Front matter
Class L j n (o 3S.
Book- *J (a
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Preface To The First English Edition
THESE hot discursive thoughts were thrown upon paper during the ten months that followed the British retreat to the outskirts of Amiens. They take their general complexion from the events of that tremendous time, and reflect its fluctuating hopes and fears, its anxieties and agitations and suspenses, from the dark hours of April to the magic reversal of our fortunes in July, onwards to the present hour when, having defeated the Germans, we seem to be preparing to defeat ourselves.
No book has ever grown more strangely. Starting to write a letter to the papers upon the edict that prevents children from appearing on our stage, I found it would be too long for their restricted space. On considering the matter, I saw it was involved with our whole system of Popular Education. I therefore addressed myself to the Minister of Education, and the first two chapters of the book were in his hands before he passed the recent Education Act.
Meantime it had daily become more and more evident that the question of iN^ational Education was of small moment in comparison with the question of National Existence. As the vast panorama displayed its succession of bewildering scenes, it caught me into its whirl. I was taken by that irresistible impulse which, when great events are happening, moves us to run out of vi Preface to the First English Edition
doors and talk them over with our neighbours. I let my thoughts carry my pen wheresoever they would, llonco the want of unity, and perhaps of consisWcy, which may bo found in these pages.
But I aimed not at unity or consistency, but only at a searching inquiry into the meaning of these stupendous happenings, and a faithful interpretation of them. Such unity and consistency as come from the single desire to speak the exact truth about all the matters I have touched — this unity and this consistency, I am sure I have attained.
I have given considerable space and attention to the affairs of the drama. But in presence of the illimitable tragedy that has been acted on the world's stage during the last few years, the English theatre has shrunk to the size and office of a silly toy; nor at present has it any other meaning, or pretensions, or ambitions. I was therefore glad to escape for a while to a platform whence a man may hail liis fellow men with some hope of obtaining an intelligent hearing for intelligible speech. There can be no revival of English drama except as part of a national revival and a general awakening to our national duties and responsibilities. Of what use is it to nurse a sickly orchid in a hot-house, while all the field and garden of our national life is choked with weeds and rank confused growths ? Conversely, of what use is it to hope for a national awakening to the realities and responsibilities of life, while the bulk of our population feed all their leisure with the grossest unrealities and trivialities ? A nation may be sound and vigorous without developing any great school of national drama. But a foolish, degraded form of national drama is a symptom of moral and intellectual debasement.
Those who regard the great commandments as
'^Preface to the First English Edition vii
obsolete conventions will call the book reactionary. Its general tendency is against the present swing of popular thought. Therefore I cannot hope for any wide acceptance of its doctrines. Let them stand or fall as the future shall determine. I hold no brief for my opinions, except as facts shall confirm them.
However brokenly or mistakenly I have written, no Englishman has ever addressed his countrymen under the weight and shadow of greater events, or upon matters of more supreme importance. Involved as we are in still gathering national perplexities and obscurities,
I may be excused for lighting up my little lantern, if haply we can discern where we are and whither we may be wandering.
HENKY ARTHUR JONES.
II February 1919.
Preface To The Second English Edition
IT will be remembered, that when the word of the Lord came to Jonah, to cry against the Ninevites, the prophet at first declined the mission, and escaped to sea. Jonah was doubtless well aware that prophets who proclaim unpleasant truths to a nation run some danger of being stoned. However, three days' solitary confinement in the belly of a whale served to convince him that Heavenly warnings must be delivered, even at some personal risk.
When at leng-th he addressed himself to his task, he seems to have fulminated against the Ninevites with undue vehemence and fervour. In definitely announcing the overthrow of their city in forty days, he clearly went beyond his instructions. Still, he succeeded in thoroughly alarming the Ninevites, and thus saved them from destruction.
The question arises, whether, if Jonah had not spread a panic of conviction that their ruin was imminent, overwhelming, irrevocable — the question arises, whether anything short of this conviction would have roused the Ninevites to take the urgent and stringent measures which alone averted the impending calamity.
Jonah was certainly in a dilemma. If he had not magnified the danger to the Ninevites, undoubtedly it would have fallen upon them, and they would have perished. By magnifying the danger, and persuading
X Preface to the Second English Edition
them of its reality, lie stirred them to repentance, and saved the city. But at the cost of proving himself a false prophet.
