“We are members one of another.”—St. Paul.

“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do on earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them; and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man’s life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.

“Therefore I bid you not to dwell in hell but in heaven; or while ye must, upon earth, which is part of heaven, and forsooth no foul part.”—William Morris, The Dream of John Ball.”

“Sans d’ÉgalitÉ donc, point d’unitÉ; sans libertÉ point d’ÉgalitÉ; mais point de libertÉ non plus sans des devoirs mutuels volontairement accomplis, c’est-a-dire accomplis par la volontÉ se portant d’elle-mÊme et sans contrainte a tout ce qui produit l’union entre les Êtres Égaux; autrement chacun n’aurait d’autre rÈgle que son intÉrÊt, sa passion. Et du conflit de tant de passions, de tant d’intÉrÊts opposÉs naÎtraient aussitÔt, avec la guerre, la servitude et la tyrannie. Or, l’obÉissance libre au devoir est une obÉissance d’amour; libertÉ lorsque l’amour s’affaiblit, la libertÉ dÉcline mÊme proportion. A la place de l’union volontaire et morale, dont il est le principle, la force, loi des brutes, opÉre une union purement matÉrielle.”—Lamennais, Affaires de Rome.

IT is usually assumed that the distinctively social end of life begins “after business hours.” There is, we say, “no room for sentiment in business,”—which is part of the intolerable price we pay for our subjection to the economic motive. In business the presumption is that we are all competitors; when business is over we are prepared to be friends. The formality and the insincerity of much social intercourse in our time—not to speak of its utter fruitlessness for any healthy human good—has its origins largely in the banishment of fellowship from the “business end” of life. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of wholesome human intercourse in modern life or that there are not genuine friendships between business competitors and between principals and subordinates in industry; but it is generally true that we conceive of commerce and industry as admitting of no extensive exercise of the humanities; and for this habit of mind we are punished by a deep impoverishment of life.

There is a sense in which the struggle for liberty may be regarded as being essentially a struggle to broaden the basis of human fellowship; and it is undoubtedly true that forms of privilege are the most prolific causes of social schism. No community possesses the conditions of real fellowship while it is (as modern communities are) divided into topdogs and underdogs, whether the topdogs be aristocrats or plutocrats, and the underdogs be serfs or wage-slaves. For the poison of privilege is apt to permeate the whole body; and an exploited class may itself be composed of exploiters. In our day the quest and the possession of pecuniary advantage has so grievously muddied the springs of fellowship that we live in a chronic temper of mutual suspicion and distrust. We do not constitute living societies; we are but collections of individuals who live together because we must, and come no nearer to each other than is necessary for the indispensable common operations of life. Lord Morley has pointed out that the business of the Irish Land League lay as much in adjusting feuds among its own members as in carrying on their common feud against the landlords. Within small circles there is, of course, much genuine friendly exchange and co-operation; there are holiday occasions when good temper and good fellowship rule; but for the rest, we chiefly live under jungle law.

It is essential to the creation of a living society that we should recognise that the principle of fellowship is a condition of the highest fruitfulness of human effort in every part of life. But fellowship in this connection means something more than the casual and superficial camaraderie of one’s leisure hours. It must be translated into concrete policies and into organised and sustained co-operation. In this sense its application to industry is one of the first conditions of its restoration in other regions and in other senses. Indeed, it may be regarded as the natural complement of that change in the worker’s status which we have seen to be impending. Free men will flow into fellowship as the cistern to the river; and the “democratic control” of industry is the name we give to the practice of fellowship in industry which is the clear sequel to the doctrine of partnership.

Mr. Sidney Webb, as we have seen, advocates the grant of a “constitution” to industry; but this proposal suffers from the inherent defect of the well-meaning experiments in co-partnership and profit-sharing of which there have been not a few in recent years. This defect is that all alike preserve the line of privilege. The benefits are granted as concessions from above; and generally as incentives to greater assiduity. There can be no objection to the granting of concessions from above so long as those who are above come down and stand on the same footing as those below. But so long as a vestige of the old differentiation of superior and inferior, of master and servant remains, not all the nominal co-partnership and profit-sharing in the world can satisfy the conditions of real partnership. While for instance the administrative and executive branches of an industry remain out of the sphere of co-partnership, the partnership is a polite fiction; and it is only by the passing of all the departments of an industry, administrative as well as operative, into the control of all who carry them on, that democratic conditions can be established. The theory of partnership implies an actual interest in and an actual control over all the divisions of an industry; and, while this does not imply that direction and leadership and the powers of discipline will not still be vested in individuals, these individuals will owe their position not to any antecedent privilege but to the will and consent of the workers as a whole.

On the surface there seems to be a danger lest such an arrangement may lead to an exclusive and particular fellowship within separate industries and therefore may militate against the larger fellowship of the community, a fellowship, that is, of producers against consumers. But it is not contemplated that the control of the workers—whether operative or administrative—shall be absolute over their industry. That will in turn be subject to the will of the commonwealth as a whole—this superior authority being made effective by such devices as the control of raw material. This particular danger may, however, be very easily exaggerated. After all, every producer is a consumer; and the co-operative societies have shown that it is possible to create a very fruitful fellowship of consumer and producer. Moreover, this is a danger which we imagine largely because we argue from existing conditions. It will be greatly diminished as the economic motive ceases to exercise its withering influence upon men.

But it stands to reason that men will do better and more faithful work under conditions which give them a direct interest in and control over their work. Both the quantity and quality of work suffer to-day because nothing is left to the worker’s sense of honour and responsibility. It is only a more or less irksome necessity to which the worker goes apathetically and from which he turns with relief. But convert it into a social task in which fellowship may be actually realised in a genuine participation in control, where management is an affair of common counsel and not of autocratic fiats, where the ideal of public service has superseded the purpose of private gain, and you set free potentialities both of quality and quantity of workmanship of which under the present demoralising conditions it is not possible to form a conception.

