The Far Country: The case for (and against) emigration.

With its generic title and un-grabby premise – English girl goes to Australia, falls in love – I doubt anyone besides Nevil Shute completists is reading his 1952 novel The Far Country these days. I enjoyed it, but I concede that it’s a tad lacking in dramatic incident. When in the 1980s it was made into an Australian TV miniseries – which I haven’t seen – the writers seem to have thought it necessary to crank up the melodrama by adding controversy over the Czech love interest’s wartime service as a doctor with the German army.

In the book, no-one is the least bit bothered about this. The English girl’s Aussie relatives express some misgivings about her gadding about with a dark-complexioned older man, but only because they’re afraid her folks back home will be prejudiced against foreigners. It’s strange. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when ordinary Brits and Aussies would have had ample justification for hating their former foes, it didn’t occur to Shute that his hero would be affected by such resentment. Thirty-odd years later, the creators of the miniseries assumed that the doctor’s Nazi guilt needed to be addressed.

Like In the Wet, Shute’s epic of electoral reform from the following year, The Far Country contrasts the war-exhausted, ration-stinted Old World with the optimism and expansiveness of the Antipodes. The heroine’s destitute grandmother receives £500 from a well-off niece in Australia, but it arrives too late to save the old lady from the effects of her meagre diet. On her deathbed she conveys the money to her granddaughter, Jennifer, with the stipulation that she should use it to emigrate from dreary, declining Britain.

Jennifer is inclined to ignore her grandmother’s directive and return the money to its sender. A few days later, at the government office where she’s employed as a typist, someone mentions a nephew who is prospering in Canada. A socialist co-worker gripes about the consequences of permitting such emigration:

“It’s not right, the way these young chaps go abroad,” said Sanders. “If it goes on, the Government will have to put a stop to it.”

I wasn’t sure about this character. Even in idle break-room chit-chat, would an idealistic leftist of the early 1950s have entertained the idea of restricting emigration? Or was this just Shute venting his ire at socialist control-freakery? [1]

But it wasn’t only those on the left who were concerned at the loss of British manpower. From an article by Murray Watson, co-author of a book on English immigrants to Canada: [2]

In the years after the war more than 2 million people emigrated from the United Kingdom. Such was the scale of population loss that wartime leader Winston Churchill feared those leaving would hamper post-war recovery. He issued a patriotic appeal on the BBC:

“I say to those that wish to leave our country, ‘Stay here and fight it out.’ If we work together with brains and courage, as we did in days not long ago, we can make our country fit for all our people. Do not desert the old land.”

Shute’s break-room socialist gives Churchill’s appeal an internationalist twist:

“[W]hat this country has tried to do, and what it’s doing, is to plan a new form of government and put it into practice, a new form of democracy where everyone will get a square deal. When we’ve shown it can be done, the world will copy it, all right. You see. But it can’t be worked out if people are allowed to run away to other countries. It’s their job to stay here and get this one right.” [3]

A level-headed accountant named Morrison joins the debate, asking Jennifer to consider the cost of her upbringing:

“For eighteen years somebody in this country fed you and clothed you and educated you before you made any money, before you started earning. Say you cost an average two quid a week for that eighteen years. You’ve cost England close on two thousand pounds to produce.”

Somebody said, “Like a machine tool.”

“That’s right,” the accountant said, “a human dictaphone and typewriter combined, all electronic and maintains itself and does its own repairs, that’s cost two thousand quid. Suppose you go off to Canada. You’re an asset worth two thousand quid that England gives to Canada as a free gift. If a hundred thousand like you were to go each year, it would be like England giving Canada a subsidy of two million pounds a year. It’s got to be thought about, this emigration. We can’t afford to go chucking money away like that.”

She said, puzzled, “It’s not really like that, is it?”

“It is and all,” said Morrison. “That’s what built up the United States. Half a million emigrants a year went from Central Europe to America for fifty years or so. Say they were worth a thousand quid apiece. Right – that was a subsidy from Central Europe to America of five hundred million quid a year, and it went on for fifty years or so. Human bulldozers.”

He leaned forward on the table. “Believe it or not,” he said, “Central Europe got very poor and the U.S.A. got very rich.”

Jennifer is so annoyed by the whole discussion that she decides to take her grandmother’s advice after all. She books passage for Australia.

Is it true that the Old World is poorer for the loss of generations of human capital to Australia, Canada, and the United States? Unsurprisingly, things were tight just after the war, when most of Europe’s savings had just been spent on obliterating much of Europe’s infrastructure. But by the 1970s or thereabouts, the continent – at least the half of it that wasn’t stuck under Communist rule – had rebuilt, living standards had rebounded, and the emigration slowed to a trickle.

