§ 37

We have seen that the Fine Arts are not commercial incidents in the life here, they are part of the scheme of it. The Drama is also not only a source of pleasure or, of momentary emotion. It is held to be a prominent factor in education, whose mission it is to elevate intelligence, encourage noble ardour, stimulate heroism and provide beauty. Under the old system the Drama was too often used ill. The play played down to the people, often exciting the lower passions. To be made familiar with vice is, in a measure, to take part in it. To sow vice on the boards of the stage is to make it popular. The idea that vice is romantic is combated now. Vice is ugly, as virtue is lovely. Art has no business with ugliness except it be used as a contrast to beauty. To perpetuate ugliness by Art is like encouraging the durance of the plague. Higher intelligence verified by education should be employed to uplift, not depress, choice. Lower intelligence must be guided by the higher!

What is being done by Art in the churches, in public buildings, gives evidence that the people are regarding it as essential, not as a thing to be played with. Our city, not being large, is manageable. Being near the country, every citizen is in touch with country life. Indeed, there are few who do not labour on their own bit of garden in however small a way. Country life is not foreign to the artizan or to the factory worker. Squalor, that curse of big cities, the result of ignorant and debased people herding together, is unknown here. Poverty there is, of course, that must be everywhere, but it need not be debasing. So much that was degrading has gone. Sloth is no more. What was useless is purged away, and what were positive scandals of misrule have been replaced by order, sobriety and uplifting. It is recognised that while a city must be a centre of commerce it need not be that of greed, and need not be divorced from country life. Hence the gardens provide for the people adequate means of employment in such matters; so that while the city is commercial, it is not out of touch with many forms of agriculture; and the blanched, hopeless faces in the past too prevalent, are replaced by bronzed faces and the open happy countenances of a contented industrious people.

What has been gained? Fraternity. A clean atmosphere and more sun, more leisure and more work, a broader outlook on the life of a city, expanded agriculture and education, greater variety of pleasures, a more human as well as humane ideal, and an equable government covering a great variety of interests, with absence of class legislation, death to profiteering, and education in honesty for tradesmen. What has been lost? Squalor, trade tyranny, jobbery, pollution of rivers, smoke, drunkenness, bloodless bodies and ill-nourished souls, and, above all, selfish class egoism. Government is carried on with less talk and more action. There is not less but more money in the country, which is more distributed. Agriculture pays sufficiently. The middleman having found his match, tradesmen can no longer extort from workers prices they cannot afford to pay. Politicians have not the opportunity of getting the country into a muddle and then muddling their way out of it by false promises to whichever class is for the moment uppermost. The people, better educated, are not easily led by windbags. They see that the whole nation counts before the individual, that a nation which, for temporary wealth, neglects to till the land to (as far as possible) produce, but purchases from foreign countries its food, is neglecting the first duty to the community. It has come to them to know that the success of agriculture is the first necessity to be secured. The people are being taught that a country which in an emergency cannot feed itself off its own land may be at the mercy of its enemy at any moment. The great war taught them that the weakest spot was not to be found in difficulty to make guns and shells and even an army in a hurry, but in providing them and the people at home with food. Empty bellies are bad generals! And so the people have turned to, and resolve that their country shall never again be exposed to the risk of a great débâcle, which was nearer than politicians desire them to know. While our cities are better organised, more healthfully disposed, they are smaller in area; hence congestion which produces squalor, is no more. A large proportion of what were useless folk, undisciplined, and a drag upon the State, as well as a shame to it, are performing the first duty of man, the tillage, the care of, and the provisioning of the land in all matters connected with agriculture. Agriculture being first now, industrialism second, the cities are released from over-population, and the countryside is adequately populated. Owing to the growth of an agricultural population, more small towns and villages are growing up all over England. Much of what was not a relative but positive scandal is no more. There is plenty of work for everybody who chooses to find it and take it. It is considered unmanly to live on doles.

Cities are not less but more successful commercial centres. But the influx is native, not foreign. England supplies herself out of the exertions of her people, for she is no longer buying necessities from foreign markets, but from her own. The country is the source of the wealth of the towns. The great war taught that in the future England must be self-providing. She must grow her own timber, her own fruit and corn, provide her own meat and, as far as possible, in case of another naval war, provide her own fish from inland sources as well as from the sea. Her fine rivers, her lakes, her ponds must be kept stocked with fresh water fish. To do this, the pollution of all inland waters is absolutely, not relatively, forbidden, not forbidden by an Act of Parliament which is quite a negligible affair when made by lawyers who leave open a back door for the escape of a rich delinquent, who will pay a nominal fine over and over again if it suits his purpose to destroy valuable fish by the thousand. What does the payment of a nominal fine mean to a rich manufacturer? Nothing. The pollution of rivers as of the air has been stopped by the people, who very rightly say, “We will not be deprived of the food provided for us by our rivers, and we will not be deprived of a grain of corn unnourished by the sun, or a blade of grass for the cattle poisoned by deleterious acids from factories.” “We have a right,” they say, “to pure water, to pure air, and all the benefits from life-giving rays of the sun essential in a country placed as England is in the centre of the sea, where clouds must always hide a considerable portion of sunlight.” The people are learning from science that light is essential to life, that darkness is a symbol of death.