AUTHORITY: CONSCIENCE AND THE OFFENCES.

The Egoist: No. 15, Vol. 1, August 1st, 1914.

by Dora Marsden

I DO not remember which of Matthew Arnold's commentators it was-though all my readers doubtless will-who made the observation that the poet in the lyric lines "Meeting," addressed "To Marguerite," is unconsciously confused by a mistake as to identity among his dramatis personae. Says Arnold:

"I spring to make my choice,
Again in tones of ire
I hear a God's tremendous voice
' Be counsell'd and retire.'"

Of course, says the critic, Arnold had confused God with Mrs. Grundy. The remark shows how completely an earnest critic may gaze with blind eye upon the most pronounced characteristics of his subject. The critic has failed to see that there is in those four lines the unmistakable cachet of the epicure in blended emotions. Perhaps it is in part due to the unseeing visions of such commentaries that Arnold is not much read now, which is a pity, because he is the cultured choice flower of that superabundant species which at present threatens to cover the earth, but which is found only in its meaner varieties.

With Arnold, the knowledge how to treat the thin and febrile among emotions was a consummated instinct. Just where the strength of emotions ended, he made actual his opportunity as confectioner and played the artist with them as a good cook will with an insipid vegetable, the insipidity of which occasions the opportunity to work in the foreign flavours.

Where the strength of emotion equates into the fear of discomfort and the clacking tongues of-

" All the rest,
Eight parents and the children, seven aunts,
And sixteen uncles and a grandmother . . .
besides a few real friends,
And the decencies of life,"

* * *

We are told that some of the sweetest scents are distilled from origins of very evil odour: but this whether or no, certain it is that all the powers of the gods and smaller authorities are distilled from the lack of power in their creators. Men begin to "acquire merit" at the point where they are unable to exercise strength: the verbal virtue begins where the living strength ends. Authorities conveniently "forbid" where "I can't" or "I daren't." And it is reasonable enough. Gods and other authorities are soft cushions of words placed near the vague rim where power fringes off into limitation. They are creations designed to protect us from a too particular view of our own limitations. They cover our fears and save our vanity. The recognition of their limitations is the vision which men can least tolerably bear: that is why whenever it becomes necessary to reveal them in actual fact, men are most particular in words to make them the basis of edification! a proceeding very explicable, though in its effects in no small degree, misleading.

* * *

The bouleversement of values thus brought about has however, managed to turn the chagrin of ineffectualness into a possibility of deep-seated delight. Under the shelter of its expressed form in human speech (of which it is the masterpiece); it has provided men with a second nature, which almost invariably they keep in more constant practice than the original. So does the human become the coy one amongst the animals; most coquettish and playful; serious only when bent on make believe; and very adorable indeed when he mimes well-like Arnold. To make necessity's compulsions wear the graceful air of a conceded virtue is really exceedingly clever: too clever indeed to be conscious; as is proved by the fact that it is seen to perfection only among the coxcombs. Conscious intelligence acts on it like a sharp frost; conscious humour eats it up like an acid. To be able to say of one's ineffectual love affairs,

"A God, a God, their severance ruled,
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd salt estranging sea,"

* * *

It is because the vanity of this is so unconsciously complete that it is so extremely engaging. And certainly it is very comprehensible. The desire to feel oneself so important that the gods are called upon to interfere in our affairs, even if only to boggle them: to feel that one is cutting the deuce of a fine figure in the eyes of the cosmos distils a subtler delight for the epicure in slender emotions than the satisfaction of any one thin and timorous desire. Yet it only becomes really essential to feel something encouraging of this sort when one is obviously playing a losing game. Only when we have conducted our mundane affairs with such a degree of ineffectualness that our original way of assessing values would lead us almost to apologise for our existence, does it become comforting to feel that our modest matters are so important as to draw gods to earth to interfere. Let our affairs make it clear to us that we are feeble, impotent, ignorant, timid, fearful, and let us be vain: above all things, vain-and we must either conceive and bring forth the omnipotent omniscient admiring god or prepare for a bad quarter of an hour with ourselves. It is the feeling that one is small that makes us look round for stilts, as it is our meagreness which provokes us to swell out into that exiguous extensiveness which we call vanity.

