their opponents, the common criticism of Socialism has not yet noted
the change, and still deals mainly with the obsolete Utopias of the
pre-evolutionary age. Parodies of the domestic details of an imaginary
Phalanstery, and homilies on the failure of Brook Farm or Icaria, may
be passed over as belated and irrelevant now that Socialists are only
advocating the conscious adoption of a principle of social organization
which the world has already found to be the inevitable outcome of
Democracy and the Industrial Revolution. For Socialism is by this time
a wave surging throughout all Europe; and for want of a grasp of the
series of apparently unconnected events by which and with which it has
been for two generations rapidly coming upon us--for want, in short,
of knowledge of its intellectual history, we in England to-day see
our political leaders in a general attitude of astonishment at the
changing face of current politics; both great parties drifting vaguely
before a nameless undercurrent which they fail utterly to recognize or
understand.[14] With some dim impression that Socialism is one of the
Utopian dreams they remember to have heard comfortably disposed of in
their academic youth as the impossible ideal of Humanity-intoxicated
Frenchmen, they go their ways through the nineteenth century as a
countryman blunders through Cheapside. One or two are history fanciers,
learned in curious details of the past: the present eludes these no
less than the others. They are so near to the individual events that
they are blind to the onward sweep of the column. They cannot see the
forest for the trees.
History not only gives the clue to the significance of contemporary
events; it also enables us to understand those who have not yet found
that clue. We learn to class men and ideas in a kind of geological
order in time. The Comte de Paris gives us excellent proofs that
in absolute monarchy lies the only safety of social order. He is
a survival: the type flourished in the sixteenth century; and the
splendid fossils of that age can be studied in any historic museum.
Lord Bramwell will give cogent reasons for the belief that absolute
freedom of contract, subject to the trifling exception of a drastic
criminal law, will ensure a perfect State. His lordship is a survival
from a nearer epoch: about 1840 this was as far as social science had
got; and there are still persons who have learnt nothing of later
date. When I see the Hipparion at South Kensington I do not take his
unfamiliar points to be those of a horse of a superior kind: I know
that he is an obsolete and superseded pattern, from which the horse has
developed. Historic fossils are more dangerous; for they are left at
large, and are not even excluded from Downing Street or Westminster.
But against the stream of tendencies they are ultimately powerless.
Though they sometimes appear victorious, each successive struggle takes
place further down the current which they believe themselves to be
resisting.
The main stream which has borne European society towards Socialism
during the past one hundred years is the irresistible progress of
Democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered this truth into the
reluctant ears of the Old World two generations ago; and we have all
pretended to carry it about as part of our mental furniture ever
since. But like most epigrammatic commonplaces, it is not generally
realized; and De Tocqueville’s book has, in due course, become a
classic which every one quotes and nobody reads. The progress of
Democracy is, in fact, often imagined, as by Sir Henry Maine, to
be merely the substitution of one kind of political machinery for
another; and there are many political Democrats to-day who cannot
understand why social or economic matters should be mixed up with
politics at all. It was not for this that they broke the power of
the aristocracy: they were touched not so much with love of the many
as with hatred of the few;[15] and, as has been acutely said--though
usually by foolish persons--they are Radicals merely because they are
not themselves lords. But it will not long be possible for any man to
persist in believing that the political organization of society can be
completely altered without corresponding changes in economic and social
relations. De Tocqueville expressly pointed out that the progress
of Democracy meant nothing less than a complete dissolution of the
nexus by which society was held together under the old _régime_. This
dissolution is followed by a period of anarchic spiritual isolation
of the individual from his fellows, and to that extent by a general
denial of the very idea of society. But man is a social animal; and
after more or less interval there necessarily comes into existence a
new nexus, differing so entirely from the old-fashioned organization
that the historic fossil goes about denying that it is a nexus at all,
or that any new nexus is possible or desirable. To him, mostly through
lack of economics, the progress of Democracy is nothing more than the
destruction of old political privileges; and, naturally enough, few can
see any beauty in mere dissolution and destruction. Those few are the
purely political Radicals abhorred of Comte and Carlyle: they are in
social matters the empiricist survivals from a pre-scientific age.
The mere Utopians, on the other hand, who wove the baseless fabric of
their visions of reconstructed society on their own private looms,
equally failed, as a rule, to comprehend the problem of the age. They
were, in imagination, resuscitated Joseph the Seconds, benevolent
despots who would have poured the old world, had it only been fluid,
into their new moulds. Against their crude plans the Statesman, the
Radical, and the Political Economist were united; for they took no
account of the blind social forces which they could not control,
and which went on inexorably working out social salvation in ways
unsuspected by the Utopian.
