Evening star., 1931-12-13

Tney belong OF their nature to the home
But in healthier society, where the
home had resumed its natural superiority
to the school, more intimate and in
tensive sort of education might make
thousands OF things out of this teeming
soil of original imagination; new sports,
new theatricals, almost a new mythology,
as varied as the world of totems and
household gods; yet perfectly compatible
with more serious religion of the peo-
pie. AS it is, the machine of modern Or
ganized play plows up the garden that
was playground, and not only neglects,
but prevents its growth.
THESE are in their nature but faint and
fanciful hints of the possibilities of
free commonwealth, for it would be far
too free to have it's future mapped out
for it like the slave-state of the scientists.
But the point is that I should expect a
distributist democracy to develop, and
not merely stick at that particular stage
of compromise at which the old country
life first found itself confronted and con-
quered by the machinery of the towns.
When I say that the simpler life of our
ancestors was more on the right road I
do not mean that we are all bound to
drink Aunt Susans cowslip wine and
nothing else. But do mean that Aunt
Susan's cowslip wine, In so far as it was
Aunt Susan's, and in so far as it differed
from Aunt Hannah's dandelion tea,
which was Aunt Hannah's, did in fact
open gates of fairyIand of freedom and
of OIL xvyyf n tlo
tion of all such domestic differentiation
by the use of standardized goods.
I will not launch forth into another
fairy parable, in which wild and fantas-
tic aunts shall caper about the garden
gathering for us crocus wine or convol-
vulus ale. will merely note what the
scientific sociologists, who are not wild,
but tame, have actually given us instead.
They have given us few fixed brands
of internally inferior liquor. For the mo-
ment leave prohibition quite on one
side. I am told that people sometimes
do. Anyhow, drinks, whether hard or
soft grow more and more monopolist and
therefore monotonous. We should never
expect new slogans, new advertise
ments, new methods of salesmanship,
new theories of mass psychology, in or
der to sell the old wine; which Zone
may remark in passing) does not hap
pen to be wine at all. And even then,
as have said, we shall be told we have
sold too much, and there are thousands
of laborers in the vineyard
Another way of stating the case is to
say that we have to return to a real in
OF
taliSm is quite as remote from it as Conn
munism. No man can work out anything
without vast machinery of other men,
of rich men to finance him and poor
men to work for him This spreads
everywhere mere effect of Sameness
and regimentation; and individual mem
bers of individual families no longer fer
ret out things for themselves, because
they can no longer find their reward in
natural rumor and local curiosity; the
whole countryside, so to speak, being
dominated only by huge placards offering
huge rewards for things done with huge
resources on huge scale.
There is at this moment going on an
enormous and anarchical waste of real
inventiveness and Imagination, merely
because it will not fit in with the stupid
simplifications of publicity and trade I
believe myself that world of free fami-
lies on free farms would be more active.
more progressive and more prosperous
than the present world of commercial
organization. I am quite sure that it
could not be more dull, more dreary Or
more inane.