FREEDOM'S NEW FRIENDS
Many, said the Greek proverb, are they who bear the mystic reed, but few are the true bacchanals. Many, in the present day, are they who make anoutward display of devotion to Liberty, but few, methinks, are her real worshippers. "We are fighting for Freedom" is a cry which rises from the most unexpected quarters; and, though 'twere ungracious to question its sincerity, we must admit that this generous enthusiasm is of very recent growth.
Liberty has always had her friends in England; but where she could count one, Authority could count two.[*] Five years ago, how many Englishmen really cared for Liberty, not rendering her mere lip-service, but honestly devoting themselves to her sacred cause? If you polled the nation from top to bottom, how many liberty-lovers would you find? At one election their number, as disclosed by the polls, would rise, at another it would sink. At the best of times, if you divide the nation into strata, you would find large sections in which Liberty had no worshippers and very few friends. It had long been one of the bad signs of the times that the love of Liberty had almost ceased to animate what are called, in the odious language of social convention, "the upper classes." For generations the despised and calumniated Whigs had maintained the cause of Freedom in their peculiarly dogged though unemotional fashion, and had established the political liberties of England on a strong foundation. But their day was done, their work was accomplished, and their descendants had made common cause with their hereditary opponents.
[Footnote *: I am speaking here of England only—not of Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.]
After the great split of 1886 a genuine lover of Freedom in the upper strata of society was so rare a character that people encountering him instinctively asked, "Is he insincere? Or only mad?" Deserted by the aristocracy, Liberty turned for her followers to the great Middle Class; but there also the process of apostasy had begun; and substantial people, whose fathers had fought and suffered for Freedom, waxed reactionary as the claims of Labour became more audible, and betook themselves to the side of Authority as being the natural guardian of property. If you make the division geographically, you may say, in the broadest terms, that the North stood firm for Freedom; but that London and the South were always unfriendly to it, and, after 1886, the Midlands joined the enemy.
If we apply a test which, though often illusory, cannot be regarded as wholly misleading, the Metropolitan Press was, in a remarkable degree, hostile to Freedom, and reflected, as one must suppose, the sentiments of the huge constituency for whom it catered. How many friends could Irish Nationalism count? How many could Greece, in her struggle with Turkey? How many the Balkan States? How many Armenia? How many, even in the ranks of professed Liberalism, opposed the annexation of the South African Republics? At each extension of the suffrage; at each tussle with the Lords; at each attempt to place the burden of taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, few indeed were the friends ofFreedom in the upper classes of society; in the opulent Middle Class; in London and the Midlands and the South; in the Church, alas!; in the Universities, the Professions, and the Press.
And yet, at the present moment, from these unlikely quarters there rises a diapason of liberty-loving eloquence which contrasts very discordantly with the habitual language of five years ago. To-day the friends of Freedom are strangely numerous and admirably vocal. Our Lady of Liberty, one thinks, must marvel at the number and the energy of her new worshippers. Lapses from grace are not unknown in the after-history of revivals, but we must, in charity, assume the conversion to be genuine until experience has proved it insincere. And to what are we to attribute it? Various answers are possible. Perhaps, as long as it was only other people's liberty which was imperilled, we could look on without concern. Perhaps we never realized the value of Freedom, as the chief good of temporal life, till the prospect of losing it, under a world-wide reign of force, first dawned on our imagination. Perhaps—and this is the happiest supposition—we have learnt our lesson by contemplating the effects of a doglike submission to Authority in corrupting the morals and wrecking the civilization of a powerful and once friendly people.
But, theorize as we may about the cause, the effect is unmistakable, and, at least on the surface, satisfactory. To-day we all are the friends and lovers of Liberty—and yet the very multitude ofour new comrades gives us, the veterans in the cause, some ground for perplexity and even for concern. "He who really loves Liberty must walk alone." In spite of all that has come and gone, I believe that this stern dogma still holds good; and I seem to see it illustrated afresh in the career, so lately closed amid universal respect and regret, of Leonard, Lord Courtney.[*]
[Footnote *: Leonard, Henry Courtney (Lord Courtney of Penwith), died May 11, 1918, in his eighty-sixth year.]
EDUCATION
EDUCATION AND THE JUDGE
Not long ago a Judge of the High Court (who was also a Liberal) made what struck me as an eminently wise observation. While trying a couple of Elementary School-teachers whose obscenity was too gross for even an Old Bailey audience, and who themselves were products of Elementary Schools, the Judge said: "It almost makes one hesitate to think that elementary education is the blessing which we had hoped it was." Of course, all the prigs of the educational world, and they are not few, were aghast at this robust declaration of common sense; and the Judge thought it well to explain (not, I am thankful to say, to explain away) a remark which had been sedulously misconstrued.
Long years ago Queen Victoria recording the conversation at her dinner-table, said: "Lord Melbourne made us laugh very much with his opinions about Schools and Public Education; the latter he don't like, and when I asked him if he did he said, 'I daren't say in these times that I'm against it—but Iamagainst it.'"
