January 1st, 1914

On the Interference with the Environment

VI. ÷THE QUESTION OF OBSCENITY.

AS to obscenity, it will be said with much plausibility that an obscene exhibition in a public place makes it impossible for a person÷or for many persons÷to pass that way without suffering a penalty more serious than the mere necessity of enduring something distasteful. I reject this argument, not without having considered it.

Let us define our terms. The popular conception of obscenity (and the legal conception too) covers two very different things: first, the disgusting; second, that which stirs sexual feeling. The argument which I have just described as "plausible" cannot apply to the first of these two except in so far as certain sensitive people are moved to physical nausea by certain sights. I never heard of an actual case, however, in which a person who had eaten a good meal lost it by looking at anything publicly displayed, or in which anyone was saved from such an experience by the restrictive power of laws against obscenity. I conclude, therefore, that we do not need juridical defence on this side, and that we have now to do only with obscenity in the other sense.

Our experience with the laws against obscene literature teaches us that it is impossible to define obscenity so that a man can know, in numerous cases, what a court will hold to be obscene and what it will not; or even so that two courts can be counted on to agree with each other in their decisions on the same book. We have not merely the same uncertainty which the law exhibits in regard to actions which are in other respects near the dividing line of lawful and unlawful, but a much greater degree of uncertainty. An experienced prosecutor under the anti-obscenity laws eliminates the uncertainty as far as possible by learning the personal dispositions of the judges and bringing his case before a judge from whom he can expect favour. (My only authority for this statement is the autobiographical reminiscences published by the eminent prosecutors themselves, or by their friends on their behalf. ) The net result of all this is that a man of ordinary prudence settles the question by regarding as probably legally obscene everything that opinions might differ on, and so the laws produce practically the effect of a prohibition of all such matter, to the considerable injury of the public. The mischief would be less, of course, if the range of difference of opinion on this topic were not so frightfully wide. But all this is directly against the principle that a man should be treated as innocent till those who know the facts can agree that he is guilty.

It appears, however, that it is found easier to define obscenity exhibited to the eye than obscenity in words; so the evils of the laws against obscene literature would not be absolutely duplicated by recognising it as a form of assault when an obscene sight is forced upon an unwilling person's attention in a public place.

But I observe that there seems to be no particular disposition to make obscene displays to the public in general. The substantial evils which Mr. Comstock works to suppress are those of the underhand circulation of obscenity. The rnen against whom his crusade is declared are in the business for cash, and make their money by not letting a man see their wares till he pays. If there were in even a few persons a disposition to inflict obscenity on the public, either from malice or from a quasi-religious devotion to such things, or from mere love of lubricity, a small expenditure of time and money would enable a man to annoy the public a deal without particular danger of detection. But nobody seems to devote to such business more time and money than is involved in chalking a short inscription, or a hardly recognisable drawing, on a wall. When there is complaint made

of an actually public exhibition of obscenity, the public verdict generally is that the complainant is wrong and the exhibition not obscene.

An instance of this absence of a disposition to offend even a squeamish sense of obscenity is furnished by the matter of sleeves. It is not supposed by the public that there is a law against going with bare arms; and bare arms are so often seen that their lawfulness is kept in everybody's mind. Nevertheless it is not considered quite the thing to go on the street sleeveless, or with sleeves rolled up far above the elbow, unless you are either at work or can make a plausible pretence that it is for work that your arms are bared. And accordingly people do not. The pretence that the arms are bared for work is doubtless stretched a bit in some cases, but on grown persons of either sex one does not see bare arms that are not covered by this pretence. This does not look as if there was great need of any restraint on such exhibitions as are likely to be objected to.

