Part VII—RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS LIFE

PRIMAL ELEMENTS IN HUMANITY’S EVOLUTION 287

SUMMARY 319

SYNOPSIS 325

INITIAL CHAPTER

HAPPINESS

The ultimate value of all effort is the production of happiness,

and objects excite our interest in so far as we believe them to

be conducive to that great and ultimate consummation of

existence—Happiness.—J. C. CHATTERJI.

The age in which we live is one of great activity and general movement.

We are passing out of the mindless, genetic, into the rational,

conscious epochs of evolution; and while, at every stage of human

history, right conduct depends objectively on relatively true thinking,

and subjectively, on good impulses, a transitional period such as the

present demands special efforts to attain to an adequate and clear

conception of the problems of life.

If no correct philosophy of life comes to birth in the thinking centres

of our social organism, general conduct will continue harmful to many

and inimical to progress.

How may the truth of a philosophy be tested? No better answer, I think,

can be given than that of Buddha, of whom it is chronicled that he said

in reference to a projected philosophy—“After observation and analysis

if it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one

and all, then accept it and live up to it.” Our theory of life must

appeal to the developed reason of civilized man and carry a conviction

of its truth. Moreover, it must be all-embracing. Sectional aims and

aspirations will never suffice. The aim must be universal, i.e.,

directed to the well-being of all mankind.

In view of the question: “What is the primary object of human life?” two

significant facts are apparent. First, the perpetual aim, conscious or

instinctive, of man, as of all physical beings, is to compass the

satisfaction of his desires, viz., contentment. Second, however diverse

and conflicting may seem the opinions held by popular teachers on the

subject, there is nevertheless an essential unity. For all point to some

kind of happiness, in the present or future, for oneself, or others, for

individuals, or for the race, as the ultimate end of existence.

A close observation of actual life—apart from theories of duty—reveals

incontestably that the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain is

universal and paramount. It is the general force ruling individual

conduct. A child shrinks from lessons and seeks play because the one

causes painful effort, the other gives pleasurable sensations, unless

there are the beginnings of an intellectual sense and the child is what

we call studious; in that case the sense of effort is overcome by the

pleasure of learning, and there is no unwillingness. Or when the

representative faculty is strong, the thought of a parent’s or teacher’s

approval may be so clear in the young mind as to make the future

happiness counterbalance the present effort. But it is always pleasure

at the moment, or pleasure in anticipation, or fear of punishment, viz.,

avoidance of pain, that gives the stimulus to work. The human nature of

a tender mother is much the same. She hates to hear her offspring cry,

she loves to see them smile. She _seems_ to sacrifice herself to them,

but in reality it is not so; for her greatest pains and pleasures reach

her through them. Her personal desires, her dearest hopes, are centred

in her children. She is proud of their acquirements, ambitious for their

future, happy in their success. When she strives to check and discipline

them, it is because she dreads, for them and for herself, some baneful

consequences should she refrain. She does not act for a selfish end. Her

nature is more complex, far wider and deeper than the child’s; but her

action is essentially the same. She is avoiding painful and seeking

pleasurable sensations, present and future, for herself and her

children.

Nor with the poor man is the position different. The pain of hunger or

the dread of hunger, for himself or those beings whom he loves,

stimulates to a life of continuous and wearing toil. If he submit to

present pain, it is that he may avoid remote pain, and secure the

satisfaction of his most pressing wants.

The leisured classes are differently situated. With conditions of life

that place them above the struggle for subsistence, they seek enjoyment

according to individual character and tastes. Whatever interests the

mind and stirs the emotions pleasurably will be pursued. We speak of

this and that career as guided by genius, ambition, benevolence, and so

forth, but in every case these qualities of mind have pushed choice in

the direction which will gratify the individual.

If we say goodness, not happiness, is the proper aim of life, we must

allow that goodness means the aiding to bring happiness to mankind.

Religions signifying less than this are unworthy the name of religion.

Now it is emphatically the good who keenly suffer in the midst of an

evil social state where poverty, misery and crime abound. It has been

truly said—“The contrast between the ideal and the actual of humanity

lies as a heavy weight upon all tender and reflective minds.” These

perceive that goodness, in their own case, has depended largely on the

conditions of their lives, while thousands of their fellow-creatures

have had little scope for goodness, because born and brought up in

degraded, vile conditions they had no power to escape from. It is no

consolation to the good to point to a future happy state and to

immortality for themselves. The actual is what concerns them. Their

feelings get no rest, their intellects surge with perpetual efforts to

conceive some means of radical reform, some method to secure more

goodness and more happiness for all, i.e. for every woman, man and

child, alive in the present day.

Turning now to published opinions concerning the object of life, Carlyle

taught that conscientious work was the main business of civilized man.

“Be indifferent,” he cried, “alike to pleasure and pain; care only to do

work, honest, successful work (no futilities) in this hurly-burly

world.” He directed attention from abstract ideals of the future to the

actual life of the present, pointing out the miseries and shams of the

evil social state and powerfully inveighing against its corruptions. To

maintain an outward existence of active usefulness and an inward state

of quietism and stoicism was Carlyle’s conception of an individual’s

duty, but while there was to be no seeking for personal reward he

believed this course would result in blessedness, and blessedness meant

something purer, nobler, more desirable than happiness. If we take his

own history set forth in the _Reminiscences_ as carrying out this

theory, we find that in his case it broke down. He toiled and plodded,

doing successful work to the end of what appeared a noble, victorious

career, but the blessedness never came, or if it did, it was not nobler

and purer than happiness. It was a gloomy state, bankrupt of hope and

full of querulous, dissatisfied egotism.

George Eliot gave us no theory of life in any of her works of genius.

The action of her influence is, however, unmistakeable. It was to

develop social and sympathetic feeling, to make individuals tolerant and

tender towards their fellows, judging none without due regard to his or

her surroundings. She has accustomed her thoughtful readers to the

scientific aspect of human nature and social life, to watch the manifold

relations between the two, the action and interaction of forces without

and within, and to see the continuity of causation along with the

reforming effect of ceaseless changes. The evolutional conception of

life underlies all her work. The pictures are realistic, there is no

false colouring and vain delusions, no perfection of character—but

aspiration, effort, broad humanity—and no perfect happiness attained.

She indicated, however, that the social state wants altering, and

readjustments there would conduce to nobler life and greater happiness.

She hoped for progress by gradual changes in the outward social system

and in inward human nature. “What I look to,” she once said, in

conversation with a friend, “is a time when the impulse to help our

fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to

grasp” (and as she spoke she grasped the mantelpiece) “something firm if

I am falling.” Although George Eliot formulated no theory I conceive she

held the belief that happiness for all at all times is the object of

life, and to be arrived at, chiefly, through the development of the

altruistic or sympathetic side of human nature.

Some writers teach that culture is most to be desired. The rapid growth

of wealth in this country has forced upwards in the social scale a class

of people destitute of culture and refinement. This class dominates

society and takes the lead in fashion. Luxury and ostentation are

everywhere prominent; extravagant modes of living prevail without the

comfort of the former simpler and more genial modes, and this is side by

side with poverty and destitution that do not decrease. Patronage, with

its demoralizing influence on both classes, is the most conspicuous bond

between the wealthy and the poor, and vulgarity of mind characterizes

the age. There is little to surprise us in the fact that gentle, refined

natures withdraw from public life into a narrow sphere, not necessarily

a selfish one, but a sphere bounded and circumscribed by their own

personal tastes and temperaments. Finding solace in intellectual

pursuits and a pure elevated enjoyment in the study of art and

literature, they adopt the theory that culture is the proper business of

man. Sweetness and light have been held up as the panacea for all the

ills of life and the “elevation of the masses” as the true social

progress.

Other teachers, thinking less of intelligence than of moral sentiment,

point to perfection of character as the aim of life. They recognize the

marked diversity in human nature. Some intellects are slow and dull,

incapable of being kindled into fervour or brightened into swift

reflection, and culture for such is hopeless. But in God’s sight,

surely, all men are equal. Birds without song have brilliant plumage to

compensate the defect, and so with man. The “law of compensation” holds

throughout humanity they have said, and, for the most part, hearts are

deep and tender even when heads are dull. Our finest works of literature

and art may fail to give one pleasurable sensation for lack of the

special faculty to apprehend their beauty, but kindness makes the whole

world kin. When the noble, generous, sympathetic side of human nature is

appealed to there comes a quick response. Happiness is the aim of life,

but happiness implies excellence of character, the emotional and moral

elevation of all mankind.

That Ruskin’s views were similar to the above we learn from his _Crown

of Wild Olive_. “Education,” he says there, “does not mean teaching

people to know what they do not know—it means teaching them to behave as

they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth of England the shape of

letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their

arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust. It is, on the

contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence

of their body and souls by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept

and by praise—but, above all, by example.”