There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig Prime Minister, that he wasafraid to avow his mistrust of a great social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself. The arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom extolling the unmixed blessings of education. The University of London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up. "The school-master was abroad." Lord John Russell was making some tentative steps towards a system of national education. Societies, Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education; and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.
When I say "no one" I should perhaps say "hardly anyone"; for the wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their new divinity. "Reading and writing," said Sydney Smith, "are mere increase of power. They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please. I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanicalart of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him up to his own place in the order of Creation."
That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter. "Reading and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. The language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either a blessing or a curse, according as it is used.
Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed, was urging the claims of the working classes to better education. But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher and wider ranges of knowledge. During the Victorian Age physical science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own. Any discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon, and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, among our national heroes. As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation. His vision has been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing. Chemistry is,to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things as they are. Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction as well as for salvation. Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life within five miles of the spot where it was discharged. This was an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner's discovery a weapon ready to their hand. Someone must have discovered alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it, for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of purely natural causes. But even those who least sympathize with "the lean and sallow abstinence" would scarcely maintain that alcohol has been an unmixed blessing to the race.
To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those who made them. "To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered only by the highest mathematics" is a sad result of sheer knowledge. An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges or country houses, makes definiteadditions to our knowledge of Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious as Carlyle's or Froude's. A young student of religion diligently adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel. In each of these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been benefited. We come back to what Sydney Smith said. Increase of knowledge is merely increase of power. Whether it is to be a boon or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate conflict between materialism and morality—between consummate knowledge organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right. Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation if it "gain the whole world" and lose its own soul?
THE GOLDEN LADDER
Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound. It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and "all that is at enmity with joy."To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who edited Dictionaries of everything. So, though this chapter is to be concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my title a figurative phrase. I might, with perfect justice, have chosen another figure, and have headed my paper "The Peg and the Hole"; for, after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction. In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire. He is, in my judgment, exactly the right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and contradicting one another.
When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological disputants, I by no means ignore the grievance under which some of those disputants have suffered. The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by therighteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts. There were Passive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time for voting came. The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains unredressed to this hour. Not that I admired the Liberal Education Bills. My own doctrine on the matter was expressed by my friend Arthur Stanton, who said in 1906: "I think National and Compulsory Education must be secular, and with facilities for the denominations to add their particular tenets. My objection to this Bill" (Mr. Birrell's Bill) "is that it subsidizes undenominationalism." And again in 1909, when another of our Liberal practitioners was handling the subject: "I object altogether to the State teaching religion. I would have it teach secular matters only, and leave the religious teaching entirely to the clergy, who should undertake it at their own expense. This is the only fair plan—fair to all. The State gives, and pays for, religious teaching which I do not regard as being worth anything at all. It is worse than useless. Real religious teaching can only be given by the Church, and when Christ told us to go and teach, He did not mean mathematics and geography."
That was, and is, my doctrine on religious education; but in politics we must take things as they are, and must not postpone practicablereforms because we cannot as yet attain an ideal system. So Mr. Fisher, wisely as I think, has left the religious question on one side, and has proposed a series of reforms which will fit equally well the one-sided system which still oppresses Nonconformists and the simply equitable plan to which I, as a lover of religious freedom, aspire.
I see that some of Mr. Fisher's critics say: "This is not a great Bill." Perhaps not, but it is a good Bill; and, as Lord Morley observes, "that fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin." Enlarging on this theme, Lord Morley points out that the essential virtue of a small reform—the quality which makes it not an evil, but a good—is that it should be made "on the lines and in the direction" of the greater reform which is desiderated.
Now, this condition Mr. Fisher's Bill exactly fulfils. I suppose that the "greater reform" of education which we all wish to see—the ideal of national instruction—is that the State should provide for every boy and girl the opportunity of cultivating his or her natural gifts to the highest perfection which they are capable of attaining. When I speak of "natural gifts" I refer not only to the intellect, but also to the other parts of our nature, the body and the moral sense. This ideal involves a system which, by a natural and orderly development, should conduct the capable child from the Elementary School, through all the intermediatestages, to the highest honours of the Universities.
The word "capable" occurs in Mr. Fisher's Bill, and rightly, because our mental and physical capacities are infinitely varied. A good many children may be unable to profit by any instruction higher than that provided by the Elementary School. A good many more will be able to profit by intermediate education. Comparatively few—the best—will make their way to really high attainment, and will become, at and through the Universities, great philosophers, or scholars, or scientists, or historians, or mathematicians.
At that point—and it ought to be reached at a much earlier age than is now usual—the State's, concern in the matter ends. The child has become, a man, and henceforth must work out his own intellectual salvation; but in the earlier stages the State can and must exercise a potent influence. The earliest stage must be compulsory—that was secured by the Act of 1870. In the succeeding stages, the State, while it does not compel, must stimulate and encourage; and above all must ensure that no supposed exigencies of money-making, no selfish tyranny of the employing classes, shall be allowed to interfere with mental or physical development, or to divert the boy or the girl from any course of instruction by which he or she is capable of profiting. This ideal Mr. Fisher's Bill, with its plain enactment that education shall be free; with its precaution against "half-time"; with its ample provision for Continuation Schools, goesfar to realize. Even if it is a "small" reform—and I should dispute the epithet—it is certainly "on the lines and in the direction" of that larger reform which the enthusiasts of education have symbolized by the title of "The Golden Ladder."[*]
[Footnote *: Happily for Education, Mr. Fisher's Bill is now an Act.]
