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Title:      Good-bye to Western Culture (1930)
Author:     Norman Douglas
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Good-bye to Western Culture (1930)
Author:     Norman Douglas




Some Footnotes on East and West



A GOOD while ago, as I was stepping into the train, a friend who had
come to see me off put into my hands a book and said:

"Have a look at this. Very rich, in places. Pure sensationalism, of
course; she wants to get herself talked about. I think you'll enjoy
it. If not, just throw it out of the window."

That is how I came to read _Mother India_, while the train crawled
slowly through a level, dried-up landscape under the cobalt sky of
early autumn. It was a drowsy afternoon; the corn had been cut long
ago, the country wore an air of exhaustion, and everything seemed half
asleep. And still we panted forwards, past white farmhouses and fields
of yellow stubble, stopping at every station. _Mother India_ is a
fairly long book; this was a fairly long journey, hot and tedious.

"Pure sensationalism," it soon became evident, was not quite correct.
If you poke your nose into unsavoury corners, the result is bound to
be more or less sensational. It struck me that the author had
performed in business-like fashion her job of disembowelling old
Mother India, though some of her arguments, I felt sure, would
certainly be challenged--as indeed they were. In other circumstances I
should have read it with greater attention (I did, later on).

That railway carriage was not conducive to the reading of a book like
this. The heat, the proximity to objectionable fellow-creatures,
children squalling in the next compartment, the screeching of
machinery, the perpetual coming and going, the banging of doors, the
whistling: what a coarse, undignified mode of travel! Here we were,
cooped up like hens in a basket; open the windows, and clouds of
noisome smoke pour in; shut them, and you are suffocated. A man
sitting opposite me was intent upon some newspaper article; I caught
sight of the heading "Indemnity." Indemnity--reparations; it was all
we could talk about then, it is all we can talk about now; an endless,
unbecoming haggle.... And the red velvet seats, my pet aversion.
Velvet in the brooding heat of August! Here was a sample of the
unnecessary discomfort which we Europeans endure all day long in one
form or another; that railway trip, a trifle in itself, made me
resentful against the Western world and its institutions, while this
book, with every page I turned, took me further away from them and
conjured up memories of a land where one feels more at ease. As I read
those disclosures, I could not help contrasting the two and thinking:
What she tells of India is all very sad and unpleasant, but--but how
about Europe?

Well, Europe has lost her smile. Moreover, she is growing smaller than
ever; small and explosive and hectic--_balkanized_. An air of
parochial defiance broods over us, signalizing its presence by
offensive aggressions upon liberty. Life in this continent must
present considerable difficulties just now to a really conscientious
person. They who make it their business to evade its laws and
conventions whenever possible are on a different plane; they find
their existence tolerable, and some of them--one, at all events
--would not be sorry if it lasted for ever.

* * *

A FEW observations then scrawled on the margin of _Mother India_ have
now blossomed, or at least expanded, into the following footnotes. The
long interval between the two events may suggest that the idea of this
book was conceived, and again discarded. So it was. Why bother about
the state of Europe? Such tasks should be left to the qualified
Western enthusiast, the world-improver, the dreamer, the eternally
hopeful and eternally muddle-headed. Can the leopard change his spots?
An occasional spasm of lucidity is all we may ever expect. Enlightened
individuals crop up in the most unlikely places and epochs;
enlightened groups of them are as common as a flock of white
blackbirds. The world has grown not only older since Pericles; it has
grown stupider.

The reader will find no suggestion of remedies in these pages. I am
not the stuff of which reformers are made; rather than indulge in that
variety of meddlesomeness I would sweep a crossing. Nine-tenths of the
reformers of humanity have been mischief-makers or humbugs. I have no
desire to be added to the list. A man who reforms himself has
contributed his full share towards the reformation of his neighbour.

Let Europe and Asia do what they please: good luck to them!

I observe, and pass on.

* * *

HERE they are, then--just a few footnotes, a few _asides_ that touch
the fringe of a great problem: East or West? The problem confronts
every one of us and its solution is uncommonly easy. It is a matter of
temperament; it depends, to a large extent, upon whether a man likes
to be flurried or not.

You can be flurried in the East nowadays, and to within an inch of
your life. I am thinking of modern Turkey, which last year, and during
a very brief visit, struck me as the most disagreeable place I had
ever been in. And I perceive that Mr. Harry A. Franck (_The Moslem
Fringe_) has come to the same conclusion after a longer stay in the
country. These poor devils have caught our European disease, and the
symptoms in both cases are identical. A political gale, involving the
usual varieties of cruelty and murder, has subsided into a heavy
ground-swell of morality known as "national regeneration" which, like
other forms of regeneration, is accompanied by depressing phenomena:
restrictions of liberty, police supervision, and all the bureaucratic
inconveniences to which we Europeans are now accustomed. Mr. Franck
has had a good dose of this legalized persecution; he seems to have
passed a great deal of his time at police stations; he has studied
their newly-made legislation and does not hesitate to call some of it
"quite insane."

Will these young Turks be as straightforward as the old ones, as
good-humoured and gentlemanly in their manners? I doubt it, for such
fits of self-consciousness _en masse_ are apt to leave a scar. The
official drilling they entail saps those individual virtues which a
patriarchal upbringing used lovingly to inculcate. Government by
bureaucracy has a familiar flavour in the West; a nation of Oriental
bureaucrats is something new, and a sight to make the angels weep, or
laugh.

* * *

A SIGNIFICANT little fact emerges on page 337 of _Mother India_ in
regard to local epidemics like typhoid, namely, that the natives "from
long consumption of diluted sewage have naturally acquired a degree of
immunity." They have also grown fairly immune to their own poisons of
the intellect which, imported into Europe by people who ought to have
known better, swept over our continent in a devastating epidemic of
unreason called Christianity, from which we Europeans have not yet
acquired immunity. This is a grave moral misdeed to be laid to the
charge of Mother India.

Her scientific crimes are every bit as atrocious. Max Mueller in 1873
was looking for an Indian inscription in which the cypher, the nought,
an Indian invention, occurred for the first time. It would be, he
says, among the most valuable monuments of antiquity, "for from it
would date in reality the beginning of true mathematical science,
impossible without the nought--nay, the beginning of all the exact
sciences to which we owe the discoveries of telescopes, steam engines,
and electric telegraph."

This means that the seed of plagues like Calvinism and the radio come
from over there. Mother India has a good deal on her conscience. Old
people, however, are not troubled with a conscience to the extent of
young ones; they have seen so much! And she is indeed old. At the time
when she invented these tricks we Europeans had not yet begun to paint
ourselves blue. That is a good stretch of years; she ought certainly
to be dead and buried instead of hobbling about as she insists on
doing. She is in her dotage, without a doubt, and terribly stiff in
the joints; anybody would be, at her time of life; it may end in
complete anchylosis--though I think not. She is also pig-headed and
crusted and fixed in a groove; such is the curse of age....

How about Europe? Is Europe grown up yet, and can it take care of
itself? Not for a good many years to come. Europe is still a baby in
its cot--rather a repulsive and fretful brat; all nerves. Moreover, it
seems to be unhappy just now; it has been squealing for the last ten
minutes and cannot tell us what it wants. Always squealing! What is
the matter this time? Smallpox?

Nothing so serious. It has only wetted its bed, as usual. No wonder it
feels uncomfortable, poor little thing. Let us hope a kind friend will
come forward with some violet powder and a change of linen, because
Nurse, also as usual, is engaged in a chat with that policeman round
the corner.

This makes me think that a change of nurse would likewise do no harm.

* * *

THE age of miracles is over, but a man may still have a stroke of luck
now and then. Such a one fell to my lot in February 1898, during my
first visit to India. I was in the Delhi bazaar and trying to conclude
a bargain, begun two days earlier, for an Oriental dagger-hilt of
lapis-lazuli. As is often the case, the ornamental inlaying of gold
and precious stones had already been removed; it was nevertheless a
fine specimen of that particular stone and of that class of work.

Presently we reached a deadlock; the jeweller refused to abate one
single anna more. I was still hesitating, when another man at the back
of the shop rose from his seat, took the thing out of the merchant's
hand and examined it carefully. He was oldish-looking, dressed in
European clothes, too clear-complexioned for a native and too sallow
to be a European. Then he said to me:

"Really, I don't think he is asking too much."

I should have cursed him for his interference, had the words not been
spoken in a tone of quiet, gentlemanly conviction, and with the air of
one who knows what he is talking about.

"Well, I hope you're right," I said, and, still grumbling vigorously,
paid for the article. He went on:

"In a few years' time things of this quality will fetch much more. You
are also in luck just now because of the plague; prices are down....
Now would you like to look at a few more shops? I can make them show
you what they don't show to everybody. Oh, I've nothing to do," he
added, noticing my hesitation. "Nothing whatever! It would be a
pleasure."

Walking along, and looking in at one or two jewellers' shops, we began
to talk about precious stones, and I soon discovered that his
knowledge of them was wide and deep-, he was not an ordinary expert.
He extracted something wrapped in tissue paper out of his waistcoat
pocket and said:

"You seem to be interested in gems. What do you think of this?"

A marvellous sapphire, without a flaw. In size it was not much larger
than a sparrow's egg, but its tint was the perfection of cornflower
blue.

"Siamese," he observed. "And how do you like this--and this--and this?
And _this_?"

Precious stones--the fellow was stuffed with them, and each the
choicest of its kind. Among the rest, I remember to this day a
canary-coloured diamond of about six carats, to obtain which I would
have cut almost anybody's throat. I said:

"You must have five thousand pounds' worth on you."

"A little more, I daresay."

As we were separating he suggested that we should meet again, and told
me his name. It was Jacob; he was born, he said, in the island of
Prinkipo.

"That's queer."

"How so?" he asked.

"Last July I went on a yachting cruise with a friend, Marion Crawford,
who spoke a good deal about a person of your name who was also fond of
gems, and also born in Prinkipo."

"Well, I am Mr. Isaacs."

Crawford often told me that he had gone to India with no intention of
becoming a writer. There he met Jacob, who made such an impression on
him that, just for amusement, he wrote a sketch called "Mr. Isaacs";
an uncle of his, reading the manuscript, insisted on having it
published; thus began Crawford's prosperous career as novelist. This
Anglo-Indian story created some sensation in 1882; it reads a little
thin nowadays, and is streaked with that sententious-ness and
melodrama which mar a good deal of Crawford's work.

So far as I could see, there was not much likeness between the
imaginary Isaacs and the authentic Jacob who was addressing me, save
their love of stones and their affability. Jacob was the
personification of kindness. He always had "nothing whatever to do"
except to show me the intimate life of Delhi from every angle, and to
talk about India past, present, and future. I feel sure that, thanks
to him, I learnt as much in those few days as an ordinary tourist
could have learnt in as many months, for up to that time my knowledge
of India had been derived from a course of lectures on Indian history
preparatory to passing a Civil Service examination, an examination
from which that particular subject was excluded by the authorities at
the last moment--to my considerable regret, as I then knew more about
Holkar and Scindhia than I shall ever know again.

* * *

IF YOU travel from the southermost tip of Ceylon to Darjeeling and
Hardwar and Peshawur you will at least learn this much: that India is
a pretty big place--------

And yet, how fond they are of little things and--as Marion Crawford
notices in that book--of "calling little things by big names"! They
give you a mutton cutlet and call it a chop; they give you shrimps and
call them prawns; they give you a guinea-fowl barely hatched and call
it a quail; they give you limes that are smaller than peas. I once
picked five of them, all on one branch and all of different tints j
they made a charming button-hole. And then, those microscopic knives
and forks--------

Something else soon dawns upon you: India is a gentleman's country.
That does not sound remarkable. It is more than can be said of our
continent. European servants... enough has been talked about them; the
brutes are driving us from our homes into clubs and hotels and
restaurants and out of Europe altogether, although I cannot help
thinking, from the peculiarly bitter complaints about English ones
which are not recent but have gone on for centuries, that there must
be something wrong with their mistresses. I have employed European
servants of varying ages and sexes and nationalities, and of varying
degrees of incapacity and drunkenness and insolence and thievishness.
Not a few were passable; the best of all was an Englishwoman. I think
of Mrs. Partridge with regret; she was both intelligent and devoted.

Of Sita Ram I think with more than regret; his intelligence and
devotion were not of this earth. He was the only servant to whom I
never had to explain anything. He was noiselessness personified. A
grey-haired old man, a man of an alien race--by what obscure but
infallible instinct did he know exactly what I wanted, and when I
wanted it? He was always present if I required him; always invisible
if I felt like being alone. He slept on the outside of my door; when I
woke up at night, he knew it; he woke up too. With a few passes he
could cure my worst insomnia, and send me into a dreamless sleep. If
any European can do that trick at a reasonable figure, let him step
forward. We may come to terms.