It is because Mr. Arnold would have found it an indignity as well as a misfortune to appear to be afraid of his aunts that he works gods-the external authority-into his canvasses. That is why it is likely we shall always have authorities with us. What one has not the desire strong enough to obtain, but would like to appear as strongly desiring; what one's verbal education tells us we should admire desiring, but deprecates the venturesomeness necessary to obtain it, becomes artistically the "forbidden of the authority." Which explains why authorities are so secure: impotence and fear compounded with vanity make so exceedingly strong an amalgam; and also why against them none need to fight or cry. One has effected the uttermost against an authority when one has understood it. Whether thereafter it can be overcome depends upon other and more absolute factors, but the cement which holds it together can be dissolved by understanding merely.

* * *

Authority is like opportunity; not something given and fixed, but adjusting itself from moment to moment. All seeming to the contrary notwithstanding, the seats of authority can never be occupied by a usurper. None can sit there without first being duly installed. The first essential for the creation of sitters-in-authority is the existence of such as are desirous that authority should be exercised over them. Authority takes shape and form on a principle like to that on which the solids and liquids and gases take on the characteristic which make them such: upon lines carved out by the limitations of those to whom they seem what they seem. A solid is that which we cannot easily penetrate; they are the points at which we feel resisted to such an extent that our power falls short. If our power were more the resistance would be less, and by as much as our power is more that characteristic which makes the impression of a solid would be less. Or our powers might be different; then the resistance would appear different. To a fish, doubtless, the atmosphere will have all the appearance of a solid. To men the essential difference between a granite wall and a block of glass is that our power as departmentalised in sight penetrates easily the second and with almost insuperable difficulty the first. To the being whose eyes had some of the qualities of the rontgen rays the difference must be considerable. So the appearance of solids and other substances are the reverse side of the impress, beaten into form by the dead pressure of our impotence. So, too, are the authorities over us. And just as a craftsman creates his wares by niggling at the resistance, forcing it by this and that increase of his own power to give way in some degree after the manner of his desire, we, by the exercise and constant increase of our power, penetrate authority, of which the changes which subsequently appear as the reverse side have first been operated on the hither side. So those in authority represent not those who know and are powerful, but those who as we loosely argue "must" know and "must" be powerful because we don't and aren't. They symbolise our negative qualities. It is not the positive qualities of the great which ensure their instalment in oflice. but the negative quality of those who permit them there. The stretch of authority in any sphere expands or shrinks automatically with the impotence or power of those who recognise it. The spheres in which we recognise no one's authority are those of which we know ourselves what there is in them to be known. But where we are timid and lack knowledge, where we desire to save ourselves the risk of experimentation as well as a realisation of the limitedness of our knowledge: we set up an authority. One may be ignorant and yet have a desire to know and have courage enough to be ready to pay the price for coming by knowledge. Such a one is not a creator nor a respecter of authorities. The fruitful creators of authorities are those who, being without knowledge, elect to remain without, and in lieu of it espouse-Belief.

