By Ernest Reedbuck
It is generally the concern of thinkers and writers (for this first group must necessarily fall into the second if its members intend to produce anything useful) what it is the world needs; and this, changing as it does from time to time, is a broad and nearly inexhaustible subject. That is why, I suppose, people do not tire of hearing about it, whether or not they agree with the propounder’s conclusions.
Yet, for myself, I feel that what the world needs is not something which it has not got, but something which it has, and which it is in danger of losing. We do not, in my opinion, need new experiments, but we do need old principles. The things which we have taken for granted since the beginning of the world are the things which will probably save it in the end. But I am not concerned here with saving the world, so much as simply preserving something in it which I believe to be of value.
I hesitate to give a name to what I am going to discuss. It goes under many—traditionalism and conservatism are two appellations—yet it is scarcely a thing that can be summed up in a word. It is more than a manner of thinking—it is a way of life. It is not a creed but a code. It is what makes those who subscribe to it see the world upside down from the way other people see it. It is not even one thing, but a conglomeration of many and three things in particular. It is impossible to understand the world view under discussion without first understanding the nature of these three elements.
The three elements so vital to the moral health of the world are not strange things, but familiar things; so familiar that, in accordance with the old adage, they have almost become contemptible. They are Civilisation, Rationalism, and Decency.
When I use these three words, I don’t mean by them what perhaps they really mean. The ideas embodied by them cannot be summed up in one word anyway. I chose these three words because what they basically mean to most people is fairly close to what I have used them to mean here.
Civilisation is, simplified, you eating animals instead of animals eating you. Or, if you prefer, complexity in the interests of life. The whole reason men have chosen to band together instead of living separately (which is far easier to do) is for the sake of a better quality of life, whether it be in the nature of safety, comfort, productivity, or social prestige. Men would never work in harmony with other men if they could get what they wanted without having to do it. The reason why they do have to work in harmony is, I suppose, because God did not want seven milliard nations on earth. Man can, however, get carried away by this idea of civilisation. You will recall that God was obliged to confuse the languages at Babel in order to keep mankind from the disgrace of over-achievement. The necessity that forces men to work together and the lingual and ethnic barriers that separate them create a fine balance which helps man along far enough and keeps him from going too far.
Since the beginning of time man has had rules—rules that God gave him and rules that he invented for himself. Adam took the trouble to name the animals, probably as part of a greater project of compiling the first dictionary. Men like structure and definition and where there isn’t a sharp line, they will draw one.
For instance, it was men who made up the rule that the father was dictator in his own family. God set this rule in a milder form in the fifth of the Ten Commandments, but the Ten Commandments were not given until Moses and men held absolute sway in their families before Moses’ time. The idea of authority and government outside oneself is one of the most important cornerstones of civilisation. God made man to govern himself. Man made it necessary for other men to govern him.
The form this sort of government takes is that of the coercion of the individual by the group for the sake of the group. Even in the most absolute monarchy power does not rest with one man—power is men: the group.
And it is here where the most serious problem of civilisation appears. Man was never made for the sake of men. Man was first made an individual. Civilisation is not and never could be an end in itself; it is simply (as mentioned before) a means to an end.
The whole trouble begins with men’s rules. Men are creatures of habit. In order to save themselves the trouble of thinking, they invent rules which will make the decisions for them. The trouble starts when men forget why they made the rules in the first place and that rules are made for men, not men for rules. A group of men acting according to a set of rules can become a very ugly monster indeed.
You will recall that civilisation’s purpose is to make life better in some way. This function of making life better is sometimes confused with efficiency and efficiency becomes the goal. But efficiency cannot be a goal any more than civilisation can. To do something faster or better in order to be able to do something else faster or better never did anybody any good. Progress for its own sake is not progress.
Civilisation certainly does make things better in certain ways. A group of men may more easily defend each other. They can build cities and fortifications. They can trade and do business. They can explore new territories. No one man ever built a cathedral or a suspension bridge on his own. Civilisation stands for scientific progress, national security, and a higher standard of living. These things are not common to small, scattered tribes, but to large empires. But again arises the qualification that there must be somehow a balance. The tower may rise so high that it falls and crushes those it was intended to protect.