One of many unaccountable traits was his affinity with fire. He
handled red-hot embers without apparent discomfort and carried them
from one room to another in his fingers; and it was startling to watch
how, with two wizard breaths, he could charm a blaze into wooden logs
of a hardness unknown in Europe, a hardness to break any knife which
attempted to pierce or splinter them. How was it done? No white man
need try to master this secret; it is beyond the range of European
faculties. And how did he manage to conjure up in the open air, at a
moment's notice, on an overturned flower-pot, a four-course dinner out
of nothing--out of nothing? I am old and well stricken in years; I
have witnessed many so-called mysteries, but Sita Ram's improvised
dinners were the nearest approach to magic I ever saw.

I think we have something to learn from Mother India.

I think we shall never learn it.

* * *

His curries were lovely, and of infinite variety. Thirty-one years
and six months have passed since those days, and it makes me feel like
crying to know that I shall never taste them again.

Go to India, young man, and take Baedeker or Ferguson or the
Mahabharatta, according to your fancy; inspect the Elephanta Caves and
all the rest, and please note this: in your old age the Taj Mahal and
glittering Himalayas must mingle insensibly with other memories and
lose their sharpness of outline, fading away, at last, as a dream. The
vision of curry will remain clear-cut to your dying breath. Curry is
India's gift to mankind; her contribution to human happiness. Curry
atones for all the fatuities of the 108 Upanishads. Go to India, joung
man, and may you find another Sita Ram! He was wonderful in his
curries.

He was wonderful in his death. One day at tea-time he announced that
his daughter had died, and that life had lost interest for him. Next
morning he was dead himself. They told me he must have swallowed his
tongue. It may be true; I tried to find out, but failed. Curiosity--a
kind of affection, I like to think--drove me to the malodorous bazaar,
where I was met by a conspiracy of silence. The native police vowed
they had never heard his name. Then they obligingly made enquiries on
my behalf. The enquiries lasted a week and led to nothing. Nobody
could tell them where he had lived. Nobody had ever seen him. Nobody
knew anything about him.

Illusion?

Illusion it might be, but for the fact that I possess to this day a
small box of Cashmir work which he gave me.

* * *

GO TO the East, young man; leave behind you the frowsy and fidgetty
little hole called Europe. Savour the remedial effects of that other
continent before you are caught in our humiliating machinery; before
you are ticketed and labelled as to your monetary worth to a worthless
"community"; before you are taxed, and overtaxed, for the purpose of
keeping alive thousands of people who ought to be dead.

Get out of Europe! Rectify your values while there is still some
flexibility in your mind, and learn to laugh at the flabby gibberings
of our cultured classes and the comical bestiality of their inferiors,
our nauseating politics and childish social ideals, our moral
hypocrisy that breeds liars, the inquisitorial tyranny of our laws
that breeds cowards, and certain absurd newspapers whose function
consists in persuading us to attach importance to what is not worth
thinking about. Get out of it!

Oriental life engenders self-respect and ease of soul. This is what
makes sensible people home-sick for the East. This is what we
Europeans lack and what we need more than anything else; they are
qualities so rare nowadays that most of us have forgotten what they
mean.

Over-government is killing self-respect, and hustle is killing ease of
soul.

* * *

YET India is full of ills. The remedy? We must raise the educational
level. Once her children have grasped the binomial theorem, all will
be well. Their future careers are assured; in other words, a contented
peasantry will be converted into discontented office-seekers. "Indian
Universities," says Mr. Aldous Huxley, "produce a swarm of graduates
for whom there is nothing to do." And everybody says the same.

How right was the poet Gray when he said that learning should not be
encouraged, because it only draws fools from their obscurity! And how
right was that American who told the author of _Mother India_ that it
was a crime to teach the natives to be clerks, lawyers and politicians
before they had been taught to produce food!

In raising the educational level, what are we really raising? A brood
of cads. The cad is a product of education. You will not find him in
Oriental countries--not until they have enjoyed our advantages of
universal schooling. That is one reason why Hindus are divided into
castes. They will have nothing to do with universal schooling, which
claims to be based on the doctrine that all men are equal and
therefore equally entitled to its benefits, although, as a matter of
fact, it is based on something quite different. Hindus know better.
They know that men are not equal, and that a certain number are by
nature unteachable, because they lack the required outfit. The Western
notion seems to be this: some dogs can learn tricks, therefore all
dogs must learn them. Are we ever going to realize that we have our
unteachables too, and that to keep them in schools is wasting not only
our money but their time? Presumably not. The school-age is
continually being raised. Soon we shall be doing sums when we might be
getting married. Under discipline all the time, and coddled like
little girls! The consequence is that England is full of well-groomed
adolescents of twenty-five, with no more poise or self-reliance than a
Newfoundland puppy.

I have lately gone through two volumes of a certain family history.
Astonishing, how early the ancestors of this family began life, and
what a zest they threw into it! At fourteen they had their University
degree or Army commission or whatever it was; four years later they
were married; by twenty-five, as Popes or Ambassadors, they had
already made provision for a fine progeny of bastards.

That is a well-spent youth.

* * *

IF I were asked what Europe requires at this moment I should say it is
men who can evolve notions independently of other folk, men who can
think without thinking what they are expected to think, men who tend
to diverge from the common rut and are able to contemplate with fresh
eyes what is going on around them. Such men might see what is amiss,
and might discern remedies.

These would be superior men, and somebody has said that all government
is a conspiracy against the superior man. In compulsory education the
State has forged an admirable weapon to this end, since it is the
business of schooling to suppress such men and to crush down the race
till we are all as alike as two peas. Germany before the War had
doubtless the highest educational standard in Europe. What was the
result?

At a critical moment she could produce not a single statesman of
foresight or insight; these qualities had been ground out of her
politicians by hard-and-dry school drilling in their youth. The
decline in German depth and pliability of character, which Germans
themselves observe, has coincided with the speeding-up of their school
curriculum; and I think we shall perceive the same in England. We are
perceiving it! Compulsory European schooling is based not on a desire
for individual welfare, but on international fear and distrust.

* * *

EDUCATION has been raised to a bad eminence, and one or two charges
can be brought against it which contain more than the proverbial grain
of truth. It is a centripetal process; it creates a type instead of a
character; in other words, it instils uniformity, which is an enemy of
civilization. It is a governmental contrivance for inculcating
nationalism, another enemy of civilization. None but a strong nature
can profit by its good effects and defy the bad ones; none but a small
percentage of children recover before middle age, when it is too late,
from that withering strain of application. It frets away their finer
edges and dries up the well-springs of individualism. It destroys
their originality of outlook, their curiosity, their initiative, the
directness of their mental vision. They learn to see with eyes, and to
think with brains, which are not their own. Their impulses, their
conversations--their dreams, I daresay--are standardized; and if not,
a ten years' course of schooling has certainly done its best to attain
that end. Education is a State-controlled manufactory of echoes. The
old Greeks did not share our views on this head. They held that
whoever craves for learning will find it without the help of
school-boards, and that whoever is constructed on other lines should
follow other pursuits. Men in those days were sifted as to their
natural talents--they were allowed to sift themselves, and the result
was a level of intelligence not to be achieved by modern methods.

The system has now become so fashionable that to abolish it may well
be compared to putting back the hands of the clock. What if the clock
is going backwards instead of forwards?

* * *

IT HAS been argued that illiteracy should be suppressed because there
is some connexion between it and criminality. Greater nonsense was
never talked. No criminal worth his salt can afford to be uneducated.
Illiteracy is the privilege of the Chosen Few, even as learning should
be. These people are never cads. They could not be cads if they tried;
they have not had our chances. Restful folk, full of mother-wit.
There are far too few of them. Moreover, they know their business;
illiteracy makes a man observant. I have yet to meet an analphabetic
who could be called a fool. Nor have I ever met a dishonest one;
cheating is risky, if you can neither read nor write.

I sometimes visit one of the few remaining illiterates here, and I
always think he is one of the few remaining gentlemen. He has none of
that pertness and superficiality which education produces among men of
his class. He was put to work barefoot at the age of _six_--working
from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M.; is now seventy-five, and lives with his wife in
a kind of Rowton House, where he cultivates a tiny patch of garden
which has been allotted to his two rooms. This man, you see at once,
is superior to his "educated" fellows. His dignified ease reminds me
of certain Orientals I have known. There is spontaneity in his
utterance; not a chain of cliches more or less laboriously strung
together. That talk of his, clear-cut and original, is like a breath
of fresh air in our education-tainted atmosphere, where everybody says
exactly what you expect him to say. With this man, you never can tell
what he is going to say, because you never can tell what he has been
thinking. Had he been reading the daily paper or the last novel you
could tell at once. His brain has not been addled with such things,
nor with chatter about them. He has employed it to better purpose and
kept a cleaner edge to his wit; a kind of bloom.

A supply of men who have not inhaled that poison-gas of education
which paralyses our nerve-centres of independent thought would be a
national asset in times of stress; a reservoir of sturdy sanity. It
was an analogous consideration which led to the English system of
trial by jury--the control of the expert by common sense.

I am not entering a plea for illiteracy--not every one possesses the
needful qualifications--nor suggesting that our representatives abroad
should be unable to sign their names, although, as a matter of fact,
they seem in pre-examination days, in the days of patronage, to have
been no less efficient and worthy to hold their posts than the skinny
professors whom the Civil Service Commissioners now provide for us. I
think, however, that Imperialism is an undiluted mischief, and that
all its offspring are mischief. One of them is compulsory education.
The chief result of such training on persons unfitted for it is that
it begins by creating wants, and then proceeds to demonstrate that
these wants are needs. Since these needs cannot always be gratified,
it lies at the bottom of many varieties of discontent and unhappiness.
Discontent and unhappiness are evils. This is what the
education-fetich has hitherto accomplished in Europe. For every evil
remedied, it has implanted the germs of ten new ones.

* * *

THERE are in India about 229,000,000 people who can neither read nor
write. The peasants, living in 750,000 villages, belong to this class;
those peasants who are liked by all that know them, and whom the
author of Mother India calls "simple, illiterate, peaceful, kindly,"
and again "dignified, interesting, enlisting people." Not everybody
has these rare and charming characteristics. When a man does possess
them, and also knows his business as thoroughly as the Indian
cultivator, he should be envied of his lot and allowed to enjoy it in
peace. That itch for interference! The Indian peasant is a grown-up
person; he is no mental deficient; he knows what he wants. If he wants
the benefits of education for his children, let him say so--although I
daresay he divines what it will mean. It will mean higher taxes.
Governmental altruism, in India and out of it, always ends in heavier
taxation.

Thirty-three thousand adult white illiterates are living in America,
and American children, somehow or other, still come illiterate into
the world. Compulsory education is supposed to be good enough for
them. And yet, judging by what Messrs. Upton Sinclair, Mencken, and
others have to tell us, the half-civilized American must be
sufficiently alarming; the half-civilized Babu is probably worse; and
when all the cultivators of India have learnt to despise their jobs
and to seek new outlets for their energies, as the half-civilized
English peasantry are doing at this moment with deplorable economic
results for the country--when they have learnt to consider themselves
as good as anybody else because some fool has drilled them up to the
standard of a grocer's assistant, then it will be time (as the
Persians say) to put one's trust in God.

* * *

CRITICS of Hindu illiteracy should not forget that British rule is
largely responsible for it. By the Institutes of Manu, the parent was
obliged to place his child at school in his fourth year. At the
beginning of last century there were schools in every Indian village;
in sweeping away the village system we have simultaneously swept away
the schools. John Bright complained in 1853 that while our Government
had almost wholly overthrown the universally existing native
education, it had done nothing to supply the deficiency (E. Wood: _An
Englishman defends Mother India_, p. 229). Ten years ago only one
penny per head was spent on education in British-ruled India, whereas
Russia was spending between sevenpence and eightpence (H. M. Hynd-man:
_The Awakening of Asia_, p. 218). "One cannot fail to deplore the
rapid decadence, probably more rapid than the official figures show,
of independent educational institutions" (G. T. Garratt: _An Indian
Commentary_, p. 78).

A native State, Baroda, is ahead of British-ruled India in this
respect; even as another such State, Mysore, has abolished the
temple-girls--a measure which our administration will hesitate to
adopt.

* * *

THE pest of nationalism....