* * *

Belief is thereafter accepted as knowledge, whereas belief is essentially one with doubt. Belief and doubt are two names for a particular process in a particular condition, i.e., of thinking as an unfinished product; of thinking, not carried to the issue where the process of thought (which necessarily retains uncertainty as its moving factor until it is finished) finishes; where thought being dissolved knowledge is born in its place. Whether this state of ignorance as to the facts involved in the issue one has in mind shall be called by the name of doubt or its other name, belief, depends upon several things; but in the main upon a difference of tension in the mind. If the mind is tight-braced, strung up and alert, it is likely to recognise its condition for what it is; of being only partially aware. It bluntly says "As to this issue I do not know; my thinking has proceeded thus and thus far, I have a vague feeling that the next stage of thinking will reveal so and so, but actually of the ultimate issue I am still in doubt." But let it be a slacker mind which speaks, one less braced for effort, and such a mind will shrink from the realisation of uncertainty which the word doubt expresses and which is in itself a challenge to think to a finish. Such a mind will say: "I think I know" (a colloquial contradiction in terms) or "I believe"; the latter would serve well enough were what the words say accepted at their nominal value; but belief, owing to the false associations which authorities have cunningly caused it to have with knowledge, has lost its exact connotation, i.e., that of decision left open. The derivation of belief is from lyfan, to leave, which serves to throw a bright gleam of light on the bemused psychology of believers. To believe a thing is not only to be in doubt about it; it is a resolve of the mind to leave it so, and to this extent is unlike doubt, which implies that the debate proceeeds and the enquiry is going on. It also makes clear why it is the mind which doubts rather than that which believes which leads in the way towards knowledge. Why, too, the voices of authority echo one to another all the world round with the cry of "Believe, believe." They mean, "Leave decision, leave it, leave it to us," in effect asserting that knowledge is a spurious form, a degraded type of the ideal which is lack-of-knowledge. The excessive unction with which authorities invest the word "sacred" reveals its purpose, i.e., the guaranteeing that vexed questions shall be left untouched; left whole and unquestioned. The sacred is indeed the first weapon of defence against ths prying questions of intelligence. Raise any issue which touches upon the fundamentals of the word-games, as distinguished from moves made within them, and the authorities encompass themselves about with the label "sacred," as promptly as a threatened city would hasten to ensure the integrity of its walls. Very naturally, therefore, all that one believes is by the acquiescence of belief made sacred. "My beliefs are sacred"; they would be no doubt, were the decision left with the believers, but the believer, as the history of belief shows, is encompassed about with enemies: both from within and without, he is hard pressed. Not only do those who know and those who doubt alike beset him; every spark which flashes from every gleam of his own stirring intelligence are as so many maggots gnawing into the fabrics of his beliefs. Spontaneously bursts from him the cry: "I believe help thou my unbelief. I have abandoned the quest: do thou (namely, sluggishness, comfort, whatnot) smother this itch I have to return to pry and poke."

* * *

Of course, the seats of the authorities have been occupied too long for the sitters therein not to have realised the necessity of guarding against a potential danger that even the stupidest may develop towards intelligence; so in the game full provision of language to carry off the overflow is always made. Thus men will justify every step towards enlightenment with the remark, "I must follow my Conscience," and will permit themselves to be persuaded-i.e., they will believe that Conscience upon occasion boldly bears the torch of defiant power through the darkness, in opposition to Authority. It is one of the neatest maneuvres, considering that the realms of Conscience and Authority are one. The pride which one occasionally appears to have in "following one's Conscience" is a subconscious pride not in Conscience, but in the intelligence which has been able to make Conscience fall back a degree and make Authority write down Duty less. We can only track the pride in the assertion "I must follow my Conscience" to its source when we invert it to read, "My Conscience must follow me," and always this path along which Conscience is compelled to follow "me" i.e., the ego-is that leading from less to greater intelligence and knowledge. Where the ego becomes more powerful and more aware, the Conscience shrinks by just so much as is this increase: just as, when the sun comes out, the mist retreats as far as the sunlight penetrates. If the sun, in glowing admiration of the bright sunshine, were to say, "I must follow the mist" instead of "To the limits where I have power to act I drive out the mists," it would provide an exact analogy to the person who says "I must follow my Conscience." Like the positive power of the sun, the "I" as far as it shines out consumes the Conscience, and where courage and knowledge are at the greatest the area governed by Conscience is at the least. And vice versa.

