We must never forget that human aspirations, human ideals, are as much a part of the phenomena which makes up this causally-connected Universe as the instincts and appetites that are common to man and the other animals.—David G. Ritchie.

The dawning century will have to undertake a new education of mankind if we are not to relapse.... New inventions are less needed than new ethics.—Dr. Max Nordau.

Herbert Spencer tells us that: “Free institutions can only be properly worked by men, each of whom is jealous of his own rights and sympathetically jealous of the rights of others—who will neither himself aggress on his neighbour in small things or great, nor tolerate aggression on them by others.”

The state of mind or sentiment to which Mr. Spencer here points is complex. It comprises an egoism that is not anti-social, and an altruism that is broadly social. The genesis of this sentiment is intellectual, implying a recognition in some sort of the laws of nature, by virtue of which individual rights do not conflict with nature’s harmonies or its fundamental organic unity. It is possible, therefore, only to a race comparatively advanced, i.e. intellectually endowed; but the children and children’s children of that race may possess the sentiment of individual rights as an instinct with no apprehension whatever of its source or its justification. Its alliance with, and perfect conformity to, natural law are certainly not understood, and confusion is increased in the public mind by the unscientific teaching of the daily press. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from a middle-class journal. “Law is command, control. Nature is instinctive force, and can neither give nor receive laws. There are no laws of nature, and there are no rights of man. We are using meaningless phrases when we speak of either. Man has no natural rights any more than the wolf and the bear. All rights are conventional.”

Now, before man had made a direct study of nature, and, marking the invariability of sequence in the precision of its phenomena, had attached to that invariability the term “laws of nature,” the word “law” denoted a lawgiver issuing arbitrary commands. It is in this primitive sense that our journalist uses the word “law.” He entirely ignores its appropriation by science and the modern acceptation of the term “laws of nature.” Nature has no arbitrary commands, he says, and therefore infers no laws. We admit the premise while denying the inference. The laws of health are invariable, although they do not necessarily dominate, since other and opposing laws of disorganization may at any moment get the upper hand. Man is competent to disregard the laws of life; but if he so acts, another course of natural order is initiated, and he becomes subject to pathological laws which conduct him steadily to the grave. Necessity without arbitrary command rules in the cosmos; and if happiness, which all humanity desires, is attained, it will be by conforming to all the laws of nature that favour that end. Within, there are the laws of human organization, without, the laws of circumstance or environment. The humanity that has intellect and scientific knowledge may, by union and co-operation, take a firm advantage of these laws or uniformities of nature and march steadily forward, controlling the forces of nature by a willing obedience to natural law.

No sooner, observe, does this control become possible than natural rights come into existence. Man rises in the scale of being to a sphere of self-direction and comparative liberty. The wolf and bear and all wild animals are on the lower level, and have no natural rights. They are controlled by forces external to themselves, and the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the law of destiny to them. It is not so, however, with the horse, dog, cat, etc., for man has lifted all domesticated animals from under the rule of genetic forces, and placed them under the rule of reasoned forces. He controls their breeding, limits their numbers, and gives them a happy life consistent with his own. Further, he claims for them and concedes to them natural rights; and note this point, the last phrase of our journalist’s misleading paragraph is strictly true: “All rights are conventional.” Convention means by tacit agreement, and it is by tacit agreement on the part of civilized men that rights of men and rights of animals exist and are respected. An impulse of the higher life, viz., a law of sympathy, impels civilized man to seek happiness for other beings as well as himself, and intelligence shows him that individual happiness promotes general happiness, and further that no individual happiness is possible without a certain amount of personal liberty.

Individual rights, then, are a claim for a certain amount of personal liberty, and the sentiment of individual rights is an unconscious inward preparedness to defend that claim. It lies at the very foundation of modern ethics, since from it there springs the outward equipoise of egoistic and altruistic forces, the inward, subtle, delicate sense of equitable relations, in other words, justice—the moral backbone of the modern conscience.