Still, such minimising of the issue is of very limited validity. We have to face the fact that the dominant part of the public finds the acme of obscenity in the mere exposure of the human body to view; and we cannot deny that there would be a good deal of exposure of the whole person under various circumstances if the prohibition were not rigorous. On many a beach and in many a stream boys and men would bathe without ceremony; men at work in hot weather would find that the more of their garments they laid off, the more efficient they grew; careless poverty would economise more and more in the matter of summer covering; a good many persons believe that the tanning of the skin by sunshine is good for the health, and that the reasons for the general custom of always wearing clothes are not worth a row of beans, and some of these persons would want to live up to their principles without retiring to a lonely place when their affairs did not call them to such a place; commercialised vice, which is cautious about its advertising so long as there are laws against it which will be enforced whenever it displeases the police, would try experiments m methods of advertising if this restraint were removed, and the time when my discussion begins to have practical import may well be the time when such restraints are removed. And, finally, it appears that there exists a form of insanity which, while not invariably accompanied by insanity in any other respect, manifests itself in a reckless determination to go naked. It is the same with the impulse toward nudity as it is with other natural human impulses ÷ any one of them may have an intensity that will be undisputedly abnormal. If some fanatical ruler forbade all picture-making in his domains, a born painter like Leonardo da Vinci would doubtless have the prudence to conform to the law, but a born painter like William Blake would break the law and incur the penalty.

Indeed, substantially that experiment has been tried. In American collections of Alaskan Eskimo art are a few carvings which, instead of following the conventional routine of those tribes, show a marvellous lifelikeness and power of characterisation: if the carving shows a long team of dogs, every dog has his own individuality, his own psychology. Inquiry into the origin of these unique works of genius shows that some years ago there lived in Alaska an old fellow who was universally recognised as weak-minded; for he insisted on spending his time in carving, to the neglect of the practical duties of hunting and fishing; and he did not even do his carving properly in the style that centuries of tradition have fixed as proper for carving, but persisted in making his carved dogs look like real dogs ! What could be more ridiculous? So he lived and died despised. Much good it does him that now, when he is dead, his works are being greatly admired by men of a foreign race in a foreign climate. Well, I say that when the artistic impulse is so dominant

that a man will thus neglect all his material interests to produce works of art that his neighbours do not even think well of, this is plain abnormality. So I do not necessarily imply anything as to whether the impulse toward nudity is a worthy or unworthy one when I speak of its abnormal development as furnishing, if one wishes to suppress it, all the difficulties of suppressing a mania. The case of Socrates is not far from parallel again. Or take the normal delight in building fires, and its development to an abnormal insistance. Lately there was an incorrigible pyromaniac whose incendiarism was quite unmanageable till, after two or three institutions had failed, he was sent to the asylum at Vineland, N. J. The superintendent had brains, and put him to work as stoker in the boiler house. He never makes any trouble, and is the most useful of servants: he takes the most perfect care of that fire÷he is in just the place for which nature fitted him, and no happier man ever handled a shovel than he as he feeds his furnace. Well, just as you must either restrain the pyromaniac or put up with whatever mischief his fires may do, so you must either restrain the gymnomaniac or put up with whatever mischief his nudity may do.

And the question ought not to be, if possible, whether it really does mischief. For if we take up that question we shall have no end to it. The practically important thing is that the point is not agreed on. We have numerous respectable people who believe that the sight of the naked human body, of either sex, has no more inherent tendency to rouse the sexual impulses than has the sight of the body clothed in any ordinary costume, and that if nudity became generally customary among us the ultimate result might well be a decrease of unchastity. This class includes pretty nearly everybody who writes books on the comparative moral customs of different nations, and it includes me. We have still more numerous people, still more respectable or at least still more respected, who hold the contrary view, that to exhibit the naked human person is to force upon a great part of the public an unwelcome but irresistible sexual impulse. Neither of these two classes will readily give up its belief for any argument that present circumstances permit us to bring. And there you are. Our business is to determine a reasonable basis on which people who hold these two views are to live together. If we cannot do that, our discussion is a failure. If we are not proposing a basis on which people can live together without all thinking alike, then our propositions have as their pre-requisite not merely a remote and problematical change in human nature, but an absolutely undesirable change. What I want is a plan by which men as they are can live together in peace. The present system, in which so great a part of every man's life is regulated by the threat of violence, is not what I call peace.

