The Doctor and the Doctrinaire

What the Common People are Commonly Supposed to Want and what they Really Want

G. K. CHESTERTON

IF I could give to the world a great psychological masterpiece, which is fortunately most improbable, I should throw it into the form of a drama or novel with the title of Dr. Fell. It would describe, with delicate realism, how that medical man, in spite of his medical degree and distinction (and the finished bedside manner which I feel sure he possessed) yet managed to miss a complete popularity, and that in a manner that has become a proverb. Most of the quieter scenes of the comedy would consist of the death-beds of various kinds of people, covering all classes and types of society, who could not bring themselves to die in charity with their medical adviser; and ending with the poet whose dying curse still remains in our memory, in the form of an immortal rhyme.

The last tremendous scene of all; in which Dr. Fell is torn in pieces by a raging mob, who can only answer with inarticulate howls to the doctor's repeated and lucid question as to why they do not like him—that scene would perhaps allow the author to let himself go a little more. It would rise above the light play of psychology into the dignity of human and divine justice. But it would also be at best a prophecy; for it would represent something which, I regret to say, has not happened yet.

For Dr. Fell is now a highly prosperous practitioner. He has not only a professional but a political status. The State of modern times has given him more power than was ever given to the priest. In some places he has been able to dry up all the drinks of historic humanity by pronouncing an Arabic word as a sort of charm or spell; the word "alcohol." In other places he is allowed to interfere with ordinary love-making; and to walk up to a wedding party which does not take his fancy, and stop the wedding. He calls it, I believe, eugenics. In England he has been attached as a panel doctor to the poor, under a compulsory scheme of insurance. In other words, the poor people do not like him (for such is his mystic destiny); but they are obliged to have him whether they like him or not.

Dr. Fell as a Politician

E will not here follow out the enquiry into the fine shades of this occult antipathy; or ask what nameless neurotic influences lead some simple and ignorant man to dislike having his bride taken away or his glass knocked out of his hand. I am here only using this medical gentleman as a convenient type and introduction to another truth; a truth about modern society which is best represented by such a medical metaphor. The more general question, of whether all this cold and fishy science should be enforced by law on citizens who were once supposed to be free, I will not discuss here; though I may discuss it afterwards.

But the case of Dr. Fell is very convenient as a simplification of something with which I wish to deal more immediately. It is the fundamental question of what men really want from the political and social system they endure. What they want is something very different from what they are said to want and supposed to want; and even, under certain peculiar circumstances, from what they will describe themselves as wanting. And the difference can be most clearly and compactly stated as the case of a doctor and a patient. And it goes far towards explaining that strange and sublime halo of universal hatred in which the dignified figure of Dr. Fell walks among his brethren.

Let us picture as a pleasing fancy that you are very ill in bed, and that Dr. Fell or some other eminent physician is attending you. He recommends you to take tincture of tarantula (or what you will) and goes off on his official round. Nothing happens until he comes again sometime afterwards; and then he says, with a similar firmness, that cyanide of pandemonium (or words to that effect) is now indicated. When you are beginning to be a little tired of the bed, you are pleased to find that the matter has appeared to him in a new light; and that bichloride of busterbango (I quote from memory) is undoubtedly the thing to exhibit. Now at each of these stages a message is probably sent round to the chemist, saying that you want certain things; that you want tincture of tarantula, that you urgently desire cyanide of pandemonium, that your will is strongly set in the direction of bichloride of busterbango; I may not have the technical terms absolutely correctly, but the things are of the same type, as objects of human desire.

Now the message to the chemist is strictly speaking incorrect. You do not want any of these things. You have never experienced any wave of will in their direction. What you want is your own body and arms and legs and the normal use of them, what you want is the sky and the open road and several square meals a day. In short what you want is to get out of the bed; and possibly even to get rid of the doctor. But you believe, and largely correctly, that the doctor and his chemicals will help you to reach this result; but you believe this on authority and indirectly; and there is no comparison between wanting these things in this sense and the simple and solid certainty of the things that you really do want. And this is exactly the position of the plain man in the presence of most modern social remedies.

To say, as the politicians do, that the people want Free Trade, or want Tariff Reform, or want Nationalization of this or that, is like saying that the patient loves quinine or longs for cod liver oil. The patient and the people both want something which the physician and the politician both undertake to get, by means of these successive nostrums. Nor is it true, as I have said, that the mob is fickle about Free Trade or Protection, or Individualism or Socialism. We might as well charge the patient with cruelly deserting one medicine bottle in order to coquet with another. If anybody is fickle it is the physician; and if anybody is fickle it is the governing classes, who have passed through fashion after fashion of political philosophy; not the common people, who have always wanted one thing, and who want it still.

The Progressive Vote and the Little Garden

ANY real revolution must be a popular revolution; and any popular revolution must rise out of these simple things that simple people really want. Take, to begin with, the fact which is admittedly the first fact of all political economy; yet which is scarcely ever really felt by politicians or economists. What people want is not land nationalization, or taxation of land values, or some type of land tenure, or some type of landlord, but land. They want it in the same ultimate sense that they want not central heating but heat, not water pipes but water. What has made all men subconsciously sick of the politician, what has made him figure as a Dr. Fell, is that he wants men to worship this machinery and forget what it was supposed to manufacture.

He wishes us to embrace the water pipes when they are as dry as the dry bones of his logic; he asks us to admire a sausage machine like a calculating machine, in the abstract, and regardless of the fact that it produces no sausages. In the old pantomimes the sausage machine used to cut up the policeman into sausages; and in this, as in so many of the old pantomimes, there is at least the rough suggestion of a solid social reform. An extremist might suggest that the politician as well as the policeman should be cut up into sausages; but cannibalism is a cultural and artistic movement too advanced for my taste; besides, he would make such bad sausages. He would disappoint us in that, as in everything else, when it came to the practical test.

The practical test is what the plain man really wants and what he really gets. The politicians are always trying to conjure with the names of things he has never wanted, except as a way of getting things he has never got. The politicians are always accusing him of deserting the Liberal Party, or betraying the Socialist cause, or breaking up the Union or dismembering the Empire or splitting the progressive vote. And all the time the real political question of what people want is much better expressed by what they say, when they do not think they are talking politics at all. It is much better expressed by any poor cottage woman when she looks hastily down the village street and says "Oh yes, I'd like a little garden."