Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

—HENRY ADAMS

IN SPITE of my French turn for scepticism and for “burning my nightcap every morning,” which Louis XI recommended as sound diplomatic practice, sheer curiosity has now and then let me into some rather pointless adventures. They were of the sort which I knew well enough would come to nothing, but I thought the experiment would in itself, probably, be interesting enough to make it worth while. My editorial experience was a case of that kind; I have shown my reasons for undertaking editorial work for which I had not the slightest professional qualification, and I have also shown what came of it. I think it was towards the end of the ‘twenties, though I do not remember just when, that I was asked to do some teaching. One of my friends who was busy in that line, a man for whom I have great respect and affection, was very strong for my taking up with the proposal, and so I did. The idea was that I should settle down to it as a full-time occupation, but I demurred at that. My roots were firmly fixed in Europe, and I had no notion of pulling them up. It was agreed finally that I should come over for two months each winter, and give two courses. I did this for two years, and then having had enough of it to satisfy my curiosity, I gave it up.

Ever since I left college I had felt recurrent spasms of interest in the American system of education. The revolution which took place towards the turn of the century made an impression on me, enough so that I was rather keen to see what would come of it, and therefore whenever I was in this country I looked over its development in a general way. In course of time I came to some pretty definite conclusions about this development, and about its social effects. I even went as far as writing two or three fugitive essays for Harper’s and the Atlantic on certain phases of the subject. But all this was from the outside. I had no experience, no practical acquaintance with the educational machinery which the revolutionary forces had designed and built. So when the chance for an inside view came along I decided that it would probably be worth taking.

The students who sat under me were presumably, I believe, something of a picked lot; something, that is, rather above than below the level of intelligence set by “the average student,” whatever that may signify. They may have been all of that; I am not in a position to commit myself on this point. What struck me with peculiar force was that only one out of the whole batch was taking work with me because he wanted to learn something about my subject. Most of them were taking it as a filler. They sat where they did because they had to sit somewhere in order to meet some requirement in an intricate system of “credits,” and the most convenient place for them to sit happened to be in my lecture-room. Some were there for purposes connected with their prospective ways of getting a living. The majority, however, for all I could make out, were there because they were, at the moment, nowhere else; they put me in mind of the cheerful old drinking-song which we used to sing to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:

We’re here because

We’re here because

We’re here because

We’re here.

In spite of persistent effort, neither they nor I could produce any more plausible reason why they were there, or for that matter, why they should be anywhere. The point is that with one exception, these persons did not regard the subject as one to be pursued disinterestedly for its own sake. They were not even moved to it by an impulse of intellectual curiosity; they simply cared nothing about it.

This state of things was not exceptional, or at all peculiar to the institution which I served. Any one who understood the philosophy of economism and who knew how well our educational system had been formed to fit its requirements, would expect to find just those conditions prevailing in any American college or university. He would expect to find the student body divisible into two groups, the first made up of those who were there in a sort of social quarantine. They had come to get a further respite from going to work, or to make advantageous social contacts, or because it was in fashion for everybody to go to college, or for some equally irrelevant reason or combination of reasons. The second and larger group would be made up of those who were in pursuit of such studies as bore directly on their preparation for getting a living. Outside these groups one might expect to find now and then a person of some pretensions to intelligence, some conception of education as a formative process; one who had intellectual interests unconnected with getting a living, and who had perhaps also a vague suspicion that the philosophy of economism falls a trifle short of covering the whole content and purpose of our existence on this earth.

II

I was greatly interested in seeing that our system of free popular instruction was producing results, both negative and positive, which were quite different from those which its original designers expected it to produce. As Herbert Spencer has shown, no man or body of men has ever been wise enough to foresee and take account of all the factors affecting blanket-measures designed for the improvement of incorporated humanity. Some contingency unnoticed, unlooked-for, perhaps even unforeknown, has always come in to give the measure a turn entirely foreign to its original intention; almost always a turn for the worse, sometimes for the better, but invariably different. It is this which predestines to ultimate failure every collectivist scheme of “economic planning,” “social security” and the like, even if it were ever so honestly conceived and incorruptibly administered; which as long as Epstean’s law remains in force, no such scheme can be.

Our system was founded in all good faith that universal elementary education would make a citizenry more intelligent; whereas most obviously it has done nothing of the kind. The general level of intelligence in our citizenry stands exactly where it stood when the system was established. The promoters of our system, Mr. Jefferson among them, did not know, and could not know, because the fact had not been determined, that the average age at which the development of intelligence is arrested lies somewhere between twelve and thirteen years. It is with intelligence as it is with eyesight. No oculist can give one any more eyesight than one has; he can only regulate what one has. So education can regulate what intelligence one has, but it can not give one any more. It was this unforeseen provision in nature’s economy which wrecked the expectations put upon our system. As for raising the general level of intelligence, the sluicing-out of any amount of education on our citizenry would simply be pouring water on a duck’s back.

