From J. Ramsay MacDonald
Foreign O?ce
S.W.1
31st May, 1924
My dear Russell
For some time past, His Majesty’s Government have been considering the
best means of allocating and administering the British share of the China
Boxer Indemnity, which, it has been decided, should be devoted to purposes
mutually bene?cial to British and Chinese interests.
In order to obtain the best results from the policy thus indicated, it has
been decided to appoint a committee to advise His Majesty’s Government;
and I am approaching you in the hope that you may be able to serve on this
Committee, feeling con?dent that your experience would be of the greatest
assistance in this matter, which will so deeply and permanently a?ect our
relations with China.
The terms of reference will probably be as follows: –
‘In view of the decision of His Majesty’s Government to devote future
payments of the British share of the Boxer Indemnity to purposes mutually
bene?cial to British and Chinese interests.
‘To investigate the di?erent objects to which these payments should be
allocated, and the best means of securing the satisfactory administration of
the funds, to hear witnesses and to make such recommendations as may
seem desirable.’
For the sake of e?ciency, the Committee will be kept as small as possible,
especially at the outset of its proceedings. But it will of course be possible to
appoint ‘ad hoc’ additional members for special subjects, if such a course
should recommend itself later on. The following are now being approached,
the autobiography of bertrand russell 362as representing the essential elements which should go to the composition
of the Committee:
Chairman: Lord Phillimore.
Foreign O?ce: Sir John Jordan and Mr S. P. Waterlow.
Department of Overseas Trade: Sir William Clark.
House of Commons: Mr H. A. L. Fisher, ??.
Finance: Sir Charles Addis.
Education: Mr Lowes Dickinson and The Honourable Bertrand Russell.
Women: Dame Adelaide Anderson.
China: A suitable Chinese.
It will be understood that the above list is of a tentative character and
should be regarded as con?dential.
I enclose a brief memorandum which shows the present position with
regard to the Indemnity, and to the legislation which has now been intro-
duced into the House. I trust that you will be able to see your way to
undertake this work, to which I attach the highest importance.
Yours very sincerely
J. Ramsay MacDonald
Note on a scrap of paper:
‘It is desired that the Committee should consist wholly of men with an
extensive knowledge of China and its a?airs.’
?????????? ?? ??? ????? ?????????
by
Bertrand Russell
The Boxer Indemnity Bill, now in Committee, provides that what remains
unpaid of the Boxer Indemnity shall be spent on purposes to the mutual
advantage of Great Britain & China. It does not state that these purposes are to
be educational. In the opinion of all who know China (except solely as a ?eld
for capitalist exploitation), it is of the utmost importance that an Amendment
should be adopted specifying Chinese education as the sole purpose to which
the money should be devoted. The following are the chief grounds in favour
of such an Amendment:
(1) That this would be the expenditure most useful to China.
(2) That no other course would produce a good e?ect on in?uential
Chinese opinion.
(3) That the interests of Great Britain, which are to be considered, can only
be secured by winning the good will of the Chinese.
china 363(4) That any other course would contrast altogether too unfavourably with
the action of America, which long ago devoted all that remained of
the American share of the Boxer indemnity to Chinese education.
(5) That the arguments alleged in favour of other courses all have a corrupt
motive, i.e. are designed for the purpose of securing private pro?t
through Government action.
For these reasons, it is profoundly desirable that Labour Members of
Parliament should take action to secure the necessary Amendment before it
is too late.
The China Indemnity Bill, in its present form, provides that the remainder
of the Boxer Indemnity shall be applied to ‘purposes, educational or other’,
which are mutually bene?cial to Great Britain and China.
Sir Walter de Frece proposed in Committee that the words ‘connected with
education’ should be substituted for ‘educational or other’.
It is much to be hoped that the House of Commons will carry this
Amendment on the Report stage. Certain interests are opposed to the
Amendment for reasons with which Labour can have no sympathy. The
Government thinks it necessary to placate these interests, but maintains
that the Committee to be appointed will be free to decide in favour of
education only. The Committee, however, is appointed by Parliament, and
one third of its members are to retire every two years; there is therefore no
guarantee against its domination by private interests in the future.
The Bill in its present form opens the door to corruption, is not calculated
to please Chinese public opinion, displays Great Britain as less enlightened
than America and Japan, and therefore fails altogether to achieve its nominal
objects. The Labour Party ought to make at least an attempt to prevent the
possibility of the misapplication of public money to purposes of private
enrichment. This will be secured by the insertion of the words ‘connected
with education’ in Clause I, after the word ‘purposes’.