In the present Socialist movement these two streams are united:
advocates of social reconstruction have learnt the lesson of Democracy,
and know that it is through the slow and gradual turning of the popular
mind to new principles that social reorganization bit by bit comes.
All students of society who are abreast of their time, Socialists
as well as Individualists, realize that important organic changes
can only be (1) democratic, and thus acceptable to a majority of the
people, and prepared for in the minds of all; (2) gradual, and thus
causing no dislocation, however rapid may be the rate of progress;
(3) not regarded as immoral by the mass of the people, and thus not
subjectively demoralizing to them; and (4) in this country at any rate,
constitutional and peaceful. Socialists may therefore be quite at one
with Radicals in their political methods. Radicals, on the other hand,
are perforce realizing that mere political levelling is insufficient to
save a State from anarchy and despair. Both sections have been driven
to recognize that the root of the difficulty is economic; and there is
every day a wider consensus that the inevitable outcome of Democracy is
the control by the people themselves, not only of their own political
organization, but, through that also, of the main instruments of
wealth production; the gradual substitution of organized co-operation
for the anarchy of the competitive struggle; and the consequent
recovery, in the only possible way, of what John Stuart Mill calls “the
enormous share which the possessors of the instruments of industry are
able to take from the produce.”[16] The economic side of the democratic
ideal is, in fact, Socialism itself.
THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD SYNTHESIS.
At the middle of the last century Western Europe was still organized on
a system of which the basis was virtually a surviving feudalism. The
nexus between man and man was essentially a relation of superiority and
inferiority. Social power still rested either with the monarch, or with
the owners of large landed estates. Some inroads had already been made
in the perfect symmetry of the organization, notably by the growth of
towns, and the rise of the still comparatively small trading class; but
the bulk of the population was arranged in an hierarchical series of
classes, linked to one another by the bond of Power.
We are apt to think of England as differing in this respect from
Continental Europe, and to imagine that our popular freedom was won
in 1688, if not in 1648, or even as far back as Magna Charta itself.
But as regards the people at large, this was, in the main, merely a
difference in political form. In England the aristocratic oligarchy had
prevailed over the monarch; in France the King had defeated the Fronde.
For the mass of the people in either country there was nothing but
obedience.
Even in England the whole political administration was divided between
the king and the great families; and not one person in 500 possessed
so much as a vote. As lately as 1831 one hundred and fifty persons
returned a majority of the House of Commons (Molesworth, “History of
the Reform Bill,” p. 347). The Church, once a universal democratic
organization of international fraternity, had become a mere _appanage_
of the landed gentry. The administration of justice and of the
executive government was entirely in their hands, while Parliament was
filled with their leaders or nominees. No avenue of advancement existed
for even exceptionally gifted sons of the people; and the masses found
themselves born into a position of lifelong dependence upon a class of
superior birth.
The economic organization was of a similar character. Two-thirds of
the population tilled the soil, and dwelt in lonely hamlets scattered
about the still sparsely inhabited country. Though possessing the
remnants of ancient communal rights, they were practically dependent on
the farmers of the parish, who fixed their wages by a constant tacit
conspiracy.[17] The farmers themselves were the obedient serfs of the
large proprietors, to whom they paid a customary rent. Though nominally
free to move, both farmers and laborers were practically fettered to
the manor by their ignorance and their poverty;[18] and though the lord
had lost the criminal jurisdiction of his manorial courts, his powers
as Justice of the Peace formed a full equivalent. His unrestrained
ownership of the land enabled him to take for himself as rent the
whole advantage of all but the very worst of the soils in use; and
the lingering manorial rights gave him toll even from that worst.
Throughout the countryside his word was law and his power irresistible.
It was a world whose nexus was might, economic and political, tempered
only by custom and lack of stimulus to change. The poor were not
necessarily worse off in material matters than they are now; the
agricultural laborer, indeed, was apparently better off in 1750 than
at any other time between 1450 and 1850.[19] But it was a world still
mainly mediæval in political, in economic, and in social relations;
a world of status and of permanent social inequalities not differing
essentially from the feudalism of the past.