The issue, although it was most satisfactory to the ^N'inevites, was a vexatious anti-climax for Jonah. He was naturally angry at being left in the lurch, and went and sulked under a gourd. He would have done better to put a bright face on the matter, and heartily to congratulate the Ninevites on their lucky and undeserved escape. To save his credit as a prophet, he might also have impressed upon them a strong reminder, that they were only spared by the intervention of a Special Providence. He might further have added, that it is not prudent for nations who are threatened with wide social disaster to trust that Providence will reverse the economy of the universe in their favour.
The Ninevites are now past being preached at, and equally past being prophesied about. Let us turn to ourselves. Six months have gone by since the Erst edition of this book appeared. The intervening course of events does not advise me to retract, or revise, what I wrote during the stress and uncertainties of last year. Bather, as the wheel comes to its full circle, I am urged to a more insistent affirmation and repetition of what is set down in these pages. No review of the book that I have seen has made any attempt to controvert the facts and arguments I have brought forward, or to disprove the conclusions I have drawn from them. They remain unsilenced, unrefuted. Till they are discredited and overthrown, they issue a standing challenge to our present system of Popular Education, to the confusions and fallacies of political thought that it fosters, and to the social disorder that it encourages. Let my arguments and conclusions be examined. If they are unsound and
Preface to the Second English Edition xi
false, I am the first to wish that thej may fall to the ground.
Eighty-five per cent, of our population have to earn their living by manual labour before the social machine will work. We are educating about eighty-five per cent, of them in such a way that they will hate and avoid manual labour. Inevitably, that million of houses does not get built. Inevitably, it is the workers who will suffer first, and suffer most, and suffer longest. For two generations we have been busily teaching our masses what they are only very remotely concerned to hnow, and have neglected to teach them, nay, have forbidden them to learn, what they are imperatively concerned to do and make. We have made manual labour ridiculous and repulsive to them. There is not a home or a farm, or a shop, or an office, or a factory in the Kingdom that does not suffer delay and obstruction in consequence.
However, I need not strain my voice to enforce what is day by day more loudly proclaimed by the clamour of events. The catch words and catch phrases of the war — "making the world safe for democracy," "self-determination," "a brotherhood of nations," and the like — are proving themselves to be no sterling coins of thought, valid at the counter of fact, but the worthless forgeries of bankrupt idealists, not negotiable anywhere. Even before it is constituted, the League of l^ations begins to jeer at its promoters. What else could they expect ? The first ominous result of the attempt to govern the world by a League of Nations, has been to weaken that good understanding between England and America which is the only assurance of the world's peace. Is not this a sufficient warning of the mischiefbreeding tendency of a League of Nations ? Surely the xii Preface to the Second English Edition
statesmen of the world have contentious matters enough on their hands without multiplying complications and possible causes of quarrel in a future whose contingencies and demands not one of them can foresee or guess at.
America has rejected the League of Nations, rightly judging that no country should pledge itself to deal with successive threatening international situations by involved, amiable, abstract rulers; rightly judging that no threatening international situation can be wisely dealt with until it has actually arisen; and until it is so far developed and defined that each country may take that course which its honour and its permanent interests mark out for it at that precise moment.
America has rejected the League of Nations. Will not the statesmen of England and France and Italy accept that verdict ? Will they not forsake this perilous whimsy, own that they have made a mistake and, ceasing to fumble about with international misunderstandings that may threaten the world in fifty years' time, turn to the urgent necessities that beset their own countries at the present hour ?
Above all our confusions, clear cut against the sky, plain for all of us to read, stand the two opposing signposts, the one directing all our national aims and hopes and activities towards Internationalism, the other directing all our national aims and hopes and activities towards Patriotism. The time shortens. O England, which road will you take ?
HEKRY ARTHUR JONES. 20 November 1919.
