ENG 201 (Part-1) Prose

B.A/B.Sc.
Hons-II (Prose) Eng-201 1
ENG 201 PROSE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 2
1. Allegory of Wit and Learning Samuel Johnson 5
2. Mother Tongue Amy Tan 9
3. Individual and Group Identity Desmond Morris 15
4. The Eatanswill Election Charles Dickens 24
5. On Liberty John Stuart Mill 33
6. Courtship Through the Ages James Thurber 42
7. Class Struggles Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 46
8. The Battle of the Ants Henry David Thoreau 54
9. Words and Behaviour Aldous Huxley 56
10. How To Say Nothing In 500 Words Paul Roberts 66
11. War Prayer Mark Twain 78
12. Work Bertrand Russell 81
13. How It Feels To Be Coloured Me Zora Neale Hurston 86
14. A World Not Neatly Divided Amartya Sen 91

B.A/B.Sc. Hons-II (Prose) Eng-201 2
INTRODUCTION
. . . facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the
process, they must never lose their integrity. (VIRGINIA WOOLF)
Prose writing includes biography, autobiography, and essays. Prose is rooted in

fact; however it does more than relate facts. Through the particular choice of facts, their
arrangement, and interpretation, and through the skillful use of language, authors of
prose communicate their own opinions and reveal their own personalities.
An author of a work of PROSE usually writes for a very definite purpose and
audience. The author wants to communicate a particular opinion or thought; that is his
or her purpose. The opinion or thought may be packaged so that it informs readers,
entertains them, or moves them to some action. The author may be writing for an
audience of experts or of casual readers. The author’s tone, or attitude toward the
subject, usually indicates the purpose and audience he or she had in mind in writing the
work. In addition, the work’s title and overall style - the author’s choice and arrangement
of words-may reveal the author’s purpose.
The essay is a very flexible form and has been so ever since it originated with
the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne. He used it as a means of exploring
himself and his ideas about human experience, and his essays were, in a sense, a
means of thinking on paper, of trying things out in writing. And he deliberately
emphasized their tentative and informal quality by calling-them essays, a term he
derived from the French verb essayer-to try. The term “essay” has since come to be
used as a catch-all for non-fictional prose works of limited length. Essays may be long
or short, factual or fictional, practical or playful. They may serve any purpose and take
any form that an essayist wants to tryout. The essay in its pure form uses words to
establish ideas that are addressed directly by the essayist to the reader. Thus, its
essential quality is persuasion. But the essay, is not confined to the form of
straightforward persuasion; it may also be narrative, or dramatic, or poetic in form. Or
an essay may involve a combination of the forms and the longer it is, the more likely. it
will be to combine the various possibilities of form in rich and complex ways. In its pure
form the essay explicitly attempts to persuade us of something by means of an appeal
and argument. In a narrative essay the author becomes a narrator, a storyteller, who
reports directly to us on persons and events. A narrative essay sees its subject in time
and presents it in the form of history. A dramatic essay may take one of two possible
forms. It may take the form of a dialogue between two or more character, in which case
the author is present, if at all, only to perform the duties of a director; to set the scene
and identify the characters whose works and actions are to be witnessed by the reader,
Or it may take the form of a monologue rather than of a dialogue. We use the term
“monologue” here because the speaker in this kind of essay is a dramatic character
rather than the author- or, we might say, the speaker is a character whom the author is
impersonating. An essay is poetic to the extent that its author or speaker appears to be
talking to himself rather than to others. A poetic essay takes the form of meditation
“overheard” by the reader. These definitions might seem to imply that only the pure
form of the essay has persuasive purpose, but this is not the case. In one sense or
another all essays have a persuasive purpose, for they are, after all, views-ways of
looking at a thing rather than the thing itself. When essayists describe something, they
record what they see from their angle of vision, from their point of view in space and
time, because they cannot do otherwise. They can describe something only as they
see it, not as anyone else sees it, nor as it is. Yet, in choosing to describe something,
they implicitly ask us to take their word for what it looks like. The same is true of
essayists who narrate events or report information. They ask us to take their words for
things. Persuasion, then, is at the heart of all essay, but some essayists acknowledge
this and proceed directly about their persuasive business, while others play down their
persuasive intention, or use indirect means to attain their ends. Some essays are
argumentative, while others are narrative, dramatic, or poetic.
PROSE like anything else that you read, will give you more pleasure when you
read it actively and attentively. In particular, an active reader will remember that a work
of PROSE, while factual in nature, represents one author’s version of the truth. When
you actively look for clues about the author’s intentions in a work you will be better; able
to weigh the particular version of the truth that the work presents. The following
reminders will help to make such judgments when your read PROSE. ,
1. The title often indicates the author’s purpose, intended audience, and attitude.
2. The writer of any form of nonfiction-biography, autobiography, or essays-uses

various techniques, including the following:
• Anecdotes to illustrate character traits and portray key events
• Figurative language (similes and metaphors) and sensory language to communicate

important ideas
• Details, incidents, and other evidence as well as analogies to support opinions or

clarify explanations.
• A clear organization-such as chronological order, parallelism, or comparison and

contrast- to help communicate a message
• A clear thesis statement or clearly implied message.
3. The writer of any PROSE PIECE has a purpose in mind. The reader should,
uncover that purpose
Guide for Studying Essay
1. For what audience does the essay seem to have been written?
2. What seems to have been the author’s purpose?
3. What is the author’s attitude toward the essay’s subject?
4. If the essay is narrative, how does it use details and chronological order to involve
the reader? If the essay is descriptive, what concrete language and figures of
speech are used?
5. If the essay is persuasive, what techniques of persuasion are used? How persuasive
is the essay?
6. If the essay is expository, is the main idea stated or implied? What facts, incidents,
and other information are used to explain the main idea?
(Adopted from various sources)

ALLEGORY OF WIT AND LEARNING

Samuel Johnson
Without a genius learning soars in vain;

And without learning genius sinks again;
Their force united crowns the sprightly reign.
(Elphinstion)
Wit and Learning were the children of Apollo, by different mothers; Wit was the
offspring of Euphrosyne, and resembled her in cheerfulness and vivacity; Learning was
born of Sophia, and retained her seriousness and caution. As their mothers were rivals,
they were bred up by them from their birth in habitual opposition, and all means were so
incessantly employed to impress upon them a hatred and contempt of each other, that
though Apollo, who foresaw the ill effects of their discord, endeavoured to soften them,
by dividing his regard equally between them, yet his impartiality and kindness were
without effect; the material animosity was deeply rooted, having been intermingled with
their first ideas, and was confirmed every hour, as fresh opportunities occurred of
exerting it. No sooner were they of age to be received into the apartments of the other
celestials, than Wit began to entertain Venus at her toilet, by aping the solemnity of
Learning, and Learning to divert Minerva at her loom, by exposing the blunders and
ignorance of Wit.
Thus they grew up, with malice perpetually increasing, by the encouragement
which each received from those whom their mother’s had persuaded to patronize and
support them; and longed to be admitted to the table of Jupiter, not so much for the
hope of gaining honour, as of excluding a rival from all pretensions to regard, and of
putting an everlasting stop to the progress of that influence which either believed the
other to have obtained by mean arts and false appearance.
At last the day came, when they were both, with the usual solemnities, received into the
class of superior deities, and allowed to take nectar from the hand of Hebe. But from
that hour Concord lost her authority at the table of Jupiter. The rivals, animated by their
new dignity, and incited by the alternate applauses of the associate powers, harassad
each other by incessant contests, with such a regular vicissitude of victory, that neither
was depressed.
It was observable, that at the beginning of every debate, the advantage was on
the side of Wit; and that, at the first sallies, the whole assembly sparkled, according to
Homer’s expression, with unextinguishable merriment. But Learning would reserve her
strength till the burst of applause was over, and the languor with which the violence of
joy is always succeeded, began to promise more calm and patient attention. She then
attempted her defence, and by comparing one part of her antagonist’s objections with
another, commonly made him confute himself; or, by showing how small a part of the
question he had taken into his view, proved that his opinion could have no weight. The
audience began gradually to lay aside their prepossessions, and rose, at last, with
greater veneration for Learning, but with greater kindness for Wit.
Their conduct was, whenever they desired to recommend themselves to

distinction, entirely opposite. Wit was daring and adventurous; Learning cautious and
deliberate. Wit thought nothing reproachful but dullness; Learning was afraid of no
imputation, but that of error. Wit answered before he understood, lest his quickness of
apprehension should be questioned; Learning paused, where there was no difficulty,
lest any, insidious sophism should lie undiscovered. Wit perplexed every debate by
rapidity and confusion; Learning tired the hearers with endless distinctions, and
prolonged the dispute without advantage, by proving that which never was denied. Wit,
in hopes of shining, would venture to produce what he had not considered, and often
succeeded beyond his own expectation, by following the train of a lucky thought;
Learning would reject every new notion, for fear of being entangled in consequences
which she could not foresee, and was often hindered, by her caution, from pressing her
advantages, and subduing her opponent.
Both had prejudices, which in some degree hindered their progress towards
perfection, and left them open to attacks. Novelty was the darling of Wit, and antiquity of
Learning. To Wit, all that was new was specious; to Learning, whatever was ancient was
venerable. Wit, however, seldom failed to divert those whom he could not convince, and
to convince was not often his ambition; Learning always supported her opinion with so
many collateral truths, that, when the cause was decided against her, her arguments
were remembered with admiration.
Nothing was more common, on either side, than to quit their proper characters,
and to hope for a complete conquest by the use of the weapons which had been
employed against them. Wit would sometimes labor a syllogism, and Learning distort
her features with a jest; but they always suffered by the experiment, and betrayed
themselves to confutation or contempt. The seriousness of Wit was without dignity, and
the merriment of Learning without vivacity.
Their contests, by long continuance, grew at last important, and the divinities
broke into parties. Wit was taken into protection of the laughter-loving Venus, had a
retinue allowed him of Smiles and Jests, and was often permitted to dance among the
Graces. Learning still continued the favorite of Minerva, and seldom went out of her
palace, without a train of the severer virtues, Chastity, Temperance, Fortitude, and
Labour. Wit, cohabiting with Malice, had a son named Satyr, who followed him, carrying
a quiver filled with poisoned arrows, which, where they once drew blood, could by no
skill ever be extracted. These arrows he frequently shot at Learning, when she was
most earnestly or usefully employed, engaged in abstruse inquiries, or giving
instructions to her followers. Minerva therefore deputed Criticism to her aid, who
generally broke the point of Satyr’s arrows, turned them aside, or retorted them on
himself.
Jupiter was at last angry that the peace of the heavenly regions should be in
perpetual danger of violation, and resolved to dismiss these troublesome antagonists to
the lower world. Hither therefore they came, and carried on their ancient quarrel among
mortals, not was either long without zealous votaries. Wit, by his gayety, captivated the
young; and Learning, by her authority, influenced the old. Their power quickly appeared
by very eminent effects: theatres were built for the reception of Wit; and colleges
endowed for the residence of Learning. Each party endeavoured to outvie the other in
cost and magnificence, and to propagate an opinion, that it was necessary, from the first
entrance into life, to enlist in one of the factions; and that none could hope for the regard
of either divinity, who had once entered the temple of the rival power.
There were indeed a class of mortals, by whom Wit and Learning were equally
disregarded; these were the devotees of Plutus, the God of riches; among these it
seldom happened that the gayety of Wit could raise a smile, or the eloquence of
Learning procure attention. In revenge of this contempt they agreed to incite their
followers against them; but the forces that were sent on those expeditions frequently
betrayed their trust; and, in contempt of the orders which they had received, flattered
the rich in public, while they scorned them in their hearts; and when, by this treachery,
they had obtained the favour of Plutus, affected to look with an air of superiority on
those who still remained in the service of Wit and Learning.
Disgusted with these desertions, the two rivals, at the same time, petitioned
Jupiter for re-admission to their native habitations. Jupiter thundered on the right hand,
and they prepared to obey the happy summons. Wit readily spread his wings and
soared loft, but not being able to see far, was bewildered in the pathless immensity of
the ethereal spaces. Learning, who knew the way, shook her pinions; but for want of
natural vigour, could only take short flights: so, after many efforts, they both sunk again
to the ground, and learned from their mutual distress the necessity of union. They
therefore joined their hands, and renewed their flight; Learning was borne up by the
vigour of Wit, and Wit guided by the perspicacity of Learning. They soon reached the
dwellings of Jupiter, and were so endeared to each other, that they lived afterwards in
perpetual concord. Wit persuaded Learning to converse with the Graces, and Learning
engaged Wit in the service of the Virtues. They were now the favorites of all the powers
of heaven, and gladdened every banquet by their presence. They soon after married, at
the command of Jupiter, and had a numerous progeny of Arts and Sciences.
NOTES:
Dr. Johnson is traditionally associated with a “sesquipedalian” vocabulary

(literally “words a foot and a half long”) and was credited even in his lifetime with
purposely employing ponderous and unfamiliar words in order to further the sales of his
great Dictionary. The planning of the essay is worth study. It opens with a statement of
the complexity of the hostility between wit and learning: inherent, malicious, suspicious
and bitter. The main section deals with their public hostility among the gods of classical
Olympus before an audience which appreciated their conflicting but admirable qualities.
Their opposed attitudes and prejudices are analysed, and the poor show they make
when they try to imitate each other is revealed. The distensions they cause among the
gods lead to their being driven into our lower world: their new followers are described
and how both are deserted by their best supporters. Finally they return to Jupiter. Their
success in doing so being due to their combined efforts, the means for restoring
harmony is now clear.
Olympus: the highest mountain in Greece, traditionally (e.g. in the poems of Homer)
the abode of the gods.
Jupiter: “father of gods and men” whom the Romans also called Jove, and the Greeks
Zeus.
Venus: goddess of beauty
Apollo: god of the sun, of poetry and the arts and of healing: this name is one of many
Greek ones for this deity.
Minerva: goddess of wisdom.
Here: female cup-bearer of the gods.
Euphrosyne: spirit of joy
Sophia: spirit of wisdom. These last two are not really gods, but, like Concord, glorified
personifications.
Plutus: god of wealth (hence “plutocrat”, not to be confused with Pluto).
Homer: the greatest Greek epic poet, and arguably the greatest poet in the world, from
whom we derive the usual conception of the Olympian gods.
Mother Tongue
Amy Tan
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than
personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved

language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time
thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image,
a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all-
all the English I grew up with.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was
giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a
dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book,
the Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major
difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it
was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of
English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of
memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-
and- thus”-a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it
suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional
phrases, all the forms of standards English that I had learned in school and through
books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found
myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were
talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not
Waste money that way,” My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any
switch in my English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we’ve
been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he
even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English
that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
So you’ll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I’ll quote
what my mother said during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then
transcribed. During this conversation, my mother was talking about a political gangster
in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family’s, Du, and how the gangster in
his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by comparison.
Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother’s family, and one
day showed up at my mother’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’ what she said in part:
“Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like
Du Zong-but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east
side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him
in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take
seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Ow important person, very hard to
inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for
making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom.
Chinese social life that way. If too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my
wedding. I didn’t see. I heard it. I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese
age I was nineteen.”
You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how
much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street
Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine’s books with
ease-all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they
understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90
percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese.
But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother
tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That
was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed thing, made sense
of the world.
Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks.
Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince
when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other
than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain
wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English.” For example.
But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of
the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited”
English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her
English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed
them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to
support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did
not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her,
or even acted as if they did not hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was
fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this
guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who
had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had
cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York
the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone ‘and say in
an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, “ This is Mrs. Tan.”
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send
me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money/”
And then I said in perfect English, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had
agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”
Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him
front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be
quiet, while telling the stock-broker, “ I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive
the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New
York next week,” And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this
astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the
real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less
humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a
benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken
very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not
apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing.
She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious
to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors.
She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would
have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the
doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her
daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English-lo and behold-we had assurances the CAT
scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and
apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life

as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing
language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in
the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in
shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on
achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. while my English skills were never judged as
poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong _suit. In grade
school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and
scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those
scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math
and science, because in those areas I achieve A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile
or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer.
Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a
matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items
like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, “Even though Tom was
_________Mary thought he was ___________.” And the correct answer always
seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom
was shy, Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure “even though”
limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn’t get
answers like, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous,” Well,
according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have
been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were
supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship – for example, “Sunset is to
nightfall as ___________is to ____________.” And here you would be presented with a
list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to
stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think
that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but is could not block out of my mind the
images already created by the first pair, “ sunset is to nightfall” --- and I would see a
burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of
stars. And all the other pairs of works --- red, bus, stoplight, boring --- just threw up a
mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical
as saying: “ A sunset precedes nightfall” is the same as “ a chill precedes a fever.” The
only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an
associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset,
punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about
achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more
Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian
Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go
into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer.
But I have notices in surveys -- -- in fact, just last week --- those Asian students, as a
whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And
this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English
spoken in the home might also be described as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they
also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science,
which is what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of

disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in
college, after being enrolled as premed. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the
week after I was told by my boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my
talents toward account management.
But it wasn’t until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote
using what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I
had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story
that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line; “That was my
mental quandary in its nascent state,” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader
for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because
these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind-and in fact she did read
my early drafts --- I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the
English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “
simple” ; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be
described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be
described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese
if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to
preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to
capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her
imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded
where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict:
“So easy to read.”
NOTES:
Amy Tan is a novelist and essayist who was born in California only two and a half
years after her parents emigrated from China to the United States. The essay’s title is a
pun, referring at once to the language that nurtures us and, literally, to the language
spoken by Tan’s mother. Tan presents herself here as a writer and not a student of
language, although she holds an M.A. in linguistics from San Jose State University.
Speaking and writing in standard English is essential Tan argues, but the diversity of
cultures in America requires that we acknowledge the different “Englishes” spoken by
immigrants. As you read her essay, think about your own experience in learning English
and about how you respond to the other Englishes you may have heard spoken.
QUESTIONS:
1. Tan uses technical words to distinguish standard English from the English her
mother speaks. Investigate the meanings of the following terms.
a) Scholar
b) Nominalized forms
c) Transcribed
d) Imagery
e) Linguists
f) Semantic opposites
g) Word analogies
h) Freelancer
i) Quandary
j) Nascent
2. What does Tan mean when she says. “Language is the tool of my trade”? What
are the four ways she says language can work?
3. How does Tan use homor as she contrasts the two Englishes in the telephone
conversations she records? How does the tone change when Tan shifts to the
hospital scene? Why do the authorities provide different service and different
information.
4. What is the thesis statement in Tan’s essay? Where does it appear?

INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITY

Desmond Morris
Zoologist Desmond Morris was born in England in 1928 and

studied at Birmingham and Oxford Universities. At Oxford
and the London Zoo, Morris conducted scholarly research
on animals often using his findings to arrive at controversial
explanations of human behavior. Morris has reached a large
popular audience through his books The Naked Ape (1967),
Tlie Human Zoo (1970), Manwatching (1977) and
Bodywatching (1985). The following excerpt is from Man –
watching.
A territory is a defended space. In the broadest sense, there are three kinds of
human territory: tribal, family and personal.
It is rare for people to be driven to physical fighting in defense of these “owned”

spaces, but fight they will, if pushed to the limit. The invading army encroaching on
national territory, the gang moving into a rival district, the trespasser climbing into an or-
chard, the burglar breaking into a house, the bully pushing to the front of a queue, the
driver trying to steal a parking space, all of these intruders are liable to be met with
resistance varying from the rigorous to the savagely violent. Even if the law is on the
side of the intruder, the urge to protect a territory may be so strong that otherwise
peaceful citizens abandon all their usual controls and inhibitions. Attempts to evict
families from their homes, no matter how socially valid the reasons, can lead to siege
conditions reminiscent of the defense of a medieval fortress.
The fact that these upheavals are so rare is a measure of the success of
Territorial Signals as a system of dispute prevention. It is sometimes cynically stated
that “all property is theft,” but in reality it is the opposite. Property, as owned space
which is displayed as owned space, is a special kind of sharing system which reduces
fighting much more than it causes it. Man is a co-operative species, but he is also
competitive, and his struggle for dominance has to be structured in some way if chaos is
to be avoided. The establishment of territorial rights is one such structure. It limits
dominance geo- graphically. I am dominant in my territory and you are dominant in
yours. In other words, dominance is shared out spatially, and we all have some. Even if
I am weak and unintelligent and you can dominate me when we meet on neutral
ground, I can still enjoy a thoroughly dominant role as soon as I retreat to my private
base. Be it ever so humble, there is no place like a home territory.
Of course, I can still be intimidated by a particularly dominant individual who

enters my home base, but his encroachment will be dangerous for him and he will think
twice about it, because he will know that here my urge to resist will be dramatically
magnified and my usual subservience banished. Insulted at the heart of my own
territory, I may easily explode into battle - either symbolic or real-with a result that may
be damaging to both of us.
In order for this to work, each territory has to be plainly advertised as such. Just
as a dog cocks its leg to deposit its personal scent on the trees in its locality, so the
human animal cocks its leg symbolically all over his home base. But because we are
predominantly visual animals we employ mostly visual signals, and it is worth asking
how we do this at the three levels: tribal, family, and personal.
First: the Tribal Territory. We evolved as tribal animals, living in comparatively

small groups; probably of less than a hundred, and we existed like that for millions of
years. It is our basic social unit, a group in which everyone knows everyone else.
Essentially, the tribal territory consisted of a home base surrounded by extended
hunting grounds. Any neighboring tribe intruding on our social space would be propelled
and driven away. As these early tribes swelled into agricultural super – tribes, and
eventually into industrial nations, their territorial defense systems became increasingly
elaborate. The tiny, ancient home base of the hunting tribe became the great capital city,
that primitive warpaint became the flags, emblems, uniforms, and regalia of the
specialized military, and the war-chants became national anthems, marching songs and
bugle calls. Territorial boundary-lines hardened into fixed borders, often conspicuously
patrolled and punctuated with defensive structures – forts and lookout posts,
checkpoints and great walls, and, today, customs barriers.
Today each nation flies its own flag, a symbolic embodiment of its territorial
status. But patriotism is not enough. The ancient tribal hunter lurking inside each citizen
finds himself unsatisfied by membership in such a vast conglomeration of individuals,
most of whom are totally unknown to him personally. He does his best to feel that he
shares a common territorial defense with them all, but the scale of the operation has
become inhuman. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging with a tribe of fifty million or
more. His answer is to form sub-groups, nearer to his ancient pattern, smaller and more
personally known to him – the local club, the teenage going, the union, the specialist
society, the sports association, the political party, the college fraternity, the social clique,
the protest group, and the rest. Rare indeed is the individual who does not belong to at
least one of these splinter groups, and take from it a sense of tribal allegiance and
brotherhood. Typical of all these groups is the development of Territorial Signals –
badges, costumes, headquarters, banners, slogans, and all the other displays of group
identity. This is where the action is, in terms of tribal territorialism, and only when a
major war breaks out does the emphasis shift upwards to the higher group level of the
nation.
Each of these modern pseudo-tribes sets up its own special kind of home base.
In extreme cases non-members are totally excluded, in others they are allowed in as
visitors with limited rights and under a control system of special rules. In many ways
they are like miniature nations, with their own flags and emblems and their own border
guards. The exclusive club has its own “customs barrier”: the doorman who checks your
“passport” (your membership card) and prevents strangers from passing in
unchallenged. There is a government: the club committee; and often special displays of
the tribal elders: the photographs or portraits of previous officials on the walls. At the
heart of the specialized territories there is a powerful feeling of security and importance,
a sense of shared defense against the outside world. Much of the club chatter, both
serious and joking, directs itself against the rottenness of everything outside the club
boundaries in that “other world” beyond the protected portals.
In social organizations which embody a strong class system, such as military

units and large business concerns, there are many territorial rules often unspoken,
which interfere with the official hierarchy. High status individuals, such as officers or
managers, could in theory enter any of the regions occupied by the lower levels in the
pecking order, but they limit this power in a striking way. An officer seldom enters a
sergeant’s mess or a barrack room unless it is for a formal inspection. He respects
those regions as alien territories even though he has the power to go there by virtue of
his dominant role. And in businesses, part of the appeal of unions, over and above their
obvious functions, is that with their officials, headquarters, and meetings they add a
sense of territorial power for the staff workers. It is almost as if each military
organization and business concern consists of two warring tribes: the officers versus the
other ranks, and the management versus the workers. Each has its special home base
within the system, and the territorial defense pattern thrusts itself into what, on the
surface, is a pure social hierarchy. Negotiations between managements and unions are
tribal battles fought out over the neutral ground of a boardroom table, and are as much
concerned with territorial displays as they are with resolving problems of wages and
conditions. Indeed, if one side gives in too quickly and accepts the other’s demands, the
victors feel strangely cheated and deeply suspicious that it may be a trick. What they
are missing is the protracted sequence of ritual and counter-ritual that keeps alive their
group territorial identity.
Likewise, many of the hostile displays of sports fans and teenage gangs are
primarily concerned with displaying their group image to rival fan-clubs and gangs.
Except in rare cases, they do not attack one another’s headquarters, drive out the
occupants, and reduce them to a submissive, subordinate condition. It is enough to
have scuffles on the borderlands between the two rival territories. This is particularly
clear at football matches, where the fan club headquarters becomes temporarily shifted
from the club- house to a section of the stands and where minor fighting breaks out at
the unofficial boundary line between the massed groups of rival supporters. Newspaper
reports play up the few accidents and injuries which do occur on such occasions, but
when these are studied in relation to the total numbers of displaying fans involved it is
clear that the serious incidents represent only a tiny fraction of the overall group
behavior. For every actual punch or kick there are a thousand war-cries, war-dances,
chants, and gestures.
Second: the Family Territory. Essentially, the family is a breeding unit and the
family territory is a breeding ground. At the center of this space, there is the nest – the
bedroom – where, tucked up in bed, we feel at our most territorially secure. In a typical
house the bedroom is upstairs, where a safe nest should be. This puts it farther away
from the entrance hall, the area where contact is made, intermittently, with the outside
world. The less private reception rooms, where intruders are allowed access, are the
next line of defense. Beyond them, outside the walls of the building, there is often a
symbolic remnant of the ancient feeding grounds – a garden. Its symbolism often
extends to the plants and animals it contains, which cease to be nutritional and become
merely decorative – flowers and pets. But like a true territorial space it has
conspicuously displayed boundary line, the garden fence, wall, or railings. Often no
more than a token barrier, this is the outer territorial demarcation, separating the private
world of the family from the public world beyond. To cross it puts any visitor or intruder
at an immediate disadvantage. As he crosses the threshold, his dominance wanes,
slightly but unmistakably. He is entering an area where he senses that he must ask
permission to do simple things that he would consider a right elsewhere. Without lifting
a finger, the territorial owners exert their dominance. This is done by all the hundreds of
small ownership “markers” they have deposited on their family territory: the ornaments,
the “possessed” objects positioned in the rooms and on the walls; the furnishings, the
furniture, the colors, the patterns, all owner-chosen and all making this particular home
base unique to them.
It is one of the tragedies of modern architecture that, there has been a

standardization of these vital territorial living units. One of the most important aspects of
a home is that it should be similar to other homes only in a general way, and that in
detail it should have many differences, making it a particular home. Unfortunately, it is
cheaper to build a row of houses, or a block of flats, so that all the family living-units are
identical, but the territorial urge rebels against this trend and house-owners struggle as
best they can to make their mark on their mass-produced properties. They do this with
garden-design, with front-door colors, with curtain patterns, with wallpaper and all the
other decorative elements that together create a unique and different family
environment. Only when they have completed this nest-building do they feel truly “at
home” and secure.
When they venture forth as a family unit they repeat the process in a minor way.
On a day-trip to the seaside, they load the car with personal belongings and it becomes
their temporary, portable territory. Arriving at the beach they stake out a small territorial
claim, marking it with rugs, towels, baskets, and other belongings to which they can
return from their seaboard wanderings. Even if they all leave it at once to bathe, it
retains a characteristic territorial quality and other family groups arriving will recognize
this by setting up their own “home” bases at a respectful distance. Only when the whole
beach has filled up with these marked spaces will newcomers start to position
themselves in such a way that the inter-base distance becomes reduced. Forced to
pitch between several existing, beach territories they will feel a momentary sensation of
intrusion, and the established “owners” will feel a similar sensation of invasion, even
though they are not being directly inconvenienced.
The same territorial scene is being played out in parks and fields and on
riverbanks, wherever family groups gather in their clustered units. But if rivalry for
spaces creates mild feelings of hostility, it is true to say that, without the territorial
system of sharing and space-limited dominance, there would be chaotic disorder.
Third: the Personal Space. If a man enters a waiting room and sits at one end of
a long row of empty chairs, it is possible to predict where the next man to enter will seat
himself. He will not sit next to the first man, nor will he sit at the far end, right away from
him. He will choose a position about halfway between these two points. The next man to
enter will take the largest gap left, and sit roughly in the middle of that, and so on, until
eventually the latest newcomer will be forced to select a seat that places him right next
to one of the already seated men. Similar patterns can be observed in cinemas, public
urinals, airplanes, trains, and buses. This is a reflection of the fact that we all carry with
us, everywhere we go, a portable territory called a Personal Space. If people move
inside this space, we feel threatened. If they keep too far outside it, we feel rejected.
The result is a subtle series of spatial adjustments, usually operating quite
unconsciously and producing ideal compromises as far as this is possible. If a situation
becomes too crowded, then we adjust our reactions accordingly and allow our personal
space to shrink. Jammed into an elevator, a rush-hour compartment, or a packed room,
we give up altogether and allow body-to-body contact, but when we relinquish our
Personal Space in this way, we adopt certain special techniques. In essence, what we
do is to convert these other bodies into “non-persons.” We studiously ignore them, and
they us. We try not to face them if we can possibly avoid it. We wipe all expressiveness
from our faces, letting them go blank. We may look up at the ceiling or down at the floor,
and we reduce body moments to a minimum. Packed together like sardines in a tin, we
stand dumbly still, sending out as few social signals as possible.
Even if the crowding is less severe, we still tend to cut down our social
interactions in the presence of large numbers. Careful observations of children in play
groups revealed that if they are high-density groupings there is less social interaction
between the individual children, even though there is theoretically more opportunity for
such contacts. At the same time, the high-density groups show a higher frequency of
aggressive and destructive behavior patterns in their play. Personal Space – “elbow
room” is a vital commodity for the human animal, and one that cannot be ignored
without risking serious trouble.
Of course, we all enjoy the excitement of being in a crowd, and this reaction
cannot be ignored. But there are crowds and crowds. It is pleasant enough to be in a
“spectator crowd,” but not so appealing to find yourself in the middle of a rush-hour
crush. The difference between the two is that the spectator crowd is all facing in the
same direction and concentrating on a distant point of interest. Attending a theatre,
there are twinges of rising hostility toward the stranger who sits down immediately in
front of you or the one”, who squeezes into the seat next to you. The shared armrest
can become a polite, but distinct, territorial boundary-dispute region. However, as soon
as the show begins, these invasions of Personal Space are forgotten and the attention
is focused beyond the small space where the crowding is taking place. Now, each
member of the audience feels himself spatially related, not to his cramped neighbors,
but to the actor on the stage, and this distance is, if anything, too great. In the rush-hour
crowd, by contrast, each member of the pushing throng is competing with his neighbors
all the time. There is no escape to a spatial relation with a distant actor, only the
pushing, shoving bodies all around.
Those of us who have to spend a great deal of time in crowded conditions

become gradually better able to adjust, but no one can ever become completely
immune to invasions of Personal Space. This is because they remain forever
associated with either powerful hostile or equally powerful loving feelings. All through
our childhood we will have been held to be loved and held to be hurt, and anyone who
invades our Personal Space when we are adults is, in effect, threatening to extend his
behavior into one of these two highly charged areas of human interaction. Even if his
motives are clearly neither hostile nor sensual, we still find it hard to suppress our
reactions to his close approach. Unfortunately, different countries have different ideas
about exactly how close is close. It is easy enough to test your own “space reaction”;
when you are talking to someone in the street or in any open space, reach out with your
arm and see where the nearest point on his body comes. If you hail from western
Europe, you will find that he is at roughly fingertip distance from you. In other words, as
you reach out, your fingertips will just about make contact with his shoulder. If you come
from eastern Europe you will find you are standing at “wrist distance.” If you come from
the Mediterranean region you will find that you are much closer to your companion, a
little more than “elbow distance.”
Trouble begins when a member of one of these cultures meets and talks to one
from another. Say a British diplomat meets an Italian or an Arab diplomat at an embassy
function. They start talking in a friendly way, but soon the fingertips man begins to feel
uneasy. Without knowing quite why, he starts to back away gently from his companion.
The companion edges forward again. Each tries in his way to set up a Personal Space
relationship that suits his own background. But it is impossible to do. Every time the
Mediterranean diplomat advances to a distance that feels comfortable for him, the
British diplomat feels threatened. Every time the Briton moves back, the other feels
rejected. Attempts to adjust this situation often lead to a talking pair shifting slowly
across a room, and many an embassy reception is dotted with western-European
fingertip-distance men pinned against the walls by eager elbow-distance men. Until
such differences are fully understood and allowances made, these minor differences in
“body territories” will continue to act as an alienation factor which may interfere in a
subtle way with diplomatic harmony and other forms of international transaction.
If there are distance problems when engaged in conversation, then there are
clearly going to be even bigger difficulties where people must work privately in a shared
space. Close proximity of others, pressing against the invisible boundaries of our
personal body-territory makes it difficult to concentrate on non-social matters. Flat-
mates, students sharing a study, sailors in the cramped quarters of a ship, and office
staff in crowded cork-places, all have to face this problem. They solve it by “cocooning.”
They use a variety of devices to shut themselves off from the others present. The best
possible cocoon, of course, is a small private room - a den, a private office, a study, or a
studio-which physically obscures the presence of other nearby territory-owners. This is
the ideal situation for non-social work, but the space-sharers cannot enjoy this luxury.
Their cocooning must be symbolic. They may, in certain cases, be able to erect small
physical barriers, such as screens and partitions, which give substance to their invisible
Personal Space boundaries, but when this cannot be done, other means must be
sought. One of these is the “favored object.” Each space-sharer develops a preference,
repeatedly expressed until it becomes a fixed pattern, for a particular chair, or table or
alcove. Others come to respect this, and friction is reduced. This system is often
formally arranged (this is my desk, that is yours), but even where it is not, favored
places soon develop. Professor Smith has a favorite chair in the library. It is not formally
his, but he always uses it and others avoid it. Seats around a mess-room table, or a
boardroom table, become almost personal property for specific individuals. Even in the
home, father has his favorite chair for reading the newspaper or watching television.
Another device is the blinkers-posture. Just as a horse that over-reacts to other horses
and the distractions of the noisy race-course is given: a pair of blinkers to shield its
eyes, so people studying privately in a public place put on pseudo-blinkers in the form of
shielding hands. Resting their elbows on the table, they sit with their hands screening
their eyes from the scene on either side.
A third method of reinforcing the body-territory is to use personal markers. Books,

papers, and other personal belongings are scattered around the favored site to render it
more privately owned in the eyes of companions. Spreading out one’s belongings is a
well-known trick in public-transport situations, where a traveller tries to give the
impression that seats next to him are taken. In many contexts carefully arranged
personal markers can act as an effective territorial display, even in the absence of the
territory owner. Experiments in a library revealed that placing a pile of magazines on the
table in one seating position successfully reserved that place for an average of 77
minutes. If a sports-jacket was added, draped over the chair, then the “reservation
effect” lasted for over two hours. In these ways, we strengthen the defenses of our
Personal Spaces, keeping out intruders with the minimum of open hostility. As with all
territorial behavior, the object is to defend space with signals rather than with fists and at
all three levels - the tribal, the family, and the personal-it is a remarkably efficient system
of space sharing. It does not always seem so, because newspapers and newscasts
inevitably magnify the exceptions and dwell on those cases where the signals have
failed and wars have broken out, gangs have fought, neighboring families have feuded,
or colleagues have clashed, but for every territorial signal that has failed, there are
millions of others that have not. They do not rate a mention in the news, but they
nevertheless constitute a dominant feature of human society – the society of a
remarkably territorial animal.
QUESTIONS
1. What is the thesis of the selection? Locate the sentence(s) in which Morris states
his main idea. If he does not state the thesis explicitly, express it in your own
words.
2. Why do territories prevent disputes, according to Morris? How do humans signal

the existence of their territories?
3. Why, according to Morris, aren’t people’s needs to be part of a tribe satisfied by

citizenship in a nation? What other ways do people find to satisfy their tribal
needs?
4. What do we do when we cannot avoid having our personal space invaded?
5. Refer to your dictionary as needed to define the following words in the selection:
encroaching (paragraph 2), regalia (5), portals (9), protracted (9), demarcation
(11), proximity (20).
6. What three types of the territory does Morris describe? What is the basis for this
classification? What subcategories does Morris develop within each kind of
territory? How does he use these classifications and sub-classifications to
illustrate his thesis?
7. Examine Morris’s introduction. Why is it so lengthy? What mode of development

does he use in this introduction?
8. How does Morris signal he is moving from the discussion of one type of
territoriality to another? What kind of transitional signals does he provide within
each section?
9. Who do you think is the intended audience for this essay? Consider such stylistic
and content features as sentence and paragraph length, types of support, and
vocabulary.
THE EATANSWILL ELECTION