Would Europe have recovered more quickly if emigrants like Shute’s hero and heroine had remained, their “brains and courage” helping to increase productivity? Or did their departure contribute to the rising standard of living, bleeding off surplus population and thus helping to keep the cost of housing low and wages high?

In his podcast last year, John Derbyshire scoffed at Nancy Pelosi’s contention that a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border was “immoral”. Pointing to news reports indicating that “There are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than in Ethiopia” and that “Half of Romania’s doctors left the country between 2009 and 2015”, he wondered:

Don’t those people’s home countries need their bright, educated, accomplished citizens way more than we do? Could someone please ask moralist-in-chief Nancy Pelosi about this?

I doubt that Derbyshire, a cantankerous immigration foe, really worries that the United States is enriching itself at the developing world’s expense. He would probably argue that migration is a lose-lose proposition: it weakens the source countries by robbing them of their smartest and most ambitious citizens, and weakens the destination countries by afflicting them with overcrowding, linguistic confusion, and interethnic squabbling.

One could also argue that migration is win-win: that teeming poor countries benefit by sending abroad workers who are unlikely to find an outlet for their talents at home, and that rich countries benefit by the infusion of energetic, ambitious young people. This would presumably be Nancy Pelosi’s view.

My own view is somewhere in between. Some people – habitual criminals, mental defectives, and unemployables – are a drain on whichever country they live in. If a poor country can guilt some rich country into taking these people off its hands, why not? For the rich country, it might be worthwhile to take in ninety-nine slackers and thugs on the chance of nabbing a single undiscovered genius whose ideas will generate enough wealth to maintain all the others. But if you can figure out how to get the one genius without taking the other ninety-nine, why not try that instead?

But why does the west feel it necessary to import Ethiopian and Romanian doctors at all? Medicine is a high-paying, high-prestige career, yet for some reason we can’t turn out enough young doctors to meet demand. Are salaries too low? Working conditions too gruelling? Is the high cost of education putting young people off? It can’t be the last: more people are getting advanced degrees than ever before. Wouldn’t it be less trouble to Tiger Mother an extra two or three percent of those high-achievers into med school than to relocate the finest young minds of Addis Ababa and Bucharest halfway around the world to tend our aging, flabby selves?

As it happens, Romanian doctors come up in The Far Country. The Czech hero, Zlinter, is unable to practice medicine in Australia as his credentials aren’t recognized. He can’t afford the three years of additional schooling he’d need to re-qualify, and as he’s happy enough doing manual labour, he’s resigned himself to never being a doctor again. Jennifer protests:

“But what an idiotic regulation!” the girl said.

He looked at her, smiling at her indignation for him. “It is not so idiotic,” he said. “There must be some rule. The doctors from some countries are ver’ bad. I would not like you to be treated by a Roumanian doctor, or a doctor from Albania.”

Working as a lumberman deep in the bush, Zlinter steps up to perform an emergency operation when two of his co-workers are injured in a gruesome accident. This incident attracts the attention of the authorities, who investigate the foreigner for practicing medicine without a licence. His friends and colleagues, resenting this intrusion by big-city bureaucrats, come to the Czech’s defence, but an Australian doctor named Jennings puts the case for caution:

“You’ve got to have a rule,” Jennings said. “Most of these D.P. doctors are crook doctors, oh, my word. You’d be the first to scream if some of them got loose on your family. …Take this Zlinter, for example. He seems to be a careful sort of chap, and since he qualified he’s had a very wide experience of surgery in front-line conditions with the German army. You’ve seen him at his best. He certainly knows a lot about these sort of accidents. But that’s not general practice. Ninety per cent of the general practitioner’s job is trying to decide if an old lady’s pain is heart trouble or wind, or whether a kiddy’s got scarlet fever or a sore throat. Zlinter may be useless at that sort of thing – probably is.”

He paused. “I don’t want you to think I’m against Zlinter,” he said. “I think he’s a good man. If he was qualified I’d like to see him practice in this district and take some of the work off me. But not before he’s been checked over at the hospital and been passed out as competent.”

Seems sensible enough. But I suspect no modern doctor would speak so forthrightly. Shute was writing in the unenlightened age before the benefits of diversity had been revealed to our governing class. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has put it:

[O]ur diversity isn’t a challenge to be overcome or a difficulty to be tolerated. Rather, it’s a tremendous source of strength. … Canada has succeeded – culturally, politically, economically – because of our diversity, not in spite of it.

If such assertions are meant to be taken literally, it follows that even if your Romanian or Albanian doctor turns out to be a bit “crook” (by which Dr. Jennings meant incompetent, not dishonest), the workforce-enriching effects of added diversity should more than compensate for any niggling increase in miscommunication, misdiagnosis, and malpractice.