Aside from this negative result, I saw that our system had achieved a positive result. If it had done nothing to raise the general level of intelligence, it had succeeded in making our citizenry much more easily gullible. It tended powerfully to focus the credulousness of Homo sapiens upon the printed word, and to confirm him in the crude authoritarian or fetishistic spirit which one sees most highly developed, perhaps, in the habitual reader of newspapers. By being inured to taking as true whatever he read in his schoolbooks and whatever his teachers told him, he is bred to a habit of unthinking acquiescence, rather than to an exercise of such intelligence as he may have. In later life he puts this habit at the unreasoning service of his prejudices. Having not the slightest sense of what constitutes a competent authority, he tends to take as authoritative whatever best falls in with his own disorderly imaginings.

Thus a system of State-controlled compulsory popular instruction is a great aid in making Homo sapiens an easy mark for whatever deleterious nonsense may be presented to him under the appearance of authority. One does not have to go farther than the account which the Pickwick Papers give of the great election at Eatanswill to see how this is so. The spread of literacy enabled Mr. Pott of the Gazette and Mr. Slurk of the Independent to approach the credulousness of a greater number of people than they could otherwise reach, and to debauch their credulousness much more effectively. It enabled Mr. Pott to play upon the meanest prejudices of the Blues, and Mr. Slurk to inflame the worst passions of the Buffs; and thus to keep alive the feud of ignorant partisanship, like the feud of the Greens and Blues in Rome and Byzantium so long ago, or the feud of Whigs and Tories, Democrats and Republicans, Black Shirts and Red Shirts, in more recent years. Mr. Pott and Mr. Slurk knew as well as the editor of today’s newspaper knows, that what best holds people together in pursuance of a common purpose is a spirit of concentrated hate and fear. They knew that their constituents, Blue and Buff alike, were a mere mob, intellectually as irresponsible as the wild dogs of Algiers, and that an appeal to intelligence would be vain, nay, embarrassing. “Mere reason and good sense,” said Lord Chesterfield, “is never to be talked to a mob. Their passions, their sentiments, their senses and their seeming interests are alone to be applied to. Understanding, they have collectively none.” I am reminded here of an acute French critic’s remark made almost a century ago, that this observation of Lord Chesterfield constitutes one of the most serious arguments against representative government. In my opinion it is by far the most serious argument; indeed, I believe a century of experience has shown that it is the only argument needed. One may confidently rest one’s case on it.

I observed that the course of our educational revolution had followed the regular pattern common to all revolutions; but knowing the inflexible laws which prescribe that pattern, I was not disappointed or taken aback. “The sense of the inevitable” which Mr. van Loon speaks of had warned me that the inevitable upshot of other revolutions would be the inevitable upshot of this one. As soon as the system was on its way to become a going concern with the taxing-power of the State behind it, the path of least resistance lay open to a rapidly-increasing flow of persons whose interest in education was secondary. These were careerists of sorts, impelled by the fundamental law of conduct, that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Then the general estimate, the currency-value, of education,—the generally-accepted idea of what education is and ought to be,—was set by the worst form in circulation, a form which had virtually nothing to do with education, but only with training; and those forms which had more to do with education were forced out. Then finally, after the system had passed a certain point of development in size, power and prestige, the percentage of net profit (putting the matter in commercial terms) began to show a steady decline.

Furthermore, the curiously composite public character of the system, as I observed it in the late ‘twenties, interested me as having likewise come out inevitably according to pattern; the pattern set in earlier times by the Church, and now by the State. As a State-controlled enterprise maintained by taxation, virtually a part of the civil service (like organised Christianity in England and in certain European countries) the system had become an association de propaganda fide for the extreme of a hidebound nationalism and of a superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw it functioning as a sort of sanhedrim, a levelling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-unionist body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests; and one noticed that in this capacity it occasionally took shape as an extremely well-disciplined and powerful political pressure-group.

During my brief and unserviceable career as an instructor of youth I had a good many hearty laughs whenever I thought of the quiet fun one might have with Mr. Jefferson if he could return to the Republic and see what his pet project of universal popular instruction had come to. I had studied his character rather carefully, and could not make out that the great and good old man had been blessed with an over-keen sense of humour. Apparently he had enough to go on with, but not much more, and what he had was of a dry type. I think, however, he would have risked a wry smile at the spectacle of our colleges annually turning out whole battalions of bachelors in the liberal arts who could no more read their diplomas than they could decipher the Minoan linear script. He might also find something to amuse him in the appearance of eminent shysters, jobholders, politicians, and other unscholarly and unsavoury characters, on parade in gowns and hoods of the honorary doctorate. Yet it would probably occur to him that academic misdemeanours of evil example were not unknown even in his own day. Only some half-dozen years after Mr. Jefferson’s death, Harvard College admitted to its doctorate a man whom John Quincy Adams very properly described as a barbarian, incapable of putting a grammatical sentence together, and barely able to spell his own name—Andrew Jackson.