Let us see how we treat, in our nurseries, this foundation of ethics, this sentiment of individual rights. We enter a middle-class nursery where a baby and his sister Jessie, a child of three years of age, are side by side on the floor. An impulse seizes baby to clutch the doll, which Jessie holds firmly. Baby screams and nurse turns round and lifts him in her arms. “See, Jessie,” she says, “he wants your doll, surely you will be kind to baby brother?” She takes the doll from Jessie and gives it to the infant. Jessie throws herself on the ground and kicks and screams. A paroxysm of emotion sweeps over her, and until the wave has spent itself tranquillity in nerve or muscle is simply impossible. But the nurse, ignorant of the fact that the child is for the moment bereft of any power of self-control, commands her to be still, and when not obeyed, she scolds her severely. Finally she puts her in a corner, and there poor Jessie sobs and weeps till pure exhaustion brings her to passivity and an abject state of mind which nurse calls “being good again.” She signifies her approval of it by a kiss of forgiveness as unmerited as the previous anger.

Now here we have an emotion supremely important to the welfare of humanity rudely desecrated in infancy. There was nothing base, sordid, exclusive or even selfish in the tempest of feeling that swept away the placidity of Jessie’s little soul. Mingled together there was an impulse to defend her personal rights and a hot indignation that any infringement of these rights should occur. And the whole was a wave of the complex forces destined to weld society into an organic whole, capable of maintaining free institutions. When the nurse through ignorance punished the child for the involuntary expression of a virtuous social-emotion, she was opposing the very order of nature that genetic evolution is striving to attain; she was checking the progress of modern civilization.

Later in the day Jessie with her doll restored to her arms is happy again. Baby plays with his rattle on nurse’s knee; but Jessie thinks, “My dolly is a baby too and wants a rattle.” She takes the rattle out of baby’s hands to give to dolly. Baby shouts and kicks, and nurse is furious. She slaps Jessie and calls her a “naughty child.” There is no ebullition of anger this time, although the tender little fingers ache from the rude blow. Jessie shrinks aside with a subdued air. Had her former rebellion been an impulse of pure vindictiveness it would have repeated itself now. It had no such feature. It revealed the fact that Jessie was the offspring of a self-dependent, self-protective race preparing for a new stage of social evolution, and her aspect at the present crisis reveals the same. She did not know she was in the wrong; but vaguely she felt it. She had trespassed on baby’s rights, and conscience dumbly stirred in her infant bosom. If intelligence is strong the child questions silently, “Why may baby take my doll when I may not take his rattle?” The nurse will give no answer. Her province is to feed and cleanse and clothe her charges, and, if need be, punish action. But the motive springs of action lie quite beyond her range, and what is the consequence? If Jessie’s intellect predominates over her emotional quality, her conscience may develop, although under adverse conditions; but if the balance tends the other way the position is fatal. The child gathers her ideas of right and wrong from the frowns and smiles, the slaps or kisses of an ignorant woman who is ruling the nursery with an authority purely barbaric, and the budding conscience of a modern civilization adapts itself to the archaic environment and reverts or lapses backward.

Further, observe, the nurse strove to create—in this case, at least—sympathy towards a baby brother. Was this wise? It was not wise, although well-intentioned. Sympathy never develops under command, and to order a child to be kind at the moment when an aggression has been made on his or her rights is like commanding a steam-engine to move forward without turning on the steam! Moreover, baby, young as he was, suffered mentally and morally by the event. He learned an evil lesson, viz., that if he cried he would probably get what he wanted. Vigorously, though unconsciously, he will pursue that vicious course and act up to the principle.

