From J. Ramsay MacDonaldForeign O?ceS.W.131st May, 1924My dear RussellFor some time past, His Majesty’s Government have been considering thebest means of allocating and administering the British share of the ChinaBoxer Indemnity, which, it has been decided, should be devoted to purposesmutually bene?cial to British and Chinese interests.In order to obtain the best results from the policy thus indicated, it hasbeen 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 thisCommittee, feeling con?dent that your experience would be of the greatestassistance in this matter, which will so deeply and permanently a?ect ourrelations with China.The terms of reference will probably be as follows: –‘In view of the decision of His Majesty’s Government to devote futurepayments of the British share of the Boxer Indemnity to purposes mutuallybene?cial to British and Chinese interests.‘To investigate the di?erent objects to which these payments should beallocated, and the best means of securing the satisfactory administration ofthe funds, to hear witnesses and to make such recommendations as mayseem 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 toappoint ‘ad hoc’ additional members for special subjects, if such a courseshould 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 compositionof 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 andshould be regarded as con?dential.I enclose a brief memorandum which shows the present position withregard 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 toundertake this work, to which I attach the highest importance.Yours very sincerelyJ. Ramsay MacDonaldNote on a scrap of paper:‘It is desired that the Committee should consist wholly of men with anextensive knowledge of China and its a?airs.’?????????? ?? ??? ????? ?????????byBertrand RussellThe Boxer Indemnity Bill, now in Committee, provides that what remainsunpaid of the Boxer Indemnity shall be spent on purposes to the mutualadvantage of Great Britain & China. It does not state that these purposes are tobe educational. In the opinion of all who know China (except solely as a ?eldfor capitalist exploitation), it is of the utmost importance that an Amendmentshould be adopted specifying Chinese education as the sole purpose to whichthe money should be devoted. The following are the chief grounds in favourof 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?uentialChinese opinion.(3) That the interests of Great Britain, which are to be considered, can onlybe secured by winning the good will of the Chinese.china 363(4) That any other course would contrast altogether too unfavourably withthe action of America, which long ago devoted all that remained ofthe American share of the Boxer indemnity to Chinese education.(5) That the arguments alleged in favour of other courses all have a corruptmotive, i.e. are designed for the purpose of securing private pro?tthrough Government action.For these reasons, it is profoundly desirable that Labour Members ofParliament should take action to secure the necessary Amendment before itis too late.The China Indemnity Bill, in its present form, provides that the remainderof 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 witheducation’ should be substituted for ‘educational or other’.It is much to be hoped that the House of Commons will carry thisAmendment on the Report stage. Certain interests are opposed to theAmendment for reasons with which Labour can have no sympathy. TheGovernment thinks it necessary to placate these interests, but maintainsthat the Committee to be appointed will be free to decide in favour ofeducation only. The Committee, however, is appointed by Parliament, andone third of its members are to retire every two years; there is therefore noguarantee against its domination by private interests in the future.The Bill in its present form opens the door to corruption, is not calculatedto please Chinese public opinion, displays Great Britain as less enlightenedthan America and Japan, and therefore fails altogether to achieve its nominalobjects. The Labour Party ought to make at least an attempt to prevent thepossibility of the misapplication of public money to purposes of privateenrichment. This will be secured by the insertion of the words ‘connectedwith education’ in Clause I, after the word ‘purposes’.Bertrand RussellFrom Y. R. ChaoBerlin August 22 ’24Dear RussellHere is an abbreviated translation of C. L. Lo’s letter to me (Lo & S. N. Fubeing S. Hu [Hu Shih]’s chief disciples, both in Berlin).‘Heard from China that Wu pei fu advised Ch. Governm. to use funds forrailways. Morning Post said (4 weeks ago) that Brit. Gov’t cabled Ch. Gov’t tosend 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 tomount horse with his prestige. In any case, Brit. Gov’t still has full power. Wethe autobiography of bertrand russell 364have written trying to in?uence Chu, but on the other hand you please writeto Lo Su [Russell] to in?uence Brit. For. O?ce, asking him to recommendTsai if nothing else is possible. There is already a panic in Peking educ’lworld. There was a cable to Brit. Gov’t, and another to Tsai asking him to goto 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 learntthat Peking (For. O?ce?) is in favor of (?) Dr C. H. Wang, who is not inEurope. I doubt whether the latter would accept the appt’m’t . . . I will talkover this question with Mr Russell when he returns to town.’I know Wang (brother of C. T. Wang of Kuo Ming Tang (National