Table Of Contents
PAQE
Preface to the First Edition {February 1919) ... v
Preface to the Second Edition {November 1919) ... ix Opening Address to the Minister op Education
CHAPTER I {March— April 1918) Popular Edttcation as it reveals itself in our Work
My old Carpenter 1
"Artistic, si.xpence three farthings" 2
A well-educated working man 3
Dame Nature a harsher "exploiter" than the Capitalist . 5
Working men cheat their brother working men .... 6 Not a question of Capital and Labour, but of honesty or
dishonesty 7
A call for the Parsons 9
Proposal to ship some of them to Kikuyu 9
Robinson Crusoe and Friday's neglected education ... 11 Friday's deplorable ignorance of matters that did not concern him 11
Consequent economic stability of the Island 13
Friday's capacity for abstract thought 13
General education often the enemy of good craftsmanship 17 Monstrous and ridiculous proposal to drill our boys for the
future defence of their country 18
Equally monstrous and ridiculous proposal to teach our girls
what will be useful to them as wives and mothers . . 23 Enlargement of dictum of the Minister of Education concerning general education 24
CHAPTER II {April—May 1918)
Popular Education as it reveals itself in our plat; The Secondary Education of our masses at picture palaces
and popular theatres 26
Its effect upon conduct and character 27
xiii xiv Table of Contents
PAoa
Gradual disappearance of Shakespeare from our stage . . 29 Dull imbecility and licentiousness of our popular entertainments 33
The wisdom of good tomfoolery 33
Hideous exhibition of chorus girls 36
Popular Education and the quality of our stage dialogue . 36
"I suppose you mean to infer that I'm hot stuff" ... 38
Slang and its functions 40
German arxd French criticism of the English stage ... 43
The orgy at the beginning of the war 44
The bishops get fidgety 45
Rosy Twaddle, Holy Twaddle, and Revue 47
Advice to bishops and clergymen about to advertise plays . 47
Actors, actresses, scullery maids, and dung-cart emptiers . 60
Children on our stage 63
Discouragement of Shakespeare by new Education Act . 53
Virtual prohibition of five of his most popular plays . . 53
Our greatest actresses educated on and by the Stage . . 53
Early training necessary to make good actors and carpenters 56
French middle classes sound and acute critics of plays . . 58
Children with a native talent for the stage 60
Child supernumeraries 63
Many of them better in the theatre than at home ... 63 Evils and abuses of the stage caused and multiplied by
zealous, ignorant bigots 64
Invitation to them to abstain from pecking and kicking at
the theatre 64
Connexion between Popular Education and present degradation of our stage 66
Elizabethan audiences 67
Their ability to understand and enjoy Shakespeare ... 68
Shakespeare's true home the English theatre .... 70 Appeal to Minister of Education to aid in getting him back
there 71
CHAPTER III {May— June 1918) Popular Education and Politics before the War
Political Dogma and Religious Dogma 73
Impossibility of drawing up indisputable codes for children 74
General education a very devious compass 74
National Defence of transcendent importance from 1890 . 75 Popular Education opposed to teaching future citizens their
chief duty 76
Table of Contents xv
PAOB
Consequent immeasurable cost to the nation .... 77
Lack of vision and guidance 78
The xinreturning wheel of fate 79
Germans teach us what Popular Education failed to teach us 81
BUndness of our poUticians traced to Popular Education . 85
The housemaid's excuse — "It shan't happen again" , . 87
Where lay the fault? 88
Intellectual dishonesty the worst of mental ailments . . 90
Endemic at Westminster 90
Boy Scouts' movement more beneficial than school teaching 91
IntractabiUty of "yoimg persons" 92
Cicero and EucUd the safest companions for them ... 92
Economic benefit of continuation classes 93
Rosy estimate of its amount 94
Not one hundredth of the national loss caused by neglect of
Popular Education to teach our boys their first duty . 95
CHAPTER IV {July — August 1918' A Leagxtb op Nations
Legislating for the Millennium 97
The prophet Micah beats swords into ploughshares ... 98 The prophet Joel counters the prophet Micah, and beats
ploughshares into swords 98
War and Design in Nature 98
An automatic peace-machine 100
The philanthropist in Laputa and his safety dustbin . . 101
Man wiU never divine the strategy of Nature .... 103
Possible material profit from war 105
Greater certainty of spiritual profit 105
Diflficultiea of constitution of League 107
The master fact for osr statesmen to remember .... 107
Germany's future attitude towards Britain 108
Do we not know this nation? 110
The League of Nations a fruitful field for German intrigue 113
The servant girl and the fair young man 115
League of Nations a futility or a danger 116
Improbability of all the Nations being wise for all the time 118 Dark anarchic forces gathering on the horizon . . . .118
Governing the world by a committee 119
The war after the war 120
Victories of peace compared with victories of war . . . 120
English and American commercial practices 122
A League of Nations, sooner or later, causes war . . . 126
Approaching ground swell after this tempest 128 xvi Table of Contents
PAGE
Balancing alternations of peace and war through all history 129 This law would be operative under class government . . 129
A soldier always the final custodian of peace By recognizing this we avoid or shorten war Immediate and remote dangers of a League of Nations
Hecate and false security
War and the dark backward and abysm of Time War and the dark forward and abysm of Time . Canute and the framers of a League of Nations .