Does my reader inquire “What should the nurse have done?” She should have instantly removed the baby, saying gently to Jessie, “Children must never take things from one another. Not even a baby can be permitted to do that, and we must teach him better. But see he is so young, he does not know the doll is yours, not his. Would you like to lend it to him for a little? No? Ah, well he cannot have it then, but come and help me to amuse him that he may forget the doll.” The older child puts down her treasure to fondle her baby brother, and there are ten chances to one that by-and-bye her sympathy—called out naturally and not by command—carries her a step further, and she says: “Nurse, baby may hold my doll for a little now.” Later, when the brilliant idea occurs that dolly would enjoy the rattle, Jessie understands—she does not blindly, vaguely feel, she knows—that she must not trespass on baby’s rights. She restrains her impulse therefore to snatch the rattle, and in this self-control she is exercising the noblest faculty of her nature under the dominion of a moral conscience—a sense of justice or equivalence of rights.

And now we pass from an upper middle-class nursery to any British boys’ school or playground. We find that quarrels there arise not so much from the simple barbarous impulses of cruelty, hatred, revenge, fear, as from a different source—an effective sense of personal rights unbalanced by an equally effective sense of sympathy with the rights of others. The phenomenon here is justice in embryo, self-conscious, but lacking development on the altruistic side. “It isn’t” or “it wasn’t fair” is a phrase frequently upon a schoolboy’s lips, and it is remarkable with what courage and dignity an urchin of ten or twelve will criticize a master’s treatment of him, and perhaps tell the man of fifty to his face that this or that “wasn’t fair.”

Were every boy as eager that all human beings—schoolmasters included—should be as fairly treated as he himself, the only further regulation of conduct necessary would be a clear intelligence to discern truth from falsehood in every case of misdemeanour. Instructed intelligence is however a minus quantity, and the sympathetic jealousy for the rights of others that exists here and there amongst boys in minor quantity, gets deflected from its true course. It links boys of one age together in a mutual fellowship that excludes masters and all others. Nor is this difficult to understand. Mutual interests is the soil in which sympathy grows; but with arbitrary authority in the field, also conflicting desires, and no distinct teaching on the subject, the deeper relations of life, I mean the mutual interests of teacher and taught and of the whole school as a social unity, are often ignored. To shield a companion from punishment, at all hazards, becomes virtue in a schoolboy’s eyes, and antagonisms spring up with confused notions of right and wrong, and a general impulse to falsehood and deceit in special directions. These are menacing features of character for the social life of the future. Men of introspection have recognized in themselves the baneful after-effects of the clannishness engendered at school. Robert Louis Stevenson bewailed the extreme difficulty he had in forcing himself to perform a distinct public duty. It involved some exposure dishonourable to a former schoolmate! “I felt,” he said, “like a cad!”

From middle-class nurseries where authority is chiefly barbaric and the budding conscience is hurt, children destined to become the élite of a future society and its rulers, pass into schools where there is no clear and definite training for the emotional nature, no scientific development of the social, and repression of the anti-social impulses. From school the student passes to college or university, and is emancipated more or less from outward control. When he enters upon the duties and pleasures of adult life he presents, in many ways, an element of social danger, for this simple reason, his native bumptiousness, his sense of individual rights is not held in check by an intelligent understanding of, and feeling of sympathy with, the equal rights of others. The groundwork of the modern conscience has been tampered with while authority—propelled by genetic forces of evolution—has gradually relaxed and fallen back before the free-born British schoolboy. By our present system of education we destroy infant virtue in the nursery and in the school. We dwarf that sympathy which should grow and expand till it bursts forth in manhood into deeds of rectitude, justice, love, manifesting the threefold quality of human nature which alone is competent to lift the whole area of man’s existence into line with cosmic order. Our schools are yearly pouring into the busy world a rich harvest of human aptitudes that are quickly absorbed in activities mercantile, professional, legislative, but the outcome of these activities is not tuning life into social harmony, it is merely increasing national wealth, and that without any marked increase of plenty and pleasure to the nation at large. The picture presented is one of perpetual warfare—an outward struggle in money-making for oneself and family, an inward contentious spirit that reveals itself abroad in our blatant imperialism, at home in class antagonisms—the whole re-acting fatally on individual character and lowering the general standard of civilized life. Generous enthusiasms die down, the emotional nature hardens, till intelligence itself is dimmed and becomes incapable of any wide outlook that entails unselfish effort.

