A Critical Examination of Socialism[13] Mr. G. Wilshire, in criticising this argument as stated in one of my American addresses, declares that there would be nothing in socialism to prevent any great artist (such as a singer) from making an even larger fortune than he or she does now. But though a Melba, under the existing system, demands a large price for her services, under socialism all would be changed. Though she _could_ get it, she would no longer want it. She would then want no reward but the mere joy of using her voice. And he infers that this change which would take place in the bosoms of great singers would repeat itself under the breast-pocket of every leader and organiser of commercial enterprise. It would be hard to find a better ill.u.s.tration of the purely fanciful reasoning commented on in the text.
[14] The question of how much labour, _as such_, produces in modern societies is discussed in a later chapter.
CHAPTER X
INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRACY
The ascription of imaginary powers to the so-called "sovereign"
democracy, which are really beyond the reach of any kind of government whatsoever, is, as I have said, a fallacy by no means peculiar to Socialists. Socialists merely push it to its full logical consequences; and I will begin with ill.u.s.trating it by the arguments of a recent writer who, professedly as a social conservative, has dealt in detail with this precise question of the motives of the exceptional wealth-producer, which has just now been engaging us. I refer to the author of an essay in _The North American Review_, who hides his personality under the cryptic initial "X," but who is said to be one of the most cultivated and best-known thinkers now living in the United States.
The subject of his essay is the growth, almost peculiar to that country, not of large, but of those colossal fortunes, which have certainly had no parallel in the past history of the world. The position of "X" is that the growth of such fortunes is deplorable, partly because they are possible instruments of judicial and political corruption, and partly because they excite antagonism against private wealth in general by exhibiting it to the gaze of the mult.i.tude in such monstrous and grotesque proportions. In any case, says "X," "it is to the true interest of the multimillionaires themselves to join those who are free from envy in trying to remove the rapidly growing dissatisfaction with their continued possession of these vast sums of money."
Now, though "X" hints that some of the fortunes in question may be open to further reprehension, on the ground that they have been acquired dishonestly, he by no means maintains that this opprobrium attaches itself to the great majority of them. On the contrary, he admits that the typical huge fortunes of America are based on the productive activities of the remarkable men who have ama.s.sed them. The talents of such men, he says, are essential to the prosperity of the country, and it is necessary to stimulate such men to develop their talents to the utmost by allowing them to derive for themselves some special reward for their use of them; but he contends that the rewards which they are at present permitted to appropriate are needlessly and dangerously excessive, and ought therefore to be limited. But limited by what means?
It is his answer to this question that here alone concerns us.
The means, he says, by which these rewards may be limited are ready to hand, and can be applied with the utmost ease. They are provided by the democratic Const.i.tution of the United States of America. "No one can doubt, for example," he goes on to observe, "that, if the majority of the voters of the State of New York chose to elect a governor of their own way of thinking, they could readily enact a progressive taxation of incomes which would limit every citizen of New York State to such income as the majority of voters considers sufficient for him. And it would be particularly easy," adds the writer, "to alienate the property of every man at death, for it is only necessary to repeal the statutes now authorising the descent of such property to the heirs and legatees of the decedent." Here, then, according to "X," is an obvious way out of the difficulty, the feasibility of which no one can doubt. A certain minority of the citizens render services essential to the majority; but these advantages are accompanied by a corresponding drawback. The majority, by the simple use of their sovereign power as legislators, can retain the former and get rid of the latter. The remedy is in their own hands.
It would be difficult to imagine an ill.u.s.tration more vivid than this of the error to which I am now referring--the common error of ascribing to majorities in democratic communities powers which they do not possess, and which, as I said before, no kind of government possesses, whether it be that of a democracy or of an autocrat. That a majority of the voters in any democratic country can enact any laws they please at any given moment which happen to be in accordance with what "X" calls their then "way of thinking," and perhaps enforce them for a moment, is no doubt perfectly true. But life is not made up of isolated moments or periods.
It is a continuous process, in which each moment is affected by the moments that have gone before, and by the prospective character of the moments that are to come after. If it were not for this fact, the majority of the voters of New York State, "by electing a governor of their own way of thinking," might not only put a limit to the income which any citizen might possess. It might do a great deal more besides.
