The Future By Gilbert K. of America Chesterton Axthor of “Heretics,” “The Club of Queer Trades,” “Greybeards at Play,” ett. T is one of the worst fallacies of our time that coming in contact with somebody means coming to some sort of understanding with him. Modern Society is a sort of gush- ing hostess who is quite happy if she can only get a sufficient number of people to misunder- stand one another in one room. “Arranging a meeting” in the twentieth century very often means what it meant in the eighteenth cen- tury; it means arranging a fight. We are asked to take it as a first mark of the millen- nium that all kinds of people are getting into all kinds of relations, even if they are wrong relations. Nearly all the characteristic tendencies of the last twenty years have been in this irritat- ing style. Imperialism is in this style; it asks us to admire the union of all men because some black men have found new white men to hate, and some white men have found new black men to despise. Philanthropy and fashionable slumming are in this style; it sim- ply means that some frivolous woman whose vice it is that she cannot understand her own life, shall make it her virtue that she cannot understand the average life of humanity, but regards it with a neurotic shiver which she calls social responsibility. A certain kind of faddist attempt at social equality is in this style; that which is satirized in Mr. J. M. Barrie’s “‘ Admirable Crichton” in which the earl makes the terrified servants take tea in the drawing-room. This is false because it creates no kindly relations; it creates no kindly relations because it does not really spring from kindness. ‘The faddist is thinking more of himself instead of less, as he should in the presence of his fellows. What we really want out of an earl is not that he should rhetorically declare that the servants are fit to sit in the drawing-room, but that he should vividly realize that he may not be in the least fit to sit in the servants’ hall. The symbolic swagger of some noble leaders of insurgent labor is very much in this style. A man who in Trafalgar Square re- 273 cently made a bitter and brave appeal for the unemployed insisted on doing it in a silly little white surplice of his own invention. Touching his speech, the unemployed ought to have thanked him; but touching his shirt, I am certain that they simply thought him mad. It is impossible to imagine anything the masses would dislike more than such an arbitrary ritual vestment. All the atheists would dislike it because it was a surplice. All the Christians would dislike it because it was not. This is the great art of establishing false relations, art which the modern world has carried to the subtlety of algebfa and the piercing perfection of music. The modern world is full of ladies who have to be treated as gentlemen, gentlemen who have to be treated as servants, servants who oppress their masters, partners who are unequal, and representatives who represent anything but that which employs them. And amidst this welter of the unreal and the unexplained, we are often asked to admire especially the grow- ing understanding between different nations. And of these alleged understandings there is none that we are more constantly asked to admire than the understanding between Eng- land and America. For this reason I have deliberately struck first the note of possible misunderstandings. Most of what are called the bonds of union between these two great peoples are really simply sources of disunion, sources of dis- aster and nonsense. That we speak the same language does not go very far, when we so often mean entirely different things by every word that we speak. That we are all Anglo-Saxons is an illiterate lie. The Eng- lish never were pure Anglo-Saxons; and if the Americans ever had been they would be turn- ing into something different every minute by the clock under their present inundation of Latins and Celts. We English are not even bound to America as we are bound to North Germany by the accident of surviving Prot-274 estantism; for American democracy is al- ready choosing between Catholicism and new mysteries such as Christian Science. And England is not bound to America by democ- racy, because England is not democratic in any sense at all. 1 am writing for Americans; and between nations there is no possible alternative except courtesy or war. Until we find it right to fight the foreigner we ought always to praise him; for love and war are the two ultimate realities. Therefore it is only proper in speaking of a great people to take some trouble to begin all criticism at the compli- mentary end. So, before I venture to speak of what is (in my opinion) wrong with Amer- ica, it is best to state what is right with America. And in the matter of stating what is right with America I know no better way of doing it than by taking the lowest and humblest ground and stating what is not right with England. ‘Briefly, the real superiority of America over England is in this: that in America you can shut ears but you cannot shut mouths. You can create an elegant American society in which Mr. Hearst is never mentioned; but you cannot restrain Mr. Hearst from the not ‘uncongenial occupation of mentioning him- self. In England you can. In England, by a certain universal pressure of fashion and false good taste, working downward through the aristocracy, the Parliament and the pri- vate owners of the public press (even the king is not powerless), it is possible for all practical purposes to prevent a point of view being really uttered at all. There are certain facts which I know to be