Charles Dickens
The noise and bustle which ushered in the morning were sufficient to dispel from
the mind of the most romantic visionary in existence any associations but those which
were immediately connected with the rapidly approaching election. The beating of
drums, the blowing of horns and trumpets, the shouting of men, and tramping of horses,
echoed and re-echoed through the streets from the earliest dawn of day; and an
occasional fight between the light skirmishes of either party at once enlivened the
preparations and agreeably diversified their character.
“Well Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick, as his valet appeared at his bedroom door just as
he was concluding his toilet, “all alive to-day, I suppose?”
“Reg’lar game sir,” replied Mr. Weller; “our people’s a collecting down at the Town
Arms, and they’re a hollering themselves hoarse already.” .
“Ah,” said Mr. Pickwick “do they seem devoted to their party, Sam ?”
“Never see such devotion in my life, sir.”
“Energetic, eh ?” said Mr. Pickwick.
. “Uncommon”, replied Sam; “I never see men eat and drink so much afore. 1
wonder they a’nt afeer’d o’bustin.
“That’s the mistaken kindness of the gentry here,” said Mr. Pickwick.
“Werry likely, “ replied Sam, briefly.
“Fine, fresh, hearty fellows they seem,” said Mr. Pickwick, glancing from the
window.
“Werry fresh,” replied Sam; “me and the two waiters at the Peacock, has been a
pumpin’ over the independent voters as supped there last night.”
“Pumping’ over the independent voters!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.
“Yes,” said his attendant, “every man slept vere he fell down; we dragged’em out,
one by one, this mornin’, and put ‘em under the pump and they’re in reg’lar fine order
now, ShiIlin’ a head the committee paid for that ‘ere job.”
“Can such things be!” exclaimed the astonished Mr. Pickwick.

__
“Lord bless your heart, sir,” said Sam, “why, where was you half-baptized?
that’s nothin’ that ant.”
“Nothing ?” said Mr. Pickwick.
“Nothin’ at all sir,” replied his attendant. “The night a fore the last day o’ the
election here, the opposite party bribed the barmaid at the Town Arms to hocus the
brandy and water of fourteen unpolled electors as was a stoppin’ in the house.”
“What do you mean by ‘hocussing, brandy and water ?” inquired Mr. Pickwick.
“Puttin’ laud’num in it,” replied Sam. “Blessed if she didn’t send ‘em all to sleep till twelve
hours after the election was over. They took one man upto the booth, in a truck, fast
asleep, by way of experiment, but it was no go – they wouldn’t poll him; so they brought
him back and put him to bed again.”
“Strange practices these,” said Mr. Pickwick; half speaking to himself and half
addressing Sam.
“Not half so strange as a miraculous circumstance as happened to my own

father, at an election time in the wery place, sir,” replied Sam.
“What was that ?” inquired Mr. Pickwick.
“Why, he drove a coach down here once,” said Sam; “election time came on, and
he was engaged by vun party to br’ng down voters from London. Night afore he was a
going to drive up, committee ont’ other side sends for him quietly, and away he goes
with the messenger, who shows him in – large room – lots of gen’l’m’n–heaps of papers,
pens and ink, and all that ‘ere. ‘Ah, Mr. Weller, says the genl’m’n in the chair, ‘glad to
see you, sir; how are you?”-‘Werry well, thank’ee sir,’ says my father; ‘I’ hope you’re
pretty middlin,’ says he-‘Pretty well, thank’ee, sir,’ says the gen’I’m’n;’sit down, Mr.
Wellers pray sit down, sir.’ So my father sits down, and he and the gen’I’m’n looks very
hard at each other. You don’t remember me?’ says the gen’l’m’n: – ‘Can’t say I do,’
says? my father. ‘Oh, I know you,’ says the gen’l’m’n; ‘know’d, you ven you was a boy,
says he. ‘Well, I don’t remember you, says my father. ‘That’ I very odd,’ says the gen’l’
m’n-’Werry,’ says my father. “You must have a bad memory Mr. Weller,’ says the
gen’l’m’n-’Well, it is a wery bad ‘un’, says my father.-’I thought so,’ says the gen’l’m’n.
So then they pairs him out a glass, of wine, and gammons him about his driving, and
gets him into a reg’lar good humour and at last shoves a twenty-pound note in his hand.
‘It is werry bad road between this and London,’ says the gen’I’m’n.-’Here and there it is
a heavy road,’ says my father.-’Specially near the canal, I think,’ says the gen’l’m’n. –
Nasty bit that ‘ere,’ says, my father. – ‘Well, Mr. Weller,’ says the gen’l’m’n. ‘You’re a
very good whip, and can do what you like with your horses, we know. We’re all very
fond o’ you, Mr. Weller, so incase you should have an accident when you’re a bringing
these here voters dawn, and should tip ‘em over into the canal without hurtin’ of ‘em,
this is for yourself,’ says he – “Gen’l’n’n you’re very kind,’ says my father, and I’ll drink
your health in another glass of wine,’ says he; which he did, and then buttons up the
money, and bows himself out. You wouldn’t believe’ sir,” continued Sam, with a look of
inexpressible impudence at his master, “that on the wery day as he came down with the
voters, his coach was upset on than ‘ere very spot, and every man on ‘em was turned
into the canal.”
“And got out again?” inquired Mr. Pickwick, hastily.
“Why replied Sam, very slowly. “I rather think one old gen’l’m’n was missin’; I
know his hat was found, but a’nt quite certain whether his head was in it or not. But
what I look at, is the extraordinary, and wonderful coincidence, that after what that
gen’l’m’n’ said, my father’s coach should be upset in that very place and on that very
day!
“It is, no doubt, a very extraordinary circumstance indeed,” said Mr. Pickwick.
“But brush my hat, Sam, for I hear Mr. Winkle calling me to breakfast.”
With these words Mr. Pickwick descended to the parlour, where he found
breakfast laid, and the family already assembled. The meal was hastily dispatched;
each of the gentlemen’s hats was decorated with an enormous blue favour, made up by
the fair hands of Mrs. Pott herself; and as Mr. Winkle had undertaken to escort that lady
to a housetop, in the immediate vicinity of the hustings, Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Pott
repaired alone to the Town Arms, from the back window of which one of Mr. Slumkey’s
committee was addressing the small boys, and one girl, whom he dignified, at every
second sentence, with the imposing title of “men of Eatanswil;” whereat the six small
boys aforesaid cheered prodigiously.
The stable yard exhibited unequivocal symptoms of the’ glory and strength of the
Eatanswill Blues. There was a regular army of blue flags, some with one handle, and
some with two, exhibiting appropriate devices, in golden characters four feet high, and
stout in proportion. There was a grand band of trumpets, bassoons, and drums,
marshalled four abreast, and earning their money, if every man did, especially the drum
beaters, who were very muscular. There were bodies of constables with blue staves,
twenty committee-men with blue scarfs and a mob of voters with blue cockades. There
were electors on horseback, and electors a-foot. There was an open carriage and four,
for the Honourable Samuel Slumkey’; and there were four carriages and pair, for his
friends and supporters; and the flags were rustling, and the ‘band was playing, and
constables were swearing and the twenty committec-men were squabbling, and the
mob were shouting and horses were backing, and the post-boy perspiring; and
everybody, and everthing, then and there assembled, was for the special use, behoof,
honour and renown, of the Honourable Samuel Slumkyey, of Slumkey Hall, one of the
candidates for the representation of the Borough on Eatanswill, in the Commons House
of Parliament of the United Kindom
Loud and long were the cheers, and mighty was the rustling of one of the blue
flags, with “Liberty of the Press” inscribed there on, when the sandy head of Mr. Pott
was discerned in one of the windows, by the mob beneath; and tremendous was the
enthusiasm when the Honourable Samuel Slumkey himself, in topboots, and a blue
neckerchief, advanced and seized the hand of the said Pott, and melodramatically
testifies by gestures to the crowd, his ineffaceable obligations to the Eatanswill Gazette.
“Is everything ready?” said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey to Mr. Perker.
“Everything, my dear sir,” was the little man’s reply.
“Nothing has been omitted, I hope?” said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey.
“Nothing has been left undone, my dear sir – nothing whatever. There are twenty
washed men at the street door for you to shake hands with and six children in arms that
you’re to pat on the head, and inquire the age of; be particular about the children my
dear sir, – it has always a great effect, that sort of thing.”
“I’ll take care,” said the Honourable Samuel slumkey.
“And, Perhaps, my dear sir –” said the cautious little man, “perhaps if you could –
I don’t mean to say it’s indispensable – but if you could manage to kiss one of them, it
would produce a very great impression on the crowd.
“Would’nt it have as good an effect if the proposer or seconder did that?” said the
Honourable Samuel Slumkey.
“Why, I am afraid it wouldn’et,” replied the agent; “if it were done by yourself, my
dear sir, I think it would make you very popular.
“Very well,” said the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, with a resigned air, “then it
must be done. That’s all.”
“Arrange the procession,” cried the twenty committee-men.
Amidst the cheers of the assembled throng, the band, and the constables, and
the committee-men and the voters, and the horsemen, and the carriages, took their
places – each of the two-horse vehicles being closely pakced with as many gentlemen
could manage to stand upright in it; and that assigned to Mr. Perker, containing Mr.
Pickwick, Mr. Tumman, Mr. Snodgrass, and about half a dozen of the committee
besides.
There was a moment of awful suspense as the procession waited for the
Honourable Samuel Slumkey to step into his carriage. Suddenly, the crowd set up a
great cheering.
“He has come out,” said little Mr. Perker, greatly excited; the more so as their
position did not enable them to see what was going forward.
Another cheer, much louder.
“He has shaken hands with the men,” cried the little agent.
Another cheer, far more vehement.
“He has patted the babies on the head,” said Mr. Perker trembling with anxiety.
A roar of applause that rent the air.
“He has kissed one of ‘em!” exclaimed the delighted little man.
A second roar.
“He has kissed another,” gasped the excited manager.
A third roar.
‘He’s kissing ‘em all!” screamed the enthusiastic little gentleman. And hailed by
the deafening shouts of the multitude, the procession moved on.
How or by what means it became mixed up with the other procession, and how it
was ever extricated forcing the confusion consequent thereupon, is more than we can
undertake to describe, inasmuch as Mr. Pickwick’s, hat was knocked over his eyes,
nose, and mouth by one spoke of a Buff flag-staff, very early in the proceedings. He
describes himself as being surrounded on every side, when he could catch a glimpse of
the scene, by angry and ferocious countenances, by a vast cloud of dust, and by a
dense crowd combatants. He represents himself as being forced from the carriage by
some unseen power, and being personally engaged m a pugilistic encounter. but with
whom, or how, or why, he is wholly unable to state. He then ,felt himself forced. up’
some wooden: steps by the persons from behind; and on removing his hat, found
himself surrounded by his friends, in the very front of the left hand side of the hustings.
The right was reserved for the Buff party, and the centre for the Mayor and his officers;
one of whom-the fat crier of Eatans will-was ringing an enormous bell, by way of
commanding silence, while Mr. Horatio Fizkin, and the Honouable Samuel Slumkey,
with their hands upon their hearts, were bowing with the utmost affability to the troubled
sea of heads that mundated the open space in front; and from whence arose a storm of
groans, and shouts, and yells, and hooting, that would have done honour to an
earthquake.
There’s Winkle,” said Mr. Tupman, puIling his friend by the sleeve.
“Where ?” said Mr. Pickwick, putting on his spectacles, which he had fortunately
kept in his pocket hitherto.
“There,” said Mr. Tupman, “on the top of that house.” And there sure enough in
the leaden gutter of a tiled roof, were Mr. Winkle and Mrs. Pott, comfortable seated in a
couple of chairs, waving their handkerchiefs in token of recognition – a compliment
which Mr. Pickwick returned by kissing his hand to the lady.
The proceedings had not yet commenced; and as an inactive crowd is generally
disposed to be jocose, this very innocent action was sufficient to awaken their
facetiousness.
“Oh’ you wicked old rascal,” cried one voice, “looking after the girls, are you?”
“Oh you, wenerable sinner,” cried another.
“Putting on his spectacles to look at a married ‘ooman !” said a third.”
“I see him a winkin at her with his wicked old eye,” shouted a fourth. .
“Look after your wife,Pott,”belIowed a fifth ;-and then there was a roar of laughter.
As these taunts were accompanied with invidious comparisons between Mr.

Pickwick and an aged ram, and several witticisms of the like nature; and as they
moreover rather tended to convey reflections upon the honour of an innocent lady, Mr.
Pickwick’s indignation was excessive; but as silence was proclaimed at the moment, he
contented himself by scorching the mob with a look of pity for their misguided minds, at
which they laughed more boisterously than ever.
“Silence,” roared the Mayor’s attendants.
“Whiffin, proclaim silence,” said the Mayor, with an air of pomp befitting his lofty
station. In obedience to his command the crier performed another concerto on the bell,
whereupon a gentleman in the crowd called out “Muffins”; which occasioned another
laugh.”
“Gentlemen,” said -the Mayor, at as loud a pitch as he could possibly force his voice to,
“Gentlemen,” Brother electors of the Borough of Eatanswill. We are met here today for
the purpose of choosing a representative in the room of our late___”
Here the Mayor was interrupted by a voice in the crowd.
“Success to the Mayor !” cried the voice, “and may he never desert the nail and
sarspan business, as he got’ his money by.”
This allusion to the professional pursuits of the orator was received with a storm
of delight, which, with,’ a bell-accompaniment, rendered the remainder of his speech
inaudible, with the exception of the concluding sentence, in which he thanked the
meeting for the Impatient attention with which they had heard throughout – an
expression of gratitude which elicits another burst of mirth, of about a quarter of an
hour’s duration.
Next; a tall thin gentleman, In a very stiff white: neckerchief after, being
repeatedly ‘desired by the crowd to “send a boy home, to ask whether he hadn’t left his
voice under the pillow,” begged to nominate a fit and proper person to represent them in
Parliament. And when he said it was Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin, Lodge, near
Eatanswill, the Fizkinites applauded, and the Slumkeyites groaned, so long and so
loudly, that both he and the seconder might have sung comic songs in lieu of speaking,
without anybody’s be a bit the wiser.
The friends of Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, having had their innings, a little choleric
pink-faced man stood,” forward to propose another fit and proper person to represent
the electors of EatanswilI in Parliament; and very swimmingly the pink-faced, gentleman
would have got on, if he had not been rather too choleric to entertain a sufficient
perception of the fun of the crowd. But after a very few sentences of figurative
eloquence, the pink-faced gentleman got from denouncing those who interrupted him in
the mob, to exchanging defiance with the gentlemen on the husting; whereupon arose
an uproar which reduced him to the necessity of expressing his feelings by serious
pantomime, which he did, and then left the stage to his seconder, who delivered a
written speech of half an hour’s length, and wouldn’t be stopped because he had sent it
all to the Eatanswill Gazette, and the Eatanswill Gazette had already printed it, every
word.
Then Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, near EatanswilI, presented himself
for the purpose of addressing the electors; which he no sooner did, than the , band
employed by the Honourable Samuel Slumkey commenced performing with a power to
which their strength in the morning was a trifle; in return for which, the Buff crowd
belabored the heads and, shoulders of Blue crowd; on which Blue crowd endeavored to
dispossess themselves of their very unpleasant neighbours the Buffcrowd; and scene of
struggling, and pushing, and fighting succeeded, to which we can no more do justice
than the Mayor could, although he issued imperative orders to twelve constables to
seize the ringleaders, who might amount in number to two hundred and fifty, or
thereabouts. At all these encounters, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, and his
friends, waxed fierce and furious; until at last Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge,
begged to ask his opponent the Honourable Samuel Slumkey,of Slumkey Hall,’whether
that band played by his consent ; which question the Honourable Samuel’Slumkey
declining to answer, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, shook his fist in the
countenance of the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Sluumbey Hall; upon’ which the
Honourable Samuel Slumkey, his blood being up, defied Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, to
mortal combat. At this violation of all known rules and precedents of order, the Mayor
commanded another fantasia on the bell, and declared he would bring before himself”,
both Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, and the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of
Slumkey Hall, and bind them over to keep the peace. Upon this terrific denunciation, the
supporters of the two candidates interfered and after the friends of each party had
quarrelled in pairs, for three- quarters of an hour, Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, touched his
hat to the Honourable Samuel Slumkey; the Honourable Samuel Slumkey touched his
to Horatio Fizkiri, Esquire: the band was stopped: the crowd was partially quieted; and
Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, was permitted to proceed.
The speeches of the two candidates, though differing in every other respect,
afforded a beautiful tribute to the merit and high worth of the electors of Eatanswill. Both
expressed their opinion that a more independent, a more enlightened, a more public-
spirited, a more a noble minded, a more disinterested set of men than those who had
promised to vote for him, never existed on earth; each darkly hinted his suspicions that
the electors in the opposite interests had certain Swinish and besotted infirmities which
rendered them unfit for the exercise of the important duties they were called upon to
discharge. Fizkin expressed his readiness to do anything he was wanted. Both said that
the trade, the manufacture, the commerce, the prosperity of Eatanswill, would ever be
dearer to their hearts than any earthly object; and each had it in his power to state, with
the utmost confidence, that he was the man who would eventually be returned.
There was a show of hands; the Mayor decided in favour of the Honourable
Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall. Horatio Fizkin, Esquire, of Fizkin Lodge, demanded
a poll and a poll was fixed accordingly. Then a vote of thanks was moved to the Mayor,
for his able conduct in the chair; and the Mayor devoutly wishing that he had had a chair
to display his able conduct in (for he had been standing during the whole proceedings)
returned thanks. The procession re-formed, the carriages rolled slowly through the
crowd, and its members screeched and shouted after them as their feelings or caprice
dictated.
During the whole time of the polling, the town was in a perpetual fever of
excitement. Everything was conducted on the most liberal and delightful scale.
Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public-houses; and spring vans
paraded the streets for the accommodation of voters who were seized with any
temporary dizziness in the head, - an epidemic which prevailed among the electors,
during the contest, to a most alarming extent, and under the influence of which they
might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility. A small
body of electors remained unpolled on the very last day. They were calculating and
reflecting persons, who had not yet been convinced by the arguments of either party,
although they had had frequent conferences with each. One hour before the close of the
poll, Mr. Parker solicited the honour of a private interview with these intelligent, the
noble, the patriotic men. It was granted. His arguments were brief, but satisfactory. They
went in a body to the poll; and when they returned, the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of
Slumkey Hall, was returned also.
NOTES:
Charles Dickens (1812-70) is inimitable as a portrayer of middle-class English life