As for Romania and Albania, today’s wisdom would tell them that instead of vainly attempting to coax their disillusioned professionals into remaining, they should look to even poorer countries – say, Mali or Mozambique – for doctors willing to bring to Eastern Europe the tremendous strength of their diversity. Meanwhile, Australia and Canada will go on sending their idealistic young doctors to do aid work in Mali and Mozambique, completing the cycle.

M.

1. Although Britons were never prevented from transporting their expensively-nurtured selves abroad, the Exchange Controls Act limited how much of their wealth they could take with them. At the time Shute was writing, emigrants to the United States and Canada could bring along only £1000; the remainder of their fortune had to be invested with an “authorised depositary” in the U.K. Even vacationers could take just £25 a year across the border. These rules wouldn’t have impacted Jennifer’s Australia trip, as they didn’t apply to the countries in the “sterling area” that used the pound as a reserve currency. (See the Bank of England’s “The U.K. Exhange Control: A Short History”.)

2. Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945, by Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson.

3. I can find no evidence that the U.K. has ever entertained the idea of restricting emigration. But earlier this year the Guardian reported the results of a European Council on Foreign Relations poll showing that majorities in Spain, Greece, and Italy – and near-majorities in Poland and Hungary – would support their citizens being “prevented from leaving the country for long periods of time”.

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I’ve written about, let’s see…four of Nevil Shute’s books now. John Derbyshire I last mentioned in an essay on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. Justin Trudeau came up just a few weeks ago, when I compared him to a “second-rate game show host”.

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Update, July 29, 2020: Added cover image and linked to Bibliography page.

No harm done: Racism and rape in Nevil Shute’s The Chequer Board.

There’s a small subgenre of mid-20th-century fiction concerned with black or brown men being railroaded by white authorities on charges of sexually assaulting white girls. Or at any rate, there are two famous instances that came easily to my mind, besides the much obscurer novel I came here to discuss – which together should be enough to wring a couple thousand words out of.

Set yourself to guessing which two famous novels I’m thinking of, while I tell you about Nevil Shute’s The Chequer Board, published in 1947. A lower-middle-class Englishman of no great brains or imagination learns that an old war injury will kill him inside of a year. He resolves to get in touch with three fellow soldiers who were kind to him in the hospital while he was recuperating from the wound. At the time all four had been at low points in their lives; the hero wants to see if the other three made it through all right, and if not, to attempt to repay their kindness during the time he has left.

It’s a pretty moving book, by the way. Among Shute’s several tales of stolid, decent, ordinary joes being dragged out of their routines into the wide romantic world, it’s the best I’ve read so far.

One of the men our hero tracks down, and the one whose story concerns us here, is a black ex-GI named Dave Lesurier.

Flashing back to the war years, we find Lesurier stationed near a village in Cornwall. He and his fellow black Americans, used to condescension and scorn from whites in their own country, are surprised to find that the English villagers treat them decently, and even tolerate them “walking out” with their white daughters. When a new white commanding officer arrives, he decides that these coloured boys are getting above themselves, and implements a more exacting regime to keep them in their place. The villagers side with the blacks, grumbling at the unfairness of the new rules.

Meanwhile, shy, tongue-tied Lesurier has developed a crush on a village girl, not quite seventeen, who works in the shop where he buys his cigarettes. Finding her friendly, but never having an opportunity to speak a private word to her, he approaches her on the street one night, intending to ask if she’d like to go for a walk. But when he tries to speak, things go awry…

Reading The Chequer Board, I wonder how the next generation, raised on current feminist orthodoxies, will interpret the scene where Lesurier “assaults” the girl. But before I get to that let’s consider the parallel cases in (did you guess?) Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India.

We never receive an objective account of what happened to the accuser, Mayella Ewell, in To Kill A Mockingbird. Our narrator, Scout Finch, can only report what she hears from the balcony overlooking the Maycomb County courtroom where Mayella, her father, and her supposed assailant give their testimony.

Nevertheless, no sane reader is going to come away believing that the accused is anything but perfectly innocent. In the Ewells’ version of events, Mayella hailed a random black man, Tom Robinson, as he passed their yard, offering him a nickel to “bust up this chiffarobe” – chop up an old wooden wardrobe for kindling. Tom entered the yard and, when Mayella stepped inside to retrieve the nickel, followed her in, jumped her, and viciously beat and raped her. Her father arrived home to find a man “ruttin’ on” his daughter, and chased him away.

In Tom’s much more detailed account, he’d been well known to Mayella already, having done various small chores free of charge out of pity for the dirt-poor, lonely white girl. Mayella invited him inside, threw her arms around him, and:

“She reached up an’ kissed me ‘side of th’ face. She says she never kissed a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her papa do to her don’t count. She says, ‘Kiss me back, nigger.’ I say Miss Mayella lemme outa here an’ tried to run but she got her back to the door an’ I’da had to push her. I didn’t wanta harm her, Mr. Finch, an’ I say lemme pass, but just when I say it Mr. Ewell yonder hollered through th’ window.”