facts, of which I can say with complete and solid sincerity that if I were to write them down it is not only true that no Englishman would believe them, but it is certain that no Englishman would print them, To America such scandals are, if you will, declared scandalously. But they are declared. In an American paper, very likely, Lord Northcliffe, for instance, might be described as a terrible pirate, whereas he is really a fresh-faced, energetic man who has so little imagination that he collects money as children collect tram tickets, But the point is that he could be hit hard for the good of the public in America. But in England people would think more of his feelings than of the public good; because England is governed by a small group of families and is therefore forced to think al- most entirely in terms of personality. The Hampton’s Magazine curse of English politics is that so much of it is conducted in a good-natured whisper, about “Poor Young So-and-So,” or “Good Old What’s-His-Name.” Many good Americans have complained that in America all private life is made public. But in England all pub- lic life is made private. 7 I come back, therefore, as I always love to do, to truisms; to the truisms of a hundred years ago. After all, the thing whereby ‘America really towers over the old country is the thing which Jefferson reared and Wash- ington defended. The solid good of America that when all is said and done she is a re- public, a Public Thing and a people repre- senting itself. There are men rich enough, and strong enough, almost to starve America; but there are no men strong enough to silence America. No oligarchy acts as an entirely false interpreter between Americans and the world. America and the Americans may be right or wrong. But England may actually be wrong while Englishmen are right. We have said then that the true American virtue is this candid and complete democracy, the fact that the truth may be told even if it is not believed. Let us now state what is the real virtue and possible superiority of England. I think it can be suggested, at least, in one sentence: when a man grows old he learns to take some things lightly. Americans are often told (often with a pompous impudence of which I am ashamed) that the old English castles and cathedrals, tombs and armorial teach the "English to be reverent, spiritual, and idealistic. This English boast is utterly false, Americans are far more reverent, spiritual, and idealistic than we are. The escutcheons and the abbeys, the turrets and the tombs, do not, as a matter of fact, teach us in England to pray or even to hope. What the abbeys and the tombs really do for us is to teach ustolaugh. We feel the irony of the ages brooding above the newest fancy or the noblest fad. Our land is so full of the monuments of old religions that we cannot become excited about a new religion. We have seen the sepulchers of so many kings that we can only endure a king on condition that we do not take him seriously. At the bottem of England there is something that no one not English can under- stand, a sort of deep, antiquarian levity. Scott, Thackeray, and even Dickens were full of it; it was sometimes a sort of praise of the past combined with thanking God that itThe Future was past. Not to take earnest things and people too much at their own valuation, to rebel with irrational laughter at the right moment, to permit the gravedigger to score off the Prince of Denmark, sometimes to for- get convictions and only feel truths; that is the best spirit of England. Mrs. Eddy in England would not be allowed to say that Christmas would be nicer without Christmas presents. England will never endure Chris- tian Science; simply because it declares itself to be scientitic. Now it is here that the really interesting point appears, The real American virtue is a virile equality; the real English virtue is a sort of illogical liberty, a reckoning by more or less genial likes and dislikes. But the poignant question is this: is the modern meet- ing of the two nations, the Anglo-American rapprochement, acting as a good and creative give-and-take? Are the English learning any more of the American republican seriousness? Are the Americans learning any more of the English ancestral gaiety? In short, when an Englishman and an American meet at the Hotel Cecil does the American get any more of what was great in Dickens; does the Eng- lishman get any more of what was great in Walt Whitman? After gravely considering the query, I will take the responsibility of re- plying, ‘‘ Most certainly not.” The rich Eng- lishman at the Hotel Cecil is probably the kind of man who has learned to sneer at Dickens; the rich American is probably the kind of man who has learned to sneer at democracy. These two types meeting have not in them the fullness and the tradition of their fathers: the ambassadors are not pleni- potentiary. In truth, international friendship suffers much the same hitch or inconvenience which is the trouble with political representation. The elected man tends to be a man of wealth and leisure; because the really representative man cannot spare the time to represent. milarly, typical Englishmen or Americans seldom meet; for typical men do not travel; because typical men have no money. The types which travel are never the best national types, and are sometimes decidedly the worst. ‘When I am called upon, for instance, to re- joice in the marriage arranged between a bankrupt peer and a millionaire’s daughter from Chicago, I resolutely decline to rejoice, or to hail the thing as any link between two living peoples. I would just as soon rejoice that a Hounsditch burglar had married the of America 295 niece of a Chinese pirate and call it an Asiatico-European entente cordiale. 