call them conventions, the Ten Commandments, social inhibitions, or positive law: they are in effect rules of necessity. And although an unregenerate "A" may very much desire to kill "B," to steal his possessions or to take away his wife, he does in practice exercise control over his unregenerate instincts and not do these things, first because he does not desire to have them done to himself and secondly because he knows that if he does do them the outraged social sense of the community will punish him for their own protection. It is in the attempt to give a higher sanction than mere social convenience to these rules that men have devised a God to whom such actions are displeasing and a breach of the Divine Law.

It seems to me that some extension and sublimation of these primitive considerations will suffice to cover the whole field of ethics. If it is not to the public benefit that one man should be allowed to kill or wound another or to rob him with violence, neither is it to the public benefit that he should be allowed to kill him by letting typhoid emanations from his drain emerge into his neighbour's house, or rob him by a fraudulent company prospectus, even without violence. Here we get a foundation for all sanitation and laws against fraud. If“A” has entrusted property to "B," it is desirable that he should be able to get it back without having to fight "B" for it, and hence we get the obligation of trustees even to women and children who would not be strong enough to fight for their own. If a policeman arrests a pickpocket in the Strand, he is in a position to march him to the police station and prefer a charge against him without any public disturbance, not only because he is supported by the rest of the police force and by every rifle and bayonet at the Government's disposal, but also because he is for the moment the embodiment of the moral sense of the community. And experience has led the community to prefer that the question of whether the policeman is right or wrong should be settled in an orderly manner by a properly constituted tribunal rather than by a series of scuffles in the street at each arrest. Where this moral support is absent bayonets and rifles alone will not suffice to prevent such anarchy as we have seen in Ireland.

So far I have dealt only with what one might call positive law and obvious crime, but it is clear that the same principle may be extended to far more refined considerations. Why does the community impose upon the parent an obligation to educate his child? Clearly because it is considered that it is an advantage to the community that its citizens should be educated. What is the foundation of the laws against child labour, long hours for expectant mothers, and un

healthy workshop conditions? Clearly that the community considers that it is not to its advantage to have its future citizens stunted or diseased. These lesser matters as well as the grosser crimes I dealt with before are all manifestations of the social conscience, but I think it will be found that the same or similar rules apply to the individual conscience. It is not right for a child to lie to its parents (or for that matter for parents to lie to their children) or for a husband and wife to deceive each other, because lying impairs and renders precarious the social relation and leads to a state of uncertainty and suspicion which it is the object of civilization to remove. Precisely similar reasons make it wrong to lie to other people in less intimate relations, or even for nations to lie to each other. It may be said that such considerations as those I have tried to indicate have not the certainty and definition of the Ten Commandments, and that is very true, but it is possible for a man to go through life without breaking any of the Ten Commandments, and yet to be a bad man and anti-social. Christ himself did not find the Commandments sufficient and substituted for them a new one, "Love one another." This is really a poetic and emotional way of stating the considerations which I have already advanced as they appeal to nobler minds.

A man who practises these ethical principles will discover that they are sound from the happiness he gives both to himself and to others, and will have no more desire to run counter to them than a child who has once experienced its effects has to touch a red hot poker. Any system of ethic which is founded on an emotional certainty less definite than this cannot be relied on under stress. The definiteness of this emotional certainty in an individual case and a particular action, must not be mistaken for a rigid classification of actions into right and wrong. There is scarcely any imaginable action from killing a man to pulling an alarm signal in a train which may not be right at one time and wrong at another.

Moreover, though it may not be possible to discern any ultimate purpose in the world there is not much doubt about its immediate purpose and about what tends to make the world a happier and safer and more pleasant place for human beings than there is about the duty of an individual ant to the community of the ant-heap. The doubt of any complete and perfect scheme of eschatology involves no denial of evolution or of progress. In many ways we have made advances even upon the great civilizations of Egypt and Athens, although the recent war has rather let loose the barbaric mind.

To believe that individually we have but one life to live, and that life here and now, should not lead us to be more careless of it but more careful, that in all ways it may have fulfilment during this brief span. I see no reason why a passion for useful service and an emotion for humanity should not prove as potent and active a force for good as an attitude which regards this earth as a sinful and pitiable affair and a mere preparation for some other life hereafter. People will often differ and people will often be wrong as to what is for the good of the community, but if they are all animated by that as their chief desire they will at any rate improve the world as we know it and the Brotherhood of Man may achieve that reality which the Christian religion tried to give it by representing all men as sons of one Father.