Bertrand Russell
From Y. R. Chao
Berlin August 22 ’24
Dear Russell
Here is an abbreviated translation of C. L. Lo’s letter to me (Lo & S. N. Fu
being S. Hu [Hu Shih]’s chief disciples, both in Berlin).
‘Heard from China that Wu pei fu advised Ch. Governm. to use funds for
railways. Morning Post said (4 weeks ago) that Brit. Gov’t cabled Ch. Gov’t to
send a delegate. If so, it would be terrible. Already wrote to London Ch. stud.
Club to inquire Chu. If report true, try to cancel action by asking Tsai to
mount horse with his prestige. In any case, Brit. Gov’t still has full power. We
the autobiography of bertrand russell 364have written trying to in?uence Chu, but on the other hand you please write
to Lo Su [Russell] to in?uence Brit. For. O?ce, asking him to recommend
Tsai if nothing else is possible. There is already a panic in Peking educ’l
world. There was a cable to Brit. Gov’t, and another to Tsai asking him to go
to London...’
Another letter, from Chu, came to me last night:
‘I did give my consent (?) to the nomination (?) of Mr Ting. I quite agree
(?) with you Ting is the most desirable man for the post, but recently I learnt
that Peking (For. O?ce?) is in favor of (?) Dr C. H. Wang, who is not in
Europe. I doubt whether the latter would accept the appt’m’t . . . I will talk
over this question with Mr Russell when he returns to town.’
I know Wang (brother of C. T. Wang of Kuo Ming Tang (National People
Party) fame), C. H. Wang is a ?ne gentle fellow, recently worked in business
and a Christian. One should emphasise the personal attractiveness and good-
ness but do the opposite to his suitability to this in-its-nature roughneck
tussle of a job.
My noodles are getting cold and my Kleines helles bier is getting warm
200 meters away where my wife is waiting.
Excuse me 1000 times for not reading this letter over again.
Yrs ever
Y. R. Chao
china 36511
SECOND MARRIAGE
With my return from China in September 1921, my life entered upon a less
dramatic phase, with a new emotional centre. From adolescence until the
completion of Principia Mathematica, my fundamental pre-occupation had been
intellectual. I wanted to understand and to make others understand; also
I wished to raise a monument by which I might be remembered, and on
account of which I might feel that I had not lived in vain. From the outbreak
of the First World War until my return from China, social questions occupied
the centre of my emotions: the War and Soviet Russia alike gave me a sense of
tragedy, and I had hopes that mankind might learn to live in some less painful
way. I tried to discover some secret of wisdom, and to proclaim it with such
persuasiveness that the world should listen and agree. But, gradually, the
ardour cooled and the hope grew less; I did not change my views as to how
men should live, but I held them with less of prophetic ardour and with less
expectation of success in my campaigns.
Ever since the day, in the summer of 1894, when I walked with Alys on
Richmond Green after hearing the medical verdict, I had tried to suppress my
desire for children. It had, however, grown continually stronger, until it had
become almost insupportable. When my ?rst child was born, in November
1921, I felt an immense release of pent-up emotion, and during the next ten
years my main purposes were parental. Parental feeling, as I have experienced
it, is very complex. There is, ?rst and foremost, sheer animal a?ection, and
delight in watching what is charming in the ways of the young. Next, there is
the sense of inescapable responsibility, providing a purpose for daily activ-
ities which scepticism does not easily question. Then there is an egoistic
element, which is very dangerous: the hope that one’s children may succeed
where one has failed, that they may carry on one’s work when death orsenility puts an end to one’s own e?orts, and, in any case, that they will
supply a biological escape from death, making one’s own life part of the
whole stream, and not a mere stagnant puddle without any over?ow into the
future. All this I experienced, and for some years it ?lled my life with happiness
and peace.
The ?rst thing was to ?nd somewhere to live. I tried to rent a ?at, but I was
both politically and morally undesirable, and landlords refused to have me as
a tenant. So I bought a freehold house in Chelsea, No. 31 Sydney Street,
where my two older children were born. But it did not seem good for
children to live all the year in London, so in the spring of 1922 we acquired a
house in Cornwall, at Porthcurno, about four miles from Land’s End. From
then until 1927 we divided our time about equally between London and
Cornwall; after that year, we spent no time in London and less in Cornwall.