A further complication is the prospect of off-hand individual violence. A monument in honour of Heine, with sundry nude marble nymphs, was erected in New York a few years ago. After a little while a man rode up to it on his bicycle in the middle of the night, broke off all breakable parts of the nymphs with a hammer, and got safe away on his bicycle before the police found it out. He was never caught. If a man without clothes tried to go along one of our streets to-day, he would not last nearly so long, in the absence of police interference, as the Heine monument did. If the police undertook to protect him, it is not certain that their protection would be more effective than it was in the case of the monument. As long as the sight of the undisguised human figure is unfamiliar in a certain inhabited place, the person who exhibits it must reckon with a probability of stones and whip-lashes. And if anybody undertakes either the protection of that person or the protection of the public peace, the protector will have (To be continued. )

January 15th, 1914.

On Interference with the Environment

AS long as the sight of the undisguised human figure is unfamiliar in a certain inhabited place, the person who exhibits it must reckon with a probability of stones and whip-lashes. And if anybody undertakes either the protection of that person or the protection of the public peace, the protector will have trouble. Mr. Tucker, I see, objects to what he imagines to be my views (his imaginations are partly right) on the ground that economy, and the desire to avoid disagreements, will require any rational police agency to pay attention to as few things as possible, and that I would increase the expenses and difficulties by giving the police more things to do. I call Mr. Tucker's attention to the fact that the police are already in the business of saving themselves trouble, and that they regularly do this by prohibiting whatever is so shocking to the feelings of the crowd as to promise to start a disturbance. The result is that whatever the crowd objects to is prohibited by the combined forces of the crowd and the policeman. East-and-west streets in New York are generally not full of vehicles; a woman walks along the middle of such a street because it happens to be a better pavement than the sidewalk; a company of street boys come jeering behind her; the policeman arrests the woman for creating a disturbance. Thereby he saves himself the much more difficult job of handling the boys. The papers print it as an amusing occurrence, not as an alarming one; and every New Yorker who reads it knows that the policeman did just what any policeman would be likely to. That's what you get by making the saving of trouble to the police your guide: by no means a reduction in the number of things that the police arrest for. The present reign of restriction is distinctly the lazy man's way of doing things, and Theodore Roosevelt is eminently characterised by the desire to handle every difficulty in the easiest way. Mr. Tucker should not imagine that by appealing to the desire to save the policeman's trouble he will get anything like what either he or I want.

But laziness will not soon be extinct, and the desire for public quiet will continue to be widespread. Hence the fact that exposure of the person invites fisticuffs will, as long as it is a fact, be a potent reinforcement of all arguments for systematically and quietly suppressing the exposure of the person. And, as it will certainly be a fact till some time after the contrary practice is introduced, any discussion of practical policies must begin by treating it as an unescapable fact.

This all looks as if a workable social order must count it legitimate to let those who object to any exhibition as obscene suppress that exhibition, whatever the exhibition may be, until such time as the human mind shall have undergone a quite unpredictable change. It is time to balance the argument a trifle by reminding the respectable public that if we make any pretence to uniformity or consistency, then the rule must be applied equally where the custom of