* * *

Just as the stretch of Authority, whether of knowledge or of action, in any sphere, expands or shrinks with the impotence or power respectively of those over whom it is exercised, so does the dominion of Conscience: which is Authority's ambassador. We have pointed out how men, since they learnt how to forge magic armour out of generalised speech, and so become endowed with the power to invert all values and meanings, have ceased to be serious save in the make-believe of the great word-games. Initiate the game, erect the word-pieces, and solemnity is invoked and at hand. Accordingly, in treating of these generalised words, God, Authority, Conscience, Duty, Sin, Immorality, Crime, Belief, Doubt, we have recognised the conventions-i.e., the piece names of the game. Aces, Jacks, and Kings, Pawns, Knights, and Castles, to each we have allowed its game value. To have done otherwise in this, their most solemnest sport, would have been to rouse more rage than is conducive to understanding; as if a visitant from Mars quite new to the game, say of chess, should interfere with the pieces, to criticise their labels during the progress of the play for the world's championship. It would not save him from the wrath of the players if he were to plead that the Kings and Castles did not greatly resemble kings and castles. To the players they do: they are them, in fact. They have become so accepted in the game that if we would describe it we ourselves must for the moment accept its word conventions as well as its rules. More over, most of them are hearthstone generalities, unlike some others, Justice or Freedom, throned triumphantly because remotely eternal in the heavens. They hover about our dwellings: nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet, some of them.

* * *

So at their game-value let us spread the pieces out- Conscience, Duty, Obedience, Immorality, Crime, Sin, Conscience, the Ambassador of all Authorities, Voice of God, Authority at its height, begets Duty-Poetic Duty. Not, of course, the simple and vulgarly limited form of duty which is recognised as debt, the wiping out of which is merely just in that secondary sense which we recently have defined as the keeping of a promise: Duty as debt which we disburse from motives like those which induce us to pay our gas bills because the owners otherwise would cut off the supply. This sort of duty is of too low an order to be admitted into the great poetic scheme built up on Authority and Conscience and Duty about which the parsons preach and poets sing. The poetic duty recognised by the make believers-the believers, as they henceforward shall be called-is based on Belief in Authority. The Authorities we believe in, Conscience tells us we must obey. Such action is our Duty. What form the Duty will take the Authority decides. It is the Authority's business to make out the due-bill, as it is Conscience's to see that it is paid: that duty is done. Let Conscience be what you elect to term it-the "Voice" of Authority, its Ambassador, its Bailiff, Procurer, Pimp, Master of Ceremonies. Duty shall be what Wordsworth called her "Stern daughter of the Voice of"-the Authorities. Like its parent and grandparents, it comes of the stock of the impotent, feeble, timid, fearful, ignorant. It, as they, takes birth where living virtue ends, and, as into theirs, an incursion is made into its territory with every degree of increase in power.

Just as Conscience has never been divorced from Authority it is never divorced from Obedience and Duty. Always it prompts obedience to whatever authority can impose itself. It is equally obliging to all authorities, no matter what their sphere. As the Master of Ceremonies in the Festival of the Impotent it calls the Conscience-dances. They vary in character and measure. Some are stately and solemn and others are the reverse; but they all have one characteristic in common: they are all movements to rhythm, and the rhythm is Obedience. If it is the legal authority Conscience calls the measure "Obedience to the law: which same dance is your Duty." Disobey or trip, and Conscience and the offended Authority in chorus pronounce your tripping: Crime. Or it is the Social Authority, and the dance Conscience call is "Obedience to the common custom," Trip here and it is: Immorality. Or perhaps it is a dance in obedience to a lesser Authority, so minor in the popular estimation that its ordinances dwindle down to mere rules: a schoolmaster's, or a railway company's by-laws. The dance Conscience in such case will announce will be a two-step: a polka: in which tripping is mere naughtiness, though there are schools, for instance, in which a rule by sedulous exaltation is raised to the awed height of a religious observance. And this brings us to the stateliest measure: the very minuet of the Conscience-dances. It is the religious Authority itself, the one built out of the vast blank stretch of the unknown from which all those fears that are the more fearsome because they are nameless, spring. The Authority which is the Holy Ghost is the shadowiest dweller in the unlit mists, and is built round with the Holy of Holies-a wall between men's souls and the vision of that which they fear most. And Conscience calls, "Obedience to God, to His Ministers and to His Church, to all its ordinances, and to the Holy Spirit." This is the dance in which you foot it with the solemnity of a Rite. Trip and fall short here, and: You Sin. The heavens themselves, the sun, moon and stars frown and scowl blackly upon you. Conscience, the Voice of God, the Ambassador of the offended Lord, then takes up his seat in your very heart, nestling snugly in your deepest fears; and to him you tender your heartstrings as faggots with which he may pile up and keep ever burning the consuming Wrath of God. Conscience convicting a man of sin is Conscience in Excelsis. It then fully lets itself go, becomes orgiacal, and reveals that Feast of Conscience which, viewed from the human side, men have called Hell.