From the field of modern science there has come as yet no direct

teaching on the subject of life’s duties and purpose, but two of our

eminent scientists have thrown out hints that are important and

significant. The late Professor Huxley says of his own career: “The

objects I have had in view are briefly these—To promote the increase of

natural knowledge and forward the application of scientific method to

all problems of life—in the conviction that there is no alleviation for

the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action and the

resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe

by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.”

(_Methods and Results_, Essays by Thomas M. Huxley.)

Professor Sir Oliver Lodge has stated that new paths of investigation

are opening up to science. Telepathy, clairvoyance and some other allied

psychic states have been tested and found in the range of actual fact.

They reveal qualities in man which although special to a few individuals

only, are latent it may be in all, and point to an unknown province of

nature to which man seems related independently of his five senses. It

becomes evident that by the “resolute facing of the world as it is,”

science is altering our conception of man’s existence and nature, and

extending our vista of his future.

Positivist thinkers, who base their teaching on materialistic

philosophy, have bright anticipations for the human race, although ages

may elapse before the realization of their hopes; and the existence of

poverty and misery in our midst is fully recognized, graphically

described, and feelingly deplored. The exponents of Positivism are

eloquent, cultured, refined. We want a new religion, they say, and

without that, no rapid progress can be made. The public mind is all at

sea, floating in a chaos of unfixed beliefs, and to reach settled

convictions and formulate a creed is the crying need of our times.

Religion is a scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of

individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and

reciprocal activity with reference to a Superior Being which men and

societies alike may serve. The Superior Being is collective humanity,

and men’s true business is to understand and seek to perfect human

nature and the social state.

A marked feature of present-day French literature, we are told, is a

reaction of religious sentiment against the rule of scientific

naturalism, and religious sentiment dominates in the strangely pathetic

and fascinating journal of the Swiss author, Amiel, which has been

widely read. “To win true peace,” says Amiel, “a man needs to feel

himself in the right road, i.e., in order with God and the Universe.

This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. Sybarite and

dreamer,” so he addresses himself, “will you go on like this to the end

for ever, tossed backwards and forwards between duty and happiness,

incapable of choice and action? Is not life the test of our moral force?

Are not inward waverings temptations of the soul?” To the question—Will

all religions be suppressed by science? he replies: “All those that

start from a false conception of nature, certainly,” and adds

reflectively: “If the scientific conception of nature prove incapable of

bringing harmony to man, what will happen?” To which he answers: “We

shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of

the soul.” Then, protesting against Emil de Laveleyes’ notion that

civilization could not last without belief in God and a future life, he

exclaims: “A belief is not true because it is useful; and it is truth

alone—scientific, established, proved and rational truth—which is

capable of satisfying now-a-days the awakened minds of all classes.”

I have here presented what is only a meagre reflection of portions of

our mental atmosphere, but I know of no clearer, more definite thoughts

emanating from influential teachers calculated to throw light on the

great enigma of life. It may seem to my readers that on these mental

heights unanimity exists as little as on the lower planes of man’s

discordant impulses, his confused and conflicting actions. Clearly we

have no philosophy of life as groundwork to orderly personal and social

action, no religion of vital power to bind the nations in one, no moral

code adapted to the complexities of our social relations, and, above

all, no steady belief in a universal love to sweeten society from end to

end and create the requisite medium in which alone the nobler qualities

of human nature will bud and blossom.

Nevertheless the diverse opinions held by the above thinkers are not

irreconcilable. Carlyle’s “blessedness” is the feeling of harmony with

the divine order of development in humanity and the universe, therefore

it is identical with Amiel’s “true peace.” The Positivists’ “Supreme

Being” is the perfected man whose endowments of sympathetic fellowship,

emotional sweetness, intellectual light, moral strength, kingly

continence of body and soul, and knowledge of truth are specialized and

pointed to by George Eliot, Ruskin, Huxley and others. All have simply

given expression to aspiration from the subjective side of their human

nature conformably to the evolutionary process within themselves, and

the attitude of mind produced thereby in each. Partial, but not

contradictory views, characterise those thinkings. Beneath superficial

differences there lurks a unanimous belief that harmony of life with

conditions—viz., happiness, is the legitimate _aim_ of life. A Humanity

steadily moving in a given direction may be infinitely varied in detail,

and since the correct philosophy of life must be a wide generalization

embracing all, we need not wonder at its slowness to appear. Modern

nationalities are only now emerging from the individualistic to pass

into the socialistic stage of industrial development. Our popular

writers and teachers, springing from a specialized class—not the main

body of the people—instinctively show their limitations by

individualistic or sectional modes of thought. Mark, for instance, the

insufficiency, nay, the pathetic absurdity of the thought—Culture will

cure the ills of life, in face of the fact that thousands in our midst

to-day possess no intellectual desires whatever, while the appetites

belonging to their physical nature which forms the very basis of life

have never been properly met and satisfied.

In setting forth a definition of happiness we have to recognize the

marvellous complexity of human nature. We have to take into account not

only variations distinctive in, and native to, separate individuals, but

the gradations and variations within each individual arising from

progress, or the reverse, in his or her outward condition and inward

development. Contentment means the satisfaction of desire. But desire

may be directed to the physical plane, the emotional plane, the mental

plane, the spiritual plane. The harmony of all life is happiness, and

brings blessedness or peace.

Having shown that practically infants, children, young men and women,

adults and old people of every social class are similarly engaged in

seeking happiness, each according to his tastes and tendencies

controlled by his personal, social and spiritual development; having

shown also that thinkers and writers offer no condemnation, I proceed to

point out that this universal habit is in harmony with evolution. It

tends to personal evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of

character and capacities. Moreover, it tells favourably on general life.

It tends to social evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of the

social organism or collective society so long as the method pursued by

each individual is unhurtful to the other organic units incorporated in

that society.

To seek to attain happiness at the expense of other human beings whose

happiness is thereby sacrificed, is of course evil. It is anti-social,

or vicious, i.e., it is wholly adverse to personal evolution and social

evolution, in other words, to general progress. But given a society that

has carefully surrounded its units by conditions of personal freedom

(harmonious with general well-being) in which to seek innocent

happiness, the normal man or woman on a level with the average of his

race is not in any danger of preferring the vicious course.

That we confuse a wholesome love of pleasure with selfishness arises

from the fact that individual selfishness unhappily is developed by our

present evil system of life. Notwithstanding, it is easy to show the

real value of pleasure by its ready alliance with unselfishness. A

significant feature is this—people take pleasure in uniting for

pleasure. Sensuous pleasures are taken as a rule, socially, it being

recognized that to civilized man the presence of the enjoyment of others

enhances his personal enjoyment. The physiological effect of pleasure is

to promote health and activity. “Every pleasure raises the tide of life;

every pain lowers the tide of life,” says Herbert Spencer. The pleasures

of love are essentially and pre-eminently invigorating and social. It is

only when they are selfishly pursued that evil creeps in, and what

should produce the purest happiness becomes degraded into a source of

misery.

It seems hardly necessary to point out further that asceticism and

purism are immoral because directed against an element in happiness.

Whenever science finds out means to alleviate suffering or free the

condition of pleasure from accidental accompaniments that are evil, it

is clearly the duty of man to hail the discovery and apply it that he

may add to the sum of human happiness.

Before touching on environment, i.e., the social condition under which

alone general happiness becomes possible, I may classify desires into

primary and secondary in order to make the subject clearer. Primary

desires are those common to all physical beings, the satisfaction of

which (in man) is necessary to healthful ordinary social life. Secondary

desires are those whose satisfaction is necessary to some individuals,

but not to all.

Desires for food, clothing, shelter, also for work alternating with

rest, and for love, belong to the first class. They are primary and

fundamental. But desires that imply a development of cultured intellect,

of delicate sensibilities, of high moral and emotional attainments, of

aesthetic tastes, and of spiritual life are secondary desires, i.e.,

they are not common to all at the present stage of the evolution of man.

That they may become so is devoutly to be desired; but if we expect to

reach a high standard of life in the social organism without first

securing for its individual units the satisfaction of primary needs, we

indulge a vain delusion. Does a tree throw out fruitful branches before

it is rooted in the soil at its base? Development depends on the

satisfaction of primary needs, and proportionally to these being made

secure will the satisfaction of the higher desires become necessary to

happiness.

