CHAPTER VI

THE ORDERED SOCIETY

§ 20. The order of reverence. § 21. The utility of the reverential order. § 22. The ordered society and the biological species. § 23. Ordered relations vs. social relations. § 24. The decay of reverence and the dawn of morality.

I

§ 20

COME now to the motive of authority as embodied in the conception of social order. The characteristic phrase for this motive is "reverence for authority", or "respect for the constituted authorities"; to which the corresponding diagnosis for all social maladjustments is "the decay of reverence". The metaphysical development of the motive of reverence may be found in "The Philosophical Theory of the State", by the late Bernard Bosanquet.

It is, I suppose, an indisputable fact that every child is born with a determinate potential complexion-say, with red hair or black. For Bosanquet it seems to be a fact equally indisputable (and in the last analysis a necessity of the same organic kind) that every child bears at birth. the mark of a determinate social class. And therefore it is axiomatic for Bosanquet that the only conceivable social relation is an arrangement of men in classes; which are to be distinguished (as every logic of social classification seems to demand) as higher and lower, and bound together in a system of reverence for authority. This view of the logical necessities seems to be also axiomatic for many

other persons; among them (including, strangely, some of the more advanced exponents of democracy) those for whom the social problem is a problem of "leadership"as if the only conceivable social order were an order of leaders and followers. We have heard much about leadership since the War. But true reverence for authority is expressed in the recognition of "natural" or "right leaders", to be found only among "the intelligent classes", the distinction of classes being referred to the Laws of Nature.

And for a true sentiment of reverence a society thus ordered is the embodiment also of an aesthetic ideal. The ordered society is a thing of beauty; beautiful because in the last analysis its beauty is the beauty of Nature. Perhaps it would be better to say that the ordered society is picturesque. Society is made picturesque by the presence of distinctions; and distinctions seem to require that men be graded. The ordered society is again conceived as a society distinctively and exclusively moral. Ideally it seems that there can be neither beauty nor virtue in the relations of men except in a relation of superior and inferior in which benevolence is exchanged for reverence.

The ideally "ordered" society is, accordingly, a society patriarchally or hierarchically ordered, in which men are graded, and ranked, according to a single principle of worth. The type of all such is the society pictured in Plato's "Republic" (presented as the social ideal both by Bosanquet and by T. H. Green), in which a broad distinction is made between a lower class of common-minded men, or artisans, and an upper class of high-minded men, or warriors, the whole being guided and directed by a select, uppermost class of philosophers and (in the language of a later period) saints. A more familiar illustration, how

ever, is the picture of English country life presented by the literature of the earlier Victorian period, in which society consists of an upper class of landed gentry, an intermediate class of tenant-farmers, with whom are grouped some yeomen, or freeholders, and a lower class of farmlaborers, all bound together by the feudal principle of mutual loyalty. The tenant was bound in loyalty to his landlord-woe to the tenant who should vote against his landlord! But the landlord was bound to the tenant; and especially bound to respect his first right to a lease of the farm which had been held by him and by his fathers before him.

The moral principle governing these relations is the principle defended in F. H. Bradley's essay on "My Station and Its Duties". According to this principle the whole duty of each man consists in faithfulness to that station in life to which it hath pleased God to call him. The duties flowing from this principle are substantially those tabulated in the church catechism under the several heads of "my duty to my superiors", "to my equals", and "to my inferiors". inferiors". In this moral system it was at once the virtue and the pride of any man that he "knew his place". By this indeed he vindicated his claim to self-respect. For the matter of that, it would seem that the two motives of self-respect and respect for superiors were interwoven in a mutual understanding which becomes at times almost democratic. Squire and tenant-farmer might be warm friends and even good fellows; but the tenant never aspired to dine at the squire's table, and he condemned as vulgar those of his fellow-tenants who cherished such aspirations.

On the other hand, it seems that for those who lay out1 F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies.

side of the system, such as the village shopkeeper, a truly sound morality was out of the question. Honest Hodge, the farm-laborer, achieves dignity by removing his cap in the presence of the squire; Dawkins, the shopkeeper, achieves only servility. The commercial, or calculating, motive could offer doubtless only a hypocritical respect for authority. For this, in the end, was the principle underlying the system, not respect for the person but respect for his rank, and respect for the principle of distinctions involved in the ordered society. Respect for one's betters and condescension to inferiors were the two signs by which, according to circumstances, one indicated a belief in the moral order.

This tradition of reverence survives to trouble us, in a society supposedly emancipated, as an element in the servant question and the labor problem. As for the first, I will not be so rash as to suggest that the need of personal or household service, for many persons a truly vital need, can very easily be reduced to a "business proposition". It is none the less the question of status, the question of a "proper respect", that presents the greatest difficulty. Mrs. Brown, a lady of liberal tendencies, and a matter-offact person, will have you believe perhaps that all that interests her is so much work for so much money. But she addresses her cook as "Mary", and she would be stunned if the cook should address her as "Emily". She is also slow to abandon her traditional prerogative of supervising, on behalf of morality, the cook's goings-out and her comings-in, and especially her relations with young And when in consequence Mary the cook prefers a place in a shop or a factory, probably a more grinding task and on the whole less lucrative, Mrs. Brown will begin

men.

to wonder whether these persons know what is good for them.

It is true that Mrs. Brown and her friends, finding themselves in the position of Mary (which, however, cannot politely be suggested), would feel in honor bound to prefer the shop or even the factory to menial service, or possibly to starve on something lower than shop wages in an occupation conventionally more genteel; and those hardships which make it a foolish choice for Mary would for them make it heroic. But their case, they would explain, if brought to the point, is different. And if you ask, How different? the answer, I fancy, would boil down to this: that God in his wisdom has created different sorts of persons for different stations in life; to most of whom, appropriately, a servile occupation is not really objectionable. Mrs. Brown and her friends would probably claim to be Christian women. They would be dismayed to learn that they are following Aristotle, the heathen philosopher, who taught that some men are by nature slaves.

It may be supposed that the husbands of these ladiesbusiness men, captains of industry, entrepreneurs, as the economist calls them-are untroubled by any of this nonsense about the proprieties. As men of hard fact, their imagination is supposed never to be deflected by sentiment from the line marked by the arithmetical balance of profit and loss. And Mr. Brown would tell you perhaps that as long as he receives a sufficient return for wages paid, moral considerations have no interest for him. But he has probably failed to grasp the full connotation of the term "moral". In England, I believe, the entrepreneurs are still distinguished as "masters" from the workmen as "servants". In the United States we prefer the politer