Anyhow, some of us do disbelieve in that sort of unity. We do not think a picture will be a better picture because all the colours run, however freely and largely they run into each other. We do not believe that a dinner will always be a better dinner because all the liquors and liqueurs are successively poured into the soup; or that our taste and enjoyment will really be widened by mixing the coffee with the claret or the vermouth with the port. We believe in certain Enclosures, called ‘courses’, or appropriate selections from the carte des vins, being actually interposed to prevent all these separate pleasures from flowing into each other. We do not believe that every tennis-court should be flooded to turn it into a swimming-bath, and people be forced to play tennis only in the water (that the two sports may be unified and made one); we should not hesitate to erect artificial Enclosures, in the form of walls and partitions, around baths, bath-rooms, swimming-pools, and similar things, lest this one delight should end in a universal Deluge. We should not shrink even from marking out, on the grass or the ground, the severe and restricting limits of the tennis-court, discouraging enthusiasts from playing tennis all over the billiard-room and the progressive whist-party, lest one good custom should corrupt the world, as the first Lord Tennyson observed. In short, we have a curious notion, firmly fixed in our heads, that Enclosures do play a highly practical and profitable part in the real life of this world; and that the mere destruction of them is not the destruction of mere negative taboos, but the destruction of positive creations, positive achievements, positive arts and pleasures of life. And in the same way we think that a mere philosophy of unification, of mixing sex with sex or nation with nation or style with style, is altogether a paltry, sterile, and provincial simplification; no more truly intellectual than the act of a baby in mixing all the paints in a paint-box or stirring five or six things together with a spoon.

  That is the principle behind the philosophy of Enclosures; and there is no space here to develop in detail the sociological application of it, that some of us call Distributism. Mr. H. G. Wells’s general philosophy, in such things, seems to be a mere desire for largeness, under the impression that it is enlargement. He has only got to get stuck firmly in the middle of a large crowd in order to learn that largeness may be the very opposite of enlargement. There is one thing that a man does in a reasonable degree want to have large — or, at any rate, to have larger. And that is elbow-room, which our pedantic political ancestors were in the habit of calling Freedom. I doubt whether the modern American advice to everybody to elbow his way has really resulted in more elbow-room. I do believe that many rude and simple social types were better in this respect, though I do not necessarily mean that they were better in every respect. And I believe that upon this alone could be founded that just and normal though now almost forgotten thing, the real defence of Private Property, which has no more to do with profiteering than with privateering. It is the essential principle that a man does not even own his own elbows unless he owns a room large enough for them, that he does not own his own legs unless he has liberty to stretch them; or own his own feet unless he owns the soil on which they stand.

  XVIII. On Current Claptrap

  IT is not often that we find the one book that ought to be written, written by the one man who ought to write it. The Abbé Dimnet is a distinguished French authority who has made a very lucid and most timely pronouncement on the Art of Thinking, for want of which the whole modern world was going mad. He suggests, with very sympathetic insight, that there is something not only accidental but needless about the vast amount of the dull claptrap that makes up current culture. It is not really because thinking is not a normal human function; but because so many have never been encouraged to discover how normal and human it is. Almost any man, he argues, may have a flash in which he feels ‘ ”I am in a rut, I know, but if I would make the least effort, move only one line, say: henceforth I will talk no more nonsense, in an instant I could be outside the herd of the unthinking.” . . . A trifle, a mere nothing, the buzz of a fly or the bang of a door may be enough to disturb this mood and bring back commonplace thoughts in full force; but it is no less true that, during a few moments, we have been separated from a higher mental life only by a vision which we realized was within reach and by an effort which did not seem to be an exertion. All this amounts to saying that we have a natural belief in the existence of an Art of Thinking. Some men possess it; others not; but those who do not possess it must blame themselves’.

  There lies on the table before me, side by side with this luminous and temperate statement of the French thinker, an invitation to join a movement for Peace and Progress Throughout the World, which a number of men more distinguished than myself seem to have already joined. And I cannot help feeling a faint curiosity, in reading the terms of such appeals, about whether these distinguished men and their friends ever have sat down suddenly and said, ‘I am in a rut, I know, but if I would make the least effort ...’ For it seems to me that what is the matter with the modern world, distinguished men and all, is that they have allowed their minds to be completely cluttered up with a lumber of language, some of it the legacy of old blunders, some of it suited to old conditions which no longer exist. There are any number of phrases which everybody speaks and nobody hears. There are any number of phrases which when they were used the first time may have meant something, and which are now used for the millionth time because they mean nothing. I will take one example out of a thousand, an example which happens to occur in the idealistic document of which I have spoken. I mean the expression about being ready to welcome ‘men of every race and creed’.

