive?

HILDA [despairingly]  Oh, Sir Arthur, we must get on with the
notes: we really must.  I have all the letters to do yet.  Do try
to pick up the thread.  The family the foundation of the empire.
The foundation of Christianity.  Of civilization.  Of human
society.

SIR ARTHUR.  Thats enough about the foundation: it wont bear any
more.  I must have another word to work up.  Let me see.  I have
it.  Nationalization of women.

HILDA [remonstrating]  Oh, Sir Arthur!

SIR ARTHUR.  Whats the matter now?

HILDA.  Such bunk!

SIR ARTHUR.  Miss Hanways: when a statesman is not talking bunk he
is making trouble for himself; and Goodness knows I have trouble
enough without making any more.  Put this down.  [He rises and
takes his platform attitude at the end of the table].  "No, your
Grace, my lords and gentlemen.  Nationalize the land if you will;
nationalize our industries if we must; nationalize education,
housing, science, art, the theatre, the opera, even the cinema; but
spare our women."

HILDA [having taken it down]  Is that the finish?

SIR ARTHUR [abandoning the attitude and pacing about]  No: write in
red capitals under it "Rock of Ages."

HILDA.  I think Rock of Ages will be rather a shock unless in
connexion with something very sincere.  May I suggest "The Church's
One Foundation"?

SIR ARTHUR.  Yes.  Much better.  Thank you.  The family the Church's
one foundation.  Splendid.

Miss Flavia Chavender, 19, bursts violently into the room through
the masked door and dashes to her father.

FLAVIA.  Papa: I will not stand Mamma any longer.  She interferes
with me in every possible way out of sheer dislike of me.  I refuse
to live in this house with her a moment longer.

Lady Chavender follows her in, speaking as she enters, and comes
between the Prime Minister and his assailant.

LADY CHAVENDER.  I knew you were coming here to make a scene and
disturb your father, though he has had hardly six hours sleep this
week, and was up all night.  I am so sorry, Arthur: she is
uncontrollable.

David Chavender, 18, slight, refined, rather small for his age,
charges in to the table.

DAVID [in a childish falsetto]  Look here, Mamma.  Cant you let
Flavia alone?  I wont stand by and see her nagged at and treated
like a child of six.  Nag! nag! nag! everything she does.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Nag!!  I control myself to the limit of human
endurance with you all.  But Flavia makes a study of annoying me.

FLAVIA.  It's not true: I have considered you and given up all the
things I wanted for you until I have no individuality left.  If I
take up a book you want me to read something else.  If I want to
see anybody you want me to see somebody else.  If I choose the
color of my own dress you want something different and dowdy.  I
cant sit right nor stand right nor do my hair right nor dress
myself right: my life here is a hell.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Flavia!!

FLAVIA [passionately]  Yes, hell.

DAVID.  Quite true.  [Fortissimo]  Hell.

LADY CHAVENDER [quietly]  Miss Hanways: would you mind--

HILDA.  Yes, Lady Chavender [she rises to go].

FLAVIA.  You neednt go, Hilda.  You know what I have to endure.

DAVID.  Damn all this paralyzing delicacy!  Damn it!

LADY CHAVENDER.  Arthur--

SIR ARTHUR [patting her]  Never mind, dear.  They must be let talk.
[He returns placidly to his chair].  It's just like the House of
Commons, except that the speeches are shorter.

FLAVIA.  Oh, it's no use trying to make papa listen to anything.
[She throws herself despairingly into Basham's chair and writhes].

DAVID [approaching Sir Arthur with dignity]  I really think,
father, you might for once in a way take some slight interest in
the family.

SIR ARTHUR.  My dear boy, at this very moment I am making notes for
a speech on the family.  Ask Miss Hanways.

HILDA.  Yes.  Mr Chavender: Sir Arthur is to speak this afternoon
on the disintegrating effect of Socialism on family life.

FLAVIA [irresistible amusement struggling with hysterics and
getting the better of them]  Ha ha!  Ha ha ha!

DAVID [retreating]  Ha ha!  Haw!  Thats the best--ha ha ha!

SIR ARTHUR.  I dont see the joke.  Why this hilarity?

DAVID.  Treat the House to a brief description of this family; and
you will get the laugh of your life.

FLAVIA.  Damn the family!

LADY CHAVENDER.  Flavia!

FLAVIA [bouncing up]  Yes: there you go.  I mustnt say damn.  I
mustnt say anything I feel and think, only what you feel and think.
Thats family life.  Scold, scold, scold!

DAVID.  Squabble, squabble, squabble!

FLAVIA.  Look at the unbearable way you treat me!  Look at the
unbearable way you treat Papa!

