A Critical Examination of SocialismThat such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_. One is a reference to the last Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor, he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war. Of the insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation."
For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?
Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter of common-sense, instinctively a.s.signs to great men absolutely contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives us an elaborate ill.u.s.tration taken from modern industry--that is to say, the invention of the _Times_ printing-press. This wonderful piece of mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and having specified a mult.i.tude of these, winds up with a repet.i.tion of his moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_, Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail, he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas,"
or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were, out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at times, as these pa.s.sages clearly show, sees that while great men, when considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a definite place in his general sociological system.[12]
The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the pa.s.sage that was just now quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the ma.s.s" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer are all the d.y.k.es of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they are nothing. For the practical man they are everything.
It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced price.
Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr.
Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fact on which it bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it proves? That more men than one should reach at the same time the same discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect, when we consider what the character of scientific discovery is. The facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely a.n.a.logous to such a peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation, than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been accomplished less by these men themselves than by the ma.s.s of tourists who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to an ascent by the Rigi Railway.
Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than encyclopaedic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. It is perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise; but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated, the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased difficulty in a.s.similating even those which are connected most closely with each other. We may safely say that a knowledge of the simple rules of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the property of individuals only in proportion to the quant.i.ty of it which their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both vessels have been filled from the same stream.
Let us now pa.s.s on to the argument which, differing essentially from the preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their produce is really the result of their social inheritance and environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included, is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate.
No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment?
Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment, could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it, the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant because they are both standing on the top of a New York skysc.r.a.per, or because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.
But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially more efficient than the great ma.s.s of their fellows, and that man for man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says, that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of them be awarded an equal share of the product--that if one man produces only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty--this proposal "has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society as the unearned increment of rent."
Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr.
Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that, if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His const.i.tutional fault, and his const.i.tutional disinclination to mend it, are both of them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer.
If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual drunkards.
And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, antic.i.p.ate what we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question.
Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of such changes as they initiate.
CHAPTER IX
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE
The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they deal with motive directly.
Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as with perfect accuracy, stated by the socialists themselves. Under existing conditions the monopolists of business ability are mainly induced to add to the national store of wealth by the prospect, whose fulfilment existing conditions make possible, of retaining shares of it as their own which are proportionate to the amounts produced by them. The question is, therefore, whether, if this prospect is taken away from them, socialism could provide another which men of this special type would find equally stimulating. Is human nature in general, and the nature of the monopolists in particular, sufficiently adaptable to admit of such a change as this? The socialists answer that it is, and in making such an a.s.sertion they declare that they have all the facts of scientific sociology at the back of them. The unscientific thing is, they say, to a.s.sume the contrary; and here, they proceed, we have the fundamental error which renders most of the conclusions of the ordinary economists valueless. Economic science, in its generally accepted form, bases all its reasonings on the behaviour of the so-called "economic man"--that is to say, a being from whom those who reason about him exclude all operative desires except that of economic gain. But such a being, say the socialists, is a mere abstraction. He has no counterpart among living, loving, idealising, aspiring men. Real men are susceptible of the desire of gain, no doubt; but this provides them only with one motive out of many; and there are others which, as experience amply shows us, are, when they are given unimpeded play, far stronger. I do not know whether socialists have ever used the following parallel; but if they have not it expresses their position better than they have expressed it themselves. They argue virtually that, in respect of the desire for exceptional gain, able men are comparable to victims of the desire for alcohol. If alcohol is obtainable, such men will insist on obtaining it. They will constantly fix their thoughts on it; no other fluid will satisfy them. But if it is placed altogether beyond their reach, they will be compelled by the force of circ.u.mstances to drink lemonade, tea, or even plain water instead. In time they will come to drink them with the same avidity; and their health and their powers of enjoyment will be indefinitely improved in consequence. In the same way, it is argued, the monopolists of business ability, though, so long as it is possible for them to appropriate a considerable share of their products, they will insist on getting this share, and will not exert themselves otherwise, need only be placed under conditions which will render such gain impossible, and at once they will find out that there exist other inducements which will prove before long to be no less efficacious.