OASES
My title is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the ideal which I wish to set before my readers.
The suggestion of this article came to me from a correspondent in Northumberland—"an old miner, who went to work down a mine before he was eight years old, and is working yet at seventy-two." My friend tells me that he has "spent about forty years of his spare time in trying to promote popular education among his fellow working-men." His notice was attracted by a paper which I recently wrote on "The Golden Ladder" of Education, and that paper led him to offer some suggestions which I think too valuable to be lost.
My friend does not despise the Golden Ladder. Quite the contrary. He sees its usefulness for such as are able to climb it, but he holds that they are, and must be, the few, while he is concerned for the many. I agree. When (following MatthewArnold at a respectful distance) I have urged the formation of a national system by which a poor man's son may be enabled to climb from the Elementary School to a Fellowship or a Professorship at Oxford or Cambridge, I have always realized that I was planning a course for the exceptionally gifted boy. That boy has often emerged in real life, and the Universities have profited by his emergence; but he is, and always must be, exceptional. What can be done for the mass of intelligent, but not exceptional, boys, who, to quote my Northumbrian friend, "must be drilled into a calling of some kind, so as to be able to provide for themselves when they grow up to manhood"? When once their schooling, in the narrow sense, is over, must their minds be left to lie fallow or run wild? Can nothing be done to supplement their elementary knowledge, to stimulate and discipline their mental powers?
The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men—such as the late Lord Grey—who led it. But I suppose he speaks from experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will never become established in working-class villages. Forty-five to fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a comet." My friend uses an astronomicalfigure, I a geographical one; but we mean the same thing. The idea is to establish Oases—"fertile spots in the midst of deserts"—permanent centres of light and culture in manufacturing districts. "The Universities teach and train ministers of religion, and they go and live in their parishes among their flocks all the year round. Why not send lecturers and teachers of secular subjects in the same way? A system something similar to the Wesleyan or Primitive Methodists' ministerial system would answer the purpose. The country might be divided into circuits of four or five centres each, and a University man stationed in each circuit, to organize Students' Associations, give lectures, hold classes, and superintend scientific experiments, as the case may be."
This is a good illustration. The Church professes to place in each parish an official teacher of religion and morality, and most of the Nonconformist communities do the same. To place an official teacher of culture (in its widest sense) in every parish is perhaps a task beyond our national powers as at present developed; but to place one in every industrial district is not conceivable only, but, I believe, practicable. The lecturer who comes from Oxford or Cambridge, delivers his course, and departs, has no doubt his uses. He is like the "Hot Gospeller" of an earlier age, or the "Missioner" of to-day. He delivers an awakening message, and many are the better for it; but if culture is to get hold of the average lads and young men of an industrial district, its exponentmust be more like the resident minister, the endowed and established priest. That he should live among the people whom he is to instruct, know them personally, understand their ways of thinking and speaking, is at least as important as that he should be a competent historian or mathematician or man of letters. If the State, or voluntary effort, or a combination of the two, could secure the permanent presence of such a teacher in every district where men work hard, and yet have leisure enough to cultivate their intellects, a yawning gap in our educational system would be filled.
It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way of example such a district as Dickens's "Coketown," or Disraeli's "Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which Cobbett expressively called "Hell-Holes." Let the State establish in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions. In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real Oasis—"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the strugglefor subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis" would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral principles of personal and social action which have been thought out "by larger minds in calmer ages."
That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE
When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader. If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal discussion and of freely exchanged opinion. I have lately written an article on "Life and Liberty" as proposed by some earnest clergymen for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher's Education Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of the State to teach religion. Both these articles have brought me a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile. The term allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of making a general reply. "Life and Liberty" are glorious ideals, but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice. Hence my title.
The State consists of persons who profess all sorts of religion, and none. If the State compels its citizens to pay for religious teaching in which they do not believe, it commits, in my opinion, a palpable injustice. This is not merely a question between one sect and another sect. It is, indeed, unjust to make a Quaker pay for teaching the doctrine of the Sacraments, or a Unitarian forteaching the Deity of Christ; but it is equally unjust to make an Atheist pay for teaching the existence of God, or a Churchman for teaching that curious kind of implied Socinianism which is called "undenominational religion."
The only way out of these inequities is what is commonly called "Secularism." The word has some unfortunate associations. It has been connected in the past with a blatant form of negation, and also with a social doctrine which all decent people repudiate. But, strictly considered, it means no more than "temporal" or "worldly"; and when I say that I recommend the "Secular" system of education, I mean that the State should confine itself to the temporal or worldly work with which alone it is competent to deal, and should leave religion (which it cannot touch without inflicting injustice on someone) to those whose proper function is to instil it.