It might enact a law which limited the amount which any citizen might eat. It might limit everybody to two ounces a day. Besides enacting that no father should bequeath his wealth to his children, it might enact just as readily that no father should have the custody of his children.
It might enact, in obedience to the persuasions of some plausible quack, that no one should take any medicines but a single all-curing pill.
There is nothing in the principles so solemnly laid down by "X" which would render any of these enactments more impossible than those which he himself contemplates. But if such enactments were made by the so-called all-powerful majority, through a governor of their own way of thinking, what would be the result? If a law forbade the citizens to eat enough to keep themselves alive, it might perhaps be obeyed throughout Monday, but it would be broken by Tuesday morning. A law which deprived fathers of the care of their own children might just as well be a law which decreed that no children should be born. A law which decreed that no remedy but the same quack pill should be applied to any disease, whether cholera, appendicitis, or small-pox, would be either disregarded from the beginning, or would soon be repealed by a pestilence. In short, if any one of these ridiculous laws were enacted, the very voters who voted for it would disregard it as soon as they realised its consequences; and the work which they did as legislators they would tear to pieces as men.
In other words, if we mean, by legislation, legislation which can be permanently obeyed, the legislative sovereignty of democracies, which is so commonly spoken of as supreme, is limited in every direction by another power greater than itself; and this is the double power of nature and of human nature. Just as all laws relating to the food which men are to eat, and the drugs by which their maladies are to be cured, must depend on the natural qualities of such and such physical substances, so do the const.i.tution and propensities of the concrete human character limit legislation generally, and confine it within certain channels.
This is what "X" and similar thinkers forget; and the nature of their error is very pertinently ill.u.s.trated by an observation of the English jurist, Lord Coleridge, to which "X" solemnly refers, as corroborating him in his own wisdom. "The same power," says Lord Coleridge, "which prescribes rules for the possession of property can of course alter them"; this power being the legislative body of whatever country may be in question. It is easy to see the manner in which Lord Coleridge reasons. Because, in any country, the formulation and enforcement of laws have the will of the governing body as the proximate cause which determines them, it seems to Lord Coleridge that, in this contemporary will, the laws thus formulated and enforced have their ultimate cause also. For example, according to him, the entire inst.i.tution of property in the State of New York is virtually a fresh creation of the voters from year to year, and has nothing else behind it. But, in reality, all this business of formulation and enforcement is a secondary process, not a primary process at all. Lord Coleridge is simply inverting the actual order of things. Half the existing "rules prescribed as to the possession of property" have, for their ultimate object, the protection of family life, the privacy of the private home, and the provision made by parents for their children. But family life is not primarily the creation of prescribed rules. It is the creation of instincts and affections which have developed themselves in the course of ages.
Instead of the law creating family life, it is family life which has gradually called into being--which has created and dictated--the rules and sanctions protecting it. The same is the case with bequest, marriage, and so forth. The conduct of civilised men is bound to conform to laws, but the laws must first conform to general human practice. They merely give precision to conduct which has a deeper origin than legislation. Laws, in fact, may be compared to soldiers' uniforms.
These, within certain limits, may be varied indefinitely by a war-office; but they all must be such as will adapt themselves to the human body and its movements. The will of a government may prescribe that the trousers shall be tight or loose, that they shall be black or brown or bright green or vermilion. But no government can prescribe that they shall be only three inches round the waist, or that the soldier's sleeves shall start, not from the shoulders, but from the pockets of the coat-tails. The human body is here a legislator which is supreme over all governments; and just the same thing is true with regard to the human character.
Now, the curious thing with regard to "X" is that he is all along a.s.suming this fundamental fact himself; though he utterly fails to put two and two together, and see how this fact conflicts with the omnipotence which he ascribes to legislation. Let us go back to the a.s.sertion, which embodies his whole practical argument, that the majority of the voters in New York State could, without interfering with the activity of any one of its citizens, limit incomes in any manner they pleased, and alienate with even greater ease the property of every man at his death; and let us see what he hastens to say as the sequel to this oracular utterance.