It is on this basis that civilisation, in the form of government and authority, is attacked. It is true that when men work together they defraud, cheat, and wrong each other, but it is also true that when they work together they help and benefit each other. It may be a simpler life to follow the clan model and appoint each man the lord of his own home and his own property, but it may not be a better life. It may be more free to wear a grass skirt instead of a silk tie, to hunt goats instead of buy butter, to jump naked around a bonfire instead of sit in a pew and sing hymns, to eat a man for lunch instead of ask him out to lunch: but it may not be more desirable.
And there is more to the idea of civilisation than mutual collaboration. It is expressed in the adjective ‘civilised.’ Civilised men put on with their clothes a certain decorum and sense of propriety. Politeness is policy. They know that no matter how much they may hate a man they do not call him names to his face because that would upset the delicate social balance, the necessary link between man and man on which civilisation is based. Men conduct ‘civilised’ warfare, a ludicrous mixture of enlightenment and barbarism in which even a life and death struggle has rules. These rules are based on the remaining two pillars, rationalism and decency.
But the most evident point of civilisation is not so much its necessity or its expediency, as the simple fact that it is preferable to savagery—that people want it. Perhaps it is more natural for man to live in a barbaric state, but I think it is the other way round—that men started out civilised and some few bohemians and freethinkers set out to explore the uncharted waters of primalism. It is certainly true that the majority, even without knowing it, prefer civilisation.
This is not in the slightest sense unnatural. Men don’t prefer civilisation only because it makes life better but because it appeals to an inborn sense of dignity as well. I have said that men love rules; they love rules because they protect men from themselves. Civilisation is not only men not being eaten by animals, but men not being eaten by other men. It is this love of the ritual of rules and government that makes the word ‘civilised’ a complimentary adjective.
Civilisation and rationalism are often thought to go hand in hand. This is not necessarily true, but in one sense it is, because rationalism is a necessary prerequisite to civilisation. Rationalism allows a man to give up present comfort in return for future good. Without this ability a man would never be able to work with other men for the sake of a common goal.
Rationalism has become a negative term to some because of the rationalistic idea that nothing exists that cannot be encompassed by the mind. This is certainly wrong because the mind cannot even encompass its own self. But although rationalism has its faults, it is still in some respects a good and commendable thing.
Although there are many definitions of rationalism (and probably none of them are right), I’ve added yet another to the tally--my own: Rationalism is being grateful to God for giving you a head by using it. I really think that the best way of being grateful for anything is to use it for its intended purpose. God would never have given us heads if He had not intended us to think, and it would be base ingratitude if, after having been given the invaluable gift of a complex and powerful thinking organ with ability to store huge quantities of memory, we went about all day doing nothing but stupid things.
It is arguably morally wrong to do stupid things. I will not make this argument. I think that doing stupid things is an inevitable by-product of doing anything at all. The bravest men and those who have accomplished the most for mankind have all done many stupid things in the process, as you may learn from any biography. In order to do something good you must first overcome the fear of doing something stupid.
But despite the impossibility of completely eradicating unintelligent deeds from one’s record, the brain was given to man so that he might avoid idiocy as much as possible. In my definition I do not mean rationalism to mean using one’s intellect to explain everything he observes around him, but rather using his intellect (in accordance with divine direction) to determine how to respond to his environment. I mean this especially as opposed to allowing man’s desires or emotions to control his actions. The greatest asset of man’s intellect (and one signal area where it differs from an animal’s) is its ability to grasp time and eternity. Man is able to interpret the present with the aid of the past, and to compromise the present for the sake of the future. He has a perspective in the fourth dimension.
This was not given him by accident, and it carries with it a grave responsibility. Men know that their actions bring consequences and these consequences are typically foreseen. Rationalism allows men to weigh these consequences in the balance of right and wrong. It also allows men to sacrifice physical realities for the sake of abstract principles. It is a step into the unseen.
Unlike any other creature, man is judged by the choices he makes. Rationalism is the glue that holds together the disordered fibres of our wills and emotions. It is the screw that holds our courage to the sticking place and the greatest ally of conscience. No man can say he is the victim of circumstance: rationalism precludes that excuse.
But there is one area of ethics which rationalism cannot cover. This is the idea of decency. Decency requires a suspension of rational thought because it has no rational basis—at least, none that is readily apparent. But decency is as necessary as civilisation or rationalism—more so: for there is hope for an uncivilised and irrational being if he is still a decent one.
