CHAPTER XXII: SOCIALISM.

§ 840. Some socialists, though probably not many, know that their ideal modes of associated living are akin to modes which have prevailed widely during early stages of civilization, and prevail still among many of the uncivilized, as well as among some of the civilized who have lagged behind. In the chapter on “Communal Regulation” were given examples of communism as practised by tribes of Red men, by various Hindus, and by some unprogressive peoples in Eastern Europe. Further instances of each class will serve to exhibit at once the virtues of these methods of combined living and working and their vices. Writing of the aborigines of North America, Major Powell, Director of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, says:—

That a natural connexion exists among certain traits thus described, cannot be doubted when we find that a like connection of traits exists among some peoples of the Balkans; and that the groups displaying them are now dying out along with the dying out of the militant conditions to which they were natural. Mr. Arthur J. Evans, describing the Croatian house-communities, writes:—

When with the fact that these Slavonic house-communities under modern conditions of comparative peace and commercial activity, are dissolving, we join the fact that they were formed during times of chronic war and remained coherent during such times; when we add that such communities are still coherent among the Montenegrins, whose active militancy continues; when we add, further, that maintenance of this combined living by American Indians has similarly gone along with perpetual inter-tribal conflicts; we are shown again, as before (§§ 465, 481, 804), that in these small social unions, as in the larger social unions including them, the subordination of the individual to the group is great in proportion as the antagonism to other groups is great. Be it in the family, the cluster of relatives, the clan, or the nation, the need for joint action against alien families, clans, nations, &c., necessitates the merging of individual life in group-life.

Hence the socialist theory and practice are normal in the militant type of society, and cease to be normal as fast as the society becomes predominantly industrial in its type.

§ 841. A state of universal brotherhood is so tempting an imagination, and the existing state of competitive strife is so full of miseries, that endeavours to escape from the last and enter into the first are quite natural—inevitable even. Prompted by consciousness of the grievous inequalities of condition around, those who suffer and those who sympathize with them, seek to found what they think an equitable social system. In the town, sight of a rich manufacturer who ignores the hands working in his mill, does not excite in Edition: current; Page: [578] them friendly feeling; and in the country, a ploughman looking over the hedge as a titled lady drives by, may not unnaturally be angered by the thought of his own hard work and poor fare in contrast with the easy lives and luxuries of those who own the fields he tills. After contemplating the useless being who now lounges in club-rooms and now rambles through game-preserves, the weary artizan may well curse a state of things in which pleasure varies inversely as desert; and may well be vehement in his demand for another form of society.

How numerous have been the efforts to set up such a form, and how numerous the failures, it is needless to show. Here it will suffice to give one of the most recent examples—that of the South Australian village-settlements. These were established by government and started with government funds. A commission of inquiry lately travelled through them. Fragments of the evidence given before it respecting the Lyrup settlement run thus.

At the Pyap Settlement examination of the ex-chairman, A. J. Brocklehurst, resulted in the following questions and answers:—

Thomas Myers’ testimony was more decided.

James Holt, villager, gave more favourable evidence—

William Bates gave evidence as follows.

At Holder, Patrick John Conway, chairman of the settlement, said:—

And so on continues the testimony showing dissensions, violence, idleness, rebellion; joined with admissions on the part of nearly all, that their beliefs in the goodness of a communistic system had been dissipated.

Of course this failure, like multitudinous such failures elsewhere, will be ascribed to mistake or mismanagement. Had this or that not been done everything would have gone well. That human beings as now constituted cannot work together efficiently and harmoniously in the proposed way, is not admitted; or, if by some admitted, then it is held that the mischiefs arising from defective natures may be prevented by a sufficiently powerful authority—that is, if for these separate groups one great organization centrally controlled is substituted. And it is assumed that such an organization, maintained by force, would be beneficial not for a time only but permanently. Let us look at the fundamental errors involved in this belief.

§ 842. In an early division of this work, “Domestic Institutions,” the general law of species-life was pointed out and emphasized—the law that during immature life benefit received must be great in proportion as worth is small, while during mature life benefit and worth must vary together. “Clearly with a society, as with a species, survival depends on conformity to both of these antagonist principles. Import into the family the law of the society, and let children from infancy upwards have life-sustaining supplies proportioned to their life-sustaining labours, and the society disappears forthwith by death of all its young. Import into the society the law of the family, and let the life-sustaining supplies be great in proportion as the life-sustaining labours are small, and the society decays from increase of its least worthy Edition: current; Page: [581] members and decrease of its most worthy members” (§ 322). Now, more or less fully, the doctrine of collectivists, socialists, and communists, ignores this distinction between the ethics of family-life and the ethics of life outside the family. Entirely under some forms, and in chief measure under others, it proposes to extend the régime of the family to the whole community. This is the conception set forth by Mr. Bellamy in Looking Backwards; and this is the conception formulated in the maxim—“From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”

