THE SALT OF THE EARTH
(1918)
IT is a curious commentary upon the confusion of tongues which has descended upon us in our efforts to build towers reaching to Heaven, that you would have been misled had I given this address its true title. Had I called it "the Value of Purity" most of you would have imagined that I was going to speak of what is usually called—with such strange one-sidedness—the "social evil"; just as we call the liquor traffic "the Trade." You would have thought, probably, that I was going to speak about Regulation 40 D, or some other aspect of the sex problem with which the word "purity" has become conventionally allied. It would, indeed, be one-sided in the other direction, to exclude such considerations from the scope of so embracing a theme; but my intention is rather to disencumber the word "purity" from the narrow and puritanical meaning to which it has become limited; and the "Salt of the Earth" does bring us nearer by its salutary implication to what purity should really mean.
For if purity is not a good sanitary principle of fundamental application to all ethical problems alike, it is merely a pious fad which may easily become a pious fraud—a religious tenet pigeon-holed by crabbed age for the affliction of youth. To departmentalise it in a particular direction leads to impurity of thought; for we destroy the balance of life and degrade its standards if we do not use our moral weights and measures consistently in all relations alike. And if you allow a particular implication of purity to impose its claim in a society whose impurity in other directions makes it entirely impracticable, then you are reducing your social ethics to mere pretence and mockery; and honest youth will find you out, and will turn away from your religions and your ethical codes with the contempt which they deserve.
Is not that what is actually happening—more apparently to-day, perhaps, than ever before? Has not that departmental code to which I refer broken down and become foolish in the eyes of honest men and women, largely because purity is nowhere established in the surrounding conditions of our social life?
What is the true aim of social life and social organisation in regard to the individual? What claim has it upon his allegiance if it does not offer the means of self-realisation and self-fulfilment equally to all? And suppose, instead of doing this in a large majority of cases, it does the reverse: starves his imagination, reduces his initiative, cripples his development, makes practically impossible (at the time when desire awakes and becomes strong) the fulfilment of his nature instinct for mating; how does the claim stand then? If you can only offer him marriage conditions which are themselves impure, unequal laws which are themselves a temptation, houses incompatible with health or decency, wages insufficient for the healthy support of home, and wife, and children; if that, broadly speaking, has been the marriage condition which society offers to wage-earning youth, what right has it to babble about "purity" in that narrower and more individual relation, while careless to provide it in its own larger domain?
If you have employments—such as that of bank-clerk or shop-assistant—which demand of those engaged a certain gentility of dress and appearance, but offer only a wage upon which (till a man is over thirty) domestic establishment at the required standard of respectability is quite impossible—if that is the social condition imposed in a great branch of middle-class industry—if you tolerate that condition and draw bigger profits from your business, and bigger dividends from your investments upon the strength of it—what right have you to demand of your victims an abstinence which is in itself unnatural and penurious, and therefore impure?
Yet what proportion of sermons, think you, have been preached during the last hundred years in churches and chapels against that great social impurity of underpaid labour, and underfed life which have between them done so far more to create prostitution than any indwelling depravity in the heart of youth? Thwarted life, and sweated labour, those have been the makings of the "social evil," so called; and they lie at the door of an impure system which has made its money savings at the cost of a great waste of life.
That particular instance, which I refer to merely in passing, has to do with our ordinary application of the word purity. But I want to show how all social purity really hangs together, and how, unless you have a great fundamental social principle pure throughout, corruption will carry infection from one department to the other, making useless or impracticable any ideal of purity which you try to set up in one particular direction. If you do—to put it plainly and colloquially—the doctrine won't wash; honest minds will find out that the part is inconsistent with the whole.
What, then, is the whole social ideal which lies at the root of the modern State? Is it pure, or is it impure? Is it the true "Salt of the Earth" which, if equally applied, will benefit all nations and all peoples alike: those to whom, in President Wilson's phrase, we wish to be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just? Does any modern State really present within its own borders, and in its treatment of all classes and interests, an example which, if extended, would make the world safe for Internationalism—an end which I am inclined to think is more important than making it safe for Democracy?
The phrase "Salt of the Earth," which I have taken to illustrate the meaning and value of social purity, has come to us from that wonderful compendium of ethical teaching known to Christians as the "Sermon on the Mount"; that body of coherent, consistent, and constructive doctrine from which Christianity—so soon as it had allied itself with Cæsar and the things of Cæsar—made such haste to depart. And the whole process of that departure was (from the pure ethical standard of the Sermon on the Mount) a process of adulteration—of impurity—an adaptation of a spiritual ideal to a secular practice of mixed motives. But the process really began earlier. It began in the attempt to identify the God of the Sermon on the Mount with Jahveh, the tribal God of Hebrew history. And in that attempted identification (incompatible ethics having to be reconciled) ethics became confounded.
The Rabbinical training of St. Paul, the Hebraistic tendencies of the early Christian Church (whose first device was to prosyletize the Jews on the old nationalistic assumption that they were the Chosen People), all combined to give an impure vision of God to the followers of the new faith. The nationalism of Judaism corrupted the internationalism of the Day of Pentecost; and the primitive Mosaic code uttered from Sinai, and adapted to the mission of racial conquest there enjoined, stultified the teaching of Calvary.
