Whats Wrong With The World | Page 7

But both are efficient when they have been
effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who thinks
much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must
be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always come
late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but idealism.
This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man
demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man
really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he
forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a
pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely
prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical
compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points
if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between
two litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much
prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it were
for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer
should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most
of us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse
unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor
for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us have
known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such
admirable women, our practical politicians keep things in the same
confusion through the same doubt about their real demands. There is

nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small
surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in
favor of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who
desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who
regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want
peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this
dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.
If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If
we ask for something in the abstract we might get something in the
concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it
is impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out
plainly like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in
the old bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word
"compromise" contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word
"promise." Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The
middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.
If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as
a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable
distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I
differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the
plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the
pirate's common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as
hard as any geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.
* * *
III
THE NEW HYPOCRITE
But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old
English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an
improvement merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and
revolutionary that anyone should really have his own way, or anything
be really done, and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a
loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems
to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.
As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our
everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new
kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man
whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that

they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really
religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. The
Rev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares
nothing for creeds, but only for education; meanwhile, in truth, the
wildest Wesleyanism