Now in relation to primary needs, the conditions which it is the duty of

society as a whole to secure for the individual are, first: Freedom to

act for the end of securing satisfaction of desire; second, opportunity

for acquiring the means of satisfaction; third, ability to adopt the

means; fourth, protection of life and action. And these conditions have

a wide implication. The first implies some control of individual conduct

as regards propagation, that each social unit may possess a sound

constitution and the comfort of physical health. The second implies

access to nature. The third implies education to give knowledge and

skill. The fourth implies an organized society with an appropriate,

scientifically arranged system of industry.

That our present confused industrial and social system—the survival of

an archaic state—is inimical to happiness, few thinkers will deny.

Discontent is not confined to the poor. Where wealth abounds there is

little, if any, real happiness. “The towers of Westminster,” says Edward

Carpenter, “stand up by the river, and within, the supposed rulers

contend and argue.... The long lines of princely mansions stretch

through Belgravia and Kensington; lines of carriages crowd the park;

there are clubs and literary cliques and entertainments, but of the

voice of human joy there is scarcely a note.... And I saw the many

menacing, evil faces, creeping, insincere worm-faces, faces with noses

ever on the trail, hunting blankly and always for gain; faces of stolid

conceit, of puckered propriety, of slobbering vanity, of damned

assurance.

“O faces, whither, whither are you going?

“No God, no truth, no justice, and under it all no love.

“O the deep, deep hunger!

“The mean life all around, the wolfish eyes, the mere struggle for

existence, as of man starving on a raft at sea—no room for anything

more.

“O the deep, deep hunger of love.”

This picture of the degradation and misery of rich and poor alike is

essentially true to fact. Our collective life does not supply the

necessary conditions for real happiness in any section of the community;

and nothing less than a reconstruction of society and regeneration of

its life will suffice to meet the wants of humanity. Immense efforts are

put forth in philanthropy and benevolence. Enormous energy is expended

in partial or sectional reforms; for quite correctly has it been said

that “Reform tends to run on a single rail, the majority of people

refusing to study society as an organism of organisms resting on

biological law.” (John M. Robertson.) We make no attempt as yet, to

prevent waste of energy, to focus the factors of meliorism, to mass

them, to direct them straight to the causes of evil and apply them

effectively there—and that, because we have no carefully constructed

scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men

and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity

to the end of creating happiness for all.

Social regeneration is necessarily of a two-fold character, embracing

action without and action within. The first—which I call objective,

signifies collective action on the physical plane adapted to promote and

sustain the healthful, happy vitality of a race expected to grow

steadily and uniformly in physical, mental, moral and spiritual

elevation. The second, which I call subjective, signifies collective

action directed to the repression of all the unsocial desires of

man—those selfish emotions and narrow affections that alloy the mental

and moral structure of human beings and render it impossible to develop

the spiritual side of Humanity. The Darwinian laws—supposed by many to

be still applicable to man—had relation, not to happiness, but to the

preservation of life and the continuance of the race in the genetic,

unconscious period of evolution. It is in the conscious period or stage

of evolution that happiness evolves. Our present system of social life,

if system it can be called, is a chaos of conflicting interests, duties,

thoughts, feelings, actions—a prison-house in which the finer qualities

and attributes of man can scarcely exist.

Let us put forth all our strength to create out of this chaos “the

garden in which we may walk.” Let us break down the walls of our

prison-house till it “opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds

of heaven.” (Edward Carpenter.)

_PART I_

ECONOMICS IN MODERN LIFE

The only safety of nations lies in removing the unearned increments of

income from the possessing classes and adding them to the wage-income of

the working classes or to the public income in order that they may be

spent in raising the standard of consumption.—J. A. HOBSON,

_Contemporary Review_, _August, 1902_.

CHAPTER I

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

It is a leading thought in modern philosophy that in its process of

development, each institution tends to cancel itself. The special

function is born out of social necessities; its progress is determined

by attractions or repulsions which arise in society, producing a

certain effect which tends to negate the original function.—WILLIAM

CLARKE.

If we view the physical aspects of existence in relation to happiness,

it is obvious that the satisfaction of desires for food, clothing and

shelter stands first in order of urgency in the life of nations.

That modern nationalities are very far from the attainment of this

satisfaction of primary wants is lamentably evident to the eye of

observers who examine the conditions in which the great majority of

their members live. Food to the mass of the people is excessively dear.

In order to buy it for his family, a workman has often to spend

two-thirds of his weekly wage, leaving one-third only to meet the cost

of shelter and clothing, and nothing at all for recreation and

instruction.

If we add to this difficulty of satisfying the primary needs of a family

on average wages, the frequent lack of employment with the consequent

lack of any weekly income at all, and the prevalence of low wages,

rightly termed starvation-wages, we have before us a picture of the

utter inadequacy of our present industrial system to subserve general

well-being.

It is necessary to understand something of our present industrial

system, its foundations and evolution in the past, if we are to forecast

the changes that will occur in the immediate future, when the

fast-growing recognition of its manifold failings must inevitably bring

about a different order of industry. Private property in land and in

other essentials for the production of food, shelter, clothing, etc.,

lies at the basis of the present system; and since the direct object of

private proprietors is not to satisfy the primary needs of the people,

but to create individual profits, we cannot wonder that a system thus

motived by selfishness works out in a miserable and wholly imperfect

manner.

The industrial class may be broadly divided into two sections, employers

and employed, while a few highly skilled workers, members of the

professions of law, medicine, arts, letters, and science stand in a

measure outside this category. Landlords and shareholders as such are an

idle section of the community. They absorb the labour of a multitude of

workers, while giving no personal service in return. Quite truly has it

been said: “The modern form of private property is simply a legal claim

to take year by year a share of the produce of the national industry

without working for it.” (_Fabian Essays_, page 26).

In comparing past forms with the present forms of industry, a

distinguishing feature of the latter is the number of great factories

where workers toil long hours, usually in the tending of machines, to

turn out for the private profit of their employers, vast quantities of

goods destined for retail distribution all over the world. The large

organizations of industry, so familiar to us, are of quite recent

growth, and already show signs of a coming change as sweeping in its

scope as any changes that have occurred in the past. Yet to listen to

the expression of opinions that prevail in literary and upper class

circles, one would suppose we had reached finality in our social system,

and that the conventional tributes paid to proprietors of land and

capital in the shape of rent and interest would, as a matter of course,

remain legal to the end of time.

Now let us glance at the history of the past. For two centuries after

the Norman conquest, intestine war and feudal oppressions embittered the

life of the British labourer. He might be called from the plough at any

moment to take up arms in his master’s quarrel, and if he sowed seed and

saw his fields ripen, the harvest of his hopes might still be cut down

by the sword of the forager, or trodden by the hoof of the war-horse. He

was bondsman and slave, defenceless in the hands of the lords of the

soil, who at best, protected him only in the barest necessities of a

scanty livelihood—a hut without a chimney, its furniture a great brass

pot and a bed valued at a few shillings. (Wade’s _History of the Working

Classes_.) A change for the better came after the plague of 1348, and,

when by perpetual warfare with France, men had become more valuable

through diminution of their number.

King Edward the Third freed the bondsmen to recruit his armies, and

enforced villeinry service was exchanged for service paid by

wages—these, however, were ordinarily fixed by statute. In the middle of

the eighteenth century wages stood at the ratio of about a bushel and a

half of wheat for one week’s labour; by the middle of the nineteenth

century they had fallen to what could only purchase one bushel of wheat.

(_Threading my Way_, R. D. Owen, p. 220.) The cause of this change was

that meanwhile, two clever men—Arkwright and Watt—had made discoveries

which gave an impetus to industry beyond all previous experience.

Mechanical aids to production were invented, and the consequent

cheapening of products created more and more demand. Machinery and human

labour side by side were under stress and strain to meet the call of new

desires. Cotton and wool and flax were woven into fabrics and poured out

of Great Britain to every quarter of the globe; capital was amassed, and

wealthy capitalists bid against each other for more labour still.

Agriculturists flocked into towns, factories sprang up in all

directions, population rapidly increased, and children were sucked into

the industrial maelstrom, for health and happiness were in no way

considered when remunerative work was offered.

Outwardly the British world had altered. Internal warfare had passed

away, and the war-horse was no longer visible in harvest-fields. The

scene now presents a resemblance to a huge hive of bees industriously

secreting and amassing honey for future use. Great Britain has assumed

beyond her own shores a foremost place among civilized nations. The

resources of her newly-created wealth seem boundless, and everywhere her

power is felt. She can thin the ranks of her population, and swell her

army to conquer and suppress the tyrant Napoleon, while keeping at work

the enormous leviathan of her own trade and commerce by the deft fingers

of her little children. Summer and winter find her tiny bees—infants of

seven or eight—at labour in the factories from six a.m. to noon. One

hour for dinner is allowed, and they toil on once more till eight

o’clock at night.

