Delphi complete works of.., p.407
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 407
So over in England they’re saying that the thing to do with the city is to get it out of the city. They imagine a set of centres — semi-rural, semi-industrial, with workers’ homes that are little country houses — gardens, rockeries, rookeries — all those things. They even say that the workers who still have to stay in the city for their day’s work will prefer to live out in the semi-country anyway.
How like Utopia it sounds! — the city day’s work done — and away in a comfortable train — swift as wings, smooth as rubber — reading the afternoon paper on a wicker seat with lots of room — no standing up and all free, of course, for this is a semi-collectivist state and transport is thrown in, society emancipated from the bottom up.
How brief the trip. Practically not more in time than any ordinary city worker spends today between house and office. I understand that at present the average man puts in seventeen and a half minutes and covers a mile and a quarter. But I don’t hold much by that. The “average man” is a poor shrimp; statistics make too much of him. In reality, he has a chest measurement below 37 and never got as far as algebra in school. So we won’t reckon by him.
But, as I say, how wonderful this return home after work; the rush for the overalls, the spade, the trout rod, the golf clubs...
What the future could be, if we only had the stuff to make it! We certainly need bombing. Drop some more.
But now here is the strange contradiction. We have no sooner visualized these “garden homes for all” in the semi-country than we find that there are plenty of people who won’t want them. So it appears from the discussions going on in England — in the papers, I mean. I always take my discussions from England because over there they certainly do discuss things. Here we can’t. We’re so much alike that we can’t discuss. We can only fight. But over there they have different sorts of people who sign themselves “Old Fog” and “late Major, Rawalpindi Field Force, Third Base,” and “Working-man” — and so on. We don’t have those people here.
So when you ask them where they want to live, you find that there are ever so many who want to live in the city for the sake of the city, the bright lights, the noise, the moving scene about them — it’s like a club. So what they are saying over in England is that rebuilding the cities will involve a lot of inner-city housing for those who won’t go out. This, I think, is true; it’s like being Liberals and Conservatives; people are just that way and can’t help it. This question of inner-city versus outer will vary very much from city to city, especially according to climate. In Toronto, people will want to get out as far as they can; in Montreal, they will want to stick inside. They always have.
In my book on Montreal there is a passage which contrasts waiting for a suburban bus on a summer evening in California where young love stands under the magnolia trees hoping the bus will never come, as against waiting in the Montreal suburbs on a February night, thirty below, a blizzard blowing, wind dead astern, for a bus that doesn’t come because it’s snowed up in Cartierville.
So in such a city as Montreal you must rebuild housing inside the city. You must do it on a giant scale. You must begin by shovelling up flat a huge big area. Shovel the proprietors up with it and throw them into the St. Lawrence. It’s quicker than letting crooked proprietors bribe crooked aldermen to cheat the life out of the city by paying too much. I know that just now we have no crooked aldermen left in Montreal. We have councillors now, and they won’t even accept salaries. Some one left twenty-five cents on the board room table the other night and it was there in the morning — at least, fifteen cents. But crooked aldermen will come back. They always do, certain as spring.
So look what an appalling difficulty you must face when you begin to plan to rebuild a city; what an avalanche of illicit profits, of crooked bargains, what opportunities for legal theft! Do you know I believe honestly, and I mean it, that we can’t plan to rebuild our cities until we first rebuild ourselves. I don’t want to talk religion because that’s terribly bad taste and very offensive, but somebody has spoken somewhere about renewing a right spirit within us. Till we get it we’d better let the cities alone.
But suppose we get it — or enough of it to make a start. Again we should find a lot of technical difficulties as to what and how to build, and if we rebuild the city wrong again we’ve wasted another generation. For instance, it is my opinion that the houses of the city of the future will involve certain general principles utterly unknown now. We always think of houses as facing the street. That was nice in the old days. Peter Kalm tells us of how in the old French Montreal of 1749 all the people sat in the evening on their house-steps along St. Paul and Notre Dame Streets, talking and sewing and watching the world go by. But now the world goes by in a cloud of gasoline and a roar of brakes — noise, noise, that never ends. The houses of the coming city will turn their backs on the street — blind walls with doors for garages — and turn their faces inward, locking shoulders around a great inner courtyard, all trees and lawn and flowers. There it is that children will play, young love saunter, and old age doze in the sun.
Community life? — not exactly. Still every man his own, but such a lot for all.... We can’t tell yet how far life in common will go. Will the people — not that damn average man — I mean ordinary people, want to have community meals in dining halls built into the houses, or will they be like me and want to eat alone, rather cook an egg for myself than share an omelette with a prince — especially with some princes I’ve seen pictures of...?
No, no — I begin to think that we’re not ready to build yet. We don’t know enough about it. We’ve got to think some more. You remember how Tennyson wrote in one of his poems, “Consider, William, take a month to think.” He had England down pat, didn’t he? Well, that’s us.