In low grades of culture there is but vague consciousness of natural causation; and even in the highest grades of culture at present reached, such consciousness is very inadequate. Fructifying causation—the production of many effects each of which becomes the cause of many other effects—is not recognized. The socialist does not ask what must happen if, generation after generation, the material well-being of the inferior is raised at the cost of lowering that of the superior. Even when it is pointed out, he refuses to see that if the superior, persistently burdened by the inferior, are hindered in rearing their own better offspring, that the offspring of the inferior may be as efficiently cared for, a gradual deterioration of the race must follow. The hope of curing present evils so fills his consciousness that it cannot take in the thought of the still greater future evils his proposed system would produce.

Such mitigations of the miseries resulting from inferiority as the spontaneous sympathies of individuals for one another prompt, will bring an average of benefit; since, acting separately, the superior will not so far tax their own resources in taking care of their fellows, as to hinder themselves from giving their own offspring better rearing than is given to the offspring of the inferior. But people who, in their corporate capacity, abolish the natural relation between merits and benefits, will presently be abolished themselves. Either they will have to go through the miseries of a slow decay, Edition: current; Page: [582] consequent on the increase of those unfit for the business of life, or they will be overrun by some people who have not pursued the foolish policy of fostering the worst at the expense of the best.

§ 843. At the same time that it is biologically fatal, the doctrine of the socialists is psychologically absurd. It implies an impossible mental structure.

A community which fulfils their ideal must be composed of men having sympathies so strong that those who, by their greater powers, achieve greater benefits, willingly surrender the excess to others. The principle they must gladly carry out, is that the labour they expend shall not bring to them its full return; but that from its return shall be habitually taken such part as may make the condition of those who have not worked so efficiently equal to their own condition. To have superior abilities shall not be of any advantage in so far as material results are concerned, but shall be a disadvantage, in so far that it involves extra effort and waste of body or brain without profit. The intensity of fellow feeling is to be such as to cause life-long self-sacrifice. Such being the character of the individual considered as benefactor, let us now ask what is to be his character considered as beneficiary.

Amid minor individual differences the general moral nature must be regarded as the same in all. We may not suppose that along with smaller intellectual and physical powers there ordinarily goes emotional degradation. We must suppose that the less able like the more able are extremely sympathetic. What then is to be the mental attitude of the less able when perpetually receiving doles from the more able? We are obliged to assume such feeling in each as would prompt him to constant unpaid efforts on behalf of his fellows, and yet such lack of this feeling as would constantly let his fellows rob themselves for his benefit. The character of all is to be so noble that it causes continuous sacrifice of self to others, and so ignoble that it continuously Edition: current; Page: [583] lets others sacrifice to self. These traits are contradictory. The implied mental constitution is an impossible one.

Still more manifest does its impossibility become when we recognize a further factor in the problem—love of offspring. Within the family parental affection joins sympathy in prompting self-sacrifice, and makes it easy, and indeed pleasurable, to surrender to others a large part of the products of labour. But such surrender made to those within the family-group is at variance with a like surrender made to those outside the family-group. Hence the equalization of means prescribed by communistic arrangements, implies a moral nature such that the superior willingly stints his own progeny to aid the progeny of the inferior. He not only loves his neighbour as himself but he loves his neighbour’s children as his own. The parental instinct disappears. One child is to him as good as another.

Of course the advanced socialist, otherwise communist, has his solution. Parental relations are to be superseded, and children are to be taken care of by the State. The method of Nature is to be replaced by a better method. From the lowest forms of life to the highest, Nature’s method has been that of devolving the care of the young on the adults who produced them—a care at first shown feebly and unobtrusively, but becoming gradually more pronounced, until, as we approach the highest types of creatures, the lives of parents, prompted by feelings increasingly intense, are more and more devoted to the rearing of offspring. But just as, in the way above shown, socialists would suspend the natural relation between effort and benefit, so would they suspend the natural relation between the instinctive actions of parents and the welfare of progeny. The two great laws in the absence of either of which organic evolution would have been impossible, are both to be repealed!

§ 844. When, from considering the ideal human nature required for the harmonious working of institutions partially Edition: current; Page: [584] or completely communistic—a nature having mutually exclusive traits—we pass to the consideration of the real human nature exhibited around us, the irrationality of socialistic hopes becomes still more conspicuous. Observe what is done by these men who are expected to be so regardful of one another’s interests.

