On the Instability of the State

and for the resumption of the patriarchal dignity that has figured with such distinction from the beginning of history. At the same time, we see statements in the newspapers about schemes for supporting all the fads that have recently attacked the family. We read of all the stale theories of Eugenics; the talk of compulsory action to keep the breed in a certain state of bestial excellence; of nosing out every secret of sex or origin, so that nobody may survive who is not Nordic; of setting a hundred quack doctors to preserve an imaginary race in its imaginary purity. Now Eugenics of that sort is, always has been, and always must be, merely a violent assault on The Family. It is, by definition, the taking away from The Family of the decisions that ought to belong to The Family. When those decisions are made in the domestic and individual way, in which they should be made, nobody in his senses ever dreams of describing the decision as Eugenics. The private persons involved do not call the issue of their own private affairs Eugenics; they call it love, or childbirth, or childlessness, or whatever they choose. The whole point of these pseudo-scientific theories always was that they were to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing power than the individual husband or wife or household. The way in which the newspaper reports refer to them, in the case of the New Germany, is not reassuring. But then, on the other hand, the newspaper reports may be lies. Or again, the other and contrary newspaper reports may be lies. I shall here go no further than recording that they cannot both of them be true.

But there is one point about this particular problem of The Family which connects itself, in another way, with the present revolutions and counter-revolutions of Europe. There are certain sayings which for the last hundred years or so have not been considered quite respectable, because they were religious; or perhaps connected with the sort of religion that was not quite respectable. One of those statements is this: "The Family comes first; it comes before the State; its authority and necessity are anterior to those of the State." This always sounded perfectly horrid to rows and rows of earnest young people, learning statistics for Fabian Socialism at the London School of Economics. To that type, to that generation, the State was everything; that great official machine, which managed the traffic and took over the telephone system, was the very cosmos in which these people lived. For them, The Family was a stuffy thing somewhere in the suburbs which only existed to be the subject of Problem Plays and Problem Novels. The only question about it was whether its gloom should be brightened up by suicide; or its selfishness exalted by self-indulgence. But the whole o£ this view, though it is a view very nearly universal in the big modern towns, only exists because the big modern town is an entirely artificial society. Those inside it know no more about the normal life of humanity than the equally select society inside Colney Hatch or inside Portland Gaol. In some ways a lunatic asylum or a convict settlement are much better organized, are certainly much more elaborately organized, than the huggermugger of human beings doing as they like outside. But it is the human beings outside who are human; and it is their life that is the life of humanity.

Now the sweeping social revolutions that have swept backwards and forwards across Europe of late, the stroke of the Bolshevists, the counter-stroke of the Fascists, the imitation of it in Hitlerite Germany, the recovery of the secret societies in Spain, the new creation in Ireland, all these great governmental changes may serve to bring men's minds back to that big fundamental fact which the big cities have fancied to be a paradox. The big cities had this notion for a perfectly simple reason: that in the modern moment in which they lived, and especially in an industrial country like ours, the framework of the State did really look stronger than the framework of The Family. The modern industrial mob was accustomed to the endless and tragic trail of broken families; of tenants failing to pay their rents; of slums being condemned and their inhabitants scattered; of husband or wife wandering in search of work or swept apart by separation or divorce. In those conditions, The Family seemed the frailest thing in the world; and the State the strongest thing in the world. But it is not really so. It is not so, when we take the life of a man over large areas of time or space. It is not so, when we pass from the static nineteenth century to the staggering twentieth century. It is not so when we pass out of peaceful England to riotous Germany or gun-governed America. Over all the world tremendous transformations are passing over the State, so that a man may go to bed in one State and get up in another. The very name of his nation, the very nature of his common law, the very definition of his citizenship, the uniform and meaning of the policeman at the corner of his street, may be totally transformed tomorrow, as in a fairy-tale. He cannot really refer the daily domestic problems of his life to a State that may be turned upside-down every twenty-four hours. He must, in fact, fall back on that primal and prehistoric institution; the fact that he has a mate and they have a child; and the three must get on together somehow, under whatever law or lawlessness they are supposed to be living.

Take a very influential and creative culture in which the family has always been fundamental; take China. Is there any earthly sense, at this moment, in telling a Chinaman that he must cease to belong to The Family, and be content to belong to the State? He may not unnaturally ask, "What State?" The Japanese armies may advance today, over the land occupied by one of five rival Chinese generals yesterday. Tomorrow, both of them may have disappeared from practical politics; a national reaction may have restored the Son of Heaven to his sacred palace in Pekin; or the Russian Communists may have swept across China and plotted it out under Commissars, that "the State" may start another Five-year Plan. It is simply not possible for men to regard these vast tempestuous changes, in what the Chinese might call the Upper Air, as having the same real relation to themselves as the mother that bore them, or the child that is born to them. In the break-up of the modern world, The Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history; the only thing that can really remain a loyalty, because it is also a liberty.

XXIV On a Melodrama

MANY have seen, and many more must have heard of, the very amusing performance which was given at the Ambassadors Theatre. "The Streets of London" based on the idea of acting a melodrama as a burlesque. It is true that the old melodrama of Dion Boucicault is not turned into an extravagant burlesque; nor indeed, compared with some, was it ever a very extravagant melodrama. It is almost entirely a matter of certain stage conventions which look very stiff to our generation; which always looked rather stagey even to the earlier generation, only that the earlier generation really rather liked the stage to be stagey. It is always necessary to remember, and it is very easy to forget, this last little point about the changes in human taste. A young man of the time and type of Shelley, let us say, wearing a loose collar and neckcloth and long flowing hair, certainly regarded his grandfather as a very artificial old dandy if he was patched and powdered and buttoned up with innumerable buttons in the frills and furbelows of the eighteenth century. The young man thought his own costume was more natural, and the old man