  Now the modern tragedy of man is that he does not stop and start when he has used those words, and gaze at them with a wild surmise, and cry distractedly, ‘My God! what am I saying?’ For he really does not know what he is saying. He is classing together two things as if they were obviously in the same class, when they have obviously never been in the same category. This does not mean that a man may not feel fraternity or charity for men of every race and creed, as he may for men with every sort of heaven and hat, or with every type of truthfulness and trousers, or with every variety of saintly self- sacrifice and taste in tobacco. But the things have nothing particular to do with each other; there is no sort of reason why they should go together; and the phrase is based on the assumption that they must always go together. Race and creed are linked in the language, like pots and pans, or sticks and straws, or boots and shoes, or any other recognized grouping of things of the same type. But they are no more things of the same type than adenoids and algebra.

  When we talk of somebody’s creed, we mean certain convictions which must have some relation to our own convictions: either in confirming them, or contradicting them, or agreeing or disagreeing with them in various degrees. We may not burn ourselves up with missionary zeal to convert a Mormon or a worshipper of Mumbo-Jumbo; but we do regard it as conceivable that he might be converted. And we do most probably think we know of something that would be an improvement on Mormonism or Mumbo-Jumbo. Anyhow, we know he holds his creed with his mind; and he might possibly change his mind. We do not expect the Ethiopian to change his skin. We do not expect the Chinaman to cease to be a Mongolian when he ceases to be a Confucian. It is as if we were to talk about having no prejudice of colour; and then to class a Red Indian with a Red Republican. It is as if we were to extend the same loving welcome to the Yellow Peril and the Yellow Press. It is simply a confusion; but it is one of a million confusions that are now making confusion worse confounded. I only take it as a small working model, because without a working model the modern mind cannot see how things work.

  The welcome we offer to men of any belief must be in its nature different from that we offer to men of any blood. If only for the simple reason that, if a man may believe anything, he may believe in the badness of all blood except his own blood. You may associate with him and his race, simply considered as a race. But if it is a Chosen Race, he may not associate with you. His thoughts, whatever they are, must determine everything about his relations with you; whereas the colour of his skin may be in most relations quite irrelevant. I rather fancy that ‘colour’ and ‘creed’ have come to be associated by mere alliteration and have no more rational relation than whiskers and wisdom. If a Chinaman and I discuss Proportional Representation (which God forbid!) it is in the hope that one or other will at least be intellectually influenced; but not in the hope that I shall turn yellow or he will turn pink.

  Now, if any one will pick up a paper or a page of modern writing, and look at it carefully, he will find it is a pastiche or mosaic of meaningless combinations of that sort. As a preliminary exercise, before the more subtle exercises of the French philosopher’s manual, I recommend this experiment. The catch words are generally, indeed, used more or less unconsciously, in the service of some false philosophy. In this case it is the base and servile creed that creeds are as inevitable and incurable as black faces or Eskimo skulls. It is the theory that we must all reconcile ourselves to thinking differently, because no thinking is any good and it is better not to think at all. It is out of that unmanly despair that such unthinking expressions arise; the thoughtless phrase out of the thoughtless philosophy. But there is, after all, nothing but a contradiction in terms in a thoughtless philosophy; and especially in a philosophy directed against thought. Fortunately, we can all think, whether we are red, black, or yellow; and that is the only true beginning of Peace and Progress throughout the World.

  XIX. On Evil Euphemisms

  SOMEBODY has sent me a book on Companionate Marriage; so called because the people involved are not married and will very rapidly cease to be companions. I have no intention of discussing here that somewhat crude colonial project. I will merely say that it is here accompanied with sub-titles and other statements about the rising generation and the revolt of youth. And it seems to me exceedingly funny that, just when the rising generation boasts of not being sentimental, when it talks of being very scientific and sociological — at that very moment everybody seems to have forgotten altogether what was the social use of marriage and to be thinking wholly and solely of the sentimental. The practical purposes mentioned as the first two reasons for marriage, in the Anglican marriage ser vice, seem to have gone completely out of sight for some people, who talk as if there were nothing but a rather wild version of the third, which may relatively be called romantic. And this, if you please, is supposed to be an emancipation from Victorian sentiment and romance.

  But I only mention this matter as one of many, and one which illustrates a still more curious contradiction in this modern claim. We are perpetually being told that this rising generation is very frank and free, and that its whole social ideal is frankness and freedom. Now I am not at all afraid of frankness. What I am afraid of is fickleness. And there is a truth in the old proverbial connexion between what is fickle and what is false. There is in the very titles and terminology of all this sort of thing a pervading element of falsehood. Everything is to be called something that it is not; as in the characteristic example of Companionate Marriage. Every thing is to be recommended to the public by some sort of synonym which is really a pseudonym. It is a talent that goes with the time of electioneering and advertisement and newspaper headlines; but what ever else such a time may be, it certainly is not specially a time of truth.