It engendered, among other monsters, the Great War; and this, in its
turn, has produced an obnoxious little abortion which is making
England the laughing-stock of the nations: Dora. So many things are
forbidden by law that it would now save time to draw up a list of what
is still allowed. I cull the following well-known case from the
papers:

"In the early hours of yesterday morning 20 detectives, all wearing
evening dress, with red poppies in their button-holes, raided the
luxurious premises in Grafton Street of Chez Victor, one of the most
exclusive supper--and dance-clubs in the West End of London. The
officers arrived in five motor cars, and, in Indian file, passed up
the steps of the club, deposited their hats and coats in the
cloak-room, and marched upstairs to the ball-room. A dance was in
progress at the time, and the detectives seated themselves at the
tables till it was over. Then they [some words illegible] and
proceeded to take down the names of the 40 people who were there,
nearly all of whom were titled folk. It is understood that among those
present at the time were an M.P., a V.C., and a leading actress. The
officers also took samples of the liquids in glasses on the tables,
and, before leaving, interviewed the manager. Mr. Victor Perosino, the
proprietor, was at a loss to account for a visit of this character.
'Chez Victor has been in existence for about four years,' he stated,
(and we have never had any trouble before. The detectives found two or
three glasses on the tables with a little champagne in them.
Everything had been cleared away except those glasses, which my
waiters had overlooked. But the champagne had been served before 12
o'clock. No wine was served after the legal time. The police showed us
every courtesy, and were as little trouble as possible.' Chez Victor
numbers royalty among its patrons, and it is the resort of many highly
placed in Court, diplomatic, and political society."

Has anything more futile ever occurred on earth?

Nearly all of them were titled folk....

What fools they must have looked, these titled folk, V.C.'s and
Parliamentarians!

And why do they put up with such nonsense?

They manage these things better, out East.

* * *

MORE freak-legislation:

"Last Tuesday a woman shopkeeper sold a twopenny packet of cigarettes
'because she needed the money,' and was fined the cost of the
prosecution."

"_Whatever we think of the law we have to administer it_, said the
Mayor of Newark when fining a grocer five shillings yesterday for
selling a loaf of bread at nine o'clock at night."

Can cretinism go further?

Of course it can:

"On Saturday a Paddington confectioner was fined 5 pounds for selling two
pennyworth of cough drops after hours. His defence was that he thought
they were medicine."

Babies. That is what any Oriental would call us.

"More than a score of East-End news-agents were yesterday fined sums
ranging between 10s. and 40s. at Old Street Police Court for selling
newspapers after 8 P.M."

It is to be hoped that such rubbish may soon be a thing of the past,
and that we shall have to look up the files of musty newspapers in
order to believe that it ever could have existed. Meanwhile it is
significant to note that while other European countries have long ago
abolished these restrictions, the Englishman remains too phlegmatic
to get rid of them, although they are a disgrace to the Government
which guaranteed their repeal, an injustice to many, and an annoyance
to all.

Here is a pearl: the Secretary of the Athenaeum Club writing to the
papers to the effect that if a member, even the Prime Minister, asks
for a glass of whisky-and-soda at 11.15 he will not be served.

What a pack of masochists!

* * *

GLANCING through the pages of Mother India one gains the conviction
that the author's indictment of Hinduism is nothing but an indictment
of Christianity. That is the long and short of it. What else could we
expect? East is East, and Christianity is Eastern. If Christ were to
come to earth again, He would undoubtedly prefer life among the Hindus
to life in England or America. More familiar and homelike.... And I
question whether He would insist, even at this hour of the day, on the
teaching of French or algebra. The Kingdom of Heaven lies not in that
direction.

Christian poets, mediaeval and modern, have hymned the charms of
womanhood in moving verse; what the old law-book of Manu says, or
rather sings, about women and maidens has a refinement of beauty which
is not surpassed in any European tongue. And Manu alone, of all
ancient lawgivers, allows for the passionate nature of women and will
not have them treated as frigid creatures: he knew the world! Of the
mother he says that she "exceedeth a thousand fathers in the right to
reverence, and in the function of educator." The scripturally
prescribed course of an Indian woman's life is not more humiliating
than that laid down in our own texts, and its practical working,
despite such horrors as Sati--the authority for which is based on an
altered text--has proved less calamitous. It is well to remember that
Christ Himself was not overpolite to His Mother on a certain occasion,
while Saint Peter and Saint Paul said things about women that were
both unkind and unreasonable.

Now the extreme views of these two holy men may be impugned. I am
inclined to think, at least, that Paul, being an epileptic, cannot
have known much about women, and that Peter, as a married man, may
have known more than was good for him. Be that as it may, it is easy
to realize how much saner was the old Mosaic conception according to
which it became the greatest disaster for a woman to die without
progeny, and dishonourable to remain unmarried and childless. "God
hath taken away my reproach," said Rachel, when she bore her son. This
is Hinduism, and there is a gulf between it and the later Christian
teaching.

* * *

THE mischief began with Paul. His doctrine was paraphrased by S.
Augustine--who, by the way, tolerated concubinage--in words which
afterwards became the canon of the church: to wit, that a fruitful
marriage is not to be compared in excellence to the purity of a
virgin; that perpetual continence is preferable to the married
condition, even if the begetting of children be its aim; that if one
had no children one should render thanks to God; and so forth. Even so
Chrysostom, who calls women "a foe to friendship, an unescapable
punishment, a necessary evil," etc., tells us that virginity is a
saintly state, and as superior to married life as Heaven is superior
to earth--a statement which would have scandalized Moses. Other
Fathers are no less explicit. S. Bernard says of women that their face
is a burning wind and their voice the hissing of serpents; S. Jerome
tells us that he who loves his wife to excess is an adulterer; he
calls women the "gate of Hell," and, writing to a widow about to
re-marry, quotes S. Peter's words in regard to the dog returning to
its vomit and the sow that was washed going back to wallow in the
mire.

Christianity of this--the official--type is incompatible with decent
sex-relations.

The movement towards the degradation of womanhood went on in a
delirious crescendo^ and soon we have our schoolmen asking whether
females be human beings at all, or not rather monsters in human shape,
and suchlike conundrums. Does the religious literature of India
contain researches of this sort? It is not likely, but I cannot tell
for certain. The casuists meanwhile were at work pursuing the enemy,
with unimpeachable logic, into labyrinthine byways of nastiness where
the most dirty-minded of modern laywriters would fear to read. Their
labours, directed to transforming woman into a guinea-pig, have been
conscientiously summed up in _Theologie Amoureuse des Peuples
d'Occident: Morale Matrimoniale: par un ancien Chanoine_. It is
written from a strictly Catholic point of view (published, I should
guess, in the 'nineties). And yet-how strangely anti-Catholic in
spirit! A sensible Pope like Pius the Second, one fancies, would
have had small use for this kind of "Theology." As to Alexander the
Sixth... The book is not suitable for a school-prize. Its effect
upon a newly married couple must be depressing in the extreme, and I
venture to recommend the Kama Sutra as a counter-irritant.

* * *

IN THE whole course of history, the most brutal enslaver of women has
been Christianity. We have been told much about the low position of
the female sex at Athens, but, as Mr. M'Cabe points out (_Sources of
the Morality of the Gospels_, p. 103), Plato vindicated the equality
of women two thousand years before any Christian Of rceived it.
Adultery was punished with death at Athens, not out of a
transcendental (Christian) regard for chastity, but because it broke
in upon the mutual attachment of married people. Even in the most
licentious periods of antiquity, and among the most licentious
authors, you will have difficulty in discovering anything which
justifies adultery. Where would our Christian literature be without
this peppery ingredient?

A propos of literature, there is nothing like the _Malleus
Maleficarum_ in that of any country on earth. It was written not by
some amateurish woman-hater in a fit of bad temper, but by two
recognized teachers of Christian dogma at the command of a Pope
(Apostolical Bull of Innocent VII. issued on 9th December 1484, and
addressed to the authors). A section of it, Part I, Question 6, might
be called the misogynist's handbook. No creed save ours has engendered
this pathological fear and loathing of the female sex.

One single Biblical phrase, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"
has led to the death by agonizing torture of unnumbered innocent old
women; another one, "that I may present you as a chaste virgin to
Christ," has condemned many hundred thousand young ones to lifelong
imprisonment--to tears and misery in the cells of convents. And if
they slipped through that net, there were other cheerful texts, such
as "compel them to enter in," lying in wait for them. Whoever wishes
to refresh his memory in regard to these enormities need only glance
into the Memoirs of Princess Henrietta Caracciolo, which were written
as late as 1864.

So much for the enslaving of women by Hindus.

* * *

AS TO the enslaving of men, Plato, and after him the Stoic moralists
and lawyers, already censured slavery, which neither Christ nor any of
His followers discovered to be wrong till twelve centuries later. And
how about slavery among the Hindus? Megasthenes reports that no Indian
can, under any circumstances, be a slave; Arrian adds that they forbid
even the employment of aliens as slaves. In this, as in every other
department of social life, the ethics of the Hindus are as superior to
those of Semitic Christians as are their achievements in art and
philosophy, in literature and science.

One might do worse, in this connexion, than see what Ouida writes in
her _Failure of Christianity_ :

"... Even of death Christianity has made a terror which was unknown to
the gay calmness of the Pagan and the stoical repose of the Indian.
Never has death been the cause of such craven timidity as in the
Christian world....

"... Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has
forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which
sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as
the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of
earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and
darkness, and bade the woman whose lips were warm with the first
kisses of her lover believe herself accursed and ashamed. Even in the
unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the
passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely
to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. The words of the
Christian nuptial service expressly say so. Love, the winged god of
the immortals, became, in the Christian creed, a thrice-damned and
earth-bound devil, to be exorcised and loathed. This has been the
greatest injury that Christianity has ever done to the human race...."

If our attitude towards women has changed of late, the explanation is
this: we have abandoned the precepts of our inspired teachers, and cut
the cables that bound us to them.

* * *

LIKE the Hindus, we talk about our "superfluous" women. I dislike that
word. I question whether women can be proved to be superfluous until
you have abolished them, and in the present case the word is based on
the assumption that each man requires only one mate. Why not fifty? I
have watched in the old days the Turkish harem taking their pleasure
out of doors; they were as happy as children and, in point of law, as
free to leave their husbands as our wives are, if they have any cause
for complaint against him. This is an economic problem; it depends
upon how many women a man is able and willing to support, or, if you
like, how many women care to club together in order to support one
man. Seeing that a single male of our species is capable of
fecundating any number of females, one might more reasonably talk
about superfluous men.

Hindus deal with these economically over-numerous women by practising
female infanticide (among unlettered classes) and polygamy--two
straightforward attempts to tackle the problem.

We Europeans have improved on the Oriental system of infanticide. Save
for a little amateurish overlying and an occasional foetus down the
lavatory pipe, the custom has grown obsolete. We have birth control
and other tricks that get at the root of the matter. Their only
drawback--a serious one--is that they destroy males and females
indiscriminately.

And Oriental polygamy, carried on under Western conditions of life,
would be a terrible drain on a man's income, and a great
responsibility as well. Absurd, nevertheless, to suggest that our
adult males are living monogamous lives; if one or two are doing so,
it means that they lack either the moral grit or the physical outfit,
or both. They are polygamists; but their polygamy is practised on
inexpensive lines and with a minimum of personal responsibility. Our
European rule runs to the effect that a man's mistresses are to be
kept by their husbands.

This is an advance on Eastern methods.

* * *

ON THE other hand, our Divorce Courts, which make absolute about three
thousand cases a year, reveal European life at a low level; they lack
the frankness and consistency of the East. An unlovely, farcical
tangle, which involves elements of hypocrisy and dirty work on the
part of everybody concerned, not excluding the judge. The sanctity of
wedlock is prescribed both by our religion and by that of the Hindu,
but we have cut the cables, as usual, whereas the Hindu still regards
divorce as _at once monstrous and impossible_.

This public airing of soiled linen is vulgar, un-Asiatic.

Said Mr. Justice Hill: "The law which this Court has to administer is
full of inconsistencies, and is often very difficult to reconcile with
common sense."

So is the whole institution.

* * *

THERE seems to be some confusion between Indian child-betrothal and
Indian child-marriage, which are two different things. The former is a
measure to hinder incontinence before marriage, and might
advantageously be copied in Europe (as it used to be) if we attached
the same importance as do the Hindus to a virginal state of body on
the part of the bride; that is, if we insisted on such a state. We
dare not insist. We must buy the cat in the bag. The cat is not
always up to specified quality.

At Ahmedabad not long ago an injunction was applied for to prevent the
marriage of a widower of 53--some said 55, while he maintained that
his age was 49--with a girl of 15, on the ground of the disparity of
their ages. Incredible to relate, the injunction was granted by the
English district judge and, on appeal, upheld.

It may be that the girl did not want to marry; that would put another
complexion on the affair. If she was willing, then my sympathies
go out to the widower. He might have obtained his heart's desire,
had his legal adviser pointed out that in 1927, according to our
Registrar-General, seventeen old Englishmen of over seventy married
girls in their'teens. A wedding described in the press as "77 marries
15" took place in the South of England last month. It was the third
marriage of the bridegroom, who is said to have been for many years
"interested in child welfare." So it appears, and I can only
congratulate him on not living at Ahmedabad. Despite the precocious
physical development of Indians, the child-marriage business is
overdone out there. These poor fellows are petrified in
conservativeness; they wish to conform to the law which binds all
mammals and lays it down that menstruation is indicative of sexual
maturity. Girls therefore, like other mammals of their sex, can and
should be married at the earliest date after reaching puberty. Now
most mammals--take, for example, the domestic kitten--are mentally
mature before they are sexually so. Not the man of to-day. The
complex conditions which society has evolved demand so relatively high
a standard of mentality that mental maturity in his case actually lags
behind the attainment of the other. And mental maturity is now to be
the test of the marriageable age.