in the early part of the nineteenth century, especially the life of the streets of London,
the city which, like Charles Lamb, he loved above all. In Dickens, laughter and tears,
humour and pathos, lie close together. Some have complained that his humour is
farcical and his pathos maudlin, and it may be that his characters are in reality
caricatures. But Pickwick, When it appeared in 1837, took Europe by storm, and no
more irresistible comic picture than the adventures of the amiable and benevolent Mr.
Pickwick, his friends Mr. Winkle, Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass, and his faithful
follower Sam Weller, exists in literature. In this case, they arrived at Eatanswill just as
the little town is in the throes of an election, in which they become immediately involved.
Incidentally, Dickens gives us an admirable description of how elections were conducted
a century ago. Dickens always regarded his novels as a vehicle for Social Reform, and
he did an immense amount of good by showing up the glaring defects of the social
system of his day.
QUESTIONS:
1. Does the election scene described here connect with election practices in
Pakistan?
2. Is this merely a humorous piece or does Dickens have some serious purpose in
view?
ON LIBERTY
John Stuart Mill
The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately
opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social
Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by
society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in
general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by
its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognized as the vital question of
the future, it is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind,
almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized
portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and
requires a different and more fundamental treatment.
The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in
the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece,
Rome, and England. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or some
classes of subjects, and the Government. By Liberty, was meant protection against the
tyranny of the political rulers. The rulers were conceived (except in some of the popular
governments of Greece) as in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom
they ruled. They consisted of a governing One, or a governing tribe or caste, who
derived their authority from inheritance or conquest, who, at all events, did not hold it at
the pleasure of the governed, and whose supremacy men did no venture, perhaps did
not desire, to contest, whatever precautions might be taken against its oppressive
exercise. Their power was regarded as necessary, but also as highly dangerous; as a
weapon which they would attempt to use against their subjects, no less than against
external enemies. To prevent the weaker members of the community from being preyed
upon by innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an animal of prey
stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of the vultures
would be no less bent upon preying on the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was
indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defense against his beak and claws. The
aim, therefore, of patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be
suffered to exercise over the community and this limitation was what they meant by
liberty. It was attempted in two ways. First, by obtaining a recognition of certain
immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of
duty in the ruler to infringe and which if he did infringe, specific resistance or general
rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A second and generally a later expedient was the
establishment of constitutional checks, by which the consent of the community, or of a
body of some sort, supposed to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition
to some of the more important acts of the governing power. To the first of these modes
of limitations, the ruling power, in most European countries, was compelled, more or
less, to submit. It was not so with the second; and to attain this, or when already in
some degree possessed, to attain it more completely, became everywhere the principal
object of the lovers of liberty. And so long as mankind were content to combat one
enemy by another and to be ruled by a master, on condition of being guaranteed more
or less efficaciously against his tyranny, they did not carry their aspirations beyond this
point.
A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men ceased to
think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an independent power,
opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various
magistrates of the State should be their tenants of delegates, revocable at their
pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could they have complete security that the
powers of government would never be abused to their disadvantage. By degrees this
new demand for elective and temporary rulers became the prominent object of the
exertions of the popular party, wherever any such party existed; and superseded, to a
considerable extent, the previous efforts to limit the power of rulers. As the struggle
proceeded for making the ruling power emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled,
some persons began to think that too much importance had been attached to the
limitation of the power itself. That was a resource against rulers whose interests were
habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers
should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest
and will of the nation. The nation did not need to be protected against its own will. There
was no fear of its tyrannizing over itself, Let the rulers be effectually responsible to it,
promptly removable by it, and it could afford to trust them with power of which it could
itself dictate the use to be made. Their power was but the nation’s own power,
concentrated, and in a form convenient for exercise. This mode of thought, or rather
perhaps of feeling, was common among the last generation of European liberalism, in
the continental section of which it still apparently predominates. Those who admit any
limit to what a government may do, except in the case of such governments as they
think ought not to exist, stand out as brilliant exceptions among the political thinkers of
the Continent. A similar tone of sentiment might by this time have been prevalent in our
own country, if the circumstances which for a time encouraged it, had continued
unaltered.
But, in political and philosophical theories, as well as in persons, success

discloses faults and infirmities which failure might have concealed from observation.
The notion, that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves, might
seem axiomatic, when popular government was a thing only dreamed about, or read of
as having existed at some distant period of the past. Neither was that notion necessarily
disturbed by such temporary aberrations as those of the French Revolution, the worst of
which were the work of a usurping few, and which, in any case, belonged, not to the
permanent working of popular institutions, but to a sudden and convulsive outbreak
against monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time, however, a democratic republic
came to occupy a large portion of the earth’s surface, and made itself felt as one of the
most powerful members of the community of nations; and elective and responsible
government became subject to the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great
existing fact. It was now perceived that such phrases as “self-government”, and “the
power of the people over themselves”, do not express the true state of the case. The
“people” who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom
it is exercised; and the “self-government”, spoken of is not the government of each by
himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means
the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or
those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people,
consequently may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as
much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation,
therefore, or the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance
when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the
strongest party therein, this view of things recommending itself equally to the
intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those important classes in European
society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty
in establishing itself; and in political speculations “the tyranny of the majority” is now
generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.
Like other tyranny, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly,
held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But
reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant-society collectively
over the separate individuals who compose it- its means of tyrannizing are not restricted
to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and
does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any
mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny
more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually
upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much
more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore,
against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against
the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to
impose by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of
conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible,
prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all
characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the
legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find
that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition
of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general terms, the
practical question, where to place the limit-how to make the fitting adjustment between
individual independence and social control-is a subject on which nearly everything
remains to be done, all that makes existence valuable to anyone, depends on the
enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct,
therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things
which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be is the
principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it
is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and
scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country
is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect
any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed.
The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-
justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence
of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continually
mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the
rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete
because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that
reasons should be given either by one person to others or by each to himself. People
are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged in the belief by some who aspire
to the character of philosophers, that their feeling in each person’s mind that everybody
should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathies, would like them to
act. No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own
liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as
one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given are a mere appeal to a similar
preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one. To an
ordinary man, however, his own preference, thus supported, is not only a perfectly
satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality,
taste, or propriety, which are not expressly written in his religious creed; and his chief
guide in the interpretation even of that. Men’s opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable
or blamable, are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in
regard to the conduct of other and which are as numerous as those which determine
their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes their reason-at other times their
prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones,
their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly their
desires or fears for themselves-their legitimate on illegitimate self-interest. Wherever
there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from
its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. The morality between Spartans
and Helots, between planters and negroes, between princes and subjects, between
nobles and roturiers, between men and women, has been for the most part the creation
of these class interests and feelings: and the sentiments thus generated react in turn
upon the moral feelings of the members of the ascendant class, in their relation among
themselves. Where, on the other hand a class, formerly ascendant, has lost its
ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is unpopular, the prevailing moral sentiments
frequently bear the impress of an impatient dislike of superiority. Another grand
determining principle of the rules of conduct, both in act and forbearance, which have
been enforced by law or opinion, has been the servility of mankind towards the
supposed preferences or aversions of their temporal masters or of their gods. This
servility, though essentially selfish, is not hypocrisy; it gives rise to perfectly genuine
sentiments of abhorrence; it made men burn magicians and heretics. Among so many
baser influences, the general and obvious interests of society have of course had a
share, and a large one, in the direction of the moral sentiments: less, however, as a
matter of reason, and on their own account, than as a consequence of the sympathies
and antipathies which grew out of them: and sympathies and antipathies which had little
or nothing to do with the interests of society, have made themselves felt in the
establishment of moralities with quite as great force.
The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the
main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance,
under the penalties of law or opinion, and in general, those who have been in advance
of society in thought and feeling, have left this condition of things un-assailed in
principle, however they may have come into conflict with it in some of its details. They
have occupied themselves rather in inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike,
than in questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to individuals. They
preferred endeavouring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points on which
they were themselves heretical, rather than make common cause in defence of
freedom, with heretics generally. The only case in which the higher ground has been
taken on principle and maintained with consistency, by any but an individual here and
there, is that of religious belief: a case instructive in many ways, and not least so as
forming a most striking instance of the fallibility of what is called the moral sense: for the
odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot, is one of the most unequivocal cases of moral
feeling. Those who first broke the yoke of what called itself the Universal Church, were
in general as little willing to permit deference of religious opinion as that church itself.
But when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving a complete victory to any
party, and each church or sect was reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of
the ground it already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming
majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert,
for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battle field, almost solely, that the rights
of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and
the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The
great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly
asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a
human being is accountable to others for this religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind
is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly
anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes
to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In
the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of
toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear with dissent in matters of
church government, but not of dogma ;another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist
or a Unitarian; another every one who believes in revealed religion; a few extend their
charity a little further, but stop at the belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the
sentiment of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have abated little of
its claim to be obeyed.
In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the
yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is lighter, than in most other countries of
Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or
the executive power, with private conduct; not so much from any just regard for the
independence of the individual, as from the still subsisting habit of looking on the
government as representing an opposite interest to the public. The majority have not yet
learnt to feel the power of the government their power, or its opinions their opinions.
When they do so, individual liberty will probably be as much exposed to invasion from
the government, as it already is from public opinion. But, as yet, there is a considerable
amount of feeling ready to be called forth against any attempt of the law to control
individuals in things in which they have not hitherto been accustomed to be controlled
by it; and this with very little discrimination as to whether the matter is, or is not, within
the legitimate sphere of legal control; in so much that the feeling, highly salutary on the
whole, is perhaps quite as often misplaced as well grounded in the particular instances
of its application. There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or
impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according
to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to
be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while
others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the
departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range
themselves on one or the their side in any particular case, according to this general
direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the
particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the
belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they
prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to
what things are fit to be done by a government. And it seems to me that in consequence
of this absence of rule or principle, one side is at present as often wrong as the other;
the interference of government is, with about equal frequency, improperly invoked and
improperly condemned.
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to
govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion
and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or
the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which
mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action
of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient
warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for
him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of other, to do
so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or
reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or
visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which
it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only
part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which
concerns others. In the part, which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of
right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to
human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of
young persons below the age, which the law may fix as that of manhood or
womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must
be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same
reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which
the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of
spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for
overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of
any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their
improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a
principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind
have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there
is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so
fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being
guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since
reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either
in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer
admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my

argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility
as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense,
grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being. Those interests,
I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in
respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people. If anyone
does an act hurtful to others, there is a prima facie case for punishing him, by law, or,
where legal penalties are not safely applicable, by general disapprobation. There are
also many positive acts for the benefit of others, which he may rightfully be compelled to
perform; such as to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the
common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of
which he enjoys the protection; and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence,
such as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenseless against
ill-usage, things which whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do, he may rightfully be
made responsible to society for not doing. A person may cause evil to others not only by
his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the
injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cautious exercise of compulsion
than the former. To make anyone answerable for doing evil to others is the rule; to make
him answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet
there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to justify that exception. In all
things which regard the external relations of the individual, he is de jure amenable to
those whose interests are concerned, and, if need be, to society as their protector.
There are often good reasons for not holding him to the responsibility; but these
reasons must arise from the special expediencies of the case: either because it is a kind
of case in which he is on the whole likely to act better, when left to his own discretion,
than when controlled in any way in which society have it in their power to control him; or
because the attempt to exercise control would produce other evils, greater than those
which it would prevent. When such reasons as these preclude the enforcement of
responsibility, the conscience of the agent himself should step into the vacant judgment
seat, and protect those interests of others which have no external protection; judging
himself all the more rigidly, because the case does not admit of his being made
accountable to the judgment of his fellow-creatures.
But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the

individual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a
person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects other, only with
their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself,
I mean directly, and in the first instance for whatever affects himself, may affect others
through himself this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is
the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of
consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense;
liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects,
practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and
publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that
part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as
much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same
reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of
tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as
we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our
fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should
think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual,
follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to
unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being
supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.
No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free,
whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do
not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that
of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive
others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his
own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by
suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to
live as seems good to the rest.
COURTSHIP THROUGH THE AGES