The word has gotten rather a bad rap over the years, as many an excellent word has, but in its original use it was quite a good expression. If you asked anyone what decency means, he might have difficulty telling you, but he would have no difficulty at all telling you what decency is. Decency is not hitting the other fellow when he can’t hit back. Decency is stepping aside for the weaker party. Decency is not using certain words and phrases—not around women, at any rate. The most notable thing about decency is its utter unsoundness logically speaking. There is really no logical reason why you should not hit someone who can’t hit you back. If there is no hope of saving a drowning man and diving in after him will only ensure your own death as well, the reasonable thing is to stay safely out of it; but decency demands otherwise. The only sense in which the principle is obvious is in that it is self-evident.
Decency is, then (if I may make so bold as to give it a definition), the distinguishing between two separate items; or the recognition of what is sacred. Some people look on the world as one vast mass of impersonal matter. The truth is that the universe is made up of two kinds of things: what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is temporal and what is eternal.
Decency is inborn. It is the single greatest link between a man and all the rest of humanity, the great common invariable. When we first enter life our views of it are necessarily somewhat objective, but in the area of decency we know what every man who ever lived has always known. And we know it until we die.
When one speaks of civilisation or rationalism or decency, whether together or separate, one country, one people, and one historic period generally come to mind. I am speaking of the kingdom of Great Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century. Whether Great Britain was the greatest empire on earth may be a debatable issue, but I feel that few would debate the statement that Britain at this time was the best representative of the three ideas with which this article has to deal.
Take Victorian Britain, then—Britain at the height of its empire; the Britain of Gladstone and Kitchener; of Trollope, Stevenson, and Kipling; Britain of the Crystal Palace, the Light Brigade, and the green playing fields of Eton; Britain with all its faults, foibles, and weaknesses—and you still find something great, some deep-rooted strength that would not be amiss in the world today.
Imperialism, in the modern mad and emotion-driven plunge towards racial equality, is considered one of the greatest evils of the latter half of the last millennium. It is argued that the white, European ‘race’ was no better than the peoples it conquered—indeed, if all that is said may be believed, it was a great deal worse. And this is, in part, true. But the fact remains that, worthy or not, the white men were almost universally respected by those they subjugated. These were peoples of no mean quality, either—the Maoris, Sikhs, Afghans, Sioux, and many others—all fighting tribes made up of some of the finest warriors ever known. Yet, although they fought the white man, they also respected him—in war as well as in peace.
This was not due to the white man’s superior weapons—the tribesmen were often armed with similar, if fewer—but to something yet deeper which permeated the dealings of most of the European nations, and particularly the British nation, with the native tribes. When the Zulus were finally conquered by the British, the ‘white masters’ had won their respect—but not without a price. They won it not only at Ulundi, the final battle that ended the Zulu War, but to an even greater extent at Rorke’s Drift where for ten hours the out-numbered white soldiers defended Natal from the invading Impis. And they won it even at the greatest British defeat of the war—Isandlwana—where the Zulus annihilated an entire British regiment but where the last man died fighting.
It was how the British lived no less than how they died that won them the respect of those they ruled. Englishmen had a code—platitudes ingrained in their natures, gradually bred into them and struck into them over centuries: ‘Stick to it and hold out;’ ‘Never go back on a friend;’ ‘Do your duty to God and Country;’ and the sense of the impossibility of shooting the unarmed or the unprotected—‘hitting the man who is down.’
I don't mean that the nation as a whole maintained these principles or even that each Briton subscribed to them, but the British nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came closer than anyone before or since has come to upholding them.
There are many items associated with Britain at this time, but I have chosen as significant and yet familiar, the common, cane handled, black silk umbrella. Its ubiquity on Fleet Street during the era under discussion signified it as almost an icon, a badge of the society that formed Britain’s empire and maintained it.
In this age a sort of patronising contempt is shown towards the Victorian era and towards Britain in particular as the greatest representative of the qualities of civilisation, rationalism, and decency. It is now thought ‘free’ or ‘enlightened’ to behave towards others, particularly strangers, in an uncivilised manner, to embrace irrationality, and to exalt indecency. It is not so much that the qualities have come under attack, as that they have simply been thought unimportant and so rejected.
And thus I feel justified in propounding my code. While I can walk down the street and swing my black umbrella, I shall hold to it.
For these three qualities, civilisation, rationalism, and decency, though small in themselves and unable to compass every part of life, take a great place in the three basic relationships belonging to all people: man in relation to other men; man in relation to himself; and man in relation to God, respectively. It is civilisation which enables men to interact with others, rationalism which allows them to respect themselves, and decency which opens to them, in a small and finite way, the heart of their Creator.