PeopleParty) fame), C. H. Wang is a ?ne gentle fellow, recently worked in businessand a Christian. One should emphasise the personal attractiveness and good-ness but do the opposite to his suitability to this in-its-nature roughnecktussle of a job.My noodles are getting cold and my Kleines helles bier is getting warm200 meters away where my wife is waiting.Excuse me 1000 times for not reading this letter over again.Yrs everY. R. Chaochina 36511SECOND MARRIAGEWith my return from China in September 1921, my life entered upon a lessdramatic phase, with a new emotional centre. From adolescence until thecompletion of Principia Mathematica, my fundamental pre-occupation had beenintellectual. I wanted to understand and to make others understand; alsoI wished to raise a monument by which I might be remembered, and onaccount of which I might feel that I had not lived in vain. From the outbreakof the First World War until my return from China, social questions occupiedthe centre of my emotions: the War and Soviet Russia alike gave me a sense oftragedy, and I had hopes that mankind might learn to live in some less painfulway. I tried to discover some secret of wisdom, and to proclaim it with suchpersuasiveness that the world should listen and agree. But, gradually, theardour cooled and the hope grew less; I did not change my views as to howmen should live, but I held them with less of prophetic ardour and with lessexpectation of success in my campaigns.Ever since the day, in the summer of 1894, when I walked with Alys onRichmond Green after hearing the medical verdict, I had tried to suppress mydesire for children. It had, however, grown continually stronger, until it hadbecome almost insupportable. When my ?rst child was born, in November1921, I felt an immense release of pent-up emotion, and during the next tenyears my main purposes were parental. Parental feeling, as I have experiencedit, is very complex. There is, ?rst and foremost, sheer animal a?ection, anddelight in watching what is charming in the ways of the young. Next, there isthe sense of inescapable responsibility, providing a purpose for daily activ-ities which scepticism does not easily question. Then there is an egoisticelement, which is very dangerous: the hope that one’s children may succeedwhere 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 willsupply a biological escape from death, making one’s own life part of thewhole stream, and not a mere stagnant puddle without any over?ow into thefuture. All this I experienced, and for some years it ?lled my life with happinessand peace.The ?rst thing was to ?nd somewhere to live. I tried to rent a ?at, but I wasboth politically and morally undesirable, and landlords refused to have me asa 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 forchildren to live all the year in London, so in the spring of 1922 we acquired ahouse in Cornwall, at Porthcurno, about four miles from Land’s End. Fromthen until 1927 we divided our time about equally between London andCornwall; after that year, we spent no time in London and less in Cornwall.The beauty of the Cornish coast is inextricably mixed in my memorieswith the ecstasy of watching two healthy happy children learning the joys ofsea and rocks and sun and storm. I spent a great deal more time with themthan is possible for most fathers. During the six months of the year we spentin Cornwall we had a ?xed and leisurely routine. During the morning mywife and I worked while the children were in the care of a nurse, and later agoverness. After lunch we all went to one or other of the many beaches thatwere within a walk of our house. The children played naked, bathing orclimbing 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 verylarge tea; then the children were put to bed and the adults reverted to theirgrown-up pursuits. In my memory, which is of course fallacious, it wasalways 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 knowwhat ‘North Pole’ means.In the circumstances it was natural that I should become interested ineducation. I had already written brie?y on the subject in Principles ofSocial Reconstruction, but now it occupied a large part of my mind. I wrote abook, On Education, especially in early childhood, which was published in 1926 andhad a very large sale. It seems to me now somewhat unduly optimistic in itspsychology, but as regards values I ?nd nothing in it to recant, althoughsecond marriage 367I think now that the methods I proposed with very young children wereunduly harsh.It must not be supposed that life during these six years from the autumn of1921 to the autumn of 1927 was all one long summer idyll. Parenthood hadmade it imperative to earn money. The purchase of two houses hadexhausted almost all the capital that remained to me. When I returned fromChina I had no obvious means of making money, and at ?rst I su?eredconsiderable 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 thecircumstances. In 1922 I published a book on China, and in 1923 (with mywife Dora) a book on The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, but neither of thesebrought 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 agood deal by a lecture tour in America. But I remained rather poor until thebook 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 tomake money, but I did also some more technical work. There was a newedition of Principia Mathematica in 1925, to which I made various additions; andin 1927 I published The Analysis of Matter, which