And, anyway, when you come to talk of the housing of the poor, perhaps there won’t be any poor! They may slip out on us. So we should perhaps begin by asking them, are they going to stay poor? Because if not, I for one won’t spend a lot of money on housing the rich.
Casting Out Animosity
JUST NOW WE are all filled with the idea of post-war reconstruction, rebuilding the railways, recharting the air, shovelling up the cities. I propose, my dear friend, that as a first need for a post-war world you reconstruct yourself a little; shovel up a lot of yourself and throw it away; knock yourself down and start over. And, in particular, cast away a whole lot of minor grievances and mimic animosities that the fierce light of war has brought down to their true pettiness.
The war has shown us what real suffering is, real sorrow, and has revealed the appalling extremity of barbaric cruelty to which human nature can be distorted.
Seen in this light, how petty are the things we used to fuss and quarrel about, how trivial the make-believe animosities that kept people enemies. I have known two professors of Greek who ceased speaking to one another because of divergent views on the pluperfect subjunctive. I’ve seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf, just because one could play better but the other counted better.
Above all, such animosities arose out of the make-believe of our politics.
I recall from years of long ago two old men whom I knew in the country, bitter partisan opponents. Old Archie hadn’t spoken to old Sidney for ten years: no, siree! Archie was a Grit and Sidney was a Tory. You don’t know what that means, but then, neither did they. Anyway it kept them apart. There they sat each morning in the “rotunda” of the country tavern (the space between the clerk’s desk and the barroom door), waiting for the morning papers from the city off the eleven o’clock train. Each got his paper and started a sideways campaign of sneers, addressed to the room but intended for the other, “I see where some darn fool of a Tory, etc.” So it went on for years. Then old Sidney died. I saw old Archie at Sidney’s funeral, standing shrunken and silent, his head shaking from side to side. They said that at the next election (his last), he changed his vote.
So while there is yet time, let us realize how petty are these animosities, what good fellows we all are in reality. I recall an English music-hall song with the refrain, “He’s all right when you know him, but you’ve got to know him first.” We are all like that. I am sure I am and I think it likely that you are. You may look pretty disagreeable and repellent but that’s because you can’t help it with that face of yours. Try to let people realize that it is only just your face; that behind it you are all right.
And, mind you, we can do this if we try. For this is exactly what we all do once a year at Christmas: we all pretend to be such good fellows that somehow the whole world looks brighter for the pretence, transformed for twenty-four hours by the merry greetings and the cheery compliments of Christmas.
For you see, it is the illusion that is the real reality. I think that there are only two people who see clearly (at least as to one another), and these are two young lovers, newly fallen in love. They see one another just as they really are, namely, a Knight Errant and a Fairy. But who realizes that that old feller shuffling along in spats is a Knight Errant, too, and that other is a Fairy, that bent old woman knitting in the corner.
This illusion, greater than reality, we grasp easily in the form of what we call art — our books, our plays. We like to read of people in books, better than ourselves. How quickly we respond to them! So, too, with the drama: “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare said, or at least it could be if we set ourselves to make it so, with each of us idealized into the form of what is really his true self. Come, let us make it so. Let us distribute the parts. Let me see — I’ll be the cheery, generous philanthropist — or no, you take that — I’ll be the still more cheery fellow, little more than an acquaintance, that he gives the money to. You see, you’ve heard that I’m hard up (though of course I’m so bright and cheery you’d never guess it) and so you press money on me, or perhaps better, you send me money anonymously; you can start and rehearse it that way at any rate.
And now I’ll tell you why I want this reconstruction. It is because I don’t believe that we can mend our broken world without it. Treaties and compacts, legislation and pledges, are worthless without the heart and spirit of the people. In the long run, the world can only move with the spirit.
I’m going to start anyway. I’m going to pretend that I’m just the kindliest, friendliest feller that ever stepped along the street. You’ll notice it right away when you see me. Only, of course, don’t push the thing too far: don’t strain it: don’t ask me to lend you five dollars on account. Let the mould get set a little firmer first.
And you start, too. Don’t wait for the rebuilding of the railways and the recharting of the air and the reorganization of trade with South America and all those things you talk about over a cigar in your armchair. Don’t put it up to the President of the United States. You begin.
And when we all get reconstructed — oh, my! — what a bright world! There’ll be no trouble then.
Woman’s Level
THERE IS A very general feeling that after the war women will have the right to be placed on their proper level. We are all for it. The only question is to know where the level is. Do we lift them up to it, or put them down to it, or move them over sideways? In other words, how does woman’s level compare with man’s level?
This is the question which I wish to discuss. It is very probable that my views will appear to many people quite reactionary. They represent, in part, a reversion to the “home-and-mother” stuff now so widely despised. But in other aspects they run in quite the other direction. At any rate, any one person’s views are of interest, if only as a point of departure for wiser people.
