“What you want, Mr. Flint, is to build a kind of human rabbit hutch, designed on the best hygienic lines. I can see that at the back of your mind all the time. You think material things ought to come first, don’t you?”
“I certainly want to see the people well housed and well cared for before going any further.”
“And then?”
“Oh, after that, I want other things as well, naturally.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I want. I want to see them happy.”
I can still remember that evening. The table between us was covered with papers; and a shaded lamp threw a soothing light upon them. All the rest of the room was in shadow; and I saw her face against the setting of the darkness behind her. In the next room I could feel the slow steps of Nordenholt in his study, pacing up and down as he revolved some problem in his mind.
“When I think about it,” she went on, after a pause, “you men amaze me. In the mass, I mean, of course; I’m not talking about individuals. There seem to be three classes of you. The biggest class is simply looking for what it calls ‘a good time.’ It wants to enjoy itself; it looks on the world just as a playground; and it never seems to get beyond the stage of a child crying for amusement in a nursery. At the end of things, that type leaves the world just where the world was before. It achieves nothing; and often it merely bores itself. It doesn’t even know how to look for happiness. I don’t see much chance for that type in the future, now that things have changed.
“Then there’s a second class which is a shade better. They want to make money; and they’re generally successful in that, for they are single-minded. But in concentrating on money, it seems to me, they lose everything else. In the end, they can do nothing with their money except turn it into more. They can’t spend it profitably; they haven’t had the education for that. They just gather money in, and gather it in, and become more and more slaves to their acquisitive instincts. To a certain extent they are better than the first type of men, for they do incidentally achieve something in the world. You can’t begin to make money without doing something. You need to manufacture or to transport goods or develop resources or organise in some way; so mankind as a whole profits incidentally.
“Then you come to the last of the types: the men who want to do something. Activity is their form of happiness. All the inventors and discoverers and explorers belong to that class, all the artists and engineers and builders of things, great or small. Their happiness is in creation, bringing something new into the world, whether it’s new knowledge or new methods or new beauty. But they are the smallest class of all.”
“What amazes you in that?”
“The difference in the proportions of men in the different classes, of course. You know what the third type get out of life: you’re one of them yourself. Wouldn’t things be better if everyone got these things? Don’t you think the pleasure of creation is the greatest of all?”
“Of course I do; but that’s because I’m built that way. I can’t help it.”
“Well, I think that a good many of the rest of us have the instinct too; but it gets stifled very early. It seems to me that our education in the past has been all wrong. It has never been education at all, in the proper sense of the term. It’s been a case of putting things into minds instead of drawing out what the mind contains already.”
I was struck by the similarity between her thoughts and my own upon this matter; but after all, there was nothing surprising in that; it was what everyone thought who had speculated at all on the problem. She was silent for a time; then she continued:
“It’s just like the thing we were speaking of tonight. A child’s mind is like a box of bricks; and each child has a different box with bricks unlike those of any other child. Our educational system has been arranged to force each child to build a standard pattern of house from its bricks, whether the bricks were suitable or not. The whole training has been drawn up to suit what they call ‘the average child’—a thing that never existed. So you get each child’s mind cramped in all sorts of directions, capacities stifled, a rooted distaste for knowledge engendered—a pretty result to aim at!”
“I don’t think you realise the difficulties of the thing,” I said. “The younger generation isn’t a handful; it’s a largish mass to tackle: and one must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth. The number of possible instructors is limited by the labour market.”
“Hearken to the voice of the ‘practical man.’ ” She laughed, but not unkindly. “You don’t seem to realise, Mr. Flint, that things can be done if one is determined to do them—physical impossibilities apart, of course. When a conjurer devises a trick, do you think that he sets out by considering his available machinery? Not at all. He first thinks of the illusion he wants to produce; and he fits his machinery to that. What we need to do is to fix on our aim and then invent machinery for it. You seem to me always to put the cart before the horse and to work on the lines: ‘What can we do with the machinery we have?’ That’s all wrong, you know. We’re on the edge of a new time now; and we can do as we please. The old system is gone; and we can set up anything