Were these, then, the “good old times” of which we are proud? At all

events they _were_ the times in which England’s greatness was

established and vast fortunes were built up, founded upon the industry

of young children sweating in factories for thirteen hours a day.

“It was not in exceptional cases,” wrote Robert Dale Owen, when on a

tour of inspection of factories with his father in 1815, “but as a rule,

that we found children of ten years old worked regularly fourteen hours

a day, with but half an hour’s interval for the midday meal, eaten in

the factory.” In the fine yarn cotton mills, the “temperature usually

exceeded 75 degrees,” and in all factories the atmosphere was more or

less injurious to the lungs. In some cases “greed of gain had impelled

mill-owners to still greater extremes of inhumanity, utterly disgraceful

to a civilized nation.” Their mills were run fifteen, sometimes sixteen,

hours a day, and children were employed even under the age of eight. “In

some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were

cripples or otherwise deformed. Most of the overseers openly carried

stout leather thongs, and frequently we saw even the youngest children

severely beaten.” (_Threading my Way_, p. 102.) At that period Robert

Owen the elder expressed himself thus to the Earl of Liverpool: “It

would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which

they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have

less humanity than any other class of men.” The system was what Robert

Owen condemned, and he strained every nerve to bring about some

alterations in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for the

protection of children by law, and for their compulsory education, and

he publicly exposed the ghastly evils that spring from competition

unchecked by law, while left free to regulate itself at any amount of

cost to life, health, and happiness.

After the lapse of about four years, the first point aimed at by Robert

Owen was gained, and infants became protected by statute from gross

oppression. His second point was gained in 1870, when the Government

Bill for National Education was passed. And ever since the period of

that noble, unselfish life, minds have everywhere been awakening to the

truth of his third point, viz., that frightful evils inalienably belong

to free industrial competition.

Owen proved that in the year 1816, the machine-saved labour in producing

English fabrics—cotton, woollen, flax, and silk—exceeded the work which

two hundred million of operatives could have turned out previous to the

year 1760. (_Threading my Way_, p. 218.) The world was richer then to

the extent of all this enormous producing power—a power, he thought,

surely sent down from Heaven to set man free from the ancient curse that

in the sweat of his brow should he eat bread. But what were the actual

facts? There was no respite from toil for the workers, no freedom from

the curse! Throughout the old and new world, senseless machinery

competed with the living sons of toil, or, as Robert Owen expressed it,

“a contest goes on between wood and iron on the one hand, human thews

and sinews on the other—a dreadful contest, at which humanity shudders,

and reason turns astonished away.” (_Threading my Way_, p. 218.) The

problem presented was this: A recent rapid growth of wealth had enriched

the few and left many in misery; nay more, it had lowered and pressed

down the many to depths of degradation previously unknown. Were there no

means by which mankind could _unitedly_ work for the benefit of all, and

all be made happy as the world grew richer? Political Economy suggested

none, and Robert Owen turned from its futile study to that of the facts

themselves. He was a manufacturer, in sympathy with employers as well as

with employed. He had every opportunity for a practical understanding of

the interests involved, and he gave years to the study of this question

in a spirit of keen inquiry and ardent devotion to the cause. His

ultimate conclusion was that in _some form of socialism alone_ could a

remedy for the existent evils of industrial life be found.

Henceforth he laboured to give to the world an object lesson in

socialism. He embarked his fortune in bold experiments, which proved—as

in the case of New Harmony—financial failures. Into the details of these

failures I cannot now enter, nor have we to deal just yet with socialism

as a remedy. My present purpose is to show the origin and reality of the

evils inherent in the individualistic system of industry—evils on which

the argument for socialism is based. And I must reiterate the statement

made by John Stuart Mill in 1869, that the fundamental questions

relating to property, and to the best methods of production and

distribution—questions involved in socialism—require to be thoroughly

investigated. Mr. Mill’s opinion regarding socialism was that in some

future time communistic production might prove well-adapted to the wants

and the nature of man, but a high standard of moral and intellectual

education would first be necessary, and the passage to that state could

only be slow.

Meanwhile the sufferings of the proletariat are as intense as in the

days of Robert Owen. The problem which absorbed his energies and wrecked

his fortunes remains as yet unsolved, and we, who live when a twentieth

century has been entered upon, are daily surrounded by a mass of workers

tied hand and foot by poverty and often weighed down by despair. And

this is the case, notwithstanding the lapse of a long intermediate

period of national prosperity; in spite, also, of the powers of science

to enlighten manual labour, the intellectual efforts to advance

education, and a boundless benevolence and sympathy ready to embrace all

mankind, and give happiness to all, were only the right means devised

wherewith to accomplish that end.[1]

Footnote 1:

In the _Scotsman_ of March 16, 1897, this paragraph occurs: “At the

meeting of Edinburgh Parish Council yesterday, it was stated that

pauperism is increasing, and pointed out that for the month ending

15th ult. there was an increase of 114 applications for individuals

for relief, compared with the corresponding period last year!”

It was stated by Mr. Rowntree (whose investigations of this subject

are widely known and respected) that one-fourth of the population of

Great Britain lives in poverty, either primary or secondary; while 52

per cent. of the cases of primary poverty are due to the principal

wage-earner receiving too low a wage to maintain his family in

physical efficiency. (_Evening News_ Report, March 22, 1903.)

Individual benevolence has failed, and that as completely as Robert

Owen’s socialism, to cope with general poverty, and the method of Poor

Laws has accomplished almost nothing.

In Robert Owen’s day the evils described in factory life belonged

specially to Great Britain. That is not the limit, however, now. I need

only refer my reader to Henry George’s picture of poverty dogging the

footsteps of progress in America and to Professor Goldwin Smith’s

corroborative words: “It is a melancholy fact, that everywhere in

America we are looking forward to the necessity of a public provision

for the poor.” And again: “There will in time be an educated proletariat

of a very miserable and perhaps dangerous kind, for nothing can be more

wretched and explosive than destitution with the social humiliation

which attends it, in men whose sensibilities have been quickened and

whose ambition has been aroused.”

The problem respecting appalling poverty in the midst of wealth (it is a

poverty marring the happiness of the rich as well as the poor) cries out

for solution. It forces itself upon public attention in the old world as

in the new. There is no escape from it. The problem must be grappled

with by educated reason, and solved by means of the patient exercise of

a cold calculation of natural forces. Happily it is recognized in its

evolutional aspects by many thinkers all over the world. Twenty years

ago Charles Letourneau in his _Sociology_ wrote: “In every country which

enjoys the European system of civilization, the right of property has

ever been in a state of evolution, always tending to give a greater

degree of independence to the individual owner; in other words, the

evolution is always worked in favour of individual egotism. Who can say

that the evolution is now complete, or that we have yet realized the

highest ideal system in the disposition of our property? A progressive

evolution is, for every society, one of the conditions of existence. The

right of proprietorship cannot, therefore, remain stationary.” The

period that has elapsed since that passage was written has witnessed a

widespread and strong growth of opinion upon these lines.

In the _Contemporary Review_ of February, 1902, Mr. J. A. Hobson thus

writes: “... The idea of natural individual rights as the basis of

democracy disappears. A clear grasp of society as an economic organism

completely explodes the notion of property as an inherent individual

right, for it shows that no individual can make or appropriate anything

of value without the direct continuous assistance of society.”

The right of proprietorship in land is the first principle to examine.

The relation between land and life in its simpler aspects is clear and

definite. All classes of land animals—man included—are immediately

dependent for subsistence upon the produce of land, and when man emerges

from slavery, another element, namely, labour, enters into the

conditions of his life and becomes, with land, essential to his

existence. Of food, fitted for the nourishment of man, uncultivated land

produces little save some wild fruits and edible roots, and many wild

animals, which he may eat if in hunting them down they do not eat him.

But land placed under the additional forces of man’s physical and

intellectual energies produces an immense variety of objects—a perfect

wealth of raw material, vegetable, animal, mineral—which, yielding to

further elaboration through his efforts and genius, all help to create

for him a civilized life. This raw material, in short, supplied man with

food, shelter, clothing, with the comforts and luxuries his developing

nature demands, and with all necessaries to the existence of literature,

science, and art.

Passing over the primitive forms of associated life—the nomad and

pastoral—we come to the agricultural stage, when labourers on the land

are manifestly the all-important social units. They sow, till, and reap

the fields. They tend domestic animals, whose skins and wool are made

into garments by other members of the group. But the latter depend for

food and the raw materials of their industry on the cultivators, who

are, if I may so express it, the foundation stones of the simple social

structure. To whom does the land belong? To the whole group, and an

annual division amongst the families for purposes of cultivation takes

place, whilst weapons, fishing-boats, tools and other movables are the

property of individuals.

