A Critical Examination of SocialismCHAPTER VII
PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS
For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we will a.s.sume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will merely consider how, a mult.i.tude of such men being given, the most efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner in which the problem is solved now.
Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say, invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely, two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages; and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them, the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages, on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that n.o.body cares to buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's implement of direction pa.s.ses out of his hands altogether; and the simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means of directing or of misdirecting it again.
But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a mult.i.tude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own industrial failure.
Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure, on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less than it would be otherwise.[10]
Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats, the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as they would be under the regime of socialism, were reduced to specific fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the b.u.t.ter which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore, to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such goods and such quant.i.ties of them as would satisfy from moment to moment the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a regime of socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return, the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased.
It is impossible to ill.u.s.trate in detail the situation which would thus arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is an inst.i.tution which imaginably might take various forms; and socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have refrained from committing themselves to any detailed programme. The socialistic state, however, having to perform a double function--namely, that of political governor and universal director of industry--would necessarily be divided into two distinct bodies. One of these, consisting of statesmen and legislators, would, we may a.s.sume, be elected by the votes of the people. But the other, consisting of industrial experts--the inventors, the chemists, the electricians, the naval engineers, the organisers of labour--might conceivably be in the first or the second of the two following positions: They might either be left free, as they are under the existing system, to do severally the best they can, according to their own lights, in estimating what goods or services the population wants, and in satisfying these wants with such increasing economy that new goods and services might be continually added to the old. They might be left free to promote or dismiss subordinates, to fill up vacancies, and take new men into partnership, very much as the heads of private firms do now. Or else they might be liable, in greater or less degree, to removal or supersession, and interference with their technical operations, on the part of the political body, whose members, while representing the general ideas of the community, would presumably not be experts in the direction of its particular industries.
Now, let us suppose first that the official directors of labour are left practically free to follow their own devices. The situation which will arise may be ill.u.s.trated by the following imaginary case: The nation, let us say, requires two sister ships. They are built in different yards, under two different directors, and a thousand labourers are employed in the construction of each; but while the labourers who work under one director take a year to complete their task, those who work under the other complete theirs within ten months. This would mean for the community that, through the inferiority of the former of these two officials, two months' labour of the national shipwrights had been lost; and the public interest would require that the industrial regiment commanded by him should as quickly as possible pa.s.s out of his control into that of an official who could render it more efficient than he. And under the existing system this, as we have seen already, is precisely what sooner or later would be brought about automatically. The inefficient director, in proportion to his relative inefficiency, loses his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor of ships wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available.
There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are a.s.suming that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in money, we must necessarily a.s.sume that they will value their posts for some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical superiority to both.
Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch as that to which it could be raised by the compet.i.tion of to-day. But the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical development of any compet.i.tion from without.
That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.
The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit letters with a prompt.i.tude which the post-office still declined to emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the inst.i.tution of the Boy Messengers.
Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France, where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle, would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture, are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state itself would have made by selling an equal quant.i.ty of its own inferior articles.
The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself against the compet.i.tion of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.
And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend them, to the activities of the entire community.
We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of socialised industry on the a.s.sumption that they would be free to follow the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely coincide with fact. This is the a.s.sumption that the official directors of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the great ma.s.s of the people.
Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency, embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and consciously approved of by the lowest.
And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we can turn to historical facts for ill.u.s.trations of its substantial truth.
For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations, the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two patrons who, resembling in this respect far-seeing investors of to-day, dared to be original, and provided him with the necessary ships and control over the necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of governments left them without defence; and had governments then represented public opinion completely, and had also controlled all labour and capital, the discovery in question, which was r.e.t.a.r.ded for three generations, would in all probability have never been made at all.
Arkwright's experience with regard to his spinning-frame was similar.
His epoch-making invention was in danger of being altogether lost, because the general opinion of the capitalists of his day was against it; and if all capital had been vested in a representative state, to the exclusion of the far-seeing individuals who eventually came to his a.s.sistance, its loss would have been almost certain. The successful development of the automobile did not take place till yesterday--and why? A steam-driven vehicle ran in Cornwall before the end of the eighteenth century; but the state and public opinion both condemned it as dangerous; and all further progress in the matter was checked for more than twenty years. Then again private enterprise a.s.serted itself, but only to suffer precisely the same fate. Steam-driven omnibuses plied between Paddington and Westminster. Steam-driven stage-coaches plied on the Bath road. But the state and public opinion were again in obstinate opposition; these vehicles were crushed out of existence by the imposition of monstrous tolls; and progress was checked a second time and for a longer period still. An instance yet more modern is that supplied by the electric lighting of London. The electric lighting of London was r.e.t.a.r.ded for ten years solely by the att.i.tude which the state a.s.sumed towards private enterprise.
It is needless to multiply ill.u.s.trations of this kind further; for my object is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever, the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole determiner of the forms which such implements shall a.s.sume in the future, and also of the kinds and quant.i.ties of the consumable goods which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day produce.
But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state, being controller of all the implements of production, a private press would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. n.o.body could issue a book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What would happen under these circ.u.mstances to purely imaginative literature we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publishing business were managed by the College of Cardinals.
And what, under a regime of socialism, would be true of human thought, a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities.
Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the maximum which is at the time obtainable.
This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its machinery of private compet.i.tion, and of independent capitals, which automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism, with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive ability, or, in other words, the necessity for compet.i.tion among able men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such compet.i.tion can be made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it within the narrowest limits.