As a rule—though with honourable exceptions—our compatriots advanced in life do not fulfil the promise of their youth; and with forces of nature amenable to man’s will, if wisely directed, real progress in this scientific age is wofully sluggish. We focus attention on environments that press on adults only, and in seeking reform overlook the environments that vitally effect our infant population, therefore the adult life of the future.

How different is our action in other directions. In horticultural nurseries, for instance, progress is not sluggish. Scientific discovery and methods of practice are applied and promptly produce definite results. The composite plants are distinguished from simple plants, and while all are secured in necessary conditions of healthy life—good soil, air, light, etc.—those receive from the gardener a special fostering care. He studies the laws of differentiation, the peculiarities of each organism with its hidden possibilities of varied efflorescence, and by fitting environment to wider issues, watching them day by day, nourishing every tendency favourable, checking every tendency unfavourable, he induces an outburst of blossom as varied in colour and form as it is marvellous in beauty or grace, and that in spite of the fact that unaided by natural forces he is utterly powerless to make a blade of grass grow.

That human plants give promise of blossoming into a moral beauty as yet undreamed of by the British public is patent to any wise observer of the confused social life of to-day. Our greatest realists in fiction note the point. We have George Meredith putting into the mouth of his hero, Matthew Weyburn, these significant words: “Eminent station among men doesn’t give a larger outlook ... I have come now and then across people we call common, slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts and ready to learn and logical. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice upon which wisdom is founded ... that is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air there’s no peace and no steady advance. But these humble people had it. I felt them to be my superiors. On the other hand, I have not felt the same with our senators, rulers and lawgivers. They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.” (Lord Ormont and his Aminta.)

As regards physical health, I have shown the necessity for stirpiculture and the birth of the fit; as regards mental and moral health, i.e. Humanity’s efflorescence on higher planes—the need of the times is less eugenics than education and training. Germs of truth, justice, love, lie latent in the basic structure of our half-civilized race, and so long as we neglect or destroy these germs it were folly to desire material of finer quality. “Our raw material is of the very best,” said the headmistress of a London Board School, “our children are full of generous impulses and fearless spontaneity. I sometimes think the no-rule in the homes of the masses a better preparation for life than the factitious training given in homes of the classes. But our teachers are so few and so seldom scientifically enlightened that we spoil very much of the good material.” On behalf of the classes my reader might argue that susceptibility to beauty or the aesthetic sentiment with its creative expression in art belongs almost exclusively to the upper section of society, and is deemed by some social reformers the very foundation of moral life, the basis of the ethical temper.

It is not my purpose to provoke comparison between the classes and the masses, and I fully recognize the value of the fine arts as factors in the general elevation of life and character, but I submit that evolution does not pursue the same line of development in the various races of mankind, and in the British race an advanced ethical temper is in process of formation quite irrespective of the fine arts and the aesthetic sentiment.

Dr. Le Bon laid before the French Geographical Society an account of a primitive group of people, numbering several hundred thousand, who inhabit a remote region high up among the Carpathian mountains. Of this people, the Podhalians, he says, “they are born improvisatori, poets and musicians, singing their own songs, set to music of their own composition. Their poetry is tender and artless in sentiment, generous and elevated in style.” He attributes these qualities to the wealth of spontaneous resources possessed by natures which neither know violent passions nor unnatural excitements. The British race, moulded by different conditions—geographical and historical—has developed differently. Great masses of our population are wholly insensitive to the influences of art. The picture drawn by Wordsworth of his Peter Bell comes nearer to our native uncultured type—

Nevertheless, through another channel he was touched to the quick. Thrilled into sudden sweetness and pathos by the sight of a widow’s tears—

The hard life of our workers has undoubtedly deprived them, as yet, of any widespread aesthetic development, but the chords of their vital part, if played upon, produce a sentient state far removed from the rudimentary stage. It is a product of centuries of evolution.