The beauty of the Cornish coast is inextricably mixed in my memories
with the ecstasy of watching two healthy happy children learning the joys of
sea and rocks and sun and storm. I spent a great deal more time with them
than is possible for most fathers. During the six months of the year we spent
in Cornwall we had a ?xed and leisurely routine. During the morning my
wife and I worked while the children were in the care of a nurse, and later a
governess. After lunch we all went to one or other of the many beaches that
were within a walk of our house. The children played naked, bathing or
climbing or making sand castles as the spirit moved them, and we, of course,
shared in these activities. We came home very hungry to a very late and a very
large tea; then the children were put to bed and the adults reverted to their
grown-up pursuits. In my memory, which is of course fallacious, it was
always sunny, and always warm after April. But in April the winds were cold.
One April day, when Kate’s age was two years three and a half months,
I heard her talking to herself and wrote down what she said:
The North wind blows over the North Pole.
The daisies hit the grass.
The wind blows the bluebells down.
The North wind blows to the wind in the South.
She did not know that any one was listening, and she certainly did not know
what ‘North Pole’ means.
In the circumstances it was natural that I should become interested in
education. I had already written brie?y on the subject in Principles of
Social Reconstruction, but now it occupied a large part of my mind. I wrote a
book, On Education, especially in early childhood, which was published in 1926 and
had a very large sale. It seems to me now somewhat unduly optimistic in its
psychology, but as regards values I ?nd nothing in it to recant, although
second marriage 367I think now that the methods I proposed with very young children were
unduly harsh.
It must not be supposed that life during these six years from the autumn of
1921 to the autumn of 1927 was all one long summer idyll. Parenthood had
made it imperative to earn money. The purchase of two houses had
exhausted almost all the capital that remained to me. When I returned from
China I had no obvious means of making money, and at ?rst I su?ered
considerable anxiety. I took whatever odd journalistic jobs were o?ered me:
while my son John was being born, I wrote an article on Chinese pleasure in
?reworks, although concentration on so remote a topic was di?cult in the
circumstances. In 1922 I published a book on China, and in 1923 (with my
wife Dora) a book on The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, but neither of these
brought much money. I did better with two small books, The A.B.C. of Atoms
(1923) and The A.B.C. of Relativity (1925), and with two other small books,
Icarus or The Future of Science (1924) and What I Believe (1925). In 1924 I earned a
good deal by a lecture tour in America. But I remained rather poor until the
book on education in 1926. After that, until 1933, I prospered ?nancially,
especially with Marriage and Morals (1929) and The Conquest of Happiness (1930).
Most of my work during these years was popular, and was done in order to
make money, but I did also some more technical work. There was a new
edition of Principia Mathematica in 1925, to which I made various additions; and
in 1927 I published The Analysis of Matter, which is in some sense a companion
volume to The Analysis of Mind, begun in prison and published in 1921. I also
stood for Parliament in Chelsea in 1922 and 1923, and Dora stood in 1924.
In 1927, Dora and I came to a decision, for which we were equally respon-
sible, to found a school of our own in order that our children might be
educated as we thought best. We believed, perhaps mistakenly, that children
need the companionship of a group of other children, and that, therefore, we
ought no longer to be content to bring up our children without others. But
we did not know of any existing school that seemed to us in any way satisfac-
tory. We wanted an unusual combination: on the one hand, we disliked
prudery and religious instruction and a great many restraints on freedom
which are taken for granted in conventional schools; on the other hand, we
could not agree with most ‘modern’ educationists on thinking scholastic
instruction unimportant, or in advocating a complete absence of discipline. We
therefore endeavoured to collect a group of about twenty children, of roughly
the same ages as John and Kate, with a view to keeping these same children
throughout their school years.
For the purposes of the school we rented my brother’s house, Telegraph
House, on the South Downs, between Chichester and Peters?eld. This owed
its name to having been a semaphore station in the time of George III,
one of a string of such stations by which messages were ?ashed between
the autobiography of bertrand russell 368Portsmouth and London. Probably the news of Trafalgar reached London in
this way.
The original house was quite small, but my brother gradually added to it.
He was passionately devoted to the place, and wrote about it at length in his
autobiography, which he called My Life and Adventures. The house was ugly and
rather absurd, but the situation was superb. There were enormous views to
East and South and West; in one direction one saw the Sussex Weald to Leith
Hill, in another one saw the Isle of Wight and the liners approaching South-
ampton. There was a tower with large windows on all four sides. Here I made
my study, and I have never known one with a more beautiful outlook.