Who are they? Speaking generally, parents, ministers of religion, and teachers who are themselves convinced of what they teach; but I must narrow my ground. To-day I am writing as a Churchman for those Churchmen whom my previous articles disturbed; and I have only space to set forth some of the grounds on which we Churchmen should support the "secular solution."
A Churchman is bound by his baptismal vows to "believe all the articles of the Christian Faith." These, according to his catechism, are summed up in the Apostles' Creed. He cannot, therefore, be satisfied with any religious instruction which isnot based on that formula; and yet such instruction cannot rightly be enforced in schools which belong as much to unbelievers as to Christians. A Churchman's religious faith is not derived primarily from the Bible, but from the teaching of the Christian Church, who is older than the oldest of her documents. There was a Church before the New Testament was written, and that Church transmitted the faith by oral tradition. "From the very first the rule has been, as a matter of fact, that the Church should teach the truth, and then should appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching." For a Churchman, religious instruction must be the teaching of the Church, tested by the Bible. The two cannot be separated. Hence it follows that, while the State is bound to respect the convictions of those who adhere to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, the Churchman cannot recognize religious teaching imparted under such conditions as being that which his own conscience demands.
And, further, supposing that some contrivance could be discovered whereby the State might authorize the teaching of the Church's doctrine, the Churchman could not conscientiously be a party to it; for, according to his theory, there is only one Body divinely commissioned to decide what is to be taught—and that Body is not the State, but the Church; and there is only one set of persons qualified to teach it—viz., those who are duly authorized by the Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.
It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation without being subsidized in some way by the State. The principal requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission. If the Bishops and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely commissioned to undertake they will be divinely assisted to fulfil, this question need not be suggested. The first teachers of the Christian religion performed their task without either "Rate-aid" or "State-aid" and the result of their labour is still to be seen; whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get done for them what they ought to do for themselves. It may be well to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the Liberal Government was dealing with education. "We are now, more or less, in the middle of a crisis. We are always in the middle of a crisis. This crisis is about the religious question in our day-schools. I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our difficulty. What is it? The heart of our difficulty is partly that we haveshifted on to the wrong shouldersthe central function of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of what the teaching of the Church is, andthe meaning of religious education, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious knowledge for everybody."
The difficulty as to means might be overcome if the Church would mind its own business, andleave to the State what the State can do so much more effectively. Let me quote the words of a great Christian and a great Churchman—Mr. Gladstone—written in 1894: "Foul fall the day when the persons of this world shall, on whatever pretext, take into their uncommissioned hands the manipulation of the religion of our Lord and Saviour."
Surely Churchmen will best serve the religion which they profess by joining with other "men of goodwill," though of different faiths, who desire the secular solution. In that way only, as far as I can see, can the interests of Education be reconciled with the higher interests of Justice.
THE STATE AND THE BOY
When Mr. A. J. Balfour was a very young man he publishedA Defence of Philosophic Doubt. Nobody read it, but a great many talked about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring, "How sad that Lord Salisbury's nephew should be an Agnostic!" When Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced, and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it was an essay in orthodox apologetic. Thenceforward Mr. Balfour ranked in their eyes as a "Defender of the Faith" second only to Henry VIII.
To compare small things with great, I have had a similar experience. Not long ago I wrote a paper designed to set forth the pretty obvious truth that increase in knowledge is not in itself a good. It evoked much criticism, and the critics once again exemplified our truly English habit of denouncing what we have not read. If these quaint people were to be believed, I was an enemy of education in general and of elementary education in particular. I hope that they will be as much relieved as were Mr. Balfour's critics when they discover that I am, and all my life have been, a zealous supporter of education, and, to some extent, an expert in it.
If the world could be exhaustively divided into two classes-the Educated and the Uneducated—I suppose that I should be included in the former, though I anticipate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line. It is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a sacred duty to its boys. If I leave the education of girls on one side, I do so, not because I consider it unimportant, but because I know nothing about it.
Information, as the great Butler said, is the least part of education. The greatest is the development of the child's natural power to its utmost extent and capacity; and the duty of so developing it must be admitted by everyone who ponders ourLord's teaching about the Buried Talent and the Pound laid up in the Napkin. Unless we enable and encourage every boy in England to bring whatever mental gifts he has to the highest point of their possible perfection, we are shamefully and culpably squandering the treasure which God has given us to be traded with and accounted for. We shall have no one but ourselves to blame if, as a Nemesis on our neglect, we lose our present standing among the educated peoples of the world. I always get back to the ideal of the "Golden Ladder," reaching from the Elementary Schools, by Scholarships or "free places," to the Secondary Schools, and from them again to the Universities. This ideal is, unlike some ideals, attainable, and has in repeated instances been attained. Again and again the highest mathematical honours of Cambridge have been won by Elementary Schoolboys, and what is true of mathematics might also be true of every branch of knowledge. I say advisedly that it "might" be true: whether or not it will be depends on our handling of quite young boys.