Such is the general argument of the modern school of socialists; but they do not leave it in this indeterminate form. They have, to their own satisfaction, worked it out in detail, and claim that they are able to demonstrate from the actual facts of human nature precisely what the character of the new inducements will be.
It may be looked upon as evidence of the methodical and quasi-scientific accuracy with which modern socialists have set themselves to discuss this question of motive that the thought of all of them has moved along the same lines, and that what all of them fix upon as a subst.i.tute for the desire of exceptional pecuniary gain is one or other, or all, of a few motives actually in operation, and notoriously effective in certain spheres of activity.
These motives practically resolve themselves into four, which have been cla.s.sified as follows by Mr. Webb or one of his coadjutors:
"The mere pleasure of excelling," or the joy of the most powerful in exercising their powers to the utmost.
"The joy in creative work," such as that which the artist feels in producing a great work of art.
The satisfaction which ministering to others "brings to the instincts of benevolence," such as that which is felt by those who give themselves to the sick and helpless.
And, lastly, the desire for approval, or the homage which is called "honour," the efficiency of which is shown by the conduct of the soldier--often a man of very ordinary education and character--who will risk death in order that he may be decorated with some intrinsically worthless medal, which merely proclaims his valour or his unselfish devotion to his country.
Now, that the motives here in question are motives of extraordinary power, all history shows us. The most impressive things accomplished by human nature have been due to them. But let us consider what these things are. The first motive--namely, that supplied by the mere "pleasure in excelling"--we need hardly consider by itself, for, in so far as socialists can look upon its objects as legitimate, it is included in the struggle for approbation or honour. We will merely remark that the emphasis which the socialists lay on it is not very consonant with the principles of those persons who propose to abolish compet.i.tion as the root of all social evils; and we will content ourselves with examining in detail the three other motives only, and the scope of their efficiency, as actual experience reveals it to us.
We shall find that the activities which these three motives stimulate are confined, so far as experience is able to teach us anything, to the following well-marked kinds, which have been already indicated: those of the artist, of the speculative thinker, of the religious and philanthropic enthusiast, and, lastly, those of the soldier. This list, if understood in its full sense, is exhaustive.
Such being the case, then, the argument of the socialists is as follows: Because a Fra Angelico will paint a Christ or a Virgin, because a Kant will immolate all his years to philosophy, because a monk and a sister of mercy will devote themselves to the victims of pestilence, because a soldier in action will eagerly face death--all without hope of any exceptional pecuniary reward--the monopolists of business ability, if only such rewards are made impossible for them, will at once become amenable to the motives of the soldier, the artist, the philosopher, the inspired philanthropist, and the saint. This is the a.s.sertion of the socialists when reduced to a precise form; and what we have to do is to inquire whether this a.s.sertion is true. Does human nature, as history, as psychology, and as physiology reveal it to us, give us any grounds, in fact, for taking such an a.s.sertion seriously? Any one who has studied human conduct historically, who has observed it in the life around him, and examined scientifically the diversities of temperament and motive that go with diversities of capacity, will dismiss such an a.s.sertion as at once groundless and ludicrous.
Let us, to go into detail, take the case of the artist. What reason is there to suppose that the impa.s.sioned emotion which stimulates the adoring monk to lavish all his genius on an altar-piece will stimulate another man to devise, and to organise the production of, some new kind of liquid enamel for the decoration of cheap furniture?[13] Or let us turn to an impulse closely allied to the artistic--namely, the desire for speculative truth, as manifested in the lives of scientific and philosophic thinkers. These men--such as Kant and Hegel, for example--have been proverbially, and often ludicrously, indifferent to the material details of their existence. Who can suppose that the disinterested pa.s.sion for truth, which had the effect of making these men forget their dinners, will stimulate others to devote themselves to the improvement of stoves and saucepans?
Yet again, let us consider the area of the industrial influence of the motives originating in religious fervour or benevolence. The most important ill.u.s.tration of this is to be found in the monastic orders.