Clearly the reality of fellowship in industry must be validated by making every position of greater responsibility open to every worker; and appointment to such positions should be by choice of the workers. That the workers may be trusted to make good appointments is demonstrated by the sagacity which has generally been manifested in the selection of their Union leaders; and this is a far more certain guarantee of effective management than the present system which often assigns incompetent men to important positions on grounds of kinship or “influence.” It further goes without saying that a genuine partnership implies the right of withdrawal. A man must be free to choose his work and the place where he works. Freedom is of the very essence of fellowship. Anything of the nature of coercion or conscription would be deadly to the spirit which it is desired to create.

II

Naturally a living society will require a living fellowship in the ordering of its public affairs; and it is true that the arrest and corruption of democracy—wheresoever those ills have befallen it—are due more to the ignorance and the indifference of the mass of the people in respect of their common affairs than to any other single cause. This is ever the opportunity of the demagogue and the spoilsman. Where there is no vision, said the ancient scribe, the people perish; but the people perish no less certainly where there is no common thought. The mental indolence and inertia of the public and the incompetency of public criticism is the danger of the statesman, and the very life of the carpet-bagging politician. The extent of this ignorance and apathy—beyond the narrow limits where our pockets are concerned—is appalling. Especially in regard to the external relationships of their respective states, the common people have lived in the past in great darkness, and as the war has shown, in the shadow of death. If the masses of the European peoples had been in 1914, as well-informed concerning their neighbours as they are to-day (and this does not say very much), the war might well have never happened; and it is well that we should remember that the democratic control of foreign policy, of which we justly hope much, will prove a vain thing without systematic education of the people in the matters which are gathered up in the expression “foreign policy.”

And, indeed, the main root of indifference is ignorance; for we are vitally interested in nothing of which we do not know something. It is to education that we must look for our main remedy. Some gleams of light have indeed already begun to pierce our darkness. We have commenced to educate school children in the rudiments of civic obligation; and there is no reason why history and geography should not be taught, not as at present to stimulate national pride or commercial efficiency, but to generate a sympathetic and comprehensive outlook upon human relationships. To this subject we shall need to turn in more detail presently; here all we need is to premise that the stimulation and mobilisation of common thought requires an education which shall equip the citizen with a system of knowledge and ideas which will enable him to respond to the challenge of the problems of common life and approach them with intelligence and sympathy. No one who is familiar with the proceedings of parliaments and congresses will require proof of the existence of this need.

But this is no more than a beginning. To education must be added the opportunity of free and unfettered discussion. Every manner of embargo or restraint on thought must be removed. When a Cambridge don once said that morning chapel should be compulsory on the ground that if there were no compulsory religion there would be no religion at all, Thirlwall, afterwards Bishop of St. David’s, replied that the distinction was too subtle for his apprehension. No less does restraint upon thought lead to the destruction of thought. Yet thought, just because it is free, requires some method of test and correction; and this is supplied by discussion. In this region especially is fellowship the necessary co-efficient of freedom. At present the comparative paucity of opportunities of systematic discussion, outside small circles and coteries, has led to that lack of mental independence to which the modern press owes its ordinate power. The pathetic, not to say tragic, readiness of the multitude to follow any demagogue in the press who shouts loudly enough is a manifest sign of dangerous mental incompetency. The Northcliffes and the Hearsts owe their influence to the incapacity of the multitude to think for itself; and no multitude will ever be able to think which does not acquire the habit of thinking together.

It is impossible to estimate the value of the New England Town Meeting as an organ of discipline in common thought; and some such focus of public discussion there should be in every community. Nowadays the community elects a board or a council and relegates the function of discussion to this body, and so far as its local affairs are concerned goes to sleep until the next election, except perhaps for a small minority chiefly composed of hostile critics. This elected body rarely reaches a plane of initiative and leadership in thought even within the narrow province committed to its care. Its discussions chiefly gather around minor points of administration; rarely do they reveal any degree of constructive originality. Yet the public spirit which is the life of a community needs continual stimulus; and this stimulus is dependent on discussion. It is a frequent, almost a constant complaint against municipal bodies that they are composed of persons who have axes of their own to grind, or who, though they are not personally corrupt, are promoting the advantage of particular interests. There is no way out of this difficulty save by the creation of community centres for regular and free public discussion. Those who are charged with the conduct of public affairs—whether local or national—should be open to continuous and reasoned popular criticism for which an election allows no opportunity.

The rapid extension of the public Forum in America takes to some extent the place once filled by the Town Meeting; but its outlook is too general and its constitution too casual to enable it to discharge the functions of the latter. Yet it has a very important office to fill; and in many respects it is the most promising object in the outlook for democracy in America. As yet it is too dependent upon the platform; and questions do not form an adequate alternative to reasoned discussion. These are, however, defects which will be remedied as the movement develops. It is not at all improbable that the churches may find a way of recovering their social usefulness by the promotion of the Forum method. Dr. Kirsopp Lake has a theory that just as the sacramental stage of religion has passed, so now the “sermon” stage is passing, and we are entering upon the “discussion” stage. It may be so. Certainly no human concern so stands in need of vigorous and radical discussion as does religion; and now that it becomes increasingly evident that the day is wholly gone when religion could be cultivated as an isolated interest unrelated to the secular concerns of life, it will be of untold advantage to the church and to society, in the interests of truth and right thinking, that the free discussion of religion and public affairs in the closest possible relation to one another should be seriously fostered. Neither religion nor any view of the world which does not touch life at every point is likely to survive in an age which is slowly learning the unity of all life. In modern England, the Trade Union branches have in many cases proved to be educational centres of the utmost value; but even more than the Trade Unions has the Socialist propaganda, with its challenge to discussion, proved a fruitful organ of common thought on public affairs.