If, in our days, the name “birds of prey and of passage,” which Burke gave to the English in India at the time of Warren Hastings’ trial, when auditors wept at the accounts of the cruelties committed, is not applicable as it was then; yet the policy of unscrupulous aggrandizement continues. As remarked by an Indian officer, Deputy Surgeon-General Paske, all our conquests and annexations are made from base and selfish motives alone. Major Raverty of the Bombay Army condemns “the rage shown of late years for seizing what does not, and never did, belong to us, because the people happen to be weak and very poorly armed while we are strong and provided with the most excellent weapons.” Resistance to an intruding sportsman or a bullying explorer, or disobedience to a Resident, or even refusal to furnish transport-coolies, serves as a sufficient excuse for attack, conquest, and annexation. Everywhere the usual succession runs thus:—Missionaries, envoys to native rulers, concessions made by them, quarrels with them, invasions of them, appropriations of their territories. First, men are sent to teach the heathens Christianity, and then Christians are sent to mow them down with machine-guns! So-called savages who, according to numerous travellers, behave well until they are ill-treated, are taught good conduct by the so-called civilized, who presently subjugate them—who inculcate rectitude and then illustrate it by taking their lands. The policy is simple and uniform—bibles first, bomb-shells after. Such being the doings abroad, what are the feelings at home? Honours, titles, emoluments, are showered on the aggressors. A traveller who makes light of men’s lives is regarded as a hero and fêted by the upper classes; while the Edition: current; Page: [585] lower classes give an ovation to a leader of filibusters. “British power,” “British pluck,” “British interests,” are words on every tongue; but of justice there is no speech, no thought. See then the marvellous incongruity. Out of men who do these things and men who applaud them, is to be formed a society pervaded by the sentiment of brotherhood! It is hoped that by administrative sleight-of-hand may be organized a community in which self-seeking will abdicate and fellow-feeling reign in its place!

Passing over, for brevity’s sake, similar and often worse doings of other superior peoples who present themselves to inferior peoples as models to be imitated—doings abroad which are in like manner applauded at home—let us, instead of further contemplating external conduct, contemplate internal conduct. The United States has local civil wars carried on by artizans, miners, &c., who will not let others work at lower wages than they themselves demand: they wreck and burn property, waylay and shoot antagonists, attempt to poison wholesale those who dissent. There are, according to Judge Parker, lynchings at the rate of three per day; there is in the West “shooting at sight”; and the daily average of homicides throughout the States has risen in five years from twelve per day to thirty per day; while in the South occur fatal fights with pistols in courts of justice. Again, we have the corruption of the New York police—universal bribery to purchase immunity or to buy off punishment. Add to this the general admiration for the unscrupulous man of business, applauded as “smart.” And now it is hoped that a nation in which self-regard leads to these startling results, may forthwith be changed into a nation in which regard for others is supreme!

No less marvellous is the incongruity between anticipations and probabilities in the land pre-eminently socialistic—Germany. Students gash one another’s faces in sword-fights: so gaining their emperor’s approval. Duelling, legally a crime and opposed in the extremest degree to the Edition: current; Page: [586] current creed, is insisted on by military rule; so that an officer who declines is expelled from the army—nay, worse, one who in a court of justice is proved to have been falsely charged is bound to challenge those who charged him. Yet in a country where the spirit of revenge is supreme over religion, law, and equity, it is expected not only that men will at once cease to sacrifice others in satisfaction of their “honour,” but will at once be ready to sacrifice their own interests to further the interests of their fellows!

Then in France, if the sentiment of private revenge, though dominant, is shown in ways less extreme, the sentiment of national revenge is a political passion. Enormous military burdens are borne in the hope of wiping out “dishonour” in blood. Meanwhile the Republic has brought little purification of the Empire. Within a short time we have had official corruption displayed in the selling of decorations; there have been the Panama scandals, implicating various political personages—men of means pushing their projects at the cost of thousands impoverished or ruined; and, more recently still, have come the blackmailing revelations—the persecuting of people, even to the death, to obtain money by threatened disclosures or false charges. Nevertheless, while among the select men chosen by the nation to rule there is so much delinquency, and while the specially cultured who conduct the public journals act in these flagitious ways, it is supposed that the nation as a whole will, by reorganization, be immediately changed in character, and a maleficent selfishness transformed into a beneficent unselfishness!