What Mr. Ewell hollered, according to Tom, was “You goddamn whore, I’ll kill ya.” Tom ran off, leaving his supposed victim completely unharmed. What happened to her after she was left alone with her father, we can infer.

Mayella’s story seems to require her assailant to have been able to seize her by the neck while simultaneously beating her about the right side of her face, which Tom’s attorney Atticus Finch argues Tom, with his shriveled left arm, couldn’t have done. I doubt that a modern jury would disbelieve Mayella just because she was fuzzy on the details of her beating, or be moved by Atticus’s assertion that as a “strong girl” she should have been able to fend off her crippled but much larger attacker.

In fact, the reason we assume she and her father are lying, and that Tom Robinson is telling the truth, is simply that the narrator paints the Ewells as repellent racist cretins, and Tom as a noble victim. The same testimony presented minus the character portraits might lead to a different interpretation.

A Passage to India leaves more room for speculation, but not about the guilt of the accused: we’re told exactly what Dr. Aziz is doing at the time of Miss Quested’s ordeal in the Marabar Caves. Embarrassed over a moment of social awkwardness with his new acquaintance – Miss Quested has innocently asked whether Dr. Aziz, a Muslim, has one wife or several – Aziz ducks into the nearest cave to hide his confusion. Meanwhile the young Englishwoman wanders into a different cave, where…

“[T]here was this shadow, or sort of shadow, down the entrance tunnel, bottling me up. It seemed like an age but I suppose the whole thing can’t have lasted thirty seconds really. I hit at him with the glasses, he pulled me round the cave by the strap, it broke, I escaped, that’s all. He never actually touched me once. It all seems such nonsense.”

For all their blustering about this being the sort of thing that comes of mixing socially with the natives, the British authorities have every reason to assume Aziz’s guilt. He attempts to flee the arresting officers in a guilty-seeming way. The victim’s field-glasses, their strap broken, are discovered in his pocket. And he is found to have told his friends several small lies to smooth over the strangeness of Miss Quested abandoning the group without a word, scrambling down a hillside, and flagging down a passing car for a ride back to town.

Luckily for Aziz, the “queer, cautious” Miss Quested doesn’t share the prejudices of the local Anglo-Indians, and almost as soon as she recovers from her panic she begins to doubt her own memories.

I was reminded of Miss Quested while reading in the British press about three recent well-publicized rape cases that fell apart when exonerating evidence turned up. The barrister for one of the defendants commented:

I can’t talk about the psychology of those who make false accusations, but I do know that once a complaint is made and video evidence is recorded it is very difficult for a complainant to withdraw their allegations without facing prosecution. The whole thing snowballs. You can’t just go into a police station and say: “I was in a bit of an emotional mess at the time, I want to take it back.”

Despite her second thoughts, Miss Quested allows the prosecution to go forward: a skeptical observer comments that “[s]he has started the machinery; it will work to its end.” It takes great courage for her to dramatically recant her accusation mid-trial; she is shunned by the white community that had rallied to her so credulously, and exposes herself to the danger of a lawsuit from the outraged Dr. Aziz.

Still, something made the sensible young woman run in terror from the Marabar Caves that day. The question of whether she was in fact assaulted by a third person – perhaps the guide who disappeared immediately afterward, or “one of that gang of Pathans who have been drifting through the district” – or whether she hallucinated the whole thing, is left unanswered, and ultimately dismissed by Miss Quested as unimportant. She wasn’t harmed, after all.

***

One thing the accused have in common in A Passage to India and To Kill A Mockingbird is a complete lack of sexual interest in their supposed victims. Dr. Aziz feels it a disgrace “to have been mentioned in connexion with such a hag” as Miss Quested. Tom Robinson only feels sorry for Mayella Ewell, and is unwise enough to say so in his testimony; the comment doesn’t go over well with the white jurors.

The Chequer Board is a different case. Here’s what happens when Dave Lesurier, after standing around all evening waiting for her to pass by, finally spots the village girl he has a crush on:

He stood in front of her, and said, “Say, Miss Grace…” And then he stopped.

She said, “Oh, it’s you.” She smiled at him, a little nervously.

He said again, “Say, Miss Grace…” And then he stopped again, because it suddenly seemed silly to ask her to take a little walk with him one evening, at ten o’clock at night. And because he was uncertain what to do, and because he had to do something, he put his arms round her and kissed her.