American delay in entering the war
American mothers and the war tnampets of Eiirope . America's unique and fortunate position Speculation on the future of American civilization and policy 139 The Eternal will not consider our suggestions for a new
world-civilization 141
Our future civilization — the artist will be murdered by the
mechanic 142
Four possible states of world civilization 143
The earth littered with combustible matter 145
The two signposts 148
CHAPTER V (September — October — November 1918) Patriotism and Internationalism
Apology to Minister of Education for continuing to address
him 150
The neglected Hampstead missionary 151
Aims of Internationalism before the war 154
No danger of War 155
The good Scheidemann would prevent it 156
The great illusionist 157
The meddling old warrior 157
Our sagacious Internuncio 159
Crash! The war comes 159
What shall we do with our opinions now? 160
Socialists' forecasts falsified 163
They forsake their comrades and their whimsies to defend
their country 163
Patriotism, a compulsive universal instinct 165
Compared with the sexual, maternal and religious instincts 165 Patriotism of constructive value in the evolution of the
human race 167
Competition and co-operation 167
Faults of Patriotism the inverse side of its virtues . . , 168
Persistence of Irish Patriotism 170
Table of Contents xvii
FAQB
Consequences of Separation from Great Britain .... 169
Every form of Home Rule unworkable 170
Federal Parliaments the only solution 171
Goethe says the final word on Ireland in 1829 .... 171
Kathleen, sister Kathleen! 172
Incipient Patriotism at East and West Gawkham . . . 175
Engrafted Patriotism 176
"Reconstruction," a misleading term 178
Nations cannot be "reconstructed" 178
Internationalists ignore this 179
The Parable of the old township and Mr. Fervent Im-
possibihst 180
The general aim and design of Internationalists and Socialists 188
Internationalism will not lead to Peace ...... 189
Who are the real enemies of the working classes of each
nation? 194
Internationalism strikes athwart all social structure . . . 194
Internationalists and Bolshevism 196
Mr. H. G. Wells gets a grip on Bolshevism and interprets it
to us 197
Mr. Wells gets a grip on the situation in Russia ... .197
Mr. Wells gets a grip on the situation in Africa .... 199
Mr. Wells, Uke Sangrado, has a panacea 199
Mr. Wells allows the British flag to wave, and sometimes
to flap 201
Examination of Mr. Wells's African constitution . . . 202
Mr. Wells threatens the Solomon Islands 204
Mr. Wells prophesies delightfully about machines . . . 205
Goes on to prophesy about mankind 205
Defence of Mr. Wells's reputation against Mr. Archibald
Spofforth 205
Mr. Wells and Old Moore 206
Gorgeous symbohsm in prophecy 206
Scarlet Ladies of Babylon and seven-headed beasts . . . 206
The sacred jig-saw puzzle 207
Common defects and fallacies of International schemes . 208
Alternations of commercial conflict and actual war . . . 209
Commercial conflict perhaps the more deadly .... 209
Our interest in sustaining the British Empire .... 210
Our Foreign Office "bunglers and bluffers" 210
Where are the perfectly wise statesmen to work these perfectly wise International schemes? 212
Tendency of Labour to displace its constructive leaders . 213
Who are the men that finally come to the top? .... 213 Appeal to Labour not to wreck and destroy the Empire that
it has saved and fortified 214 xviii Table of Contents
pAoa
New nations will be increasingly patriotic 220
WUl press their own separate aims, interests, and ambitions . 220
Watered down Internationalism 222
Dulce et decorum est contra patriam mori 223
Sympathy with constructive Socialism 224
Greater proportion of physically unfit in England than in
Germany or France 224
Our social incubator for hatching and cherishing wastrels . 225
Digression to Miss Marie CorelU and Cicero .... 226
Return to argument on Patriotism 228
Again, the two signposts 229
Clear thinlvers who think wrongly 230
Internationalism always destructive, Patriotism always constructive 233
Proposal for amalgamation of our planetary system with
that of Sirius 234
The Interstellarists 235
Instinct of Patriotism universal 237
Our Pacifists superabundantly endowed with it ... . 237 Pacifism and Internationalism perversions of the instinct of
Patriotism 238
Patriotism and fire insurance 239
Renewed fruitless appeal to Minister of Education . . . 240 Elementary drilling of our boys the safest and cheapest way
to reauce our armaments 241
Also the best physical and moral training for the boys themselves 242
A glance at our National Debt and at the little cherub who
sits up aloft 244
CHAPTER VI {November — December 1918 — January 1919) Renewed Examination of Poptilab Education and its
Effects: Daring suggestion to educate our carpenters to make tables