* * *

And thus the play goes on. The gentle buffoon still clutches his magic mantle: his role is the tragic and comic both at once. They are matters of light and shade, and he is playing the one or the other according to the angle from which the observer views him. His life has its full compensations. His pleasures are real if his pains are formidable. And he has all the thrills of the gamble. Though to-day he writhes in Hell, tomorrow he may become reconciled and, like Browning's believer, full-fed, beatified, he may find himself smiling on the breast of God. A good game and a spirited competition, anyway.

There are some interesting fictions called duties to ourselves. They do not, however, share in the High Game, and would best be deferred to a sequel.

VIEWS AND COMMENTS.

The Egoist: No. 15, Vol. 1, August 1st, 1914.

by Dora Marsden

THE development of the Ulster Rebellion provides THE EGOIST uith the sort of satisfaction which Newton must have had when he found the actual figuring finally justifying his hypothesis regarding the movements of the planets. As we prophesied, even so it is. Of the "most sober-minded of my people" we must be ranked the first. No prophet who is made for the role, however, could be so ill-advised as to appear among the people unsupported by his prophetic robes. That we are not prophets born, but have had the role thrust upon us we prove by revealing the naked principle on which we work the oracle. The trick is worked after a device familiar to all sportsmen-i.e., that in play you forget all the instructions and keep your eye on the ball. Adapted to political philosophy: you forget the constitution and keep your eye on the men. The "oughts" and "shoulds" are decoys: leave them to the Manual, and weigh out the character of the men engaged: because action will be according to the kind of men, and not according to the rules. That Sir Edward Carson becomes a rebel-leader and the Labour leaders become rebel-dampers is not because they have different opinions about rebellion. The explanation is that the former is the sort of person who rebels, and rebels successfully, when his mind turns to it, while the latter are not. They would be afraid of the responsibility, afraid of failing, afraid of succeeding, afraid of other people's skins and afraid of their own. That is why they make such a mistake when they imagine that they rebelling would be all of one pattern with Carson rebelling: whereas the situation would represent a totally different proposition. And again, when in a surprised sort of way the Labour-men ask, "If we were to arm should we be recognised and asked to Buckingham Palace" the answer would not cover any subtle point, and could easily be made plain to them. They mistakenly imagine that their recognition is postponed until the advent of an hypothetical rebellion. They do not see that they are fully recognised at present for what they are-i.e., for people who would not, nay, could not, rebel by appeal to force-as accurately, indeed, as they are recognised as exactly the people to be invited to the King's garden-parties. Handling tea-cups they are recognised to be in their own role, but in handling guns they are clean out of it. They are not even to be invited to confer on a situation which involves those who do. How is a party which is constantly pointing out the horrific repugnance it has of appealing to force to be called in to confer on a situation which turns on an appeal to force.

* * *

The answer to the question of recognition makes clear the significance of the recent Conference in relation to the "House of Commons" and the implication as to what needs to be done which the House of Commons cannot do. The House of Commons is a place for talk and debate, and as it considers there could be no question of public policy where its own verdict should not be decisive, it is hypnotised by its own make-believe into the end of believing that there can be no matters upon which its debates are frivolous and an irritant. The action of the King is tantamount to giving public utterance to an open secret: that the constitutional restraints are for just those who elect to be held in leash by them. A very honest admission, and very unusual-because a very honest one.