For a moment she yielded, too surprised to do anything else. For a moment he thought that it was going to be all right. Then fear came to her, irrational, stark fear…

She started to struggly madly in Dave’s arms, to free herself. She cried, “Let me go, you beast, let me go.” And she cried quite loud.

Chagrined, and already ashamed, he released her. He said, “Say, I didn’t mean…Miss Grace, I guess I did wrong…” But she was gone, half running, sobbing with emotion and with fright.

When Dave hears the whistles of the American military policemen, he decides that the safest course is to scram – quite sensibly, as the MPs are prepared, in fact eager, to shoot the black rapist on sight. Eventually he’s cornered, and slashes his own throat in an unsuccessful suicide attempt, which is how he ends up in hospital with the hero of The Chequer Board.

The American officers are none-too-secretly pleased to have a black soldier to make an example of, but the locals don’t think much of the ruckus. A village girl brushes off the incident:

“[A] girl what’s got her head screwed on right doesn’t have to get assaulted, not unless she wants to.”

Even Grace’s father thinks it’s a lot of fuss over nothing:

“Be all right if her mother’d stop putting a lot of fool notions in her head. After all, many a girl’s been kissed in a dark corner before now, and will be again.”

***

Maybe it’s tacky to conflate these fictional cases, streamlined for dramatic and moral effect, with ugly real world crimes; but reading these blithe dismissals of Grace’s complaint, I thought of a story told by British Columbia’s then-premier, Christy Clark, a few years back.

In 1974, fourteen-year-old Christy was walking to her job as a waitress when she was grabbed from the sidewalk by a stranger and pulled into the bushes. She resisted, the stranger lost his footing, and she wriggled free and ran off. Arriving at work she slipped into her apron and went on with her day, never mentioning the attack to anyone. She later wrote:

I suppose I felt that if I hadn’t been physically hurt, people would think I was self-absorbed, overly upset about something that was just part of life for my half of humanity.

I told myself: Get over it. Bad things happen. It was trivial.

If this is really what Christy Clark thought at the time, it’s consistent with the ethos communicated by the authors of A Passage to India and The Chequer Board, who deem it a sign of moral fortitude among women as well as men to suck it up and move on. A kiss and a squeeze from a stranger? A little tug-of-war in a dark cave? No harm done, dearie. Get over it.

Maybe this ethos really did discourage girls like young Christy Clark from reporting “bad things” when they happened, but I’m pretty sure no grown-up even then would have advised her to keep her mouth shut about the attack. No doubt 1970s police were more skeptical when women turned up with unsupported sexual assault allegations, but in no era have cops been okay with strangers dragging young girls off the street. They might have decided that Clark’s story was too vague to pursue (she remembered nothing about her attacker’s appearance), but they might also have received other reports of a pervert skulking in the bushes, and pieced together something about his habits and whereabouts.

I’m not convinced that our modern culture of therapy and oversharing is actually healthier than the old one of swallowed emotions. Maybe Clark would have benefited from the psychological support that a modern police force would have scurried to provide, but the worst consequence of her silence wasn’t her mental trauma; she obviously turned out fine. It’s that a potential rapist was left free to traumatize other girls.

As for Dave Lesurier – we know he meant no harm, but Grace had no way to know. Nor did the military policemen summoned by her screams.

***

After Dave’s suicide attempt, the local innkeeper, concerned about the growing tensions between the black and white soldiers who patronize his pub, is moved to write a letter to General Eisenhower, describing the attempted rape charge as “a bit of humbug”. This results in a level-headed officer from the US Army’s Staff Judge-Advocate’s office being dispatched to investigate the case. He questions Grace about the kiss:

“What happened when you started struggling? Did he let you go, or did he hang on?”

She said, “I was ever so frightened. I don’t really know.” She thought for a minute. “I ran round the corner and bumped right into another man, that fat policeman.”

“That’s not what the lieutenant put in his report. He said that the Negro didn’t let you go until the policeman came. It makes a big difference,” he explained, “whether he let you go at once or not until the policeman came.”

She said, “I think he must have let go. I think he must have done. He wasn’t all that bad.”

With a little bit of time to reflect – and away from the influence of her overbearing mother – Grace decides that it was only a harmless misunderstanding after all. The charge is withdrawn; Dave stays in the army and, when the war is over, remembering the kindness of the villagers, makes his way back to Cornwall. When the hero tracks him down at the end of the novel, he’s living near the scene of the fateful kiss – and married to Grace.

M.

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Update, July 28, 2020: Added cover images and linked to Bibliography page.

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I’ve previously written about Nevil Shute’s autobiography Slide Rule (and evolving linguistic taboos) and his novel In The Wet (and the strange electoral reform scheme described therein).

Nevil Shute’s multiple vote: Would it do any good?