clothing is stricter than among us, and any Englishwoman who goes with unveiled face in a Mohammedan community where the veiling of women on the street is general must be held liable to the appropriate penalties of indecent exposure. The parallel is rigorously correct. It is perfectly attested that the Englishwoman's face has the same effect on the men of such a community as the sight of a Marquesas Islander's whole person would have on an English street. Englishmen resident in such cities as Lahore declare, for instance, that in driving through the city by a lady's side it is hard to resist the temptation to get off the carriage several times to thrash Mohammedans for the looks that they are seen to cast. If the rousing of such feelings constitutes a public nuisance that calls for forcible suppression, then the wearing of unveiled faces by Englishwomen should be forcibly suppressed in every community where even a large minority are dominated by the classic Mohammedan tradition. If shocking the moral orthodoxy of a majority is ground for suppression, then the unveiled woman should be suppressed where Mohammedans are a majority. If the matter is made to rest on the ground that Lahore is controlled by the English, and consequently English notions of propriety shall rule, then we establish at least one of the points that I want to insist on÷that a majority, as such, has no special right to control such things: if a majority and a minority cannot agree on a modus vivendi, the strongest fighting power must have its way.

For it positively cannot be maintained that the English standard of propriety is entitled to preference on the mere ground that its precise grade of strictness is more ideally correct than either the stricter standards or the less strict. Evidence of such a thing is too utterly lacking. The English standard of decency in clothing is not supported by the instinct of most of the human race, nor even by a continuous uniform feeling on the right little tight little island itself. I suppose by hearsay (I have never been to Europe) the words " mixed bathing " will suffice to shut the mouth of any Englishman who might claim permanence as a quality of the English standard. And it is hardly more than a century since the poet Coleridge saw handsome women bathing naked among men on the beach of a fashionable watering-place on the Welsh coast, and recorded his testimony (valuable as coming from a young man at the most impressionable age) that the effect was not salacious.

I do not see how we can, in the end, refuse to consider the issue which this testimony raises. It is indeed certain that the sight of an unfamiliar exposure of the person will produce on some beholder that salacious effect with which it is popularly credited. But it is not certain, far from it, that this effect will be produced with anything like such generality as is supposed. Granting that we have in the first place a community divided into those who are irreconcilably opposed to the exhibition of the human body and those who are incorrigibly in favour of it, the injury which the former might, on their own hypothesis, receive from such exhibitions would be problematical in extent and in incidence (and a few of the more reasonable of them will concede, in duration); while the enslavement of the person who desires to lay aside his clothes, and who is restrained by force from doing so, is certain and direct. If on the ground of a man's claim to control his own person one protests against compulsory vaccination, or against the prohibition of the liquor traffic, or against any other bit of restriction which provokes a protest, the protester cannot with a decent show of consistency refuse to acknowledge that the privilege of deciding whether one will wear clothes is as fundamental a part of the control of one's own person as is the privilege of choosing one's own medical treatment or one's own beverages. I conclude that it is a sophistry, specious only to those who are antecedently prejudiced in its

favour, to contend that the right of self-defence involves a right to make a man clothe himself for fear of the harm that the sight of his body may do.

I seem to have ended with deciding a single detail of the question I set out to discuss. But this detail is so dominant that few will hesitate to let its settlement settle the central question. Besides, if we started rightly by deciding that the claim for restriction had no plausibility except when the obscenity was salacity, then we might now take note that obscenity in the sense of salacity cannot be defined with sufficient certainty to let anybody know what exhibitions a rule of restriction would apply to. The only exhibition to which the advocates of restriction would be tolerably unanimous is the exhibition of the flesh-and-blood human body; remove that, and the demand for restriction breaks up into incoherent discord.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON. (End of Series. )

WHY NOT PUT UP THE SHUTTERS?

To the Editor, THE EGOIST. MADAM,

Your comments on my letter to you (which was written, by the way, not to attack you for being an Archist, but to excuse myself for ceasing to co-operate with you) show a most ludicrous misapprehension of the Anarchist position. It is not my intention, however, to attempt to set you right. I wish simply to point out that, if the fact that the combination of Egoism and Archism has figured largely in the world's history shows that it will "work," and if you, as a pragmatist, find it on that account satisfactory, there seems to be no raison d'etre for a paper that heretofore has not had the air of singing paeans to the glory of things as they are. Against what is THE EGOIST rebelling? Against rebellion? Or, having discovered that you are not an Anarchist, am I now to discover that you are not even a rebel? Ajaccio, Corsica.