The pedagogic notion under which people of my time were reared was that every boy must learn exactly the same things as every other boy, and must go on learning them till his last day at school, whether that day arrived when he was fourteen or eighteen. "We must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate anddecline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek tragedians." So said Sydney Smith, and with perfect truth. "The grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum" was enforced on the boy whose whole heart was in the engineer's shed, while his friend, to whom literature was a passion, was constrained to simulate an interest in the blue lights and bad smells of a chemical lecture. "Let it be granted" (as the odious Euclid, now happily dethroned, used to say) that there is a certain amount that all alike must learn but this amount will prove, when scrutinized, to be very small. I suppose we must all learn to read and write, and it is useful to be able to do a sum in simple addition; though very eminent people have often written very illegible hands, and Dean Stanley—one of the most accomplished men of his day—could never be persuaded that eighteen pence was not the equivalent of 1s. 8d. Zealots for various "knowledges" (to use the curious plural sanctioned by Matthew Arnold) will urge the indispensability of their respective hobbies. One will say let everybody learn that the earth is round; another, that James I. was not the son of Queen Elizabeth. But let us leave, these pribbles and prabbles. Let every boy be coerced into learning what is absolutely necessary for the daily work of life; but let him, at a very early age, have his powers concentrated on the subject which really interests him.
One of the highest gifts which a teacher canpossess is the power of "discerning the spirits"—of discovering what a boy's mind really is; what it is made of; what can be made of it. This power is a natural gift, and can by no means be acquired. Many teachers entirely lack it; but those who possess it are among the most valuable servants of the State. This power may be brought to bear on every boy when he is, say, from fourteen to sixteen years old—perhaps in some cases even earlier; and, when once the teacher has made the all-important discovery, then let everything be done to stimulate, and at the same time to discipline, the boy's natural inclination, his inborn aptitude. Fifty years ago, every boy at every Public School, though he might be as unpoetical as Blackstone who wrote the Commentaries, or Bradshaw who compiled the Railway Guide, was forced to produce a weekly tale of Latin and Greek verses which would have made Horace laugh and Sophocles cry. The Rev. Esau Hittall's "Longs and Shorts about the Calydonian Boar," commemorated inFriendship's Garland, may stand for a sample of the absurdities which I have in mind; and the supporters of this amazing abuse assured the world that Greek and Latin versification was an essential element of a liberal education. It took a good many generations to deliver England from this absurdity, and there are others like unto it which still hold their own in the scholastic world. To sweep these away should be the first object of the educational reformer; and, when that preliminary step has been taken, the State will be able to sayto every boy who is not mentally deficient: "This, or this, is the path which Nature intended you to tread. Follow it with all your heart. We will back you, and help you, and applaud you, and will not forsake you till the goal is won."
A PLEA FOR THE INNOCENTS
My "spiritual home" is not Berlin, nor even Rome, but Jerusalem. In heart and mind I am there to-day, and have been there ever since the eternally memorable day on which our army entered it. What I am writing will see the light on the Feast of the Holy Innocents;[*] and my thoughts have been running on a prophetic verse which unites the place and the festival in a picturesque accord:
"Thus saith the Lord, I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem:... and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."
The most brilliant Israelite of our times, Lord Beaconsfield, said of a brilliant Englishman, Dean Stanley, that his leading feature was his "picturesque sensibility," and that sensibility was never more happily expressed than when he instituted the service for children in Westminster Abbey on Innocents' Day—"Childermas Day," as our forefathers called it, in the age when holidays were also holy days, and the Mass was the centre of social as well as of spiritual life. On this touchingfeast a vast congregation of boys and girls assembles in that Abbey Church which has been rightly called "the most lovable thing in Christendom"; and, as it moves in "solemn troops and sweet societies" through aisles grey with the memories of a thousand years, it seems a living prophecy of a brighter age already at the door.
[Footnote *: December 28, 1917.]
It seems—rather, it seemed. Who can pierce the "hues of earthquake and eclipse" which darken the aspect of the present world? Who can foresee, or even reasonably conjecture, the fate which is in store for the children who to-day are singing their carols in the church of the Confessor? Will it be their lot to be "playing in the streets" of a spiritual Jerusalem—the Holy City of a regenerated humanity? or are they destined to grow up in a reign of blood and iron which spurns the "Vision of Peace" as the most contemptible of dreams?
In some form or another these questions must force themselves on the mind of anyone who contemplates the boys and girls of to-day, and tries to forecast what may befall them in the next four or five years.
It is a gruesome thought that the children of to-day are growing up in an atmosphere of war. Bloodshed, slaughter, peril and privation, bereavement and sorrow and anxiety—all the evils from which happy childhood is most sedulously guarded have become the natural elements in which they live and move and have their being. For the moment the cloud rests lightly on them, for not"all that is at enmity with joy" can depress the Divine merriment of healthy childhood; but the cloud will become darker and heavier with each succeeding year of war; and every boy and girl is growing up into a fuller realization of miseries which four years ago would have been unimaginable.
But at Christmastide, if ever, we are bound to take the brightest view which circumstances allow. Let us then assume the best. Let us assume that before next Innocents' Day the war will have ended in a glorious peace. God grant it; but, even in that beatific event, what will become of the children? They cannot be exactly what they would have been if their lot had been cast in normal times. Unknown to themselves, their "subconscious intelligence" must have taken a colour and a tone from the circumstances in which they have been reared. As to the colour, our task will be to wipe out the tinge of blood; as to the tone, to restore the note which is associated with the Angels' Song.