Last month Noah Millman linked to Damian Linker’s overblown argument that the modern Republican Party is actively plotting to disenfranchise the poor. To Linker, a liberal, it goes without saying that this supposed plot, if successful, would have monstrous results. Millman, judicious as always, took a moment to analyze what those monstrous results would actually be.

Millman summarizes two “Randite arguments” he claims to hear on the right for excluding non-taxpayers from the franchise – both of which he goes on to dismiss as “transparently absurd”.

The first argument, as he puts it, is “that it’s unfair for one’s representation to be less than proportional to one’s contribution (therefore people who don’t pay income taxes should not be allowed to vote).”

The second is “that it’s dangerous to give power to the unpropertied (because they don’t have a sufficient stake in stable property rights that promote productive enterprise).”

Having done a bit of browsing on the kind of websites where such sentiments are current, I suspect Millman has phrased these specimens of the “two most common forms” of right-wing anti-democratic thinking in a manner that makes them easier for him to undermine. Even so, I’m not sure he quite does the job.

Taking the points out of order, Millman’s criticism of Randite argument #2 is that we should “read [our] Livy”, and “take a look at the history of Latin America”, to see what chaos can result from entrenching the division between rich and poor. I’m sure Millman knows far more about both those subjects than I do, but in any case it seems obvious that there are a lot of intermediate steps between 21st century America and, say, the late Roman Republic; to argue that we may have extended voting rights a shade too far is not to say they must be rolled back to the days of the Gracchi. We might wish to go only as far as that notorious Randite John Stuart Mill, who conceded in an 1861 treatise in favour of universal suffrage that:

It is important, that the assembly which votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed. Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people’s money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize. ^[1]

On these grounds the compassionate anti-democrat might argue that, even if contracting the franchise does inevitably lead to some social instability, it will compensate by helping ensure the solvency of our institutions; the poor would be better off under a stingier but sounder government than they would be scrabbling in the ruins of a failed republic. (Obviously your receptivity to this argument depends on how much faith you have in the sustainability of the welfare state.)

As for Randite argument #1, the “transparently absurd” notion that representation should be “proportional to one’s contributions” to the state, all Millman really tries to prove is that such a change would be difficult to implement. Apart from taxpayers, any number of interest groups could argue that their non-monetary contributions gave them a moral claim to a greater say in government; Millman identifies soldiers, mothers, and the descendents of slaves as citizens who, whatever their contribution to the treasury, might justly make such a case. And on what principle would we adjudicate these competing interests?

But to say it would be difficult isn’t to say either that it’s impossible or that it shouldn’t be done. We’ve already demonstrated our ability to democratically negotiate various deviations from the ideal of one-person-one-vote. In both the United States and Canada, residents of rural and more remote districts usually have greater weight apportioned to their votes than those who live in urban or more central areas. For instance, the 170,000 residents of the riding of Brampton West, in suburban Toronto, elect as many Members of Parliament – one – as the 26,000 residents of Labrador, making the Labradorian vote roughly six and a half times as weighty as the West Bramptonian. Regardless of whether you think this is fair, few would argue that a parliament elected under such rules was illegitimate, much less that it was incapable of debating whether Labradorian and West Bramptonian votes should be made either more equal or still less so.

In short, there’s no reason a legislative body elected under existing voting rules couldn’t debate and vote on the merits of changing the rules to favour certain voters in subsequent elections. This is in fact what Nevil Shute imagined in his 1953 novel In The Wet.

The novel is set in the then-near future of the early 1980s, mainly in a post-World War III England that is exhausted, impoverished, and stifled by rationing and central planning – not unlike the post-WWII England with which Shute and his contemporary readers were familiar. The hero is an Australian pilot who lands the plum job of captaining the Queen’s personal airplane. In contrast to the mother country, Australia is vibrant, prosperous, and growing, conditions which the author attributes to its adoption some years earlier of a system of “multiple voting”. Citizens can acquire up to seven votes, in any combination, according to the following criteria:

• The first vote is given to every citizen on reaching the age of 21.
• The second vote is for university graduates and commissioned military officers.
• The third vote is earned after living and working abroad for at least two years.
• The fourth vote is for raising two children to the age of fourteen without divorcing.
• The fifth vote is for earning at least £5000 in the year before the election. (This is a pretty elite-level income. A newly-built three-bedroom house, we are told, costs four or five thousand Australian pounds.)
• The sixth vote is for officials in any of the recognized Christian churches.
• The seventh vote is given only at the discretion of the monarch. (At the novel’s climax our hero, a “three-vote man”, saves the Queen’s life, earning the rare and prestigious seventh vote.)

