Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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The causes of shrinkage in population are the opposites of those which
we have found to promote its increase. The production of food may be
diminished by the exhaustion of the soil, or by the progressive aridity
caused by cutting down woods. The manufacture of goods to be exchanged
for food may fall off owing to foreign competition, a result which is
likely to follow from a rise in the standard of living, for the labourer
then demands higher wages, and consumes more food per head, which of
itself must check fertility, since the same amount of food will now
support a smaller number. The delusion shared by the whole working class
that they can make work for each other, at wages fixed by themselves, is
ludicrous; a community cannot subsist 'by taking in each other's
washing.' Or the supply of importable food may fail by the peopling up
of the countries which grow it. Any conditions which make it no longer
worth while to invest capital in business, or which destroy credit, have
the same effect. One of the causes of the decay of the Roman Empire was
the drain of specie to the East in exchange for perishable commodities.
When trade is declining a general listlessness comes over the industrial
world, and the output falls still further. There have been alleged
instances of peoples which have dwindled and even disappeared from
_taedium vitae_. This is said to have been the cause of the extinction
of the Guanches of the Canary Islands; but the symptoms described rather
suggest an outbreak of sleeping-sickness.

Paradoxical as it may seem, neither voluntary restriction of births, nor
famine, nor pestilence, nor war, has much effect in reducing numbers.
Birth-control instead of diminishing the population, may only lower the
death-rate. France in 1781, with a birth-rate of 39, had much the same
net increase as in the years before the war with a birth-rate of 20. The
parallel lines of the births and deaths in this country have already
been mentioned. Famine and pestilence are followed at once by an
increased number of births. India and China, though frequently ravaged
by both these scourges, remain super-saturated. Of course, if the famine
is chronic, the population must fall to the point where the food is
sufficient; and a zymotic disease which has become endemic may be too
strong for the natural fertility of the nation attacked, as has happened
to several barbarous races; but an invasion of plague, cholera, or
influenza has no permanent effect on the numbers of Europeans. War
resembles plague in its action upon population. When, as in the late
war, nearly the whole of the able-bodied men are on active service, the
loss of population caused by cessation of births is greater than all the
fatal casualties of the battle-field. A rough calculation gives the
result that twelve million lives have been lost to the belligerent
nations by the separation of husbands and wives during the war. And yet
it may be predicted that these losses, added to the eight millions or so
who have been killed, would be made good in a very few years but for the
destruction of capital and credit which the war has caused. If we study
the vital statistics of a country like Germany, which has engaged in
several severe wars since births and deaths began to be registered, we
shall find that the contour-line representing the fluctuations of the
birth-rate indicates a steep ravine in the year or years while the war
lasted, followed by a hump or high table-land for several years after.
In a short time, as far as numbers are concerned, the war is as if it
had never been. When we remember that the number of possible fathers is
much reduced by casualties, this rise in the birth-rate after a war
offers a strong confirmation of the thesis which we have been
maintaining, that the ebb and flow of population are not affected by
conscious intention, but by increased or diminished pressure of numbers
upon subsistence. If the German people, who before the war consumed more
food than was good for them, have been habituated by our blockade to a
reasonable abstemiousness, we shall have contributed to the eventual
increase of the German people, in spite of all their soldiers whom we
killed in France, and the civilians whom we starved in Germany. And if
our success leads to a greater consumption by our working class, our
population will show a corresponding decline. Emigration, as we have
seen, does not diminish the home population by a single unit; and so,
while there are empty lands available for colonisation, it is by far the
best method of adding to the numbers of our race.