This humanity will move forward to higher planes of existence, and a spiritual plenitude—of which aestheticism is by no means the crown and glory, but only an imperfect foretaste—by two convergent paths trodden concurrently. These are a steady growth in social qualities and the happiness that flows from these qualities, the creation, in short, of organic socialism; and the opening up outwardly of channels of sympathy and community of interests throughout the whole nation, causing the banishment of class distinctions, the establishment of an organized socialism. Perfection in art is not the appropriate ideal for this age, but perfection in social life, and it is not from a love of art to a love of mankind and the practices of moral rectitude that our masses will advance. It is by the practice of all the humanities on ever broader, deeper lines, until the nation, vibrating with harmonized life, frames new visions of art, and strengthens all the well-springs of art’s creation.

The aestheticism that belongs exclusively to one social class neither elevates general morals nor produces the noblest art. Its narrowing influences are exemplified in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son: “If you love music, go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a contemptible light; ... few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert with a fiddle under your chin.” Lord Chesterfield belonged to a past century, but the spirit of his thought is not dead; it manifests prominently to-day. In my own experience a lady novelist was invited to a London At Home, and accepted conditionally. If evening costume were necessary she must decline, but if less ceremonious dress were permissible she would gladly appear, and the hostess consenting, she did so. Now I heard a large group of middle-class ladies passionately condemning this action, on the ground that aestheticism had been outraged and the rules of society set at nought by a blot in rooms otherwise beautiful. Yet the novelist had been tastefully attired, that was freely admitted. She had sinned merely in nonconformity to fashion and in covering her neck and arms. Can we seriously believe that the type of humanity to which these ladies belong is developing the liberal mind which alone may create and support the highest morality, the noblest art? Are we not compelled to recognize the truth of Mr. J. H. Levy’s profound remark: “In the present stage of human progress the aesthetic and the moral are conterminate at neither end. Aesthetic emotion may be roused in us by that which is ethically odious, and moral feeling may be called up by that which is artistically ugly.” (The National Reformer.)

The true ethical temper is engendered by a complexity of social attractions issuing in an inward sense of justice and the delicate equipoise of natural rights between meum and tuum. The task before us is to unite the half-conscious, instinctive justice already existent with an intellectual apprehension and clear understanding of right and wrong, in other words, to complete the modern conscience; and in view of this task we must distinctly realize that the sentiment of what is proper and improper in conventional society has no ethical value, and is a false guide to conduct.

The facts which it is at once most important and most difficult to appreciate are what may be called the facts of feeling.—Lecky.

The area of man’s emotional life is one of vast magnitude. It lies behind the scenes of his outward existence, yet it interpenetrates the social structure throughout, and stretches beyond it to distances we know not whence or whither. Mysterious as this region is, no sooner does man aspire to control the social forces of collective life, as he already largely controls the natural forces of physical life, than he is compelled to apply his reason scientifically to the phenomena of human emotions, and to contemplate, trace out and master there the general features of the process of evolution.

In the case of personal development the task is comparatively easy. A child’s feelings are simple, not compound. For the most part they seem vague and indefinite, always fleeting and evanescent; but as the child grows his powers of feeling grow likewise and alter in character. Their childish simplicity passes away; they augment in mass, they become complex, more permanent and coherent in their nature, and far more delicate in susceptibility. Consequently the breadth of range, the depth and richness of emotion possible in an adult, as compared with the emotions of a child, are as the music of an organ to the sweet notes that lie within the compass of a penny whistle.

In racial development evolution of feeling has not pursued one invariable course. Distinctive sentiments and modes of feeling characterize the different races of mankind as well as distinctive outward features, and the impressing on a plastic race of these divergent states of feeling is mainly, though not entirely, due to external conditions—not climatic and geographical conditions only, but also the form of civilization that had taken root and moulded the habits and customs of the race. Greek civilization, for instance, tended to develop largely the aesthetic group of feelings, while in Scotland these feelings, through outward influences I must not pause to consider, have been stunted in growth, and moral sentiments have had a deeper and firmer development.

