I I I
So, JUDGED BY REASON, Owen was right; his deductions were logical and, what is more, were justified in practice. All that they lacked was understanding in his hearers.
'It's a matter of time ; people will understand one day.'
'I don't know.'
'One can't think, though, that people will never arrive at an understanding of their own interests.'
Yet it has been so till now; this lack of understanding has been made up by the Church and the State, that is, by the two chief obstacles to further development. This is a circular argument., from which it is very hard to get away. Owen imagined that it sufficed to point out to people their obsolete absurdities for 30 A banquet arranged by Simon Moritz Bethmann, a banker, in 1818
i n connection with a congress o f the Holy Alliance then meeting a t Aachen. (A.S.)
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them to free themselves-and he was mistaken. Their absurdities, especially those of the Church, are obvious; but this does not hamper them in the least. Their indestructible solidity i s based not o n reason but o n the lack of it, and therefore they are as little amenable to criticism as are hills, woods and cliffs.
History has developed by means of absurdities; people have constantly set their hearts on chimeras, and have achieved very real results. In waking dreams they have gone after the rainbow, sought now paradise in heaven, now heaven on earth, and on the way have sung their everlasting songs, have decorated temples with their everlasting sculptures, have built Rome and Athens, Paris and London. One dream yields to another; the sleep sometimes becomes lighter, but is never quite gone. People will accept anything, believe in anything, submit to anything and are ready to sacrifice much; but they recoil in horror when through the gaping chink between two religions, which lets in the light of day, there blows upon them the cool wind of reason and criticism. If, for example, Owen had wished to reform the Church of England, he would have been just as successful as the Unitarians, the Quakers and I do not know who else. To reorganise the Church, to set up the altar behind a screen, or without one, to remove the images, or bring in more of themall this is possible, and thousands would follow the reformer; but Owen wanted to lead people out of the Church, and here was the sta, viator, here was his Rubicon. It is easy to walk up to the frontier: the most difficult thing in every country is to cross it, especially when the people itself is on the side of the passport official.
In all the thousand and one nights of history, as soon as a little education has been amassed, there have been the same endeavours: a few men have woken up and protested against the sleepers, have announced that they themselves were awake, but have been unable to rouse those others. Their appearance demonstrates, without the slightest doubt, man's capacity to evolve a rational understanding. But this does not solve our problem: can this exceptional development become general? The guidance which the past gives us does not favour an affirmative verdict. Perhaps the future will go differently, will bring to bear different forces, other elements, unknown to us, which will change for the better or for the worse the destiny of humanity, or of a considerable part of it. The discovery of America is tantamount to a geological upheaval ; railways and the electric telegraph have transformed all human relationships. What we do not know we have no right to introduce into our calculation;
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but even if we have the best of luck we still cannot foresee that it \viii be soon that men will feel the need for common sense.
The development of the brain needs and takes its time. There is no haste in nature: she could lie for thousands and thousands of years in a trance of stone, and for other thousands could twitter with the birds, scour the forests with the beasts or swim in the sea as a fish. The delirium of history will last her for a long time, and it will prolong magnificently the plasticity of nature, which in other spheres is exhausted.
People who have realised that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary satisfactions.
Take at haphazard, without making a choice, any newspaper: cast your eye upon any family. 'What Robert Owen could help there? For absurdities people suffer with self-abnegation; for absurdities they go to their death; for absurdities they kill other men. Everlasting care and trouble, want, alarms, the sweat of his brow, toil without rest or end-man does not even enjoy them. If he has any leisure from his work he hastens to twist together the net of a family, he twines it quite casually, finds himself caught in it, pulls others in and, if he is not to escape from death by starvation by the never-ending toil of a galley slave, he starts upon a violent persecution of his wife, his children, his relations, or himself is pe1·st>cuted by them. So people oppress each other in the name of family love, in the name of jealousy, in the name of marriage, and make hateful the most holy ties. When will man come to his senses? 'Will it be on the other side of the family, beyond its grave, when a man has lost everything--energy, freshness of intellect-and seeks only tranquillity?
Look at the troubles and cares of a whole ant-hill, or of a single ant: enter into its quests and purposes, its joys and sorrows, its conception of good and evil, of honour and disgrace, into everything that it does in the course of its whole life, from morning to night; see to what it devotes its last days and to what it sacrifices the best moments of its life-you will find yourself in a nursery, with its little horses on wheels, with gold foil and spangles, with dolls stood in one corner and the birch stood in another. In a baby's prattle a flash of sense can from time to time be perceived, but it is lost in childish distraction. You cannot stop and consider-you will confuse matters, fall behind, get stuck; everything has been too much compromised, and things move too quickly for it to be possible to stop, especially before a
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handful of people with no cannons, money or power, protesting in the name of reason, and not even warranting with miracles the truth of what they say.
A Rothschild or a Montefiore must be in his office in the morning, to begin the capitalisation of his hundredth million ; in Brazil there is plague, and war in Italy, America is falling to pieces-everything is going splendidly: and, if someone talks to him then of man's exemption from responsibility and of a different distribution of wealth, of course he does not listen. Mac
Mahon spent days and nights considering how most surely, i n the shortest time, t o get the greatest number o f people dressed in white uniforms destroyed by people in red trousers;31 he destroyed more of them than he had thought he would; everyone congratulated him, even the Irish who, as papists, had been beaten by him-and then he is told that war is not only a repulsive absurdity but a crime too. Of course, instead of listening he sets himself to admiring the sword presented to him by Ireland.