When we pass from the plane of local to that of national interests we find a state of things which provokes wonder that any shred of democracy has survived it. The system of political parties has its roots in human nature; and we are never likely to outlive it. The quip that we are all born either little Liberals or little Conservatives has beneath it the fact of a profound and perhaps permanent difference of temperament. There are those—and probably will always be—who take less kindly to change than others; and in this difference there will always be ample room and occasion for discussion and criticism. It is also well to remember that the conflict of sincerely held opinion is one of the most fruitful forms of co-operation in the search for truth. But there are few existing lines of party division which reflect a genuine cleavage of conviction. The present opposition of Republican and Democrat in America seems to have only a distant connection with that profound division of opinion in which the opposition first originated. In Great Britain, Liberal and Conservative have stood ideally for the two necessary principles of freedom and order, progress and stability; but the party conflict has raged chiefly in recent times around the question of power. It has been a duel of the “ins” and “outs.” There are, of course, Liberals like Lord Morley, and Conservatives like Lord Hugh Cecil, whose political attachments rest upon deep and reasoned conviction; but reasoned conviction is not the main subject of interest in the Whips’ offices. The final judgment upon the nature of the party struggle is to be sought in the practical business of electioneering. Direct corruption is on the whole rare in democratic countries; but the organisation of the party vote—whether in England or America—is a wholly scandalous and deplorable business. The practice of canvassing for votes, attended frequently with intimidation and generally with a good deal of insincere cajoling, the easily made and easily forgotten electioneering promises, the frantic shepherding of sluggish voters to the polling booth,—these things show how little substance of conviction and thought there is in the modern political game. Canvassing is sometimes defended as a method of political education; occasionally in competent hands it no doubt is so; but anyone who is acquainted with electioneering methods knows that the education is merely incidental to securing the promise of a vote. Canvassing would conceivably serve a useful purpose if the attempt to extract the promise of a vote were declared to be in fact what it is in spirit—a violation of the Ballot Act. It is questionable, however, how long the practice of canvassing would survive this curtailment. And in addition to this, all inducements to drag unwilling and indifferent citizens to the poll should be made illegal. Democracy is not necessarily government by the mob. It is rather government by the intelligent and the interested; and the remedy for popular apathy here, as elsewhere, is proper education.

The two-party system of Great Britain, and in the United States, may in time be replaced by the group system as it prevails on the continent of Europe.^[31] The group system is subject to the evils and the disadvantages attending the two-party system; but it has the distinct advantage of making possible a larger range and variety of criticism. Nevertheless, whether under the two-party or group conditions, it is doubtful whether the present territorial arrangement of representation can ever secure a truly democratic government. The territorial arrangement is derived from a period which long antedates the railroad; and improved means of communication have created national groups with specialised but ultra-local interests, and for the purposes of democratic government the Labour Union (for instance) is as important a unit as the county. It is absurd that the only way in which the specific interests of organised labour can be represented in the House of Commons is by putting Labour candidates in competition with Liberals and Conservatives in mixed constituencies. Some alleviation of this anomaly may be found in the plan of proportional representation; but this does not fully provide for the necessity of securing direct and adequate representation of functional and cultural associations in the councils of the nation. It is an anachronism that to-day the mind of the nation should be gathered solely on a geographical basis, when the actual living mind of the nation increasingly resides in the various groups into which men form themselves on the basis of interests that are no longer determined by local considerations. The representation of non-territorial constituencies in the councils of the nation raises the question of the nature of the state which must be considered separately.

Freedom and fulness of discussion is the very breath of life to popular institutions, and wheresoever any problem or range of problems is withdrawn from public discussion, there is a virtual denial of the democratic principle. When, for instance, and in particular, foreign policy is conducted behind closed doors, a control over the destinies of the people is vested in individuals or in a class of individuals which is as real and as monstrous as that of an autocrat; and democracy is denied in its most sensitive and critical part. It is true that the practice of secret diplomacy has survived because nations have been too little concerned about their external affairs; and no plausible arguments about “delicate situations” and the like could resist for a moment the insistence of an intelligent democracy upon the management of its own affairs. If democracy is to survive at all, it must make up its mind speedily that the principle of its inner life shall not be denied in its outer. But if democracy is to have a mind at all, it must learn to use the mind it has; and the chief stimulus to this end would be the multiplication of centres of discussion. This would be materially helped if government departments were required to produce not only ponderous blue-books which only bewilder the common man, and official documents intelligible only to the expert, but popular accounts, published regularly, of their proceedings. The press should be used far more extensively for this purpose; and even the children of the public schools should be provided with appropriate graded summaries of the acts of the national government. Then on the basis of this material for discussion, the social debating society, the reading circle, the Forum and all such groups would become the living and increasing springs of democracy.