For the rest, our English rule which allows a boy of fourteen to marry
a girl of twelve compares unfavourably not only with other European
countries but with some Oriental ones: with Turkey, for instance,
where the marriageable age for both sexes is fixed at fifteen; or with
China, which insists upon sixteen as the lowest age. In 1927,
thirty-five of our English brides were only fifteen, and twelve
bridegrooms only sixteen; and 58,000 persons were married under
twenty-one.

Lord Buckmaster made some pertinent remarks the other day in the House
of Lords:

"I wonder if your Lordships realize that, although child-marriages are
permitted in non-Christian India, yet none the less, married or no, it
is a criminal offence for a man to have relations with a girl under
the age of thirteen years. In other words, all the time that we were
making this disturbance about the condition of affairs in India, we
had a condition of affairs here at home which in some respects was
identical, and in one marked instance was worse. Surely the first
thing we ought to do is to put our own house in order before we start
arranging other people's."

* * *

AS WE have a fit of age-raising just now we might consider, I think,
whether it would not be reasonable to raise the hanging age, which is
at present fixed at sixteen. It is difficult to conceive in what
circumstances a boy of sixteen can deserve death by hanging. Yet
during the twenty-five years ending 1926, fifty-seven persons under 21
were sentenced to death, and twenty of them actually executed.

And while we are about it, we might raise the age of criminality in
general. As matters stand, a child above seven who commits an offence
against the law is a criminal. I gather from Mr. Brockway's _New Way
with Crime_ that a departmental Commission which lately reported on
this imbecility has concluded that the age "could now be safely raised
to eight."

Perhaps seven and a-half would meet the case.

* * *

WHILE Hindus like their brides under-ripe, a certain proportion of us
prefer them in the dowager stage. How explain the fact that it is
sometimes the bride who leads the blushing bridegroom to the
altar--the bride well out of her'teens? This incongruity is a
ceaseless source of marvel to me, though I can appreciate the lady's
point of view. Have such men lost the wit to perceive the discrepancy
of marrying women who are almost old enough, and always shrewd enough,
to be their grandmothers? Or is it a sign of insufficient manliness
that, instead of capturing young girls, they are captured by old ones?

Not a single union of this kind ever takes place among Orientals, nor
could it take place among any men possessing a relic of the aesthetic
sense, for if there is one thing uglier than an unclothed old or even
middle-aged man, it is a woman at the same period of life.

Such dames are probably more experienced than younger ones and also
more grateful, as Benjamin Franklin observed long ago. Their husbands,
however, must find it difficult to instil any fresh notions into their
heads, and that is surely one of the joys in store for the bridegroom.
Uphill work, trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Uphill
work! Whence the hunted look peculiar to married men of this variety.

* * *

I HAVE also a prejudice, not shared by everybody, against golden and
silver weddings. If these observances are not Teutonic in their
origin, they ought to be; they bear the impress of vulgar
ostentatiousness. Such anniversaries should be celebrated in the
strictest intimacy. Conjugal fidelity recorded on a tomb will pass,
since nobody takes these inscriptions seriously; but it strikes me as
questionable taste when two people suggest in public that they have
slept together for fifty years, or whatever it is, like a brace of
Wandaroo monkeys. Besides, they haven't....

* * *

THERE is one feature peculiar to Indian married women which the author
of Mother India, observant--viciously observant--as she is of such
things, has overlooked. I refer to their singular custom of nursing
boy-children at the breast till they are almost old enough to play
polo. Whether the habit be good for the parent or not, it certainly
strikes me that mother's milk is incongruous nourishment for
youngsters who can digest mutton cutlets and jam tarts.

This little absurdity, if my American informant be correct, can be
matched in some wilder parts of the West. Overheard in Kentucky:

"Say, young man, what are you beating up your mother for? Put down
that stick!"

"The damned old bitch--she's trying to wean me."

* * *

INDIANS keep a good number of their "superfluous" women indoors. They
are sometimes let out for hire, the young ones, and are known among
Europeans as "private girls," earning a little money and giving
satisfaction to a class of white men who might dread contact with
professionals.

We do not put our superfluous women into the Zenana. We put them on
the streets. I am not going into prostitution-statistics. During the
War, and on good--rainless and windless--nights, I often counted over
thirty of them, freelances all, to a measured hundred paces of Paris
boulevard; forty-eight was my record (unbelievable crocks, many of
them). They have now a better breed, but fewer in numbers. The really
high-class prostitute--in England, at least--tends to disappear. Her
days are numbered. The lady is usurping her functions.

A certain class of Indian girls are put into temples for the use of
the priests, and the Buddhist monks of Ceylon are not content with
this system. These yellow-robed saints will have nothing to do with
the pretty Singhalese; they import their girl-friends direct from
Japan.

* * *

THERE has been some talk lately about the De-vadasis owing, I daresay,
to a chapter in another book by the author of _Mother India_. In every
case, there seem to be two sides to this question as to their
ill-treatment. A late Lieut.-Colonel in the R.A. Medical Corps
writes: "... During my six years in India I must have visited many
hundreds of temples. I spoke the language fairly fluently, and for a
short time I was acting Governor of the jail, and had opportunities of
seeing and hearing a good deal that tourists do not. Only on rare
occasions did I ever see any dancing-girls in the temples. These
Temple Maidens, or Devadasis, as they are called, appeared to be
extremely happy and well cared for...."

We do not put girls into temples for the use of the priests. We put
them into brothels for the use of anybody who cares to go there. It is
nothing unusual, in low-class European establishments, for a girl to
receive visits from twenty to thirty men a day; indeed, it is usual.

I think I should prefer the Indian temple engagement. It sounds more
restful.

* * *

"THE number of still-births," says the author of _Mother India_ (p.
106), "is heavy. Syphilis and gonorrhoea are among its main
causes...."

So they are everywhere.

The frequency of syphilis is a disgrace to Europe. I do not know
Indian statistics of mortality (they probably do not exist), but I
defy them to be more appalling than those of France, which are lying
before me in the shape of a bundle of recently printed reports. Here
are some French figures that provide matter for thought:

40,000 miscarriages a year are due to syphilis.

20,000 children die from it every year between the sixth month of
gestation and the third day after birth.

80,000 others die from it every year--including 36,000 child-victims
between the ages of four days and fifteen years.

Syphilis is therefore responsible for 140,000 yearly deaths in France.
If gonorrhoea be taken into account, "the ravages of venereal disease
are greater than those of tuberculosis," which is responsible for
150,000 deaths a year.

Four million Frenchmen are suffering from it.

These figures are considered to be "very certainly still below the
reality."

Is it to the credit of Europe that, in spite of all we knew about this
disease, we should have waited until the last few years before
discarding haphazard methods and grappling systematically with it?
During the war, in 1916, was noted an ominous rise which culminated in
1919, the worst year. This scared the medical profession and the
public.

Better late than never. The French have now started a scientific
crusade, attacking the enemy from every side--by the formation of
societies to this end, by propaganda of many kinds, posters, films,
theatrical representations, gratuitous dispensaries, ambulances,
lectures by radio and otherwise, a campaign against patent medicines
and quack doctors, revised regulations for prostitutes, distribution
of leaflets and brochures, money-prizes for the best popular essays on
the subject, newspaper publicity, sanitary control of immigrants,
special educational courses, and other measures.

The results are on the whole satisfactory--not so satisfactory,
however, as in Belgium, where syphilis has been reduced in only four
years to one-fifth of what it was before that time: a "diminution
foudroyante" which shows what can be done by concentrated effort, and
for which "propaganda" is said to be chiefly responsible.

There has been so serious an outbreak of venereal disease in Carnarvon
among children under sixteen years of age that the County Health
Committee are advocating the compulsory notification of such cases. I
question whether the Ministry of Public Health would ever take a step
of this kind. During the War, in a certain military hospital, the
parents of infected men were notified of their condition, with the
result that there were so many suicides among the patients that the
number of the ward had to be changed, on account of its ill-repute.
You may notify scarlet fever; who is going to notify venereal disease?
People would sooner take their chance of being fined for not doing so.
On the other hand, many of the methods of Franco-Belgian propaganda
are inconceivable in a Godfearing country like Wales. Whoever wishes
to abolish syphilis should begin by abolishing hypocrisy.

* * *

SO MUCH for the superfluous-are they superfluous?-women of the lower
classes. Their social superiors of the middle class can best be
studied in places like Kensington High Street or Oxford Circus, where
legions of marriageable but unmarried women block the pavements to
such an extent that future town-planning will have to take this factor
into account, and build special subways for those of us who have any
business on hand. Sad to think how few of them are professionals. They
would at least have a _raison d'etre_ in this world, and be earning
their own bread-and-margarine.

Or if they could be induced to emigrate! But that is not the ideal of
those whom we could spare most easily. They prefer Oxford Circus. And
yet a few shiploads would be a godsend in places like British East
Africa, where they would have a good time with the young planters and
Government clerks, who are nearly all unmarried and entitled by nature
to a little female society, whether as wives or otherwise--I mean as
honest housekeepers; especially in view of the twice-repeated
confidential circular recommending Government employes to avoid all
intercourse with native women.

Though something may be said for such instructions, they are a dead
letter, if they exist at all, among the French and Dutch and
Portuguese, who have not forgotten the organic needs of their colonial
officials, and do not condemn them to celibacy at a period of life
when they arc least fitted for it. Our youngsters out there arc losing
a disproportionate amount of health and happiness, considering the
little they gain in prestige. Once you are accustomed to the proximity
of these black fairies there is nothing to be said against them. They
are ready for as much fun as you please, and no trouble whatever to
keep. A liaison with such a one would be more amusing and
unquestionably more instructive than with the average white girl,
though I daresay we should tire of them sooner or later.

We tire of the white ones too.

And don't they tire of us....

* * *

NOT many years ago the German Reichstag by a great majority asked the
Government to bring in a Bill legalizing in their colonies marriages
between whites and blacks. There is something to be said for such
unions; they have a political significance which is emphasized in
Shiva by Mr. R. J. Minney. Speaking of the early days of the British
occupation in India when they were common, he says that they "resulted
in a far greater understanding of native mentality and conditions than
is possible from the detached viewpoint of the white home, where the
black is only a menial and even the educated Indian is admitted on
suffrance." An understanding of native mentality is of more value than
big battalions. They have, however, this drawback: the whites are
sometimes inoculated with the mentality of the blacks, as Lord
Dalhousie had occasion to discover.

The same state of affairs prevailed in the days of William Hickey,
whose memoirs contain an exhilarating account of Anglo-Indian life in
the eighteenth century. No opprobrium then attached to a man's having
a native concubine or wife, and Hickey himself, at first inconsolable
for the loss of his darling Charlotte, takes to his heart later on a
"lovely Hindostanee girl," who was "respected and admired" by all his
friends. These friends included the Governor-General, the Chief
Justice, the Commanding Military Officer, and all the _dessus du
panier_, male and female.

Let him try it on, nowadays....

* * *

I SHOULD be vastly pleased to see a complete and definitive edition of
these memoirs, which I have just been re-reading. So far they have
appeared in slightly abbreviated form, because some parts were
considered dull, and others, owing to freedom of language, unfit for
publication. This un-fitness, I fear, will prove a disappointment to
those who hope to find in the omitted portions what they find in the
unexpurgated Pepys. Hickey's was a franker variety of amorousness,
and his coarseness is simply that of Smollett. "I vomited out of the
coach window the whole way to the great entertainment of the
foot-passengers." Whoever still believes in the immutability of racial
characters, a theory that has some bearing on the problem of East and
West, should read these memoirs in order to see how differently an
Englishman near to us in point of time could think and behave. Were
memoirs of this kind written to-day, they would doubtless
contain--incidentally, at least--some description of the country or
reflection on its inhabitants; we might also expect to find literary
or political allusions. There is little of the kind here. The book
deals with social events happening to Hickey and his group, and with
nothing else; it glides smoothly along--no haste, no fretfulness, no
snobbery, no erudition; a convivial document full of zest and yet
quite leisurely. It reeks of wine and good cheer. Hickey relished life
and, unlike the present generation, was not afraid of human nature.

He began boozing early. At the ripe age of seven, sitting on
somebody's knee, he swallows his bumper of claret, declaring that he
looks forward to the day when he may be able to drink two bottles. And
Willie was not the "pickle" of the family; his brother was worse.
They were fond of each other, and their fraternal orgies grew to be so
terrible that "I came to the determination never again to join my
brother in those tete-a-tetes."

