第21章

[Civilization and the Unemployed.]

Where Civilization fails is in not providing men and women with sufficient work.In the Stone Age man was, one imagines, kept busy.

When he was not looking for his dinner, or eating his dinner, or sleeping off the effects of his dinner, he was hard at work with a club, clearing the neighbourhood of what one doubts not he would have described as aliens.The healthy Palaeolithic man would have had a contempt for Cobden rivalling that of Mr.Chamberlain himself.He did not take the incursion of the foreigner "lying down." One pictures him in the mind's eye: unscientific, perhaps, but active to a degree difficult to conceive in these degenerate days.Now up a tree hurling cocoa-nuts, the next moment on the ground flinging roots and rocks.Both having tolerably hard heads, the argument would of necessity be long and heated.Phrases that have since come to be meaningless had, in those days, a real significance.

When a Palaeolithic politician claimed to have "crushed his critic,"he meant that he had succeeded in dropping a tree or a ton of earth upon him.When it was said that one bright and intelligent member of that early sociology had "annihilated his opponent," that opponent's friends and relations took no further interest in him.It meant that he was actually annihilated.Bits of him might be found, but the most of him would be hopelessly scattered.When the adherents of any particular Cave Dweller remarked that their man was wiping the floor with his rival, it did not mean that he was talking himself red in the face to a bored audience of sixteen friends and a reporter.It meant that he was dragging that rival by the legs round the enclosure and making the place damp and untidy with him.

[Early instances of "Dumping."]

Maybe the Cave Dweller, finding nuts in his own neighbourhood growing scarce, would emigrate himself: for even in that age the politician was not always logical.Thus roles became reversed.The defender of his country became the alien, dumping himself where he was not wanted.The charm of those early political arguments lay in their simplicity.A child could have followed every point.There could never have been a moment's doubt, even among his own followers, as to what a Palaeolithic statesman really meant to convey.At the close of the contest the party who considered it had won the moral victory would be cleared away, or buried neatly on the spot, according to taste: and the discussion, until the arrival of the next generation, was voted closed.

All this must have been harassing, but it did serve to pass away the time.Civilization has brought into being a section of the community with little else to do but to amuse itself.For youth to play is natural; the young barbarian plays, the kitten plays, the colt gambols, the lamb skips.But man is the only animal that gambols and jumps and skips after it has reached maturity.Were we to meet an elderly bearded goat, springing about in the air and behaving, generally speaking, like a kid, we should say it had gone mad.Yet we throng in our thousands to watch elderly ladies and gentlemen jumping about after a ball, twisting themselves into strange shapes, rushing, racing, falling over one another; and present them with silver-backed hair-brushes and gold-handled umbrellas as a reward to them for doing so.

Imagine some scientific inhabitant of one of the larger fixed stars examining us through a magnifying-glass as we examine ants.Our amusements would puzzle him.The ball of all sorts and sizes, from the marble to the pushball, would lead to endless scientific argument.

"What is it? Why are these men and women always knocking it about, seizing it wherever and whenever they find it and worrying it?"The observer from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race.Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle with the "Ball" on behalf of mankind in general.

"As a rule," so he would report, "it is a superior class of insect to which this special duty has been assigned.They are a friskier, gaudier species than their fellows.

[Cricket, as viewed from the fixed Stars.]

"For this one purpose they appear to be kept and fed.They do no other work, so far as I have been able to ascertain.Carefully selected and trained, their mission is to go about the world looking for Balls.Whenever they find a Ball they set to work to kill it.

But the vitality of these Balls is extraordinary.There is a medium-sized, reddish species that, on an average, takes three days to kill.