1 would as soon be glad that an East End pawn- broker had gone into partnership with a Ben- galese money lender who had done time for forgery, and call that the ultimate reconcilia- tion of the East and West. As I proposed to conjecture, vaguely and humbly enough, about the future of America, I will respectfully take the liberty, first of all, of dismissing all that talk of Anglo-Saxon unity and a common destiny which one hears from such eloquent people as Mrs. Corn- wallis West. That class of people never understand their own nation; it is not to be expected that they should understand another one. The destinies of England and America seem to me about as distinct as any two des- tinies in the world; they must both walk alone down very different roads. If they both come to smash (which is not at all unlikely), it will be in two entirely different ways. The chief danger of America, and also, per- haps, the chief hope of America, lies in the cruelty of the rich; the savage loneliness of the self-made millionaire who has not spared him- self and will not spare others. But the chief danger of England lies in the kindness of the rich, in a silly and meddlesome philanthropy which will neither respect the poor as citizens nor feed them properly as slaves, but is al- ways bothering them to go to Browning lec- tures or to give up beer. The tyranny of Rockefeller cannot be borne much longer un- Jess men have ceased to be men; the thing must come to a crash. But the tyranny of the Duke of Norfolk may be borne for cen- turies, or until the end of the world, because the man is good-natured, because he behaves like a gentleman, smiles at babies and over- pays cabmen. Therefore there is this great difference be- tween the futures of England and America, that the future of America must almost cer- tainly be exciting; whereas the future of Eng- land might conceivably be quite dull. Eng- lish oligarchy may linger for Heaven knows how long unless some great effort is made, be- cause there is a kind of loose Christianity tangled somewhere in the forest of its feudal- ism. But American oligarchy is hard and heathen, and must be broken because it can- not be bent. ‘The peril of America is that she will have a ghastly upheaval. The horrible peril of England is that she won't. In the future of America one can really, without any mere political phraseology, look276 forward to the possibility of new things; of something happening a hundred years hence which will not be a mere echo of the somewhat monotonous soliloquy of England. New things may happen in America which cannot possibly happen in England; some of them very unpleasant things. But when we begin to talk about new things, we find ourselves face to face with one of the strongest of the ap- parent paradoxes which dislocate the logic of such situations. For when we talk of a nation being left open to new ideas, we neces- sarily mean that it is left open to old ideas. Any idea will be new which has ot been heard of for hundreds of years. Oligarchy, and those fashions and conventions which are created by oligarchy, do not (as the cheaper revolutionists say) merely keep men behind the times. These conventions also keep men uptodate. An aristocratic dinner party does not merely forbid me to wear the newest style in Jaeger, it also dextrously prevents me from wearing ‘the oldest thing in wool, Aris- tocracies keep people in the fashion; they pre- vent people from going back to the beginnings and asking why we wear hats or have votes at all. A slightly oppressive oligarchy is the best instrument in the world for keeping every- body quite modern. Thus we see that the English aristocracy keeps the whole English people at the precise temperature of the twentieth century. The English people may believe exactly as far as their cultured class considers it respectable; they may believe in hypnotism, and exactly up to a certain point in spiritualism; they must believe in evolution but they may say (so long as they say it vaguely enough) that it includes design. They may believe in miracles so long as they are not very striking miracles, They may believe in a number of devils so long as they do not be- lieve in one. In short, the English people is exquisitely attuned to the exact work of the newest discoveries or experiences of its rulers. An aristocracy must always be modern; be- cause an aristocracy must always be fashion- able. But, as I have said, we need not neces- sarily take our modernism very seriously, any more than we take our fashion. The true English top hat is strictly formal and respect- able; nevertheless it is a very light and well- ventilated hat. But a democracy (being self-determining) is free to go back to the Stone Age if it likes, and begin chipping stones again. Moreover, a democracy (being in its nature serious) can Hampton’s Magazine go back to the stones with enthusiasm and re- ligious thoroughness; it can find sermons in stones, A democracy can disinter tl thousands of years old and throw itself into them with the energy of youth and the inno- cence of childhood. America has already given strong examples of this power of remote historical resurrection. The United States itself indeed was in some sense such a resurrection; for the great legend of valor, stoicism, and republican virtue in Franklin and Washington was really dug out of the ruins of the ancient pagan cities. It would, perhaps, be invidious and open to misunderstanding to suggest, in addition, that slavery was rather