Shute is a little fuzzy on how this cockeyed scheme managed to get implemented. Apparently it began in the state of Western Australia, which, the protagonist explains, “was always pretty Liberal” (in the Australian and European sense of pro-free-market). As to what happened next:

“Aw, look,” said David. “West Australia was walking away with everything. We got a totally different sort of politician when we got the multiple vote. Before that, when it was one man one vote, the politicians were all tub-thumping nonentities and union bosses. Sensible people didn’t stand for parliament, and if they stood they didn’t get in. When we got multiple voting we got a better class of politician altogether, people who got elected by sensible voters.” He paused. “Before that when a man got elected to the Legislative Assembly, he was an engine driver or a dock labourer, maybe. He got made a Minister and top man of a Government department. Well, he couldn’t do a thing. The civil servants had him all wrapped up, because he didn’t know anything.”

“And after the multiple voting came in, was it different?”

“My word,” said the Australian. “We got some real men in charge. Did the Civil Service catch a cold! Half of them were out on their ear within a year, and then West Australia started getting all the coal and all the industry away from New South Wales and Victoria. And then these chaps who had been running West Australia started to get into Canberra. In 1973, when the multiple vote came in for the whole country, sixty per cent of the Federal Cabinet were West Australians. It got so they were running every bloody thing.”

“Because they were better people?” asked the captain.

“That’s right.”

I’m not going to try defending this as a piece of writing. Much of In The Wet concerns the boring romance of the pilot and his English girlfriend. There’s a lot of long-distance flying. I think we’re supposed to be awed by descriptions of the futuristic aircraft in which the Queen travels from Canada to Australia with just one refueling stop on Christmas Island, but in this respect Shute was too prophetic for his own good; what once seemed fantastical is now mundane. The voting scheme is by default the most interesting thing about the novel. Luckily, it’s fairly central to the plot. At the end of the book, the Queen essentially blackmails the UK into adopting the multiple vote by threatening to relocate permanently to Australia.

I am, to put it mildly, unconvinced A) that Shute’s scheme would ever pass in the first place, and B) if it somehow did, that it would have anything like such a dramatic effect on the quality of our legislators. Shute, like most political commentators, believes that if “sensible” voters were in charge, they’d elect the kind of governments he happens to favour – in his case, pragmatic, pro-monarchist, moderately right-wing ones. Just like Thomas Frank, who is convinced that the Matter With Kansas is that its citizens don’t share his left-of-centre outlook, and Bryan Caplan, who believes the properly informed Rational Voter must necessarily adopt libertarian views like his, Shute assumes that where he  has convictions, his political foes have only prejudices; where he reasons dispassionately, they are swayed by cheap emotionalism; where he considers the common good, they selfishly pursue their own trivial fancies. ^[2]

I don’t hold a much higher opinion of the electorate than Frank or Caplan or Shute. But I can’t help noticing that intelligent, thoughtful, idealistic people (like, for instance, Frank and Caplan and Shute) manage to hold widely divergent opinions on every imaginable topic of contention. John Derbyshire in an article somewhere made the point that if in the 1930s or ’40s the franchise had been restricted to university professors, the United States would probably have wound up with a Communist dictatorship. His point being that highly intelligent people often support stupid ideas. Why? For the same reasons stupid people do. Because those stupid ideas become fashionable. Because they’re emotionally appealing. Because they flatter our sense of self-importance. Because it’s not obvious how stupid they are until you see them put into practice.

So if you’re going to extend or limit the franchise, it’s not enough to say you’ll favour “sensible” voters. You need to work backwards from what kind of government you want to create. Shute desires a certain set of policies; he knows that wealthy people, parents of teenage children, military officers, and clergymen tend to support those same policies; so he gives their votes extra weight. In his day, no doubt, it also seemed reasonable to gamble on the conservative instincts of university graduates and those who’d worked abroad. The resulting electorate might not usher in an age of philosopher-princes, but it would probably stick up for Queen, country, and low taxes.

On the other hand, if you want more liberal policies, it helps to spread the franchise as far and wide as you can. Here in Canada there is occasional talk about lowering the voting age to sixteen; it won’t surprise you to learn that the New Democrats, Canada’s most left-wing mainstream party, have been the most enthusiastic proponents of this change. In the States, the Democratic Party is fighting to extend citizenship to a few million illegal immigrants who, by a funny coincidence, are highly likely, once enfranchised, to vote for Democratic candidates. This isn’t to say the NDP or Dems are cynically supporting these policies solely with an eye to their vote share. Like conservatives in the US and Canada who are pushing to tighten ID requirements to vote, on the probably spurious grounds that voter fraud is a widespread problem, they fully believe their own rhetoric, and get sincerely indignant when you challenge it. They believe they’re acting disinterestedly in the name of justice. You’d think intelligent people would be quicker than others to notice when they’re deceiving themselves, but their facility for self-deception is correspondingly more nimble.