I suppose we should call him precocious nowadays. "Many a bumper of
champagne and claret have I drunk in the society of this set, at
taverns and brothels, accompanied by the most lovely women of the
Metropolis, and this before I had completed my fourteenth year"-and
again: "I told her the strength of my purse, and proposed going to the
play, which she consenting to, there was I a hopeful sprig of 13,
stuck up in a green box, with a disreputable woman. From the theatre
she took me home to supper, giving me lobsters and oysters, both of
which she knew I was very fond of, and plenty of rum punch...."

Hindu boys must look to their laurels.

Was he any the worse for these and other "excesses"? On the contrary.
After spending half his life under the then pestilential conditions of
India, he died in England over eighty years of age.

* * *

NUMBERS of them perished out there from fever, because they had no
quinine, and bark was taken only empirically. They must have been a
tough lot on the whole. Hickey gives us more than one glimpse of Lord
Lake and his almost unbelievable achievements at the age of
sixty-five; there were others of his genus, and one marvels how they
got through their tasks in the India of those days with no tinned
provisions or condensed milk, no ice--they "cooled" their claret, I
imagine, by evaporation: the first ice was brought to Calcutta from
America--no electric fans, no whisky-and-soda or light beer, no escape
to the hills from the burning heats of summer when, to refresh
themselves, they swilled quarts of madeira (port is never named). Now
here is a little point. Hickey prided himself upon a connoisseurship
of wine, and yet, whatever he drank, be it claret or burgundy or
champagne or madeira, he describes as either good or bad, and there's
an end of it. I can discover no mention of any particular brands. When
did our interest in such things begin?

Another little point. I observe no disparagement of native life or
customs--indeed, older travellers to the East and older residents
there are altogether lacking in our tone of arrogance towards
Orientals. When did our racial superiority over them begin to dawn on
us? When our racial intelligence began to decline. The theatre is as
good a test of general intelligence as any, and nobody, I think, will
dare to assert that the mind of our present theatre-going public is as
nimble and critical as it was in Hickey's day, or even much later.

And what I said on p. 23 about our doing sums in school when we might
be getting married finds a commentary here. Hickey himself was
appointed a midshipman before he could read or write; another boy of
14 is mate of a ship; another of 21 in command of one of the company's
vessels; another of 18 commands a troop of Dragoons; another of 22 is
senior officer of his regiment; another of the same age commands a
frigate.

Were these lads incompetent? Far from it, though their equipment might
not always be adequate for modern needs.

* * *

SPEAKING of education, certain of the letters sprinkled about these
pages deserve a close study by reason both of their well-expressed
language and of the fine feeling which underlies that language.
Analogous letters written nowadays would not betray this genuine
sympathy, this delicacy of touch. What is the use of education if,
instead of producing a sensitive and cultured mind, it frets away--as
I said before--our finer edges?

With all this gentlemanliness, the memoirs are pervaded by a
refreshing air of corruptibility--a breath of earlier days, when
Englishmen were still made of flesh and blood, and a few sparks of
spontaneity glimmered under our puritan ashes. We encounter various
delightfully accommodating Customs Officers: one would like to shake
hands with them. How smoothly the wheels went round! I confess that,
with increasing experience, I have reached the conclusion that honesty
is a matter of time and place. I am not pleading for dishonesty; as
with illiteracy, not every one possesses the required qualifications.
But I should say that an imaginative man can never be constitutionally
honest, as some of us may rightly claim to be. The eighteenth century
was more imaginative than ours. What is honesty? A time-saving
contrivance. The eighteenth century was not pressed for time. The
majority of modern people being dullards pressed for time, honesty is
not only their best policy, but their only possible one.

Hickey, for the rest, seems to have been a man of singular rectitude.
What he earned was devoted to social pleasures, with the result that
while many of his friends grew rich out there--one of them, not a
merchant but a barrister, made 80,000 pounds in a little over three
years--he returned home relatively poor. There he died at a
patriarchal age, after writing memoirs which are a veritable godsend.
There are four volumes of them; forty would not be too much.

Memoirs are being printed furiously just now--cheery accounts of
globe-trottings and sports, with political gossip, an occasional
glimpse of royalty, a little scandal, and a good story here and there.
These things are records, not revelations of a personality. You cannot
offer to others what you lack yourself, and their authors have no
personality to reveal. There is also not much sense of spaciousness;
the present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously
suburban in spirit. In short, nobody can give us a document on
Hickey's lines; we possess neither his outlook nor his material.

* * *

WHAT are they doing meanwhile in Oxford Circus, these thousands of
potential mothers doomed to sterility? Flattening their noses against
the windows of drapers' shops. What have they ever done? They have
flattened their noses.

I should not be surprised to learn that some of them can cook a
passable dinner, and that a good many have outgrown the chastity ideal
of their grandmothers. Even if not, they can now do something still
better than that. They can serve on juries; they can vote: over five
million have been added to the register by the recent Act. It
promises well. Somebody has said that the spirit of revolution broods
over the female sex. Let us hope that he, or she, was right; for in
that case women will at last be in a position to counteract that
fuddle-headed romancer, the male, whose veneration for cast-iron
principles, however obsolete and perverse, is ripe for a formidable
shattering. Under these new conditions we shall, I trust, have more
imagination in public affairs--call it flexibility or laxity if you
like: no need to haggle about a word, so long as the thing itself
comes about. That will mean more sympathy. Love of principles and
lack of sympathy are not to be distinguished in their results. And
lack of sympathy means lack of charity.

Some more charity would not be amiss. About fifteen thousand
non-criminal debtors are locked up in England at this moment (this is
an English specialty--almost). In 1926 the Courts of summary
jurisdiction convicted 525,543 persons; 25,564 receiving terms of
imprisonment without the option of a fine. And although everybody is
agreed that prison life is harmful to persons under 21, yet the
average sent there is 3000 a year; in 1925-1926 twenty-one were
sentenced to penal servitude, the minimum term being three years. The
other day a boy of 17 was sentenced to six months' hard labour;
another of 15 sent to prison for a month for stealing four-pence. How
about the Probation Act? And what is Jesus saying to all this?

Something, maybe, about the deplorable consequences of a reverence for
out-of-date principles. ...

* * *

THE idealistic male with his cult of principles is the curse of
Europe. He will die for his principles; no harm in that. He will
persecute others for his principles, and this is what makes him such a
nuisance. Let us thank our stars that women are congenitally
unprincipled. Up to the present they have not had much chance of
displaying this quality as public functionaries. Now they have, and
herein lies our hope. But for this fact, society might well go to
pieces from sheer ossification and priggishness.

For your prig is a person with fixed principles, who can therefore see
only one side of a question. He is no modern product; Roman history is
full of such people--the Romans may be called a nation of prigs, and
England is infested with them to such an extent that they poison the
very air we breathe. Now there are more women in England than men.
Nevertheless, there are fewer woman-prigs than man-prigs. How does
this come about? Because preconceived theories lie less heavily on
women; they find no difficulty in seeing two sides of a question. And
if they sometimes see more sides than there actually are, as they are
supposed to do--why, it is a fault in the right direction.

P.S. A man who calls women congenitally unprincipled may look out for
squalls. Let me shelter in good time behind the skirts of Mrs. Walter
M. Gallichan, who calls women "instinctive moral anarchists," and of
Madame Andreas-Salomi, who says that they are "swayed, far more deeply
than men, by a hidden contempt for what is traditionally accepted."

One of these days it may be an outspoken contempt.

* * *

IF ASKED to say what principles are, I should reply that they are
adaptations; guiding rules of conduct derived from our experience of
ourselves and of our surroundings. This experience, as every one
knows, is shifting all the time. A good deal has had the bottom
knocked out of it during the last century. Many principles therefore
have ceased to be adaptations, unless modified. They are survivals,
anomalies. Our social machinery is clogged by what were once
adaptations and are now anachronisms as useless and menacing as the
vermiform appendix. They ought to be scrapped. They would be scrapped,
but for the idealistic man-fool who is too lazy to take the trouble.
Laziness is the hall-mark of idealism.

The French Revolution and Bonaparte gave us English such a scare as to
the dangers of individualism that there followed a general
tightening-up of principles; the late War has had a similar effect. We
are living in an era of constriction. The mischief, however, is older
than that. It is rooted in the codification-mania of the old Romans,
and in their _pietas_ (leave things as you find them) which suits our
lymphatic temperament down to the ground.

Orientals are more fluid and more pliant. A "precedent"--the
Englishman's delight, because it saves him the trouble of confronting
an emergency--is of no great account with themj they hold that "no law
can meet individual cases, and that a regime of law is a regime of
injustice." I wonder, indeed, whether an authentic precedent has
ever existed on earth, unless one disregards contributory elements of
greater or less moment. Be that as it may, a precedent is a
rule-of-thumb measure, and Orientals distrust such measures. As Mr.
Townsend points out, they prefer to the inexorableness of our system,
to our leaden order, a flexible and human will. They realize that
every act of man is unique of its kind. They believe in expediency as
opposed to abstract principles.

It is to be hoped that woman-voters will justify their existence by
battering down a few obstructive principles which are responsible for
an infinity of harm, and which the man-dreamer would not touch to save
his life, unless they kick him into doing it. What trouble it has
cost, hitherto, to obtain the repeal of some hopelessly senile
exactment! These women should expedite matters and make the country
more inhabitable.

As for the others, the non-voters--a Zenana-life might have
attractions for some of them. There they could talk _chiffons_ day
and night, and play with embroideries and jewelry, and eat as much
fancy pastry as they like. There, too, they would find what not all of
them can find in Oxford Circus.

* * *

THE social superiors of this class of woman can be studied to
advantage during the winter months on the French Riviera, where they
abound--all of them rich, and most of them past middle age. A resident
tells me that seven out of ten English visitors at this season are
women. Certainly one of the features of the landscape down there is
that horde of painted old dames, double-chinned and encrusted with
pearls, tearing up and down the country in high-priced cars. What are
they doing? Driving about. What have they ever done? They have driven
about. One wonders what the upkeep of these rest-(84) lessly-gadding
parasites costs their respective males. And if they have money of
their own, one wonders who was fool enough to give it them. One hopes,
in every case, that they are being well trimmed by some friend or by
their servants.

Into purdah? No. The old dears are having a lovely time of it.
Besides, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that purdah-life could
teach them.

* * *

WHEN all is said and done, an intelligent interest in food--how to
prepare it and how to enjoy it--is no illusory sign of civilization.
Judged by this test, the French stand in the front rank of civilized
people.

Another test. There appeared in Paris not long ago a collection of
appreciative sketches by prominent writers which had for subject a
colleague of theirs; the volume was dedicated to him; it was their
publicly expressed "Homage" to his merits. Homage books are known in
England also, but I have no hesitation in saying that what is implied
in the publication of this particular one demonstrates that France has
reached a point of liberal culture to which England has not yet begun
to aspire. Here, then, is a second and different touchstone of
civilization.

This by way of preamble.

M. Louis Roubaud, in the interests of the _Quotidien_, wrote a series
of articles about French reformatories for boys and girls; they came
out afterwards in book form under the title _Enfants de Cain_. If the
material was printed in the _Quo-tidien_ as it stands in the book,
that paper is to be congratulated on its courage. No English editor
would have accepted it. As to the book itself--not one of our
publishers would touch it unless a considerable number of entire pages
were cut out. Not that there is anything revolting in what the author
has to tell us. He merely adverts, with data, to certain features in
the social life of these institutions, features to which an English
writer would not dare to advert because he knows, firstly, that his
readers cannot bear to look truth in the face, and, secondly, that if
they could, his publisher would still refuse to print. I think it was
Mr. Lowes Dickinson who said that "an obstinate and familiar habit of
the English is to get rid of facts they don't like by pretending that
they don't exist."

They tell me that Jacques Dhur's (or is it Andre de Lorde's) _Bagne
d'Enfants_ contains more vivid accounts of the sufferings of these
children; I have not seen it. _Enfants de Cain_ is quite
disheartening enough, though not sensational on the lines of _Mother
India_. Two things strike me as peculiarly lamentable: the large
percentage of young inmates of these places who have not been
convicted of any offence whatever and are none the less rotting there,
and the incapacity of the "unlettered" persons in charge of them. And
the injustices... a boy of 14 was instigated by one of 25 to help in
the theft of a bicycle; the instigator received fifteen days'
imprisonment, and the other was landed for seven years in one of these
Hells. The official callousness... the directress had applied for
"provisional liberty" for the best-behaved girl in the establishment
who had been there three years without incurring any blame; the
Ministry refused it. The cruelties... they have a strait-waistcoat
punishment for girls; your hands are strapped from behind over your
shoulders, you are thus bent double, and, in order to eat--there being
neither table nor chair--you must lie on your stomach on the floor and
lap up your food like a dog. One girl died of suffocation under this
torture; according to the inquest it was a case of ordinary
congestion, "mais elle est bien morte camisolee."

Accidents will happen....