[We are sorry that THE EGOIST'S mottled label should so worry and÷we fear÷irritate Mr. Tucker. Irresistibly one thinks of the old song:

"By what name shall I greet her?

How shall I know her voice?"

Perhaps if we made a few statements we might help matters somewhat.

(1) We refuse to answer to "Rebel."

(2) We prefer not to be called "Pragmatist."

(3) We may not÷according to Mr. Tucker÷be called "Anarchist"÷wherein we are quite willing to acquiesce.

(4) We respond readily to "Egoist," and beg it to be observed that throughout this battle about nomenclature, the "voice" remains the same: and that a well-meaning person could distinguish it anywhere. ÷ED. ]
DORA MARSDEN

April 15th, 1914

PRO DOMO SUA.

To the Editor, THE EGOIST. MADAM,

These two months I have been getting spanked by instalments, and I think it is time to howl. If I did not howl I fear

I should be called a Good Child or some other name with contemptuous capital letters.

First, then, I take notice of the extract from Bergson which is commended to my study. But it is the first time I ever heard that the ancient Greek sense of the word "idea" was to govern the modern use of the word. I thought it was a commonplace of the history of philosophy that Descartes, wisely or unwisely, had given to that word a sense totally different from the one which it bore previous to his time, and that ever since Descartes the word "idea" has had nothing to do with the "ideas" of Plato and other Greeks except when one is writing on the history of philosophy, as Bergson is here. I cannot think it was Bergson's intention to prescribe that the modern world should use "idea" in the sense he is discussing; for he himself, before he gets to the bottom of the column as reprinted by you, uses

"idea" in the modern way. He is not guilty of confusion; he uses "idea" in both senses in one column, but he does not mix them. The number of "Views and Comments" over which I started was less cautious: it began by using "idea" in a sense which I understand is to be identified with the sense defined by Bergson, and then it went on to apply its conclusions to the modern use of the word in such phrases as "We want a man with ideas." This is as if I should argue that lying is unworthy of a man of energy because, first, deceit is the natural weapon of the weak, and, second, the heart beats less vigorously when lying than when standing.

But I cannot but welcome Bergson into the field against me: for if he is an opponent he is one of the most obliging ones I

ever met. Being on the topic of Greek philosophy, he takes up the well-known Greek arguments to prove the impossibility of motion, and identifies this defiance of common sense with their disposition to worship ideas. The idea, the particular state of existence conceived as stationary, corresponds to any one of the various places in which the moving body is conceived to stand successively; but just as the moving body never stands in any of these places, so man, or any other progressive being, never is in any of the states represented by our ideas÷he is only passing through them. So Bergson. Let us accept the analogy, and instead of considering merely the metaphysical question of the possibility of motion let us consider its application to practical life. Suppose the moving body to be a man; and suppose that he intends to make his motion more or less satisfactory to himself. He has nothing more urgent to consider than these places to which or through which he is to pass. Ordinarily his only rational purpose is to pass to or through these places; the choosing of his route so that the process of movement itself shall be satisfactory is of some consequence indeed, yet of minor consequence." Even if he is not aiming at any place÷if he is walking through unknown country for pleasure or exploration-÷ he must still from time to time have an eye to places that he does not wish to pass through, or he will come to grief. Does Bergson's analogy hold in all these respects? Decidedly it does. In the conduct of human life, intelligent planning is possible only by having an eye to these states represented by the "ideas" which form the landmarks of our course, choosing which of them we wish to reach, and, as a very urgent matter, noting the ones to be avoided. Whether we stop at the ideas or not, we must steer by aiming at them if we are to live sensibly. That is what the page of Bergson comes to.

