ot say, "What is
Eugenics?" or "Where on earth are you going?" but only "Woe unto you,
hypocrites, that devour widows' houses and for a pretence use long
words."

Part II

THE REAL AIM

CHAPTER I

THE IMPOTENCE OF IMPENITENCE

The root formula of an epoch is always an unwritten law, just as the
law that is the first of all laws, that which protects life from the
murderer, is written nowhere in the Statute Book. Nevertheless there
is all the difference between having and not having a notion of this
basic assumption in an epoch. For instance, the Middle Ages will
simply puzzle us with their charities and cruelties, their asceticism
and bright colours, unless we catch their general eagerness for
building and planning, dividing this from that by walls and
fences--the spirit that made architecture their most successful art.
Thus even a slave seemed sacred; the divinity that did hedge a king,
did also, in one sense, hedge a serf, for he could not be driven out
from behind his hedges. Thus even liberty became a positive thing like
a privilege; and even, when most men had it, it was not opened like
the freedom of a wilderness, but bestowed, like the freedom of a city.
Or again, the seventeenth century may seem a chaos of contradictions,
with its almost priggish praise of parliaments and its quite barbaric
massacre of prisoners, until we realise that, if the Middle Ages was a
house half built, the seventeenth century was a house on fire. Panic
was the note of it, and that fierce fastidiousness and exclusiveness
that comes from fear. Calvinism was its characteristic religion, even
in the Catholic Church, the insistence on the narrowness of the way
and the fewness of the chosen. Suspicion was the note of its
politics--"put not your trust in princes." It tried to thrash
everything out by learned, virulent, and ceaseless controversy; and it
weeded its population by witch-burning. Or yet again: the eighteenth
century will present pictures that seem utterly opposite, and yet seem
singularly typical of the time: the sack of Versailles and the "Vicar
of Wakefield"; the pastorals of Watteau and the dynamite speeches of
Danton. But we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight
of the idea of _tidying up_ which ran through the whole period, the
quietest people being prouder of their tidiness, civilisation, and
sound taste than of any of their virtues; and the wildest people
having (and this is the most im