On the Return of the Barbarian

It might arise from a perfectly rational, and indeed from a perfectly traditional, inheritance of human protest. Nor do I mean (God forbid) that modern banks, or modern books, or remarkable realistic studies of this or that, or the perpetually shifting fog that they call physical science, or the cranks who run naked because they have never thought about clothes, or the louts who go Communist because they have never thought about private property, or the wasters who sponge on six wives and call it Free Love — I do not mean that any of that sort of liberty or laxity or liberal-mindedness has ever had anything to do with civilization. The very word civilization is from a city. The very nature of a city is something that has to be built according to a plan; and with some sacrifice from the citizens in fitting in with that plan. There are many modern things called Culture which one would be glad to see destroyed by Goths and Vandals, let alone by mild modern Germans, who do whatever they are told. There are many modern books, advertised as masterpieces of literary art, which I should be glad to see destroyed by rats and worms, let alone Hitlerites. There are many idiotic experiments in nakedness, in the northern climate of Europe, which might well be exterminated by germs, let alone by Germans.

No; the essential point does not concern any o£ those questions, such as arose also in the fall of Roman civilization; questions in which the barbarians might happen to be right, and the decayed citizens of civilization might happen to be wrong. It is none the less true that civilized men must defend civilization against any sort of barbarians. And the reason is, that civilization retains the power of curing its own diseases, whereas it is only by an accident that the barbarians may be free from the disease. If England is prostrate with influenza, it may conceivably (of course) be invaded by Eskimos, who may conceivably (of course) be generically immune from influenza. But that does not mean that Eskimo culture is really superior to English culture. It does not even mean that Eskimos could guard against influenza so promptly or practically as English-men could guard against a return of influenza. The advantage is with our culture — even germ-culture. The! bother with the barbarian is that he is right by accident, and sometimes does not even know why he is right. The case for the civilized man is that he is wrong by his own fault, and knows it is his own fault; and, knowing that he is wrong, may have some reason to put himself right. Never be merely on the side of, barbarism, for it always means the destruction of all that men have ever understood, by men who do not understand it.

That is the sense in which a detached and dispassionate person, watching that strange turn of the tide in the centre o£ tribal Germany, will be disposed to suspect a tragedy. The Germans have done many things that many of us may think right, but there is nothing to hold them back from doing anything that all of us think wrong. There have been many such ethical eddies in history, and the trouble with the German ones is that they have always been more ethnical than ethical. That is, they have perpetually turned back, by a sort of introspective or centripetal movement, from the judgment of Christendom to the judgment of Germany. The debate always turned from considering whether the German was really right to considering how really right the real German had always been. It is quite true that the word German is used to cover a vast variety of tribes and trends, about which historians may debate as they please. But it is a manifest modern fact that this racial mass has been, even if only recently, solidified by a staggering sense of triumph, and a hypnotic faith, that it is all one people. Oddly enough, indeed, its really staggering triumph was followed very rapidly by a much more staggering defeat. But that is the advantage of hypnotism. That is the charm of illusion and the compelling power of unreality. The Germans, not being realistic, have already forgotten that they were defeated ten years ago; but they still remember vividly that they were victorious fifty years ago. That is the advantage of being a sentimentalist. You only remember what you like to remember. It is also the advantage of being a barbarian. When we say that something must have its head, we generally say it of some animal with a rather inferior head. A horse may occasionally have its head, but a horseman who had his head, in that blind and instinctive sense, would probably have his head punched by other and more judicious horsemen. The danger of the emergence of anything really barbaric in the world is that we do not know what it will do next, or where it will turn up at last; just as we do not know whether a runaway horse will be stopped by the nearest policeman or will be smashed in a shop-window two miles away. And this, let it be noted, has very little to do with the original cause of the accident, or with whether it was the sort of incident we should call an excuse for the horse, or even a justification for the horse. The horse might have been subjected to a shock that no normal horse could be expected to stand. There would always be, in judging the horse as a horse, a difference between his having shied because a baby threw a ball, or bolted because an anarchist threw a bomb. But we are still judging, justly or unjustly, according to what is called the nature o£ the beast. Now Barbarism is a beast, and has the nature of the beast. It is not peculiar to any particular movement among Teutons, any more than among Turks or Mongols or Slavs. But in all of these we can mark the moment of history when men turned back towards it, and delayed for centuries the civilization of mankind. What is really disquieting about this new note of narrow nationalism or tribalism in the north is that there is something shrill and wild about it, that has been heard in those destructive crises of history. There are many marks by which anybody of historical imagination can recognize the recurrence: the monstrous and monotonous omnipresence of one symbol, and that a symbol of which nobody knows the meaning; the relish of the tyrant for exaggerating even his own tyranny, and barking so loud that nobody can even suspect that his bark is worse than his bite; the impatient indifference to all the former friends of Ger-many, among those who are yet making Germany the only test — all these things have a savour of savage and hasty simplification, which may, in many individuals, correspond to an honest indignation or even idealism, but which, when taken altogether, give an uncomfortable impression of wild men who have merely grown weary of the complexity that we call civilization.

VIII On Women Who Vote

A LETTER from a lady, in the correspondence column o£ the News Chronicle, picked out the present writer with a withering distinction; a spotlight calculated to put him on the spot. Miss Florence Underwood, secretary of the Women's Freedom League, was complaining of the present condition of affairs in which "an increasing number of women are having a fierce struggle for economic independence and are becoming more and more embittered because of irritating discrimination against women workers/' In spite of this, it appears, men, even including leader-writers on Liberal papers, continue to talk in a tone of heartless heartiness. And this reminds Miss Underwood of the darker passages in my own past; and she thus recalls them:

"In pre-suffrage days Mr. G. K. Chesterton inquired from his wife, his mother, and his charwoman if any of them wanted the vote. Each of them said 'No!' and Mr. Chesterton remained more convinced than ever that practically all women did not want the vote."

This is something of a simplification of what Mr. Chesterton really said; but it is true that the principle