It should now be possible to form a judgment on the prospects of the
Anglo-Saxon race in various parts of the world. In India, Burma, New
Guinea, the West Indian Islands, and tropical Africa there is no
possibility of ever planting a healthy European population. These
dependencies may grow food for us, or send us articles which we can
exchange for food, but they are not, and never can be, colonies of
Anglo-Saxons. The prospects of South Africa are very dubious. The white
man is there an aristocrat, directing semi-servile labour. The white
population of the gold and diamond fields will stay there till the mines
give out, and no longer. Large tracts of the country may at last be
occupied only by Kaffirs. The United States of America are becoming less
Anglo-Saxon every year, and this process is likely to continue, since in
unskilled labour the Italian and the Pole seem to give better value for
their wages than the Englishman or born American, with his high standard
of comfort. In Canada, the temperate part of Australia, New Zealand, and
Tasmania the chances for a large and flourishing English-speaking
population seem to be very favourable, though in these dominions the
high standard of living is a check to population, and in the case of
Australasia the possibility of foreign conquest, while these priceless
lands are still half empty, cannot be altogether excluded.

Even more interesting to most of us is the future of our race at home.
As regards quality, the outlook for the present is bad. We have seen
that the destruction of the upper and professional classes by taxation
directed expressly against them has already begun, and this
victimisation is certain to become more and more acute, till these
classes are practically extinguished. The old aristocracy showed a
tendency to decay even when they were unduly favoured by legislation,
and a little more pressure will drive them to voluntary sterility and
extermination. Even more to be regretted is the doom of the professional
aristocracy, a caste almost peculiar to our country. These families can
often show longer, and usually much better pedigrees than the peerage;
the persistence of marked ability in many of them, for several
generations, is the delight of the eugenist. They are perhaps the best
specimens of humanity to be found in any country of the world. Yet they
have no prospects except to be gradually harassed out of existence, like
the _curiales_ of the later Roman Empire. The power will apparently be
grasped by a new highly privileged class, the aristocracy of labour.
This class, being intelligent, energetic, and intensely selfish, may
retain its domination for a considerable time. It is a matter of course
that, having won its privilege of exploiting the community, it will use
all its efforts to preserve that privilege and to prevent others from
sharing it. In other words, it will become an exclusive and strongly
conservative class, on a broader basis than the territorial and
commercial aristocracies which preceded it. It will probably be strong
enough to discontinue the system of State doles which encourages the
wastrel to multiply, as he does multiply, much faster than the valuable
part of the population. We are at present breeding a large parasitic
class subsisting on the taxes and hampering the Government. The
comparative fertility of the lowest class as compared with the better
stocks has greatly increased, and is still increasing. The competent
working-class families, as well as the rich, are far less fertile than
the waste products of our civilisation. Dr. Tredgold found that 43
couples of the parasitic class averaged 7.4 children per family, while
91 respectable couples from the working class averaged only 3.7 per
family. Mr. Sidney Webb examined the statistics of the Hearts of Oak
Benefit Society, which is patronised by the best type of mechanic, and
found that the birth-rate among its members has fallen 46 per cent,
between 1881 and 1901; or, taking the whole period between 1880 and
1904, the falling off is 52 per cent. This decline proves that the
period of industrial expansion in England is nearly over. It would be
far better if our birth-rate were as low as that of France, as it would
be but for the reckless propagation of the 'submerged tenth,' England
being now a paradise for human refuse, the offscourings of Europe
(170,000 in 1908) take the place of the better stocks, whose position is
made artificially unfavourable. These doles are at present paid by the
minority, and this method may be expected to continue until the looting
of the propertied classes comes to an enforced end. This will not take
long, for it is certain that the amount of wealth available for plunder
is very much smaller than is usually supposed. It is easy to destroy
capital values, but very difficult to distribute them. The time will
soon arrive when the patient sheep will be found to have lost not only
his fleece but his skin, and the privileged workman will then have to
choose between taxing himself and abandoning socialism. There is little
doubt which he will prefer. The result will be that the festering sore
of our slum-population will dry up, and the gradual disappearance of
this element will be some compensation, from the eugenic point of view,
for the destruction of the intellectual class. This process will
considerably, and beneficially, diminish the population: and there are
several other factors which will operate in the same direction. High
wage industry can only maintain itself against the competition of
cheaper labour abroad by introducing every kind of labour-saving device.
The number of hands employed in a factory must progressively diminish.
And as, in spite of all that ingenuity can do, the competition of the
cheaper races is certain to cripple our foreign trade, the trade unions
will be obliged to provide for a shrinkage in their numbers. We may
expect that every unionist will be allowed to place one son, and only
one, in the privileged corporation. A man will become a miner or a
railwayman 'by patrimony,' and it will be difficult to gain admission to
a union in any other way. The position of those who cannot find a place
within the privileged circle will be so unhappy that most unionists will
take care to have one son only. Another change which will tend to
discourage families will be the increased employment of women as
bread-winners. Nothing is more remarkable in the study of vital
statistics than the comparative birth-rates of those districts in which
women earn wages, and of those in which they do not. The rate of
increase among the miners is as great as that of the reckless casual
labourers, and the obvious reason is that the miner's wife loses nothing
by having children, since she does not earn wages. Contrast with these
high figures (running up to 40 per thousand) the very low birth-rates of
towns like Bradford, where the women are engaged in the textile industry
and earn regular wages in support of the family budget. If the time
comes when the majority of women are wage-earners, we may even see the
pressure of population entirely withdrawn. Thus in every class of the
nation influences are at work tending to a progressive decrease in our
national fertility. It must be remembered, however, that at present the
annual increase, in peace time, is 9 or 10 per thousand, so that it may
be some time before an equilibrium is reached. But if our predictions
are sound, a positive decrease, and probably a rapid one, is likely to
follow. For our ability to exchange our manufactures for food will grow
steadily less, as the self-indulgent and 'work-shy' labourer succeeds in
gaining his wishes. If the coal begins to give out, the retreat will
become a rout.