James Thurber
Surely nothing in the astonishing scheme of life can have nonplussed Nature so
much as the fact that none of the females of any of the species she created really cared
very much for the male, as such. For the past ten million years Nature has been busily
inventing ways to make the male attractive to the female, but the whole business of
courtship, from the marine annelids up to man, still lumbers heavily along, like a
complicated musical comedy. I have been reading the sad and absorbing story in
Volume 6 (Cole to Dama) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this volume you can learn
all about cricket, cotton, costume designing, crocodiles, crown jewels, and Coleridge,
but none of these subjects is so interesting as the Courtship of Animals, which recounts
the sorrowful lengths to which all males must go to arouse the interest of a lady.
We all know, I think, that Nature gave man whiskers and a mustache with the
quaint idea in mind that these would prove attractive to the female. We all know that, far
from attracting her, whiskers and mustaches only made her nervous and gloomy, so that
man had to go on for somersaults, tilting with lances, and performing feats of parlor
magic to win her attention; he also had to bring her candy, flowers, and the furs of
animals. It is common knowledge that in spite of all these “love displays” the male is
constantly being turned down, insulted, or thrown out of the house. It is rather
comforting, then, to discover that the peacock, for all his gorgeous plumage, does not
have a particularly easy time in courtship; none of the males in the world do. The first
peahen, it turned out, was only faintly stirred by her suitor’s beautiful train. She would
often go quietly to sleep while he was whisking it around. The Britannica tells us that the
peacock actually had to learn a certain little trick to wake her up and revive her interest:
he had to learn to vibrate his quills so as to make a rustling sound. In ancient times man
himself, observing the ways of the peacock, probably tried vibrating his whiskers to
make a rustling sound: if so, it didn’t get him anywhere. He had to go in for something
else; so, among other things, he went in for gifts. It is not unlikely that he got this idea
from certain flies and birds who were making no headway at all with rustling sounds.
One of the flies of the family Empidae, who had tried everything, finally hit on
something pretty special. He contrived to make a glistening transparent balloon which
was even larger than himself. Into this he would put sweetmeats and tidbits and he
would carry the whole elaborate envelope through the air to the lady of his choice. This
amused her for a time, but she finally got bored with it.. She demanded silly little colorful
presents, something that you couldn’t eat but that would look nice around the house. So
the male Empis had to go around gathering flower petals and pieces of bright paper to
put into his balloon. On a courtship flight a male Empis cuts quite a figure now, but he
can hardly be said to be happy. He never knows how soon the female will demand
heavier presents, such as Roman coins and gold collar buttons. It seems probable that
one day the courtship of the Empidae will fall down, as man’s occasionally does, of its
own weight.
The bowerbird is another creature that spends so much time courting the female
that he never gets any work done. If all the male bowerbirds became nervous wrecks
within the next ten or fifteen years, it would not surprise me. The female bowerbird
insists that a playground be built for her with a specially constructed bower at the
entrance. This bower is much more elaborate than an ordinary nest and is harder to
build: it costs a lot more, too. The female will not come to the playground until the male
has filled it up with a great many gifts: silvery leaves, red leaves, rose petals, shells,
beads, berries, bones, dice, buttons, cigar bands, Christmas seals, and the Lord knows
what else. When the female finally condescends to visit the playground, she is in a coy
and silly mood and has to be chased in and out of the bower and up and down the
playground before she will quit giggling and stand still long enough even to shake
hands. The male bird is, of course, pretty well done in before the chase starts, because
he has worn himself out hunting for eyeglass lenses and begonia blossoms. I imagine
that many a bowerbird, after chasing a female for two or three hours, says the hell with
it and goes home to bed. Next day, of course, he telephones someone else and the
same trying ritual is gone through with again. A male bowerbird is as exhausted as a
night-club habitue before he is out of his twenties.
The male fiddler crab has a somewhat easier time, but it can hardly be said that
he is sitting pretty. He has one enormously large and powerful claw, usually brilliantly
colored, and you might suppose that all he had to do was reach out and grab some
passing cutie. The very earliest fiddler crabs may have tried this, but, if so, they got
slapped for their pains. A female fiddler crab will not tolerate any caveman stuff: she
never has and she doesn’t intend to start now. To attract a female, a fiddler crab has to
stand on tiptoe and brandish his claw in the air. If any female in the neighborhood is
interested and you’d be surprised how many are not she comes over and engages him
in light badinage, for which he is not in the mood. As many as a hundred females may
pass the time of day with him and go on about their business. By nightfall of an average
courting day, a fiddler crab who has been standing on tiptoe for eight or ten hours
waving a heavy claw in the air is in pretty sad shape. As in the case of the males of all
species, however, he gets out of bed next morning, dashes some water on his face, and
tries again.
The next time you encounter a male web-spinning spider, stop and reflect that he
is too busy worrying about his love life to have any desire to bite you. Male web-
spinning spiders have a tougher life than any other males in the animal kingdom. This is
because the female web-spinning spiders have very poor eyesight. If a male lands on a
female’s web, she kills him before he has time to lay down his cane and gloves,
mistaking him for a fly or a bumblebee who has tumbled into her trap. Before the species
figured out what to do about this, millions of males were murdered by ladies they called
on. It is the nature of spiders to perform a little dance in front of the female, but before a
male spinner could get near enough for the female to see who he was and what he was
up to, she would lash out at him with a flat-iron or a pair of garden shears. One night,
nobody knows when, a very bright male spinner lay awake worrying about calling on a
lady who had been killing suitors right and left. It came to him that this business of
dancing as a love display wasn’t getting anybody anywhere except the grave. He
decided to go in for web-twitching, or strand vibrating. The next day he tried it on one of
the near- sighted girls. Instead of dropping in on her suddenly, he stayed outside the
web and began monkeying with one of its strands. He twitched it up and down and in
and out with such a lilting rhythm that the female was charmed. The serenade worked
beautifully; the female let him live. The Britannica’s spider-watchers, however, report
that this system is not always successful. Once in a while, even now, a female will fire
three bullets into a suitor or run him through with a kitchen knife. She keeps threatening
him from the moment he strikes the first we notes on the outside strings, but usually by
the time he has got up to the high notes played around the center of the web, he is
going to town and she spares his life.
Even the butterfly, as handsome a fellow as he is, can’t always win a mate
merely by fluttering around and showing off. Many butterflies have to have scent scales
on their wings. Hepialus carries a powder puff in a perfumed pouch. He throws perfume
at the ladies when they pass. The male tree cricket, Oecanthus, goes Hepialus one
better by carrying a tiny bottle of wine with him and giving drinks to such doxies as he
has designs on. One of the male snails throws darts to entertain the girls so it goes,
through the long list of animals, from the bristle worm and his rudimentary dance steps
to man and his gift of diamonds and sapphires. The golden-eye drake raises a jet of
water with his feet as he flies over a lake; Hepialus has his powder puff, Oecanthus his
wine bottle, man his etching. It is a bright and melancholy story, the age-old desire of
the male for the female, the age-old desire of the female to be amused and entertained.
Of all the creatures on earth, the only males who could be figured as putting any irony
into their courtship are the grebes and certain other diving birds. Every now and then a
courting grebe slips quietly down to the bottom of a lake and then, with a mighty
“Whoosh!,” pops out suddenly a few feet from his girl friend, splashing water all over
her. She seems to be persuaded that this is a purely loving display, but I like to think
that the grebe always has a faint hope of drowning her or scaring her to death.
I will close this investigation into the mournful burdens of the male with the
Bntannica’s story about a certain Argus pheasant. It appears that the Argus displays
himself in front of a female who stands perfectly still without moving a feather. . . . The
male Argus the Britannica tells about was confined in a cage with a female of another
species, a female who kept moving around, emptying ashtrays and fussing with
lampshades all the time the male was showing off his talents. Finally, in disgust, he
stalked away and began displaying in front of his water trough. He reminds me of a
certain male (Homo sapiens) of my acquaintance who one night after dinner asked his
wife to put down her detective magazine so that he could read a poem of which he was
very fond. She sat quietly enough until he was well into the middle of the thing, intoning
with great ardor and intensity. Then suddenly there came a sharp, disconcerting slap! It
turned out that all during the male’s display, the female had been intent on a circling
mosquito and had finally trapped it between the palms of her hands. The male in this
case did not stalk away and display in front of a water trough; he went over to Tim’s and
had a flock of drinks and recited the poem to the fell as. I am sure they all told bitter
stories of their own about how their displays had been interrupted by females. I am also
sure that they all ended up singing “Honey, Honey, Bless Your Heart.”
QUESTIONS
1. In a paragraph describe the persona Thurber presents here.
2. The essay is amusing, and we need not say that it seriously represents Thurber’s
ideas about courtship. Nevertheless, can one reasonably say that some serious
point is hinted at, or is set forth playfully? If so, what might this point (or these points)
be?
3. Find out something about the mating behavior of bees, or bees, or penguins, or a
subject of your own choice, and write an essay of 500 words in Thurber’s style.
Notice that Thurber clearly (and comically) writes from the point of view of a
male. You may, may, if you wish (whether you are a male or a female), write from
a female point of view.
CLASS STRUGGLES
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
THE history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on a uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time
ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of
the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated

arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In
ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middles Ages,
Feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of
these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society
has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature. It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each
other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the series of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for
the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of
America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never
before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a
rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by

closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The
manufacturing systems took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds
vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised
industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry,
the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires – leaders of whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of
America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce,
to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on
the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation railways
extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is it itself the product of a long
course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of
exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a

corresponding political advance of the class. An oppressed class under the sway of the
feudal nobility, it became an armed and self-governing association in the medieval
commune; there independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable
‘third estate’ of the monarchy (as in France); after wards, in the period of manufacture
proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise
against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world
market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoise has played a must revolutionary role in
history.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties
that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left no other bond between man and
woman than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most
heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms,
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Fee Trade. In one word, for
exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and
looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest,
the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of
vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting
complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s
activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptain
pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that
put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of

production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for
all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of
life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a
competition character to production and consumption in every country. To the great
chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground
on which it stood. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are
daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction
becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place
of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common

property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world
literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by

the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the most
barbarian, into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery
with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce
what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word,
it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created
enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural,
and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on
nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
More and more the bourgoisie keeps doing away with the scattered state of the
population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population,
centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The
necessary consequence of this was political centralistion. Independent, or but loosely
connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of
taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of
laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces then have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to
industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of
the ground – what earlier centuries had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then that the means of production and of exchange, which served as the
foundation for the growth of the bourgeoisie, were generated in feudal society. At a
certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the
conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation
of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in a word, the feudal relations of property

became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they
became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political
constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois
class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society
with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured
up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no
longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom be has called up by his
spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history
of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,
against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie
and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical
return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more
threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of
the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises
there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdity – the epidemic of over – production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into
a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of
devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and
commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too
much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive
forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for
these conditions, by which they are fettered, and no sooner do they overcome these
fetters than they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to
comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeois get over these
crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the
other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old
ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises,
and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it
has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern
working class – the proletarians.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same

proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as
their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal,
are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to
all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the
workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple,
most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence the
cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of
subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of
production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the
wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and dvision of labour
increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by
prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the working hours, by increase of the
work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into
the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the
factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed
under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they
slaves of the bourgeois class, and of they bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly
enslaved by the machine, by the over looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois
manufacturer himself. The more openly this depotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other
words, the more modern industry develops, the more is the labour of men superseded
by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social
validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to
use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner has the labourer received his wages in cash, for the moment escaping
exploitation by the manufacturer, than he is set upon by the other portions of the
bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class – the small trades people, shopkeepers, and
retired tradesmen generally, the handi-craftsmen and peasants – all these sink
gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for
the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition
with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by
new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins
its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers,
then by the work people of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality,
against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not
against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of
production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they
smash machinery to pieces, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by forces the
vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole
country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more
compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the
union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover still able to do so for a
time. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the
enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-
industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is
concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for
the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number;
it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength
more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are
more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of
labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers every more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of a machinery, ever
more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the
collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the
character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form
combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; they club together in order to keep
up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision
before hand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into
riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their
battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.
This union is furthered by the improved means of communication which are created by
modern industry, and which place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But
every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers
of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletarians, thanks to raliways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political
party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers
themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative
recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions
among the bourgeoisie itself.
Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further the course of
development of the proletariat in many ways. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a
constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the
bourgeoisie itself whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry;
at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the
political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own
elements of political and general education.
THE BATTLE OF THE ANTS

Henry David Thoreau
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed
two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black,
fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but
struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was
surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a
duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against
the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons
covered all the hills and vales in my woodyard, and the ground was already strewn with
the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever
witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war;
the red republicans on the one hand, the black imperialists on the-other. On every side
they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and
human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in
each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared
to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened
himself like a vise to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumbling on that field
never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his-feelers near the root, having already
caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side
to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his
members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least
disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was “Conquer or die.” In the
meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full
of excitement, who either had dispatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle;
probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to
return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had
nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He
saw this unequal combat from afar, for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,-
he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the
combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and
commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select
among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of
attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should
not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands
stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the
slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they
had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is
not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will
bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the
patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or
Dresden. Concord fight! Two killed on the patriot’s side, and Luther Blanchard wounded!
Why here every ant was a Buttrick, - “Fire, for God’s sake fire!” – and thousands shared
the fate of Davis and Hosmer.” There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it
was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three: -
penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable
to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were
struggling, carried it, into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in
order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that,
though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed
his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there
to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to
pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war
only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I
looked again that’ black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and
the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his
saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with
feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know
not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an
hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in
that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of
his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would
not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause
of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had my feelings excited and harrowed
by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage of a human battle before my door.
QUESTIONS:
1. Identify and comment on the effectiveness of Thoreau’s comparisons. Consider
the small-scale brief similes and the overall analogy between the ant war and the
Trojan War.
2. What does Thoreau gain by including the quoted phrases “Conquer or die” and
“Fire, for God’s sake fire!”
3. What does Thoreau’s Latinate diction contribute to the effects of this prose?
Consider especially the following words: incessantly, internecine, resolutely,
divested, pertinacity, dispatched, eminent, carnage, assiduously, industry, and
ferocity.
WORDS AND BEHAVIOUR

Aldous Huxley
WORDS form the thread on which we string our experiences. Without them we
should live spasmodically and intermittently. Hatred itself is not so strong that animals
will not forget it, if distracted, even in the presence of the enemy. Watch a pair of cats,
crouching on the brink of a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from far down in the throat of
each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance; as though animated by a
life of their own, the tails twitch and tremble. What aimed intensity of loathing! Another
moment and surely there must be an explosion. But no; all of a sudden one of the two
creatures turns away, hoists a hind leg in a more man fascist salute and, with the same
fixed and focussed attention as it had given a moment before to its enemy, begins to
make a lingual toilet. Animal love is as much at the mercy of distractions as animal
hatred. The dumb creation lives a life made up of discrete and mutually irrelevant
episodes. Such as it is, the consistency of human characters is due to the words upon
which all human experiences are strung. We are purposeful because we can describe
our feelings in rememberable words, can justify and rationalize our desires in terms of
some kind of argument. Faced by an enemy we do not allow an itch to distract us from
our emotions; the mere word’ enemy’ is enough to keep us reminded of our hatred, to
convince us that we do well to be angry. Similarly the word ‘love’ bridges for us those
chasms of momentary indifference and boredom which gape from time to time between
even the most ardent lovers. Feeling and desire provide us with our motive power;
words give continuity to what we do and to a considerable extent determine our
direction. Inappropriate and badly chosen words vitiate thought and lead to wrong or
foolish conduct. Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases
stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously or sub-
consciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because
incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations
and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one
likes, but ought not, to do. Our egotisms are incessantly fighting to preserve
themselves, not only from external enemies, but also from the assaults of the other and
better self with which they are so uncomfortably associated. Ignorance is egotism’s
most effective defense against that Dr. Jekyll in us who desires perfection; stupidity, its
subtlest stratagem. If, as so often happens, we choose to give continuity to our
experience by means of words which falsify the facts, this is because the falsification is
somehow to our advantage as egotists.
Consider, for example, the case of war. War is enormously discreditable to those
who order it to be waged and even to those who merely tolerate its existence.
Furthermore, to developed sensibilities the facts of war are revolting and horrifying. To
falsify these facts, and by so doing to make war seem less evil than it really is, and our
own responsibility in tolerating war less heavy, is doubly to our advantage. By sup-
pressing and distorting the truth, we protect our sensibilities and preserve our self
-esteem. Now, language is, among other things, a device which men use for
suppressing and distorting the truth. Finding the reality of war too unpleasant to
contemplate, we create a verbal alternative to that reality, parallel with it, but in quality
quite different form it. That which we contemplate thenceforward is not that to which we
react emotionally and upon which we pass our moral judgments, is not war as it is in
fact, but the fiction of war as it exists in our pleasantly falsifying verbiage. Our stupidity
in using inappropriate language turns out, on analysis to be the most refined cunning.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are
individual human beings, and that these individual human beings are condemned by the
monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own, to
inflict upon the innocent and, innocent themselves of any crime against their enemies,
to suffer cruelties of every kind.
The language of strategy and politics is designed, so far as it is possible, to

conceal this fact, to make it appear as though wars were not fought by individuals drilled
to murder one another in cold blood and without provocation, but either by impersonal
and therefore wholly non-moral and impassible forces, or else by personified
abstractions.
Here are a few examples of the first kind of falsification. In place of ‘cavalrymen’
or, ‘foot-soldiers’ military writers like to speak of ‘sabres’ and’ rifles.’ Here is a sentence
from a description of the Battle of Marengo: ‘According to Victor’s report, the French
retreat was orderly; it is certain, at any rate, that the regiments held together, for the six
thousand Austrian sabres found no opportunity to charge home.’ The battle is between
sabres in line and muskets in echelon – a mere clash of ironmongery.
On other occasions there is no question of anything so vulgarly material as

ironmongery. The battles are between Platonic ideas, between the abstractions of
physics and mathematics. Forces interact; weights are flung into scales; masses are set
in motion. Or else it is all a matter of geometry. Lines swing and sweep; are protracted
or curved; pivot on a fixed point.
Alternatively the combatants are personal, in the sense that they are
personifications. There is ‘the enemy’, in the singular, making ‘his’ plans, striking ‘his’
blows. The attribution of personal characteristics to collectivities, to geographical

expressions, to institutions, is a source, as we shall see, of endless confusions in
political thought, of innumerable political mistakes and crimes. Personification in politics
is an error which we make because it is to our advantage as egotists to be able to feel
violently proud of our country and of ourselves as belonging to it, and to believe that all
the misfortunes due to our own mistakes are really the work of the Foreigner. It is easier
to feel violently towards a person than towards an abstraction; hence our habit of
making political personifications. In some cases military personifications are merely
special instances of political personifications. A particular collectivity, the army or the
warring nation, is given the name and, along with the name, the attributes of a single
person, in order that we may be able to love or hate it more intensely than we could do
if we thought of it as what it really is: a number of diverse individuals. In other cases
Personification is used for the purpose of concealing the fundamental absurdity and
monstrosity of war. What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no
personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. By personifying
opposing armies or countries, we are able to think of war as a conflict between
individuals. The same result is obtained by writing of war as thought these were carried
on exclusively by the generals in command and not by the private soldiers in their
armies. (‘Rennenkampt had pressed back won Schubert.’) The implication in both cases
is that war is indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room. Whereas in reality
it is profoundly different. A scrap between two individuals is forgivable; mass murder,
deliberately organized, is a monstrous iniquity. We still choose to use war as an
instrument of policy; and to comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would
therefore be inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some
effort to get rid of the abominable thing. Accordingly, when we talk about war, we use a
language which conceals or embellishes its reality. Ignoring the facts, so far as we
possibly can, we imply that battles are not fought by soldiers, but by things, principles,
allegories, personified collectivities, or (at the most human) by opposing commanders,
pitched against one another in single combat; For the same reason, when we have to
describe the processes and the results of war, we employ a rich variety of euphemisms.
Even the most violently patriotic and militaristic are reluctant to call a spade by its own
name. To conceal their intentions even from themselves, they make use of picturesque
metaphors. We find them, for example, clamouring for war planes numerous and
powerful enough to go and ‘destroy the hornets in their nests’ – in other words, to go
and throw termite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of neighbouring
countries before they have time to come and do the same to us. And how reassuring is
the language of historians and strategists! They write admiringly of those military
geniuses who know ‘when to strike at the enemy’s line’ (a single combatant deranges
the geometrical constructions of a personification); when to ‘turn his flank’; when to
execute an enveloping movement.’ As though they were engineers discussing the

strength of materials and the distribution of stresses, they talk of abstract entities called’
‘man power’ and ‘fire power’. They sum up the long-drawn sufferings and atrocities of
trench warfare in the phrase, ‘a war of attrition’; the massacre and mangling of human
beings is assimilated to the grinding of a lens.
A dangerously abstract word, which figures in all discussions about war, is ‘force’.
Those who believe in organizing collective security by means of military pacts against a
possible aggressor are particularly fond of this word. ‘You cannot,’ they say, ‘have inter-
national justice unless you are prepared to impose it by force.’ ‘Peace-loving countries
must unite to use force against aggressive dictatorships.’ ‘Democratic institutions must
be protected, if need be, by force.’ And so on.
Now, the word ‘force’, when used in reference to human relations, has no single,
definite meaning. There is the ‘force’ used by parents when, without resort to any kind of
physical violence, they compel their children to act or refrain from acting in some
particular way. There is the ‘force’ used by attendants in an asylum when they try to
prevent a maniac from hurting himself or others. There is the ‘force’ used by the police
when they control a crowd, and that other ‘force’ which they use in a baton charge. And
finally there is the ‘force’ used in war. This, of course, varies with the technological
devices at the disposal of the belligerents, with the policies they are pursuing, and with
the particular circumstances of the war in question. But in general it may be said that, in
war, ‘force’ connotes violence and fraud used to the limit of the combatants’ capacity.
Variations in quantity, if sufficiently great, produce variations in quality. The ‘force’