* * *

SPEAKING of these children, M. Roubaud says:

"Ils sont nes: c'est leur crime.... Eysses et Clermont sont des
paradoxales prisons ou l'on enferme indifferemment les innocents et
les coupables, et d'ou sortent des apaches et des filles publiques....
Il est intolerable que des enfants soient durement punis sans avoir
rien fait; il est plus odieux encore que sous pretexte de les
reeduquer on les pervertisse.... Je sais bien que les mots 'maisons
correctionelles' ont ete effaces sur les portes. Il faut maintenant
raser les murs."

And an enlightened Director of such an establishment told him:

"What our children suffer would be nothing if one saved them. But I
can affirm, and have the proof of it, that all or nearly all finish
their existence in Guyana [as convicts].... What I have been able to
see in this reformatory is unimaginable, and I should have been
ashamed to stay so long in such a cloaca, had I not done my best to
clean it up."

These are abuses, but the French have at least the courage to expose
them in a public newspaper.

It would be useless attempting to obtain analogous information
concerning our English reformatories. You would no more hear the
truth than you can hear the truth about our penitentiaries. You would
be up against the usual brick wall. Yet a little leaks out now and
then, and that little is not to our credit. A defect of the English
system is that such places are mostly under private management, with
the result that "there is a danger that children may be retained
longer than is necessary, in order to retain the grant" (A. F.
Brockway, _A New Way with Crime_, p. 73). A painful instance of this
was recently exposed in _John Bull_ in an article beginning "If the
Board of Control cannot be bent, it must be broken" (8th Dec. 1928).
Indeed, that paper has done a public service in drawing attention to a
variety of things that call for betterment in our English
"Homes"--_see_, for example, 3rd Nov. 1928; 24th Nov. 1928; 29th Dec.
1928; 9th March 1929. It was with a certain purpose that I claimed
for France just now the first place among civilized people. M.
Roubaud's book is dated 1925. Exactly one hundred years earlier the
New York "House of Refuge" was founded by the local Society for the
reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. Seven years after the date were
issued the seven annual reports of the Society with a variety of
supplementary documents (_Documents of the New York House of Refuge_.
New York, printed by Mahlon Day, 376 Pearl Street, 1832). Whoever
reads this book will be convinced beyond all doubt that, as an
experiment in humanitarian reform, the American system of a hundred
years ago was superior, both in methods and results, to that of the
most civilized European nation of to-day.

It is not a consoling reflection.

One-third of the marriages contracted in France are sterile. No wonder
the French are crying about the depopulation of their country; they
want more citizens. Why do they condemn to a life of misery and
criminality so many of their children?

* * *

Two features of French life contribute to fill these reformatories
with undesirable--should I say undesired?--children. M. Roubaud
probably knows all about it, but refers to the matter only once (p.
207) when he tells of a boy of I 3 who was placed in such an
institution by his mother in order that she might pass the holidays at
a watering-place with her lover, undisturbed. My knowledge of such
things may be slight, but it is first-hand; it was acquired in Paris
during the War, when, circumstances compelling me to frequent a
particular "set," I opened my eyes, and saw.

Firstly, stepmothers. Your Frenchman, like many brave people, has
a pronounced streak of masochism in his nature. He relishes being
ordered about by wife or mistress; you can hear him boasting of his
obedience. Supposing such a man loses his wife and has her children on
his hands. Well, he mopes; he might pine away altogether if not
consoled with wife No. 2. This is the stepmother; and whoever knows
France will agree with me in saying that the French stepmother is
unlike anything else on earth. The children of the first marriage are
in her way; she is tigerishly concentrated on her own offspring--more
so than any English mother; they take up a certain amount of her
husband's time and affection, which annoys her; lastly, she controls
the family finances, and the idea of disbursing money on creatures not
her own is more odious to a close-fisted Frenchwoman than to any
other. She sets about discovering faults in them; the man dare not
disagree; he discovers them too. Anything for peace; the poor devil
has never had a will of his own, where domestic affairs are concerned.
He begins to neglect them; she nags them into resistance. At last,
convinced of the growing coldness of their father who once behaved so
differently, and driven to despair by their stepmother's systematic
persecution, they escape from home into the streets-even those of
decent families-where they are _ramasse_'d. in due course by the
police and sent, on the charge of undisciplined conduct, to some
reformatory. This is what the stepmother had in mind from the
beginning.

Secondly, the usual triangle; that is to say, where the mother of a
child has not only a husband but a lover as well. One such woman had a
son of about 14 who began to take notice of her liaison with this man
not his father and perhaps made some inconvenient remarks about him,
as a boy naturally would do. She saw her love-affair imperilled, and
it was not long before she had persuaded the boy's father to send him
to one of these unspeakable institutions on the usual pretext. There
he remained. A flabby father, you will say. So he was; and a cocu into
the bargain, like many of them. I could tell several such stories.

* * *

WHEREVER there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them; and
all that goes on behind those particular walls is misery. A case of
suicide, a most determined case, managed to leak out some time ago
owing to an indiscretion; otherwise it would have been hushed up. I
should like to know (1) what percentage of children confined in these
establishments has been landed there through the agency of stepmothers
or of married women with lovers on their hands; (2) what percentage,
if any, comes out "reformed" in any sense of that word; and (3) what
percentage of those in charge of them are retired prison warders, the
most brutal class of humanity.

Such children, whether boys or girls, would be happier and better
cared for in Indian brothels. They would also not end their lives as
convicts.

Needless to add that these _maisons de correction_, which are found
throughout Europe and which ought to be wiped off the face of the
earth, have not existed among Hindus in all the course of their long
history.

Mohammedans, who consider that children, however obstreperous or
perverse, are their parents' flesh and blood, would be horrified at
such methods. (It is the same with Foundling Hospitals. Followers of
Islam cannot understand our need of similar places.)

Orientals are able to control their offspring.

Why cannot Europeans?

* * *

THE appearance of books like M. Roubaud's and a more conscientious
application of the law seems to have led to some improvement in these
_maisons de correction_. This is reflected in a series of nineteen
articles by M. Raymond de Nys entitled "L'Enfance Maudite" and
published in the _Petit Parisien_ between the 22nd December 1927 and
23rd January 1928.

Much remains to be done before the system, if it is to be kept up at
all, can be called satisfactory. There is, for example, the Petite
Roquette establishment (soon, it appears, to be closed) full of
unhappy children, but possessing neither water, nor electricity, nor
heating, and whose "filthy and damp walls exude misery and vice." The
concluding article summarizes the chief defects still existing, one of
them being the inefficiency of those in charge. The old complaint!

"Il faudrait eduquer le personel de surveillance. ..."

I have just spoken of the Director of one reformatory who told M.
Roubaud that all or nearly all of the child-inmates ended their
existence as convicts in Guyana. Well, whoever can digest strong fare
might read the admirable description of Guyana convicts by M. Georges
le Fevre, which was written in the form of 26 articles for the Paris
_Journal_ (aoth Dec. 1925-4th Feb. 1926). It is to be hoped that these
articles will appear in book form like those of M. Rou-baud: they are
worth it. We learn that there are six thousand of these convicts
(one-quarter of the whole population) rotting out there, and the whole
system is riddled with cruelties and abuses and absurdities--a
disgrace to Europe which calls for instant and wholesale revision.

If they do not manage these things better out East, they could
certainly not manage them much worse.

* * *

A PROPOS of France, what of the concierge system?

A pest.

I have no objection, in Paris cafes and so forth, to being supervised
by the stony, argus-eyed female who sits enthroned night and day in
some strategic position of control (does she ever eat or sleep?); no
great objection, in a public convenience, to being escorted to my
particular destination by some sinister-looking person of the other
sex. _On s'y fait_.

Nothing will accustom me to that compound of slimy servility, police
espionage, and blackmail, who withholds your letters, forgets messages
entrusted to her, tells your friends you are out when you are in, and
invents other exquisite methods of annoyance, unless her paw be
periodically greased. Has any one ever written the life of the average
concierge and related the steps by which she has raised herself, often
from the dregs, to a position where she can control the happiness of
several households? The _Roman chez la Portiere_ is not to the point;
but I think one or two of my French friends are in a position to write
a little sketch entitled "How my Concierge got her Job"--instructive,
but hardly publishable (to which she, well informed as she is
regarding their habits, could reply with a "What his Concierge found
out"--equally instructive and, I fear, equally unpublishable).

You will not encounter the concierge East of Suez.

No wonder Orientals, observing how twenty decent families are
dominated and terrorized by a single disreputable female, come to the
conclusion that Europe is growing, or has grown, into a lunatic
asylum.

* * *

IT is difficult to put one's finger on a single spot and say: Here is
the difference between East and West. David Urquhart, whose books are
full of shrewd reflections, observes of the Turkish villagers: "though
they might suffer from the irregular excesses of ephemeral governors,
they ( loo) had not to wither under the undying errors of
legislators." Elsewhere he elaborates this argument about the
_intrusion of law_.

"... The difference between the tyranny of man and the tyranny of law
is one of the most instructive lessons the East has to teach. The one
is uncertain, and leaves to the oppressed chances and hopes of
escaping it; it varies with the individual; and those who suffer, if
not benefited, are, at least, consoled by the vengeance that, sooner
or later, overtakes the guilty. The tyranny of law is a dead and
immovable weight, that compresses at once the activity of the limb and
the energy of the mind; leaves no hope of redress, no chance of
escape; is liable to no responsibility for its acts, or vengeance for
its crimes."

Tyrannies so different in their nature cannot but differ as to their
results; persistently applied, they mould the minds of men into
dissimilar patterns. The inconstant pressure of a human will
induces shiftiness, mobility, and an uncomplaining readiness to take
the bad with the good; the constant pressure of an inhuman machine is
not favourable to the development of personality. We have seen the
process at work in England. The Anglo-Saxon, before he became a slave
to law, was more of an Oriental than he is to-day; more mercurial in
temperament, more flighty and tricky, but also more of an individual.
Our sense of private dignity can survive the most oppressive
man-despot; the despotism of law corrodes it.

* * *

THE opening pages of _Mother India_ are dedicated to a picturesque
account of a visit to a temple of Kali. This goddess is worshipped
chiefly by the lower classes, and in the temple a continuous slaughter
of kids and other revolting ceremonials are proceeding in her
honour--a gruesome spectacle calling for some pungent language, whose
veracity has not been left unchallenged (_Father India_, p. 69). It
was good journalism to start the book with this sanguinary
description, this epitome of the baser aspects of Hinduism; it arouses
the reader's interest and makes him hope for similar horrors later on.
He will not be disappointed.

Against these pages I had scrawled the enigmatical syllables Ath:
East: Can any one guess what they stand for? I abandoned all hope of
remembering, and only just now has it occurred to me that they signify
Athens: Easter. At that season, namely, there is a great slaughter of
lambs and kids in the streets of Athens, and the worshippers are not
confined to the lower classes. The beasts, as at Calcutta, are
sacrificed in honour of a deity; the only difference is that in India
their bodies are consumed by the priests and not by the populace, and
that the bloodshed takes place within the precincts of a temple and
not on the public roadways.

Squeamish persons are therefore not obliged, as at Athens, to witness
the rite. Squeamish tourists in Greece will do well to avoid the
steamers plying between the Aegean islands and the capital just before
Easter. These boats are loud with the bleating of lambs and kids torn
from their mothers and bound for the slaughter in Athens. They are
penned as closely as sardines, but in less regular order. So they roll
and pitch about, often on the top of each other, and sometimes for two
days. A sailor comes round now and then to throw overboard those which
have been trampled or suffocated to death.

Here is a job for the newly-founded Greek Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals.


* * *

INDIAN gods are apt to be grotesque, and Kali is no exception to that
rule. She is, on the other hand, too unnatural to inspire either
reverence or fear or loathing. A goddess with four hands is no longer
redoubtable, having overshot the mark and become a mere curiosity.

A little more tolerance on the subject of Eastern idols would do no
harm. All religious symbols are absurd, but some are more pleasant to
behold than others. I should like to ask any man who is neither Hindu
nor Christian whether a well-smeared lingam be not a less repulsive
object than a crucified God or Man.

* * *

INDIAN superstitions--we have heard enough about them.

How about European superstitions? I cull the following from the
press: "The persistent use by the populace of pagan specifics against
the Evil Eye is causing concern to certain leaders of the Church, who
complain that 'even among faithful observers of Christian practices
this superstitious idea has not fully died out.' Particular objection
is raised to objects such as horse-shoes, horns, and sheaves of corn
placed upon doorways, which contradict the Christian belief that 'all
goodness comes from God.' Cardinal ----- has approved a scheme
whereby these will be replaced by 'oriflammes bearing the name of the
Saviour.'"