The system had, however, already begun to decay. The rise of the towns
by the growth of trade gradually created new centres of independence
and new classes who broke the bonds of innate status. The intrusion
of the moneyed city classes and the Indian “Nabobs” into the rural
districts tended to destroy the feudal idea. The growth of new sects
in religion made fresh points of individual resistance, degenerating
often into spiritual anarchy or unsocial quietism. The spread of
learning built up a small but active disintegrating force of those
who had detected the shams around them. But the real Perseus who was
to free the people from their political bondage was Newcomen or Watt,
Hargreaves or Crompton, Kay or Arkwright, whichever may be considered
to have contributed the main stroke towards the Industrial Revolution
of the last century.[20] From the inventions of these men came the
machine industry with its innumerable secondary results--the Factory
System and the upspringing of the Northern and Midland industrial
towns,[21] and the evangelization of the waste places of the earth
by the sale of grey shirtings. Throughout one-third of England the
manor gave way to the mill or the mine; and the feudal lord had to
slacken his hold of political and social power in order to give full
play to the change which enriched him with boundless rents and mining
royalties. And so it happened in England that the final collapse of
mediævalism came, not by the Great Rebellion nor by the Whig Treason of
1688, nor yet by the rule of the Great Commoner, but by the Industrial
Revolution of the eighteenth century, which created the England of
to-day. Within a couple of generations the squire faded away before
the mill-owner; and feudalism lingered thenceforth only in the rapidly
diminishing rural districts, and in the empty remnants of ceremonial
organization. The mediæval arrangement, in fact, could not survive the
fall of the cottage industry; and it is, fundamentally, the use of new
motors which has been for a generation destroying the individualist
conception of property. The landlord and the capitalist are both
finding that the steam-engine is a Frankenstein which they had better
not have raised; for with it comes inevitably urban Democracy, the
study of Political Economy, and Socialism.
The event which brought to a head the influences making for political
change was the French Revolution. The fall of the Bastille was hailed
by all who had been touched by the new ideas. “How much the greatest
event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!”
wrote Charles James Fox.[22] It shewed, or seemed to shew, to men that
a genuine social reconstruction was not only desirable, but possible.
The National Assembly, respectable old oligarchy as it was, pointed the
way to legislative fields not even yet completely worked out.
When the rulers of England perceived that in France at least Humpty
Dumpty was actually down, the effect at first was to tighten the
existing organization. The mildest agitation was put down with a
cruelly strong hand. The Whig party in the House of Commons sank to
half-a-dozen members. Prices were kept up and wages down, while the
heaviest possible load of taxation was imposed on the suffering people.
Then came the Peace, and Castlereagh’s “White Terror,” culminating in
the “massacre of Peterloo” (1819) and Lord Sidmouth’s infamous “Six
Acts.” But the old order was doomed. The suicide of Castlereagh was
not only the end of the man, but also the sign of the collapse of the
system. With a series of political wrenches there came the Repeal of
the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), Catholic Emancipation (1829), the
beginnings of legal and administrative reform, and finally the great
Reform Bill of 1832, by which the reign of the middle class superseded
aristocratic rule. But the people were no more enfranchised than they
had been before. The Factory had beaten the Manor for the benefit, not
of the factory hand, but of the millowner. Democracy was at the gates;
but it was still on the wrong side of them. Its entry, however, was
only a matter of time. Since 1832 English political history is the
record of the reluctant enfranchisement of one class after another, by
mere force of the tendencies of the age. None of these enfranchised
classes has ever sincerely desired to admit new voters to share the
privileges and submerge the power which it had won; but each political
party in turn has been driven to “shoot Niagara” in order to compete
with its opponents. The Whig Bill of 1832 enfranchised the middle-class
for Parliament: the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 gave them the
control of the provincial towns. After a generation of agitation,
it was ultimately the Tory party which gave the townspeople in 1867
Household Suffrage. Eleven years later a Conservative majority passed
Sir Charles Dilke’s Act enfranchising the tenement occupier (1878).
In 1885 the Liberals, intending permanently to ruin their opponents,
gave the vote to the agricultural laborer; and last year (1888) it was
the Tories, not to be outdone, who gave him the control of the local
administration of the counties, and placed the government of London in
the hands of a popularly elected council. Neither party can claim much
credit for its reform bills, extorted as they have been, not by belief
in Democracy, but by fear of the opposing faction. Even now the citizen
is tricked out of his vote by every possible legal and administrative
technicality; so that more than one-third of our adult men are
unenfranchised,[23] together with the whole of the other sex. Neither
the Conservative party nor the self-styled “Party of the Masses” gives
proof of any real desire to give the vote to this not inconsiderable
remnant; but both sides pay lip-homage to Democracy; and everyone knows
that it is merely a waiting race between them as to which shall be
driven to take the next step. The virtual completion of the political
revolution is already in sight; and no more striking testimony can be
given of the momentum of the new ideas which the Fall of the Bastille
effectually spread over the world than this democratic triumph in
England, within less than a century, over the political mediævalism of
ten centuries growth.
The full significance of this triumph is as yet unsuspected by the
ordinary politician. The industrial evolution has left the stranger
a landless stranger in his own country. The political evolution is
rapidly making him its ruler. Samson is feeling for his grip on the
pillars.
THE PERIOD OF ANARCHY.