As to the "Views and Comments" of January 1st, it will be more convenient to contradict them than to make out that they agree with me. The first thing is that in my "meticulous" discussion of human affairs I leave out human nature. But, as usual particulars are lacking. Surely it is no news that when a charge of this sort is made in general terms only, it is always open to the accused to reply, "You are mistaken; you yourself are the one who does that." Which answer, omitting the first three words for meticulousness' sake, I hereby make. I admit that I should approach with fear and trembling a non-competitive examination on my ability to see into what those queer creatures called men are thinking, or will think, or will do. But as for a competitive examination÷what have I done that is as bad as the allegation that the governing classes in general are agreed to teach the subject classes a morality which they, the governing classes, laugh at in their hearts, and that the various mouthpieces of opinion who inculcate this current morality are the agents suborned by the governing classes to keep the masses submissive? The notion started in a century when, or in a social stratum where, it was normal to assume that the man who preaches what I don't believe must be a wilful liar and hypocrite; and it has been handed down by constant tradition through a succession of those who think so little of the infinite variety of human nature, and who take so little note of the fanatic's superiority to the swindler in the matter of convert-winning, that the echoing of this old piece of shallowness seems to them the most obvious solution of the problem of the existence of differences of opinion. I see it is hard for the most meticulous to resist the temptation to meet an opponent with the opponent's own weapons, whether the weapon be pyrotechnical objurgation or anything else. But at least I am talking in my own defence, for it is I who am accused of letting the Capitalist Press, that organ of the dominant, bamboozle me into accepting the "grotesque suggestion" that Asquith was afraid of Larkin and was actuated by his fear. Now I solemnly protest that on this side of the water the suggestion would not seem at ail grotesque. The typical American politician is more afraid of the man who makes him lose votes and elections than of any other creature that breathes. My only error consisted in assuming that politicians in England were the same kind of cattle. I cannot so easily excuse myself for transferring to Asquith another character of the American politician, who is delighted with the idea of armed opposition because he knows that the voters will think of Abraham Lincoln's saying, "It is better not to trade horses while crossing a stream," and will keep their government in the same hands till that darling government has had its fight out, after which, if they have any scores to settle with the administration, they will settle them at the next election. Now there are plain geographical reasons why Lincoln's words should not be as proverbial in England as in America; so, since the soundness of the maxim is not at all self-evident (few rulers have ever kept changing the general of the army in the midst of a campaign so persistently as did Lincoln himself; when he uttered those famous words he was arguing for his own retention in office, which is obviously a very different thing), it follows that I had no ground for assuming that Carson's doings would be as welcome to Asquith as they would have been to Roosevelt in a like situation.

Next, you claim that the mathematical calculation of the cause of interest on money is invalid because the circumstances of the different borrowings are so endlessly various. If the argument were pertinent it would prove only that the rates of interest would differ from transaction to transaction; which is not a very crushing answer when the opposed argument had started from a frankly fictitious rate of interest so as to emphasise the fact that the rate has nothing to do with the present question. But hard experience teaches us that these things do admit of mathematical treatment even as to rates. Your argument would equally serve to prove that the statistician cannot predict the number of suicides in London next year, the distribution of this number between the different months, and the percentages who will use the various methods of shooting, poisoning, jumping

from windows, etc. Yet the statistician will make these predictions with an accuracy not much inferior to the prediction of the height of the tide at a given port at noon next Friday. Consider the business of life insurance. The life insurance business consists in offering to bet any tolerably vigorous person two to one or three to one that he will never die. The companies make large and steady profits by this rash-looking speculation. Their hope of profit depends on their correctness in reducing to mathematical formulae (and that before any of the events take place) the resultant of the care a man takes of his health, the physiological processes of his system, the changes of his economic situation, etc.; and also, as a matter not less essential to the insurance business than all these, the rate of interest and the security of investment. When we are inquiring what method of study suits the practical facts of life, the argument of a successfully-filled purse seems to me to be irresistible. Against the record of the life insurance companies' dividends, no demonstration of the uselessness of mathematical study of the laws of interest is worth a picayune.