The monastic orders constructed great buildings; they successfully practised agriculture and other industrial arts: and those of them who were faithful to their vows aimed at no personal luxuries. On the contrary, their superfluous possessions were applied by them to the relief of indigence. But this industrial asceticism was made possible only by its a.s.sociation with another asceticism--the renunciation of women, the private home, the family. Even so, in the days when Christian piety was at its highest, those who were capable of responding to the industrial motives of the cloister formed but a fraction of the general population of Christendom, while even among them these motives constantly ceased to operate; and, as St. Francis declared with regard to his own disciples, the desire for personal gain continually insisted on rea.s.serting itself. What ground have we here for supposing that motives, whose action hitherto has always been strictly limited to pa.s.sionate and seclusive idealists turning their backs on the world, will ever become general among the monopolists of that business ability, the object of whom is to fill the world with increasing comforts and luxuries. One might as well argue that, because the monastic orders were celibate, and formed at one time a very numerous body, all men will probably soon turn celibate also, and yet at the same time continue to reproduce their species.
But the scientific quality of the psychological reasoning of the socialists is best ill.u.s.trated by their treatment of another cla.s.s of facts--that on which they themselves unanimously lay the greatest stress--namely, the heroisms of the soldier, and other men of a kindred type. The soldier, they say, is not only willing but eager to perform duties of the most painful and dangerous kind, without any thought of receiving any higher pay than his fellows. If, then, human nature is such, they continue, that we can get from it on these terms work such as that of the soldier's, which is work in its most terrifying form, it stands to reason that we can, on the same terms, get out of it work of a much easier kind, such as that of exceptional business ability applied to the safe and peaceful direction of labour. Nor is this argument urged by socialists only. Other thinkers who, though resembling them somewhat in sentiment, are wholly opposed to socialism as a formal creed, have likewise pitched upon the soldier's conduct in war as a signal ill.u.s.tration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral a.s.similation of industrial action to military. "Soldiers of the ploughshare," he exclaims in one of his works, "as well as soldiers of the sword! All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase." So, too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following out the same train of thought, has declared that the soldier's readiness to die in battle for his country is a realised example of a readiness, always latent in men, to spend themselves and be spent in the service of humanity generally. Again in the same sense, another writer observes, "The soldier's subsistence is certain. It does not depend on his exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism, and he will value a bit of bronze, which is the reward of valour, far more than a hundred times its weight in gold"--a pa.s.sage to which one of Mr. Sidney Webb's collaborators refers with special delight, exclaiming, "Let those take notice of this last fact who fancy we must wait till men are angels before socialism is practical."
Now, the arguments thus drawn from the facts of military activity throw a special light on the methods and mental condition of those who so solemnly urge them; for the error by which these arguments are vitiated is of a peculiarly glaring kind. It consists of a failure to perceive that military activity is, in many respects, a thing altogether apart, and depends on psychological and physiological conditions which have no a.n.a.logies in the domain of ordinary economic effort.
That such must necessarily be the case can be very easily seen by following out the train of reasoning suggested by Mr. Frederic Harrison.
Mr. Harrison correctly a.s.sumes that no man, in ordinary life, will run the risk of being killed or mutilated except for the sake of some object the achievement of which is profoundly desired by him. If a man, for instance, puts his hand into the fire in order to pick out something that has dropped among the burning coals, we naturally a.s.sume that this something is of the utmost value and importance to him. We measure the value which a man places on the object by the desperate character of the means which he will take to gain it; and Mr. Harrison jumps to the conclusion that what holds good in ordinary life will hold equally good on the field of battle also. Hence he argues--for this is his special point--that the willingness of the soldier to die fighting on behalf of his country shows how individuals of no unusual kind value their country's welfare more than their own lives, and how readily, such being the case, devotion to a particular country may be enlarged into a religious devotion to Humanity taken as a whole. Now, there are occasions, no doubt, in which, a country being in desperate straits, the soldier's valour is heightened by devotion to the cause he fights for; but that ideal devotion like this affords no sufficient explanation of the peculiar character of military activity generally; and that there must be some deeper and more general cause at the back of it, is shown by the fact that some of the most reckless soldiers known to us have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for another. And this deeper and more general cause, when we look for it, is sufficiently obvious. It consists of the fact that, owing to the millions of years of struggle to which was due, in the first place, the evolution of man as a species, and, in the second place, the races of men in their existing stages of civilisation, the fighting instinct is, in the strongest of these races, inherent after a fashion in which the industrial instincts are not; and will always prompt numbers to do, for the smallest wage or none, what they could hardly, in its absence, be induced to do for the highest. This instinct, no doubt, is more controlled than formerly, and is not so often roused; but it is still there. It is ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and the sight of regiments marching stirs the most apathetic crowd.