In speaking of education we are far too apt to confine the word to the education of children; but what may be done in the education of adults and at the same time in the stimulation of fellowship in thought, is well shown by the achievement of the Workers’ Educational Association in England. The education of the working class is an idea which dates back to the social and political ferment of the early nineteenth century—the earliest expression being the Mechanics’ Institute movement. This was followed by the Working Men’s College movement under Frederick Denison Maurice and his friends. Then came the educational experiments, first of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1840, and then of the Co-operative Societies, out of which grew ultimately the University Extension movement. The existing Worker’s Educational Association originated in an alliance of the educational activities of the Co-operative, Trade Union and University Extension movements. It was based upon “the vital principle that there could be no complete education of working people unless it was a result of the combination of working men and women and scholars, respectively experts in demand and supply.” It is certain—and the war has provided many instances of it—that this alliance of worker and scholar has done much to break down the partition wall of class prejudice; and the “tutorial class” has in particular been a very fruitful agent of fellowship and education. “The days of the W.E.A.” (as it is called) says Mr. Alfred Mansbridge, its devoted and able secretary, “have been few so far; but it has already demonstrated the soundness of its theories—to take one instance alone—by the development of the University Tutorial Class movement which conforms in method to that of Plato so far as question and answer developed in discussion are concerned. In England alone over eight thousand men and women have passed through these courses which are organised in connection with every University and University College. If it were not for the clear demonstration of experience, it would seem fatuous to expect that men and women who have undergone no educational training other than that provided in the few years of attendance at the elementary school would be willing to attend classes for three years, and in some cases for as many as seven or eight years. It must be remembered that the discipline of the class though self-imposed is severe. No absence is allowed for other than unavoidable causes. Moreover, their purpose is the acquisition of knowledge as assisting the fulfilment of an educational ideal which is conceived not in the interests of the individual but in the interests of citizenship. The level of intellectual achievement testified to by many eminent educationists is such as to warrant the Board of Education in making a regulation to the effect that ‘the instruction must aim at reaching within the limits of the subject covered, the standard of University work in honours.’”^[32] While the emphasis in this account is laid chiefly upon the educational aspects of the movement those who are acquainted with its working lay much stress upon the part which the practice and realisation of fellowship play in it.^[33] The sense of common quest is at once a source and a result of the movement: and it is not open to any question that the W.E.A. is one of the most powerful organs of the new democracy now existing. Alongside the W.E.A. in Great Britain is also the Adult School movement, which chiefly under the auspices of the Society of Friends is doing much similar, though not so severe work. It gathers together every Sunday morning in all parts of the country thousands of working men and women in its many hundred schools to study not only “the principles of the life and teaching of Jesus, but the manifold and perplexing problems of national and international life.” In such fruitful activities as these will the mind and the temper of the coming democracy be created. These men and women are learning the practice of freedom and fellowship in thought, which is the fundamental democratic method.

III

Now that we have come to acknowledge not only that Jack’s vote is as good as his master’s, but that Jill’s vote is as good as Jack’s, we have laid the train of a further change in the relations of men and women. For just as surely as the worker has discovered that political equality does not of necessity remove economic disability, and is now beginning to demand economic emancipation, so also women will pass on from the acquisition of political equality to a demand for economic equality. Indeed, the demand is already being made. The war has served to reveal the arbitrary and illusory character of the assumptions which closed certain occupations to women. We know that the number of occupations for which women are temperamentally or physically unfitted is comparatively small. There are obvious reasons for believing that some few trades will remain permanently undesirable for women; but the immediate fact that confronts us is that the traditional line of demarcation has been swept away under the stress of war needs; and that we shall have to work out in the school of experience a new classification of occupations more consonant with the new facts.

Some years ago there was much discussion in England concerning a high legal decision that a woman was not a “person” within the meaning of a certain Act of Parliament. This was symptomatic of a general survival of the view which assigned women to a slightly sub-human class; and the vitality of this view is still more considerable than many hopeful minds are willing to think. Yet it is only when we have educated ourselves into the conception of woman which attributes to her a distinct personality of her own, with an end in and for herself, and with all the rights and privileges, the freedom and the independence appertaining to it, that we shall approach the problem of the relations of men and women from a genuinely democratic standpoint. Woman is commonly regarded as having a function rather than an individual end. It is her part to preserve the race. Her peculiar vocation is child-bearing. It cannot, however, be affirmed with too much emphasis that the perpetuation of the race is no more the task of woman than of man. The heavier end of the physical burden of race-preservation certainly falls upon the woman; but this fact does not indicate that this is the purpose for which she exists. Her traditional assignment to this role, and the consequent limitation of her circle of experience and interest, the virtual incarceration of the great majority of women to the “home,” and the denial to them of any real participation in the larger concerns of the common life, must cease if social existence is to achieve the balance necessary to stable and healthy progress.

The preservation of the race can be left to look after itself. Race-suicide only becomes a peril when the relations of men and women become perverted and unnatural as they commonly do in our present social order. When at one end of society, the bringing up of families entails an economic burden too heavy to be borne, and at the other, the hedonism which accompanies excessive wealth tends to a sensuality which refuses to accept the natural risks and to pay the natural price of the sex-relation, a poisonous arrest is unavoidably laid upon the normal operation of the sex-instincts. The most easily perverted endowment of human nature is sex, and it cannot retain a balanced and healthy functioning under disordered conditions of life. The incessant discussion of marriage and divorce misses the point largely because it ignores the background of the problem. While we regard the physical distinction of sex as the primary fact to be considered in relation to woman, and still cling to the obsession so dear to bourgeois respectability that her business is motherhood and “her place is the home,” so long, that is, as we regard her life and its purpose as dependent upon man, so long will judgment be deflected from its true pole at its very source. Wholesome and free men and women will continue to fall in love with one another and will want to have children of each other, where to-day because their relations are unwholesome and unequal, they tend only to seek possession of one another, without any disposition (not to speak of eagerness) to welcome the fruit of their union; and too often with the deliberate intention of preventing the fruitage. For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.

The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. The freedom and spontaneity of the relation between men and women is made impossible by those calculations of position and wealth which the career theory of marriage requires. While it is nominally the case that no woman is compelled to marry, it is actually the fact that many women—in the bourgeois classes, most women—are so brought up that marriage becomes their only escape from indigence. The fact of woman’s independence should be made concrete and real by requiring that every woman shall be self-supporting, that is to say, that she shall share in the necessary industrial processes of the community or do some work of acknowledged social worth. Naturally the latter category includes the bearing and upbringing of children; for than this there is no work more fundamental or of greater social worth. This requires the economic independence of the mother; and since the social reconstruction postulated in these pages, involves in some form or other the establishment of an universal minimum standard, the mother will not only be economically independent but will also be released from the harassing task of bringing up a growing family upon a stationary income.