  In short, these friends of frankness depend almost entirely on Euphemism. They introduce their horrible heresies under new and carefully complimentary names; as the Furies were called the Eumenides. The names are always flattery; the names are also nonsense. The name of Birth- Control, for instance, is sheer nonsense. Everybody has always exercised birth-control; even when they were so paradoxical as to permit the process to end in a birth. Everybody has always known about birth-control, even if it took the wild and unthinkable form of self-control. The question at issue concerns different forms of birth-prevention; and I am not going to debate it here. But if I did debate it, I would call it by its name. The same is true of an older piece of sentiment indulged in by the frank and free: the expression ‘Free Love’. That also is a Euphemism; that is, it is a refusal of people to say what they mean. In that sense, it is impossible to prevent love being free, but the moral problem challenged concerns not the passions, but the will. There are a great many other examples of this sort of polite fiction; these respectable disguises adopted by those who are always railing against respectability. In the immediate future there will probably be more still. There really seems no necessary limit to the process; and however far the anarchy of ethics may go, it may always be accompanied with this curious and pompous ceremonial. The sensitive youth of the future will never be called upon to accept Forgery as Forgery. It will be easy enough to call it Homoeography or Script-Assimilation or something else that would suggest, to the simple or the superficial, that nothing was involved but a sort of socializing or unification of individual handwriting. We should not, like the more honest Mr. Fagin, teach little boys to pick pockets; for Mr. Fagin becomes far less honest when he becomes Professor Faginski, the great sociologist, of the University of Jena. But we should call it by some name implying the transference of something; I cannot at the moment remember the Greek either for pocket or pocket-handkerchief. As for the social justification of murder, that has already begun; and earnest thinkers had better begin at once to think about a nice inoffensive name for it. The case for murder, on modern relative and evolutionary ethics, is quite overwhelming. There is hardly one of us who does not, in looking round his or her social circle, recognize some chatty person or energetic social character whose disappearance, without undue fuss or farewell, would be a bright event for us all, Nor is it true that such a person is dangerous only because he wields unjust legal or social powers. The problem is often purely psychological, and not in the least legal; and no legal emancipations would solve it. Nothing would solve it but the introduction of that new form of liberty which we may agree to call, perhaps, the practice of Social Subtraction. Or, if we like, we can model the new name on the other names I have mentioned. We may call it Life-Control or Free Death; or anything else that has as little to do with the point of it as Companionate Marriage has to do with either marriage or companionship.

  Anyhow, I respectfully refuse to be impressed by the claim to candour and realism put forward just now for men, women, and movements. It seems to me obvious that this is not really the age of audacity but merely of advertisement; which may rather be described as caution kicking up a fuss. Much of the mistake arises from the double sense of the word publicity. For publicity also is a thoroughly typical euphemism or evasive term. Publicity does not mean revealing public life in the interests of public spirit. It means merely flattering private enterprises in the interests of private persons. It means paying compliments in public; but not offering criticisms in public. We should all be very much surprised if we walked out of our front-door one morning and saw a hoarding on one side of the road saying, ‘Use Miggle’s Milk; It Is All Cream’, and a hoarding on the other side of the road inscribed, ‘Don’t Use Miggle’s Milk; It’s Nearly All Water’. The modern world would be much upset if I were allowed to set up a flaming sky-sign proclaiming my precise opinion of the Colonial Port Wine praised in the flaming sign opposite. All this advertisement may have some thing to do with the freedom of trade; but it has nothing to do with the freedom of truth. Publicity must be praise and praise must to some extent be euphemism. It must put the matter in a milder and more inoffensive form than it might be put, however much that mildness may seem to shout through megaphones or flare in headlines. And just as this sort of loud evasion is used in favour of bad wine and bad milk, so it is used in favour of bad morals. When somebody wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency, the very first thing he does is to find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent. He has no more of the real courage that would pit vice against virtue than the ordinary advertiser has the courage to advertise ale as arsenic. His intelligence, such as it is, is entirely a commercial intelligence and to that extent entirely conventional. He is a shop-keeper who dresses the shop-window; he is certainly the very reverse of a rebel or a rioter who breaks the shop-window. If only for this reason, I remain cold and decline the due reverence to Cornpanionate Marriage and the book which speaks so reverentially about the Revolt of Youth. For this sort of revolt strikes me as nothing except revolting; and certainly not particularly realistic. With the passions which are natural to youth we all sympathize; with the pain that often arises from loyalty and duty we all sympathize still more; but nobody need sympathize with publicity experts picking pleasant expressions for unpleasant things; and I for one prefer the coarse language of our fathers.

  XX. On Encyclopaedias

  ON turning my attention to the subject of Encyclopaedias, and generally to projects for providing general information, I am struck by certain rather neglected problems in the nature of information itself. There is considerable activity at present in the scattering of a certain sort of information. Any magazine or newspaper is likely to contain a sort of examination paper, trustingly accompanied by a crib. Sometimes the paper is so printed and arranged that the answers actually come before the questions. But all that is a matter of what is called ‘make-up’ and can safely be trusted to the hard headed, practical, successful men who have made-up the paper. Sometimes they seem to have made up the answers as well as the questions. But we all know the general character of the questions. On any such page of any such paper we may encounter the challenge: ‘At what date did a dentist suffer death for his theological opinions?’ or, ‘What deadly poison is a by-product of crushed strawberries?’ or, ‘What is the income of Mr. Henry Ford reckoned in ancient Greek drachmae?’ But pressing and practical as these questions are, for any one living an active modern life, there are difficulties connected with the correct answering of many of them: difficulties not always appreciated either by those who ask or these who answer.