People who put their faith in modern democracy make two assertions that strike me as debatable. The first is that the existing system is fairer than a system that would limit the franchise to those deemed, by whatever inevitably imperfect method, to be the most responsible citizens. Whether or not it’s fairer, it’s certainly easier to say “To heck with it – votes for everyone!” than embark on the awkward task of telling some of us we’re less qualified to bear the burden of governing. The second dodgy assertion is that our system is more effective at producing good government. This assertion of course depends on everyone agreeing beforehand on what constitutes good government, which it’s not in our nature ever to do; that’s why we resort to democracy in the first place. We can probably agree that avoiding outbreaks of anarchy is a good, objective measure of effectiveness; by which metric, universal suffrage has so far performed pretty well. But the experiment is less than a hundred years old. There’s no guarantee that fairness and effectiveness, in the end, must go together.

M.

PS. I might be the only person you’ll ever hear arguing against universal suffrage who doesn’t believe under a “better” system he’d enjoy a couple well-deserved extra votes. Under Nevil Shute’s rules I’m a one-vote man, and almost certainly always will be.

1. That John Stuart Mill passage is from Chapter 8 of Considerations on Representative Government, which advocates extending votes to “the very lowest ranks of the people”:

[I]t is a personal injustice to withhold from any one, unless for the prevention of greater evils, the ordinary privilege of having his voice reckoned in the disposal of affairs in which he has the same interest as other people.

However, “the prevention of greater evils” permits – in fact, requires, “by first principles”, Mill says –  the disenfranchising of tax evaders and parish relief recipients, as well as the uneducated: he advocates a “simple test” for voters in the presence of the registrar to determine literacy and numeracy. This reminds me of Robert Heinlein’s scheme, half-jokingly proposed in his 1980 collection Expanded Universe:

[S]tep into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over that booth – and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system – smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers – and fathers – decline to be humiliated twice.

In the same essay Heinlein recommends Mark Twain’s The Curious Republic of Gondour, which outlines a voting scheme very much like the one in In The Wet.

2. Full disclosure: I haven’t read Thomas Frank or Bryan Caplan’s books. Maybe they’re not as simplistic as their back-cover copy makes them sound.

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Update, July 27, 2020: Redirected a couple dead links, corrected the title of J.S. Mill’s book Considerations (not “Reflections”) on Representative Government, added cover pic for In The Wet and linked it to Bibliography page.

Nevil Shute’s bad language.

A while back I wrote about Nancy Mitford’s surprisingly liberal use of the word “whore”. Today I came across an anecdote in Nevil Shute’s memoir Slide Rule, about the author’s career as an engineer in the early days of aviation.

In the early 1930s his aircraft design business is growing and the work is overwhelming the firm’s sole secretary, Miss Brunton. She suggests that her sister, an unsuccessful dog breeder, be taken on. This creates confusion:

Rightly or wrongly I decreed that the girls were not to be called by their Christian names in the office. The new girl was no problem to my staff of shareholders because from the first she was known as Dog-Brunton. An unfortunate extension followed, and the office heard cries of “Bitch! Where’s Bitch? Oh, Bitch, when you’ve done Mr. Norway’s letters I’ve got some for you.” Perhaps Ethel and Joan would have been better, after all.

Nowadays this would lead to a lawsuit, but the word “bitch” in England in the 1930s was still in everyday use for a female dog, and therefore only mildly scandalous. Meanwhile, when Shute submits his first novel for publication he is told,

“The House of Cassel does not print the word ‘bloody.'” So we changed them all into “ruddy.”

There is a tendency among modern readers to snicker at the hang-ups of those who came before us; Victorian ladies blushing at the word “pants”, for example. But we have hang-ups of our own, as my surprise at these casual uses of “bitch” and “whore” illustrates.

When I read Huckleberry Finn aloud to my girlfriend not long ago, her body resting against mine as we sat together in bed, I felt her tense up each time I came to the word “nigger”, which was necessarily often. I explained that neither Twain nor Huck meant any insult by it; in their milieu “nigger” was no more shocking than “pants” is to us; but it made no difference, her revulsion was automatic. I sympathized. I’d had to gird myself to speak the forbidden word aloud.

I don’t know how long that taboo will last. As I got off the train the other day a couple of white teenage girls were getting on. I winced as one playfully shouted “Shut up, nigger” at her friend. I’m sure other old-timers in the crowd winced too, but none of us said anything, and the train pulled away with the girls loudly and unabashedly trash-talking each other in language absorbed from hip hop culture.

Who knows what those girls will be offended by, as they yell “cunt” and “cocksucker” freely on the streets.

M.

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Update, July 27, 2020: Added cover image and linked to Bibliography page.