We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began
with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of
industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. Within 200
years, it may be--for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents
which will retard the flow of the stream--the hideous new towns which
disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have
been reclaimed for the plough. Humanitarian legislation, so far from
arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same
may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters. It is indeed
instructive to observe how cupidity and sentiment, which (with
pugnacity) are the only passions which the practical politician needs to
consider, usually defeat their own ends. The working man is sawing at
the branch on which he is seated. He may benefit for a time a minority
of his own class, but only by sealing the doom of the rest. A densely
populated country, which is unable to feed itself, can never be a
working-man's paradise, a land of short hours and high wages. And the
sentimentalist, kind only to be cruel, unwittingly promotes precisely
the results which he most deprecates, though they are often much more
beneficial than his own aims. The evil that he would he does not; and
the good that he would not, that he sometimes does.

For, much as we must regret the apparently inevitable ruin of the upper
and upper middle classes, to which England in the past has owed the
major part of her greatness, we cannot regard the trend of events as an
unmixed misfortune. The industrial revolution has no doubt had some
beneficial results. It has founded the British Empire, the most
interesting and perhaps the most successful experiment in government on
a large scale that the world has yet seen. It has foiled two formidable
attempts to place Europe under the heel of military monarchies. It has
brought order and material civilisation to many parts of the world which
before were barbarous. But these achievements have been counterbalanced
by many evils, and in any case they have done their work. The
aggregation of mankind in large towns is itself a misfortune; the life
of great cities is wholesome neither for body nor for mind. The
separation of classes has become more complete; the country may even be
divided into the picturesque counties where money is spent, and the ugly
counties where it is made. Except London and the sea-ports, the whole of
the South of England is more or less parasitic. We must add that in the
early days of the movement the workman and his children were exploited
ruthlessly. It is true that if they had not been exploited they would
not have existed; but a root of bitterness was planted which, according
to what seems to be the law in such cases, sprang up and bore its
poisonous fruit about two generations later. It is a sinister fact that
the worst trouble is now made by the youngest men. The large fortunes
which were made by the manufacturers were not, on the whole, well spent.
Their luxury was not of a refined type; literature and art were not
intelligently encouraged; and even science was most inadequately
supported. The great achievements of the nineteenth century in science
and letters, and to a less degree in art, were independent of the
industrial world, and were chiefly the work of that class which is now
sinking helplessly under the blows of predatory taxation. Capitalism
itself has degenerated; the typical millionaire is no longer the captain
of industry, but the international banker and company promoter. It is
more difficult than ever to find any rational justification for the
accumulations which are in the hands of a few persons. It is not to be
expected that the working class should be less greedy and unscrupulous
than the educated; indeed it is plain that, now that it realises its
power, it will be even more so. In some ways the national character has
stood the strain of these unnatural conditions very well. Those who
feared that the modern Englishman would make a poor soldier have had to
own that they were entirely wrong. But as long as industrialism
continues, we shall be in a state of thinly disguised civil war. There
can be no industrial peace while our urban population remains, because
the large towns are the creation of the system which their inhabitants
now want to destroy. They can and will destroy it, but only by
destroying themselves. When the suicidal war is over we shall have a
comparatively small population, living mainly in the country and
cultivating the fruits of the earth. It will be more like the England of
the eighteenth century than the England which we know. There will be no
very rich men; and if the birth-rate is regulated there should be no
paupers. It will be a far pleasanter age to live in than the present,
and more favourable to the production of great intellectual work, for
life will be more leisurely, and social conditions more stable. We may
hope that some of our best families will determine to survive, _coute
que coute_, until these better times arrive. We shall not attempt to
prophesy what the political constitution will be. Every existing form of
government is bad; and our democracy can hardly survive the two diseases
which generally kill democracies--reckless plunder of the national
wealth, and the impotence of the central government in face of
revolutionary and predatory sectionalism.

