THE PEDIGREE OF THE POPULACE

New Zealand Tablet, 24 April 1919, Page 18

THE PEDIGREE OF THE POPULACE

(By G. K. Chesterton, in the New Witness.)

It would be easy to fancy a medieval society instituting some social ritual between men who had the same patron saint ; and often therefore the same Christian name. It would have been quite in the temper of the time to establish some feast of fellowship or pageant of chivalry merely to link together men who were all named after St. Philip or St. George. But when I have amused myself by imagining the notion in modern life, it has necessarily been an indulgence in

the farcical as well as the fanciful. If we were all sorted out in companies according to, our Christian names, many of us would be considerably surprised to discover how Christian our names are. - Many of us would be still more surprised to discover how Christian would be the charity required to cover all the types of Christendom. Some of the associations would be sufficiently obvious and pleasing, and will occur to the least fanciful mind. A ceremonial brotherhood-in-arxns between Father Bernard Vaughan and Mr. Bernard Shaw seems full of possibilities. I am faintly pleased with the idea of-Mr. Arnold Bennett endeavoring to extract the larger humanities of fiction from the political differences of Mr. Arnold White and Mr. Arnold Luptou. I myself should find myself fettered to the fascinating society of Professor Gilbert Murray and Sir Gilbert Parker; who would probably differ very much from each other, and. both differ not a little from me. I can only say that I should probably embrace

them both” in a comparative ecstasy of camaraderie, if we' all found our company further enriched by the talents of Mr. Gilbert Caiman. But I merely '-touch Upon the fancy for the moment, as an example of something which would once have seemed at least symbolic as well as fantastic, 'but which has now lost its significance by a process which has worn many things thin. Christian names have fallen into’ chaos and oblivion of a kind very typical of our time.' I mean that there are still fashions in them, but no longer reasons for them. For a fashion is a custom without a cause ; a custom which can never last, because it is without a cause.

Parnell as well as 7 the Parnell they will -discuss Casement in terms of other Casements, unknown to England or Germany or the Congo. The Victorian English could no more have conceived a plural to the word Gladstone than to the word God. They could never have imagined Disraeli compassed about with a great cloud of Disraelis ; it would have seemed altogether too apocalyptic an exaggeration of being on the side of the'angels. To this day in England, as we have reason to know, it is regarded as a rabid and insane form of religious persecution to suggest that a Jew very probably comes of a Jewish family. In short, the modern English, while their rulers are willing to give due consideration to

, . - " —L. Rossbotham, photo. ST. VINCENT DE PAUL ORPHANAGE, SOUTH DUNEDIN. This beautiful institution, conducted by the Sisters of Mercy, was recently- visited by the delegates to the Catholic Federation who attended the half-yearly conference of that organisation in Dunedin. The delegates were deeply impressed, as are all visitors to St. Vincent de Paul’s Orphanage, with the splendid work being carried out there in the interests of Catholic charity.

But we have reached an even stranger stage of the same process ; for in some quarters the surname also threatens to become meaningless by being rootless. The title that is meant to connect a man corporately with his history and his human origins is more and more taken at once in a light and in a lonely spirit. Our plutocratic society is more and more a world of pseudonyms, when it is not a world of anonymity. It is a queer irony that the name of “Montague,” which remains in great literature in the memory of an Italian feud, as an example of frantic loyalty to a family name, has passed into modern political satire as the example ''of the desertion and the disguise of a family name. But even where the family name is retained in modern England, it is retained as something quite individual and accidental. The surname has- become as solitary as a nickname. As I remarked last week, nobody in England sees a man as a member of a family, known or unknown, as men still see him in Ireland and in Scotland. Irishmen will talk to you of Parnell as a

eugenics as a reasonable opportunity for various forms of polygamy and infanticide, are drifting further and further away from the only consideration of eugenics that could possibly be legitimate, the consideration of it as an accomplished fact. I have spoken of infanticide ; but indeed the ethic involved is rather that of parricide and matricide. The theoretic tendency is to destroy all traces of the parents and then to study the heredity of the children. It would ruin all the prospects of so progressive a science, if the people in England, as in Ireland and Scotland, themselves knew something about their own mental heredity. It would be utterly disastrous, of course, if they also knew something about the mental heredity of the men of science. The paradox cannot be too plainly repeated that this sense of pedigree works against aristocracy and in favor of democracy. To follow anything, including family, seriously and realistically, is to follow it into all the tragic and comic ups and downs of the common human lot. If a man is interesting because he is a

McCarthy, it is in the same sense in which he is interesting because he is a man. That is, he will be interesting whether poor or rich, whether eminent or insignificant. But if he is interesting because he is Lord h itzArthur and lives at Fitz Arthur House, he will be interesting when he haS merely bought the house, or when he has merely bought the title. To maintain a squirearchy, it is necessary to admire the new squire ; and therefore to forget the old squire. The sense of family is like a dog and follows the family • the sense of oligarchy is like a cat and continues to haunt the house. the snob, that very tame and very treacherous cat, is in this respect the modern degeneration of the lion or the leopard of England. The snob keeps his eye on one patch of the sunshine of success ; he is ignorant of all that happens to people before or after they pass across it ; therefore he is more ignorant of the varieties,of mankind than the narrowest partisan of a clan or a name. Aristocracy as it has existed in modern England is built up of broken and desecrated bones. It has to destroy a hundred poor relations to keep up a family. It-has to destroy a hundred families to keep up a class. This fact of the family alone constitutes a difficulty which makes it flatly impossible for the English plutocracy to govern the Irish peasantry, or even to help to govern it. To do it justice, it has never really tried : and it certainly is not really trying - now. The English, free and happy people, are at present being governed by plutocracy: the Irish are being governed Ly mere militarism. They might again be governed, as we have often governed them, by mere massacre. We had come very near it when the end of the war apparently saved us from the appalling tomfoolery of applying conscription to Ireland. But though our rulers might apply massacre to Ireland, even our rulers do not go so far as to apply social reform to Ireland. Madmen may yet let loose in that island all the horrors of reaction ; but even a madman does not dream of imposing the horrors of progress. Laws will still be passed for England that do not apply to Ireland: laws will still be framed specially for Ireland that are not needed in England, ft would be impossible for a ruler to recognise more definitely the difference between two nations than by always subjecting them to two quite different kinds of tyranny.