By a quaint paradox, we generally miss the meaning of simple stories because we are not subtle enough to understand
their simplicity. As long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other romance of things in general, they
saw the thing solid and swallowed it whole, knowing that it could not disagree with them. But the moment men have lost
the instinct of being simple in order to understand it, they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find,
for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins;
about how Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by lightning for going out after dark. Now
these moral stories are immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because Puritanism is wrong. But they
are not quite so wrong, they are not a quarter so wrong, as many superficial sages have supposed.
The truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a human meaning; and not one of the fixed fools
of history was such a fool as he looks. And when our great–uncles or great–grandmothers told a child he might be
drowned by breaking the Sabbath, their souls (though undoubtedly, as Touchstone said, in a parlous state) were not in
quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their god was a devil who dropped babies into the Thames for
a trifle. This form of religious literature is a morbid form if taken by itself; but it did correspond to a certain reality in
psychology which most people of any religion, or even of none, have felt a touch of at some time or other. Leaving out
theological terms as far as possible, it is the subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with Nature as well as right with
Nature; that the point of wrongness may be a detail (in the superstitions of heathens this is often quite a triviality); but
that if one is really wrong with Nature, there is no particular reason why all her rivers should not drown or all her storm–
bolts strike one who is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a mental sickness, but it is too human
or too mortal a sickness to be called solely a superstition. It is not solely a superstition; it is not simply superimposed
upon human nature by something that has got on top of it. It flourishes without check among non–Christian systems, and
it flourishes especially in Calvinism, because Calvinism is the most non–Christian of Christian systems. But like
everything else that inheres in the natural senses and spirit of man, it has something in it; it is not stark unreason. If it is
an ill (and it generally is), it is one of the ills that flesh is heir to, but he is the lawful heir. And like many other dubious or
dangerous human instincts or appetites, it is sometimes useful as a warning against worse things.
Now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the loss of this; the loss of what we may call the
natural and heathen mysticism. When modern critics say that Julius Caesar did not believe in Jupiter, or that Pope Leo
did not believe in Catholicism, they overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours. Perhaps Julius did
not believe in Jupiter; but he did not disbelieve in Jupiter. There was nothing in his philosophy, or the philosophy of that
age, that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit personal and predominant in the world. But the modern
materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe. Hence, while the heathen might avail himself of
accidental omens, queer coincidences or casual dreams, without knowing for certain whether they were really hints from
heaven or premonitory movements in his own brain, the modern Christian turned heathen must not entertain such
notions at all, but must reject the oracle as the altar. The modern sceptic was drugged against all that was natural in the
supernatural. And this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom, as a tyrant literally pagan might possibly not
have done.
There is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales (those, for instance, on which Shakespeare is so
often based)—an idea that is profoundly moral even if the tales are immoral. It is what may be called the flaw in the deed:
the idea that, if I take my advantage to the full, I shall hear of something to my disadvantage. Thus Midas fell into a
fallacy about the currency; and soon had reason to become something more than a Bimetallist. Thus Macbeth had a
fallacy about forestry; he could not see the trees for the wood. He forgot that, though a place cannot be moved, the trees
that grow on it can. Thus Shylock had a fallacy of physiology; he forgot that, if you break into the house of life, you find it
a bloody house in the most emphatic sense. But the modern capitalist did not read fairy–tales, and never looked for the
little omens at the turnings of the road. He (or the most intelligent section of him) had by now realised his position, and
knew in his heart it was a false position. He thought a margin of men out of work was good for his business; he could no
longer really think it was good for his country. He could no longer be the old "hard–headed" man who simply did not
understand things; he could only be the hard–hearted man who faced them. But he still marched on; he was sure he had
made no mistake.
However, he had made a mistake—as definite as a mistake in multiplication. It may be summarised thus: that the same
inequality and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour, and at last no labour at all. It was as if a man
who wanted something from an enemy, should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in the despair of
winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen the bargain; and then come out to find the man dead upon the
doorstep.
He had discovered the divine boomerang; his sin had found him out. The experiment of Individualism—the keeping of
the worker half in and half out of work—was far too ingenious not to contain a flaw. It was too delicate a balance to work
entirely with the strength of the starved and the vigilance of the benighted. It was too desperate a course to rely wholly
on desperation. And as time went on the terrible truth slowly declared itself; the degraded class was really degenerating.
