As We Are and As We May Be

In the history of every measure designed for the amelioration of the people there may be observed four distinct and clearly marked stages. First, there is the original project, fresh from the brain of the dreamer, glowing with the colours of his imagination, a figure fair and strong as the newly born Athênê. By its single-handed power mankind are to be regenerated, and the millennium is to be at once taken in hand. There are no difficulties which it will not at once clear away; there are no obstacles which will not vanish at its approach as the morning mist is burned up by the newly risen sun. The dreamer creates a school, and presently among his disciples there arises one who is practical enough to reduce the dream to a possible and working scheme. The advocates of the Cause are still, however, a good way from getting the scheme established. The battle with the opposition follows, in which one has to contend—first with those who cannot be touched by any generous aims, always a pretty large body; next with those who are afraid of the people; and lastly with those who have private interests of their own to defend. The triumph which presently arrives by no means concludes the history of the agitation, because there is certain to follow at no distant day the discovery that the measure has somehow failed to achieve those glorious results which were so freely promised. It has, in fact, gone to swell the pages of that chronicle, not yet written, which may be called the 'History of the Well-intentioned.'

The emancipation of the West Indian slaves, for instance, has not been accompanied by the burning desire for progress—industrial, artistic, or educational—which was confidently anticipated. Quite the contrary. Yet—which is a point which continually recurs in the History of the Well-intentioned—one would not, if it were possible, go back to the former conditions. It is better that the negro should lie idle, and sleep in the sun all his days, than that he should work under the overseer's lash. For the free man there is always hope; for the slave there is none. Again, the first apostles of Co-operation expected nothing less than that their ideas would be universally, immediately, and ardently adopted. That was a good many years ago. The method of Co-operation still offers the most wonderful vision of universal welfare, easily attainable on the simple condition of honesty, ever put before humanity; yet we see how little has been achieved and how numerous have been the failures. Again, though the advantages of temperance are continually preached to working men, beer remains the national beverage; yet even those of us who would rather see the working classes sober and self-restrained than water-drinkers by Act of Parliament or solemn pledge, acknowledge how good it is that the preaching of temperance was begun. Again, we have got most of those Points for which the Chartists once so passionately struggled. As for those we have not got, there is no longer much enthusiasm left for them. The world does not seem so far very substantially advanced by the concession of the Points; yet we would not willingly give them back and return to the old order. Again, we have opened free museums, containing all kinds of beautiful things: the people visit them in thousands; yet they remain ignorant of Art, and have no yearning discoverable for Art. In spite of this, we would not willingly close the museums.

The dreamer, in fact, leaves altogether out of his reckoning certain factors of humanity which his first practical advocate only partially takes into account. These are stupidity, apathy, ignorance, greed, indolence, and the Easy Way. There are doubtless others, because in humanity as in physics no one can estimate all the forces, but these are the most readily recognised; and the last two perhaps are the most important, because the great mass of mankind are certainly born with an incurable indolence of mind or body, which keeps them rooted in the old grooves and destroys every germ of ambition at its first appearance.