Amongst barbarous tribes of men the violent emotions—anger, fear, jealousy, revenge—generally speaking, hold sway; but there are also in various parts of the world uncivilized communities where these fierce passions are little known, and where, in consequence of the absence of warlike surroundings, the gentle, tender sentiments that have for their foundation family ties and peaceful social life, prevail, and are considerably developed.

The conditions of emotional evolution in a given race, then, are complex. We have to bear in mind a threefold environment—cosmic, planetary, social—pressing upon individual life and powerfully swaying the emotional part of it. Social environment is pre-eminently potent in modifying emotional characteristics; yet the prime factor of change in social environment springs from this region of feeling, and this factor may, under rational guidance, take a path of direct and rapid progression.

British civilization is the product of a turbulent, militant stage of evolution, an epoch of military glory, followed by a long period of industrial development and commercial activity. We inherit a survival of virtues and vices from each of these evolutional stages. To the first we attribute our courage, independence and proper pride, both national and individual; and we are apt to suppose that without the experience of military glory our manly John Bull would have been a milk-sop. That may or may not be true; but when we infer that the above characteristics depend fundamentally and absolutely upon a military environment we are vastly mistaken. Observe what is said by travellers and missionaries of certain unwarlike tribes found in India and the Malay Peninsula. The Jakuns are inclined, we are told, to gratitude and beneficence, their tendency being not to ask favours, but to confer them. The Arifuras have a very excusable ambition to gain the name of rich men by paying the debts of their poorer fellow-villagers! One gentle Arifura, who had hoped to be chosen chief of his village and was not, met his disappointment with the spirit of a philosopher and philanthropist, saying: “What reason have I to grieve? I still have it in my power to assist my fellow-villagers.” When brought into contact with men of an opposite type—hardy, fierce and turbulent, they have no tendency to show the white feather. The amiable Dhimal is independent and courageous, and resists “with dogged obstinacy” injunctions that are urged injudiciously. The Jakun is extremely proud—his pride showing itself in refusals to be domesticated and made useful to men of a different race and therefore alien to himself. The simple-minded Santal has a “strong natural sense of justice, and should any attempt be made to coerce him, he flies the country. The Santal is courteous and hospitable, whilst at the same time he is free from cringing.” Dalton writes of the Hos—a tribe belonging to the same group as the Santals—“a reflection on a man’s honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to self-destruction”; and of the Lepchas, Hooker says, “In all my dealings with them they have proved scrupulously honest.... They cheer on the traveller by their unostentatious zeal in his service, and when a present is given to them, it is divided equally among many without a syllable of discontent or a grudging look or word.”^[4]

From these facts we gather that a number of virtues associated in our minds with Western civilization are present amid barbarous tribes, and that the vices associated by us with barbarism—cruelty, dishonesty, treachery, selfishness—are in some cases glaringly absent. Human nature is not dependent on culture or Christianity to humanize and make it lovable. There is that in the very groundwork of its nature which renders it capable of developing, under favourable conditions, into what is admirable, pure and gracious. The traits given us of these peoples show virtue, truth, generosity, moral courage and justice, and what nobler, more elevated sentiments have as yet been found in civilized man?

The favourable conditions are an entire absence of warlike surroundings and warlike training, hence an absence also of any inheritance of warlike proclivities. These tribes “have remained unmolested for generation after generation; they have inflicted no injuries on others.” Their social or unselfish feelings have been fostered and nourished by the sympathetic intercourse of a peaceful life.

In a purely military state unselfish feelings are necessarily repressed, whilst the bold, keen, hard and cruel side of human nature is liberally developed. To hate an enemy and avenge an injury are manly virtues. The predatory instincts are useful and approved. Treachery is not discredited, and the man clever enough to take advantage of an enemy and successfully intrigue against him may be ranked among the gods! The plunderer who falters not in keen pursuit of prey and in the hour of victory shows relentless cruelty is deemed heroic. No thought of happiness or misery to others gives him pause; military glory is his absorbing aim, and in the intervals of peace his callous nature manifests in ruling with tyrannic power slavish subordinates, who bend and cringe before him.