It was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool; but the tool, ceaselessly used, was being used up. It was quite
reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling a man away like a tool; but when it was flung away in the rain the tool
rusted. But the comparison to a tool was insufficient for an awful reason that had already begun to dawn upon the
master’s mind. If you pick up a hammer, you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling away a chisel by
the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of little chisels. But the meanest of the tools, Man, had still this strange
privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake. Despite all improvements in machinery, the most important part
of the machinery (the fittings technically described in the trade as "hands") were apparently growing worse. The firm was
not only encumbered with one useless servant, but he immediately turned himself into five useless servants. "The poor
should not be emancipated," the old reactionaries used to say, "until they are fit for freedom." But if this downrush went
on, it looked as if the poor would not stand high enough to be fit for slavery.
So at least it seemed, doubtless in a great degree subconsciously, to the man who had wagered all his wealth on the
usefulness of the poor to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor. The time came at last when the rather
reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be
something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was
aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were,
therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and
such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists
assert, but still to a notable extent, in a much looser sense than the Eugenists assume, but still in some sort of sense, the
types that were inadequate or incalculable or uncontrollable began to increase. Under the hedges of the country, on the
seats of the parks, loafing under the bridges or leaning over the Embankment, began to appear a new race of men—men
who are certainly not mad, whom we shall gain no scientific light by calling feeble–minded, but who are, in varying
individual degrees, dazed or drink–sodden, or lazy or tricky or tired in body and spirit. In a far less degree than the
teetotallers tell us, but still in a large degree, the traffic in gin and bad beer (itself a capitalist enterprise) fostered the evil,
though it had not begun it. Men who had no human bond with the instructed man, men who seemed to him monsters and
creatures without mind, became an eyesore in the market–place and a terror on the empty roads. The rich were afraid.
Moreover, as I have hinted before, the act of keeping the destitute out of public life, and crushing them under confused
laws, had an effect on their intelligences which paralyses them even as a proletariat. Modern people talk of "Reason
versus Authority"; but authority itself involves reason, or its orders would not even be understood. If you say to your valet,
"Look after the buttons on my waistcoat," he may do it, even if you throw a boot at his head. But if you say to him, "Look
after the buttons on my top–hat," he will not do it, though you empty a boot–shop over him. If you say to a schoolboy,
"Write out that Ode of Horace from memory in the original Latin," he may do it without a flogging. If you say, "Write out
that Ode of Horace in the original German," he will not do it with a thousand floggings. If you will not learn logic, he
certainly will not learn Latin. And the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subject (such as that which punishes the
homeless for not going home) have really, I think, a great deal to do with a certain increase in their sheepishness and
short–wittedness, and, therefore, in their industrial inefficiency. By one of the monstrosities of the feeble–minded theory,
a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could then be examined by doctors as to the state of his mind—presumably in
order to discover by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In other words, when the police cannot
jail a man who is innocent of doing something, they jail him for being too innocent to do anything. I do not suppose the
man is an idiot at all, but I can believe he feels more like one after the legal process than before. Thus all the factors—
the bodily exhaustion, the harassing fear of hunger, the reckless refuge in sexuality, and the black botheration of bad
laws—combined to make the employee more unemployable.
Now, it is very important to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed
capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have reversed his machine, so to
speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet.
In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the
community, and then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings to produce a generation better
born, bred and cared for than these tortured types that were less and less use to him. It might still not be too late to
rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan that poverty might fly out of the window, with the reasonable
prospect of love coming in at the door. In short, he might have let the English poor, the mass of whom were not weak–
minded, though more of them were growing weaker, a reasonable chance, in the form of more money, of achieving their
eugenical resurrection themselves. It has never been shown, and it cannot be shown, that the method would have failed.
But it can be shown, and it must be closely and clearly noted, that the method had very strict limitations from the
employers' own point of view. If they made the worker too comfortable, he would not work to increase another’s comforts;
if they made him too independent, he would not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages were so good that he
could save out of them, he might cease to be a wage–earner. If his house or garden were his own, he might stand an
economic siege in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been built on his dependence; but now it was getting out of
hand, not in the direction of freedom, but of frank helplessness. One might say that his dependence had got independent
of control.
But there was another way. And towards this the employer’s ideas began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more
and more clearly, to drift. Giving property, giving leisure, giving status costs money. But there is one human force that
costs nothing. As it does not cost the beggar a penny to indulge, so it would not cost the employer a penny to employ. He
could not alter or improve the tables or the chairs on the cheap. But there were two pieces of furniture (labelled
respectively "the husband" and "the wife") whose relations were much cheaper. He could alter the marriage in the house
in such a way as to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children he did want, with the smallest
possible number of the kind he did not. He could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds. And he could harness
to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of the blood of a man in his youth, as he has already harnessed to
them all the wild waste rivers of the world.