It is generally the concern of thinkers and writers (for this first group must necessarily fall into the second if its members intend to produce anything useful) what it is the world needs; and this, changing as it does from time to time, is a broad and nearly inexhaustible subject. That is why, I suppose, people do not tire of hearing about it, whether or not they agree with the propounder’s conclusions.
Yet, for myself, I feel that what the world needs is not something which it has not got, but something which it has, and which it is in danger of losing. We do not, in my opinion, need new experiments, but we do need old principles. The things which we have taken for granted since the beginning of the world are the things which will probably save it in the end. But I am not concerned here with saving the world, so much as simply preserving something in it which I believe to be of value.
I hesitate to give a name to what I am going to discuss. It goes under many—traditionalism and conservatism are two appellations—yet it is scarcely a thing that can be summed up in a word. It is more than a manner of thinking—it is a way of life. It is not a creed but a code. It is what makes those who subscribe to it see the world upside down from the way other people see it. It is not even one thing, but a conglomeration of many and three things in particular. It is impossible to understand the world view under discussion without first understanding the nature of these three elements.
The three elements so vital to the moral health of the world are not strange things, but familiar things; so familiar that, in accordance with the old adage, they have almost become contemptible. They are Civilisation, Rationalism, and Decency.
When I use these three words, I don’t mean by them what perhaps they really mean. The ideas embodied by them cannot be summed up in one word anyway. I chose these three words because what they basically mean to most people is fairly close to what I have used them to mean here.
Civilisation is, simplified, you eating animals instead of animals eating you. Or, if you prefer, complexity in the interests of life. The whole reason men have chosen to band together instead of living separately (which is far easier to do) is for the sake of a better quality of life, whether it be in the nature of safety, comfort, productivity, or social prestige. Men would never work in harmony with other men if they could get what they wanted without having to do it. The reason why they do have to work in harmony is, I suppose, because God did not want seven milliard nations on earth. Man can, however, get carried away by this idea of civilisation. You will recall that God was obliged to confuse the languages at Babel in order to keep mankind from the disgrace of over-achievement. The necessity that forces men to work together and the lingual and ethnic barriers that separate them create a fine balance which helps man along far enough and keeps him from going too far.
Since the beginning of time man has had rules—rules that God gave him and rules that he invented for himself. Adam took the trouble to name the animals, probably as part of a greater project of compiling the first dictionary. Men like structure and definition and where there isn’t a sharp line, they will draw one.
For instance, it was men who made up the rule that the father was dictator in his own family. God set this rule in a milder form in the fifth of the Ten Commandments, but the Ten Commandments were not given until Moses and men held absolute sway in their families before Moses’ time. The idea of authority and government outside oneself is one of the most important cornerstones of civilisation. God made man to govern himself. Man made it necessary for other men to govern him.
The form this sort of government takes is that of the coercion of the individual by the group for the sake of the group. Even in the most absolute monarchy power does not rest with one man—power is men: the group.
And it is here where the most serious problem of civilisation appears. Man was never made for the sake of men. Man was first made an individual. Civilisation is not and never could be an end in itself; it is simply (as mentioned before) a means to an end.
The whole trouble begins with men’s rules. Men are creatures of habit. In order to save themselves the trouble of thinking, they invent rules which will make the decisions for them. The trouble starts when men forget why they made the rules in the first place and that rules are made for men, not men for rules. A group of men acting according to a set of rules can become a very ugly monster indeed.
You will recall that civilisation’s purpose is to make life better in some way. This function of making life better is sometimes confused with efficiency and efficiency becomes the goal. But efficiency cannot be a goal any more than civilisation can. To do something faster or better in order to be able to do something else faster or better never did anybody any good. Progress for its own sake is not progress.
Civilisation certainly does make things better in certain ways. A group of men may more easily defend each other. They can build cities and fortifications. They can trade and do business. They can explore new territories. No one man ever built a cathedral or a suspension bridge on his own. Civilisation stands for scientific progress, national security, and a higher standard of living. These things are not common to small, scattered tribes, but to large empires. But again arises the qualification that there must be somehow a balance. The tower may rise so high that it falls and crushes those it was intended to protect.