an old institution. But there are much more startling and fascinating instances than this. - ‘The American democracy has produced the one great instance of white men setting up systematic polygamy. The Mormons had so soaked themselves in the rich and remote spices of Oriental prose and poetry that they reproduced in the heart of the West, among ballot boxes and factory chimneys, the mon- strosity, the secrecy, the frightful fidelity of an Eastern people almost prehistoric. ‘They re-created the terrible tablets, the almost ir- responsible prophet, the march across the desert, the mystical imperialism of the Chosen Race, the palpable and walking God. And among other things they revived what seemed most Oriental and impossible of all— the harem. Never has there been so per- fect a renaissance of so remote a civilization. Such is the power of democracy in archaeology and the revival of the past. Therefore we must face first this most im- portant fact in connection with the future of America: that the future of America may possibly be very like the past of Europe—or perhaps even the past of Asia. We must be prepared, among other things, for the re- appearance of certain huge phenomena of history from which, in our corner of Europe, particular conventions protect us, Thus it can be made a matter of reproach against America that in America has broken out again that mysterious evil which can endure to burn the living body of a man. But it is ‘unjust to state this side of the question alone. For the truth is that if Americans sometimes lynch like the men of dark ages, it is because the men of the dark ages were much more essentially democratic than the men of mod- ern England. But whether this be so or not there are, I think, certainly two ancient ele-The Future ments of humanity which one may expect to see rear their heads in America before very long. The first of the two solid and shocking calamities which may occur to America is the rise of a real aristocracy. England is aristo- cratic, comparatively speaking, in so far as one Christian nation can be more aristocratic than another. England is the most aristo- cratic country in Europe. But there have been no real aristocracies in Europe for nearly two thousand years. Christianity broke the back of aristocracy when it made every man important enough to be damned. But Amer- ican civilization happens to have chiefly collected and increased itself during one of those epochs in which Christianity is regu- larly eclipsed, just as the moon is regularly eclipsed. A society started in this eclipse may easily become really heathen, and there- fore really aristocratic. I have noticed in some strong American novels, notably in “Patience Sparhawk,” a note of harshness and inhuman liberty in the rich, an awful note that has not been heard since pagan times. If aristocracy arises in America, as it very possibly may, it will not be hampered by any of those clumsy obligations of humanity and Christian service which broke the iron shins of the old Barons of Europe. Aristocracy in America may find itself free to rise to the most hideous heights to which tyranny has ever risen in the forgotten empires of Asia; it may fan to life the lost cruelties of the cold and burned-out hells of the East. There is no limit to what men can do when once they really despise men. Mr. H. G. Wells in his recent book, “First and Last Things,” says one thing which would alone give him a right to his great and growing reputation. He ex- presses the real value of democracy by simply saying “it abolishes contempt.” It may seem queer to say that the very democracy of America lays it open to aristocracy; yet this is of America 277 true. You have so genuinely abolished con- tempt that when your great aristocracy comes you will not realize how contemptible it is. The other elemental force which undoubt- edly threatens your democracy like a thun- dercloud is the thing called supernaturalism. I need hardly say that, like nearly all rational and thinking modern men, I believe in the supernatural. But in my cloudy and cozy Eng- land I know that there never will besuch waves of lucid fanaticism as have sometimes swept across Asia, But such waves of lucid fanati- cism may possibly sweep across America. If I were called upon to make a wild con- jecture about how the splendid American democracy might be ruined, my conjecture would be something like this: A prophet will arise, probably female and quite wealthy. But she will be far too Amer- ican to fall into the folly of supposing that the Americans are mere materialists. Before the foolish English magazines have done talking about the American materialism she will have denied the very existence of matter. While dreary British journalists are still say- ing that Americans worship the dollar, she will have made Americans worship her. She will preach something shocking and cruel, like all heathen mystics—as that a child must not be pitied for a toothache, or that there is no reality in the empty bellies of the poor. It will be pleaded for her that her people are spiritually at peace; and indeed they will be, with the peace of Satan that passes all under- standing. Pride, which is the denial of dan- ger, rather than courage, which is the facing of it, will stamp itself on the very faces of her elect. The rich people will hear her gladly; she will not be crucified. Between her and the Crucified God of the poor there will be waged the greatest of the religious wars; and upon the issue of it will depend whether Amer- ica falls back into the thousand forms of heathenry or goes forward with the cavalcade of Christendom.