It will be argued against such proposals as these that they endanger the sanctity of the family. But this criticism possesses neither grace nor force in a generation which has permitted industrial conditions to prevail which have virtually destroyed the home-life of the working-classes. The only assumption on which it is safe to proceed in dealing with this question is that anything entitled to be called a “home life” is quite exceptional among large masses of the population. Both the physical setting of the home—the house—and the economic condition of its members rob the home of that quality of sanctuary and base which is of the essence of a genuine home. Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. The housing question has its own importance in the problem; but of infinitely more importance to the recovery of home life is the establishment of the economic independence of the woman. So long as custom and necessity place her in a position of dependence on the man, so long will she be denied the freedom which is essential to perfect comradeship. Her present status denies the equality which is necessary to fellowship; and much of the unhappiness of modern marriage is due to the intelligible chafing of women against the conditions which dependence and inferiority of status impose upon her. That many married people succeed in overcoming this initial handicap is true; but that is due to certain qualities in themselves and does not in the least alter the fact that where marital relations go awry the evil is largely in the conditions which govern those relations in our present social order.

The relaxing of marriage ties is no remedy; it is only a relief to persons of incompatible tempers. Both the advocates and the opponents of greater facilities for divorce seem to argue their case out of all relation to the existing social environment of marriage. The evils for which a remedy is sought in easier divorce are not to be found in the nature of the marriage relation but in the conventional and legal status of women.^[34] While the social and economic sources of the trouble are left untouched, no amount of Catholic emphasis upon the sacramental character of marriage is going to stay the demand for the greater dissolubility of a tie which existing conditions do much to make difficult and frequently intolerable. Even under the best conditions, the mutual adjustments of the man and woman in married life are not easy; but when one party enters the relation in a position of more or less explicitly acknowledged dependence and inferiority, there are seeds of ineradicable trouble.

It is not for a moment argued that the establishment of the economic independence of woman is a cure for all the ills that afflict the family. But this is fundamental; and we shall simply be beating the air so long as we do not accept this principle. For it is the only method which holds a promise of restoring the life of the home. At the same time, it is no less necessary that the woman being by reason of her motherhood economically independent should not be regarded as the economic handmaid of the state. If the endowment of motherhood is only a provision for increasing the economic and military human material of the community, then we are better without it. For the poison which vitiates our life will return to it at its most delicate and sensitive point. To regard the marriage relation simply as the means of supplying a constant stream of military and economic units for the state is to deny the spiritual nature of man at its very source, and to reimpose on ourselves the deadly incubus of materialism. This is the danger which the Eugenics movement threatens us with. To introduce the principle of selective breeding into human relations may result in a community of persons, healthy, vigorous and efficient for economic and military purposes; but we are learning how little physical heredity has to do with the ultimate purpose of life. In so far as Eugenics will lead to greater precautions against the propagation of diseased and mentally and physically degenerate persons, and quickens a greater vigilance and a more insistent demand for sound minds and sound bodies in those about to give themselves in marriage, it brings a necessary and valuable reinforcement to the influences that make for human welfare. But when it goes beyond this point, it becomes a danger to the spiritual conception of life and society. What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman.

Yet it may be held that the partnership is an affair so momentous that none should be permitted to enter it so precipitately as the marriage laws of the United States allow. Some degree of deliberation should be insisted upon before legal recognition of the union is granted. The demand for greater facilities for divorce is probably not unconnected with the extreme facility with which persons can enter upon the marriage relationship.

But the establishment of right relations between the sexes must begin before the period when men and women have reached the condition of personal independence. It should be plain that the sense of sex-difference which emerges in adolescence should not be allowed to develop in the unregulated and capricious manner in which our false modesty compels it to develop to-day. The processes of initiation into the mysteries of sex should begin sufficiently early to avert so far as possible the danger of its being discoloured and perverted by the undue obtrusion of its sense-accompaniments. There is no real reason why the frank comradeship of boys and girls should not be maintained through adolescence into youth, but the criminal negligence which we have shown concerning the means by which sex-knowledge is communicated to growing children has succeeded in creating a gulf between men and women which persists more or less permanently and constitutes the most obstinate difficulty in the way of perfect freedom of fellowship between men and women. It is no exaggeration to say that the attitude of most men to women is poisoned—perhaps beyond perfect recovery at any time—by the conditions under which as boys they received their first intimations of the nature of the sex-relation. A good deal has already been done to pave the way of change in this matter; and an increasing number of parents are assuming the responsibility of communicating this knowledge to their children. But there is still unfortunately a great mass of unhealthy prudery to be overcome before rational dealing with this problem becomes anything like universal.

The problem of the fellowship of men and women, however, extends beyond the institution of marriage. Now that the enfranchisement of women is opening up the question of their availability and qualification for national legislatures, we are confronted with a very large possibility of change in the tone and temper of government. Much nonsense is talked about the psychological differences between men and women; and of this nonsense, the emptiest is that which assumes that women are dominated by sentiment and emotion, while men are guided by reason. An unprejudiced observer, watching deliberative gatherings of men over any space of time would certainly arrive at the conclusion that the occasions on which they acted upon purely rational grounds were rare and exceptional; and it has been the experience of the present writer that in deliberative groups of men and women the women are on the whole more likely to display a dispassionate rationality in arriving at their judgments than the men. It is a region in which broad generalisations are bound to be unsound; and the progress of the higher education of women is undoubtedly obliterating any patent difference of mental operation between men and women. At the same time, there are certain differences which are embedded in the physical structure of sex and which may be therefore permanent; but so far from disqualifying women from a share in government, those very differences entitle them to it. Quite apart from the fact that the problems of food and clothing in their incidence on the home are of peculiar importance to women, and that the woman’s point of view should always be represented in discussion of the large-scale problems of production and distribution, the mind of woman brings a check and balance to the operations of the male mind which they very acutely need. There can, for instance, be no question that the male mind tends to an inordinate faith in force and coercive processes; and while it would hardly be correct to say that the female mind possesses an antithetic bias of a reasoned kind, it does normally display a certain hesitancy to apply the closure of compulsion which the too ready real-politik of a purely male assembly is prone to adopt when it sets out to translate its emotions into enactments. The truth of the matter, in fine, is this—that because humanity is bi-sexual, its affairs cannot be reasonably and fruitfully determined save through the common counsels of men and women. We have already made a beginning in the admission of women to the councils of the community. A woman has sat in the Congress of the United States; women have long been at home in British municipal bodies, and their right to a place in Parliament has been acknowledged. It is only a matter of time when the logic of the enfranchisement of women will reach its inevitable conclusion in their admission to all public deliberative bodies on equal terms with men. They have a contribution to bring to the corporate direction of affairs without which the nations can no longer do; and the fact that as a class they may take some time to become habituated to the mechanics of legislation is an argument for hastening their complete admission to it.