The courageous and patriotic service of women in the war has led in certain quarters to the demand for complete equality and uniformity of status of the two sexes. Put in an extreme way, this means that since women can serve as soldiers, then half of the soldiers ought to be women; if women can serve at sea, then half the sailors ought to be women; and similarly half the aviators, half the factory workers, half the miners, half the railway operators and so on. Still more so is it with the white-collar professions. Seen in this light the average banker ought to be half-man and half-woman, the prime minister, as likely as not, an old woman, and the cabinet, by popular vote, a bunch of girls. In setting out to meet an Anglican bishop, one would be prepared to find him an imposing matron in shorts.
One has only to state this half-and-half view of society to show how impossible it is in actual reality, as a basis of human organization. There is a vast section of the activities of men, indeed the larger part of them, from which women are debarred by the initial reason of inferior physical strength. The occupations of war on land and sea and air, the fighting that is called into being by the deplorable necessities of an imperfect world — these must, overwhelmingly, be for men. Even the rougher and heavier tasks of peace, on sea and land, in mines and lumber camps and in the fields, all the hard work, must be done by men.
We may call this hard work in the simple sense in which chopping wood is hard work and speaking in Parliament is easy. Factories are here a mixed product, with easy work, like that of the general manager, and the “girls on machines,” and hard work like that of the furnace men. If any one still doesn’t see the difference I want to make as between hard work and other work, I can’t help him. But the point I want to emphasize is that a great part, a major part, of men’s work is hard work and that women cannot do it. This means that since the total numbers of the sexes are even, women’s main occupations and men’s main occupations are by necessity separated. The ground that they occupy in common is only a relatively small part of the field.
This does not deny women the right to do anything that they are able to do. The question of women’s rights is a dead issue, a battleground of the past, swept clean by victory and with nothing on it now but monuments — busts of Mrs. Pankhurst, and statues of Carrie Nation and of the other great women who won the cause. All this was a tremendous question in the Nineteenth Century. There is nothing left of it now. In the new world that we are to make after the war, it must be taken for granted that women are to have all the political rights and professional rights that men have — the right to vote on anything and sit on anything that a man can sit on, a size larger if need be.
It seems likely, at least to some of us, that women, on the whole, will make only a very small part of their life out of interest in political activities. Democracy has already shown that even with men most of them don’t want to be bothered with active politics, have better things to do (or worse) than to attend trivial meetings and, on the whole, keep away from the control of public affairs. The complexity of our society forces this. Public questions are too intricate in detail for everybody to follow all of them. We are compelled to adopt the process of trying to find a good man who likes that sort of thing and then letting him do it. The obvious danger here is that we are apt to find a bad man. That was why any initial good that there was in Mussolini’s Fascism — which meant originally, “let a man rule who knows how” — was lost in its perversion.
Put very simply, this means that women in the new world will keep out of politics. A few will run: a few will sit: a few will talk. They will probably run and talk and sit with about as much, or as little, success as has been already shown by the women who sit and talk and run now. Each of us can judge for himself how great, or small, that success is. But the life and the life work and life interest of future women must lie elsewhere.
So with the professions. Women should have a right, and no doubt will have after the war, the right to enter any profession. They will even, let us say, enter the church. To many of us it would seem very strange, even repellent, to “sit under” a woman clergyman preaching from a pulpit. But this is only prejudice, from our upbringing, not reason; and in any case those of us who think this way don’t as a rule go to church. So we won’t be there. Indeed, it will give us a new reason for staying away.
So with the other professions. Women can be and are doctors — some of them excellent ones. Women can be and are lawyers and judges. But there is not the least danger that either profession, medicine or law, will ever be split up fifty-fifty as between man and woman. It attracts one sex; it does not, except in exceptions, attract the other. Engineering, as practised only by men, is, and must remain, a man’s profession, the same as with running saw-logs and pounding sand.
All this, then, is negative, the discussion of what women won’t do — either can’t or won’t want to. The real discussion is as to what women in the new world will do. I want to show that in my opinion a great part of them, the larger part of them, the most important part of them, will stay at home and raise children, about four children each, statistically, or possibly four and a half. That is what they will do in our country and in similar countries. As to what they will do in India and in the Sahara, I don’t know. But in our country, and in similar countries, unless the right women have the right children to about this extent, our national heritage — all that we started from — is not good for a hundred years’ purchase.
This contention that the best women ought once again to unite their lives to their homes and children has become so heretical, so offensive to many people, that it requires some hardihood to affirm it, and makes one hasten to explain it. These new homes and mothers will be operating in a world greatly changed from the present world of poverty and slums, of lives on the narrow margin, of apprehension everywhere and security nowhere — the world in which parenthood became a risk undertaken only on a small scale, except by the worst-off classes who could risk everything, having nothing to risk.