that is war, particularly modern war, is very different from the ‘force’ that is police action,
and the use of the same abstract word to describe the two dissimilar processes is
profoundly misleading. (Still more misleading, of course, is the explicit assimilation of a
war, waged by allied League-of-Nations powers against an aggressor, to police action
against a criminal. The first is the use of violence and fraud without limit against
innocent and guilty alike; the second is the use of strictly limited violence and a
minimum of fraud exclusively against the guilty.)
Reality is a succession of concrete and particular situations. When we think

about such situations we should use the particular and concrete words which apply to
them. If we use abstract words which apply equally well (and equally badly) to other,
quite dissimilar situations, it is certain that we shall think incorrectly.
Let us take the sentences quoted above and translate the abstract word ‘force’
into language that will render (however inadequately) the concrete and particular
realities of contemporary warfare.
‘You cannot have international justice, unless you are prepared to impose it by
force.’ Translated, this becomes: ‘You cannot have international justice unless you are
prepared, with a view to imposing a just settlement, to drop termite, high explosives and
vesicants upon the inhabitants of foreign cities and to have termite, high explosives and
vesicants dropped in return upon the inhabitants of your cities’. At the end of this
proceeding, justice is to be imposed by the victorious party-that is, if there is a victorious
party. It should be remarked that justice was to have been imposed by the victorious
party at the end of the last war. But, unfortunately, after four years of fighting, the temper
of the victors was such that they were quite incapable of making a just settlement. The
Allies are reaping in Nazi Germany what they sowed at Versailles. The victors of the
next war will have undergone intensive bombardments with thermite, high explosives
and vesicants. Will their temper be better than that of the Allies in 1918? Will they be in.
a fitter, state to make a just settlement? The answer, quite obviously, is; No. It is
psychologically all but impossible that justice should be secured by the method of
contemporary warfare.
The next two sentences may be taken together. ‘Peace-loving countries must
unite to use force against aggressive dictatorships. Democratic institutions must be
protected, if- need be, by force.’ Let us translate. ‘Peace-loving countries must unite to
throw thermite, high explosives and vesicants on the inhabitants of countries ruled by
aggressive dictators.
They must do this, and of course abide the consequences, in order to preserve
peace and democratic institutions.’ Two questions immediately propound themselves.
First, is it likely that peace can be secured by a process calculated to reduce the orderly
life of our complicated societies to chaos? And, second, is it likely that democratic
institutions will flourish in a state of chaos? Again, the answers are pretty clearly in the
negative.
By using the abstract word ‘force’, instead of terms which at least attempt to
describe the realities of war as it is to-day, the preachers of collective security through
military collaboration disguise from themselves and from others, not only the
contemporary facts, but also the probable consequences of their favourite policy. The
attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by ‘force’ seems reasonable enough
until we realize, first, that this non-committal word stands, in the circumstances of our
age, for activities which can hardly fail to result in social chaos; and second, that the
consequences of social chaos are injustice, chronic warfare and tyranny. The moment
we think in concrete and particular terms of the concrete and particular process called
‘modern war’, we see that a policy which worked (or at least didn’t result in complete
disaster) in the past has no prospect whatever of working in the immediate future. The
attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by means of a ‘force’, which means, at
this particular moment of history, thermite, high explosives and vesicants, is about as
reasonable as the attempt to put out a fire with a colourless liquid that happens to be,
not water, but petrol.
What applies to the ‘force’ that is war applies in large measure to the ‘force’ that
is revolution. It seems inherently very unlikely that social justice and social peace can
be secured by thermite, high explosives and vesicants. At first, it may be, the parties in
a civil war would hesitate to use such instruments on their fellow-countrymen. But there
can be little doubt that, if the conflict were prolonged (as it probably would be between
the evenly balanced Right and Left of a highly industrialized society), the combatants
would end by losing their scruples.
The alternatives confronting us seem to be plain enough. Either we invent and

conscientiously employ a new technique for making revolutions and settling
international disputes; or else we cling to the old technique and, using ‘force’ (that is to
say, thermite, high explosives and vesicants), destroy ourselves. Those who, for
whatever motive, disguise the nature of the second alternative under inappropriate
language, render the world a grave disservice. They lead us into one of the temptations
we find it hardest to resist-the temptation to run away from reality, to pretend that facts
are not what they are. Like Shelley (but without Shelley’s acute awareness of what he
was doing) we are perpetually weaving
A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun
Of this familiar life.
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities,

metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to
ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity
and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to
commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes:
The poor wretch who has learned his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeats,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which

We join no meaning and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound:
As if the fibers of this godlike frame
Were gored without a pang: as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
Passed off to Heaven translated and not killed;
As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him.
The language we use about war is inappropriate, and its inappropriateness is

designed to conceal a reality so odious that we do not wish to know it. The language we
use about politics is also inappropriate; but here our mistake has a different purpose.
Our principal aim in this case is to arouse and, having aroused, to rationalize and justify
such intrinsically agreeable sentiments as pride and hatred, self-esteem and contempt
for others. To achieve this end we speak about the facts of politics in words which more
or less completely misrepresent them.
The concrete realities of politics are individual human beings, living together in
national groups. Politicians-and to some extent We are all politicians substitute
abstractions for these concrete realities, and having done this, proceed to invest each
abstraction with an appearance of concreteness by personifying it. For example, the
concrete reality of which ‘Britain’ is the abstraction consists of some forty-odd millions of
diverse individuals living on an island off the west coast of Europe. The personification
of this abstraction appears, in classical fancy-dress and holding a very large toasting
fork, on the backside of Our copper coinage; appears in verbal form, every time we talk
about international politics. ‘Britain’, the abstraction from forty millions of Britons, is
endowed with thoughts, sensibilities and emotions, even with a sex-for, in spite of John
Bull, the country is always a female.
Now it is of course possible that ‘Britain’ is more than a mere name-is an entity
that possesses some kind of reality distinct from that of the individuals constituting the
group to which the name is applied. But this entity, if it exists, is certainly not a young
lady with a toasting fork; nor is it possible to believe (though some eminent philosophers
have preached the doctrine) that it should possess anything in the nature of a persona!
will. One must agree with T.H. Green that ‘there can be nothing in a nation, however
exalted its mission, or in a society however perfectly organized, which is not in the
persons composing the nation or the society. . . . We cannot suppose a national spirit
and will to exist except as the spirit and will of individuals.’ But the moment we start
resolutely thinking about our world in terms of individual persons we find ourselves at
the same time thinking in terms of universality. ‘The great rational religions,’ writes
Professor Whitehead, ‘are the Outcome of the emergence of a religious consciousness
that is universal, as distinguished from tribal, or even social. Because it is universal, it
introduces the note of solitariness.’ (And he might have added that, because it is
solitary, it introduces the note of universality.) ‘The reason of this connection between
universality and solitude is that universality is a disconnection from immediate
surroundings.’ And conversely the disconnection from immediate surroundings,
particularly such social surrounding as the tribe or nation, the insistence on the person
as the fundamental reality, leads to the conception of an all-embracing unity.
A nation, then, may be more than a mere abstraction may possess some kind of
real existence apart from its constituent members. But there is no reason to suppose
that it is a person; indeed, there is every reason to suppose that it isn’t. Those who
speak as though it were a person (and some go further than this and speak as though it
were a personal god) do so, because it is to their interest as egotists to make precisely
this mistake.
In the case of the ruling class these interests are in part material. The
personification of the nation as a sacred being, different from and superior to its
constituent members, is merely (I quote the words of a great French jurist, Leon Duguit)
‘a way of imposing authority by making people believe it is an authority de jure and not
merely de facto.’ By habitually talking, of the nation as though it were a person with
thoughts, feelings and a will of its own, the rulers of a country legitimate their own
powers. Personification leads easily to deification; and where the nation is deified, its
government ceases to be a mere convenience, like drains or a telephone system, and,
partaking in the sacredness of the entity it represents, claims to give orders by divine
right and demands tile unquestioning obedience due to a god. Rulers seldom find it hard
to recognize their friends. Hegel, the man who elaborated an inappropriate figure of
speech into a complete philosophy of politics, was a favourite of the Prussian
government. ‘Es ist,’ he had written, ‘es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, das der Staat
ist.’ The decoration bestowed on him by Frederick William III was richly deserved.
Unlike their rulers, the ruled have no material: interest in using inappropriate
language about states and nations. For them, the reward of being mistaken is
psychological. The personified and deified nation becomes, in the minds of the
individuals composing it, a kind of enlargement of themselves. The superhuman
qualities which belong to the young lady with the toasting fork, the young lady with plaits
and a brass soutien-gorge, the young lady in a Phrygian bonnet, are claimed by
individual Englishmen, Germans and Frenchmen as being, at least in part, their own.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori But there would be no need to die, no need of war,
if it had not been even sweeter to boast and swagger for one’s country, to hate, despise,
swindle and bully for it. Loyalty to the personified nation, or to the personified class or
party, justifies the loyal in indulging all those passions which good manners and the
moral code do not allow them to display in their relations with their neighbours. The
personified entity is a being, not only great and noble, but also insanely proud, vain and
touchy; fiercely rapacious; a braggart; bound by no considerations of right and wrong.
(Hegel condemned as hopelessly shallow all those who dared to apply ethical standards
to the activities of nations. To condone and applaud every iniquity committed in the
name of the State was to him a sign of philosophical profundity.) Identifying themselves
with this god, individuals find relief from the constraints of ordinary social decency, feel
themselves justified in giving rein, within duly prescribed limits, to their criminal
proclivities. As a loyal nationalist or party-man, one can enjoy the luxury of behaving
badly with a good conscience.
The evil passions are further justified by another, linguistic error-the error of
speaking about certain categories of persons as though they were mere embodied
abstractions. Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as men and
women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as representatives
and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any personality at all, it is the
personality we mistakenly attribute to their class – a personality that is, by definition,
intrinsically evil. We know that the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and
we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to be wrong. But when particular men
and women are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously
been defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt
or murder disappears. Brown, Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of as Brown,
Jones and Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids, niggers, barbarians, Huns,
communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals- whichever the case may be. When they have
been called such names and assimilated to the accursed class to which the names
apply, Brown, Jones and Robinson cease to be conceived as What they really are-
human persons – and become for the users of this fatally inappropriate language mere
vermin or, worse, demons whom it is right and proper to destroy as thoroughly and as
painfully as possible. Wherever persons are present, questions of morality arise. Rulers
of nations and leaders of parties find morality embarrassing. That is why they take such
pains to depersonalize their opponents. All propaganda directed against an opposing
group has but one aim: to substittite diabolical abstractions for concrete persons. The
propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of
people are human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale
of moral obligation. Mere symbols can have no rights-particularly when that of which
they are symbolical is, by definition, evil.
Politics can become moral only on one condition: that its problems shall be
spoken of and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of
persons. To depersonify human beings and to personify abstractions are
complementary errors, which lead, by an inexorable logic, to war between nations and
to idolatrous worship of the State, with consequent governmental oppression. All current
political thought is a mixture, in varying proportions, between thought in terms of
concrete realities and thought in terms of depersonified symbols and personified
abstractions. In the democratic countries the problems of internal politics are thought
about mainly in terms of concrete reality; those of external politics, mainly in terms of
abstractions and symbols. In dictatorial countries the proportion of concrete to abstract
and symbolic thought is lower than in democratic countries. Dictators talk little of
persons, much of personified abstractions, such as the Nation, the State, the Party, and
much of depersonified symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies, Capitalists. The stupidity of
politicians who talk about a world of persons as though it were not a world of persons is
due in the main to self-interest. In a fictitious world of symbols and personified
abstractions, rulers find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can
gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality
demand that they should repress. To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It
is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable
temptations.
HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN 500 WORDS

Paul Roberts
It’s Friday afternoon, and you have almost survived another week of classes. You
are just looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says: “For
Monday you will turn in a five-hundred word composition on college football.”
Well, that puts a good big hole in the weekend. You don’t have any strong views
on college football one way or the other. You get rather excited during the season and
go to all the home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the
class has been reading Robert Hutchinsin the anthology and perhaps Shaw’s “Eighty-
Yard Run,” and from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor thinks
college football is for the birds. You are no fool, you. You can figure out what side to
take.
After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school
graduation. You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five
hundred words is about two double-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a
sheet of paper, think up a title, and you’re off:
Why College Football Should Be Abolished
College football should be abolished because it’s bad for the school and also bad
for the players. The players are so busy practicing that they don’t have any time for their
studies.
This, you feel, is a mighty good start. The only trouble is that it’s only thirty-two
words. You still have four hundred and sixty- eight to go, and you’ve pretty well
exhausted the subject. It comes to you- that you do your best thinking in the morning, so
you put away the typewriter and go to the movies. But the next morning you have to do
your washing and some math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The
English instructor turns up too, and you wonder if you’ve taken the right side after all.
Saturday night you have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You
shouldn’t let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one thing and
another, it’s ten o’clock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make
a pot of coffee and start to fill out your Views on college football. Put a little meat on the
bones.
Why College Football Should be Abolished
In my opinion, it seems to me that college football should be abolished. The

reason why I think this to be true because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in
nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he
discusses college football, it would be better if the colleges had race horses and had
races with one another, because then the horses would not have to attend classes. I
firmly agree with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many other students
would agree too.
One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become
too commercial. In the olden times when people played football just for the fun of it,
maybe college football was all right, but they do not play football just for the fun of it now
as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a big
business. Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I don’t think it is especially true here
at State, but certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America
nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches
and alumni go around to the high schools and offer the high school stars large salaries
to come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high
school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college.
Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players.
They do not have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing
football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six, and then he
is so tired that he can’t concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to
sleep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having studied
and maybe he fails the test.
(Good ripe stuff so far, but you’re still a hundred and fifty-one words from home.
One more push.)
Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because
not very many students get to participate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students
only seventy-five or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call
a spectator sport. That means that most people go to watch it but do not play it
themselves.
(Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you
retype it, you can make the margins a little wider.)
These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should
be abolished in American colleges and universities.
On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back
marked “weak in content” and sporting a big “D.”
This essay is exaggerated a little, not much. The English instructor will recognize
it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football will bring in. He knows
that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred words to say that college football
is too commercial and bad for the players. Most of the other half will inform him that
college football builds character and prepares one for life and brings prestige to the
school. As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same
words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he
allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy
and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.
Well, you may ask, what can you do about it? The subject is one on which You
have few convictions and little information. Can you be expected to make a dull subject
interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the
writer’s essential task. All subjects are dull until, somebody makes them interesting. The
writer’s job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take
the reader with him. This is seldom easy, and it is particularly hard in subjects that have
been much discussed: College Football, Fraternities, Popular Music, Is Chivalry Dead?,
and the like. You will feel that there is nothing you can do with such subjects except
repeat the old bromides. But there are some things you can do which will make your
papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably tedious than they might
otherwise be.
Avoid the Obvious Content
Say the assignment is college football. Say that you’ve decided to be against it.
Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind: it is too commercial, it
takes the students’ minds off their studies, it is hard on the players, it makes the
university a kind of circus instead of an intellectual center, for most schools it is
financially ruinous. Can you think of any more arguments just off hand? All right. Now
when you write. your paper, make sure that you don’t use any of the material on this list.
If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else’s too, and
whether you get a “c” or a “D” may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper
early when he is fresh and tolerant or late, when the sentence “In my opinion, college
football has become too commercial,” inexorably repeated, has brought him to the brink
of lunacy.
Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are
keen and perceptive ones, that’s splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or
indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else’s reasons too.
Be against it because the colleges don’t spend enough money on it to make it worth
while, because it is bad for the characters of the spectators, because the players are
forced to attend classes, because the football stars hog all the beautiful women,
because it competes with baseball and is therefore un-American and possibly
Communist inspired. There are lots of more or less unused reasons for being against
college football.
Sometimes it is a good idea to sum up and dispose of the trite and conventional
points before going on to your own. This has the advantage of indicating to the reader
that you are going to be neither trite nor conventional. Something like this:
We are often told that college football should be abolished because

it has become too commercial or because it is bad for the players. These
arguments are no doubt very cogent, but they don’t really go to the heart
of the matter.
Then you go to the heart of the matter.
Take the Less Usual Side
One rather simple way of getting interest into your paper is to take the side of the
argument that most of the citizens will want to avoid. If the assignment is an essay on
dogs, you can, if you choose, explain that dogs are faithful and lovable companions,
intelligent, useful as guardians of the house and protectors of children, indispensable in
police work-in short, when all is said and done, man’s best friends. Or you can suggest
that those big brown eyes conceal, more often than not, a vacuity of mind and an
inconstancy of purpose; that the dogs you have known most intimately have been
mangy, ill-tempered brutes, incapable of instruction; and that only your nobility of mind
and fear of arrest prevent you from kicking the flea-ridden animals when you pass them
on the street.
Naturally, personal convictions will sometime dictate your approach. If the