Now observe, a change gradually occurs, a change from the communal

possession of land to a system of the individual possession of land, and

force is the sole cause of this change. External aggression has

initiated militant activity, while, in the process of frequent

resistance to invasion, and frequent aggression upon others, there is

produced the class inequalities which distinguish a militant type of

society and a system allowing of individual land-ownership. Land becomes

private property in the hands of the bold and crafty, who compel the

cultivation of the soil by the landless men of the group, and by

prisoners of war spared on condition that they perform hard labour. The

institution of slavery thus becomes established, and it is a leading

factor in the promotion of civilization. Lords of the soil spend their

energies in warlike activities, whilst protecting their slaves and serfs

at labour. The produce of that labour is appropriated by the dominant

class, and used for its own particular benefit. Its requirements extend

much beyond the mere necessaries of existence that it yields to the

workers, and slowly there uprises a new form of labour and a large class

of labourers, producing a variety of commodities to gratify the desires

of pomp-loving, barbaric chiefs.

Now this class, the labour of which is wholly absorbed by the chiefs,

must be fed from the produce of the land. How is this accomplished? The

chiefs, while exacting hard labour from the slaves and serfs, yield them

only a bare living. But the proceeds of their labour, over and above the

bare living of the producers, is very considerable. There is therefore a

large surplus, which, appropriated by the chiefs as rent, is the source

of their power. With it they support a large class of landless men

engaged in ministering to their own specific wants. Moreover, this class

groups itself around the castle of the chiefs, which are filled with

military retainers, and here we have the beginnings of towns.

The town population increases steadily with the increase of the surplus

produce from land under better conditions of cultivation. Markets and

stores are instituted, and a commercial system is introduced. Barter

gives way to the use of money, and the entire social organism expands

and becomes more complex.

Anon, slavery disappears. But workers on the land—always the most

necessary social units—remain poor as before. Competitors for work, in

danger of starving, drive no hard bargain with masters who are in full

possession of the soil, and able to forbid their growing even the simple

fruits and grain required for a meagre living. For food enough to live,

they readily pledge the labour of their whole lives, and since nature’s

recompense for labour is liberal, there is an abundant surplus produce

for landowners to grasp and employ as they choose. Into the towns it is

sent, and there it stimulates progress—mental and material—and creates

new departures in social life.

Class inequalities among town workers increase, and labour becomes

organized. The mentally stronger dominate the weaker in the new fields

of industry. They direct and control the production of commodities for

the use of the dominant class, and succeed in acquiring a greater reward

for their work than a meagre living. Out of the surplus produce of the

land they become able to secure from their lords a portion which forms

the foundation of wealth in a new social class—a class of landless

capitalists who, possessing brain power and later money-power, become

the supreme factors in altering social conditions. These men promote

manufacture and commerce by action similar to the landholders’ methods

of promoting agriculture. They press down their workers to a bare

living, and take as profits all that competition permits of the results

of the joint labour. These profits they apply to the satisfaction of

their personal desires and the carrying out of their schemes of

manufacturing and commercial enterprise. Finally, they indulge in

luxurious living and emulate landholders in the purchase of valuable

commodities, thus stimulating certain trades.

Meanwhile, through the intercourse of urban life, mental activity

rapidly augments. Education is initiated, aptitude and skill are more

and more prized and rewarded. Invention profoundly modifies the

primitive modes of production, and genius aspires to understand and

govern the forces of nature. One direction taken by mental activity

eventuates in an important social force, viz., the Church, or religious

organization. Many of the best minds in early ages were allied with the

priesthood, and the Church’s desire for stately temples, gorgeous

shrines, and decorative worship have enormously aided the outward

development of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, and the

inward growth of aesthetic capacity. But priests and all whose labour is

absorbed by the requirements of religious worship and the constructing

of temples, must be fed on the produce of the land. The priesthood is

maintained in leisure by rents, tithes, or the voluntary offerings of

the people. It is freed from the necessity of industrial labour and

military activity, and members within this large class have devoted

their leisure to literature, history, philosophy, and art, thereby

greatly advancing civilization.

Under increased stability of governments the organization becomes of a

mainly industrial type. Nations now possess enormous wealth in the form

of material commodities, wealth in the form of intellectual literature

and the educational institutions that promote knowledge; wealth in the

form of ornament—all that embellishes and makes beautiful the

surroundings of human life; and all this wealth has come into existence

through the natural action of evolutionary forces—an action creative,

step by step, of a system of social interdependence and regulation. The

prominent features of the system are: First, private property in land;

second, great social inequality; third, poverty of manual labourers;

fourth, a large town population, and a small or minimum peasant

population. Its less prominent but no less decisive feature is the

complete social subjugation of the poor by the rich.

The supports of the system through the whole process of its growth have

been labourers on the land, and these labourers have scarcely at all

partaken of the national wealth. The food they reaped formed the motor

force vitalizing and energizing the evolving social organism. Food was

the ruling power deciding the growth and extent of economic life, as

well as the form of its development. But food-producers have never

determined the destination of the surplus food, and in this fact lies

the key to a great social problem which students of social science are

bound to comprehend. The landholders—and these as a rule have not been

workers on the land—have decided the destination of the surplus produce.

Up to the present-day landlords—including the proprietors of coal, iron

and other mines, capitalist employers of labour, the churches of the

nation, and hereditary rulers—are at the fountainhead of modern

civilization. It is through their action—caused mainly by selfishness,

tyranny, pride, greed—that cultivators and operatives have been kept at

maximum toil and been limited in number, while at the same time the

land’s resources have developed and improved until land and labour

united serve to support an enormous mass of population—individuals of

entirely distinctive character, activities, social position and social

worth, all alike in this one particular—they are daily and hourly

consumers of the produce of the land.

A good harvest that is general over the world sends activity like an

electric current through the economic system. A bad harvest, if

universal, would cause universal depression; not agriculture alone must

suffer, but manufacture, commerce, science, art, literature, education,

recreation—for on the production of food depends the buying power of the

whole trading world. It is true that modern countries are not maintained

from their own food resources alone. Also, it is true that the machinery

of exchange—money and our vast credit system—enter into the phenomena

and confuse the student’s mind. Nevertheless, an all-important fact

discloses itself on close investigation, viz., this—the relation of

landlordism to modern civilization is not accidental, it is essential

and causal.

As already shown, the general drift of the produce of the land has been

into the towns; and thither also have migrated the labourers. Machinery

and science applied to land cultivation lowered the amount of peasant

labour required, but it did not lower the birth-rate. Surplus peasants

have been driven by necessity from their homes to the centres of

manufacturing industry, and, competing for work there with the operative

class, have kept wages low and facilitated the enriching of capitalist

employers. These men, actuated by personal desires, selfish ambition,

and a tendency to mercantile speculation, use their wealth in extending

the production of objects that minister to a life of luxury and

refinement.

The older political economists mistakenly taught that “all capital, with

a trifling exception, was originally the result of saving.” (J. S.

Mill’s _Political Economy_, book 1, chap. 5.) Attention to the history

of social evolution, however, proves the fact to be otherwise. Not

individual saving, but social seizure, created capital. Its origin, as

we have shown, was the surplus produce taken from producers and disposed

of by a dominant class. It originated through the selfish quality of

rapacity and not through the respectable virtue of prudence, as some

capitalists would have us believe. The growth of capital has been

enormous since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and at the

present moment the riches of a comparatively small number of the owners

of our land and capital are colossal and increasing. At the same time,

there is no diminution of poverty among workers. Thirty per cent. of the

five million inhabitants of London are inadequately supplied with the

bare necessaries of life, and about a fourth of the entire community

become paupers at sixty-five. I refer my reader to Sidney Webb’s

pamphlet, _The Difficulties of Individualism_.

The supersession of the small by the great industry has given the main

fruits of invention and the new power over nature to a small proprietary

class, upon whom the mass of the people are dependent for leave to earn

their living. The rent and interest claimed by that class absorbs, on an

average, one-third of the product of labour. The remaining 8_d._ of the

1_s._ is then shared between the various classes co-operating in the

production, but in such a way that at least 4_d._ goes to a set of

educated workers numbering less than one-fifth of the whole, leaving

four-fifths to divide less than 4_d._ out of the 1_s._ between them.

“The consequence is the social condition we see around us.” (Ibid.)

Thus four out of five of the whole population—the weekly

wage-earners—toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate

product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most £40 per adult,

and are hurried into early graves by the severity of their lives, dying,

as regards at least one-third of them, destitute, or actually in receipt

of poor law relief.