* * *

The fact that in a highly critical moment he musters- not "the people," but the telling personalities, shows that either the King has insight or is surrounded by those who have. (The act, indeed, should not be without significance for such as fondly imagine that "the people as a whole" are of very great moment in important decisions: the few decide: the entire body minus a few units is excluded; the decision made, the "body" falls into line in due course. The bigger the corporate body the greater the number left excluded: the more momentous the decision the more certain that "one or two" will decide it.) It shows pretty exactly how much in the opinion of its Head there is in the boasted Constitution.

* * *

The cry that the Constitution is in danger sounds as though it ought to be impressive, but now, as ever, it isn't for the simple reason that there is no Constitution. It is a mistaken notion that there exists a growing body of "guaranteed permissions." automatically increasing, lumped together and called "freedom," which "constitute the Constitution." It is this feeling of doubt as to the bona fide existence of the Constitution which is half-expressed in the phrase, "The price of freedom is eternal watchfulness." But even watchfulness does not equate into "freedom "-i.e., the "effects of power"! To get these effects we must furnish the power. It is not to guard the Constitution- the mythical "body" of rights-which will perpetuate them. No amount of watchfulness will avail to make secure the exercise of privileges the continuance of which those who enjoy them have not the power to enforce. The only negotiable "price" for the enjoyment of power is to continue to produce the powerful stock. So the "price" of "freedom" is to produce the individuals with the power to risk and fight, to assert and reassert: which is not a price at all, but a simple sequence of cause and effect. "Rights" and "privileges" are never permanently won: that we slowly add strength of precedent to strength of percedent is a delusion. Not merely is there no written Constitution, but the nature of that body of precedents to which is given grandiloquently the name of "Unwritten Constitution" is such as to make a steady accretion of powers unrealisable, precedents being what they are- the acts and words of certain personalities noted because caught in the limelight-and because noted- precedents! There could be no emptier opposition to any actions than the cry "There is no precedent." It is the cry of the deluded. If there is no precedent for the doing of something a person of ability--a states man or other-wants to do: he does it, and then there is. And that is all there is to precedents. What distinguishes men from muffs is the inevitable addition which they make to this elastic body. To this extent the King in calling a conference of an unprecedented nature is proving himself something of a character. He will find, of course, that he would have had far fewer enemies had he elected to continue to appear as a muff and played for safety, for not even kings can have things both ways. All initiatory action belongs essentially to the spirit of fight, and is full of risks because it rouses antagonism: a fact which the humanitarian, egalitarian, peace-loving fraternal spirit of democracy plays upon when in its systematised attempt to eliminate exceptional power in the spirit of fight it tries to put force into the moral cry, "There is no precedent."

The belief in the ultimate success of the entire democratic schemata is based on the assumption that men prefer the safe and placid joys of peace to the spirited risks of war: an assumption which is refuted hourly, in spite of the fact that all the accredited mouthpieces dub the one the "lofty" and the other the "degrading." The people continue to enjoy disporting themselves on this lower plane, if only by proxy. The continued popularity of boxing in spite of the preachers and teachers is an instance. It is the dumb but direct repudiation of the doctrine which would hold the human person "sacred"- which would regard personal violence as a desecration of "divine humanity." This fear of personal violence which we all have, and which is in no need of augmentation, has been sedulously worked upon in the interests of humanitarian democracy. Yet it is clear that all power in the long run is tested by its possessor's willingness and ability to risk encountering personal violence, and the horse-sense of the crowd which backs the boxing-ring and neglects Mr. F. B. Meyer, if it fails in daring in this particular respect, itself proves that at least it admires those who do not so fail. Even women you begin to find repudiating the humanitarian softness: as indeed they must when men preach to men the adoption of women's feebleness as a proposed improvement of men's virtue. They must in self-defence. Women can only afford to be weak and finicking when they belong to men who are not: a fact which women have formerly understood. It is merely this modern inverting of values-the outcome of humanitarian democracy-with its attempted substitution of words for action and strength, which has sent the more wordy and feeble-minded out in search of a verbal utopia.

