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XXVIII Fornication Without Tears That the consequences of the psychological error of regarding Man as fundamentally good should have been particularly severe in England and America, may be due to the fact that nowhere else are the romantic doctrines of the Liberal Faith so dominant and so hopelessly aggravated by the vicious practice of making bad laws out of hard cases. Particularly noticeable is the damage resultant from the widespread relaxation of discipline and above all self-discipline, and the blindly benevolent legislation which in the last hundred or so years has marked the social life of these two countries even it we confine our survey to the effects of such measures as have provided assistance to unmarried mothers and thus diminished the need of any sense of responsibility or obligation on the part of sexually uncontrolled women and their male partners; or to the effects of succouring deserted wives, and subsidising families of children exceeding one child — let alone all the compulsory charities which come under the head of "Public Assistance", we should find ample evidence of the character deterioration which has already occurred. Apart from the amount of fraud, self-indulgence and sloth which this kind of Liberal legislation has promoted, what seems generally to be overlooked is its twofold effect in character deteriorisation and in penalising the more industrious, thrifty, responsible and self-reliant members of the population for the sake of the indolent, profligate, unscrupulous and least disciplined. To behold in any of our cities or towns, as we now too often do, a young and able-bodied man, decently attired and evidently leisured, walking along the main street at eleven in the morning accompanied by a wife, a perambulator brimming over with babies, and leading a string of small children by the hand — to behold such a spectacle I say, may have become such a com-
For, unless the young able-bodied man in question is actually on holiday, he is one of those new idle rich whose procreative zeal has relieved him of any need to work for his living. On Sunday, May 8th 1960, for instance, the Sunday Express reported a typical case of this sort. "A 29-year-old Glasgow labourer," it said, "has discovered a simple pleasant way to live without working. He and his wife have combined to produce 3 successive sets of twins as well as four other children." For this "an appreciative country pays them £12 a week. So he says quite reasonably that he would be silly to take a job at less than £13 a week. And as no one will pay him that wage he doesn't work and hasn't worked for five years." Similarly, the Daily Mail, on the 2nd of September 1959 reported the case of one, Jesse Gamble, a man of 45 and father of 14 children. Whenever he was "offered a job", wrote the Daily Mail reporter, "he turned it down. For . . . he felt he had no need to work. He drew £8 a week from the National Assistance, £4 18s. in Family Allowances, and £3 from his working children a total of £15 18s. a week." In the same newspaper on Nov. 15th 1963 we read of a man of 22, Peter Blackman by name, who took three months holiday at Cannes while he was on National Assistance. He had not been working since January of that year and was drawing £4 15s. a week assistance. By July he had saved so much he was able to take the Mediterranean holiday in question. Nor are these cases at all exceptional. Similar abuses of the compulsory charities now extorted from the responsible, thrifty and industrious elements in the population are reported almost daily. What with family allowances, the lump sums granted to parturients, and the provision made for unmarried mothers, we now have, to the astonishment of people uninfected with the Liberal virus, inaugurated an era which, in spite of Eng-
Only mental defectives could have assumed that the legislative measures leading to all these abuses could fail to be exploited. For it is not as if the masses, high and low, had been, like distinguished captives, placed on parole not to take a mean advantage of the privileges granted them. All the benefits enumerated were showered upon them unconditionally, and their deplorable abuse of the naïve belief in the fundamental goodness of Man was therefore only to be expected. The burden of these abuses borne by the better elements in the nation is not however their most serious aspect. More disastrous by far is their effect on the character of the people. By giving the populace the chance of profiting by the wholly gratuitous belief in their native honour and public spirit, a habit of cynicism has insensibly been cultivated in the nation, and as cynicism is never far removed from unscrupulousness and criminality, only a safe opportunity is needed in order quickly to make it assume these more sinister guises. According to Sir Henry Maine, this by no means exhausts the untoward effects of Liberal doctrine; for he maintains that even intelligence is adversely affected by the tendency democratic institutions have of promoting the habit of forming snap judgments, of taking for granted one's ability to hold opinions on every possible question, no matter how abstruse, and of assenting to policies inadequately understood and only superficially pondered. "Useful as it is to democracies," he says, "this levity of assent is one of the most enervating of national habits of mind. It has seriously enfeebled the French intellect. It is most injuriously affecting the mind of England . . . it threatens little short of ruin to the awakening intellect of India." (Popular Government, Essay II). As far as the decline of intelligence in England is concerned, the evidence given by Walter P. Pitkin. Dr. A. Carrel, Sir Cyril Burt, the Royal Commission on Population (May 1950), Sir Godfrey Thompson, Prof. R. A. Fisher and Drs. E. O. Lewis and J. A. Fraser, is conclusive and certainly confirms Sir Henry Maine's allegation made 80 years ago. (On this whole question, see Chap. V., Sect. 33 of my Quest of Human Quality.) I am given to understand that in the United States of
In California in particular, the Welfare Provisions Programme is being so consistently exploited by the improvident, the lazy, and the unskilled, that the Authorities are at their wits' end. In this State, where the unemployment benefit is as high as 26 dollars a week and where only a five-year residential requirement entitles all newcomers to the largesse recklessly distributed by the Administration, a woman receives 50 dollars a month for every illegitimate child she bears, and many unmarried women are collecting as much as 500 dollars a month by this means alone. Rebuked by a Social Welfare visitor for her lack of restraint in this respect, one of these female beneficiaries exclaimed indignantly: "I ain't no iron woman!" But the worst racket of all is connected with the provision for so-called "Deserted Wives." Hundreds of these women are really not abandoned at all and carry on clandestine relations with husbands who continue to cohabit with them in secret. In San Francisco where a raid was carried out to catch some of these couples red-handed, in 19 out of 21 homes the alleged "absconded" husband was found in bed with his deserted wife. In San Diego, owing to the provision made for three or four days sick-leave for all workers every month, most of the workers, whether sick or not, take these days off as a matter of course and draw the prescribed compensation. |
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