This is my "Plea for the Innocents." What will the State offer them as they emerge from childhood into boyhood, and from boyhood into adolescence?
Perhaps it will offer Conscription; and, with no "perhaps" at all, some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon ever conferred upon the youth of a nation. Then, if there is any manliness or fibre left in the adherents of freedom, they will answer that we adopted Conscription fora definite object, and, when once that object is attained, we renounce it for ever.
What will the State offer? Obviously it must offer education—but what sort of education? The curse of militarism may make itself felt even in the school-room. It would be deplorable indeed if, as a result of our present experience, children were to be taught what J. R. Green called a "drum-and-trumpet history," and were made to believe that the triumphs of war are the highest achievements of the human spirit.
As long as there is an Established Church, the State, in some sense, offers religion. Is the religion of the next few years to be what Ruskin commends: a "religion of pure mercy, which we must learn to defend by fulfilling"; or is it to be the sort of religion which Professor Cramb taught, and which Prussian Lutheranism has substituted for the Gospel?
And, finally, what of home? After all said and done, it is the home that, in the vast majority of cases, influences the soul and shapes the life. What will the homes of England be like when the war is over? Will they be homes in which the moral law reigns supreme; where social virtue is recognized as the sole foundation of national prosperity; where the "strange valour of goodwill towards men", is revered as the highest type of manly resolution?
It is easy enough to ask these questions: it is impossible to answer them. The Poet is the Prophet, and this is the Poet's vision:
"The days are dark with storm;—The coming revolutions have to faceOf peace and music, but of blood and fire;The strife of Races scarce consolidate,Succeeded by the far more bitter strifeOf Classes—that which nineteen hundred years,Since Christ spake, have not yet availed to close,But rather brought to issue only now,When first the Peoples internationalKnow their own strength, and know the world is theirs."[*]
Know their own strength, and know the world is theirs—a solemn line, which at this season we may profitably ponder.
[Footnote *: "The Disciples," by H. E. Hamilton King.]
MISCELLANEA
THE "HUMOROUS STAGE"
I am not adventuring on the dangerous paths of dramatic criticism. When I write of the "humorous stage," I am using the phrase as Wordsworth used it, to signify a scene where new characters are suddenly assumed, and the old as suddenly discarded.
Long ago, Matthew Arnold, poking fun at the clamours of Secularism, asked in mockery, "Why is not Mr. Bradlaugh a Dean?" To-day I read, in a perfectly serious manifesto forwarded to me by a friendly correspondant, this searching question: "Why is not the Archbishop of Canterbury Censor of Plays?" It really is a great conception; and, if adopted in practice, might facilitate the solution of some perplexing problems. If any lover of the ancient ways should demur on the ground of incongruity, I reply that this objection might hold good in normal times, but that just now the "humorous stage" of public life so abounds in incongruities that one more or less would make no perceptible difference. Everyone is playing a part for which, three years ago, we should have thought him or her totally unqualified. Old habits, old prepossessions—even in some cases old principles—arecast aside with a levity which even Wordsworth's young actor could not have surpassed. We all are saying and doing things of which we should have thought ourselves incapable; and even our surprise at ourselves, great as it is, is less than our surprise at our friends.
To begin at the top. I have long held the present Prime Minister in high admiration. I can never forget—nor allow others to forget—that he fought for the cause of Justice and Freedom in South Africa almost single-handed, and at the risk of his life. An orator, a patriot, a lover of justice, a hater of privilege, I knew him to be. I did not see in him the makings of a Dictator directing the destinies of an Empire at war, and in his spare moments appointing Successors to the Apostles within the precincts of an Established Church. Certainly of Mr. Lloyd George, if of no one else, it is true that
The little actor cons another part,"
and I heartily wish him success in it. But it is true of everyone, and true in every corner of the stage. Let me strike into the medley at random. The anti-feminists, where are they? They have changed their garb and their "lines" so thoroughly that it is difficult for even a practised eye to recognize them in their new parts. Lord Curzon is a member of a Cabinet which established the women's vote, and such stalwarts as Mr. Asquith and Lord Harcourt welcome with effusion the enfranchisement of the victorious suffragette.
And what of the Pacificists? Where are they? Some, I know, are in prison, but, if it had not been for the rapid change of parts which the war has brought, they would have had a good many more fellow-captives than they have. The writer of this article was, from his first entrance into public affairs, a Pacificist to the backbone. He believed that war was the greatest of preventible evils, and that no war which had occurred in his lifetime had been justified by the laws of right and wrong. To-day that Pacificist is heart and soul with his countrymen in their struggle; and, having lived to see England engaged in a righteous war, he has changed his motto from "Rub lightly" to "Mak sicker."
Not less remarkable is the transformation of the liberty-lovers (among whom also the present writer has always reckoned himself). Four years ago we were eagerly and rightly on the alert to detect the slightest attempt by Ministers or bureaucrats or public bodies to invade our glorious privilege of doing and saying exactly what we like. To-day the pressure of the war has turned us into the willing subjects of a despotism. We tumble over each other in our haste to throwaway the liberties which we used to consider vital to our being; and some of us have been not merely the victims, but the active agents, of an administrative system which we believe to be necessary for the safety of the State.