Now let us glance at two of these militant characteristics, viz. rapacity and personal pride, with a view to observe how their survival into our industrial epoch has vitiated the national life.

The purely militant stage of British development has passed, and the outward form of our collective life is industrial, not military. A sanguinary path of glory has no intrinsic fascination for our people, and there is no national desire to conquer and rule over races established on other parts of the earth’s surface, however superior to ours may be their climate and quarters. Nevertheless, within the last half century we have fought battles and shed blood copiously in China, Persia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere. Seldom, however, has the nation itself clamoured for war. In the year 1854 a relapse into militant mood occurred, and, in spite of unwillingness on the part of individual rulers, the Government yielded to a sinister wave of barbaric feeling in the nation—a martial frenzy that impelled to the Crimean War. Since that period wars have originated from other causes than the will of the nation. Our people, immersed in a painful struggle for livelihood at home, are indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the many squabbles into which we flounder abroad. General malevolence has no part in this matter; our real collective attitude towards foreigners is one of friendliness, combined with an impulse to the peaceful exchange of commodities, kind words and gentle arts—the whole provocative of love, not hatred.

The fundamental causes of war, then, have been: first, the commercial interests of a capitalist class, or, if expressed in terms of feeling, the desire in that class for increased wealth—a desire partly the product of inherited rapacity, a sentiment descended to us from our militant epoch; second, national pride—a pride which has kindled animosities, embroiled us in disputes and dragged us into wars, the pettiness of whose small beginnings is only matched by the pettiness of British conduct throughout their whole extent. But both this rapacity and this national pride belong almost exclusively to our ruling classes. Their existence is explained by the action of outward conditions on special sections of the community. The British passed suddenly out of a period of constant fighting and feud into a period of frantic industrial activity. Feudal chiefs and their descendants became grasping landlords. There also sprang up a class of sharp-witted, keen-sighted men, whose native rapacity strengthened in the genial hot-bed of our brilliant commercial success. A tremendous start in the international race after wealth was secured to Great Britain by her possession of iron, coal, etc. She absorbed riches from every quarter of the globe, and mercantile triumph swelled the pride already deeply implanted in our industrial organizers, our politicians and plenipotentiaries. The great mass of the people were differently affected by industrial conditions. Workers of every description, packed together in towns and factories, rapidly developed the qualities of intimate social life, and out-grew, in the main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker, nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the joys and blessings of universal peace.

But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all strongly in evidence.

The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.

In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of others.

No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and energies are set free for further development. Some social units become complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism.

Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol. of Essays, 2nd series, p. 132.)

That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth (but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice and inward misery and corruption.

The British merchant goes on accumulating long after he has amply provided for himself and family, and many a poor man feels towards that other’s wealth precisely as a savage feels towards his fetish. He is filled with reverence, admiration, desire and a sense of distance from the golden calf that makes him hopeless, abject, despairing.

The American millionaire, as depicted by Mr. Howells, will, “on a hot day, when the mortal glare of the sun blazes in upon heart and brain, plot and plan in his New York office till he swoons at the desk.” Such a man is as much a victim to over-development of acquisitiveness as the drunkard is victim to an undue development of the love of stimulants, and in each case the depraved taste carries ruin to the individual and havoc into society. Social unity is rent in twain. A life of exuberant wealth and extravagant expenditure runs parallel with one of constant, inescapable poverty, and so long as the nation continues to heap up riches in private possession, just so long must we reap an emotional harvest of envy, malice, private animosities, class hatreds and a subtle estrangement of heart throughout the length and breadth of the land. Yet even the great poet Tennyson in his writings exalts into a worthy motive for holy wedlock this sentiment—love of property. An affectionate father, in the poem, “The Sisters,” exhorts his daughters thus: “One should marry, or ... all the broad lands will pass collaterally”!