High-spirited boys will, for the mere pleasure of fighting, run the risk of having their noses broken, while they will wince at getting up in the cold for the sake of learning their lessons, and would certainly rebel against being set to work as wage-earners at a task which involved so much as a daily p.r.i.c.king of their fingers.
Here we have the reason, embodied in the very organism of the human being, why military activity is something essentially distinct from industrial, and why any inference drawn from the one to the other is valueless. And to this primary fact it is necessary to add another. Not only is the fighting instinct an exceptional phenomenon in man, but the circ.u.mstances which call it into being are in these days exceptional also. Socialists frequently, when referring to the soldier's conduct, refer also to conduct of a closely allied kind, such as that of the members of fire-brigades and the crews of life-boats, and repeat their previous question of why, since men like these will, without demanding any exceptional reward, make such exceptional efforts to save the lives of others, the monopolists of business ability may not be reasonably expected to forgo all exceptional claims on their own exceptional products, and distribute among all the superfluous wealth produced by them just as freely as the fireman climbs his ladder, or as life-belts are distributed by the boatmen in their work of rescue. And if human life were nothing but a chronic conflagration or shipwreck, in which all alike were fighting for bare existence, all alike being menaced by some terrible and instant death, this argument of the socialists might doubtless have some truth in it. The men of exceptional ability, by a variety of ingenious devices, might seek to save others no less a.s.siduously than themselves, without expecting anything like exceptional wealth as a reward; for there would, in a case like this, be no question of wealth for anybody. But as soon as the stress of such a situation was relaxed, and the abilities of the ablest, liberated from the task of contending with death, were left free to devote themselves to the superfluous decoration of life, the artificial tension of the moral motives would be relaxed. The swimmer who had plunged into the sea to save a woman from drowning would not take a second plunge to rescue her silk petticoat. The socialists, in short, when dealing with military and other cognate heroisms, ignore both of the causes which alone make such heroisms possible. They ignore the fact that the internal motive is essentially isolated and exceptional. They ignore the further fact that the circ.u.mstances which alone give this motive play are essentially exceptional also, and could never be reproduced in social life at large, except at the cost of making all human life intolerable.
I have called special attention to this particular socialistic argument, partly because socialists, and other sentimental thinkers, like Ruskin, attach such extreme importance to it; but mainly because it affords us an exceptionally striking ill.u.s.tration of the manner in which they are accustomed to reason about matters with regard to which they ostentatiously profess themselves to be the pioneers of accurate science. One of the princ.i.p.al grounds--to repeat what has been said already--on which they attack what they call the Economics of Capitalism, is that it deals exclusively with the actions of "the economic man," or the man whose one motive is the appropriation of wealth. Such a man, they say, is an abstraction. He does not exist in reality; and if economics is to have any scientific value it must deal with man as a whole, in all his living complexity. As applied to the orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out with denouncing. The one-motived economic man who cares only for personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of Euclid. Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real existence and produces real effects. It has been defined with accuracy; and by studying its effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions.
But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish, so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific a.n.a.lysis, that they do not correspond to anything. Instead of forming any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl. They have only the effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though incomplete, are so far as they go actual.
Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the monopolists of business ability, other than that supplied under the existing system by the prospect of possessing wealth proportionate to the amount produced by them, let us consider this motive in itself, as history and observation reveal it to us.