It would not be altogether irrational to expect that some of the peaceful Indian hill-tribes, who display the virtue of forgiveness without professing it, or those Papuan Islanders among whom the man chosen as chief uses his property to help poorer men out of their difficulties, might live harmoniously under socialistic arrangements; but can we reasonably expect this of men who, pretending to believe Edition: current; Page: [587] that they should love their neighbours as themselves, here rob their fellows and there shoot them, while hoping to slay wholesale men of other blood?

§ 845. Reduced to its ultimate form, the general question at issue between socialists and anti-socialists, concerns the mode of regulating labour. Preceding chapters have dealt with this historically—treating of regulation that is paternal, patriarchal, communal, or by a gild—of regulation that has the form of slavery or serfdom—of regulation under arrangements partially free or wholly free. These chapters have illustrated in detail the truth, emphasized at the outset, that political, ecclesiastical, and industrial regulations simultaneously decrease in coerciveness as we ascend from lower to higher types of societies: the modern industrial system being one under which coerciveness approaches a minimum. Though now the worker is often mercilessly coerced by circumstances, and has nothing before him but hard terms, yet he is not coerced by a master into acceptance of these terms.

But while the evils which resulted from the old modes of regulating labour, not experienced by present or recent generations, have been forgotten, the evils accompanying the new mode are keenly felt, and have aroused the desire for a mode which is in reality a modified form of the old mode. There is to be a re-institution of status not under individual masters but under the community as master. No longer possessing themselves and making the best of their powers, individuals are to be possessed by the State; which, while it supports them, is to direct their labours. Necessarily there is implied a vast and elaborate administrative body—regulators of small groups, subject to higher regulators, and so on through successively superior grades up to a central authority, which coordinates the multitudinous activities of the society in their kinds and amounts. Of course the members of this directive organization must be adequately paid Edition: current; Page: [588] by workers; and the tacit assumption is that the required payment will be, at first and always, much less than that which is taken by the members of the directive organization now existing—employers and their staffs; while submission to the orders of these State-officials will be more tolerable than submission to the orders of those who pay wages for work.

A complete parallelism exists between such a social structure and the structure of an army. It is simply a civil regimentation parallel to the military regimentation; and it establishes an industrial subordination parallel to the military subordination. In either case the rule is—Do your task and take your rations. In the working organization as in the fighting organization, obedience is requisite for maintenance of order, as well as for efficiency, and must be enforced with whatever rigour is found needful. Doubtless in the one case as in the other, multitudinous officers, grade over grade, having in their hands all authority and all means of coercion, would be able to curb that aggressive egoism illustrated above, which causes the failures of small socialistic bodies: idleness, carelessness, quarrels, violence, would be prevented, and efficient work insisted upon. But when from regulation of the workers by the bureaucracy we turn to the bureaucracy itself, and ask how it is to be regulated, there is no such satisfactory answer. Owning, in trust for the community, all the land, the capital, the means of transit and communication, as well as whatever police and military force had to be maintained, this all-powerful official organization, composed of men characterized on the average by an aggressive egoism like that which the workers display, but not like them under any higher control, must inevitably advantage itself at the cost of the governed: the elective powers of the governed having soon failed to prevent it; since, as is perpetually shown, a large unorganized body cannot cope with a small organized one. Under such conditions there would be an increasing deduction from the aggregate Edition: current; Page: [589] produce by these new ruling classes, a widening separation of them from the ruled, and a growing assumption of superior rank. There must arise a new aristocracy for the support of which the masses would toil; and which, being consolidated, would wield a power far beyond that of any past aristocracy. Let any one contemplate the doings of the recent Trade Union Congress (September, 1896), whence delegates from societies that had tolerated non-unionists were expelled, whence reporters of papers having employés not belonging to printers’ unions were obliged to withdraw, and where wholesale nationalization of property (which necessarily implies confiscation) was approved by four to one; and then ask what scruples would restrain a bureaucracy pervaded by this temper.

Of course nothing will make socialists foresee any such results. Just as the zealous adherent of a religious creed, met by some fatal objection, feels certain that though he does not see the answer yet a good answer is to be found; or just as the lover to whom defects of his mistress are pointed out, cannot be made calmly to consider what will result from them in married life; so the socialist, in love with his scheme, will not entertain adverse criticisms, or gives no weight to them if he does. Illustrations like those above given, accumulated no matter to what extent, will not convince him that the forms of social organization are determined by men’s natures, and that only as their natures improve can the forms become better. He will continue to hope that selfish men may be so manipulated that they will behave unselfishly—that the effects of goodness may be had without the goodness. He has unwavering faith in a social alchemy which out of ignoble natures will get noble actions.