One can not be sure that Mr. Jefferson would look with the eye of humour upon certain other results of the system’s working. I suppose that in the whole country today one would have to go a good long way to find a boy or girl of twenty who does not automatically take for granted that the citizen exists for the State, not the State for the citizen; that the individual has no rights which the State is bound to respect; that all rights are State-created; that the State is morally irresponsible; that personal government is quite consistent with democracy, provided, of course, it be exercised in the right country and by the right kind of person; that collectivism changes character according to the acceptability of the peoples who practice it. Such is the power of conditioning inherent in a State-controlled system of compulsory popular instruction.

When it came to matters like these, Mr. Jefferson was an extremely serious and outspoken person. I doubt that he would be in the least amused by the turn which his pet project has given them since his time; and not only in his own country, but in all countries where his project has taken root. On the contrary, I believe he would regard the entire exhibit with unstinted disgust and contempt.

III

Back in the days when I was doing editorial work, immediately after the war, I had heard so much exasperating talk about education that I became heartily sick of the word. War, like whisky, engenders seasons of repentance, and that was one of them. The post-war dislocations, disturbances and distresses got no end of well-meaning people stirred up over the idea that nothing of the kind should ever be allowed to happen again. They wrote, printed, lectured, organised clubs, associations, forums, brought forth reconstruction-plans, peace-plans, and the devil-and-all of other plans and projects designed to educate war off the face of the earth. I was astonished at their number; one would hardly believe there could be so many. Everything I remember of them now is that they were all very strong for education, highly articulate, highly ineffectual, and did not last long.

My occupation obliged me, for my sins, to keep more or less track of these doings, but I went no further than that with any of them; and with most of them, if the truth must be told, I rather scamped my job. None of them contemplated anything really fundamental. One might agree that if people can be educated to a common will in pursuance of a common purpose to abolish war, the purpose will no doubt be accomplished; but the main question surely is whether, if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the thing can be done at all; and the second question, if the first be answered in the affirmative, is how to set about it. I saw no evidence that the main question had ever even entered the heads of these enthusiasts, or that the second had been entertained in any but a superficial, handover-head fashion which could produce nothing practicable or even sensible. Some of the more adventurous spirits, apparently under the effects of Mr. Wilsons inspiration, went so far as to propose educating all mankind into setting up a World State which should supersede the separatist nationalist State; on the principle, so it seemed, that if a spoonful of prussic acid will kill you, a bottleful is just what you need to do you a great deal of good. I did not join forces with any of the groups engaged in these endeavours. I was as much against war as they were, and as much in favour of education as any one could be; and I also had the highest respect for their earnestness and devotion. But I knew, as they apparently did not, that if you go in for education you must first make sure of having something educable to educate; and second, you must have some one with a clear and competent idea of what he is about, to do the educating. I saw no prospect that either condition would be met. With the average of intelligence standing immovable at the thirteen-year-old level, I knew that the first one could not possibly be met; and as for the second, even in the case of the educable, it would be a Sisyphean job to offset the processes of intensive conditioning which the State continually applies to its citizens, beginning from the first day of their conscription into its system of compulsory instruction, and ending on the last day of their lives.

Another numerous body of opinion had a grievance against war, but it was rather particular than general. They did not make so much of moral and humanitarian issues as the others did, though probably in principle they disapproved of war quite as heartily. Their particular contention, however, was that never again should the United States pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire but its own. The outcome of the war bore hard on those who had swallowed the jobholders’ glib mendacity about the enterprise being a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. When it finally became clear that the war was no such noble undertaking as all that, but was merely a disreputable scuffle for loot, exactly like the wars which for untold ages had preceded it, those who had accepted it in good faith as a crusade for righteousness felt that they had been outrageously let in, and made no bones of saying what they thought about it.