The result of the industrial revolution, with its dissolution of
mediævalism amid an impetuous reaction against the bureaucratic tyranny
of the past, was to leave all the new elements of society in a state
of unrestrained license. Individual liberty, in the sense of freedom to
privately appropriate the means of production, reached its maximum at
the commencement of the century. No sentimental regulations hindered
the free employment of land and capital to the greatest possible
pecuniary gain of the proprietors, however many lives of men, women
and children were used up in the process. Ignorant or unreflecting
capitalists still speak of that terrible time with exultation. “It was
not five per cent or ten per cent,” says one, “but thousands per cent
that made the fortunes of Lancashire.”
Mr. Herbert Spencer and those who agree in his worship of
Individualism[24] apparently desire to bring back the legal position
which made possible the “white slavery” of which the “sins of
legislators” have deprived us; but no serious attempt has ever been
made to get repealed any one of the Factory Acts. Women working half
naked in the coal mines; young children dragging trucks all day in the
foul atmosphere of the underground galleries; infants bound to the
loom for fifteen hours in the heated air of the cotton mill, and kept
awake only by the onlooker’s lash; hours of labor for all, young and
old, limited only by the utmost capabilities of physical endurance;
complete absence of the sanitary provisions necessary to a rapidly
growing population: these and other nameless iniquities will be found
recorded as the results of freedom of contract and complete _laisser
faire_ in the impartial pages of successive blue-book reports.[25] But
the Liberal mill-owners of the day, aided by some of the political
economists, stubbornly resisted every attempt to interfere with their
freedom to use “their” capital and “their” hands as they found most
profitable, and (like their successors to-day) predicted of each
restriction as it arrived that it must inevitably destroy the export
trade and deprive them of all profit whatsoever.
But this “acute outbreak of individualism, unchecked by the old
restraints, and invested with almost a religious sanction by a certain
soulless school of writers,”[26] was inevitable, after the economic
blundering of governments in the eighteenth century. Prior to the
scientific investigation of economic laws, men had naturally interfered
in social arrangements with very unsatisfactory results. A specially
extravagant or a specially thrifty king debased the currency, and then
was surprised to find that in spite of stringent prohibitions prices
went up and all good money fled the country. Wise statesmen, to keep
up wages, encouraged the woollen manufactures of England by ruining
those of Ireland, and were then astonished to find English wages cut
by Irish pauper immigration. Benevolent parliaments attempted to raise
the worker’s income by poor law allowances, and then found that they
had lowered it. Christian kings eliminated half the skilled artisans
from their kingdoms, and then found that they had ruined the rest by
disabling industry. Government inspectors ordered how the cloth should
be woven, what patterns should be made, and how broad the piece should
be, until the manufacturers in despair cried out merely to be let alone.
When the early economists realized how radically wrong had been even
the well-meant attempts to regulate economic relations by legislation,
and how generally these attempts multiplied private monopolies, they
leaned in their deductions heavily towards complete individual liberty.
The administration of a populous state is such a very difficult
matter, and when done on false principles is so certain to be badly
done, that it was natural to advocate rather no administration at all
than the interference of ignorant and interested bunglers. Nature,
glorified by the worship of a famous school of French philosophers
and English poets, and as yet unsuspected of the countless crimes of
“the struggle for existence,” appeared at least more trustworthy than
Castlereagh. Real Democratic administration seemed, in the time of
the “White Terror,” and even under the milder Whig hypocrisy which
succeeded it, hopelessly remote. The best thing to work and fight for
was, apparently, the reduction to impotence and neutrality of all the
“Powers that Be.” Their influence being for the moment hostile to the
people, it behooved the people to destroy their influence altogether.
And so grew up the doctrine of what Professor Huxley has since called
“Administrative Nihilism.” It was the apotheosis of _Laisser Faire,
Laisser Aller_.
Though the economists have since had to bear all the blame for what
nearly everyone now perceives to have been an economic and social
mistake, neither Hume nor Adam Smith caught the _laisser faire_ fever
to as great an extent as their French contemporaries and imitators. The
English industrial position was not the same as that of France. The
“mercantile system” by which, as by “Fair Trade” to-day, foreign trade
was to be regulated and encouraged according as it tended to cause
the stock of goods, especially coin and bullion, to increase in the
country, was the same on both sides of the Channel. But our political
revolution had already been partly accomplished; and the more obvious
shackles of feudalism had been long since struck off. No Englishman was
compelled to grind his corn at the mill of the lord of the manor;[27]
to give up unpaid days to plough the lord’s field and cart the lord’s
hay; or to spend his nights in beating the waters of the lord’s marsh
so that the croaking of the frogs might not disturb the lord’s repose.
Our labor dues had long before been commuted for money payments;
and these had become light owing to the change in currency values.
Our apprenticeship laws and guild regulations were becoming rapidly
inoperative. No vexatious excise or gabelle hampered our manufactures.