These powers of the sovereign majority, which he is apparently so anxious to invoke, would, he says, be practically much less formidable in their action than timid persons might antic.i.p.ate. And why should they be less formidable? "Because," says "X," "although each man, by reason of his manhood alone, has an equal voice with every other man in making the laws governing their common country, and regulating the distribution of the common property ... yet immense and incalculable differences exist in men's natural capacities for rendering honest service to society. Encouragement should, therefore, be given to every man to use all the gifts which he possesses to the fullest extent possible; and, accordingly, reasonable acc.u.mulations and the descent of these should be respected." They should, he says, be respected. Yes--but for what reason? Because they encourage exceptional men, whose services are essential to society, to develop and use their capacities to "the fullest extent possible"; and this is merely another way of saying that, without the motive provided by the possibility of acc.u.mulation and bequest, the exceptional faculties would not be developed or used at all. Moreover, the amounts which may be acc.u.mulated and bequeathed, although they will be strictly limited, must, "X" says, be considerable. He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to 8,000, and bequeathable property up to 200,000. And here we come to a question which is still more pertinent than the preceding. Why must the permissible amounts of income and of bequeathable property be of proportions such as those which he contemplates? Why does he not take his bill and write down quickly 200 of income instead of 8,000, and limit bequeathable property to 2,000 instead of 200,000? Because he evidently recognises that the men whose possible services to society are "immensely and incalculably greater" than those of the majority of their fellow citizens would not be tempted by a reward which, reduced to its smallest proportions, would not be very largely in excess of what was attainable by more ordinary exertions. In his formal statement of his case, he says that the amount of the reward would be entirely determined by what _ought_ to be sufficient for the purpose in the estimation of the voting majority; and he mentions the sums in question as those on which they would probably fix. And it is, of course, quite imaginable that the majority, in making either these or any other estimates, might be right. But what "X" fails altogether to see is that, if the majority of the citizens _were_ right, such sums would not be sufficient because the majority of citizens happened to think that they ought to be. They would be sufficient because they were felt to be sufficient by the minority who were invited to earn them, at whose feelings the majority would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess. A thousand men with fishing-rods might meet in an inn parlour and vote that such and such flies were sufficient to attract trout. But it lies with the trout to determine whether or no he will rise to them. It is a question, not of what the fishermen think, but of what the trout thinks; and the fishermen's thoughts are effective only when they coincide with the trout's.
So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out of its citizens, and so long as some men are, in the words of "X," "immensely and incalculably" more efficient than the great ma.s.s of their fellows, and so long as their efficiency requires, as "X" admits that it does, some exceptional reward to induce these men to develop it, these men themselves, in virtue of their inherent characters, must primarily determine what the reward shall be; and not all the majorities in the world, however unanimous, could make a reward sufficient if the particular minority in question did not feel it to be so. The majority might, by making a sufficient reward unattainable, easily prevent the services from being rendered at all; but, unless they are to forgo the services, the majority can only obtain them on terms which will, in the last resort, depend on the men who are to render them.
Now, in what I have been urging thus far--which practically comes to this, that the sovereignty popularly ascribed to democratic majorities is an illusion--not socialists only, but other advocates of popular government also, will alike be against me, as the promulgator of some blasphemous paradox. It will be easy, however, to show them that their objections are quite mistaken, and that the exceptional powers of dictation which have just been ascribed to a minority are so far from being inconsistent with the real powers of the majority that the latter, when properly understood, are seen to be their complement and their counterpart. For, though socialists and thinkers like "X" ascribe to majorities powers which they do _not_ possess, we shall find that majorities do actually possess others, in some ways very much greater, of which such thinkers have thus far taken no cognisance at all. I have said that minorities can dictate their own terms to majorities which desire to secure their services, the reason being that the former are alone competent to determine what treatment will supply them with a motive to exert themselves. What holds good of minorities as opposed to majorities holds good in essentials, though in a somewhat different form, of majorities as opposed to such minorities.