I was not one of this number, for I had already cut my eye-teeth on the Spanish War. My observations of foreign affairs since the days of McKinley and John Hay convinced me that what British jobholders were wanting in 1914 was exactly what British jobholders had wanted in 1898. It was clear to me in 1898, as I have already said somewhere in these pages, that the British Foreign Office had constantly before its eyes the vision of a world at peace, dominated and operated by British imperialism, with the United States kept in hand to act as a bouncer and pay heavily for the privilege, whenever malcontents became obstreperous. I could make nothing else of Mr. Hay’s conduct; of the British Colonial Secretary’s “blowing the gaff”; and of our military and diplomatic doings in the Pacific. The Spanish War had turned out to be a tradesmen’s war; there was no doubt of it. So when the war of 1914 came on, I bent a jaundiced eye upon its officially-advertised aims and motives, for I knew too much of what had been going on in European politics since 1910 to believe a word of them. When the secret treaties came to light after the Bolshevist revolution, and the reports of Belgian diplomatists in Berlin, Paris and London were published, the whole rationale of the war was shown to be just what one would know it must be. When the peace-terms were seen to correspond with the terms of the secret treaties and not with those of the infatuated Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it could surprise no one. When the League of Nations proved to be only a blind for jobholders intent on maintaining the status quo, what else could one expect?

I felt somewhat sorry for the gudgeons who had been hooked by the lies of jobholders and their tagtails of the press, pulpit and platform, as one must always feel sorry for the victims of any set of common swindlers; but I did not see how anything could be done about it. I thought the hardest trial they had to bear must be the memory of all the appalling drivel they had poured forth in their spasms of pseudopatriotic ardour. During the war I often witnessed the sorry spectacle of old acquaintances, normally quite cool-headed persons, emitting great volumes of lurid nonsense about “the mad dog of Europe” and his murderous designs on the world in general; and how if Britain and France should fall, the whole structure of Western civilisation (for so they naïvely called it) would collapse in ruin. What must they have thought of themselves when daylight finally broke in on them!

I never disputed or discussed these views,—what was there to discuss?—but I often recalled them afterwards when projects of “education for peace” were being broached. I could imagine how far any of these projects, or all of them put together, would be likely to get with an average popular mentality capable at any time, on twenty-four hours’ notice, of being sent clean daft by any egregious canard that officialdom saw fit to disseminate. Writing from Rome in 1536 to the bishop of Maillezais, the great realist Rabelais grimly cites Claudian’s line, Mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus. So it did in 1914, virtually overnight; and conditions being what they were, I saw no way of ever educating it to do otherwise thereafter.

But after all, as I reflected on the wild whirling words of my acquaintances, I asked myself is not all this just democracy? As I understand the term, it is of the very essence of democracy that the individual citizen shall be invested with the inalienable and sovereign right to make an ass of himself; and furthermore, that he shall be invested with the sovereign right of publicity to tell all the world that he is doing so. I do not know whether these rights are implicit in the Magna Carta, but if a sufficient political interest were at stake no doubt the Supreme Court could discover that they somehow are. I do know, however, that they are expressly stipulated in the American Bill of Rights; they are declared beyond peradventure in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Well then, if any citizen or body of citizens chooses to exercise these sovereign rights, on any pretext or on none, is it competent for another member of the democracy to demur or interfere? I think not; but however this may be, why in the name of common sense should an intelligent person have the least wish to interfere?

So when in their course of killing off the Kaiser and his myrmidons by word of mouth, my vehement acquaintances now and then paused to catch their breath, I would say, “Yes, yes, exactly—just so—I quite understand you,” and let it go at that.

Dans le pays des bossus

II faut l’être

Ou le paraître.

IV

I have always been profoundly grateful for my luck in having been enabled in my early youth to understand that education is one thing and training quite another, and thus to avoid the vicious errors resulting from confusion of the two terms. It can not be too often reiterated that education is a process contemplating intelligence and wisdom, and employing formative knowledge for its purposes; while training is a process contemplating sagacity and cleverness, and employing instrumental knowledge for its purposes. Education, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the way of an Emerson; while training, properly applied to suitable material, produces something in the way of an Edison. Suitable material for education is extremely scarce; suitable material for training abounds everywhere. The young men I saw during my brief term of service as a teacher (not those in particular who sat under me, but generally) were manifestly ineducable beyond the thirteen-year static level of intelligence; but they were fully endowed with cleverness and sagacity, and were capable of being excellently well trained in any number of ways.

When one considers man’s place in nature, one gets a firm grasp on this distinction. In our loose and inaccurate speech, we say commonly that man rose to dominance over the rest of the animal world in virtue of his superior intelligence. I can find no evidence that this is so. It seems clear, on the contrary, that he rose to this position of dominance in virtue of his immeasurably superior cleverness and sagacity. He had the sharp-set Edisonian sagacity to notice all manner of things that were about him, to observe their relations and reactions, what they did and how they worked, and he had the Edisonian cleverness in rearranging, modifying and adapting them for the satisfaction of his needs and desires. But intelligence, properly so called, would seem to have been as sporadic, as unevenly distributed, as it is now, and its average level undoubtedly neither lower nor higher.