The Cardinal in question must be at a loose end for something to do,
and a thin-skinned old gentleman into the bargain, if he objects to
the familiar horse-shoe. He will also find it a tough job, trying to
abolish the venerable horn-symbol which is older than history,
animistic and ubiquitous, and, in the Cardinal's country, not only
"placed on doorways" but sold in thousands by coral, mother-of-pearl,
silver (and other metal) merchants, and attached to man and beast, and
to vehicles as well. Macrobius, a sensible person, tells us that there
is nothing so powerful as a horn to avert evil. He was a pagan, but
the Cardinal can also find Scriptural authority for the use of this
emblem. Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made him horns of iron, and
presented them to the King of Israel as a charm to ensure his success
if he went up to Ramoth-Gilead to battle.

I think the old gentleman has started at the wrong end, if he wishes
to root superstitions out of his Church. Why not begin a little higher
up in the establishment?

* * *

HINDU bigotry, derided by many European travellers, can be matched in
our continent; matched and beaten. It is less acrimonious than that,
for example, of the Welsh. It does not break up family life. Savages
like those depicted in Caradoc Evans' _My People_, savages living
within a few hours of Charing Cross, cannot be found in the length and
breadth of India.

Hindu polytheism fares no better. And yet, if one must have a creed,
it is more logical than ours. A Great Being who sets the Cosmos in
motion and then goes to sleep: that will pass. One who remains awake
and responsible for all that happens on earth is a monster. Even with
the help of the Devil to explain away the worst of his tricks, he cuts
an indifferent figure. Monotheism, a graceless and unreasonable
belief, has its origin in laziness. A single God is an absurdity and a
bore.

It would be an infringement of copyright if I printed here, as I
should like to do, what I have elsewhere said on this subject (E.
Hutton, _A Glimpse of Greece_, p. 147).

A system of polytheism such as we find in Homer can be evolved only
among men who are really free, men of good health, of sensitive and
alert minds; men who possess constructive imagination and a deep
sympathy--a kind of masonic feeling--for the processes of nature.
These are the qualifications; and we no longer have them. The
Christian theory that polytheism points to a low state of culture is
refuted by the life described in these poems, which reveal an ethical
outlook cleaner than our own; the morality, private and public, of
these polythsists has extorted praise from all scholars, including the
sanctimonious Mr. Gladstone. Their standard of female virtue, for
example, contrasts favourably with what our monotheistic teachers have
told us about women. And that is a crucial test. Gladstone cannot
avoid making his usual reservation in favour of Christianity; he says,
nevertheless, that "it would be hard to discover any period of
history, or country of the world, not being Christian, in which women
stood so high as with the Greeks of the heroic age."

* * *

ROMAN CATHOLICS have shaken off the nightmare of monotheism. Their
Trinity is broken up, the Holy Ghost having evaporated in the course
of years, as spirits often do. Catholics have manufactured a Pantheon
of their own where pagan deities are well represented; rather a
sunless Council-chamber, but better than a single tyrant-god. They
realize that one deity cannot decently be entrusted with all the dirty
work he has to do. Like Jupiter, he requires lieutenants,
demi-gods--saints and angels. To take only the Madonna: there are
about one hundred varieties of this Magna Mater, local
demi-god-desses, each with separate attributes according to her
functions. Polytheism....

It was the same in old India, which claims to have possessed only one
Veda, one God to whom worship was addressed. Paramesvara or Brahma or
Ishwara was the true and omnipotent One. This system having the
inevitable drawbacks, he began to subdivide after the manner of other
Supreme Beings. The Rig-Veda helped in the work of laying down the
attributes of the nature-gods, of classifying and standardizing them.
Even so Homer "arranged the generations of the gods."

Poets are hostile to monotheism.

If we must have gods, let us have them by the score--it is the only
way out of the difficulty. Let us have them numerous as in the
streets of old Naples, where, according to Symmachus, it was easier to
encounter a god than a man. The more the merrier. Then we shall know
on whom to fix--the blame, when anything disagreeable happens to us.
At present, God being good, we are up a tree. The Southern peasant
knows which saint is responsible, if his cow breaks her leg or
swallows a billiard ball. How convenient, how reasonable!

Hanuman, the Divine Monkey, jumped from India to Ceylon.

Balaam's ass could talk Hebrew.

English people poke fun at Hanuman's exploit.

These are the same who haggle in Parliament as to transubstantiation.

Grown-up men, too....

* * *

How good it is, in the middle of such buffoonery, to throw your
Parliamentary Debates or Cruden's Concordance into the waste-paper
basket, and open a tale of the Arabian Nights, no matter where!
Instantly your humour mellows; you are transported into conditions
where life was pleasanter for both rich and poor. The compilation has
been deliberately devised for entertainment, but behind this
artificial screen one divines a society which was compact, harmonious,
and substantial. There are no false notes in Mohammedanism, no
patches. It simplifies our existence, and scorns its calamities. Above
all, you have the joy of finding yourself among real men. This
religion has not sapped our _amour-propre_. .,.

Or try Athenasus, for a change. Another compilation! Open him where
you please--------

The Sybarites were not only luxurious; they were absurdly sensitive,
and had such a dislike to work that the mere sight of manual labour,
and even the mere thought of it, made them feel unwell. One day a
citizen imprudently ventured outside the town walls, and there, to his
horror, he saw a man ploughing a field. He felt as if "all the bones
in his body were broken," but managed, nevertheless, to crawl back and
consult a medical friend of his.

"Good God," said the doctor, "you--you saw a man working..."

The doctor had fainted away.

* * *

ATHENAEUS has many such tales and is always diverting, whether he
discourses of eels or harlots or pigs' trotters or towels or turnips
or grammar or perfumery or fishmongers or cheesecakes or flutes. I
daresay he was personally a dull dog, a bookworm, a collector of
scraps. It is fortunate that these scraps have survived. They give us
glimpses into a state of refinement such as no longer exists. In that
Alexandrian conglomerate is embedded the residue of civilization.

Maybe the nearest approach to such a state of affairs could have been
found in China up to a few years ago. And it strikes me as significant
that men who speak most highly of Chinese life are precisely those
whom one would expect to be most deeply convinced, by reason of their
studies, of the superiority of Western tradition.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson has told us pretty clearly what he thinks in
_Letters from John Chinaman_. In another book he says: "The West
talks of civilizing China. Would that China could civilize the West!"

Mr. Bertrand Russell observes that "when I went to China I went to
teach; but every day that I stayed I thought less of what I had to
teach them and more of what I had to learn from them." And elsewhere:
"The Chinese are gentle, urbane, seeking only justice and freedom.
They have a civilization superior to ours in all that makes for human
happiness....I think they are the only people in the world who quite
genuinely believe that wisdom is more precious than rubies."

* * *

A FRIEND, British householder, sends me the following:

"This may interest you. The Travel Association of Great Britain and
Ireland, represented by English traders, tourist agencies, railway and
steamship companies, hotel and theatre proprietors, and others, is
anxious to increase the number of visitors, chiefly American, who come
to England; it wants to keep them here instead of letting them roam
about the continent of Europe or further afield. The Government has
lent its support to the movement (guaranteeing 5000 pounds towards the
funds next year) with Committees and suchlike, which has for its
watchword COME TO BRITAIN.

"Dear me!

"The preliminary puff should be drawn up on these lines:

"COME TO BRITAIN, where you will find:

"1. The worst climate in Europe.

"2. The most brutal and ferocious Customs-examination (the fingering
of rich women's _lingerie_ by the British working-class inspector is
offensive to the last degree. I have seen nothing like it elsewhere.
Is there not a tax on silk in other countries? Of course there is, but
these apply their law in a gentlemanly manner).

"3. The most comfortless and expensive hotels.

"4. The worst cooking.

"5. The worst wagon-restaurants (Menu: a bowl of soup, half cold; a
clammy slice of cod, half cold; a slice of foreign beef, half cold;
dried apple-tart and custard, warm; Canadian cheddar; chicory and
acorns for coffee, warm).

"6. That you cannot get a drink when you want one, in part of the
morning and the whole afternoon (a cheery place for Americans, who
want a drink all the time, and deserve it).

"7. That you are not allowed to buy a cigar after 8 P.M.

"8. Or to drink at all after 11 P.M.

"9. That if you speak to a woman in the street you are run in.

"10. That if you walk in the Park after sunset you will be spied on
and probably arrested.

"11. That if you stay six months--but nobody would be such a fool--you
will pay 4/-income tax on every 20/-.

"12. That there are few trains on Sundays (a large place like Whitby
is cut off from London on that day); no theatres on Sunday (should
appeal to Continental visitors); museums open only in the afternoons;
shops shut on Sundays and on one week-day afternoon, including
post-offices; and everything more expensive than anywhere else.

"When I return to England from abroad, I always feel as if I were
going back to school.

"I forgot to say that they had a meeting of the COME TO BRITAIN
movement the other day, at which lovely prospects were opened up. Lord
Reading, however, urged that different kinds of prohibitions should be
abolished, so that the life of the tourist could be made easier. Just
note his words. He said: _Do not prevent the foreigner spending his
money at restaurants and theatres as soon as he arrives by detaining
him while he tries to master all the regulations he must observe in
order to make his stay safe_.

"In order to make his stay _safe_....

"In short: COME TO BRITAIN, where--apart from the filthy climate--you
will be bored to death by lack of amusement, poisoned by bad food,
officially persecuted, and commercially fleeced."

... If this be correct, Americans may prefer a trip to the East.

* * *

MY FRIEND refers to the Dover Customs examination, and to-day's paper
very appositely contains the following note:

"A renewed attack on alleged British methods of examining French
visitors to England is made to-night by the Paris _Soir_, and, in the
course of a fiery denunciation, a demand is made for reprisals on
English people entering France.

"The paper, referring to the 'odious examination to which French
people are still subjected entering England," says that it was
generally believed that the practice had ceased, but this is not the
case.

"The Customs officials at English ports, it alleges, chooses (_sic_)
whom they like for this inspection, and reference is made to French
girls of 15 and 16, going to England to complete their studies, being
submitted to 'outrageous examination.'

"Witnesses can be produced in support of these statements, continues
the Paris _Soir_, which says that the only way to put an end to the
scandal is for English people entering France to be made to undergo a
similar examination."

They sometimes are....

A few days ago, as we were coming out of the Ventimiglia (French)
Customs office, I saw a venerable old Englishman's pocket rifled by
one of these ruffians, who drew therefrom a handkerchief and one or
two more valueless articles. Doubtless a Corsican savage, like so
many of them. The French authorities seem to be unaware of the
discredit they bring on themselves by entrusting such positions to
Corsicans. If no Frenchmen are available, why not employ Senegalese
natives, and have done with it?

And here we are, in every part of Europe, putting up with similar
outrages at every hour of the day or night--the passport nuisance, and
all the rest of them. Nobody raises a hand, or even a voice, to batter
down these indignities. We suffer; we are grateful if our lives be
spared. What lovely material, if one wanted to breed a race of
helots!

Gobineau was right when he said that "there is no doubt that slavery
sometimes has a legitimate basis, and we are almost justified in
laying down that in this case it results quite as much from the
consent of the slave as from the moral and physical predominance of
the master."

The author of _Mother India_ has a clever chapter on "Indian
_Slave-Mentality_."

How about our own slave-mentality?

* * *

THERE are such things as bedside books, and one of them is Wallace's
_Malay Archipelago_. Glancing into it the other evening, I
rediscovered the following noteworthy passage:

"This motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population [he is
speaking of one of the Aru Islands] live here without the shadow of a
Government, with no police, no courts, and no lawyers; yet they do
not cut each other's throats; do not plunder each other day and night;
do not fall into the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed
to lead to. It is very extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into
one's head about the mountain-load of government under which people
exist in Europe, and suggests the idea that we may be overgoverned.
Think of the hundred Acts of Parliament annually enacted to prevent
us, the people of England, from cutting each other's throats, or from
doing to our neighbours as we would _not_ be done by. Think of the
thousands of lawyers and barristers whose whole lives are spent in
telling us what the hundred Acts of Parliament mean, and one would be
led to infer that if Dobbo has too little law, England has too
much.... Trade is the magic that keeps all at peace, and unites these
discordant elements into a well-behaved community."

These Oriental ruffians, it appears, can do without laws and yet live
peaceably, owing to trade. There is trade here also. Due allowance
made for our more complex social structure, was it necessary that
since 1911 seventeen different National Insurance Acts should have
been passed? The Prime Minister recently told the House of Commons
that in the last three years five thousand Statutory Rules and Orders,
possessing the force of law, have been issued. Were all of them
necessary? Perhaps yes--in the sense that their object was to bolster
up or modify preceding ones, half of which need never have been issued
at all. A vast system of buttresses, buttressing each other into
infinity....

Mother India has had a fair dose of such extravagances. During the
first ten years of the present century twenty-five thousand new laws
have been inscribed on her Statute Book (H. M. Hyndman: _The
Awakening of Asia_, p. 207) in order to govern men who for untold ages
have governed themselves without any written legislation whatever,
save of the religious kind.

