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them than dominate and
exploit them. Government and exploitation become synonymous under
such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the
brigands, and the blackguards. Those who refuse to stand in with them
are persecuted and occasionally executed when they give any trouble to
the exploiters. They fall into poverty when they lack lucrative specific
talents. At the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the
other half down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed: a
procedure which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism. And the
goodnatured majority are looking on in helpless horror, or allowing
themselves to be persuaded by the newspapers of their exploiters that
the kicking is not only a sound commercial investment, but an act of
divine justice of which they are the ardent instruments.
But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and
cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use of
giving him a religion? A religion may make him hunger and thirst for
righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to
satisfy that appetite? Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of
political science, which is a very complicated one. The most devoted

and indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this
science in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and
Beatrice Webb. It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in
the course of which they have published several treatises comparable to
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution
adequate to existing needs. If this is the measure of what can be done in
a lifetime by extraordinary ability, keen natural aptitude, exceptional
opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning,
what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political
science is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to
whom such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is
a pons asinorum never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from
the common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a
living that he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?
IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?
The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is, ourselves.
We must teach citizenship and political science at school. But must we?
There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must not teach
political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who
attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without
pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment
for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of
feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military
conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the
illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see through
this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals whom
they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new
generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the
fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are
defending the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are
opposing to them the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a
greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency
and sham of the educational side of our schools (to which, except under
compulsion, children would not be sent by their parents at all if they
did not act as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the

mature) that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine
instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no
way out through the schoolmaster.
HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION
In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or
any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It
is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or
may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he
will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to
cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want to see
a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, when it will
immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be
cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up-to-date
(BURGE-LUBIN per cent of all the registered practitioners, and 20 per
cent of the unregistered ones), when they want to rid you of