When I was an undergraduate student I read the elaborate work called Anti-Lucretius, by the accomplished French cardinal-statesman or statesman-cardinal, Melchior de Polignac, written to refute the neo-Epicurean doctrines which had been promulgated at that time by Gassendi and others. I was much impressed by a long passage in the sixth book, in which the cardinal shows how primitive man got his start in the world by observing the practices of other animals and improving on them. Philosophically, the Anti-Lucretius can hardly be said to have hit the mark, perhaps, but it is an excellent specimen of seventeenth-century hexameter, well worth my quoting a few lines from the passage I have mentioned. They give a thought-provoking view of various tricks which our sagacious and clever ancestors picked up in this way, such as dam-building, deer-stalking, netting birds and fish, mining, and even the lighter arts of dancing, acting and petty larceny:

Hinc aliquas vitiis, aliquas virtutibus olim

Insignes dixere feras; hominique fuisse

Primitus exemplo, atque opera ad complura magistras:

Ut canis occultum silvis deprendere Damam

Nare sagax, et odora sequi vestigia praedae,

Veneri docuit....

Forte etiam insidias Vulpes, artemque latendi,

Perque canaliculos fodiendae subtus arenae

Monstravit, fecitque viam ad querenda metalla;

Unde homines docti coeperunt viscera terrae

Rimari....

Et quid non Elephas, quid mimo Simia gestu

Non praestat; vafra et Felis; saltator et Ursus?...

Paxillos in aquam primus defigere Castor

Instituit, laribusque inimicum avertere flumen,

Et ligna intrito atque intritum jungere lignis;...

Callida quinetiam dum tendit Aranea laxos

In foribus casses, internectitque sagenam,

Retibus et pisces et aves captare dolosis

Admonuit.

So the passage goes on through many more instances of the same kind. But as far as my reading goes, the clearest and most interesting brief précis of what pure sagacity and pure cleverness have done for mankind is found in the sixth chapter of Mr. Charles F. Lummis’s remarkable work called Flowers of Our Lost Romance. This excellent book was published in 1929, so I suppose it has been long out of print, but if one can find a copy of it anywhere it will be worth all the trouble one has had to look for it.

It was this great endowment of cleverness and sagacity which enabled the frail, feeble and unintelligent Homo sapiens in the first instance to survive, and then to gain dominance over his more physically-powerful competitors in the struggle for existence. Furthermore it was this, and this only, which has enabled him to build up the prodigious apparatus of civilisation which with unconscious humour he persists in regarding as evidential of civilisation itself. I can not make out where intelligence played any part in the process; still less, wisdom. The satirist’s view of man’s creation is certainly not without the appearance of reason. One can see an uproarious cosmic jest (and I think by no means a bitter one; on the contrary, I should regard it as harmless, even on the whole, benevolent) in the idea of creating a being with enough sagacity and cleverness to harness all the forces of nature in constructing the most elaborate mechanism of civilisation, and then not giving him intelligence enough to civilise himself, or even to understand what civilisation means.

Here then, in the inordinate lack of balance between these two sets of forces,—sagacity and cleverness on the one hand, intelligence and wisdom on the other,—I perceived a valid reason why the social agglomerations of mankind are so unstable. They can be stabilised only by the continuous exercise of a very considerable and generally-diffused intelligence and wisdom; and these are simply not to be had, they do not exist, have never existed, and at present one sees no prospect that they ever will. Homo sapiens has already gone so astonishingly far in the progress which Goethe predicted, without any corresponding advance in intelligence and wisdom, as to make it easily conceivable that in the long-run he may perish through his own inventions. Goethe himself, with a poet’s insight, had an uneasy suspicion of something like this. In the next sentence after his prediction he says, “I foresee the time when God will have no further pleasure in man, but will break up everything for a new creation.” There is a pleasing touch of irony in the thought that the forces which have enabled Homo sapiens to survive and dominate, and to indulge in all manner of inflated conceits about himself, his merits, and his importance,—that these forces may very easily be the ones to bring about his annihilation. The broken sentence found graven on the tomb of one of the Scipios, words which for sombrous majesty have no equal in any literature, might well serve as an epitaph upon the race. Qui apicem gessisti... mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, gloria atque ingenium.