In town and country, the operatives and peasants, who, united, form one

large class engaged in manual labour, resemble Sinbad the Sailor, on

whose shoulders rides the Old Man of the Sea. It is they who maintain

our leisured classes. The proletariat carries on its back all the rich

and their innumerable dependents, more than 300,000 soldiers, an immense

navy, a million of paupers, a number of State pensioners, a multitude of

criminals, His Majesty and the Royal Family, all Government officials

and ecclesiastics—a vast host of unproductive consumers throughout

society.

Slavery of the many for the comfort and enjoyment of the few! That is

all man has attained to, so far, in the evolution of society. And no one

who studies the facts of life can deny this impeachment of civilization:

“All over the world the beauty, glory, and grace of civilization rests

on human lives crushed into misery and distortion.” (Henry George.)

The extremity of contrast between rich and poor has no ethical

justification. Under purely ethical conditions, every child born into a

nation should have equal chances of life, comforts, and luxuries, with

every other child. But, as we know, one British babe may be born to an

income of £100,000 a year, and another to no income, but to a constant

struggle for bare subsistence and a pauper’s grave at last. The system

permitting this is _ethically odious_. Nevertheless, we have to

recognize that, under non-ethical conditions, development has taken

place, and we must accept the process as the natural, inevitable result

of all prior conditions.

Man’s ethical nature itself is the product of a slow evolution, not yet

so advanced as to require and create purely ethical social conditions.

Changes in the future will proceed on lines of natural growth, as in the

past, but with this supreme difference—the issues will be favourable to

general happiness, the advance infinitely more rapid, because aided by

conscious human effort.

All schemes of social reform that are revolutionary are widely

chimerical to the thoughtful evolutionist, for were we suddenly to

deprive our richer classes of property, privilege, and power, we should

simply create a general abasement of our national civilization. Our

upper classes, rendered effeminate by ill-spent leisure and all the

artificial pleasures of a voluptuous and inane life, are incapable of

directing civilization to the highest and noblest ends. Yet it is out of

their midst that springs the demand for commodities ministering to all

the amenities and refinements of a civilized life. It is refinement

alone that demands refinement, culture that demands culture; and were

the control of human labour to pass _suddenly_ from the hands of the

upper into those of the lower classes, which are still, in the mass,

degraded and unenlightened, there would be no effective demand for these

commodities, and the science and art implicated in their production

would inevitably, though gradually, disappear.

Progressive evolution culminates in social justice, and the principle of

private property in land, which implies an injurious monopoly in what is

essential to human life (and is therefore socially unjust), is certain

to be consciously relinquished at a given stage of the nation’s

intellectual and moral advance.

Having traced the evolution of the individualistic system of industry,

and seen that the inherent evils of the system have their source in the

private ownership of land and capital, which “necessarily involves the

complete exclusion of the mere worker, as such, from most of the

economic advantages of the soil on which he is born, and the buildings,

machinery, and railways he finds around him” (Sidney Webb), let me now

sum up and state the paramount evils that have to be overcome. For the

workers these are—low wages, long hours of toil, difficulty of obtaining

work, and, when it is obtained, uncertainty of being permitted to retain

it. For the community generally there are further evils, viz., first,

the mal-production of commodities made manifest in food adulteration and

in a perpetual output of objects that, instead of promoting and

conserving civilization, debase and corrupt public taste and morals;

and, second, the mal-production of human life, for poverty is a social

force that directly tends to racial degeneration. A population born and

bred in our city slums becomes physically, mentally, and morally unfit.

The facts of poverty and the unemployed are impossible to deny.

Frederick Harrison’s picture is accurate; ninety per cent. of the actual

producers of wealth have no home they can call their own beyond the end

of the week, have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to

them, have nothing of any kind except so much of old furniture as will

go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely

suffice to keep them in health; are separated by so narrow a margin from

destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness or unexpected loss

brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is the normal

state of the average workman in town or country. (_Report of Ind. Ref.

Congress_, 1886.)

As regards the children of these workmen, fifty per cent. die before

they reach five years of age, while eighteen per cent. only of upper

class children die at the same age. The industrial evolution of the last

150 years, with its labour-saving machinery and highly organized masses

of wage-workers, has done nothing at all to lessen poverty. Poverty has

steadily kept pace with the increase of population.

But observe in the present day there is one significant feature that

forces itself upon public attention—a feature revealing to the social

student our approach to that stage of evolution spoken of by William

Clarke in the passage I quote as motto to this chapter: “Each

institution tends to cancel itself.... Its special function and progress

produce effects tending to negate the original function.”

If we look minutely into the latest developments of large businesses, we

find that the diminution in the number of competitors does not as a rule

lead to an easing of the competitive struggle. As Mr. J. A. Hobson

observes and demonstrates: “It is precisely in those trades which are

most highly organized, provided with the most advanced machinery, and

composed of the largest units of capital, that the fiercest and most

unscrupulous competition has shown itself.” (_Evolution of Capital_, p.

120.) There is an increase, in short, of the elements destined to

destroy competition. The anxiety, arduousness, and wastefulness of

strife among the rival competitors, becomes so intolerable that a mutual

truce and amalgamation is sought after as a release. When fully

realized, the amalgamation becomes a monopoly, and competition, that

much vaunted check to counteract the natural rapacity of private

capitalists, ceases altogether. Let industrial monopoly be fairly

established, and behold! competition, with all its merits, real or

assumed, is abrogated.

But industrial monopoly _in private hands_ becomes intolerable to the

public, so that invariably, in the long run, the community either puts a

forcible stop to the monopoly, or assumes it, and administers it as a

State function.

We may confidently assert that as large industries approach to the stage

of absorption into monopolies of federated groups of wealthy

capitalists, the more general and widespread grows dissatisfaction and

resentment on the part of the dispossessed smaller capitalists who have

been beaten out of the field.

Now, the trend of movement to-day, through the whole fields of

production and distribution, is from business on a small scale to

business on a large scale, and the formation of limited companies,

rings, trusts, etc. By purchasing raw material in greater quantities an

immense saving is effected, and the same occurs in the advertising of

goods and in organizing numerous workers instead of a few. These savings

make it possible to lower the price of the finished commodity to the

public. Hence the change from smaller to larger commercial enterprises

is favourable to public interests up to a certain point. But the moment

monopoly point is reached, the position straightway becomes reversed.

Henceforward the public have no protection from a sudden raising of

prices, for, the competitive check having been withdrawn, monopolists

dominate their respective fields of production and distribution, and the

individually selfish forces alone hold sway.

This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with

its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain

advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and

final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic

industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring

democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and

distribution of all commodities.

In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws

of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces

into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the

controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his

mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and

no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has

been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and

amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through

persistence in this available and satisfactory course.

Now, throughout the domain of non-material civilization, man has never

constituted himself controller of natural forces, although, in orders of

life inferior to his own, he has guided many vital forces. For instance,

there are vegetable and animal forces—all subject to natural law—that he

has enlisted in his service and made submissive to his dominion. The

forms of vegetable life around us to-day—cereals, fruit-trees, plants,

and flowers of infinitely varied tint—bear witness to the art and skill

of man; and the animal kingdom, ruled by mysterious biological laws, has

provided him with faithful servants obedient to his will, in a life

which to dogs and horses is largely artificial.

In the order of his own social life man’s position is wholly different.

What we behold, if we take an objective view of a so-called civilized

society, is a marvellous variety of complicated movements. These are the

outcome of forces pursuing an unbridled course; and that course is

always the path of least resistance. As yet there is no intervening

force of a collective, mental nature to adapt that course to an ultimate

definite aim and purpose, or to harmonize broadly those lines of least

resistance with the line of permanent and universal advantage to

mankind. As Professor Lester F. Ward expresses it, “Man has made the

winds, the waters, fire, steam and electricity do his bidding. All

nature, both animate and inanimate, has been reduced to his service....

One class of natural forces still remains the play of chance, and from

it, instead of aid, he is constantly receiving the most serious checks.

This field is that of society itself, these unreclaimed forces are the

social forces of whose nature man seems to possess no knowledge, whose

very existence he persistently ignores, and which he consequently is

powerless to control.” (_Dynamic Sociology_, vol. I. p. 35.) These

unreclaimed social forces—selfishness, rapacity, pride—give activity to

the competitive system, and run riot on the basis of private property in

land and the means of production. But the present condition of things

cannot much longer persist, and a new industrial system, the outcome of

far more elevated social forces, is shaping itself rapidly in many minds

throughout Europe, America, and the whole civilized world; that system

of co-operative industry we have now to consider.

CHAPTER II

ORGANIZED INDUSTRY

The true organic formula of political as of economic justice is—

“From each according to his powers,

To each according to his needs.”