The editorial paragraphs on interest allege, and seem to regard it as a point of fundamental importance, that "the man who can extort interest is smart or fortunate; the man who has to pay it is unlucky or an inferior." This throws our American multi-millionaires into the unlucky and inferior class, for they are a set of confirmed interest-payers. I am sure that a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Vanderbilt, a Gould, generally pays more than he receives in interest, unless those wretched political economists are permitted to extend the definition of "interest" to cover much more than payment for loans. But what is the foundation for this statement that it is the unlucky who pay interest? Does it not rest on the fact that this was generally true among the Hebrews in Old Testament times, probably also in Rome at the time of Sallust's histories, and that you have taken the word of the Hebrew and Latin classics for twentieth-century conditions? At present, if I am rightly informed, most of the borrowing is done by men who borrow a hundred pounds because they hope to make a profit of a hundred guineas, and who in most cases get their profit. I believe there is now seldom a time when borrowers in distress are so large a part of the borrowing world as to produce a great effect on the rate of interest. Banks regularly prefer to lend to people who are not in distress; and once more I appeal to the published dividends as proof that the banks get most of their business on the lines that they plan to get it on.

I suspect that I ought to correlate this about interest with the onslaught just now on the eighth commandment÷an onslaught which, with some of the words about the Dublin strikers, shows an ability to take sides against the institution of property. I would say it showed a hostility to that institution if I did not remember equally ardent words in behalf of property from the same pen. At any rate, I do not think I am misjudging this argument against interest if I say it starts with the assumption that interest is a phenomenon dependent on the institution of property and on one person's consenting to lend property to another. This is discouraging: for I had said that the utility of arguing from definite facts, even though they be fictitious, was shown by the demonstration that interest would still have to be taken into account in the intelligent planning of work even in the absence of property. If the contrary of my conclusion is to be assumed, without demonstration, as a premise for confuting me, how is the argument to go forward?

The point may be made clear by facts that are not imaginary. It was lately argued, by a writer likely to be influential, that the Intercolonial Railway of Canada shows an advantage of government construction over private construction in that the Intercolonial, built out of taxes, is not burdened with an interest-bearing debt and hence does not have to count interest on the cost of construction in making its receipts meet its expenses. It is not denied that the people had to pay the full cost of building: the point is that they paid it in such a way as to escape the charge of interest, so that the payment was made once for all instead of being a continuous burden. What I say is that the continuous burden is not escaped. The people of Canada, even those who are not personally in debt and (if there be such) those whose governments are not taxing them for interest on borrowed money, have nevertheless been losing the interest on the money that was taken from them to build that railroad. The farmer was taxed $20, say, with which sum he would otherwise have bought a piece of haymaking machinery whose service would have been worth $1.50 a year to him; if this is so, that $20 is costing that farmer seven and a half per cent, interest. (To be sure, if a citizen paid his railroad-building tax out of money that would otherwise have been spent in theatre tickets, the railroad ÷if it is of value to him after it is built÷has done him whatever service there is in a law making it compulsory to lay up money instead of spending it all on immediate satisfaction; but I don't believe that was what the praiser of government construction intended to say.) And the like would have been the case if there had been no property in Canada÷if all haymaking apparatus had been free to the use of whoever had hay to make: it would still have been impossible to sink in that railroad a quantity of the community's stock of goods without losing the yearly value of the service of those goods elsewhere, and requiring the railroad to make up that yearly value, in addition to its running expenses, if it is to show that it was worth building.

The essential point is that when you use a piece of goods for one purpose you don't get the service which it might have performed if used for another purpose. The division of the transaction between two men, so that one gives up the use of the goods and the other gets it, in which case the first man will not enter into the transaction unless he either does it out of generosity or

gets the interest paid to him, is non-essential just as, if we were discussing the fact that the same bushel of wheat cannot be used for bread and for whisky, the fact that the distiller bought it of the miller would be non-essential. The fact of exchange merely facilitates the measurement of the values involved. (I always wonder how some of those extreme Socialists who would quite abolish exchange would measure their values.)