But is there not a remnant? Have all the lovers of Liberty changed their garb and conned newparts? Not all. A remnant there is, and it is to be found in the House of Lords. This is perhaps the most astonishing feature of the "humorous stage"; and if, among superlatives, a super-superlative is possible, I reserve that epithet for the fact that the most vigorous champion of personal freedom in the House of Lords has been an ecclesiastical lawyer. From Lord Stowell to Lord Parmoor is indeed a far cry. Who could have dreamt that, even amid the upheaval of a world, a spokesman of liberty and conscience would emerge from the iron-bound precincts of the Consistory Court and the Vicar-General's Office?
Bishops again—not even these most securely placed of all British officials can escape the tendency to change which pervades the whole stage of public life. The Bishop of Winchester, whom all good Progressives used to denounce as a dark conspirator against the rights of conscience; the Bishop of Oxford, whom we were taught to regard as a Hildebrand and a Torquemada rolled into one—these admirable prelates emerge from the safe seclusion of Castle and Palace to rebuke the persecution of the Conscientious Objector, even when his objection is "nearly intolerable."
That the Press should have had its share in this general readjustment of parts was only natural; but even in what is natural there may be points of special interest. There is a weekly journal of high repute which has earned a secure place in the regard of serious-minded people by its lifelong sobriety, moderation, and respect for the prunesand prisms. When this staid old print, this steady-going supporter of all established institutions, bursts out in a furious attack on the man who has to bear the chief responsibility of the war, I can only rub my eyes in amazement. If a sheep had suddenly gone mad, and begun to bark and bite, the transformation could not have been more astonishing.
But I reserve my most striking illustration of the "humorous stage" for the last. Fifteen years ago it was the fashion to point at Lord Hugh Cecil as a belated upholder of exploded superstitions; as an "ecclesiastical layman" (the phrase was meant to be sarcastic) who lived in a realm of speculative theology, out of touch with all practical life; as a zealot, a bigot, a would-be persecutor; an interesting survival of the Middle Age; a monk who had strayed into politics. To-day we salute him as the one Member of Parliament who has had the courage to affirm the supremacy of the moral law, and to assert the imperious claim which Christianity makes on the whole of man's being.
THE JEWISH REGIMENT
It was an old and a true allegation against John Bull that he had no tact in dealing with other races than his own. He did not mean to be unjust or unfair, but he trampled on the sensitiveness, which he could not understand. In Ireland hecalled the Roman Catholic faith "a lie and a heathenish superstition"; or, in a lighter mood, made imbecile jokes about pigs and potatoes. In Scotland, thriftiness and oatmeal were the themes of his pleasantry; in Wales, he found the language, the literature, and the local nomenclature equally comic, and reserved his loudest guffaw for the Eisteddfod. Abroad, "Foreigners don't wash" was the all-embracing formula. Nasality, Bloomerism, and Dollars epitomized his notion of American civilization; and he cheerfully echoed the sentiments
"Of all who under Eastern skiesCall Aryan man a blasted nigger."
Now, of late years, John has altered his course. Some faint conception of his previous foolishness has dawned on his mind; and, as he is a thoroughly good fellow at heart, he has tried to make amends. The present war has taught him a good deal that he did not know before, and he renders a homage, all the more enthusiastic because belated, to the principle of Nationality. His latest exploit in this direction has been to suggest the creation of a Jewish Regiment. The intention was excellent and the idea picturesque; but for the practical business of life we need something more than good intentions and picturesque ideas. "Wisdom," said Ecclesiastes, "is profitable to direct;" and Wisdom would have suggested that it was advisable to consult Jewish opinion before the formation of a Jewish Regiment was proclaimed to the world. There is probably no race of peopleabout which John Bull has been so much mistaken as he has been about the Jews. Lord Beaconsfield's description of Mr. Buggins, with his comments on the Feast of Tabernacles in Houndsditch, is scarcely yet anachronistic.[*] But slowly our manners and our intelligence have improved in this as in other directions; and Lord Derby (who represents John Bull in his more refined development) thought that he would be paying his Jewish fellow-citizens a pretty compliment if he invited them to form a Jewish Regiment.
[Footnote *: SeeTancred, Book V., chapter vi.]
Historically, Lord Derby and those who applauded his scheme had a great deal to say for themselves. The remote history of Judaism is a history of war. The Old Testament is full of "the battle of the warrior" and of "garments rolled in blood." Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and David are names that sound like trumpets; and the great Maccabean Princes of a later age played an equal part with Romans and Lacedæmonians. All this is historically true; but it never occurred to Lord Derby and his friends that the idea which underlay their scheme is the opposite of that which animates modern Judaism. Broadly speaking, the idea of modern Judaism is not Nationality, but Religion. Mr. Lucien Wolf has lately reminded us that, according to authoritative utterances, "The Jews are neither a nation within a nation, nor cosmopolitan," but an integral part of the nations among whom they live, claiming the same rights and acknowledging the same dutiesas are claimed and acknowledged by their fellow-citizens. It is worth noticing that Macaulay accepted this position as disposing of the last obstacle to the civil and political enfranchisement of the English Jews, and ridiculed the notion that they would regard England, "not as their country, but merely as their place of exile." Mr. Wolf thus formulates his faith: "In the purely religious communities of Western Jewry we have the spiritual heirs of the law-givers, prophets, and teachers who, from the dawn of history, have conceived Israel, not primarily as a political organism, but as a nation of priests, the chosen servants of the Eternal."