J. A. HOBSON.

Whilst bearing in mind that the present economic system—a system

unconsciously produced through the play of selfish forces—was a

necessary stage of evolution, and tended to progress so long as savage

proclivities in the mass of the people made a closer social union

impossible, we have also to recognize the changes, outward and inward,

occurring under that system. First, a rise of co-operation, both

voluntary and involuntary—in factories and throughout business

generally—has taken place, causing evolution to proceed on wider lines.

Second, a slow, silent, unstudied, half-unconscious movement has

advanced, and in these days eventuated in the conception of a new system

which purports to be the form that industrial evolution must assume in

the near future. And inasmuch as this new system is less egoistic and

more social than any system of competition, it will move on ethical

lines of progress.

The present system, as we have seen, is based on private property in

land and the instruments of production and distribution. In opposition

to this, socialism implies that the State or people collectively should

own the land and instruments of production and distribution. Further,

that the State should organize routine labour and direct the

distribution of produce upon this basis, and that throughout society

social equality should be established and maintained.

The sentiment of justice and the feelings of sympathy and solidarity,

without which no socialized society could exist, are prominent

everywhere to-day. They manifest in philanthropic action all over the

country, in constant efforts to adjust political and economic forces to

lines of social equality and in the revolt of wage-workers, throughout

the civilized world, from conditions they are finding intolerable and

will not much longer endure.

A wholly unselfish order of life is impossible still, but under any

intelligent collectivist system, individual selfishness becomes modified

and controlled. Hence we may confidently expect that the strong

anti-social feelings fostered by the private property and competitive

system of industry will largely subside in the greater fraternity of an

organized socialism.

It is significant that ignorant opponents, in their wildly erroneous

interpretation of the theory of socialism as an equal division of money

to all, recognize the gross injustice of the present distribution of

wealth. The wrong and misery accruing from the individualistic system of

industry are widely felt and freely admitted, while the underlying

causes of the evil and the true remedies are not yet understood.

As regards the connexion of socialism with the theories of political

economy, I must shortly explain: Political economy is the science of

wealth—its production and distribution. But as the science relates

exclusively to the present competitive system, the socialist finds in it

a full exposure of the evils involved in that system, and ample grounds

for striving to bring about its supersession by a system of co-operation

on a socialized property basis. There is not and there cannot be any

conflict between a true political economy and a scientific socialism.

The one describes what is, the other what may be and ought to be. Both

recognize that wealth is produced (and it is the only possible way) by

the application of labour to land, and its products. In the present

system, the individual possession of land and the instruments of

production forms the ruling factor, producing inequality in the

distribution of wealth and gives the basis on which commercial

competition rests. In referring to laws of political economy, it is not

unusual to speak as if they were laws of nature, no more to be banished

than the law of gravitation. On this assumption there is raised the

argument that society is forever bound to the present system, with its

payments of rent, interest and profits out of the surplus proceeds of

labour. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that the so-called laws of

economics are only rules of social living springing from motives of

human self-seeking exercised within the generally accepted conditions of

private property in the essentials of life. It is not necessary for the

socialist to contend against any single generalization of political

economy; each may be true on its own basis, but, _with that basis_

socialism is at war. Let society relinquish the property basis, and

political economy remains applicable only to the past, while in the

future the motives of human self-seeking enter upon a fresh career in a

more altruistic system.

We must grasp the true nature of the various tributes imposed upon

labour—rent, interest, profits and rent of ability—to comprehend their

economic bearing. A farm is the private property of a landlord, while it

is cultivated by a farmer and his labourers. The proceeds of the

industry of the two latter is divided into three portions—the labourers’

wages, the landlord’s rent and the farmer’s profits. The first,

dependent on demand and supply in the labour market, is kept down to

what will cover the expense of a bare subsistence; and the second is

always the highest amount the landlord can extract above the portion the

farmer consents to live upon after paying the subsistence wage to his

labourers. A landlord’s rapacity, however, is no longer the only factor

in determining rent, since State interference has been found necessary

for protection of farmers in the public interests. The economic bearing

of rent is this: it gives effect to the demands of the landlord class

for the results of an immense amount of labour applied to the production

of varied commodities. As already explained, the produce sold in towns

by farmers to pay rent goes, in large measure, to the support of workers

who are manufacturing luxuries, _objets de luxe_, and many meretricious

wares that minister to the depraved taste of men and women whose

happiness is destroyed by a life of idleness and ennui.

It is not land only, but capital in the shape of railways, factories,

workshops, machinery, etc., that are held as private property. For the

use of these, therefore, workers pay a tribute called interest on

capital. This interest gives effective demand to the wants of a large

class of comparatively idle shareholders, who further absorb the

services and produce of another great army of workers. The next tribute,

namely profits, is a claim connected with the organizing of labour. It

represents a prodigious tax levied upon workers, a tax that enables

employers and managers—more or less wealthy—to enjoy comforts and

luxuries their employés can never command. The fourth tribute has been

called the rent of ability. It rests on the non-ethical principle that

some people deserve from society a great reward for work they have

pleasure in doing, while the toilers engaged in irksome, dangerous,

dirty, distasteful work—however necessary to the whole community—are

only entitled to a pittance wage.

Let us look at the proportional value of rent, interest, profits and

rent of ability in their relation to the reward of manual labour. Out of

the yearly income of the nation, recently computed at £1,450,000,000,

£510,000,000 goes in rent and interest and £410,000,000 in profits and

salaries to the ruling classes, while £530,000,000 only is available for

payment of wages to manual workers. But when we consider that the latter

compose the great mass of the population, and the former a small section

or fraction of it only, the enormities involved in the working of our

property institutions exhibit their true colours, and the growing sense

of justice within civilized humanity revolts wholly from the system. The

facts, roughly speaking, are that one-third of the total income of the

nation goes to four-fifths of the population, while the remaining

one-fifth pockets two-thirds of the income. (See Sidney Webb in _Fabian

Tract No. 69_.)

In the Census of 1891 there were 543,038 adult men who entered

themselves as not working for a living. We may assume these belonged

chiefly to the wealthy classes, and if we reckon their average incomes

at £500 per annum, there emerges a sum of £271,519,000 as approximately

the value of the labour they exact each year from workers to whom they

render no services in return. Again, if we add to the number of these

idle men the women and children now living on rent and interest, the

above computation falls far short of the reality. And, need it be said,

the more there is taken from workers by non-workers, the less must

remain for the workers themselves.

To people ignorant of economic principles, the man who spends a good

income on personal gratifications appears—in his relations to

society—either passive, or active beneficially, inasmuch as he “gives

employment,” and his “giving” on these lines is lavish. Moreover, it is

considered that the difference between rich and poor is one of _natural_

inequality, of which, if workers complain, they are considered as

unreasonable as the invalid who complains that other people are healthy.

But the facts admit of no such analogy. The rich owe everything to the

poor. They are simply a parasitic class, and the money they spend

represents a power (socially permitted) to command and absorb the labour

of their fellows. They exact life-long services, for which they bestow

no personal service in return. Were we to place a rich man with all his

money on an uninhabited island, however fertile, he would at once be

reduced to his natural stature. No money would cause his daily comforts

to spring up around him, and still less the many luxuries without which

he feels his existence has no charm. In order to live he himself must

work, for he is the sole representative of the scores of fellow-men on

whose labour he has hitherto wholly depended for necessaries and all the

amenities of a civilized life. The absorption by one of the labour of

many is a social arrangement of genetic origin, and is immoral or

non-ethical in character.

Socialism is the philosophy of a pure, wholesome, progressive industrial

life, to be initiated and maintained by human effort—nay more, it is a

veritable Gospel of Peace. And I use the word Gospel advisedly, for the

finest religious quality of human nature is not in those beings who

calmly pursue a course of spiritual development for themselves,

unmindful that the physical part of their fellows craves the food and

rest without which the latent soul within cannot manifest itself.

We have seen that in the domain of feeling the stirrings of socialism

have for years been agitating the bosom of society, and although the

outcome in philanthropic action issues usually in failure, none the less

does it spring from the highest and holiest motives of man. But while

philanthropy chiefly represents love’s labour lost, there are other and

more virile forces in action that are indicative of a coming organic

democracy. Observe, for instance, the constant efforts of the people to

alter the political and economic strain by State interference. This

agitation is a very significant fact. It betrays a hunger for social

justice which will certainly increase with the growth of knowledge,

public spirit and sensitiveness to personal rights. This hunger can

never be fully appeased under any system that permits wealth to flow to

the lucky, the clever, the cunning, the greedy, and be handed down by

inheritance and bequest from generation to generation. No modification

of individualism and not even socialism will banish all popular

agitation. Communism is the far-distant goal to which it points, for

communism alone sets forth as attainable a satisfying equality in all

the comforts of life, and since evolution must eventuate in social

justice, whatever falls short of this will inevitably contain some

conditions of discontent.