There were those who in the “militant” stage of the “Votes for Women” campaign foretold that the economic class-war would presently be superseded or complicated by a sex-war; and some women there were whose utterances undoubtedly pointed in that direction. For the time, however, this danger has dropped over the horizon. The war has evoked a community of suffering in which men and women alike have shared too deeply, and in which their mutual need has been too overwhelming to make the notion of a sex-war even thinkable to-day. But we should be rejoicing prematurely if we supposed that all possible sources of sex-antagonism have disappeared. The political enfranchisement of women certainly removes one source; but the new industrial complications caused by the entry of women into occupations which have hitherto been a male monopoly, and in which their employment has been fully justified by the character of their workmanship may, when the transition to peaceful life is being made, breed grievances and troubles in which the line of cleavage will be determined by the sex-factor. But if we assume the establishment of the “national minimum,” applicable to men and women alike, and therefore securing the economic independence of women, we shall have robbed this prospective danger of much of its substance. For the rest, there seems to be no reason why women should not be freely permitted to engage in occupations for which they are competent, on equal terms with men; and the comradeship of men and women in the control and the operation of industrial processes would do much to fix the now dominant sex-interest in its proper place in life. The primacy of the sex-interest in determining the relations of men and women works definitely toward the retention of women in a subordinate, parasitic and exploited position, and while this lasts, we shall still have with us the seeds of sex-antagonism. All this does not overlook the fact that there are kinds of work for which women are physically unsuited, and that there are times in the life of the married woman when she should be exempted from all manual work save of the lightest sort. But these problems are in essence present even in the working conditions of men. All men are not suited for all classes of work; and there are few men whose work is not occasionally interrupted by sickness. What is needed in the case of women is simply a further application of those principles of selection and accommodation which already operate in every industry. Unless some such position as this is frankly accepted, we may be presently confronted with a new militancy and a new sabotage at the hands of women who have tasted the experience of economic independence and are unwilling to surrender it to a convention of inequality which they claim their own war-time performance has permanently discredited.

IV

Difficult as the realisation of a perfect fellowship between men and women may be, it presents a problem comparatively easy of solution by the side of that entailed in the division of a community by a colour-line. In itself the colour-line is not insuperable; its difficulty lies in its symbolical character as representing a difference and an inferiority of tradition and history. The chief difficulty in the United States arises out of the memory of the former slavery of the negro population; and the consequent persistence of a prejudice against according equal treatment to a class regarded as, if not sub-human, at least permanently inferior in capacity. It is useless to press the assumption that a necessary physical aversion must always separate the white from the black, in the face of the existence of a vast number of palpably cross-bred persons in the community. This does not, of course, mean that mixed marriages should be encouraged or regarded as normal. The problems raised by miscegenation are much too difficult to permit us to remove the colour-line by the off-hand method of race-fusion. The fusion of two races separated from one another not only by the memory of two centuries of slavery but by unnumbered centuries of widely different culture, would probably create more problems than it solved. The colour-line would be superseded by a multiplicity of shade-lines; and confusion would be worse confounded. It is probable that the level of the more advanced race would be depressed more than that of the more backward race would be raised. Houston Chamberlain is probably right (in spite of his capacity for being so frequently and so colossally wrong) in holding that the finest racial types are produced by the fusion of two peoples not too widely separated in physical and historical character, followed by close inbreeding. The gulf between black and white in America and South Africa is far too deep, as yet at least, to make the removal of the colour-line by fusion a subject of hopeful discussion.

But equally the solution is not to be found in segregation—certainly so far as these two countries are concerned. The admixture of the black and the white elements in the population has gone much too far to make segregation a practical proposition. It would, moreover, have the distinct disadvantage of stereotyping two different types of cultural development within the same commonwealth and of consequently endangering its unity by setting up the possibility of rivalry and antagonism. In any two-race community the ideal must be to secure so far as may be possible a substantial identity of outlook and culture; and this is to be done not by segregation, but by contact.

But it is just this “contact” that is denied to the negro race both in America and South Africa. The races are really segregated as effectually as though they lived in separate reservations; they live in quite different cultural “climates.” The negro though no longer a chattel-slave yet constitutes a servile class; the duties assigned to him in the community are essentially of a menial kind. It is characteristic of his position in America that the higher ranks of military command are closed to him; and while a woman has made her way to Congress, there is as yet no negro congressman; the idea is still barely thinkable. Yet no community has thrived permanently which permitted a helot class to exist within itself; and the position of the negro—now that education is quickening his mind to the sense of class-disinheritance and race-consciousness—may become a grave menace to the inner harmony of the Republic.