Let us turn again to a matter to which I have referred already--namely, the family life of the citizens of any race or nation. This results from propensities in a vast number of human beings which, although they are similar, are in each case independent. These propensities give rise to legislation, the object of which is to prescribe rules by which their satisfaction may be made secure; but the propensities are so far from originating in legislation that no legislation which seriously interfered with them would be tolerated. Socialists themselves have continually admitted this very thing. The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, for instance, who attempted about fifteen years ago to found a socialistic colony in Brazil--an attempt which completely failed--attributed its failure largely to this particular cause--namely, the impossibility of inducing the colonists to conform to any rules of the community by which family life was interfered with. Here we have an example of democracy in its genuine form, rendering powerless what affected to be democratic legislation. We have the c.u.mulative power of similar human characters compelling legislation to limit itself to what these characters spontaneously demand. And now let us go a step--a very short step--further. The family propensities in question show their dictatorial power, not only in the limitations which they impose on positive laws, but also in the character which they impose on the material surroundings of existence, especially in the material structure of the dwellings of all cla.s.ses except the lowest. All are constructed with a view to keeping the family group united, and each family group separate from all others. Further, if the natural family propensities thus affect the structure of the dwelling, other propensities, more various in detail, but in each case equally spontaneous, determine what commodities shall be put into it.
And this fact brings us back to our own more immediate subject--namely, the power of the few and of the many in the sphere of economic production. The man of exceptional industrial capacity becomes rich in the modern world by producing goods, or by rendering services, which others consume or profit by, and for which they render him a return.
But, in order that they may take, and render him this return for what he offers them, the goods and the services must be such that the many desire to have them. All the highest productive ability that has ever been devoted to the business of cheapening and multiplying commodities, or rendering social services, would be absolutely futile unless these commodities and services satisfied tastes or wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of such wants or tastes depends very often, and in progressive communities usually, on a previous supply of the commodities or services that minister to them--as we see, for example, in the case of tobacco, of the telegraph, and of the bicycle; but, when once the demands have been elicited, they are essentially democratic in their nature. Each customer is like a voter who practically gives his vote for the kind of goods which he desires to have supplied to him. He gives his vote under no compulsion. He is under the manipulation of no party or wire-puller; and the men by whose ability the goods are cheapened and multiplied are bound to determine their character by the number of votes cast for them.[15]
Thus, while--so long as the productivity of labour is intensified, as it is in the modern world, by the ability of the few who direct labour--the labouring majority can never be free in their technical capacity of producers, they are free, and must always remain free, in respect of their tastes as consumers. In other words, demand is essentially democratic, while supply, in proportion to its sustained and enhanced abundance, is essentially oligarchic.
Now, that demand is essentially democratic, and depends on the tastes and characters of those by whom the demands are made, n.o.body will be inclined to deny. But if we turn our attention from society, taken as a whole, to the exceptionally able minority on whom the business of supply depends, we shall find that these men, in their turn, form similarly a small democracy in themselves, and make, as suppliers, their own demands also--a demand for an economic reward, or an amount of personal wealth, not, indeed, necessarily equal to the amount of wealth produced by them, but bearing a proportion to it which is, in their own estimation, sufficient. This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer. It rests on the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward, when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want black.[16]
That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it, become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers--the people who princ.i.p.ally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it.
They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for purely sensual self-indulgence--especially for the eating and drinking of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in their personal habits, been abstemious and even n.i.g.g.ardly to a degree which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing forces of the community. They feel the machine respond to their own exceptional management of it; they see the output of wealth varied and multiplied at their will; and thus the results of their specialised power as producers are neither more nor less than this same internal power converted into an external, an indeterminate and universalised form; and the reason why they will never produce wealth merely in order to be deprived of it is that no one will exercise power merely in order to lose it, and allow it to pa.s.s into the hands of other people. These men, as experience, especially in America, shows us, are constantly willing to use this power for the benefit of their kind generally; but this is no more a sign that they would be willing to allow it to be forcibly taken from them than the fact that a man is willing to give a shilling to a beggar in the street is a sign that he would allow the beggar to steal it out of his waistcoat-pocket.