SIR ARTHUR [rising in flaming wrath]  How dare you?  Silence.
Leave the room.

After a moment of awestruck silence Flavia, rather dazed by the
avalanche she has brought down on herself, looks at her father in a
lost way; then bursts into tears and runs out through the masked
door.

SIR ARTHUR [quietly]  Youd better go too, my boy.

David, also somewhat dazed, shrugs his shoulders and goes out.  Sir
Arthur looks at Hilda.  She hurries out almost on tiptoe.

SIR ARTHUR [taking his wife in his arms affectionately]  Treat me
badly!  You!!  I could have killed her, poor little devil.

He sits down; and she passes behind him and takes the nearest chair
on his right.

She is a nice woman, and goodlooking; but she is bored; and her
habitual manner is one of apology for being not only unable to take
an interest in people, but even to pretend that she does.

LADY CHAVENDER.  It serves us right, dear, for letting them bring
themselves up in the post-war fashion instead of teaching them to
be ladies and gentlemen.  Besides, Flavia was right.  I do treat
you abominably.  And you are so good!

SIR ARTHUR.  Nonsense!  Such a horrid wicked thing to say.  Dont you
know, my love, that you are the best of wives? the very best as
well as the very dearest?

LADY CHAVENDER.  You are certainly the best of husbands, Arthur.
You are the best of everything.  I dont wonder at the country
adoring you.  But Flavia was quite right.  It is the first time I
have ever known her to be right about anything.  I am a bad wife
and a bad mother.  I dislike my daughter and treat her badly.  I
like you very much; and I treat you abominably.

SIR ARTHUR.  No; no.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Yes, yes.  I suppose it's something wrong in my
constitution.  I was not born for wifing and mothering.  And yet I
am very very fond of you, as you know.  But I have a grudge against
your career.

SIR ARTHUR.  My career!  [Complacently]  Well, theres not much wrong
with that, is there?  Of course I know it keeps me too much away
from home.  That gives you a sort of grudge against it.  All the
wives of successful men are a bit like that.  But it's better to
see too little of a husband than too much of him, isnt it?

LADY CHAVENDER.  I am so glad that you really feel successful.

SIR ARTHUR.  Well, it may sound conceited and all that; but after
all a man cant be Prime Minister and go about with a modest cough
pretending to be a nobody.  Facts are facts; and the facts in my
case are that I have climbed to the top of the tree; I am happy in
my work; and--

LADY CHAVENDER.  Your what?

SIR ARTHUR.  You are getting frightfully deaf, dear.  I said "my
work."

LADY CHAVENDER.  You call it work?

SIR ARTHUR.  Brain work, dear, brain work.  Do you really suppose
that governing the country is not work, but a sort of gentlemanly
diversion?

LADY CHAVENDER.  But you dont govern the country, Arthur.  The
country isnt governed: it just slummocks along anyhow.

SIR ARTHUR.  I have to govern within democratic limits.  I cannot go
faster than our voters will let me.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Oh, your voters!  What do they know about
government?  Football, prizefighting, war: that is what they like.
And they like war because it isnt real to them: it's only a cinema
show.  War is real to me; and I hate it, as every woman to whom it
is real hates it.  But to you it is only part of your game: one of
the regular moves of the Foreign Office and the War Office.

SIR ARTHUR.  My dear, I hate war as much as you do.  It makes a
Prime Minister's job easy because it brings every dog to heel; but
it produces coalitions; and I believe in party government.

LADY CHAVENDER [rising]  Oh, it's no use talking to you, Arthur.
[She comes behind him and plants her hands on his shoulders].  You
are a dear and a duck and a darling; but you live in fairyland and
I live in the hard wicked world.  Thats why I cant be a good wife
and take an interest in your career.

SIR ARTHUR.  Stuff!  Politics are not a woman's business: thats all
it means.  Thank God I have not a political wife.  Look at
Higginbotham!  He was just ripe for the Cabinet when his wife went
into Parliament and made money by journalism.  That was the end of
him.

LADY CHAVENDER.  And I married a man with a hopelessly parliamentary
mind; and that was the end of me.

SIR ARTHUR.  Yes, yes, my pettums.  I know that you have sacrificed
yourself to keeping my house and sewing on my buttons; and I am not
ungrateful.  I am sometimes remorseful; but I love it.  And now you
must run away, I am very very very busy this morning.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Yes, yes, very very busy doing nothing.  And it
wears you out far more than if your mind had something sensible to
work on!  Youll have a nervous breakdown if you go on like this.
Promise me that you will see the lady I spoke to you about--if you
wont see a proper doctor.