* * *

ONE would like to know how much of an Englishman's time and energy is
consumed in trying to circumvent regulations which ought not to exist.
Says the _Saturday Review_. "It is rare, these days, to find a
respectable suburban paterfamilias who does not land himself in a
police-court twice a year."Parliamentary meddlesomeness has become an
obsession. And then, the muddlesomeness of all those unnecessary local
bodies....

Mr. Clive Bell, speaking of this frenzy for legislation, observes that
an ordinary Englishman is, on the whole, less free than a Roman slave
in the time of Hadrian. He attributes this state of affairs largely to
the activities of elderly and embittered virgins; nor should I be
surprised to learn that there is a correlation between sex-lessness
and repressive legislation, and that many of the discomforts of life
in England are due to eunuchs of one kind or another.

I suspect none the less that a considerable number of these elderly
virgins are middle-aged men, equally sexless and therefore equally
devoid of tolerance, but more mulish than any woman has the
strength to be. I do not question what the spinster would call her
good intentions; I question her staying-power. That is why, when it
comes to imbecility, nobody can beat a male.

* * *

HERE is an instance of that official interference in a man's private
affairs which, to an Oriental mind, is unbelievable:

We all know what a dog-kennel is--a worthless wooden structure which
can be broken to pieces in less than five minutes. Not long ago a
friend of mine was putting up such a contrivance (they are bought
ready made; you have only to fit the pieces together) on part of his
own English property bought with good money, to wit, in his back
garden. Shortly afterwards the District Surveyor called to say: was my
friend aware that he had rendered himself liable to a penalty? There
ensued a lengthy and lively correspondence with the Borough Council,
which, taking into consideration the fact that the kennel was erected
in ignorance of that special by-law, or whatever the contemptible
regulation calls itself, condoned the offence on the understanding
that a regular licence would be taken out, price five shillings.

A characteristic detail: the licence to erect a dog-kennel in your
back garden expires after five years, but can be renewed provided the
authorities see no objection.

_De minimis non curat lex_....

If that surveyor had approached one of my old Turkish acquaintances
with his remarks, the kennel would have been cracked over his head.
And if we followed his example, this particular nuisance would soon be
abated.

* * *

GOVERNED to death....

The _Nation_ draws attention to the inquisitorial methods of
Government departments which insist on Civil servants disclosing how
they pass their time outside the office. I should like to have the
text of this order; it is humiliating to the last degree. Soon they
will be wanting to know the yearly amount of their employes' washing
bills.

Having been a Civil servant myself, I feel no great sympathy for those
who refuse to bolt out of that treadmill; let us hope, at all events,
that they will put up a stand against such a piece of insolence. The
underlying idea is no doubt that in their spare time some ten per
cent, of them--it cannot be more--may have an occupation which, on
being revealed, will enable the Treasury to rake in a little more
income tax; so the _Nation_ thinks, adding that "the income-tax
inquisition is now so pitiless and intolerable that decent citizens
have almost reached the point of sympathizing with evaders." I
understand that some decent citizens have reached that point long,
long ago.

A trifle, but symptomatic of the general trend of things.

We once had a remedy against such abuses in the _Truth_ of Labouchere.
He would have ferreted out the origins of this new order, nailed down
the idiot who drew it up, and asked him what he meant by it. How he
used to make the Government departments tremble! An exposure in
_Truth_ was the only thing they dreaded. Private complaints were
shelved or evaded; as to questions in Parliament--they revelled in
them, as they do to this day. Labby was the wild-beast tamer. He has
left no successor of sufficient authority, sufficient wit, and
sufficient courage.

There were Government departments and thousands of Civil servants
under Kublai Khan, whose immense realm was administered as efficiently
as the British Empire. It may be that he also encouraged this prying
system, but I doubt it. Must we go to Toledo to find its counterpart?
No; because there, once you subscribed to certain opinions, you were
left in peace. In England, in Europe generally, you are harried
from pillar to post by perpetually changing bureaucratic ordinances.

* * *

OFFICIALDOM:

"Because his front identification-plate had letters and numbers which
were one and a half inches longer than the prescribed size, F---D--,
motor driver, of Walmer Road, Kensington, was fined 5/--at Tower
Bridge Court yesterday.

"Mr. Tassell said he could not see what objection there could be to
the letters being too large, though there was some to their being too
small."

Now how would this be:

"His Worship Tassa Lai, observing that there was a limit to this kind
of thing, ordered Mr. D--'s accuser to pay him five hundred rupees as
compensation for frivolous prosecution, and to receive fifty strokes
of the bastinado for wasting the Court's time on matters which
constitute no complaint."

That might discourage some of them.

* * *

OFFICIALDOM:

"Mrs. A---G--, an Englishwoman who married an alien, was bound over at
Lambeth Police Court on Saturday on a summons for failing to notify
her change of address under the Alien Regulations. She stated that she
was born of British parents, had never been out of England, and had
not lived with her husband for eight years."

London must be a cheery place for Englishwomen with non-English
husbands--a poor sub-statute, maybe, but better than nothing. What
else are some of them to procure, seeing that there are not enough
Englishmen to go round?

"At Enfield last week Mr. L---A---was summoned for keeping a dog
without having a licence. He found the dog in a starved condition,
took it home and fed it. He then reported his find to the police, to
be rewarded for his kindness by receiving a summons next day."

Mr. Fowler Wright (_Police and Public_, p. 135) remarks that _at
least nine-tenths of the summonses which are Issued at the Instigation
of the police are--public nuisances, vexatious ana needless_. Mr.
Wright's little volume was banned in advance by the railway
bookstalls.

* * *

RIBALD persons used to say: Wake up, Britain! Easier said than done.
The Anglo-Saxon is hard to wake up, being phlegmatic and
self-righteous to such a degree that the only thing which will really
wake him up is brute force. Sad, but true. We have seen it lately in
two cases. If women had not taken to smashing windows and other acts
of violence they would never have been emancipated; their arguments
would have been shelved, as they always had been, out of sheer
laziness. And the Irish, after centuries of wobbling and
half-measures, at last grasped the truth. They took to arson and
murder in good style; they scared the Anglo-Saxon and obtained what
they would have obtained ages ago, had they realized that their best
hope lay in shattering the inertia of Westminster. Those who suffer
under the harassing restrictions of life in England might make a note
of the fact that intimidation, not speechifying, will rouse the
Parliamentarians out of their post-prandial coma.

The complacency of the English has been wounded lately in three
sensitive spots: we have had infraction of naval discipline, police
corruption, and malpractices at the P.O. Something, after all,
seems to be rotten in the state of Denmark.

Now Mr. Garratt knows his India. What he writes is worth pondering.
Perhaps Britain may yet wake up, or be wakened up, to the fact that
"Indian civilization is healthy, spiritual, and in every way
admirable. Any corruption is due first to Moslem and subsequently to
British aggression. Western civilization, lacking all spiritual
significance, is rotten at the core.... In twenty years' time Indian
politicians may be looking to Turkey or Persia for models of efficient
administration for an Asiatic people living under Oriental
conditions.... A return to the paternal justice administered in many
Indian states is unthinkable, but it is a matter for consideration
whether the present system, already so very bad, can get any worse."

_P.S_. A critic, reviewing Mr. Woolacott's _India on Trial_, says of
the native that "People who cannot read or write are _ipso facto_
incapable of governing themselves on representative European
lines." That is perfectly correct. Why should Indians be expected to
govern themselves on our lines? I feel sure they prefer Oriental
methods, entailing the inevitable amount of instability and
insecurity, to the provincial stagnation which English rule is
imposing on them. The critic adds: "The political interest of those
who cannot read cannot even be aroused." Perfectly correct, once more;
and so much the better. There is already too much political interest
among Indians. Why arouse more?

* * *

IT STANDS to reason that this state of affairs is produced not by lack
of talent or good-will, but by our adherence to the Roman principle of
an inflexible administration on more or less European lines.

Indeed, whoever knows the climate and other discomforts of India
cannot be too emphatic in praise of our Civil Service, and it does one
good to hear what authoritative and dispassionate non-English
observers have to say on the subject. A Frenchman, J. Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire, writes: "Vainly we seek in history for anything like
this, and even the greatest of all nations, the Romans, showed no such
example of humanity and devotion in a great cause." The Austrian Baron
von Hubner says of our Indian Civil servants that as regards culture,
technical knowledge, statesmanlike qualities and spotless integrity
they are surpassed by no bureaucracy on earth, adding that "even when
we take the pessimist's point of view, we cannot deny that British
India offers a spectacle which is without parallel in the world's
history."

Among others there is also the testimony of a Swiss which, provoked as
it was in an accidental manner, is of special value.

I happened to be in India during the famine of 1900, and shall not
soon forget what I saw. The sufferers looked as if they had been dug
up from their graves, being reduced to such a state of emaciation that
one asked oneself how a breath of life could still pervade these
motionless anatomical exhibits. There, on the spot, I was able to
convince myself of the efforts made by our Civil staff to alleviate
the misery, and also to compare them with the system adopted in a
Native State. In England, meanwhile, this visitation was made the
pretext for an attack in Parliament on the injustice and inefficiency
of British rule in India. The _Neue Zurcher Zei-tung_, a journal which
ought to have known better, printed some of this and other fustian in
its correspondence columns, and this in its turn led to the
publication of a remarkable counter-attack of 93 pages by a Swiss
gentleman, who demolished both the false reasoning and the deliberate
misstatements of that newspaper correspondence (_Die Hungersnot in
Indien und die britisch-indische Regierung_, von Aug. F. Amman;
Frauenfeld, J. Huber, 1901).

This succinct and lucid brochure gives a bird's-eye view, so to speak,
of British activities in India, and deserves, even at this hour of the
day, to be translated out of the German. I note that the author agrees
with others (p. 28) in finding that, apart from public calamities like
plague or famine, "the lot of the so-called 'ordinary man' in India is
far happier than that of his European colleague."

* * *

SOMEWHERE in the Coelo-Syrian plain stands a tall and lonely column,
the column of Ya'at. We walked there one evening, and my companion
assured me that it was erected by the Crusaders, years and years ago.

That was a modern yarn, I said; anybody could see from the
construction of the thing.... Impossible to convince him! He was a
Syrian; he knew all about his country. The Crusaders passed that very
way, consequently they built it.

They may well have passed that way on their long overland trip from
Cologne to Jerusalem, and to ascertain whether or no they built this
particular column is of less interest than to ascertain how they
contrived to get here at all without a single passport between them.
How was that feat accomplished? A short time ago I followed more or
less the same overland track from Europe as far as Damascus, and even
for that distance no less than five visas were required. The expense
incurred in procuring this trashy stamp, though considerable, is
nothing when compared to the loss of time. But for the good offices of
a friend in authority, I might have spent the better part of a week
hanging around the consulates of five disreputable little "Powers," at
the mercy of their unwashed employes. If the brutes would at least
take a bribe, and get through with their work! Alas, incorruptibility
is the fetish of the half-civilized.

The amenities of life in Europe....

Is the visa-plague ever going to end?

Those who recall the ease of pre-passport days, and who like to live
with as little vexation as possible, will view with concern this
particular development of the labelling-disease of European
Governments. You can live without friends, without wife or children or
money or tobacco; you can live without a shirt, without a reputation;
you cannot live without a document establishing your servitude to
bureaucracy. A man's passport or _carte d'identite_ is beginning to be
of greater consequence than his person, and for a good reason. It
makes him authentic. If Mr. Jones, the European, cannot produce a
passport, he is a solar myth.

Such is the official point of view, and the shortest way of
demonstrating its fallacy would be a punch in the ribs from Mr. Jones.

May it come soon, and often....

* * *

IT WILL be long in coming.

Mr. Jones is well broken in. He is a devitalized creature. The
official herd is too strong for him. It has insinuated into his mind
that a passport consoles him for many ills; he must cleave to it, else
he may find himself landed in prison. Such is the bureaucratic
system. It invents a dilemma, and then, by means of the
passport-talisman, shows him a way out of it. All Mr. Jones has to do
is to pay, pay, pay--in order to keep the animals at their desks.

Ten to one, he is a bureaucrat himself. That being so, the system must
be upheld and extended whenever possible. Officials will soon
outnumber the population, and no wonder they fight to keep the
machinery going. They live by it. Where a man's income is, there will
his heart be also.

The passport-nuisance, as it now exists, was unknown before the War.
It is part of the ignoble tangle in which we have thereby embroiled
ourselves. A vast deal of such governmental interference has not even
this justification, being sheer meddlesomeness, costly to the nation
and obnoxious to the individual. Mr. Clive Bell has dealt with this
subject, and his analysis of the meddler's psychology ("those who
cannot express themselves except by interfering with others") is a
sound one. I should now like to read a psychological study of his
victims, of those who make the meddler possible, the passive
dirt-eaters who love being ill-treated in the name of law and order.

Of the tw