The logic of Lincoln’s proclamation has yet to be worked out in the minds of white Americans. To abolish slavery is not indeed to make a black man white; nor does it at once equip him for the responsibilities of freedom. But it does confer citizenship upon him; and the gift of citizenship should be validated by two things; first, by a frank and generous recognition of equality of standing, and second, by a thorough-going policy of education. Perhaps the former was more than could be justly expected. Just as the slave was ill-equipped for freedom, so the white man could hardly rise at once to the plane of regarding the negro as his free and equal brother. But it is a fair criticism of the public treatment of the negro that he has not been supplied with the opportunity of rising to his white brother’s plane of culture. There have been voluntary philanthropic efforts in this direction, but this work should not have been left to the precarious chances of charity. Just because negro emancipation was a public act, the full cultural education of the negro was a public responsibility.

By reason of this failure on the part of the white man, the negro has not advanced to such a point as two generations of liberty would seemingly entitle us to expert. He has inevitably retained much of the mentality and many of the habits of his servitude; and these are effectual bars to that type of social contact which the negro’s growth requires. That there is no inherent impossibility in educating the negro up to the average plane of the Anglo-Saxon has been proved in a multitude of instances; and people who are devoid of race-prejudice find no difficulty in establishing frank and fruitful fellowship with educated coloured persons.

America and Great Britain in her dominions and dependencies have to face the logic of their democratic ideals by a sustained resolution to provide the opportunity to their coloured fellow-citizens to reach their own plane of culture. As things are they deny their democratic professions by permitting their race prejudices to consign their coloured fellow-citizens to a condition of permanent social inferiority. If they wish to be democratic in fact and not merely in name, they will need to be true to the implications of their democracy through everything, even through the physical repugnances which the personal habits of backward races are apt to evoke. The colour problem was created for this generation by its forbears—by those who sold and owned slaves and those who established colonies in distant countries. But though the problem is not of our making, we cannot absolve ourselves from the moral responsibility which it lays upon us; and it is only by means of an inveterate good-will that we shall discharge this responsibility. Such a good-will must rest upon the truth—however unpalatable to our prejudices it may be—that the black man whether in New York or in Cape Town is equally with ourselves endowed with the human differentia of personality, and that he is morally entitled to all the rights of life and light and liberty that we claim for personality. With this truth must be accepted the task imposed upon us by our superior advantages (which like our responsibilities we owe to our fathers), to raise the more backward races with whom we live to a plane on which there can be free and enriching fellowship between them and ourselves. We cannot hopefully go on to make the world safe for a principle of common life which our present habits show that we do not believe in at home.

V

However complete and well-organised the provision may be against destitution in any society, it can never prevent the distress which ensues upon the accidents of life, sickness and sorrow, loneliness and old age—these we shall not wholly escape even in our earthly paradise. We may indeed lessen the occasions of sickness and of premature death by a wiser and more scientific ordering of the physical setting of life and of personal habit; but no ingenuity or skill can overcome the inevitable brokenness of life in a world of time. But this very circumstance provides fellowship with the opportunity to do its most perfect work.

And real fellowship will be possible for the simple reason that “charity” will be superfluous. In modern life, the material destitution of large numbers of people has necessitated the organisation of relief on a large scale, both public and private; and while the charitable impulse is intrinsically admirable, the conditions under which it has come to be exercised have in effect widened the gulf between the rich and the poor. On the one hand the rich have contracted the habit of condescending patronage; and the poor have fallen into a habit of cunning obsequiousness. In self-defence the rich have built up a machinery of investigation and distribution which has had three disastrous results: first, it has set up the monstrous and unfair test of deservingness,—“the deserving poor” is a phrase in which the well-to-do have forever crystallised their pharisaism; second, it has set a premium upon the petty tactics of evasion and deceit among the poor, and upon a corresponding cunning and astuteness in those entrusted with the business of investigation; and third, it has eliminated from charity the one element which could make it tolerable and preserve the grace which should properly go with it—namely, friendly contact. For the most part, the relief of destitution through charitable organisations, has—because it eliminates the direct personal touch between need and supply—produced and aggravated a deep and deplorable social schism.

Nor is the case any better with the public organisation of poor relief. The English poor-law has been so completely discredited and is so near dissolution that it is hardly necessary to discuss it here. It is more impersonal in its operations than a charity organisation society; but its most evil consequence is that it has so worked as to attach a stigma to honest poverty—for the person who has received poor-relief is denied the rights of citizenship. Old age has fortunately been provided for in Great Britain in the only worthy way, by a grant of state-pensions, though the actual amount of the pension is pitifully inadequate. Yet the fact of the provision indicates a distinct advance in the sense of public justice. But we shall not make much more progress until we realise that the pauper like the plutocrat is a social product; and that such destitution as prevails to-day is due less to personal perversity than to a vicious social order. No one is so foolishly hopeful as to suppose that even the most radical social change will eliminate the prodigal and the spendthrift and the sensualist. Nevertheless, it is no longer open to question that a revolution in economic conditions would do much to remove the auxiliary causes of pauperising excess.

But the chief evil which attends our method of dealing with poverty is that it has tended to perpetuate a pauper class. Whether in the relief work of religious and charitable societies, or in the administration of public relief, we have been chiefly governed by the fact of an immediate need. We have lived in the fond hope that if the present corner could be turned, something might transpire to save the recipient of relief from another crisis; and not even the obvious fact that the crisis is chronic in the case of multitudes has shaken us out of our preoccupation with symptoms into an investigation of causes. In one of the supplementary reports of the British Poor-Law Commission, it was stated that the investigation of the cases of applicants to whom “out-door” relief was denied (the alternative being to go into the “house”), showed that only in one instance where such persons had been helped by religious organisations was there any attempt to place the person concerned on an independent economic footing. This is symptomatic of the ineptitude of our common thought about the poor. We appear to accept the fact of their dependence as chronic and incurable; and by the process of “doles” we aggravate this dependence and turn it into what we suppose it to be.