SIR ARTHUR.  But you told me this woman is a doctor!  [He rises and
breaks away from her].  Once for all, I wont see any doctor.  I'm
old enough to do my own doctoring; and I'm not going to pay any
doctor, male or female, three guineas to tell me what I know
perfectly well already: that my brain's overworked and I must take
a fortnight off on the links, or go for a sea voyage.

LADY CHAVENDER.  She charges twenty guineas, Arthur.

SIR ARTHUR [shaken] Oh!  Does she?  What for?

LADY CHAVENDER.  Twenty guineas for the diagnosis and twelve
guineas a week at her sanatorium in the Welsh mountains, where she
wants to keep you under observation for six weeks.  That would
really rest you; and I think you would find her a rather interesting
and attractive woman.

SIR ARTHUR.  Has she a good cook?

LADY CHAVENDER.  I dont think that matters.

SIR ARTHUR.  Not matter!

LADY CHAVENDER.  No.  She makes her patients fast.

SIR ARTHUR.  Tell her I'm not a Mahatma.  If I pay twelve guineas a
week I shall expect three meals a day for it.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Then you will see her?

SIR ARTHUR.  Certainly not, if I have to pay twenty guineas for it.

LADY CHAVENDER.  No, no.  Only a social call, not a professional
visit.  Just to amuse you, and gratify her curiosity.  She wants to
meet you.

SIR ARTHUR.  Very well, dear, very well, very well.  This woman has
got round you, I see.  Well, she shant get round me; but to please
you I'll have a look at her.  And now you really must run away.  I
have a frightful mass of work to get through this morning.

LADY CHAVENDER.  Thank you, darling.  [She kisses him]  May I tell
Flavia she is forgiven?

SIR ARTHUR.  Yes.  But I havnt really forgiven her.  I'll never
forgive her.

LADY CHAVENDER [smiling]  Dearest.  [She kisses his fingers and
goes out, giving him a parting smile as she goes through the masked
door].

Sir Arthur, left alone, looks inspired and triumphant.  He
addresses an imaginary assembly.

SIR ARTHUR.  "My lords and gentlemen: you are not theorists.  You
are not rhapsodists.  You are no longer young"--no, damn it, old
Middlesex wont like that.  "We have all been young.  We have seen
visions and dreamt dreams.  We have cherished hopes and striven
towards ideals.  We have aspired to things that have not been
realized.  But we are now settled experienced men, family men.  We
are husbands and fathers.  Yes, my lords and gentlemen: husbands
and fathers.  And I venture to claim your unanimous consent when I
affirm that we have found something in these realities that was
missing in the ideals.  I thank you for that burst of applause:
which I well know is no mere tribute to my poor eloquence, but the
spontaneous and irresistible recognition of the great natural truth
that our friends the Socialists have left out of their fancy
pictures of a mass society in which regulation is to take the place
of emotion and economics of honest human passion."  Whew! that took
a long breath.  "They never will, gentlemen, I say they never will.
They will NOT [he smites the table and pauses, glaring round at his
imaginary hearers].  I see that we are of one mind, my lords and
gentlemen.  I need not labor the point."  Then labor it for the
next ten minutes.  That will do.  That will do.  [He sits down;
rings the telephone bell; and seizes the milk jug, which he empties
at a single draught].

Hilda appears at the main door.

HILDA.  Did you say you would receive a deputation from the Isle of
Cats this morning?  I have no note of it.

SIR ARTHUR.  Oh, confound it, I believe I did.  I totally forgot it.

HILDA.  Theyve come.

SIR ARTHUR.  Bother them!

HILDA.  By all means.  But how am I to get rid of them?  What am I
to say?

SIR ARTHUR [resignedly]  Oh, I suppose I must see them.  Why do I
do these foolish things?  Tell Burton to shew them in.

HILDA.  Burton is in his shirt sleeves doing something to the
refrigerator.  I'd better introduce them.

SIR ARTHUR.  Oh, bundle them in anyhow.  And tell them I am
frightfully busy.

She goes out, closing the door softly behind her.  He pushes away
the breakfast tray and covers it with The Times, which he opens out
to its fullest extent for that purpose.  Then he collects his
papers into the vacant space, and takes up a big blue one, in the
study of which he immerses himself profoundly.

HILDA [flinging the door open]  The worshipful the Mayor of the
Isle of Cats.

The Mayor, thick and elderly, enters, a little shyly, followed by
(a) an unladylike but brilliant and very confident young woman in
smart factory-made clothes after the latest Parisian models,
(b) a powerfully built loud voiced young man fresh from Oxford
University, defying convention in corduroys, pullover, and unshaven
black beard, (c) a thin, undersiz