V

Circumstances being as they are, one has no trouble about seeing that a State-controlled system of popular instruction is bound to lean heavily to the side of training, since the trainable masses stand immeasurably in excess of the educable few. But by looking a little beyond this, one can perceive another reason, equally valid, why the system should tend to be stepmotherly with the educable few; that reason being that the coercive collectivist State is distinctly uninterested in the cultivation of intelligence and wisdom. This is understandable, and there can be no complaint of it, for the State has no uses to which persons of intelligence and wisdom can be put. It is notorious that the State’s affairs can be successfully carried on only by persons of sagacity and cleverness, heavily tempered with improbity. We all accept this fact as matter-of-course and agreeable to the nature of things, which it unquestionably is; the proof of it is found in the invariable character of those who are most conspicuous in administering those affairs. Sometimes when an autocratic ruler wishes to make an impression of enlightenment, he will put men of intelligence and wisdom in some conspicuous sinecure as window-dressing, or confer some kind of ostentatious patronage on them, as Catherine II did with d’Alembert and others of the Encyclopaedists; but in all these instances the motive is political. Speaking of Napoleon’s patronage of men such as Fontanes, Joubert, Chateaubriand, Count Lüxburg put it very well that “he considers these people as drugs of the imperial pharmocopœia, ingredients to be mixed up in the chemical mass of an emperor’s government.”

But throughout history the man of intelligence and wisdom has been merely so much useless lumber in view of the State’s purposes. Voltaire’s gay epigram on le superflu, chose trèsnecessaire has distinctly not been applicable to him. Often indeed, like the Swifts, Arnolds, Butlers, Gilberts, Shaws, he has been something of an embarrassment. In England at the time of the Tangier incident, I could not keep back a smile,—rather sardonic, I am afraid,—at the thought that if the British State had ten thousand of the world’s wisest and most intelligent men at its disposal, it could not find a single thing for them to do which would not be most dreadfully embarrassing. When I was next in England, four years later, intelligence and wisdom would not have exempted a Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, if of military age, from conscript service as a private in the front line, side by side with the half-witted; what other use would the State have had for his proficiencies? It all seemed natural and reasonable enough, and I could not get stirred up about it, as so many were. What was the best that the State could find to do with an actual Socrates and an actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison the one and crucify the other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be allowed to live any longer.

On the other hand, the State can use as much highly-developed sagacity and cleverness as its institutions can turn out. There is room to spare for these everywhere throughout its bureaucracy and in the wide field of its practical politics. The State could do nothing with a thousand Emersons, but it would count itself lucky if it could build its personnel on the foundation of a thousand persons who had all of Edison’s highly-trained sagacity and cleverness, and none of his integrity. There is no need to press this point, however; every one understands it. Why, then, should a State-controlled system of instruction do more than go through the motions of dealing with an educable minority? I see no reason why it should. It is perfectly logical that it should not; the disparagement of intelligence and wisdom is all in the general “course of rebarbarisation” on which Spencer saw so clearly that Western society had set forth nearly a century ago. It is inevitable, and therefore the part of wisdom is not to resent it or deplore it or think overmuch about it.

At one time I had the notion that our system might do a little better than it was doing by the educable minority. I thought that with all its innumerable training-schools for the ineducable, it might establish two or three modest institutions which should be strictly educational, devoted to cultivating intelligence in those who gave proof of having it, and holding out the attainment of wisdom as an end preëminently desirable for its own sake. The idea seemed unpretentious enough, and putting it into effect as an experiment would cost relatively little. I went on the assumption that although persons of intelligence and wisdom were no asset to the State, they might be something of an asset to society, and were therefore worth a moderate amount of attention. I had not actually given the matter much thought, however, and as soon as I turned it over in my mind I perceived that it was nothing to be taken seriously; for obviously, whether or not such persons are an asset to society depends altogether on the kind of society you have, on what philosophy governs it, on what it is trying to make of itself, what it is driving at. As soon, then, as I found myself back on the solid ground of reason and logic, I saw that our system was all in the right, and that my notion of the educable minority being a potential social asset was quite wrong.

All this again is so completely in the course of nature, so orderly and logical, that I saw no reason why one should feel any bitterness about it or complain of it, though I knew that many did feel great bitterness. I remember having been much impressed many years ago by the dedication of a novel by Jules Vallès, the revolutionist of 1870 and member of the Commune. I think the title was Le Bachelier, though I am not sure; I was so little taken with the book itself that I have forgotten. The dedication ran:

à tous ceux qui, nourris de grec et

de latin, sont morts de faim.

But I asked myself why, when all comes to all, should they not die of starvation? I saw no reason. They were useless to the State, useless to economism, and they mustered far too few votes to interest a political collectivist humanitarianism, so how could either the State or society be reasonably expected to keep them alive? “And to think,” cried Voltaire, in a burst of wrath, “that an army-contractor makes $4000 in a day!” I could not share his indignation. That army-contractor was a man of sagacity and cleverness who was performing an indispensable service to the State’s iniquitous undertakings; and if he could turn a trick to net himself $4000 by way of a day’s pickings, his service was no doubt worth it from the State’s point of view. During the war of 1914 I saw fortunes made in this way by sagacious men who one might think were considerably overpaid, but a moment’s reflection would show that the question depended on the point of view from which one estimated the value of their services. From the point of view of civilised man, that is to say the psychically-human being, those services were of no value; but from that of the anthropoid mass-man they were of great value. Hence I could find nothing out of the way in the State’s liberality, and so far from sharing Voltaire’s indignation against it in a like case, I thought it was very just. As I saw the matter in 1914, the psychically-anthropoid masses of democracy were accepting the State’s designs and even whole-heartedly glorifying them; and moreover, ex hypothesi it is never the State’s business to promote civilisation. So to expect the State to take Voltaire’s point of view on the sagacious war-profiteer seemed to me most illogical; and for a critical observer to take that point of view seemed not only illogical, but also,—which is no doubt a more serious irregularity,—undemocratic.