With the house went two hundred and thirty acres of wild downland,
partly heather and bracken, but mostly virgin forest – magni?cent beech
trees, and yews of vast age and unusual size. The woods were full of every
kind of wild life, including deer. The nearest houses were a few scattered
farms about a mile away. For ?fty miles, going eastward, one could walk on
footpaths over unenclosed bare downs.
It is no wonder that my brother loved the place. But he had speculated
unwisely, and lost every penny that he possessed. I o?ered him a much
higher rent than he could have obtained from anyone else, and he was
compelled by poverty to accept my o?er. But he hated it, and ever after bore
me a grudge for inhabiting his paradise.
The house must, however, have had for him some associations not wholly
pleasant. He had acquired it originally as a discreet retreat where he could
enjoy the society of Miss Morris, whom, for many years, he hoped to marry if
he could ever get free from his ?rst wife. Miss Morris, however, was ousted
from his a?ections by Molly, the lady who became his second wife, for
whose sake he su?ered imprisonment after being condemned by his Peers
for bigamy. For Molly’s sake he had been divorced from his ?rst wife. He
became divorced in Reno and immediately thereupon married Molly, again
at Reno. He returned to England and found that British law considered his
marriage to Molly bigamous on the ground that British law acknowledges the
validity of Reno marriages, but not of Reno divorces. His second wife, who
was very fat, used to wear green corduroy knickerbockers; the view of her
from behind when she was bending over a ?ower-bed at Telegraph House
used to make one wonder that he had thought her worth what he had gone
through for her sake.
Her day, like Miss Morris’s, came to an end, and he fell in love with
Elizabeth. Molly, from whom he wished to be divorced, demanded ￡400 a
year for life as her price; after his death, I had to pay this. She died at about the
age of ninety.
Elizabeth, in her turn, left him and wrote an intolerably cruel novel about
him, called Ve ra. In this novel, Vera is already dead; she had been his wife, and
second marriage 369he is supposed to be heartbroken at the loss of her. She died by falling out of
one of the windows of the tower of Telegraph House. As the novel proceeds,
the reader gradually gathers that her death was not an accident, but suicide
brought on by my brother’s cruelty. It was this that caused me to give my
children an emphatic piece of advice: ‘Do not marry a novelist.’
In this house of many memories we established the school. In managing
the school we experienced a number of di?culties which we ought to have
foreseen. There was, ?rst, the problem of ?nance. It became obvious that
there must be an enormous pecuniary loss. We could only have prevented this
by making the school large and the food inadequate, and we could not make
the school large except by altering its character so as to appeal to con-
ventional parents. Fortunately I was at this time making a great deal of money
from books and from lecture tours in America. I made four such tours
altogether – during 1924 (already mentioned), 1927, 1929, and 1931. The
one in 1927 was during the ?rst term of the school, so that I had no part in
its beginnings. During the second term, Dora went on a lecture tour in
America. Thus throughout the ?rst two terms there was never more than one
of us in charge. When I was not in America, I had to write books to make
the necessary money. Consequently, I was never able to give my whole time
to the school.
A second di?culty was that some of the sta?, however often and however
meticulously our principles were explained to them, could never be brought
to act in accordance with them unless one of us was present.
A third trouble, and that perhaps the most serious, was that we got an
undue proportion of problem children. We ought to have been on the look-
out for this pit-fall, but at ?rst we were glad to take almost any child. The
parents who were most inclined to try new methods were those who had
di?culties with their children. As a rule, these di?culties were the fault of
the parents, and the ill e?ects of their unwisdom were renewed in each
holiday. Whatever may have been the cause, many of the children were cruel
and destructive. To let the children go free was to establish a reign of terror, in
which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable. A school is like the
world: only government can prevent brutal violence. And so I found myself,
when the children were not at lessons, obliged to supervise them continually
to stop cruelty. We divided them into three groups, bigs, middles, and smalls.
One of the middles was perpetually ill-treating the smalls, so I asked him why
he did it. His answer was: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the smalls; that’s fair.’ And
he really thought it was.
Sometimes really sinister impulses came to light. There were among the
pupils a brother and sister who had a very sentimental mother, and had been
taught by her to profess a completely fantastic degree of a?ection for each
other. One day the teacher who was superintending the midday meal found
the autobiography of bertrand russell 370part of a hatpin in the soup that was about to be ladled out. On inquiry, it
turned out that the supposedly a?ectionate sister had put it in. ‘Didn’t you
know it might kill you if you swallowed it?’ we said. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied,
‘but I don’t take soup.’ Further investigation made it fairly evident that she
had hoped her brother would be the victim. On another occasion, when a
pair of rabbits had been given to a child that was unpopular, two other
children made an attempt to burn them to death, and in the attempt, made
a vast ?re which blackened several acres, and, but for a change of wind, might
have burnt the house down.