And here in the presence of facts which no one seeks to deny, we shall find that the socialists themselves are among our most interesting witnesses, affording in what they a.s.sert a solitary and signal exception to that looseness of thought and observation which is otherwise their distinguishing characteristic. The motive here in question as ascribed to the exceptional wealth-producer, the director, the man of business ability--the motive which in his case the socialists propose to supersede, but which is at present in possession of the field--commonly receives from them the vituperative name of "greed." What they mean by greed is simply the desire of the great wealth-producer to retain for himself a share of wealth, not necessarily equal, but proportionate, to the amount produced by him. And what have the socialists got to tell us about greed, when they turn from their plans for superseding it in the socialistic future to consider its operations in the actual past and present?
They tell us a great deal. For what is, and always has been, their stock moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new inventions, the amplifiers of the world's wealth? Their chief indictment against such men has been this--that their exceptional ability, instead of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone.
Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago. Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting pa.s.sage written in England about the time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality, and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into their own pockets. In other words, the psychologists of socialism declare that, so far as the facts of human nature in the present and the past can teach us anything, the desire of exceptional wealth is just as inseparable from the temperament which, by some physiological law, accompanies the power of producing it, as "the joy in creation" is from the temperament of the great painter, or the love of a woman is from the lover's efforts to win her.
We thus see that those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete elimination of a certain motive from a certain special cla.s.s of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special cla.s.s of persons the motive in question is something so ingrained and inveterate that in no age or country has it ever been so much as modified.
Nor does the matter end here; for the amusing contradiction in which socialistic thought thus lauds itself, is emphasised by the fact that the socialists, when they turn from the few to the many, a.s.sume in the many, as an instinct of eternal justice, that precise desire for gain which, in the case of the few, they first denounce as a hideous and incurable disease, and then propose to cure as though it were the pa.s.sing cough of a baby. For what is the bait with which, from its first beginnings till to-day, socialism has sought to secure the support of the general mult.i.tude? It is mainly, if not solely, the promise of increased personal gain, without any increased effort on the part of the happy recipients. With Marx and the earlier socialists, this promise took the form of declaring that every man has a sacred right to whatever he has himself produced, and that, all the wealth of the world being produced by manual labour, the labourers must never be satisfied until they have secured all of it. The more educated socialists of to-day, having gradually come to perceive that labour itself produces but a fraction of this wealth only, have had to alter the form of their promise, but they still adhere to its substance; and the altered form of the promise does but bring out more clearly the fact that they appeal to the desire of personal gain as the primary economic motive of the great majority of mankind. For, whereas the earlier socialists contented themselves with promising the labourer the whole of what he produced, and promising it on the ground that he had himself produced it, what the labourer is promised by the intellectual socialists of to-day is not only all that he has produced--which in most cases he gets already[14]--but a great deal more besides, which is admittedly produced by others.
We thus see that, according to these theorists, the kind of moral conversion which is to make socialism practicable is to be rigidly confined to one particular cla.s.s; for, on the part of the majority, no change at all is required in order to make the socialistic evangel welcome. So far as they are concerned, the Old Adam is quite sufficient.
None of us need much converting in order to welcome the prospect of an indefinite addition to our incomes, which will cost us nothing but the trouble of stretching out our hands to take it. Socialists often complain that, under the existing dispensation, there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor. They propose themselves to introduce a difference which goes still deeper, and to provide the few and the many, not only with two laws, but with two different natures, and two ant.i.thetic moralities. The morality of the many is to remain, as it always has been, comfortably based on the familiar desire for dollars.
The morality of the few is to be based on some hitherto unknown contempt for them; and the cla.s.s which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of this moral transformation, is precisely the cla.s.s which they denounce as being, and as always having been, in respect of its devotion to dollars, the most notorious, and the most notoriously incorrigible.
That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and starting with the a.s.sumption that it is possible to animate a manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners. Indeed, many of them themselves would, it seems, be extremely doubtful with regard to the plasticity imputed by them to human nature, if it were not for a theory of society which is not peculiar to socialism. This is the theory that, in any community or nation in which each citizen is completely free to express his will by his vote, and realises the extent of the power which thus resides in him, the will of the majority has practically no limits to its efficiency, and will be able in the future to bring about moral changes, which are at present, perhaps, beyond the limits of possibility, but are only so because the means of effecting them have never yet been fully utilised. This theory of democracy we will consider in the following chapter.
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