It is on this basis that civilisation, in the form of government and authority, is attacked. It is true that when men work together they defraud, cheat, and wrong each other, but it is also true that when they work together they help and benefit each other. It may be a simpler life to follow the clan model and appoint each man the lord of his own home and his own property, but it may not be a better life. It may be more free to wear a grass skirt instead of a silk tie, to hunt goats instead of buy butter, to jump naked around a bonfire instead of sit in a pew and sing hymns, to eat a man for lunch instead of ask him out to lunch: but it may not be more desirable.
And there is more to the idea of civilisation than mutual collaboration. It is expressed in the adjective ‘civilised.’ Civilised men put on with their clothes a certain decorum and sense of propriety. Politeness is policy. They know that no matter how much they may hate a man they do not call him names to his face because that would upset the delicate social balance, the necessary link between man and man on which civilisation is based. Men conduct ‘civilised’ warfare, a ludicrous mixture of enlightenment and barbarism in which even a life and death struggle has rules. These rules are based on the remaining two pillars, rationalism and decency.
But the most evident point of civilisation is not so much its necessity or its expediency, as the simple fact that it is preferable to savagery—that people want it. Perhaps it is more natural for man to live in a barbaric state, but I think it is the other way round—that men started out civilised and some few bohemians and freethinkers set out to explore the uncharted waters of primalism. It is certainly true that the majority, even without knowing it, prefer civilisation.
This is not in the slightest sense unnatural. Men don’t prefer civilisation only because it makes life better but because it appeals to an inborn sense of dignity as well. I have said that men love rules; they love rules because they protect men from themselves. Civilisation is not only men not being eaten by animals, but men not being eaten by other men. It is this love of the ritual of rules and government that makes the word ‘civilised’ a complimentary adjective.
Civilisation and rationalism are often thought to go hand in hand. This is not necessarily true, but in one sense it is, because rationalism is a necessary prerequisite to civilisation. Rationalism allows a man to give up present comfort in return for future good. Without this ability a man would never be able to work with other men for the sake of a common goal.
Rationalism has become a negative term to some because of the rationalistic idea that nothing exists that cannot be encompassed by the mind. This is certainly wrong because the mind cannot even encompass its own self. But although rationalism has its faults, it is still in some respects a good and commendable thing.
Although there are many definitions of rationalism (and probably none of them are right), I’ve added yet another to the tally--my own: Rationalism is being grateful to God for giving you a head by using it. I really think that the best way of being grateful for anything is to use it for its intended purpose. God would never have given us heads if He had not intended us to think, and it would be base ingratitude if, after having been given the invaluable gift of a complex and powerful thinking organ with ability to store huge quantities of memory, we went about all day doing nothing but stupid things.
It is arguably morally wrong to do stupid things. I will not make this argument. I think that doing stupid things is an inevitable by-product of doing anything at all. The bravest men and those who have accomplished the most for mankind have all done many stupid things in the process, as you may learn from any biography. In order to do something good you must first overcome the fear of doing something stupid.
But despite the impossibility of completely eradicating unintelligent deeds from one’s record, the brain was given to man so that he might avoid idiocy as much as possible. In my definition I do not mean rationalism to mean using one’s intellect to explain everything he observes around him, but rather using his intellect (in accordance with divine direction) to determine how to respond to his environment. I mean this especially as opposed to allowing man’s desires or emotions to control his actions. The greatest asset of man’s intellect (and one signal area where it differs from an animal’s) is its ability to grasp time and eternity. Man is able to interpret the present with the aid of the past, and to compromise the present for the sake of the future. He has a perspective in the fourth dimension.
This was not given him by accident, and it carries with it a grave responsibility. Men know that their actions bring consequences and these consequences are typically foreseen. Rationalism allows men to weigh these consequences in the balance of right and wrong. It also allows men to sacrifice physical realities for the sake of abstract principles. It is a step into the unseen.
Unlike any other creature, man is judged by the choices he makes. Rationalism is the glue that holds together the disordered fibres of our wills and emotions. It is the screw that holds our courage to the sticking place and the greatest ally of conscience. No man can say he is the victim of circumstance: rationalism precludes that excuse.
But there is one area of ethics which rationalism cannot cover. This is the idea of decency. Decency requires a suspension of rational thought because it has no rational basis—at least, none that is readily apparent. But decency is as necessary as civilisation or rationalism—more so: for there is hope for an uncivilised and irrational being if he is still a decent one.