For us personally, and for our two children, there were special worries.
The other boys naturally thought that our boy was unduly favoured, whereas
we, in order not to favour him or his sister, had to keep an unnatural distance
between them and us except during the holidays. They, in turn, su?ered from
a divided loyalty: they had either to be sneaks or to practise deceit towards
their parents. The complete happiness that had existed in our relations to
John and Kate was thus destroyed, and was replaced by awkwardness and
embarrassment. I think that something of the sort is bound to happen when-
ever parents and children are at the same school.
In retrospect, I feel that several things were mistaken in the principles upon
which the school was conducted. Young children in a group cannot be happy
without a certain amount of order and routine. Left to amuse themselves,
they are bored, and turn to bullying or destruction. In their free time, there
should always be an adult to suggest some agreeable game or amusement,
and to supply an initiative which is hardly to be expected of young children.
Another thing that was wrong was that there was a pretence of more
freedom than in fact existed. There was very little freedom where health and
cleanliness were concerned. The children had to wash, to clean their teeth,
and to go to bed at the right time. True, we had never professed that there
should be freedom in such matters, but foolish people, and especially jour-
nalists in search of a sensation, had said or believed that we advocated a
complete absence of all restraints and compulsions. The older children, when
told to brush their teeth, would sometimes say sarcastically: ‘Call this a free
school!’ Those who had heard their parents talking about the freedom to be
expected in the school would test it by seeing how far they could go in
naughtiness without being stopped. As we only forbade things that were
obviously harmful, such experiments were apt to be very inconvenient.
In 1929, I published Marriage and Morals, which I dictated while recovering
from whooping-cough. (Owing to my age, my trouble was not diagnosed
until I had infected most of the children in the school.) It was this book
chie?y which, in 1940, supplied material for the attack on me in New York.
In it, I developed the view that complete ?delity was not to be expected in
most marriages, but that a husband and wife ought to be able to remain good
second marriage 371friends in spite of a?airs. I did not maintain, however, that a marriage could
with advantage be prolonged if the wife had a child or children of whom the
husband was not the father; in that case, I thought, divorce was desirable. I do
not know what I think now about the subject of marriage. There seem to be
insuperable objections to every general theory about it. Perhaps easy divorce
causes less unhappiness than any other system, but I am no longer capable of
being dogmatic on the subject of marriage.
In the following year, 1930, I published The Conquest of Happiness, a book
consisting of common-sense advice as to what an individual can do to over-
come temperamental causes of unhappiness, as opposed to what can be done
by changes in social and economic systems. This book was di?erently esti-
mated by readers of three di?erent levels. Unsophisticated readers, for whom
it was intended, liked it, with the result that it had a very large sale. High-
brows, on the contrary, regarded it as a contemptible pot-boiler, an escapist
book, bolstering up the pretence that there were useful things to be done and
said outside politics. But at yet another level, that of professional psychiatrists,
the book won very high praise. I do not know which estimate was right; what
I do know is that the book was written at a time when I needed much
self-command and much that I had learned by painful experience if I was to
maintain any endurable level of happiness.
I was profoundly unhappy during the next few years and some things
which I wrote at the time give a more exact picture of my mood than
anything I can now write in somewhat pale reminiscence.
At that time I used to write an article once a week for the Hearst Press.
I spent Christmas Day, 1931, on the Atlantic, returning from one of my
American lecture tours. So I chose for that week’s article the subject of
‘Christmas at Sea’. This is the article I wrote:
CHRISTMAS AT SEA
For the second time in my life, I am spending Christmas Day on the Atlantic.
The previous occasion when I had this experience was thirty-?ve years ago,
and by contrasting what I feel now with what I remember of my feelings
then, I am learning much about growing old.
Thirty-?ve years ago I was lately married, childless, very happy, and
beginning to taste the joys of success. Family appeared to me as an external
power hampering to freedom: the world, to me, was a world of individual
adventure. I wanted to think my own thoughts, ?nd my own friends, and
choose my own abode, without regard to tradition or elders or anything but
my own tastes. I felt strong enough to stand alone, without the need of
buttresses.
Now, I realise, what I did not know then, that this attitude was dependent