The two were incompatible; yet, somehow or another, the Christian Church had to evolve an ethic which embraced both. And it did so through allegiance to the State, and the setting-up of a compromise between things secular and things spiritual which has existed ever since.
You can see for yourselves which of the two is to-day the more recognised and observed among nations which call themselves Christian. The old tenets of Judaism—based on the Mosaic law and summed up in the saying, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth"—can be observed by any one to-day in practical entirety with the full approval of the State. A strict observance of the Sermon on the Mount, and a practical belief in the teaching of Calvary land a man in prison or may even render him liable to be shot.
Rightly or wrongly he is regarded as a danger or a weakness to the modern State. Personally, I think that he is rightly regarded so; for I do not see how the modern State could exist if everyone were a sincere believer in that great peace-offensive, the Sermon on the Mount, and in its great practical exposition, the Death on Calvary. The only thing I am in doubt about is whether the modern State is the better alternative.
Christianity, sincerely and whole-heartedly practised, might have strange social results; it might, on the other hand, be unexpectedly pleasant and workable. But of one thing I feel quite sure; it would not—as humanity is at present constituted—be practised by any but a very small minority; and it would have to work entirely without State aid. But that minority would fulfil, for the purposes of demonstration, the condition which, I think, is necessary for all great ethical adventures: it would be pure and unadulterated. It would succeed or it would fail standing upon its own feet and not upon Cæsar's, not relying on mixed motives or compromise, but on a single principle—the principle of loving your neighbour as yourself, and converting him from evil ways by a process of peaceful penetration. And being—and remaining, a decisive minority in the world's affairs, its part therein would resemble the part played by salt in the chemical sanitation of the soil out of which grow the clean or the unclean things of earth which feed or which poison us.
And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human race of minorities holding extremist opinions—so extreme that they do not seem at the present day to be practical politics—and yet having a chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities.
For the Salt of the Earth is only one single constituent, which enables a better standard of life to become established where the virtue of its presence is felt. Salt is not, and cannot be, the general constituent of life; its essence always remains a minor quantity, and yet quite definitely it affects the generality of things around it. But in itself it is an extreme, an uncompromising element; its most striking characteristic is its saltness.
It would be foolish, therefore, to blame it for not being sweet, or for not being acid, or for not being capable of taking the place of beef or mutton in the dietary of the human race, or for not making the whole human race in its own image. (The only person I ever heard of who was turned into an image of salt was Lot's wife; and as a human being it made her entirely useless). And yet, as, quite literally, the substance salt has helped the earth to become habitable, and the human race to become human, so has that symbolic salt of the earth, helped the human race to become humane, and to envisage (though not to obey) a new ethic of conduct based upon an ideal conception of the brotherhood of man.
It was the extreme expression of a new and higher moral plane to which evolution is only gradually bringing us. Had it started upon compromise it would have been useless. Its special value was, and still is, in its uncompromising enunciation of a principle which we still regard as impracticable.
But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of practicability—it appealed to men's minds; and it has gone on appealing to them ever since.
Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy with which man—the crude struggling biped—stood up against the larger and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance toward civilisation—just as previously, the salting of the earth (the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle.
And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means of establishing God's elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us in our churches—for our approving acceptance—a proposition made by the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation, has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the earth.
It is not without significance that the Christian Church all down the ages has allowed that sort of teaching to enter the minds of the common people. It is not without significance that the common people five years ago rose superior to their Bible-teaching, and regarded its reproduction in the world of to-day as a moral outrage.
And yet if the world's affairs, and its racial problems are to be solved by physical force, it was a perfectly consistent thing to do; and the inconsistency lies in our moral revolt against it.
The truth is, of course, that we are in a period of transition. We are indignant with people who regard successful force as a justification for wrong; but we are almost equally indignant with those who will not regard it as a remedy for wrong. And we are slow to see that while the school of justification by force remains rampant in the world, there may be some chemic value for the spiritual development of the human race in the school which denies the efficacy of remedy by force. Yet is it not possible that as the past belongs to the one, so the future may belong to the other?
When we started upon this war we declared that it was a war to end war; and it was quite a popular thing to say that if it did not result in the ending of war, then the cause of the Allies would stand defeated. But that was only another way of saying that we should suffer defeat if in the near future the whole world were not converted to the point of view of the conscientious objector. But that would have been a very unpopular way of putting it, so it was not said.
Surely this sort of contradiction in which war lands us is only another proof that we are in an age of transition. Transition makes consistency difficult.
But the inconsistency, which conditions of war bring into prominent reality, lies embedded in our social system (which is itself a compromise between two incompatible principles)—the Will to Love and the Will to Power; and there will always be that inconsistency till the world has definitely decided whether Love or Power is to form the basis of our moral order. It has not decided it yet. In our own country (leaving out all question of foreign relations) we have not decided it yet.
