BOOKS OF THE DAY
Eppur si Muove "
Democracy Marches. By Julian Huxley ,Chatto and Windus. 3s. 6d.)
Democracy Marches is the title of a B.B.C. series of talks to which Dr. Huxley contributed, and, while it has a good rhetorical flavour,
it does not, at first hearing, suggest the kind of book that Dr.
Huxley has written. For in this brilliant little book there is hardly any of that appeal to emotion-stirring words, hardly any of that evocation of admirable but vague moral sentiment, that such titles usually suggest. Here is fact and argument, fact supporting a thesis that progress has not stopped and is as good a thing as our immediate ancestors thought ; argument directed to prove that certain political and social attitudes are necessary to that progress and that, if they are given free rein, progress will be both accelerated and made more comely and reviving to the spirit. For progress here is not only an increase in comfort, in ease, but a progress in the level of enjoyment, in the content of comfort. Dr. Huxley is not the complacent Macaulay contemplating the beauties of Leeds or the less acute and vigorous self-admiring Victorians of the kind who evoked Matthew Arnold's wit and near despair. Dr. Huxley's democracy is marching to something better than a paradise of nationally- branded goods in widest commonalty spread.
It is implied all through these talks (and specifically stated in one) that a marching democracy must have a moral chart as well as a material one. What is wrong with the Nazis is not that they have no regard for science ; in some ways they have too uncritical a regard for it ; it is the uses to which they prefer to put it that make the thought of their triumph too dreadful. It is not that a Nazi triumph need produce immediately, or at all, that decline in technological efficiency that marked the third century. The assets of the scientific method are now so vast that it might take generations to dissipate them and a society of brilliant physicists and physiologists at the service of Himmler or Streicher is a Nazi ideal.
It is the argument of this book that we should retort on the preachers of the New Order the fact that the possibilities of a rapid improvement in the standards of life are as open to us as to them, and that our improvement is intrinsically better, easier and more lasting than theirs. But we can only shake the faith of the more human Nazis if we have a more stirring aim than ease. The German picture of decaying capitalist societies, the Marxist pictures of an increasingly depressed and exploited working-class are each shown to be false. As is right in talks directed to America, where national complacency is still almost Victorian in its intensity, Dr. Huxley stresses the improve- ment in British life that is a matter of statistical record. People are better fed, better housed, better educated, better looked after in sickness than they were in 1914. We do not live in a world that has begun to go downhill, but in a world in which it takes all the misguided political ingenuity of foolish and bad men to prevent our going upwards. And our men of ill-will are less evil, less foolish, less determined than are the rulers of Germany. If our fools are very foolish, our knaves are Only moderately knavish, and ill-will is needed more than folly to repress progress.
A great part of our progress is due to political instruments which, defective as they are, are not wholly inefficient, not merely top-dressing. Speaking to America, Dr. Huxley rightly stresses this point, although it is more doubtful if he was wise in directly criticising American deficiencies. It is not merely a question of propagandist tactics (although they have their own claims). But it is in fact very difficult to make useful critical comparisons of this kind in a few words, and a New Yorker who knew the municipal history of both his own city and of London during the past ten years might ask some awkward questions about the enter- prise of the L.C.C. as compared with that of the local and State authorities personified by Mayor La Guardia and Mr. Moses. And the same critical American might wonder if the picture of the working of our social services was not a little too rosy. It is a picture painted from the prosperous south. The depressed areas enter into it only as a place from which a worker, re-trained
in a new skill, escapes with ease. The atmosphere of Love on the Dole is missing ; the atmosphere of general depression, of a real
let-down in the standards of decency if not of comfort. A new housing estate in County Durham set beside an abandoned pit- head is not necessarily a proof of a credit-balance for the social statistician. The old filthy village slum has to set against its
innumerable defects the sense of life, of work. And the argument of Mr. Seven in La France Libre that the absence of work as
such, not of wages as such, was the poison that killed freedom in Germany deserves consideration. Our national sin crying to heaven for vengeance for the past twenty years has been com- placency on this point—and Americans know it. That they are sinners, too, does not help us much, and we have never attempted reconstruction on the scale of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Dr. Huxley is a biologist and it is natural that we should read his account of what biology can do for us with special interest. It is not that he skimps other topics. There is none of the casual, off-hand treatment of subjects outside his own speciality that is not infrequent in the writings of eminent scientists and makes one sceptical about the general pedagogic value of scientific training. I have noted only two minor slips in the historical. sections of the book, neither of them of any importance. But in his exposition of what biological and medical science can do for us, Dr. Huxley speaks with especial authority. And the ∎tor} of science in this field is not widely understood despite the brilliant efforts in popularisation which we owe to Professor Hogben and some others. It is not accident that The Food of the Gods, one of the most admirable of Mr. Wells's books as a literary as well as a prophetic success, does not seem to be at popular as those which exploited the world of physics. Vitamins (of which Mr. Wells was an unconscious prophet) are known to all of us. But how many people who carry little tins of vitamin-extract round with them have any idea of what it was Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins did, of its implications for a diet, for eugenics? How many know the history of the spelling of the word? Yet it is far easier to learn the elementary facts about vitamins than to acquire the right to talk about Einstein. As we learn here, the " condition of the people " question in its nourishment sense is soluble, and war is a good time for solving it. But our rulers and our spokesmen do not seem to know or, if they know, to care to act. Our price-and-wage policy at this moment penalises the most helpless and most important class in the community, children. But after two years of war, the Government and public opinion still prefer to ignore this depressing truth. There are many things we still cannot do; there are many we cannot do now. But there are many things we could do tomorrow—if we wanted to. Dr. Huxley tells us what they are and it is to be hoped that democracy will march
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