Meanwhile, we must understand that although the consideration of mankind
in the mass, and the calculation of tendencies based on figures and
averages, must lead us to somewhat pessimistic and cynical views of
human nature, there is no reason why individuals, unless they wish to
make a career out of politics (since it is the sad fate of politicians
always to deal with human nature at its worst), should conform
themselves to the low standards of the world around them. It is only 'in
the loomp' that humanity, whether poor or rich, 'is bad.' There are
materials, though far less abundant than we could wish, for a spiritual
reformation, which would smooth the transition to a new social order,
and open to us unfailing sources of happiness and inspiration, which
would not only enable us to tide over the period of dissolution, but
might make the whole world our debtor. No nation is better endowed by
nature with a faculty for sane idealism than the English. We were never
intended to be a nation of shopkeepers, if a shopkeeper is doomed to be
merely a shopkeeper, which of course he is not. Our brutal commercialism
has been a temporary aberration; the quintessential Englishman is not
the hero of Smiles' 'Self-help'; he is Raleigh, Drake, Shakespeare,
Milton, Johnson, or Wordsworth, with a pleasant spice of Dickens. He is,
in a word, an idealist who has not quite forgotten that he is descended
from an independent race of sea-rovers, accustomed to think and act for
themselves. Mr. Havelock Ellis, one of the wisest and most fearless of
our prophets to-day, quotes from an anonymous journalist a prediction
which may come true: 'London may yet be the spiritual capital of the
world; while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord
of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.'
For, as the Greek poet says, 'the soul's wealth is the only real
wealth.' The spirit creates values, while the demagogue shrieks to
transfer the dead symbols of them. 'All that matters' is what the world
can neither give nor take away. The spiritual integration of society
which we desire and behold afar off must be illuminated by the dry light
of science, and warmed by the rays of idealism, a white light but not
cold. And idealism must be compacted as a religion, for it is the
function of religion to prevent the fruits of the flowering-times of the
spirit from being lost. Science has not yet come to its own in forming
the beliefs and practice of mankind, because it has been so much
excluded from higher education, and so much repressed by sentimentalism
under the wing of religion. The nation that first finds a practical
reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front
place among the peoples of the world. In England we have to struggle not
only against ignorance, but against a deep-rooted intellectual
insincerity, which is our worst national fault. The Englishman hates an
idea which he has never met before, as he hates the disturber of his
privacy in a steam-ship cabin; and he takes opportunities of making
things unpleasant for those who utter indiscreet truths. As Samuel
Butler says: 'We hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy
examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who
do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent
them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their
immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is
often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete
instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the
larger aspects of great problems. Those who are able to trace causes and
effects further than the majority must expect to be unpopular, but they
will not mind it, if they can do good by speaking. The logic of events
will justify them, and science has a new weapon in official statistics
which will register at once the disastrous effects upon wealth and trade
which the insane theories of the demagogue will bring about. No agitator
can explain away ascertained figures; if we go down hill, we shall do it
with our eyes open. It may be that reactions will be set up which will
render the anticipations in this article erroneous. Things never turn
out either so well or so badly as they logically ought to do. Prophecy
is only an amusement; what does concern us all deeply is that we should
see in what direction we are now moving.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] In the small islands round our coast increase has
ceased for some decades. The vital statistics of these
islands furnish an excellent illustration of automatic
adjustment to a state of supersaturation.

