to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum
It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason
to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum.
A man must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea
of fatalistic alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul
seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their
thought is always a reaction from what went before. When you meet
a modern man he is always coming from a place, not going to it.
Thus, mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there
is a soul and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon.
But because a narrow Protestant sect called Materialists declared
for a short time that there was no soul, another narrow Protestant sect
called Christian Science is now maintaining that there is no body.
Now just in the same way the unreasonable neglect of government
by the Manchester School has produced, not a reasonable regard
for government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else.
So that to hear people talk to-day one would fancy that every
important human function must be organized and avenged by law;
that all education must be state education, and all employment
state employment; that everybody and everything must be
brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet.
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind
will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet,
that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory;
and in short that in most important matters a man has always been
free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge fundamental function
upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and childbirth,
has never been inside the political state, but always outside of it.
The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people,
but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born.
A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is an
absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with
providing for the old age of people who have never been infants.
I will not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists
have in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought
to control marriage and birth as they control labor and death.
Except for this inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall
have to deal with later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves
into two sections: ingenious people who once meant this, and rather
bewildered people who swear they never meant it--nor anything else.
But if it be conceded (by a breezier estimate of men) that they
do mostly desire marriage to remain free from government, it does
not follow that they desire it to remain free from everything. If man
does not control the marriage market by law, is it controlled at all?
Surely the answer is broadly that man does not control the marriage
market by law, but the woman does control it by sympathy and prejudice.
There was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife"s sister; yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law
forbidding a man to marry his deceased wife"s scullery-maid; yet it did
not happen nearly so often. It did not happen because the marriage
market is managed in the spirit and by the authority of women;
and women are generally conservative where classes are concerned.
It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by which ladies
have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)
to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes
procure those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and
the fleur-de lis, the turnkey"s chains or the hangman"s halter.
You need not strangle a man if you can silence him. The branded
shoulder is less effective and final than the cold shoulder;
and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can lock him out.
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