VI

When I was surveying educational matters at closer range than ordinarily, what impressed me most was the dissatisfaction of professional educationists with the results produced by our system. Complaints on this score, coming as they did from many of the most distinguished men in the service, seemed almost innumerable, and they were expressed with a force-fulness betokening disappointment and grievance. One conference of educationists, I remember, wound up in fairly general agreement, according to the press-reports, that our system is a failure. The president of a huge straggling university said despondently that our undergraduate colleges had been trying for forty years to find an effective substitute for the discarded classical curriculum, and had not yet succeeded. Reports made under the auspices of various foundations amounted actually to indictments. On a distinguished public occasion one educationist said that the type of education offered by our million-dollar high schools is about one-twentieth as valuable as the type offered by the little red schoolhouse of a past generation. I am told that these lamentations continued unabated long after I had ceased to keep any track of them. In fact, only two or three years ago I happened on a searching deliverance from the president of one of our largest colleges for women, and found it quite in the old familiar vein. I quote a few lines from it because in a general way they set forth the main ground of all the complaints I had been reading in the ’twenties:

Any one who has opportunity to meet and study in large numbers the alumni of the American colleges is likely to have attacks of depression. In spite of the vast investment of money and energy in these institutions it is only too clear that in a great many cases education has failed to “take,” or the infection has been so slight that few traces are to be perceived after five or ten years of the wear and tear of American life.

I thought that this complaint which as I said is typical, would stand a little sifting. While I had felt every sympathy with the system’s critics and was in complete agreement with them about the validity of the facts which they brought forward, I could not agree that the system was in quite such a bad way as they thought it was. They impressed me as being either victims of confusion about what exactly the system was supposed to drive at, or else victims of a rather serious failure in realism, a failure to see things in their true nature and appraise them for what they are. In forming estimates of this kind, one must above all be realistic; one must remain as little as possible unaffected by prejudice, convention or sentiment, no matter how generally laudable these may be. On all these grounds I was as far on the side of the complainants as it was possible for a child of the old educational régime to go; I was with them as far as the combined forces of prejudice, convention and sentiment could carry me. Nevertheless, in a clear view of the requirements which the State puts upon the system, and the requirements which the ruling social doctrine of economism puts upon it, and the inexorable prescriptions which nature puts upon it, I could not see but that it was doing an extremely good job.

In the first place, how can education “take” when those who are exposed to it have had nature’s gift of complete immunity conferred on them at the age of twelve or thereabouts? Any such expectation is manifestly and preposterously exorbitant. Training will “take” to some extent in almost any instance where it does not encounter absolute imbecility, but education will not. If education contemplates intelligence and wisdom—and what else can it contemplate?—one who for years had been president of a notable college for women must surely have perceived that the vast majority of his students were ineducable. He could do great things for them in the way of sagacity and cleverness; he could make them excellent routineer biologists, botanists, geologists, chemists, perhaps even passable cooks and housekeepers if his institution carried the requisite equipment; he could make them good grammarians, philologists, even historians, all of a psittacene type; but educate them he could not.

In the second place, why should education be expected to “take” in a society where the qualities of intelligence and wisdom are of necessity classified not even as by-products of its corporate life, but as waste-products? These qualities notoriously play no part in the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth, and therefore a social philosophy which regards this process as accounting for the whole content and purpose of mankind’s existence must write them off as so much slag.

So in all this I found no reason why a clear-minded person should be “likely to have attacks of depression.” I certainly experienced none. “Things and actions are what they are,” said Bishop Butler, “and the consequences of them will be what they will be.” There the State was, fixed, immovable, standing as the great instrument of economic exploitation; there also was the philosophy of economism; there also was a system of compulsory popular instruction, answering to the requirements of both. In its great work of training and conditioning the ineducable masses, I thought our system was doing, on the whole, a first-rate job, and I said so publicly. As for the educable minority, they were merely casualties of the time and circumstances into which they were born, and that was that. The whole course of things seemed to me perfectly logical, orderly, with each step making the next one inevitable in the long sequence of cause and effect, “the chancellors of God,” as Emerson so well and truly calls them. There seemed no incentive to depression or fault-finding anywhere in the sequence; the aspect of nature’s great Inevitable is too august, too admirable, to admit of either.