It is the condition of impurity resulting from that indecision—and permeating more or less the whole of our social organisation—which I ask you now to consider.
How it came about is really not difficult to explain. When primitive man began to develop the rudiments of society (the group, or the herd) he did so mainly for self-preservation. In the struggle for existence coordinated numbers gave him a better chance; and giving him a better chance of life, they gave him also a better chance of self-development and self enjoyment. But into that early society man brought not only his social instincts but his predatory instincts as well. And while the group helped him to prey more effectively on those left outside, it did not prevent him from preying in a certain measure on those within. The exceptionally strong man had an exceptional value in his own tribe; and he exacted an exceptional price for it—in wives, or in slaves captured in war, or in the division of the spoil. It was the same, as society developed, with the exceptionally resourceful leader; brain began to count above muscle; and the men of exceptional ability acquired the wealth. And you know perfectly well, without my going further into detail, that out of the price exacted within the community (whose broad interests were in common) separate and conflicting interests arose; the interest which secured political control exacted from all the dependent interests an unfair price for its services; and wherever slavery was an established part of social development, man did not love his neighbour as himself, he only loved him as his chattel.
You may take a big jump through history, from primitive to feudal, from feudal to modern times; and you will still find the same interests strong in every state, using their inherited control of wealth, of organisation, and of law, to extract advantage to themselves from the weaker, and the less educated members of the community; and always doing it in the name of the commonwealth—the strength and stability of the State. Only the other day (in a State as advanced as any in its democratic faith and its doctrine of equality for all—the United States of America) the moment there was a temporary breakdown in the legal safeguards against child-labour—there was a great organised rush in certain States of conscripted child-labour into industry—conscripted not by the State but by capital, exploiting the increased need of the wage-earning classes brought about by the raised prices of war.
The men who do that kind of thing (and they are men of great power and influence in the State) still only love their neighbours as their chattels, and still take advantage of all forms of law, or absence of law, to keep established as far as they can the conditions of social slavery. You may say that a thing like that lies outside the law, or that it is an abuse which legislation has not yet overtaken and put an end to; but what is more important and more significant is that it is an abuse which public opinion in those States where it was done had not overtaken and put an end to, or not merely put an end to, but made impossible. It makes it impossible for a black man over there to marry a white woman; and if it can do the one it can do the other.
But what are those people doing? They are merely reflecting in their own personal affairs an ideal which lies engrained in every State which puts self-interest above the interest of the whole human race. And that, in our present transitional stage, is the standpoint of every country to-day. In our heart of hearts we still hold Nationalism more important than Internationalism. And "my country right or wrong" is still for some people the last word in morality; rather than admit their country to be in the wrong they will let morality go.
In that matter, indeed, the world to-day seems to be divided into two schools. There is one school which so exalts the idea of the State as to say that the State can do no wrong: that if morality and State-interest conflict morality must go under, or rather that morals only exist to subserve State-interests,—and being a State-product, the State has the right to limit their application. We are fighting to-day against a race which is charged with having taken up that attitude; and the pronouncements of some of its most distinguished writers, as well as certain methods which it has employed in war, seem to bear out the charge. But when it comes to war, that particular school of State-ethics gives itself away by protesting that the other States which are in hostile alliance against it are behaving very wrongly indeed—though by its own doctrine (States being above morals) they are incapable of wrong. It cannot stick to its own thesis.
But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States, when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad, and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say—looking back in history—that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.
Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during the American War of Independence—very loud that we were in the wrong; but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that, in the long run (not immediately—not perhaps for a generation or two) the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day—not yet, for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any white race you can name—but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see, incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet—permitting, namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came, however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its medical needs for 140 years!)
Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies—reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst—the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home. It was because we wanted—or because our ruling classes wanted—to give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy, you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions, and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.
Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging example to others.
Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem; and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish to see applied in like case to those of our own family.
Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved; because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually—only very gradually—getting the better of it.
It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely based on dominance and power—the power of the teacher to punish. The new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest, and upon trust in youth's natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology, and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole profession is really—to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill—a lack of mutual confidence.
In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by competition—manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the other's detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient as a nation.
But in a family you don't need competition; where there is goodwill, co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock are enough.
To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.
And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our politics are pure; or that the system on which we run them is anything but a vast system of adulteration?—which may perhaps be thus expressed:—Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand each other and trying to make the general public share in their misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.
When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding—mental co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries and run a general election?
We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the words and thoughts and motives of their opponents—and very often men will be misrepresenting their own motives—because their end is really power—power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!
That process—which we see quite well is an impure process—is forced upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a matter of practical politics to suggest a better.
But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our present stage of political development—and humble in general about the position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?
Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed—you find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood—and that harm to one member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of Nations of like mind extending over all the world.
I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that statement has about it this merit of commonsense—it is pure, it is consistent—it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury—a trust in human nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to others—to do good even to your enemies—human nature will respond.
We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself—that individual emotion is beyond us. But if we can love our country enough to die for it, we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of man.