This same ineptitude has pursued society in its dealings with another class—the criminal. Criminologists do not nowadays assume the existence of a natural criminal class; but our way of treating criminals has created such a class. Both for the pauper and the criminal we require a new diagnosis. Instead of treating the pauper as an incurable social parasite we should regard him as a personal inefficient; and rather than put a premium upon his inefficiency by a continual gratuitous relief of his necessities, we should impose some discipline which may lead to personal efficiency and an ordered habit of life. As for the criminal, he is a social inefficient; and his treatment should include some provision for his training in the sense and arts of social responsibility. It is a practical recognition of this need that constitutes the contribution which men like Messrs. Thomas Mott Osborne and Homer Lane are making to the solution of a difficult problem. That some plan of temporary segregation is necessary in the treatment of the inefficient—whether personal or social—is not open to question; but the poorhouse and the prison, as we know them, only aggravate the evil which they are intended to cure.

Our increasing attention to the problem of the social misfit at an earlier stage—through the new study and treatment of mentally deficient children—will considerably reduce the proportions both of pauperism and crime. We are a long way from Samuel Butler’s vision of the time when the liar will be sent to hospital and the sick person to jail; nevertheless, the point of Butler’s extravaganza is becoming recognised in the double fact that a good deal of disease is due to preventable causes, the disregard of which is already treated as a legal offence; and that much of the delinquency that prevails originates in pathological conditions rather than in moral depravity. Especially are we on hopeful lines when we take the mentally deficient child and regard him as the subject of medical rather than of legal treatment. And we shall go yet farther when we realise that though we cannot and dare not eliminate the factor of personal responsibility, yet our social misfits are the products of our social disorder, and it is seen that while justice requires that a man shall pay the penalty of his sins, yet the same justice requires that the society which produced the sinner shall feel a corporate responsibility for his restoration. And restoration is indeed the very centre of our problem in dealing with the social misfit. For our task with the pauper and the criminal is that of making each capable of entering freely and vitally into the fellowship of free men.

Yet when we have dealt with the social misfit there will remain, life being what it is, a number of people in every community for whom the burden of life has proved too heavy or whose lives are clouded by sickness or loneliness or death. “The poor,” said Jesus, “ye have always with you.” He did not mean that we need always have physically destitute people with us; He knew better, as we know better. But the smoking flax and the bruised reed we shall ever have with us; and no society can afford to despise a ministry of comfort. Indeed, fellowship will lack its native grace if it fails to produce an unfailing stream of sympathy and consolation to the distressed. Here will be the test of the vitality of our fellowship. For our ideal of fellowship may become hardened in organisation; and personal spontaneity may be lost in a routine habit of life. And to whatever else we may be able to give an organised and official form, it is at least sure that when the ministry of comfort and help loses the touch of personal directness and spontaneity, it is from henceforth a dead and useless thing.

VII

Up to this point we have considered the more general problems of fellowship in the community as a whole; we have still to consider some of the questions raised by the more particular associations which form themselves within the community, and in which by far the largest measure of the community’s vitality resides. F. W. Maitland, in an interesting passage, reviews the endless variety of social forms in which men group themselves together. He speaks of “churches, and even the mediÆval church, one and catholic, religious houses and mendicant orders, nonconforming bodies, a presbyterian system, universities, old and new, the village community, which Germanists have revealed to us, the manor in its growth and decay, the township, the New England town, the counties and hundreds, the chartered boroughs, the guild in all its manifold varieties, the Inns of Court, the merchant adventurers, the militant “companies” of English condottieri who, returning home, help to make the word “company” popular among us: the trading companies, the companies that became colonies, the companies that make war, the friendly societies, the Trade Unions, the clubs, the group that meets at Lloyd’s Coffee House, the group that becomes the Stock Exchange, and so on even to the one man company, the Standard Oil Trust, and the South Australian statutes for communistic villages.” The prevailing political philosophy of our time has stated its problem almost wholly in terms of an abstract state over against an abstract individual; and one of the most heartening signs of the invasion of political thought and practice by a more healthy humanism is the growing recognition of these many-coloured nucleations of life. There are important and difficult questions bearing upon their political and legal status, but these are only to be answered by a frank acknowledgment that groupings of this kind come into being because they meet a real need and answer to certain facts of life and human nature. No political philosophy is likely to stand the racket of historical experience which does not stand upon the assumption that these associations have a real and inherent right to form themselves, to exist, to thrive and to multiply; for it is in groups that are voluntarily formed around a living interest that the most significant and important part of our life is lived. To the more direct political implications of this type of association we shall turn at a later point; here we are concerned only to emphasise the need and the right of such bodies to live, and their importance for the preservation of the balance of life, and therefore, of stable social progress. Their real importance may be seen from the circumstance that the struggle for religious liberty in England, which has historically been the spring of civil and political liberty, was a struggle not for the liberty of the individual but of the small voluntarily associated group.

These voluntarily associated groups will form themselves around any interest of sufficient importance; and, as we have seen, they are of the most various character and raise the most various questions concerning their relation to the commonwealth.^[35] This is a subject still in the earlier stages of exploration and likely to be of increasing importance for our political and social philosophies, especially as it comes to be recognised that for the most part the groups which are here spoken of represent interests and needs more vital to human nature than the accidental aggregations represented by political states. It may, moreover, be held that the multiplication of such groups within the commonwealth, insomuch as they bear upon real interests of life, is much to be encouraged; and the commonwealth which knows what is good for its people will impose no restrictions upon their power and readiness to form themselves into combinations of this kind. And indeed, however absolute the authority of the state, it cannot prevent the formation of voluntary associations. If it be not permitted to form these associations openly, they will be formed secretly; and the secret society is the undoing of commonwealths.

35.The commonest and the oldest type of freely associated group within the commonwealth is of course the Church, and on this point the reader may be referred to the present writer’s book The Church in the Commonwealth.