assigned subject is “Is Methodism Rewarding to the Individual?” and you are a pious
Methodist, you have really no choice. But few assigned subjects, if any, will fall in this
category. Most of them will lie in broad areas of discussion with much to be said on both
sides. They are intellectual exercises and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now
another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the side that looks to you
hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly
on that side.
This general advice, applies where you have a choice of subjects. If you are to
choose among “The Value of Fraternities” and “My Favorite High School Teacher” and
“What I Think About Beetles,” by all means plump for the beetles. By the time the in-
structor gets to your paper, he will be up to his ears in tedious tales about the French
teacher at Bloombury High and assertions about how fraternities build character and
prepare one for life. Your views on beetles, whatever they are, are bound to be a
refreshing change.
Don’t worry too much about figuring out what the instructor thinks about the.
subject so that you can cuddle up with him. Chances are his views ate no stronger than
yours. If he does have convictions and you oppose them, his problem is to keep from
grading you higher than you deserve in order to show he is not biased. This doesn’t
mean that you should always cantankerously dissent from what the instructor says; that
gets tiresome too. And if the subject assigned is, My Pet Peeve,” do not begin, “My pet
peeve is the English instructor who assigns papers on ‘my pet peeve.’” This was still
funny during the War of1812, but it has sort of lost its edge since then. It is in general
good manners to avoid personalities.
Slip Out of Abstraction
If you will study the essay on college football. . . you will perceive that one reason
for its appalling dullness is that it never gets down to particulars. It is just a series of not
very glittering generalities: “football is bad for the colleges,” “it has become too
commercial,” “football is a big business,” “it is bad for the players,” and so on. Such
round phrases thudding against the reader’s brain are unlikely to convince him, though
they may well render him unconscious.
If you want the reader to believe that college football is bad for the players, you
have to do more than say so. You have to display the evil. Take your roommate, Alfred
Simkins, the second-string center. Picture poor old Alfy coming home from football
practice every evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, scarcely able to shovel
the mashed potatoes into his mouth. Let us see him staggering up to the room, getting
out his econ textbook, peering desperately at it with his good eye, falling asleep and
failing the test in the morning. Let us share his unbearable tension as Saturday draws
near. Will he fail, be demoted, lose his monthly allowance, be forced to return to the coal
mines? And if he succeeds, what will be his reward? Perhaps a slight ripple of applause
when the third- string center replaces him, a moment of elation in the locker room if the
team wins, of despair if it loses. What will he look back on when he graduates from
college? Toil and torn ligaments. And what will be his future? He is not good enough for
profootball, and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds.
College football is tearing the heart from Alfy Simkins and, when it finishes with him, will
callously toss aside the shattered hulk.
This is no doubt a weak enough argument for the abolition of college football, but
it is a sight better than saying, in three or four variations, that college football (in your
opinion) is bad for the players.
Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is
moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts
and figure, the illustration. If he is writing on juvenile delinquency, he does not just tell
you that juveniles are (it seems to him) delinquent and that (in his opinion) something
should be done about it. He shows you juveniles being delinquent, tearing up movie
theatres in Buffalo, stabbing high school principals in Dallas, smoking marijuana in Palo
Alto. And more than likely he is moving toward some specific remedy, not just a general
wringing of the hands.
It is no doubt possible to be too concrete, too illustrative or anecdotal, but few

inexperienced writers err this way. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking
always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples.
Don’t say, “Sororities teach girls the social graces.” Say “Sorority life teaches a girl how
to carry on a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucerr.”
Don’t say, “I like certain kinds of popular music very much.” Say, “Whenever I hear
Gerber Spinklittle play ‘Mississippi Man’ on the trombone, my socks creep up my
ankles.”
Get Rid of Obvious Padding
The student toiling away at his weekly English theme is too often tormented by a
figure: five hundred words. How, he asks himself, is he to achieve this staggering total?
Obviously by never using one word when he can somehow work in ten.
He is therefore seldom content with a plain statement like “Fast driving is

dangerous.” This has only four words in it. He takes thought, and the sentence
becomes:
In my opinion, fast driving is dangerous.
Better, but he can do better still:
In my opinion, fast driving would seem to be rather dangerous.
If he is really adept, it may come out:

In my humble opinion, though I do not claim to be an expert on this

complicated subject, fast driving, in most circumstances, would seem to
be rather dangerous in may respects, or at least so it would seem to me.
Thus four words have been turned into forty, and not an iota of content has been added.
Now this is a way to go about reaching five hundred words, and if you are
content with a “D” grade, it is as good a way as any. But if you aim higher, you must
work differently. Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to
get rid of the padding, to make your sentence lean and tough. If you are really working
at it, your first draft will greatly exceed the required total, and then you will work it down,
thus:
It is thought in some quarters that fraternities do not contribute as much as might

be expected to campus life.
Some people think that fraternities contribute little to campus life.
The average doctor who practices in small towns or in the country must toil night
and day to heal the sick.
Most country doctors work long hours.
When I was a little girl, I suffered from shyness and embarrassment in the
presence of others.
I was a shy little girl.
It is absolutely necessary for the person employed as a marine fireman to give

the matter of steam pressure his undivided attention at all times.
The fireman has to keep his eye on the steam gauge.
You may ask how you can arrive a five hundred words at this rate. Simply, You
dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of
the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and
explore, figure out the details. You illustrate. You say that fast driving is dangerous, and
then you prove it. How long does it take to stop a car at forty and at eighty? How far can
you see at night? What happens when a tire blows? What happens in a head-on
collision at fifty miles an hour? Pretty soon your paper will be full of broken glass and
blood and headless torsos, and reaching five hundred words will not really be a
problem.
Call a Fool a Fool
Some of the padding in freshman themes is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word
minimum but on excessive timidity. The student writes, “In my opinion, the principal of
my high school acted in ways that I believe every unbiased person would have to call
foolish.” This isn’t exactly what he means. What he means is, “My high school principal
was a fool.” If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with ‘in-my-
opinion’s” and “it seems-to-me’s” and “as-I-see-it’s” and “at-least-from-my-point-of-
view’s” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper.
The student’s tendency to hedge stems from a modesty that in other

circumstances would be commendable. He is, he realizes, young and inexperienced,
and he half suspects that he is dopey and fuzzy-minded beyond the average. Probably
only too true. But it doesn’t help to announce your incompetence six times in every
paragraph. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without
apology and in plain words.
Linguistic diffidence can take various forms. One is what we call euphemism.
This is the tendency to call a spade “a certain garden implement” or women’s
underwear “unmentionables.” It is stronger in some eras than others and in some
people than others but it always operates more or less in subjects that are touchy or
taboo; death, sex, madness, and so on. Thus we shrink from saying “He died last night”
but say instead “passed away,” “left us,” “joined his Maker,” “went to his reward,!” Or we
try to take off the tension with a lighter cliche: “kicked the bucket,” “cashed in his chips,”
“handed in his dinner pail.” be have found all sorts of ways to avoid saying mad:
“mentally ill,” “touched,” “not quite right upstairs,” “feeble-minded,” “innocent,” “simple,”
“off his trolley,” “not in his right mind.” Even such a now plain word as insane began as a
euphemism with the meaning “not healthy.”
Modern science, particularly psychology, contributes many polysyllables in which

we can wrap our thoughts and blunt their force. To many writers there is no such thing
as a bad schoolboy. Schoolboys’ are maladjusted or unoriented or misunderstood or in
need of guidance or lacking in continued success toward satisfactory integration of the
personality as a social unit, but they are never bad. Psychology no doubt makes us
better men or women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn’t make writing any
easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might
have come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality
problem. Whether “tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a
psychic tolerance toward the maladjustment’s and repression’s induced by one’s lack of
orientation in one’s environment or__” But Hamlet would never have finished the
soliloquy.
Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. Nor, in
an effort to get away from euphemism, should you salt your paper with four-letter words.
But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those
echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and
force.
Beware of the Pat Expression
Other things being equal, avoid phrases like “other things, being equal.” Those
sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad
sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the
community soup.
Pat expressions are hard, often impossible, to avoid, because they come too
easily to be noticed and seem too necessary to be dispensed with. No writer avoids
them altogether, but good writers! avoid them more often than poor writers.
By “pat expressions” we mean such tags as “to all practical intents and
purposes,” “the pure and simple truth,” “from where I sit,” “the time of his life,” “to the
ends of the earth,” “in the twinkling of an eye,” ‘‘as sure as you’re born,” “over my dead
body, “ “under cover of darkness,” “took the easy way out,” “when all is said and done,”
“told him time and time again,” “parted that best of friends,” “stand up and be counted,”
“gave him the best- years of” her life,” “worked her fingers to the bone.” Like other.
cliches, these expressions were once forceful. Now we should use them only when we
can’t possibly think of anything else.
Some pat expressions stand like a wall between the writer and thought. Such a
one is “the American way of life.” Many student- writers feel that when they have said
that something accords with the American way of life or does not they have exhausted
the subject. Actually, they have stopped at the highest level of abstraction. The
American way of life is the complicated set of bonds between a hundred and eighty
million ways. All of us know this when we think about it, but the tag phrase too often
keeps us from thinking about it.
So with many another phrase dear to the politician: “this great land of ours,” “the
man in the street,” “our national heritage.” These may prove our patriotism or give a clue
to our political beliefs, but otherwise they add nothing to the paper except words.
Colorful Words
The writer builds with words, and no builder uses a raw material more slippery
and elusive and treacherous. A writer’s work is a constant struggle to get the right word
in the right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that
will persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him. He never succeeds
altogether-sometimes he feels that he scarcely succeeds at all- but such successes as
he has are what make the thing worth doing.
There is no book of rules for this game. One progresses through everlasting
experiment on the basis of ever-widening experience. There are few useful
generalizations that one can make about words as words, but there are perhaps a few.
Some words are what we call “colorful.” By this we mean that they are calculated
to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific
instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write
“Her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair, “we
may say, “He lounged, sprawled, coiled.” Instead of “It was hot, “we may say, “It was
blistering, sultry, muggy, suffocating, steamy, wilting.”
However, it should not be supposed that the fancy word is always better. Often it
is as well to write “Her heart beat” or “It was hot” if that is all it did or all it was. Ages
differ in how they like their prose. The nineteenth century liked it rich and smoky. The
twentieth has usually preferred it lean and cool. The twentieth century writer, like all
writers, is fore ever seeking the exact word, but he is wary of sounding feverish. He
tends to pitch it low, to understate it, to throw it away. He knows that if he gets too
colorful, the audience is likely to giggle.
See how this strikes you: “As the rich, golden glow of the sunset died away along
the eternal western hills, Angela’s limpid blue eyes looked softly and trustingly into
Montague’s flashing brown ones, and her heart pounded like a drum in time with the
joyous song surging in her soul.” Some people like that sort of thing, but most modern
readers would say, “Good grief” and turn on the television.
Colored Words
Some words we would call not so much colorful as colored – that is, loaded with
associations, good or bad. All words – except perhaps structure words – have
associations of some sort. We have said that the meaning of a word is the sum of the
contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the
situations in which we have heard it before.
In some words, these echoes are obvious and discussible. The word mother, for
example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you ,hear mother you
probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things. If one
writes, “She was like a mother to me,” he gets an effect which he would not get in “She
was like an aunt to me.” The advertiser makes use of the associations of mother by
working it in when he talks about his product. The politician works it in when he talks
about himself.
So also with such words as home, liberty, fireside, contentment, patriot,

tenderness, sacrifice, childlike, manly, bluff, limpid. All of these words are loaded with
favorable associations that would be rather hard to indicate in a straightforward
definition. There is more than a literal difference between “They sat around the fire-
side” and “They sat around the stove.” They might have been equally warm and happy
around the stove, but fireside suggests leisure, grace, quiet tradition, congenial
company, and stove does not.
Conversely, some words have bad associations. Mother suggests pleasant

things, but mother-in-law does not. Many mothers-in-law are heroically lovable and
some mothers drink gin all day and beat their children insensible, but these facts of life
are beside the point. The thing is that mother sounds good and mother-in-law does not.
Or consider the word intellectual. This would seem to be a complimentary term,

but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and
ineffectuality and general dopiness. So also with such words as liberal, reactionary,
Communist, socialist, capitalist, radical, schoolteacher, truck driver, undertaker,
operator, salesman, huckster, speculator. These convey meanings on the literal level,
but beyond that – sometimes, in some places – they convey contempt on the part of the
speaker.
The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being
written. The scientist, the scholar, try to avoid them; for the poet, the advertising writer,
the public speaker, they are standard equipment. But every writer should take care that
they do not substitute for thought. If you write, “Anyone who thinks that is nothing but a
Socialist (or Communist or capitalist)” you have said nothing except that you don’t like
people who think that, and such remarks are effective only with the most naïve readers.
It is always a bad mistake to think your readers more naive than they really are.
Colorless Words
But probably most student writers come to grief not with words that are colorful or
those that are colored but with those that have no color at all. A pet example is nice, a
word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual converstion but which is no longer
capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general
meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing. Slang adjectives, like cool
(“That’s real cool”) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to
everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.
Beware also of nouns of very general meaning, like circumstances, cases,

instances, aspects, factors, relationships, attitudes, eventualities, etc. in most
circumstances you will find that those cases of writing which contain too many instances
of words like these will in this and other aspects have factors leading to unsatisfactory
relationship with the reader resulting in unfavorable attitudes on his part and perhaps
other eventualities, like a grade of “D”. Notice also what “etc.” means. It means “I’d like
to make this list longer, but I can’t think of any more examples.”
QUESTIONS:
1. What is the thesis of the selection? Locate the sentence (s) in which Roberts
states his main idea. If he does not state the thesis explicitly, express it in your
own words.
2. According to Roberts, what do students assume they have to do to get a good
grade on an English composition?
3. What is the difference between “colorful words,” “colored words,” and “colorless
word”? Which are preferred in essay writing?
4. What are Roberts’ most important pieces of advice for the student writer?
5. Refer to the dictionary as needed to define the following word used in the
selection: bromides (paragraph 13), insufferably (13), inexorably (14), dissent
(21), abolition (24), adept (28), euphemism (33), and insensible (49).
6. What two processes does Roberts analyze in this essay? Is each process
informational, directional, or a combination of the two?
7. Why does Roberts use the second person “you” throughout the essay? How
does this choice of point of view affect your response to the essay?
8. What is Roberts’ tone in this essay? Find some typical examples of this tone.
What does Roberts do to achieve this tone? Considering his intended audience,
is this tone a good choice?
9. Does Roberts “practice what he preaches” about writing? Review the section
headings of the essay and find examples of each piece of advice in the essay.
THE WAR PRAYER

Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the
war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating,
the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and
spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and
balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers
marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers
and mother and sister and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy
emotion as they swung by nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot
oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at
briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the
while; the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the
God to battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence
which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen
rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its
righteousness straight way got such a stem and angry warning that for their personal
safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the
church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young momentum, the rushing
charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the
fierce pursuit, the surrender then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcome, adored,
submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud,
happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send
forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of noble
deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the
first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with
one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that
tremendous invocation.
“God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,

Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!
Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate
pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an
ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers,
and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriot work; bless them, shield them in
the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in his might hand, make them strong
and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them
and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main
aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in robe that reached to his
feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his
seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and
wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side
and stood there, waiting. With shut lids the preacher unconscious of his presence,
continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent
appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of
our land and flag!”
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled
minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound
audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light, then in a deep voice he
said:
“I come form the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty god!” The words
smote the house with a shock: if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has
heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your
desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its
full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that is asks for more than he
who utters it is aware of – except those who pause and think.
“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken
thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached
the ear of Him Who hearth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this
– keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! Lest without
intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing
of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse
upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
“You have heard your servant’s prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned
by God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor – and also you
in your hearts – fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant
that it was so! You heard these words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is
sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words.
Elaboration were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for
many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it.
Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He
commands me to put it into words. Listen!
“O Lord our Father, our young patriot, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be
Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our
beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to
bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of
their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their
wounded, writhing in pain; helps us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of
fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us
to turn them out roofless with their desolated land in rages and hunger and thirst, sports
of the sun, flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with
travail, imploring therefore the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who
adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage,
make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with blood
of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who in the Source of Love,
and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid
with humble and contrite hearts Amen.”
(After a pause). “You have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of
the Most High waits.’’
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no
sense in what he said.
QUESTIONS
1. What contrast is the author drawing?

2. What effect does the second prayer have on the first?
3. What happened to the few people who dared question the noble purpose of the
war? Why were they treated so?
4. What was the essential message of the first prayer?
5. What was the essential message of the second prayer? What was its purpose?
6. What is the meaning of the final paragraph?
7. What word functions as the dominant impression of the topic sentence in
paragraph 1? What details support this dominant impression?
8. Why do you suppose the minister read a chapter from the Old rather than the
New Testament?
9. What is your opinion of the “tremendous invocation” spoken by the
congregations? (see the quotation in paragraph 2).
10. What kind of language is used by the stranger who appears to the congregation?
What is the effect?
11. What is the irony of paragraph 8?
12. What transition is used to move from one prayer to the other?
WORK
Bertrand Russell
Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among the
causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful question. There is
certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome, and an excess of work in always
very painful. I think, however, that provided work is not excessive in amount, even the
dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades
from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according to the nature of the
work and the abilities of the worker. Most of the work that most people have to do is not
in itself interesting, but even such work has certain great advantages. To being with, it
fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most
people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice are at
a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they
decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been
pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilisation, and at
present very few people have reached this level. Moreover, the exercise of choice is in
itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be
told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not too unpleasant.
Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from
drudgery. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round
the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past.
Accordingly, the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were poor,
while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with innumerable trifles of
whose earth-shaking importance they are firmly persuaded.
Work, therefore, is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for

the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is
as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with
his days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes
holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work
so hard as to impair his vigour, he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an
idle man could possibly find.
The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is that it
gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In most work success is
measured by income, and while our capitalistic society continues, this is inevitable. It is
only where the best work is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to
apply. The desire that men feel to increase their income is quite as much a desire for
success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can procure. However dull work
may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation, whether in the

