Part 44 (1/2)

General Booth-Tucker's factory to-day in the south of France is very busy making money for the Salvation Army, turning out Christian gloves for the West and turning out Christians or the beginnings of Christians for the East, and the ancient, obstinate theological idea of the holiness of the rats which the Hindoos have had is being ceaselessly, happily, and stupendously, all day and all night, disproved.

Incidentally the little religious glove factory of General Booth-Tucker's in the south of France is giving India the first serious and fair chance it has ever had to stop being a pest house on the world, and to bring the bubonic plague with its threat at a planet to an end.

General Booth-Tucker's Bible was just like anybody else's Bible. But there must have been something about the way he read his Bible that made him think of things. And there must have been something about his kind look. He looked kindly at something in particular, and he was determined to make that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had the gloves, and he had the Hindoo's--and he made them do, and before he knew it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became a saviour or inventor.

In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had wedged in a G.o.d.

I wonder if General Booth-Tucker--that is, the original, very small edition of General Booth-Tucker--had been in that memorable crowd, that memorable day in the Strand when n.o.body (with a report that was heard around the world) stole a penny--I wonder if General Booth-Tucker would have been A Very Good Little Boy.

One of the pennies might have been missing.

I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics, its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering, is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug, proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never running a risk, his moral anaemia, he blocks all progress in churches, in legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the moment they are grown up.

They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of Never Making a Mistake.

If I had been given the appointment and were about to set to work to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would begin by getting together all the people in this one that I knew, or had noticed anywhere, who seemed to have in them the spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man or woman that I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds and different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that they really knew about them for themselves--would be let in. I would put these people for a time in a place by themselves where the people who want to keep them from trying or learning, could not get at them.

Then I would let them try.

I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them respectabilize.

Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in--to do what they were told.

Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy.

Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But what is the matter with them would be useful.

And everybody would be happy.

When the t.i.tanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting out the people who should die from the people who should live--if one was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die.

No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable one that could have been made.

But if G.o.d himself could have made the division or some super-man s.h.i.+p's officer who could have represented G.o.d, could have made it, it is not hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die than a difference in organs of reproduction.

The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was the way the men felt. It expressed the men who were on the deck that night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it.

But if G.o.d himself could have made the division with the immediate and conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's children would do for the world if they lived no one would have quarrelled with G.o.d for making what would have seemed at the moment, no doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the people who should die.

Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making a kind of world where _t.i.tanic_ disasters could not happen, would have chosen on the deck of the _t.i.tanic_ that night, very much the way G.o.d would.

From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a woman.

The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man who had invented a s.h.i.+p that could not sink.

There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.

If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?