The small accumulator whose petty hoard of gold was gloated over piece by piece has long been labelled miser. He is publicly condemned, and in literature derided. But the merchant-prince who, already wealthy, devotes days and years and his whole mind and heart to business; the proprietor of broad lands who adds acre to acre, and anxiously meditates on their passing collaterally; the rich capitalist who craftily seeks to lower wages in the interests of employers; the gambler on the Stock Exchange; the market manipulator whose predatory instincts are so pleasurably excited by risks and gains that he will hazard in the game all that nobler men hold precious—these beings, I say, are as worthy of scorn and infinitely more baneful than the miser. They must take their true place by his side in public estimation. They are social deformities, morally diseased. In other words, these men are incapable of moral duty, which consists in “the observance of those rules of conduct that contribute to the welfare of society—the end of society being peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.” (Huxley’s Life, vol. ii. p. 305.)

In the preceding chapter I have shown that the self-regarding sentiment exercised with due consideration for the welfare of others is a social virtue. It promotes national prosperity and personal improvement. But self-regarding actions, induced by this master-passion over-acquisitiveness, invariably issue in automatic selfishness and general deterioration.

In regard to aesthetic emotions also the cleavage between rich and poor has a fatal significance. A luxurious, idle, for the most part, inane, life led by the rich, profoundly influences the poor; not by creating anti-social feeling only, but by checking aesthetic development. In the city of many slums there is also a west-end of gay shops filled with objects de luxe, of showily dressed women, profligate men, theatre, music-hall and ball-room entrances, at which to stand gazing as into a fairy peep-show. Suggestion here plays a mischievous part. Poverty hinders the purchase of all commodities that possess any real artistic value, but commercial enterprise has flooded the markets with meretricious imitations. East-end shops reflect the glitter and glow of west-end attractions, and the ignorant, spell-bound by suggestion, become possessors of that which degrades and vulgarizes taste or the sense of the beautiful. Now that science partially dominates thought, our eyes have been opened to the fact of essential unity in human groups. We may trace the cause of a social evil to a special section or class, but the effects of that cause radiate forth till they touch every section or class. Dwellers in the west-end cannot escape disease propagated by the vilely unwholesome conditions of life at the east-end. Micro-organisms of disease are wafted from hither to thither, and on the physical plane social unity is recognized. A like continuity exists on the non-physical side. Minds are as closely united by psychical law as bodies by physical law. The experienced facts of hypnotism make this clear, and the logical inference is that in Western civilization the vices of wealthy classes infect and corrupt the masses.

That the imagination of the great mass of our people should be snared and their evolutional progress thwarted by mental suggestion from a banal, vicious life led by a comparatively small portion of the nation, is an outrage on civilization. It renders it imperative that the cause of this evil, viz., our contentious, i.e. our competitive system of industry, should be fundamentally changed.

For every group of human beings the steady growth of those social qualities which create happiness and the steady advance in intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual life, depend on a close community of interests and the constant opening up of fresh channels of sympathy throughout the group. But the British racial group has lost this community of interests—this primary condition of steady growth. It is split up into, first, a class of property possessors made effeminate by ill-spent leisure, often inflated by pride, and at all times demanding the artificial pleasures of a luxurious life; second, a class striving to amass property, a class whose thoughts and desires circle round and centre in property, and who to acquire it often sacrifice serenity of mind, health of body, and even life itself; and third, the mass of the people who, having no property, are yet enslaved by it, and who on the emotional side of their human nature are debased and corrupted by the mental state of the classes.

As evolution approaches the era of manhood of human reason it becomes conscious, and demands a national effort to improve. That effort first appears in the strenuous, scientific study of life as it is, in attempts at social reconstruction, and at improvement in public and private education. It is seen to be necessary to stamp out all the militant and predatory instincts of mankind by ethical nurture and training, while all the gentle, gracious qualities of mankind must be carefully guarded and nourished, until, in every social unit the effort to improve is habitual, i.e. has become “the essential mode of its being.” (J. McGavin Sloan.)