and chairs 247
Non-readers and non-regarders 248
The Hebrew Scriptures 249
Useful maxims from them for national guidance .... 249
These ancient rules of conduct! 251
Appeal to great permanent rules and principles .... 251 Have we got hold of sure rules and principles in Popular
Education? 252
Look at the facts! 262
Double your Education rates! Treble them! Ignorance is
the foe 253
Table of Contents xix
PAOB
The two most costly and mischievous kinds of ignorance . 253 Proposal to levy supplementary Education rate for study of
the great commandments 254
A matter for the parsons 255
England without a living credible reUgion 255
Manual labourers in angry revolt against their daily work . 256
Professor Wallace on mistaken education of manual labourers 258
These workers of England ! 260
Forbidden to learn the things they will be mainly concerned
to do 260
The yoimg blacksmith who was educated to play the flute . 261
Educational experts and Jane Austen's vicar .... 263
How Nature establishes a soimd and vigorous race . . . 264
Our care of child life 265
We shall have to call in the biologist 265
Breeding the unfit 266
More important to get ourselves rightly bom than rightly
educated 267
Appeal to the biologist for guidance towards wise legislation 267
Better to fit manual labour to its job than to force it to its job 267 Popular Education responsible for widely spread vulgarity
and shoddiness 268
Our popular songs 270
The ornament of our common life 271
Our whole system of Popular education needs to be built
on a new basis 272
Questions we now ask ourselves in educating our masses . 272
Questions we should ask ourselves 273
Broad division line between manual labour and brain labour 273 Necessary to estimate amount of each and educate our
masses in proportion 275
Coal and iron district peopled exclusively by artists, scholars,
and thinkers 278
The gas workers of Odessa 280
School-teachers and rag-pickers 281
Their rates of pay compared 281
An unsound social structure 283
Universal superficial mis-education the cause of universal
revolt 285
Nature has already sorted out our scholars for us , . , 288
Let us educate them accordingly 288
A milHon houses needed for working classes 290
Why not educate our children towards building them? . . 290
How to avoid a social and economic deluge 293
Rate of wages of secondary importance 294
Social instability again traced to absence of living credible
religion and active working faith 295
XX Table of Contents
Motto for a new Education Act 206
Nature about to bring in a stringent Uneducation Act of
her own 397
CHAPTER VII (January 1910) Summing up on Popular Education in our Theatebs
A matter of national concern 298
A niis-cducatcd public 300
Our masses badly trained, alike for useful productive work
and for wise amusement 301
Vulgarization of our national life by indiscriminate superficial Education 302
A correct " attitude of mind " towards " the facts of life " . 302
A correct attitude of body even more desirable .... 303
"Attitude of mind" of our popular audiences .... 304 Pressing invitation to Minister of Education to become a
playgoer 304
" Who has been mis-educating these dear good folk? " . . 305
SuMMiNQ UP on tub League of Nations:
Millennium again postponed 305
Aunt Julia 30G
Grand allegorical design to commemorate the founding of
the l^eague 307
The arch on which rests the peace of the world .... 307
T^B Last Appeal:
All these questions are one question 309
The innumerable cloud of witnesses oil
Our two mightiest voices speak to us 311
Choose, Englondl 313
INTRODUCTORY LETTER
To the Right Hon. Herbert A. L. Fishee, President of the Board of Education,
Dear Mr. Fisher,
Kow that your Education Bill has taken its main outlines and permanent general form, and is safe from any serious injury or wide amendment, may I, without impertinence, set down some insurgent thoughts upon the subject, which for a long time past have been collecting themselves in my mind, and which the remorseless events and emergencies of these last few years drive to seek utterance ? I can scarcely hope tliat they will be of any present service to the cause of Education, for they run away in many different directions from the main stream of national opinion. This, in itself, offers some presumption that they are more or less ill adapted to prevailing conditions. And it is rather with a forlorn and fugitive desire to help you in moulding your next Education Bill, than with the view of inducing you to change some features of the present one, that I beg leave to lay these thoughts before you. They have the merit, or defect, of being written by one who is wholly removed from party politics, and is therefore free to be concerned only for what he conceives to be the welfare of the State.