So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power as affects the material circ.u.mstances of mankind, these differences in power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily a.s.sert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society; and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish, which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months'
experience. An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found in an unlikely place--namely, a work written some years ago by a socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist, who was also an accomplished naturalist--the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is called _The Woman Who Did_.
The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the inst.i.tution of marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of such an embarra.s.sing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly insisting on the fact that the inst.i.tution of private property, which socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another, and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her daughter--and he does this with considerable skill--as developing from her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war.
"Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emanc.i.p.ating social gospel; "but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us read this pa.s.sage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness of socialism.
But the arguments at the service of socialism are not exhausted yet.
Even if voting majorities should be unable to transform human nature, that men of power shall become willing to exert their power only in order that they may be deprived of it, there is a cla.s.s of socialists who declare that what is impossible with mere human democracy, will be rendered possible by the divine influence of a rightly preached Christianity. To Christian socialists, as such, I have as yet made no special reference; nor will it be necessary now to be very prolix in our dealings with them; but in their att.i.tude and their equipment for the task of effecting an economic revolution, they throw so strong a light on the character of contemporary socialism generally that a brief consideration of their gospel will be interesting and highly instructive, and will fitly lead us to the conclusion of this part of our argument.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his criticism of the argument, as stated by me in America, says that, under the existing system, the consumer is _not_ free to choose what goods he will buy, but has them thrust on him by the capitalist producer. Yet he, and socialists in general, complain at the same time of the compet.i.tion between capitalists, which is simply a compet.i.tion to supply what consumers most desire. Here and there, when no compet.i.tion exists, one firm can force its goods, if they are of the nature of necessaries, on the local public. But under the existing system this is only an occasional incident. Under socialism it would be universal. When tobacco is a state monopoly, state tobacco is forced on the great ma.s.s of the people.
[16] Mr. G. Wilshire admits, on behalf of socialists, that the argument of this chapter is so far correct that no democracy can make men of ability exercise their ability if they do not wish to do so; and that if they wish for exceptional rewards they will be able to demand them. A Melba, he says, under socialism, would be able, if she wished for it, to get probably even higher remuneration than she does to-day. But, he continues, under socialism, such men and women, though they could get such rewards, will be so changed that they will not wish for them. A Melba will then sing for the mere pleasure of singing.
CHAPTER XI
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSt.i.tUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY.
Christian socialism, as a doctrine which is preached to-day, might, for anything that its name can tell us to the contrary, be as different from ordinary socialism as is Christian Science from secular--as the science of Mrs. Eddy is from the science of Mr. Edison. We can judge of it only by examining the utterances of its leading exponents. For this reason, although I had long been familiar with the utterances of persons who call themselves Christian socialists in England, I felt bound to decline an invitation to discuss the subject in America, unless I could be furnished with some recent and formal version of the gospel as it is preached there. Accordingly there was sent to me the precise kind of doc.u.ment I desired. It formed the princ.i.p.al article in a journal called _The Christian Socialist_. Its author was a clergyman,[17] and it was ent.i.tled "The Gospel for To-day." It was what I expected that it would be. It reproduced in almost every particular the thoughts and moods distinctive of Christian socialists in England; and this article I will here take as a text.
The writer, exhibiting a candour which many of his secular brethren would do well to imitate, starts with an attack on all existing forms of democracy, which are all, he says, based on a profound and fatal fallacy. This is the a.s.sumption that all men are born equal, from which a.s.sumption the practical conclusion is deduced that the best state of society is one which will allow each of these so-called equal beings to work out his own happiness as best he can for himself, with the minimum of interference from his fellow-citizens or from the law. Now if, says our author, men were born equal in reality, such an individualistic democracy might perhaps work well enough. But men are not born equal.
The root of the difficulty lies here. In the economic sense, as in all others, some men are incomparably more able than the great majority of their fellows, and even among the exceptionally able some are much abler than the others. Consequently, if the principles of modern individualistic democracy and modern individualistic economics are right, according to which the main motive of each should be to do the best for himself with his own powers that he can--"if it is duty to compete if compet.i.tion is the life of trade, then the battle for self must ever go grimly on. The strong must subdue the weak, the rich the poor, the able the unable. Upon this basis the millionaire and the multi-millionaire have a perfect right to roll up their untold millions, even as the working-man has a right to seek the highest wages that he can get. All in different ways are seeking their own; and the keenest compet.i.tors are the best men. The prizes must go to the strongest and the shrewdest. It is the survival of the fittest."
Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does Christian socialism aim at? It does not aim at making men equal in respect of their ability, for to do this would be quite impossible; but it aims at producing an equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose ability is most efficient to forgo all personal claims which are founded on their own exceptional powers, so that the wealth which is at present secured by these powers for themselves may in the future be divided among the ma.s.s of their less able brethren.
Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals.
But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a conversion _de luxe_ which is to be the privilege of the few only, while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case, from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has reached before. The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food offered by the devil. The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread from heaven. In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing them.
That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an ill.u.s.tration obtruded on us by the author of "The Gospel for To-day."
The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the present position of the clergy. "If we churchmen," he says, "want money for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel. We have to kneel to 'the steel kings and the oil kings,' merely because they are rich men." Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of things like this? Let us consider precisely what it is that our Christian socialist complains about. He obviously does not mean that he and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their knees. The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors. This it is which evidently sticks in the stomach of the humble follower of Christ whose self-portraiture we are now considering; for, if we confine ourselves to the Christian element in his teaching, he proposes to alter the existing situation only by kindling in the "trust magnates" such a fire of Christian philanthropy that they will have given him all he wants before he has had time to ask for it, thus exonerating him from the duty of saying "Thank you" for what he owes to another's goodness, and enabling him to offer to the Lord that which has cost him nothing.
And what the author of "The Gospel for To-day" urges on behalf of himself and his clerical brethren is precisely what he urges on behalf of the less competent majority generally. Neither on them nor on the Christian clergy does the gospel of Christian socialism urge the duty of making any new sacrifice, or any new exertion, moral or physical, for themselves. Just as the clergy are to learn no more of business than they know now, but are to be relieved of the necessity for all prudence as to ways and means, so is the ordinary labourer to work no longer, no harder, and no better than he does now. On the contrary, his hours of labour are to become ever less and less, and at the same time he is to receive ever greater and greater wages. These are to be drawn from the products, not of himself but of his neighbour: and although he will owe them solely to the virtue which his neighbour exercises, he is, according to the Christian socialist programme, to demand them as though his own incompetence gave him a sacred right to them.
Now, apart from the fact that this gospel does resemble the Christian in declaring that, while salvation can be achieved only by sacrifice, and that so far as the majority are concerned their sacrifice must be strictly vicarious, we might well pause to inquire how either of its two messages--that of economic asceticism for the few, and of economic concupiscence for the many--has any relation to the gospel of Christ at all. According to any reasonable interpretation of the words and spirit of Christ, a labourer's desire to enjoy the utmost that he himself produces is no less legitimate than natural; but it hardly ranks as one of the highest Christian virtues. How, we might ask, is it to acquire this latter character by being turned into a desire for what is produced by other people? Again, on the other hand, though according to most of the churches Christ did not condemn the possession of superfluous wealth as such, he certainly did not teach that the possession of it was generally necessary to salvation. It might therefore be justly urged, from the point of view of the few, that in proportion as Christ's valuation of this transitory life was accepted by them, the duty of melting down their own vases and candelabra in order that every workman's spoon might have a thin plating of silver on it, would constantly seem less and less, instead of more and more imperative. All this might be urged, and more to the same effect; but we will content ourselves with considering the matter under its purely practical aspect, and asking how any Christian clergymen--men presumably sane and educated--can propose, whether their programme be really Christian or no, to reorganise society on the basis of a moral conversion which is confined to the few only--which would exact from the able minority the maximum of effort and mortification, and secure the maximum of idleness and self-indulgence for the rest of the human race?