All this looks very simple. And indeed a German professor has defined mathematics as "the science of those things that are self-evident." But it sometimes takes a lot of explanation to get the self-evident things recognised. A distinguished Austrian professor of political economy, and his disciples, lately spent a lot of work and some money in trying to establish in East Africa a colony based on the principle that the burden of interest can be got rid of by issuing capital gratuitously to all who have a use for it. And in all ages the world has suffered much from those who have believed that interest is a burden imposed by the action of those who find it in their power to extort a payment in excess of what they give. I am persuaded that these persons would not be able to distinguish THE EGOIST'S utterances from their own.

STEVEN T. BYINGTON.

[1. We referred Mr. Byington to M. Bergson÷who is known even if Stirner is not÷in rebuke of the Rip-Van-Winkle tone of astonishment he chose to adopt in criticising our criticism of the present all-powerful vogue of "ideas" in the Platonic sense. That tone has now gone and we welcome its departure, whether resulting from a perusal of Bergson or from some other and unknown cause.

2. We do not agree that Descartes' connotation of ideas has superseded the Platonic one, not even in the scholastic backwater of philosophic discussion; still less in that infinitely greater and all-penetrating sphere÷the use and development of language. Our present cultural and consequently social existence is based on÷and worse still, all its developments are looked to adjust themselves to÷conceptions framed on the model of the Platonic idea, justice, equality, liberty, fraternity and the rest of the abstractions and "absolute" ideas. The influence of the Platonic Idea has increased and is increasing: and we consider it our business and pleasure as far as we are able to resist it. The rest of Mr. Byington's remarks÷on Zeno's conundrums about motion and their subsequent application to "intelligent planning" are wide of the point. With "intelligent planning" and its relation to the popular use of the term "idea" unless we are much mistaken we have already specifically dealt.

3. Concerning interest. Mr. Byington began with an assertion that interest was "right" and dragged in Bastiat and Henry George; and this latter dragged in "interest laid up in the cow." We accepted the challenge of the entire force÷Mr. Byington, Bastiat, George and the Cow, and offered an analysis with which Mr. Byington makes no effort to deal: for the simple reason, in our opinion, that, thanks to the cow, the position was made impregnable. We do not therefore intend to follow Mr. Byington in further "elucidations of the obvious" anent his Man on the Canadian Railroad. As for the "unlucky" financiers and their tearful plight in paying more "interest" (rent and profit) than they receive, we think the editor of the "Daily Herald" might offer the situation as the subject for a prize essay to small Heraldites of tender years.

4. Concerning the relative merits of the Carson and Larkin campaigns we look to current events to spare the labours of our pen.

5. Finally, property. There is no contradiction between the belief that private property is desirable, beneficial and necessary and the belief that when persons are suffering to the point of starvation through the lack of it, a sensible course is to acquire what they need by any means within their power. Indeed, of the statement "Private property is necessary and good," the statement "Therefore, if you are in lack of it, obtain it by any available means," far from being a contrary is, humanly speaking, its corollary.

Mr. Byington is apparently boggled by an assumption which his mind is harbouring, not about the benefits of private property, but of some "sacred, inalienable right" to the retaining hold of it. ÷ED. ]

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June 15th, 1914

NOTE TO READERS.

After this issue of THE EGOIST my work in connection with the journal will be limited to that of contributing editor merely. The paragraphs which have appeared under the heading "Views and Comments" will be contributed by me as hitherto and with the next issue I hope to begin a series of articles on the "Philosophic Basis of Egoism." The paper will be edited by Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver, to whom in future editorial correspondence should be addressed at Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, London, W. C.

DORA MARSDEN.