第98章 ASSISTANCE IN GENERAL.(11)

Broadly speaking,your experimental communities fail because your Utopias all start upon the system of equality and government by vote of the majority,and,as a necessary and unavoidable consequence,your Utopians get to loggerheads,and Utopia goes to smash,I shall avoid that rock.The Farm Colony,like all the other departments of the Scheme,will be governed,not on the principle of counting noses,but on the exactly opposite principle of admitting no noses into the concern that are not willing to be guided by the directing brain.

It will be managed on principles which assert that the fittest ought to rule,and it will provide for the fittest being selected,and having got them at the top,will insist on universal and unquestioning obedience from those at the bottom.If anyone does not like to work for his rations and submit to the orders of his superior Officers he can leave.There is no compulsion on him to stay.The world is wide,and outside the confines of our Colony and the operations of our Corps my authority does not extend.But judging from our brief experience it is not from revolt against authority that the Scheme is destined to fail.

There cannot be a greater mistake in this world than to imagine that men object to be governed.They like to be governed,provided that the governor has his "head screwed on right"and that he is prompt to hear and ready to see and recognise all that is vital to the interests of the commonwealth.So far from there being an innate objection on the part of mankind to being governed,the instinct to obey is so universal that even when governments have gone blind,and deaf,and paralytic,rotten with corruption,and hopelessly behind the times,they still contrive to live on.Against a capable Government no people ever rebel,only when stupidity and incapacity have taken possession of the seat of power do insurrections break out.

SECTION 7.--A MATRIMONIAL BUREAU.

There is another direction in which something ought to be done to restore the natural advantages enjoyed by every rural community which have been destroyed by the increasing tendency of mankind to come together in huge masses.I refer to that which is after all one of the most important elements in every human life,that of marrying and giving in marriage.In the natural life of a country village all the lads and lasses grow up together,they meet together in religious associations,in daily employments,and in their amusements on the village green.They have learned their A,B,C and pothooks together,and when the time comes for pairing off they have had excellent opportunities of knowing the qualities and the defects of those whom they select as their partners in life.Everything in such a community lends itself naturally to the indispensable preliminaries of love-making,and courtships,which,however much they may be laughed at,contribute more than most things to the happiness or life.But in a great city all this is destroyed.In London at the present moment how many hundreds,nay thousands,of young men and young women,who are living in lodgings,are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other,or of any one of the other sex!

The street is no doubt the city substitute for the village green,and what a substitute it is!

It has been bitterly said by one who knew well what he was talking about,"There are thousands of young men to-day who have no right to call any woman by her Christian name,except the girls they meet plying their dreadful trade in our public thoroughfares."As long as that is the case,vice has an enormous advantage over virtue;such an abnormal social arrangement interdicts morality and places a vast premium upon prostitution.We must get back to nature if we have to cope with this ghastly evil.There ought to be more opportunities afforded for healthy human intercourse between young men and young women,nor can Society rid itself of a great responsibility for all the wrecks of manhood and womanhood with which our streets are strewn,unless it does make some attempt to bridge this hideous chasm which yawns between the two halves of humanity.The older I grow the more absolutely am Iopposed to anything that violates the fundamental law of the family.

Humanity is composed of two sexes,and woe be to those who attempt to separate them into distinct bodies,making of each half one whole!

It has been tried in monasteries and convents with but poor success,yet what our fervent Protestants do not seem to see is that we are reconstructing a similar false system for our young people without the safeguards and the restraints of convent walls or the sanctifying influence of religious conviction.The conditions of City life,the absence of the enforced companionship of the village and small town,the difficulty of young people finding harmless opportunities of friendly intercourse,all tends to create classes of celibates who are not chaste,and whose irregular and lawless indulgence of a universal instinct is one of the most melancholy features of the present state of society.Nay,so generally is this recognised,that one of the terms by which one of the consequences of this unnatural state of things is popularly known is "the social evil,"as if all other social evils were comparatively unworthy of notice in comparison to this.