The word has gotten rather a bad rap over the years, as many an excellent word has, but in its original use it was quite a good expression. If you asked anyone what decency means, he might have difficulty telling you, but he would have no difficulty at all telling you what decency is. Decency is not hitting the other fellow when he can’t hit back. Decency is stepping aside for the weaker party. Decency is not using certain words and phrases—not around women, at any rate. The most notable thing about decency is its utter unsoundness logically speaking. There is really no logical reason why you should not hit someone who can’t hit you back. If there is no hope of saving a drowning man and diving in after him will only ensure your own death as well, the reasonable thing is to stay safely out of it; but decency demands otherwise. The only sense in which the principle is obvious is in that it is self-evident.
Decency is, then (if I may make so bold as to give it a definition), the distinguishing between two separate items; or the recognition of what is sacred. Some people look on the world as one vast mass of impersonal matter. The truth is that the universe is made up of two kinds of things: what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is temporal and what is eternal.
Decency is inborn. It is the single greatest link between a man and all the rest of humanity, the great common invariable. When we first enter life our views of it are necessarily somewhat objective, but in the area of decency we know what every man who ever lived has always known. And we know it until we die.
When one speaks of civilisation or rationalism or decency, whether together or separate, one country, one people, and one historic period generally come to mind. I am speaking of the kingdom of Great Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century. Whether Great Britain was the greatest empire on earth may be a debatable issue, but I feel that few would debate the statement that Britain at this time was the best representative of the three ideas with which this article has to deal.
Take Victorian Britain, then—Britain at the height of its empire; the Britain of Gladstone and Kitchener; of Trollope, Stevenson, and Kipling; Britain of the Crystal Palace, the Light Brigade, and the green playing fields of Eton; Britain with all its faults, foibles, and weaknesses—and you still find something great, some deep-rooted strength that would not be amiss in the world today.
Imperialism, in the modern mad and emotion-driven plunge towards racial equality, is considered one of the greatest evils of the latter half of the last millennium. It is argued that the white, European ‘race’ was no better than the peoples it conquered—indeed, if all that is said may be believed, it was a great deal worse. And this is, in part, true. But the fact remains that, worthy or not, the white men were almost universally respected by those they subjugated. These were peoples of no mean quality, either—the Maoris, Sikhs, Afghans, Sioux, and many others—all fighting tribes made up of some of the finest warriors ever known. Yet, although they fought the white man, they also respected him—in war as well as in peace.
This was not due to the white man’s superior weapons—the tribesmen were often armed with similar, if fewer—but to something yet deeper which permeated the dealings of most of the European nations, and particularly the British nation, with the native tribes. When the Zulus were finally conquered by the British, the ‘white masters’ had won their respect—but not without a price. They won it not only at Ulundi, the final battle that ended the Zulu War, but to an even greater extent at Rorke’s Drift where for ten hours the out-numbered white soldiers defended Natal from the invading Impis. And they won it even at the greatest British defeat of the war—Isandlwana—where the Zulus annihilated an entire British regiment but where the last man died fighting.
It was how the British lived no less than how they died that won them the respect of those they ruled. Englishmen had a code—platitudes ingrained in their natures, gradually bred into them and struck into them over centuries: ‘Stick to it and hold out;’ ‘Never go back on a friend;’ ‘Do your duty to God and Country;’ and the sense of the impossibility of shooting the unarmed or the unprotected—‘hitting the man who is down.’
I don't mean that the nation as a whole maintained these principles or even that each Briton subscribed to them, but the British nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came closer than anyone before or since has come to upholding them.
There are many items associated with Britain at this time, but I have chosen as significant and yet familiar, the common, cane handled, black silk umbrella. Its ubiquity on Fleet Street during the era under discussion signified it as almost an icon, a badge of the society that formed Britain’s empire and maintained it.
In this age a sort of patronising contempt is shown towards the Victorian era and towards Britain in particular as the greatest representative of the qualities of civilisation, rationalism, and decency. It is now thought ‘free’ or ‘enlightened’ to behave towards others, particularly strangers, in an uncivilised manner, to embrace irrationality, and to exalt indecency. It is not so much that the qualities have come under attack, as that they have simply been thought unimportant and so rejected.
And thus I feel justified in propounding my code. While I can walk down the street and swing my black umbrella, I shall hold to it.
For these three qualities, civilisation, rationalism, and decency, though small in themselves and unable to compass every part of life, take a great place in the three basic relationships belonging to all people: man in relation to other men; man in relation to himself; and man in relation to God, respectively. It is civilisation which enables men to interact with others, rationalism which allows them to respect themselves, and decency which opens to them, in a small and finite way, the heart of their Creator.
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