world at large or only in one’s own circle. Continuity of purpose is one of the most
essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes chiefly
through their work. In this respect those women whose lives are occupied with
housework are much less fortunate than men, or than women who work outside the
home. The domesticated wife does not receive wages, has no means of bettering
herself, is taken for granted b her husband (who sees practically nothings of what she
does), and is valued by him not for her housework but for quite other qualities. Of
course, this does not apply to those women who are sufficiently well-to-do to make
beautiful houses and beautiful gardens and become the envy of their neighbour; but
such women are comparatively few, and for the great majority housework cannot bring
as much satisfaction as work of other kinds brings to men and to professional women.
The satisfaction of killing time and of affording some outlet, however modest, for
ambition, belongs to most work, and is sufficient to make even a man whose work is dull
happier on the average than a man who has no work at all. But when work is
interesting, it is capable of giving satisfaction of a far higher order than mere relief from
tedium. The kinds of work in which there is some interest may be arranged in a
hierarchy. I shall begin with those which are only mildly interesting and end with those
that are worthy to absorb the whole energies of a great man.
Two chief elements make work interesting: first, the exercise of skill, and second,
construction.
Every man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it until it has
become a matter of course, or until he can no longer improve himself. This motive to
activity begins in early childhood: a boy who can stand on his head becomes reluctant
to stand on his feet. A great deal of work gives the same pleasure that is to be derived
from games of skill. The work of a lawyer or a politician must contain in a more
delectable form a great deal of the same pleasure that is to be derived from playing
bridge. Here, of course, there is not only the exercise of skill but the outwitting of a
skilled opponent. Even where this competitive element is absent, however, the
performance of difficult feats is agreeable. A man who can do stunts in an aeroplane
finds the pleasure so great that for the sake of it he is willling to risk his life. I imagine
that an able surgeon, in spite of the painful circumstances in which his work is done,
derives satisfaction from the exquisite precision of his operations. The same kind of
pleasure, though in a less intense form, is to be derived from a great deal of work of a
humbler kind. I have even heard of plumbers who enjoyed their work, though I have
never had the good fourtune to meet one. All skilled work can be pleasurable, provided
the skill required is either variable or capable of indefinite improvement. If these
conditions are absent, it will cease to be interesting when a man has acquired his
maximum skill. A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find pleasure in this
occupation when he passes the age at which he can beat his own previous record.
Fortunately there is a very considerable amount of work in which new circumstances
call for new skill and a man can go on improving, at any rate until he has reached
middle age. In some kinds of skilled work, such as politics, for example, it seems that
men are at their best between sixty and seventy, the reason being that in such
occupations a wide experience of other men is essential. For this reason successful
politicians are apt to be happier at the age of seventy than any other men of equal age.
Their only competitors in this respect are the men who are the heads of big businesses.
There is, however, another element possessed by the best work, which is even
more important as a source of happiness than is the exercise of skill. This is the
element of constructiveness. In some work, though by no means in most, something is
built up which remains as a monument when the work is completed. We may distinguish
construction from destruction by the following criterion. In construction the initial stage of
affairs is comparatively haphazard while the final state of affairs embodies a purpose; in
destruction the reverse is the case: the initail state of affairs embodies a purpose, while
the final state of affairs is haphazard, that is to say, all that is intended by the destroyer
is to produce a state of affairs which does not embody a certain purpose. This criterion
applies in the most literal and obvious case, namely the construction and destruction of
buildings. In constructing a building a previously made plan is carried out, whereas in
destroying it no one decides exactly how the materials are to lie when the demolition is
complete. Destruction is of course necessary very often as a preliminary to subsequent
construction; in that case it is part of a whole which is constructive. But not infrequently
a man will engage in activities of which the purpose is destructive without regard to any
construction that may come after. Frequently he will conceal this from himself by the
belief that he his only sweeping away in order to build afresh, but it is generally possible
to unmask this pretence, when it is a pretence, by asking him what the subsequent
construction is to be. On this subject it will be found that he will speak vaguely and
without enthusiasm, whereas on the preliminary destruction he has spoken precisely
and with zest. This applies to not a few revolutionaries and militarists and other apostles
of violence. They are actuated, usually without their own knowledge, by hatred; the
destruction of what they hate is their real purpose, and they are comparatively
indifferent to the question of what is to come after it. Now I cannot deny that in the work
of destruction there may be joy. It is a fiercer joy, perhaps at moments more intense, but
it is less profoundly satisfying, since the result is one in which little satisfaction is to be
found. You kill your enemy, and when he is dead your occupation is gone, and the
satisfaction that you derive from victory quickly fades. The work of construction, on the
other hand, when completed, is delightful to contemplate and moreover is never so fully
completed that there is nothing further to do about it. The most satisfactory purposes
are those that lead on indefinitely from one success to another without ever coming to a
dead end; and in this respect it will be found that construction is a greater source of
happiness than destruction. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that those who find
satisfaction in construction find in it greater satisfaction than the lovers of destruction
can find in destruction, for if once you have become filled with hate you will not easily
derive from construction the pleasure which another man would derive from it.
At the same time few things are so likely to cure the habit of hatred as the
opportunity to do constructive work of an important kind.
The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is

one of the most massive that life has to offer, although unfortunately in its highest forms
it is only open to men of exceptional ability. Nothing can rob a man of the happiness of
successful achievement in an important piece of work, unless it be the proof that after
all his work was bad. There are many forms of such satisfaction. The man who by a
scheme of irrigation has caused the wilderness to blossom like the rose enjoys it in one
of its most tangible forms. The creation of an organisation may be a work of supreme
importance. So is the work of those few statesmen who have devoted their lives to
producing order out of chaos, of whom Lenin is the supreme type in our day. The most
obvious examples are artists and men of science. Shakespeare says of his verse: ‘So
long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this.’ And it cannot be doubted
that the thought consoled him for misfortune. In his sonnets he maintains that the
thought of his friend reconciled him to life, but I cannot help suspecting that the sonnets
he wrote to his friend were even more effective for this purpose than the friend himself.
Great artists and great men of science do work which is in itself delightful; while they are
doing it, it secures them the respect of those whose respect is worth having, which
gives them the most fundamental kind of power, namely power over men’s thoughts and
feelings. They have also the most solid reasons for thinking well of themselves. This
combination of fortunate circumstances ought, one would think, to be enough to make
any man happy. Nevertheless it is not so. Michaelangelo for example, was a profoundly
unhappy man and maintained (not, I am sure, with truth) that he would not have
troubled to produce works of art if he had not had to pay the debts of his impecunious
relations. The power to produce great art is very often, though by no means always,
associated with a temperamental unhappiness, so great that but for the joy which the
artist derives from his work he would be driven to suicide. We cannot therefore maintain
that even the greatest work must make a man happy; we can only maintain that it must
make him less unhappy. Men of science, however, are far less often temperamentally
unhappy than artists are, and in the main the men who do great work in science are
happy men, whose happiness is derived primarily from their work.
One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that
so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the
independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich
corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they
themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists
either in England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for
which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest,
for the sake of livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be
harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling
himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer
derive wholehearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who
undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too series an alternative, but I think that
where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to a man’s constructive impulses
without entirely starving, he will be well advised form the point of view of his own
happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming
to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is
scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-
respect.
The satisfaction of constructive work, though it may, as things are, be the

privilege of a minority, can nevertheless be the privilege of a quite large minority. Any
man who is his own master in his work can feel it; so can any man whose work appears
to him useful and requires considerable skill. The production of satisfactory children is a
difficult constructive work capable of affording profound satisfaction. Any woman who
has achieved this can feel that as a result of her labour the world contains something of
value which it would not other wise contain.
Human beings differ profoundly in regard to the tendency to regard their lives as
a whole. To some men it is natural to do so, and essential to happiness to be able to do
so with some satisfaction. To others life is a series of detached incidents without
directed movement and without unity. I think the former sort are more likely to achieve
happiness than they latter, since they will gradually build up those circumstances from
which they can derive contentment and self-respect, whereas the others will be blown
about by the winds of circumstance now this way, now that, without ever arriving at any
haven. The habit of viewing life as a whole is an essential part both of wisdom and of
true morality, and is one of the things which ought to be encouraged in education.
Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy but it is an almost indispensable
condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work.
HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME

Zora Neale Hurston
I
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except
the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s
side was not an Indian chief.
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in
the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only
white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The
native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village
road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing
when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered
at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out
on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the toursts as
the tourists got out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a
gallery seat for me. My favourite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a
born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that
I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned
my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-
goin’?” Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange
of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in
farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of
course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the
first “welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will
please take notice.
During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode
through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and
wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver
for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much
that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no
dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I
belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county___everybody’s Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in
Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked
from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a
sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more. I was now a little colored girl. I
found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror. I became a fast
brown___warranted not to rub nor run.
II
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul,
nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of
Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and
whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I
have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.
No, I do not weep at the world___I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of

slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The
operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle
that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The
Reconstruction said “Get set!”: and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying
start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I
paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all
that I have paid through any ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance
for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think___to know that
for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite
exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing
whether to laugh or to weep.
The position of my white neighbors is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls
up a chair beside me when I am down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine
in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
III
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst,
but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement
that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting
about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In
the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no
time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and
splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows
rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending
it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond, I follow those heathen___follow
them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai
above my head. I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the
jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is
throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something___give pain, give death to what,
I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their
fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find
the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotions have not touched him. He
has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and
the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I
am so colored.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of
Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white
background.
For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race.
Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but
through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but
reveals me again.
IV
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle
and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front
of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned,
Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage,
knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic
Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of
beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am

merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right
or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely
astonishes me, How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s
beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall.
Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents,
and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water
diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long
since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was
and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried
flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before
you is the jumble it held___so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied,
that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the
content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that
is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place___who knows?
NOTES
The following list provides observations which help in interpreting the essay:
• Hurston writes as an adult looking back on her childhood and adolescence as well
as at her adult experiences.
• She describes her experience of living in two places___Eatonville and Jacksonville.
• She refers to the historical past, particularly to slavery and Reconstruction.
• She describes scenes that include white and black people together: welcoming
visitors to Eatonville; the jazz club.
• She uses comparisons in describing how she thinks about herself:
as a patient after an operation
as an actress on center stage
as a player in a game of “getting”
as a “dark rock surged upon and covered by waters”
as a stone statue of a lion
as a fragment of the great soul
as a brown bag of miscellany containing both priceless and worthless thing
• She divides the essay into four sections.
• She mentions changes and contrasting states of affairs:
The day she “became colored”
Her “sea change”
Different responses to cabaret music
The priceless and worthless stuff she is made of
• She chronicles her feelings:
she does not always feel colored
she feels most colored against a white background
she sometimes feels astonished
she doesn’t feel angry about her situation
she has no separate feeling about being American and colored
she feels discriminated against (somehow)
A WORLD NOT NEATLY DIVIDED

Amartya Sen
(Amartya Sen, born in Santiniketan, India, in 1933, was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Economics (1998) for his groundbreaking contributions to “welfare economics.”
Concerned with poverty and inequality, Sen has clarified the nature of decision making
and analysis with respect to poverty, not only creating more useful indexes of poverty
but also providing an intellectual foundation for the practical application of group values
to individual instances of need or distress. His major works include Collective Choice
and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973), and Poverty and Famines:
An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (I98l). Educated at Presidency College,
Calcutta, and Trinity College, Cat11bridgc. England, in t 998 Sen left his professorships
in economics and philosophy at Harvard University to become Master of Trinity College,
Cl1nlbriugc. In this selection, which appeared in the New York Times” on November 23,
2001, Sen uses extensive examples to show how blanket generalizations about
“civilizations” grossly oversimplify the complex reality of all cultures.)
When people talk about clashing civilizations, as so many politicians and

academics do now, they can sometimes miss the central issue. The inadequacy of this
thesis begins well before we get to the question of whether civilizations must clash. The
basic weak- ness of the theory lies in its program of categorizing people of the world
according to a unique, allegedly commanding system of classification. This is
problematic because civilization categories are crude and inconsistent and also
because there are other ways of seeing people (linked to politics, language, literature,
class, occupation or other affiliations).
The befuddling influence of a singular classification also traps those who dispute
the thesis of a clash: To talk about “the Islamic world” or “the Western world” is already
to adopt an impoverished vision of humanity as unalterably divided. In fact, civilizations
are hard it partition in this way, given the diversities within each society as well as the
linkages among different countries and cultures. For example, describing India as a
“Hindu civilization” misses the fitted that India has more Muslims than any other country
except Indonesia and possibly Pakistan. It is futile to try to Line derstand Indian art,
literature, music, food or politics without senile the extensive interactions, across
barriers of’ religious communities. These include Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Jains,
Sikhs, Parsees, Christians (who have been in Indian since at least the fourth century,
well before England’s conversion to Christianity, Jews pretest since the all of
Jerusalem), and even atheists and agnostic. Sanskrit has a larger atheistic literature
than exists in any other classical language. Speaking of India as a Hindu civilization
may be comfol1ing to the Hindu fundamentalist, but it is an odd reading of India.
A similar coarseness can be seen in the other categories invoked, like “the
Islamic world.” Consider Akbar and Aurangzeb, two Muslim emperors of the Mogul
dynasty in India. Aurangzeb tried hard to convert Hindus into Muslims and instituted
various policies in that direction, of which taxing the non-Muslims was only one
example. In contrast, Akbar reveled in his multiethnic court and pluralist laws. and
issued official proclamations insisting that no one “should be interfered with on account
of religion” and that “anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”
If a homogeneous view of Islam were to be taken. then only 4 one of these

emperors could count as a true Muslim. The Islamic fundamentalist would have no time
for Akbar Prime Minister, Tony Blair, given his insistence that tolerance is a defining
characteristic of Islam, would have to consider excommunicating Aurangzeb. I expect
both Akbar and Aurangzeb would protest, and so would I. A similar crudity is present in
the characterization of what is called “Western civilization.” Tolerance and individual
freedom have certainly been present in European history. But there is no dearth of
diversity here, either. When Akbar was making his pronouncements on religious
tolerance in Agra in the 1590’s the Inquisitions were still going on in 1600. Giordano
Bruno was burned at the stake, for heresy, in Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
Dividing the world into discrete civilizations is not just crude. It propels us into the
absurd belief that this partitioning is natural and necessary and must overwhelm all
other ways of identifying people. That imperious view goes not only against the
sentiment that “we human beings are all much the same,” but also against the more
plausible understanding that we are diversely different. For example, Bangladesh’s split
from Pakistan was not connected with religion, but with language and politics.
Each of us has many features in our self-conception. Our religion, important as it

may be, cannot be an all-engulfing identity. Even a shared poverty can be a source of
solidarity across the borders. The kind of division highlighted by, say the so-called “anti-
globalization” protesters-whose movement is incidentally, one of the most globalized in
the world-tries to unite the underdogs of the world economy and goes firmly against
religious. national or “civilizational” lines of division.
The main hope of harmony lies not in any imagined uniformity, but in the plurality
of our identities. which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions into
impenetrable civilizational camps. Political leaders who think and act in terms of
sectioning off humanity into various “worlds” stand to make the world more flammable-
even when their intentions are very different. They also end up, in the case of
civilizations defined by religion, lending authority to religious leaders seen as

spokesmen for their “worlds.” In the process, other voices are muffled and other
concerns silenced. The robbing of our plural identities not only reduces us; it
impoverishes the world.
QUESTIONS:
1. What, in your own words, is the inadequacy that Sen attributes to the view that
the world is today divided among “clashing civilizations” (par. 1)?
2. What does Sen mean by ‘singular classification” (par.2)?
3. How is a “singular classification” of civilizations inaccurate?
4. How does Sen show that ‘the Islamic world” is much more diverse than the term
suggests?
5. How does Sen show that “Western civilization” is not “homogeneous”?
6. What features of societies other than religion can influence identity?
7. According to Sen where does the “main hope for harmony” in the world lie?
8. Sen opens his essay by arguing against a point of view different from his own.
What is that point of view?
9. Sen’s essay exposes the inadequacies of the opposing view by citing illustrations
that undermine it. What are three such illustrations?
10. Sen uses illustrations to refute a “thesis.” How does he achieve a coherent
development of ideas in the essay?
11. How effective is Sen’s closing paragraph? Explain your answer.

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B.A/B.Sc.

Hons-II (Prose) Eng-201 1

ENG 201 PROSE

1. Allegory of Wit and Learning Samuel Johnson 5

2. Mother Tongue Amy Tan 9

3. Individual and Group Identity Desmond Morris 15

4. The Eatanswill Election Charles Dickens 24

5. On Liberty John Stuart Mill 33

6. Courtship Through the Ages James Thurber 42

7. Class Struggles Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 46

8. The Battle of the Ants Henry David Thoreau 54

9. Words and Behaviour Aldous Huxley 56

10. How To Say Nothing In 500 Words Paul Roberts 66

11. War Prayer Mark Twain 78

12. Work Bertrand Russell 81

13. How It Feels To Be Coloured Me Zora Neale Hurston 86

14. A World Not Neatly Divided Amartya Sen 91

Prose writing includes biography, autobiography, and essays. Prose is rooted in

2. The writer of any form of nonfiction-biography, autobiography, or essays-uses

• Anecdotes to illustrate character traits and portray key events

• Figurative language (similes and metaphors) and sensory language to communicate

• Details, incidents, and other evidence as well as analogies to support opinions or

• A clear organization-such as chronological order, parallelism, or comparison and

• A clear thesis statement or clearly implied message.

Guide for Studying Essay

2. What seems to have been the author’s purpose?

3. What is the author’s attitude toward the essay’s subject?

(Adopted from various sources)

ALLEGORY OF WIT AND LEARNING

Without a genius learning soars in vain;

Their conduct was, whenever they desired to recommend themselves to

Dr. Johnson is traditionally associated with a “sesquipedalian” vocabulary

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved

I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of

4. What is the thesis statement in Tan’s essay? Where does it appear?

INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITY

Zoologist Desmond Morris was born in England in 1928 and

It is rare for people to be driven to physical fighting in defense of these “owned”

Of course, I can still be intimidated by a particularly dominant individual who

First: the Tribal Territory. We evolved as tribal animals, living in comparatively

In social organizations which embody a strong class system, such as military

It is one of the tragedies of modern architecture that, there has been a

Those of us who have to spend a great deal of time in crowded conditions

A third method of reinforcing the body-territory is to use personal markers. Books,

2. Why do territories prevent disputes, according to Morris? How do humans signal

3. Why, according to Morris, aren’t people’s needs to be part of a tribe satisfied by

4. What do we do when we cannot avoid having our personal space invaded?

7. Examine Morris’s introduction. Why is it so lengthy? What mode of development

THE EATANSWILL ELECTION

“Never see such devotion in my life, sir.”

“Energetic, eh ?” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Werry likely, “ replied Sam, briefly.

“Pumping’ over the independent voters!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.

“Can such things be!” exclaimed the astonished Mr. Pickwick.

“Nothing ?” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Not half so strange as a miraculous circumstance as happened to my own

“What was that ?” inquired Mr. Pickwick.

“And got out again?” inquired Mr. Pickwick, hastily.

“Everything, my dear sir,” was the little man’s reply.

“I’ll take care,” said the Honourable Samuel slumkey.

“Arrange the procession,” cried the twenty committee-men.

“Oh you, wenerable sinner,” cried another.