BISHOP GORE AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

(1908)

The strength and the weakness of the Anglican Church lie in the fact
that it is not the best representative of any well-defined type of
Christianity. It is not strictly a Protestant body; for Protestantism is
the democracy of religion, and the Church of England retains a
hierarchical organisation, with an order of priests who claim a divine
commission not conferred upon them by the congregation. It is not a
State Church as the Russian Empire has[24] a State Church. That is a
position which it has neither the will nor the power to regain. Still
less could it ever justify a claim to separate existence as a purely
Catholic Church, independent of the Church of Rome. A community of
Catholics whose claim to be a Catholic and not a Protestant Church is
denied by all other Catholics, by all Protestants, and by all who are
neither Catholics nor Protestants, could not long retain sufficient
prestige to keep its adherents together. The destiny of such a body is
written in the history of the 'Old Catholics,' who seceded from Rome
because they would not accept the dogma of Papal infallibility. The
seceders included many men of high character and intellect, but in
numbers and influence they are quite insignificant. The Church of
England has only one title to exist, and it is a strong one. It may
claim to represent the religion of the English people as no other body
can represent it. 'No Church,' Doellinger wrote in 1872, 'is so national,
so deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with the institutions
and manners of the country, or so powerful in its influence on national
character.' These words are still partly true, though it is not possible
to make the assertion with so much confidence as when Doellinger wrote.
The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions,
tastes, and prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national
ideal of character, which has long since lost its adventitious connexion
with heraldry and property in land. A love of order, seemliness, and
good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what
a seventeenth-century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the
Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen
sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of
cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church
an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy,
feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the
sixteenth century have at last become dim. A jealous love of liberty,
combined with contempt for theories of equality, produced a system of
graduated ranks in Church government which left a large measure of
freedom, both in speech and thought, even to the clergy, and encouraged
no respect for what Catholics mean by authority. The Anglican Church is
also characteristically English in its dislike for logic and
intellectual consistency and in its distrust of undisciplined
emotionalism, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
known and dreaded under the name of 'enthusiasm.' This type is not
essentially aristocratic. It does not traverse the higher ideals of the
working class, which respects and admires the qualities of the
'gentleman,' though it resents the privileges long connected with the
name. But it has no attraction for what may be impolitely called the
vulgar class, whose religious feelings find a natural vent in an
unctuous emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism. This class, which
forms the backbone of Dissent and Liberalism, is instinctively
antipathetic to Anglicanism. Nor does the Anglican type of Christianity
appeal at all to the 'Celtic fringe,' whose temperament is curiously
opposite to that of the English, not only in religion but in most other
matters. The Irish and the Welsh are no more likely to become Anglicans
than the lowland Scotch are to adopt Roman Catholicism. Whether Dissent
is a permanent necessity in England is a more difficult question, in
spite of the class differences of temperament above mentioned. If the
Anglican organisation were elastic enough to permit the order of
lay-readers to be developed on strongly Evangelical lines, the lower
middle class might find within the Church the mental food which it now
seeks in Nonconformist chapels, and might gain in breadth and dignity by
belonging once more to a great historic body.

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