One final quotation :—

"The world has need of a philosophy or a religion which will promote life. But in order to promote life it is necessary to value something other than mere life. Life devoted only to life is animal, without any real human value, incapable of preserving men permanently from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time. Contact with this eternal world-even if it be only a world of our imagining-brings a strength and a fundamental peace which cannot be wholly destroyed by the struggles and apparent failures of our temporal life. It is this happy contemplation of what is eternal that Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. To those who have once known it, it is the key of wisdom."*

* "Principles of Social Reconstruction," by Bertrand Russell.

O

CHAPTER XXXVI

AU REVOIR

F course, I have not told the truth in this biography. Equally of course I do not mean by that statement that all the facts are not correct, and, indeed, more than correct-scrupulously correct. But what after all are the facts of life? The births, deaths, marriages, friendships and separations, travels? They are but the flotsam on the surface of the stream, they are but the quiet bays and creeks or the jutting rocks that impede its flow, or the plunge where it cascades: they tell nothing of its purpose or its meaning, its origin or its end. The facts of life are discontinuous and isolated, but the true life is a continuous whole. So far as emotions, hopes and fears, or reactions with other lives are concerned, one clearly cannot tell the whole truth about these while those still live who might be embarrassed or wounded by such frankness. While about one's self it is still more impossible to tell the truth for the simplest of all reasons, that one does not know it. "Know thyself," says the old Greek philosopher, and an excellent precept it is. But even if one tries to put away that selfdeception to which we are all prone and to stand dispassionately with a cool and critical eye outside one's self, how impossible that knowledge is to attain. If then we know so little of our own selves and our own motives, how much less can we truly know of the inner life of others and the mixed motives by which they are swayed. Only Omniscience could have such knowledge, and all that we can do is to avoid the crude, harsh and stupid judgments pronounced by those who think the Universe can be weighed in their shallow brainpans. Indeed, it is arguable to what extent we have free will at all, and how far our actions are conditioned by ancestral memories which we have inherited without any volition on our part.

None the less, old age free from the trammels of passion, from the urgent desire to live and to experience, can exercise some measure of critical contemplation of the acts and motives of its youth. I could tell of eager passions to serve and help humanity, of pathetic belief that

much might be done, and of those people who helped or hindered, and how the nature of the service depended sometimes on the smallest trifles or accidents. The time is not yet, if, indeed, such time should ever be, for I have not the quality of some moderns, be it shamelessness or be it conceit, which makes them feel no embarrassment in stripping in public. What did Browning say?

"With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart," once more!

Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

I have always been a fighter from the time when I fought first my Uncle Rollo, then Benjamin Jowett, and then for six awful years Mabel Edith. It is my misfortune and not my fault that practically the whole of my life has been chronicled in detail in the daily Press. Few people can abhor and resent publicity in what has to do with the private life more than I do, and the result, of course, is to give the public a curiously distorted view of one's character and tastes. As the world or Jowett would judge success I have been unsuccessful in politics, in finance and in matrimony. I, however, look on the world with the eyes rather of Cyrano than of Jowett, and I have always tossed my head with impatience like his at the mere suggestion of any yoke upon my neck or check upon my freedom. So I have remained free with him to" rêver, chanter, pleurer"; and at peace with myself if not with the world.

I suspect the satisfied, I distrust the majority, I have little patience with acquiescences. For these reasons I have always been ready to support lost causes, to back the under dog, and to challenge the established order. It may seem inconsistent that in my personal habits I am as conservative as any fellow Wykehamist could be, and that I detest change in my habits or surroundings. I once went so far as to tell the House of Lords that I believed I was the only real Tory in it. That, however, is one of the external things which are of no importance in spirit I am always a rebel.

I might, of course, say with Calverley :

Never, although three times married

Have I cared for aught but her.

but if I did, the "her" would be science, but it wouldn't be true any way, for I have cared a great deal. And yet though I have been married often—too often, Lord Halsbury thought—I have really only had one wife. Earlier in this book I have quoted a wish of my