XVICOSMOPOLITAN AND INTERNATIONAL
29.12.23
Sometimes words for quite unaccountable reasons get down on their luck. They lose caste, they drop out of society, nobody will be seen about with them.
A word for which I have the greatest sympathy is “Cosmopolitan.” I want to see it restored to a respectable use. It is a fine word and it embodies a fine idea. But for more than half the English-speaking people who hear it, I suppose, it carries with it the quality of a shady, illicit individual with a bad complexion, a falsified passport and a police record. This creature to be typical should be mixed up with the drug traffic and a danger to the inexperienced and honest everywhere; Monte Carlo is the idea of heaven for such a Cosmopolitan, and Ellis Island the corresponding hell. I don’t know how it has come about that this good word Cosmopolitan has got so firmly attached to the trunks of such gentry, for the proper term that should be there is surely “extreme individualist.” Even “Internationalist” would be a better word for a man or woman who passesbetween country and country and belongs to none. But I do not see why we should punish a word because it has been stupidly misapplied.
For what is Cosmopolis but the City of the World, and what can a Cosmopolitan be but a good citizen wherever he goes? That is what I want to be and not International—which seems to me an altogether homeless adjective. It means, I take it, “in between nations”—in between the substantial things of life. The only truly international thing is the ocean outside territorial waters. Trying to be International is like trying to walk about on the cracks between the boards, instead of walking on the floor; you could only do it if you had feet like skates, and I cannot understand why we tack this dismal adjective nowadays on to all our current attempts to get human brotherhood put upon a broader basis than parochial or national feeling. I am an Englishman and a Cosmopolitan, a good Englishman, and I hope a good Cosmopolitan; I do not see why I should repudiate my own original plank or any other planks because I want to go freely over all the floor.
My emotional equipment as a faithful son of England I claim to be sound and complete. To the end of my days I shall think of England, the kindly England of the south-east, London and Essex, Kent and Sussex, as my own very particular region of the world. London is mine, as no other city can ever be; I have seen it grow and change and becomeever more wonderful and beautiful and dear to me since first I came up to it, to the stupendous gloomy vault of Cannon Street Station, half a century ago. But Paris also, open and elegant, with a delicate excitement in its air; New York, the towering and beautiful; many a prim South German town; Venice; Rome, as I remember it, before reviving prosperity and that vile monument to Victor Emmanuel vulgarised it so hopelessly; frosty and sullen Petersburg, have charmed me, and I want a share in their happiness and welfare, I want to possess them also and to care for them, and I am ready to barter the welcome of my London in exchange. Cosmopolis is all these cities and a thousand others, and I want to be free of them all.
But the world is full of stupid people who will not let me be free of Cosmopolis. They make my England almost a gaol for me by inventing a thousand inconveniences if I want to go out of it. There are passport offices and tariff offices stuck across every path of travel and desire; there are differences in coinage and a multitude of petty restrictions to exasperate every attempt I make at holiday in my Europe. The streets of Cosmopolis are up and barricaded; I want to break down these barricades.
There is not a reasonable and honest man in the world who does not want a uniform coinage about the earth. Only the greedy, cunning exchange speculator—and idiot collectors—want either variedcoinages or a variety of stamps in this world. If the League of Nations at Geneva wasn’t the dismallest sham on the earth, it would insist upon running the posts of Europe and having a mint of its own. Wherever one goes in Europe one finds oneself loaded up with foreign money that ceases to be current after a day’s journey, and with useless postage stamps. And every silly little scrap of Europe is pretending to be a separate economic system—in mysterious conflict with other economic systems. Every hundred miles or so in Europe there is a fresh tariff barrier.
Everybody, except for a few monopolists and officials, loses by tariffs. They are devices for gaining a little for some particular section of mankind at the cost of an infinitely greater loss to Cosmopolis. Mean and narrow in conception, they are abominable in action. It is an intolerable nuisance to be searched for tobacco and matches by some sedulous eater of garlic before one may enter France from England—they even turn out your pockets now—and to have one’s portmanteau locks broken and one or two minor possessions stolen whenever one goes into Italy. At Dover they read the books you have with you to see if they are improper. The quays of New York again, after the arrival of a liner, are a grossly indecent spectacle. They go half-way back from civilisation to the barbecue of a foreign sailor by cannibal wreckers. Much as I like New York, I never miss a thrill of intense anger when the largehand of the Customs officer routs among my under-clothes.
And these are only the minor inconveniences of not living in Cosmopolis; they are just the superficial indications that the world one moves about in is a thin crust hanging insecurely above the abyss of war. I do not believe that any mere Internationalism and League of Nations that leaves the coinages separate, and the Customs Houses on the frontiers, and the passport officials busy at their little wickets with their nasty rubber stamps, which leaves the mean profits of tariff manipulation possible for influential people, which denies by all these things our common ownership and common responsibility for all the world, can ever open the way to world peace.
I am for world-control of production and of trade and transport, for a world coinage, and the confederation of mankind. I am for the super-State, and not for any League. Cosmopolis is my city, and I shall die cut off from it. When I die I shall have lived only a part of my possible life, a sort of life in a corner. And this is true of nearly all the rest of mankind alive at the present time. The world is a patchwork of various sized internment camps called Independent Sovereign States, and we are each caught in our bit of the patchwork and cannot find a way of escape. Because most of us have still to realise, as I do, a passionate desire to escape. But a day will come when Custom House officerswill be as rare as highwaymen in Sussex, and when the only passports in the world will be found alongside of Aztec idols and instruments of torture and such-like relics of superstition in our historical museums.