To this question it may be said that there are two answers. Admirable in character as are mult.i.tudes of the Christian clergy, n.o.body will contend that all of them are beyond reproach; nor will any such claim be made for all those of them who profess socialism. And for some of this body it is hardly open to doubt that the preaching of socialism is nothing better than a species of ecclesiastical electioneering. In the language of the political wire-puller, it affords them a good "cry" with which to go to the people. Why, they say in effect, should you listen to the agitator in the street, when we can give you something just as good from the pulpit? What the message really means which they thus undertake to deliver, they make no effort to understand. It will attract, or at least they think so; and for the moment this is enough for them. Having probably emptied their churches by talking traditional nonsense, they are willing to fill them by talking nonsense that has not even the merit of being traditional. We will not linger, however, over the case of men like these. We will turn to that of others who are morally very much more respectable, and whose condition of mind, moreover, is very much more instructive. Of these we may take the author of "The Gospel for To-day" as a type. He, we may a.s.sume, advocates his socialistic programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.
By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing things as they are. But he sees them from a distance only, as though they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual configuration he has no idea whatever. Thus when he contemplates the inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately in two different forms--as genuine powers of production and as powers of mere seizure--without his discerning where in actual life the operation of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive. This is shown by the fact that the two great productive enterprises which he singles out as typical of modern wealth-getting generally are held up by him as examples of acquisition pure and simple. "The steel kings," he says, "did not invent steel. The oil kings did not invent oil." These are the gifts of nature, which nature offers to all; but the strong men abuse their strength by pushing forward and seizing them, and compelling their weaker brethren to pay them a tribute for their use. Steel and refined oil he evidently looks upon as two natural products. He has no suspicion that, as any school-boy could have told him, steel is an artificial metal which, as manufactured to-day, is one of the most elaborate triumphs of modern industrial genius. As to the oil by the light of which he doubtless writes his sermons, he apparently thinks of it as existing fit for use in a lake, and ready to be dipped up by everybody in nice little tin cans, if only the oil kings having got to the lake first, did not by their superior strength frighten other people away. Of the actual history of the production of usable oil, of the vast and marvellous system by which it is brought within reach of the consumers, of the by-products which reduce its price--all of them the results of concentrated economic ability, and requiring from week to week its constant and renewed application--the author of "The Gospel for To-day" apparently knows nothing. The oil kings and the steel kings, according to his conception of them, need merely refrain from the exercise of their only distinctive power--that is to say, an exceptional power of seizing; and every Christian socialist in New York and elsewhere will have the same oil in his lamps that he has now, and a constant supply of cutlery and all other forms of hardware, the sole difference being that he will get them at half-price or for nothing, and have the money thus saved to spend upon new enjoyments. And his conception of ability, as connected with the output of steel and oil, is his conception of ability as applied to the production of goods generally.
He makes, however, one exception. There is, he admits, one form of ability which does actually add to the wealth of the modern world, and may possibly be credited with producing the largest part of it. This is the faculty of invention. Here, at last, we seem to be listening to the language of sober sense. But let us see what follows. Inventors, our author proceeds, being the types of exceptional ability which is really beneficent and productive, are precisely the men who afford us our surest grounds for believing in the possibility of that moral conversion which socialism proposes to effect among able men at large. For what, he says, as a fact do we find the inventors doing? They invent, he says, for the pure love of inventing, or else from a desire to do good to their fellow creatures. The thought of money for themselves never enters into their minds. The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson which is easier; for while these n.o.ble men, the inventors, have no wish to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take. Compet.i.tion, in short, as it actually exists to-day--the compet.i.tion which Christian socialism will abolish--is simply a compet.i.tion in taking; and in order to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give others a chance equal to their own.
Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it, which is worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately bring them, or by a greed which will sell them for a trifle, provided this be paid immediately. In the second place, inventions, even the greatest, so long as they represent the power of invention merely, are utterly deficient in all practical value. So long as they exist nowhere except in the author's brain, or drawings, or in descriptions, or even in the form of models, they might, so far as the world is concerned, have never existed at all. In the former cases they are dreams; in the last case they are toys. They are brought down into the arena of actual life only when, like souls provided with bodies, they cease to be ideas or toys, and become machines or contrivances manufactured on a commercial basis; and in order to effect successfully this practical transformation, countless processes and countless faculties are involved other than those comprised in intellectual invention itself.