In this chapter, however, we have been dealing with the machinery only.
We have been a.s.suming the unabated activity of the powers by which the machinery is to be driven. That is to say, we have been a.s.suming that every man who possesses, or imagines himself to possess, any exceptional gift for directing labour--whether as an inventor, a man of science, an organiser, or in any other capacity--would be no less eager, under the circ.u.mstances with which socialism would surround him, to develop and exert his faculties than he is at the present day. We will now pa.s.s on to the question of how far this a.s.sumption is correct. The question of machinery is secondary. It is a question of detail only; for if there is no power in the background by which the machinery may be driven, it will not make much difference in the result whether the machinery be bad or good.
And here once more we shall find that the socialists of to-day agree with us; and in pa.s.sing on to the question now before us, we shall be quitting a region of speculations which can be only of a general kind (for they refer to social arrangements whose details are not definitely specified), and we shall find ourselves confronted by a variety of ideas and principles which, however confused they may be in the minds of those who enunciate them, we shall have no difficulty ourselves in reducing to logical order.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] That such is the case can be seen easily enough by imagining a socialistic community consisting of twenty men, who require and consume only one article, bread. Each man, to keep him alive, requires one loaf daily; but to eat two would be a comfort to him, and to eat three would be luxury. The community is divided into two groups of ten men each, one man in each group directing the labour of the others. We will start with supposing that these two directors are men of equal and also of the highest ability, and that each of the groups, under these favourable conditions, is enabled to produce daily an output of thirty loaves. The total output of both in this case amounts to sixty, which equally divided yields to everybody the luxurious number of three. Let us next suppose that the director of one group dies, that his place is taken by a man of inferior powers, and that this group, as a consequence of his less efficient direction, instead of producing thirty loaves can produce no more than ten. Now, although this falling off in production has occurred in one group only, the loss which results from it is felt by the entire community. The total output has sunk from sixty loaves to forty; and the members of the group which retains its old efficiency, no less than those of the group which has lost so much of it, have to be content, with a dividend, not of three loaves, but two. Finally, let us suppose that, owing to a continued deterioration in management, the ten men of whom the first group is composed are able to produce daily, not ten loaves, but only five. That is to say, the number of loaves which they produce comes to no more than half of the minimum they are obliged to eat. Here it is obvious that, unless one-half of the population is to die, it can only be kept alive by being given a supply of loaves which, in consequence of its own inefficiency, must be taken out of the mouths of others.
[11] A similar drama enacted itself in London more than two centuries ago. Private enterprise established a penny post. The state killed it, and deprived the metropolis of this service for a hundred and fifty years.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT
When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable monopoly of all--namely, "the natural monopoly of business ability," or "the special ability and energy with which some persons are born." The services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which desires to prosper according to modern standards. He sees and admits also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate motive or stimulus. Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly operative among such men at present--namely, that supplied by the possibility of exceptional economic gain--he fairly faces the fact that some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists which shall take the place of this.
I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise. This specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic thinkers; and if we take together the pa.s.sages in their writings which deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own.
We shall find that the arguments brought forward by them in this connection divide themselves broadly into two cla.s.ses, one of which deals with the problem of motive directly, while the other cla.s.s aims at preparing the way to its solution by showing in advance that its difficulties are far less formidable than they appear to be. Without insisting on the manner in which they are urged by individual writers, we will take these two cla.s.ses of argument in the logical order which they a.s.sume when we consider their general character.
These preparatory arguments, with which we will accordingly begin, while admitting that some men are undoubtedly more able than others, aim at showing that the superiority of such men to their fellows is not so great as it seems to be, and that any claims made by them to exceptional reward on account of it consequently tend to reduce themselves to very modest proportions.
These arguments possess a peculiar interest owing to the fact that they have not originated with socialistic thinkers at all, but have been drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent, opens his work on the _Study of Sociology_ with an elaborate attack on what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according to which the explanation of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of exceptional or great men--the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change, they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly attributed to their actions, on "the mult.i.tudinous conditions" of the generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of mathematicians who went before him. Caesar could not have got very far with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly developed language.
But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following pa.s.sage taken from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on Dryden_, antic.i.p.ating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the ma.s.s, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.
Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on contemporary social circ.u.mstances, of the talents which we are accustomed to a.s.sociate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like results almost simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims," he proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum a.n.a.lysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it, "inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property,"
the ma.s.s of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents or other artificial restrictions.
The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious. It is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so rare or so superior to the ma.s.s of their contemporaries as they seem to be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to the co-operation of the average members of society, and that consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command at present.
And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their inspiration.
The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and its subsequent fortunes. .h.i.therto, what interests us is man in the ma.s.s, or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or cut a navigable ca.n.a.l through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother, whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped in the construction of the Panama Ca.n.a.l by learning from sociologists that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard to man in the ma.s.s, or societies, are untrue philosophically.
Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer ill.u.s.trates the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare,"
he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the mult.i.tudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted his sunsets if mult.i.tudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, ill.u.s.trates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional genius a.s.similates the data of his environment, and gives them back to the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.
And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has ill.u.s.trated more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the mult.i.tudinous character of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of "apprehending a.s.sembled propositions in their totality." It would be difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by apprehending a mult.i.tude of a.s.sembled propositions in their totality--mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so forth--by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties, he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less rare--namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an imagination which enables him to antic.i.p.ate them, an instinctive insight into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates, prompt.i.tude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of prompt.i.tude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of it painted in the absence of a great artist.
Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.