is in some sense a companionvolume to The Analysis of Mind, begun in prison and published in 1921. I alsostood 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 beeducated as we thought best. We believed, perhaps mistakenly, that childrenneed the companionship of a group of other children, and that, therefore, weought no longer to be content to bring up our children without others. Butwe 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 dislikedprudery and religious instruction and a great many restraints on freedomwhich are taken for granted in conventional schools; on the other hand, wecould not agree with most ‘modern’ educationists on thinking scholasticinstruction unimportant, or in advocating a complete absence of discipline. Wetherefore endeavoured to collect a group of about twenty children, of roughlythe same ages as John and Kate, with a view to keeping these same childrenthroughout their school years.For the purposes of the school we rented my brother’s house, TelegraphHouse, on the South Downs, between Chichester and Peters?eld. This owedits 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 betweenthe autobiography of bertrand russell 368Portsmouth and London. Probably the news of Trafalgar reached London inthis 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 hisautobiography, which he called My Life and Adventures. The house was ugly andrather absurd, but the situation was superb. There were enormous views toEast and South and West; in one direction one saw the Sussex Weald to LeithHill, 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 mademy 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 beechtrees, and yews of vast age and unusual size. The woods were full of everykind of wild life, including deer. The nearest houses were a few scatteredfarms about a mile away. For ?fty miles, going eastward, one could walk onfootpaths over unenclosed bare downs.It is no wonder that my brother loved the place. But he had speculatedunwisely, and lost every penny that he possessed. I o?ered him a muchhigher rent than he could have obtained from anyone else, and he wascompelled by poverty to accept my o?er. But he hated it, and ever after boreme a grudge for inhabiting his paradise.The house must, however, have had for him some associations not whollypleasant. He had acquired it originally as a discreet retreat where he couldenjoy the society of Miss Morris, whom, for many years, he hoped to marry ifhe could ever get free from his ?rst wife. Miss Morris, however, was oustedfrom his a?ections by Molly, the lady who became his second wife, forwhose sake he su?ered imprisonment after being condemned by his Peersfor bigamy. For Molly’s sake he had been divorced from his ?rst wife. Hebecame divorced in Reno and immediately thereupon married Molly, againat Reno. He returned to England and found that British law considered hismarriage to Molly bigamous on the ground that British law acknowledges thevalidity of Reno marriages, but not of Reno divorces. His second wife, whowas very fat, used to wear green corduroy knickerbockers; the view of herfrom behind when she was bending over a ?ower-bed at Telegraph Houseused to make one wonder that he had thought her worth what he had gonethrough for her sake.Her day, like Miss Morris’s, came to an end, and he fell in love withElizabeth. Molly, from whom he wished to be divorced, demanded ￡400 ayear for life as her price; after his death, I had to pay this. She died at about theage of ninety.Elizabeth, in her turn, left him and wrote an intolerably cruel novel abouthim, called Ve ra. In this novel, Vera is already dead; she had been his wife, andsecond marriage 369he is supposed to be heartbroken at the loss of her. She died by falling out ofone 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 suicidebrought on by my brother’s cruelty. It was this that caused me to give mychildren an emphatic piece of advice: ‘Do not marry a novelist.’In this house of many memories we established the school. In managingthe school we experienced a number of di?culties which we ought to haveforeseen. There was, ?rst, the problem of ?nance. It became obvious thatthere must be an enormous pecuniary loss. We could only have prevented thisby making the school large and the food inadequate, and we could not makethe 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 moneyfrom books and from lecture tours in America. I made four such toursaltogether – during 1924 (already mentioned), 1927, 1929, and 1931. Theone in 1927 was during the ?rst term of the school, so that I had no part inits beginnings. During the second term, Dora went on a lecture tour inAmerica. Thus throughout the ?rst two terms there was never more than oneof us in charge. When I was not in America, I had to write books to makethe necessary money. Consequently, I was never able to give my whole timeto the school.A second di?culty was that some of the sta?, however often and howevermeticulously our principles were explained to them, could never be broughtto act in accordance with them unless one of us was present.A third trouble, and that perhaps the most serious, was that we got anundue 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. Theparents who were most inclined to try new methods were those who haddi?culties with their children. As a rule, these di?culties were the fault ofthe parents, and the ill e?ects of their unwisdom were renewed in eachholiday. Whatever may have been the cause, many of the children were crueland destructive. To let the children go free was to establish a reign of terror, inwhich the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable. A school is like theworld: only government can prevent brutal violence. And so I found myself,when the children were not at lessons, obliged to supervise them continuallyto 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 whyhe did it. His answer was: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the smalls; that’s fair.’ Andhe really thought it was.Sometimes really sinister impulses came to light. There were among thepupils a brother and sister who had a very sentimental mother, and had beentaught by her to profess a completely fantastic degree of a?ection for eachother. One day the teacher who was superintending the midday meal foundthe autobiography of bertrand russell 370part of a hatpin in the soup that was about to be ladled out. On inquiry, itturned out that the supposedly a?ectionate sister had put it in. ‘Didn’t youknow 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 shehad hoped her brother would be the victim. On another occasion, when apair of rabbits had been given to a child that was unpopular, two otherchildren made an attempt to burn them to death, and in the attempt, madea vast ?re which blackened several acres, and, but for a change of wind, mighthave 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, whereaswe, in order not to favour him or his sister, had to keep an unnatural distancebetween them and us except during the holidays. They, in turn, su?ered froma divided loyalty: they had either to be sneaks or to practise deceit towardstheir parents. The complete happiness that had existed in our relations toJohn and Kate was thus destroyed, and was replaced by awkwardness andembarrassment. 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 uponwhich the school was conducted. Young children in a group cannot be happywithout a certain amount of order and routine. Left to amuse themselves,they are bored, and turn to bullying or destruction. In their free time, thereshould 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 morefreedom than in fact existed. There was very little freedom where health andcleanliness 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 thereshould be freedom in such matters, but foolish people, and especially jour-nalists in search of a sensation, had said or believed that we advocated acomplete absence of all restraints and compulsions. The older children, whentold to brush their teeth, would sometimes say sarcastically: ‘Call this a freeschool!’ Those who had heard their parents talking about the freedom to beexpected in the school would test it by seeing how far they could go innaughtiness without being stopped. As we only forbade things that wereobviously harmful, such experiments were apt to be very inconvenient.In 1929, I published Marriage and Morals, which I dictated while recoveringfrom whooping-cough. (Owing to my age, my trouble was not diagnoseduntil I had infected most of the children in the school.) It was this bookchie?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 inmost marriages, but that a husband and wife ought to be able to remain goodsecond marriage 371friends in spite of a?airs. I did not maintain, however, that a marriage couldwith advantage be prolonged if the wife had a child or children of whom thehusband was not the father; in that case, I thought, divorce was desirable. I donot know what I think now about the subject of marriage. There seem to beinsuperable objections to every general theory about it. Perhaps easy divorcecauses less unhappiness than any other system, but I am no longer capable ofbeing dogmatic on the subject of marriage.In the following year, 1930, I published The Conquest of Happiness, a bookconsisting of common-sense advice as to what an individual can do to over-come temperamental causes of unhappiness, as opposed to what can be doneby changes in social and economic systems. This book was di?erently esti-mated by readers of three di?erent levels. Unsophisticated readers, for whomit 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 escapistbook, bolstering up the pretence that there were useful things to be done andsaid 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; whatI do know is that the book was written at a time when I needed muchself-command and much that I had learned by painful experience if I was tomaintain any endurable level of happiness.I was profoundly unhappy during the next few years and some thingswhich I wrote at the time give a more exact picture of my mood thananything 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 myAmerican lecture tours. So I chose for that week’s article the subject of‘Christmas at Sea’. This is the article I wrote:CHRISTMAS AT SEAFor 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 feelingsthen, I am learning much about growing old.Thirty-?ve years ago I was lately married, childless, very happy, andbeginning to taste the joys of success. Family appeared to me as an externalpower hampering to freedom: the world, to me, was a world of individualadventure. I wanted to think my own thoughts, ?nd my own friends, andchoose my own abode, without regard to tradition or elders or anything butmy own tastes. I felt strong enough to stand alone, without the need ofbuttresses.Now, I realise, what I did not know then, that this attitude was dependent