Civilization?

THE history of England during the last seventy years can be best understood, Mr. Salt thinks, by supposing England to be a land inhabited by savages. The hypothesis that Englishmen are civilized beings requires so much suppression and distortion of obvious facts that it is better to give it up altogether; the savage hypothesis, on the other hand, explains every thing so simply as almost to appear a self evident truth.

Mr. Salt’s first acquaintance with the complexion of English life was made as a King’s Scholar at Eton. There was practically no discipline at Eton in Mr. Salt’s young days; the little savages did pretty well what they liked with the masters. Latin verse was one of the fetishes, and the hunting and breaking-up of hares one of the pastimes. Sometimes other animals were employed. As late as the headmastership of Dr. Baiston (I857-68) it had been permitted to the boys, as a variation from the hare-hunt, to pursue with beagles a mutilated fox deprived of one oi his pads. Mr. Salt tails us that in all the hundreds of sermons he heard preached in Eton College Chapel, he never heard a word on the subject of cruelty. As Mr. Ralph Nevill remarks in his “Floreat Emma,” “It was an era when the sickening cant of humanitarianism, born oi luxury and weakness, had not yet arisen, to emasculate and enfeeble the British race.” The boys’ brutality towards the working classes was sometimes ingenious. Some poor old almswomen used to came to the College Hall for remnants of bread and other victuals. The young Etonians prepared what they called “Hag-traps,” pieces of bread hollowed out and filled with mustard, pepper, salt, and left lying about far the old women to take home. As Mr. Salt says:

Was it Waterloo that was won in the Eton playing fields? I have sometimes thought it must have been Peterloo.

From this training ground Mr. Salt proceeded to Cambridge, and eventually came back to Eton as a master. It was during this second sojourn at Eton that Mr. Salt made his first “discovery.” He discovered that it was wrong to eat the flesh of animals, and he became a vegetarian. The question is, to him, purely a moral question. The Darwinian theory has made untenable the isolated position arrogated ta himself by man, and with it the naive doctrine that animals are “sent” to man for his use. In eating one of the higher animals man is, in fact, guilty of something very like cannibalism. Whatever we may think of these arguments, Mr. Salt took them with great seriousness, and being by now thoroughly out of sympathy with the general outlook at Eton, he left the school. And so became a humanitarian, a pacifist, a follower of the simple life; in fact, one of the people who are generally dismissed as faddists. But we find it difficult to dismiss Mr. Salt as a faddist; for one thing, his sense of humour forbids the classification. And there is so much on which he is obviously right. His detestation of “blood-sports,” for example, is something that all humane people can share. And we agree that flogging should be abolished.

But we are not prepared to accept the whole of Mr. Salt’s programme. That may be because we are insufficiently civilized, but it appears to us rather as an inability to accept some of the assumptions of Mr. Salt’s arguments. We found ourselves smiling at his description of the death of his cat, the cherished companion of years; yet we like cats. The way we rationalize this—possibly—unregenerate tendency in ourselves is by asserting that Mr. Salt is as anthropomorphic as his opponents are anthropocentric, that has conception of animal psychology is as unscientific as is his opponents belief in the radical difference between man and the animals. Perhaps, on the whole, it is better not to eat beef; it is mere nonsense, however, to say that the man who eats beef is a cannibal. As a point of tactics it is perhaps useful to overstate the use in this way; certainly it is inadvisable to state the case moderately, since the “brutalitarians” pounce eagerly on any statement which can be distorted so as to support their practices. Probably we shall understand Mr. Salt’s position better if we allow for the fact that he is fighter and is still weighing the propaganda value of his remarks.

Even if we are not willing to subscribe to the whole of the humanitarian creed, we may admit that, as developed by Mr. Salt, it gains in coherence what it loses in plausibility. “Blood-sports” may be condemned, by beef-eaters as well as by vegetarians; and we can agree that war is not a civilized activity, even if we are reluctant to accept the whole pacifist position. This still leaves sufficient weight to Mr. Salt’s contention that we are really savages; we have, indeed, a civilization, but we are not civilized, and for this reason there is a good chance that modern men will destroy the civilization they have. Apart from his argument Mr. Salt’s volume is thoroughly entertaining for its reminiscences of well-known people, and for the gusto with which he describes sallies by which the Humanitarian League diversified its customary trench warfare. A parody of the brutalitarian arguments which was taken seriously by the defenders of blood-sports is one of the most entertaining and instructive of these.

The Athenæum, January 21, 1921, pp. 65-66