May I be allowed then to wander round this most thorny and difficult subject of Popular Education, in searching but discursive, variable, and often perhaps
zxi xxii Introductory Letter
illogical and contradictory thought, and to take you with me so far as you have patience and inclination to go? It is necessary that our thoughts upon any subject should at first be variable, tentative, and contradictory, before they can clarify and settle into steadfast and assured conviction.
It is with no wish to hamper or obstruct you in your arduous and immensely complicated task, that I bring before you these unwelcome facts and inconvenient comments and suggestions. But perhaps they may serve to put before you certain aspects of the question which have hitherto lain somewhat outside the views and aims of experts in Education, but which seem to call for serious consideration. In any case I offer you as my justification for addressing this letter to you personally, the comforting reminder that you are not obliged to read it. And this easy way of escape from my importunities lies equally open to all who may wish to ignore them.
When your Education Bill was in its earliest stages in the House of Commons, I was lunching with a lady who, in the dearth of servants, had taken as domestic helps the wife and children of a gardener, absent at the war. A little before hmch, the elder girl of fourteen came in from school, much worried with a paper of questions that had been set her. "Tell me what you know about Cicero," was one of the demands upon her; and the other questions were of a lofty and more or less abstract kind, all equally remote from the daily duties which the girl would have to perform for the whole of her life. The child was about the average of her class in physique and intelligence, certainly not in any marked degree below the average. She was genuinely anxious to scrape up as much acquaintance with Cicero
Introductory Letter xxiii
as would tide her over any difficulties at school. To this end she sought assistance from her mother, who was cooking the lunch. How far this sudden call upon her classical acquirements deranged the good gardener's wife, I cannot say, but we certainly had a very tough and leathery omelette. A short conversation that I had with the girl after lunch, was enough to show very clearly that whatever precarious items of information about Cicero she could temporarily pack into her mind, would probably wander out of it into vacuity within a fortnight.
Further, granting that she could retain them, she could not, I am persuaded, put them into relation with her general conception of Roman history and literature, or with her stock of other knowledge, or with whatever coherent theory she may form of human life. That is to say, whatever scattered facts she may have been able to glean about Cicero, will not be of the least use to her, or to any living being, in the tremendous struggle which we shall be called upon to endure in the coming generation. They will not, I am convinced, lead her to a further knowledge of Cicero, so that she may be able to guide her friendships by Cicero's essay on Friendship, or to solace her declining years by his essay on Old Age. I question if at any time during her life she will be able to comprehend three pages of the translations of either of these essays. If any facts about Cicero remain in her memory, which is highly improbable, they will remain as dead facts, and hindrances to whatever useful mental activities she may possess. Meantime, the omelette was spoilt.
Sir, this poor flustered child is the type of hundreds of thousands of her class whom we are educating, not in knowledge that will be useful to them, and helpful xxiv Introductory Letter
to us all J not iu things that are congenial to their natural ability; not in the very fine arts that malce for domestic welfare nud happiness, hut in smatterings of recondite matters that can have no bearings on tlieir actual life, and that, so far as they are remembered at all, tend only to a state of mental bewilderment.
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