For a brief time I had a notion that in the interest of simple straightforwardness and honesty all systems such as ours might do very well to give up their nugatory fiddling with degenerate fag-ends of what used to be known as the “humanities,” and throw them on the dust-heap for good and all. I did not set much store by this notion, however, for one could see plainly that they must come to that in the natural course of things; indeed, in the ’twenties one could see that they must come to it very soon. Coercive collectivism was on its way throughout the Western world, and logically the first thing for the coercive collectivist State to do, as soon as it had got itself well established, would be to shut down firmly on all instruction which did not bear intensively on conditioning its children and young people to an unquestioning ex animo acceptance of the State’s will; and this would of course do away with even the sleaziest sort of education. It may be imagined with what interest I remarked how promptly the Fascist government of Italy fulfilled my expectations by doing just that, and since then how regularly the other great coercive collectivist governments in both hemispheres have followed the Fascist example.

It has been profoundly interesting to me to observe how closely the nationalist State’s technique of conditioning its citizens into an attitude of docile servility follows that of the mediæval Church. Up to the sixteenth century the Church was the great instrument of exploitation, as the State is now. The individual was born into the Church, and the Church’s superintendence regulated every step of his daily existence as long as he lived. Its coercions, interferences and exactions were limited only by calculation of what the traffic would bear. In pursuance of its purposes it devised an elaborate system of conditioning; and in the sixteenth century, when the nationalist State took over its purposes and hamstrung its competition, it also took over its technique of cultivating obedience and docility in its subjects. On this point I can do no better than to quote from one of Mr. Carlton J. H. Hayes’s admirable essays on nationalism:

Nowadays the individual is born into the State, and the secular registration of birth is the national rite of baptism. With tender solicitude the State follows the individual through life, teaching him in patriotic schools the national catechism, and commemorating his vital crises by formal registration not only of his birth, but likewise of his marriage, of the birth of his children, and of his death. And the death of national potentates and heroes is celebrated by patriotic pomp and circumstance that make the obsequies of a mediæval bishop seem drab.... Nationalism’s chief symbol of faith and central object of morality is the flag, and curious liturgical forms have been devised for ‘saluting’ the flag, for ‘dipping’ the flag, and for hoisting’ the flag.... Nationalism has its parades, processions and pilgrimages. It has, moreover, its distinctive holy days, and just as the Christian Church adapted certain pagan festivals to its own use, so the National State has naturally borrowed from Christianity.... Every national State has a ‘theology,’ a more or less systematised body of official doctrines which have been deduced from the precepts of the ‘Fathers’ and from admonitions of the national scriptures, and which reflect the ‘genius of the people’ and constitute a guide to national behavior.

It has taken a good three hundred years for the superstitions cultivated by the Church’s system of conditioning to show signs of wearing off, and they are not yet by any means worn off. From this one may infer that the kindred superstitions cultivated by the nationalist State’s system have a fairish lease of life, and that their manifestations will remain pretty much what they are. For a man of his ability and experience, the late Senator Borah seemed to me singularly naïve in his saying that “the marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.” To me the marvel is that any one can marvel at it.

Thus logic and the course of events in the ‘twenties combined their forces to convince me that the well-disposed persons whom I saw hopefully relying on education to bring about world-peace, to achieve some semblance of a civilised society, or to fulfil some other grandiose collective purpose, were leaning on a broken staff. Their hopes were based on an egregious misconception of man’s place in nature, of his intellectual and psychical accessibility, of the laws which mainly determine his conduct; and finally, they were based on an enormously erroneous conception of the State’s character and function. Such being the case, it appeared to me impossible that these hopes could come to anything but speedy and overwhelming disaster, as they now seem to have done.

                              

1 For an illustration of this point I may again refer to Mr. Marquand’s novel passim; and I might take this occasion to remark that H. M. Pulham, Esquire is in my judgement the nearest thing to adult fiction that has come from an American pen in many years.

• 1If the whole content and purpose of mankind’s existence can be summed up in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth, it is impossible to see where intelligence and wisdom come in for a footing. A society completely committed to the philosophy of economism has no more use for them than the State has; naturally so, since in such a society the State is the organised expression of economism. Hence such a society has nothing to gain by the presence of wise and intelligent persons; they are not a social asset. The best it can find to do with them is to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water for the sagacious and clever majority. The young person of intelligence who sets out to “get wisdom, get understanding,” as the Jewish Scriptures exhort him to do (and it is interesting to look up these exhortations and see how many and how forcible they are) does so in full knowledge that society will continually be reminding him in various well-understood ways, mostly rather harsh, that he is wasting his time and should be doing something useful.