Yet again, let us consider the area of the industrial influence of the motives originating in religious fervour or benevolence. The most important illustration 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 association 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 reasserting itself. What ground have we here for supposing that motives, whose action hitherto has always been strictly limited to passionate 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 illustrated by their treatment of another class 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 illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace. Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral assimilation 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 passage 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 analogies 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 assumes 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 assume 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 pricking 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 circumstances 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 assiduously 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 circumstances 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 illustration 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 principal 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 analysis, 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 assert 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 passage 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 class of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special class 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, assume 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 passing 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 multitude? 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 class; 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 antithetic 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 class which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of this moral transformation, is precisely the class 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 assumption 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[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 illustration 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 illustrating 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 multitude 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 amassed 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 Constitution 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 illustration 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 constitution 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 illustrated 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 institution 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 assuming 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 assertion, 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 anticipate. 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 accumulations 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 accumulation and bequest, the exceptional faculties would not be developed or used at all. Moreover, the amounts which may be accumulated and bequeathed, although they will be strictly limited, must, "X" says, be considerable. He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to L8,000, and bequeathable property up to L200,000. 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 L200 of income instead of L8,000, and limit bequeathable property to L2,000 instead of L200,000? 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 mass 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 cumulative 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 classes 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, nobody 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 principally 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 niggardly 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 pass 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 circumstances of mankind, these differences in power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily assert 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 institution 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 embarrassing 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 institution 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 emancipating 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 passage, 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 class 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 attitude 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 competition between capitalists, which is simply a competition to supply what consumers most desire. Here and there, when no competition 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 mass 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 SUBSTITUTE 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 document I desired. It formed the principal article in a journal called The Christian Socialist. Its author was a clergyman,[17] and it was entitled "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 assumption that all men are born equal, from which assumption 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 competition 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 competitors 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 mass 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 illustration 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 multitudes of the Christian clergy, nobody 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 assume, 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 noble 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. Competition, in short, as it actually exists to-day—the competition which Christian socialism will abolish—is simply a competition 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.

There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth nothing.

Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much naivete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines, which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will, like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples. He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.

Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it is never restrained by fact.

Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists—that is to say, in so far as they differ from other reformers—they are men aiming at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cushion, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in reasserting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only—that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers. But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact—or, rather, of one protean fact—by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals.

Two illustrations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument.

In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact, the only producers of wealth are the mass of manual labourers, and that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go to the labourers, and that all labourers were entitled to approximately equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic, likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of production—having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and that some men produce incalculably more than others—they have, in order to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable, the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them, and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was pressed into the service of socialism only by being associated with a false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical programme, only by associating it with a false moral psychology. In each case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a fallacy somewhere—a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a table-cloth—no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from the premises.

And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable, and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there, under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them. And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove.

The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism" in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these?

The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.

To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an inflammation of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed," it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.

But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of grass grow where one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them.

At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations—the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two classes, those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it. Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter. These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways. One of these classes takes men and nature as they are. With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other class, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this class is composed—the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacae the waters in which would have to run uphill.

The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will—the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men—is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.

The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only—that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless multitudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They are three in number, and are as follows:

The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer, and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers associated in any given industry, each produces, with few and unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that, even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact, and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds. With this question I shall deal in the following chapter.