Mr. Claude Montefiore, who is second to none as an interpreter of modern Judaism, has lately been writing in a similar strain. The Jew is a Jew in respect of his religion; but, for the ordinary functions of patriotism, fighting included, he is a citizen of the country in which he dwells. A Jewish friend of mine said the other day to a Pacificist who tried to appeal to him on racial grounds: "I would shoot a Jewish Prussian as readily as a Christian Prussian, if I found him fighting under the German flag." Thus, to enrol a regiment of Jews is about as wise as to enrol a regiment of Roman Catholics or of Wesleyan Methodists. Jews, Romans, and Wesleyans alike hold with laudable tenacity the religious faiths which they respectively profess; but they are well content to fight side by side with Anglicans, or Presbyterians, or Plymouth Brethren. They need no specialstandard, no differentiating motto. They are soldiers of the country to which they belong.
Here let me quote the exhilarating verses of a Jewish lady,[*] written at the time of the Boer War (March, 1900):
"Long ago and far away, O Mother England,We were warriors brave and bold,But a hundred nations rose in arms against us,And the shades of exile closed o'er those heroicDays of old.
"Thou hast given us home and freedom, Mother England.Thou hast let us live againFree and fearless 'midst thy free and fearless children,Sparing with them, as one people, grief and gladness,Joy and pain.
"Now we Jews, we English Jews, O Mother England,Ask another boon of thee!Let us share with them the danger and the glory;Where thy best and bravest lead, there let us followO'er the sea!
"For the Jew has heart and hand, our Mother England,And they both are thine to-day—Thine for life, and thine for death, yea, thine for ever!Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly?England, say!"
[Footnote *: Mrs. Henry Lucas (reprinted in herTalmudic Legends, Hymns and Paraphrases. Chatto and Windus, 1908).]
I am well aware that in what I have written, though I have been careful to reinforce myself with Jewish authority, I may be running counter to that interesting movement which is called "Zionism." It is not for a Gentile to take part in the dissensions of the Jewish community; butI may be permitted to express my sympathy with a noble idea, and to do so in words written by a brilliant Israelite, Lord Beaconsfield: "I do not bow to the necessity of a visible head in a defined locality; but, were I to seek for such, it would not be at Rome. When Omnipotence deigned to be incarnate, the ineffable Word did not select a Roman frame. The prophets were not Romans; the Apostles were not Romans; she, who was blessed above all women—I never heard that she was a Roman maiden. No; I should look to a land more distant than Italy, to a city more sacred even than Rome."[*]
[Footnote *:Sybil, Book II., chapter xii.]
INDURATION
Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent book on suffering calledLest We Grow Hard, and this is a very real peril against which it behoves everyone
"Who makes his moral being his prime care"
to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiargrace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.
It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he assigned to this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior—
"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!Turns his necessity to glorious gain";
and who, "as more exposed" than others "to suffering and distress," is
"Hence, also, more alive to tenderness."
This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth paid it. The brutal and senseless cry for "reprisals" which of late has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers and sailors and airmen. Of course, everyone knows that there is a sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare. Generation after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword tosword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes; this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation. And when, in more recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first employed.
But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand. They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians, and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are to commit the same foul deeds in Germany. "It is hard," says theChurch Times, "to say whether futility or immorality is the more striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in the matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.
A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes, safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim that they must be bombed by English airmen. What a function to impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!
I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance of clerical ferocity has lately been reported. A raving clergyman has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to preach. Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop rebuked him. Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that the latter is true. The established and endowed teachers of religion have not always used their influence on the side of mercy; but on the question of reprisals I have observed with thankfulness that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have spoken on the right side, and have spoken with energy and decision. They, at any rate, have escaped the peril of induration, and in that respect they are at one with the great mass of decent citizens.
I am no advocate of a mawkish lenity. When our soldiers and sailors and airmen meet our armed foes on equal terms, my prayers go with them; and the harder they strike, the better I am pleased. When a man or woman has committed a cold-blooded murder and has escaped the just penalty of the crime, I loathe the political intrigue which sets him or her free. Heavy punishment for savage deeds, remorseless fighting till victory is ours—these surely should be guiding principles in peace and war; and to hold them is no proof that one has suffered the process of induration.
Here I am not ashamed to make common cause with the stout old Puritan inPeveril of the Peak:"To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have poured forth the blood of our brethren."
But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"—it should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character: bestial, childish, stupid, scurrilous, tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth century must not sink below the moral level of Marcus Aurelius.