* * *

And democracy, which is the idealisation of the spirit of stick-in-the-mud, will find it will never fail to be repudiated, even if in faint, ineffectual fashion, by those who are in the mud. The jingoes, the crowds of spectators at football-matches, boxing contests, bull-fights, cock-pits, are saying in the feeble way of proxy that they know where honour is due: that pity is like the arsenic in the medicine: it must exist only in very small doses if it is to be reckoned to have virtue: that if only they dared they would like always to treat it as insult.

* * *

We note that a correspondont, "R. R. W.," writing in this issue on the status of wage-earners, says that it is an insult to these latter to imply that they are passive citizens whereas employers are active; he asserts that employers work for a wage: that it is all a matter of supply and demand: that there is a complete difference of working for wages and being a slave, and so on.

* * *

We are more than willing to agree that overmuch has been made of the mere term "wages." My wage is simply my reward, the income corresponding to my output. We all make our rewards what we can, and as near tne kind we prefer as lies in our power. It is not the receiving of wages which constitutes the crux of the industrial situation and places the wage-earner (in the accepted meaning of the word that of "working man") inevitably in a lower status. It is the absence of the initiatory element from his work. It is this lack which inevitably makes him the "serving man," a "secondary at control," one of tne classes of the lower-powered. The phrase about supply and demand will illustrate. Employed persons, otherwise wage-earners, leave their rewards dependent upon the chance that others will permit them to serve them. The workers are never demanders, they are always suppliers, servers. Why are they not in a position to make a demand for their superiors' services? Why do they never call the tune, but are always ready to dance submissively to a rhythm which others call? It is because they are of the "safe" variety (very unsafe in the long run, as events prove). They prefer to leave risks, responsibilities, and beginnings, to others. It is because they lack the initiatory, that is, the fighting spirit: a deficiency which drops them to their class: of servants.

* * *

It is another of the feeble word-tricks of the democratic movement that an effort is made to slide over class-distinctions. Democrats may of course keep silent about these: they may even deny them; but what they cannot do is to efface them. There will always be classes, and the power of initiation which a man has will always be the index to the class to which he belongs. As for the workers in the mass, they possess relatively and in relation to the work by which they subsist none whatever. They have not even the amount of initiative which is implied in the assertion commonly made: that they "sell their labour as a commodity." For they do not so much "sell" as the employers "buy." The transaction only takes place when the employer has a job on. The trade union movement is indeed a movement set in the direction of showing initiation thus far: to appear as a seller; but even as an appearance it is only in the mass: it represents the initiative of the few who keep the organisation alive: the majority of the workers are induced to join their respective union's only with the greatest difficulty. On the other hand, such a movement as that known by the name the "Right to Work," far from being one towards responsibility and working-class enterprise, is indeed a desperate throwing-up of the sponge. It is an attempt of the "servers" to free themselves altogether from the responsibility for initiative by endeavouring to induce the State to become Initiators-in-Chief for the passive ones.

* * *

As for the difference between slave and wage-earner: it is simply one of degree-in amount of initiative. The emancipation movement was an attempt to prove that by kicking-out of the nest those that could not fly out, "reformers" could force high-fliers. The present industrial situation is an answer to that: some have flown high, most have remained in secret communication with the nest, while the rest, the down-and-outs, are rapidly being reabsorbed into the nest of irresponsibility by a steady multiplication of statutes in the direction of making them the "wards," otherwise the "properties," of the State. The proposed scientific treatment of vagrants, of feeble-minded, of the poor and destitute. are the measures of Governments which propose to reassume that responsibility for subsistence which formerly was borne by the slave-owner.

* * *

It takes many phases to make a world, and it is not necessary to become inarticulate with indignation in describing any of them. Enough has been done when the phases have been made sufficiently clear to remove the danger of giving the palm to the devitalising instead of to the vitalising tendency: to that which accepts instead of that which originates: to fear and the playing for safety instead of to the hazard and the new precedents: to the democratic and peaceful rather the the autocratic and belligerent.

D. M.