But whilst a craving for justice among the masses cries out for State

interference, from whence comes the modern view of what justice means?

Among the classes it has been considered that the man who is clever,

i.e. mentally strong, has a right to a greater reward for labour than

the man who is stupid. The origin of this notion is simply the fact that

in a competitive system he is able to obtain that superior reward.

Power, and not any ethical idea, is the foundation of the notion. The

notions of justice prevailing throughout society have all arisen

naturally in the past amid the strong and privileged few, and readily

have they been accepted by the docile and oppressed many. The clever,

not the stupid, have formed public opinion, and that under a purely

egoistic impulse. Nevertheless, as evolution passes from the unconscious

to the self-conscious stage, reason unites with altruistic feeling to

give birth to new conceptions that are moulding public opinion to a

higher and truer form, and working out on the plane of practical action.

The conception of justice involved in socialism is naturally unpalatable

to the privileged few, but it goes far to prove the truth of socialism,

that the conception is the fruit of the most advanced study of our

social organism _as a whole_, while it coincides precisely with the

blindly instinctive pulsations of the central mass of the people.

Turning now from the moral and emotional to the economic and practical

side of the question, we are bound to inquire by what methods transition

from the present competitive commercial system of industry to the

socialism of the future will take effect. For, be it observed,

supporters of the latter system not only assert its ethical superiority,

but further assert that it is both practicable and economically

inevitable.

There are two, and only two, general directions of popular reform:

first, the revolutionary—the driving straight at established

institutions with the intention of overthrowing them; second, the

legislative—the aiming to improve the existing system by co-operative

methods and the modification and gradual destruction of its worst

features, i.e. its extremes of injustice and inequality. I have to point

out how retrograde and futile for the promotion of happiness is sudden

revolution. It is the spontaneous method of human passion where

intellect is unenlightened on natural evolution and causation. It seeks

to overturn what, for the time being, is the highest product of

evolution, and it would blindly substitute that, which although

ethically superior, the society of the time is unable to support. The

method of legislative reform, national and municipal, is the rational

one; and no other, we may confidently hope, will be tried in the

civilized countries of Europe so long as socialists are not harassed and

persecuted for their opinion beyond the point of endurance.

Already, as regards legislation in this country, the power of the

Demos—the mass of the people—is acutely felt. Step by step our rulers

have been compelled to lower the political franchise in order to quell

revolutionary tendency and maintain their position. Fear-forces within

the social organism have changed direction unnoted at the surface. The

classes are secretly more afraid of the people than the people are of

the classes; yet the actual burdens borne by the people are in no way

lightened. And why is this so? Because the people generally are ignorant

of their political power, and still more ignorant of how to wield it

favourably to their own interests. As has truly been said: “The

difficulty in England is not to secure more political power for the

people, but to persuade them to make any sensible use of the power they

already have.”

But social forces of persuasion and enlightenment are ready prepared for

their guidance. In the upper and lower sections of the middle class, men

and women whose culture is scientific and whose moral sentiment is

advanced, are ranging themselves in the van of the world’s progress, and

chiefly through their efforts there is pouring into and penetrating the

darkness of the masses a flood of intellectual enlightenment. This

process begun has its definite bearings. A growing intelligence in the

people will cause the displacement of all authority that is

irresponsible. A better selection of legislators will be made, and

these, constrained by judicious criticism, will study the principles of

social science and learn how best to attain the clear ends of

government.

As our masses rise to the full exercise of their political power and the

democratic trend of the nation goes forward, no higher motive force than

that of self-seeking is required to secure better social conditions. Not

only does the ignorant self-seeking of the masses carry weight

commanding attention, but the intelligent self-seeking of rulers is a

force set in similar direction. To please the majority of constituents

is their highest policy; and since food and leisure and education are

the essential needs of that majority, such available intellect as the

legislative body possesses will be honestly applied to promoting the

increase and better distribution of these various necessaries of a

civilized life; in short, to promoting the general well-being in so far

as the exigencies of the times permit.

I do not deny that self-seeking in rulers has hitherto mainly led to the

clever hoodwinking of ignorant constituents. I merely assert that we

have rounded the point of Cape Danger in that regard. Every step we take

on democratic lines, every advance we make in educating the people,

removes us further from that danger point. Moreover, I assert that

extending the Parliamentary franchise to women of every social class

will equally work for good. The new altruistic or philanthropic spirit

of the age has laid firm hold of the so-called educated women of to-day.

When public responsibility presses these women to self-education in

politics, the myriad injustices revealed will cause them to turn from

futile individualist charities and concentrate their energies on works

of real and lasting social reform. We may confidently anticipate that

the British Parliament will become an excellent instrument of Democratic

Government when certain reforms—that are already widely agitated—have

been carried out. These reforms are that: “The House of Commons should

be freed from the veto of the House of Lords, and should be thrown open

to candidates from all classes by a system of payment of representatives

and a more rational method of election.” (See _Fabian Tract No. 70_.)

There are two lines of action certain to be pursued by a Parliament

growing yearly more democratic. One is the line of protection of labour,

the other is that of an active service of the people. Now State

interference with trade—in the interests of workers—is condemned by the

_laissez-faire_ school of economists. Such action is scoffingly termed

“grandmotherly legislation.” It is deprecated as injurious to society as

a whole, as an outrage on the liberty of the British subject, and an

impious desecration of the capitalistic fetish, “Freedom of Contract.”

But when the knowledge of facts proves that on one side this so-called

freedom signifies freedom of choice between dire starvation and the

distasteful terms of an absolute master, surprise is not felt that

intelligent men prefer what the ignorant may regard as a species of

State bondage. This preference is a feature of the times clearly

visible. No doubt, where social equality reigns, individual liberty is a

noble attainment; but with inequality in the means of life and the

fundamental conditions of social happiness, a State that is honestly

striving to restore the balance is a very _fount of justice_. The quest

of the workers is not that of individual liberty, but of a collective

liberty, embracing every man, woman and child within the ranks of their

own order.

There is no moral principle that condemns State interference, although

we may admit that occasionally it has wrought evil instead of good.

Failures have been caused by ignorance alike in the rulers and the

ruled. But as knowledge of the real problem advances, errors in

governing will become less frequent, and the action of the State be

marked by a wise adaptation to human needs in view of the greatest

happiness possible.

State regulation is simply a matter of power and expediency. At the

present low stage of civilization, for just so long as the ruling power

is exercised by a propertied minority, it will prove injurious to the

majority; but when the power passes over to the people the evils from

which the majority suffer—in so far as they are remediable by

society—will be slowly and surely redressed. Our County, District and

Parish Councils are important instalments of democracy. These elected

bodies, with their increasing powers, are potent to make of the

community an ever larger and larger employer of labour, until, at the

will of the people, all industries become absorbed, and the collectivist

system of labour organization is gradually established. It is evident

that the instruments of a thoroughly democratic administration are

rapidly perfecting in Great Britain; and when the ideal of socialism

dominates the national mind, these will present a ready means of

realizing the ideal in practice. Ignorance of the ideal leads many minds

into the false assumption that the raising of wages, and to do this the

impoverishing of capitalists, is the socialistic _sine quâ non_ in State

action. But as Mrs. Bosanquet explains: “In our nineteenth century cry

for higher wages we are apt to lose sight of the fact that many things

are more important to the working-man than a few shillings added to his

weekly income. A good supply of water, well-paved and lighted streets, a

market in which he can always obtain wholesome food, and properly

guarded sanitary conditions, will do more to raise his standard of

living above that of his ancestors than any increase of mere money

income. With those he can lead a healthy, orderly life on comparatively

small wages; without them no rise in wages, however desirable in itself,

will enable him to escape danger and disease.” (_Rich and Poor_, by Mrs.

Bernard Bosanquet.)

This puts the case for municipal socialism in a nutshell. No amount of

philanthropy, no amount of individual action is likely to provide a

parish with a good water supply, properly paved and lighted streets,

sanitary dwellings and a well-managed market. (_Fabian News._) Yet these

are fundamental requisites of general well-being, and another requisite

for well-being and progress, dependent upon State action, is education

of the people. If the power of the masses and their independence of

arbitrary authority grow out of accord with their real knowledge of

things, disastrous and bloody revolutions become possible. That in some

sort the State must educate the masses is a principle already

acknowledged and acted upon. We know, too, with how little success! But

as Government loses its evil characteristics and grows enlightened, our

State education will be directed to new ends. Its aim will be to impress

such knowledge on the rising generations as will prepare them for social

life, and instruct them in the means of averting misery and increasing

happiness. It will educate them in the science of society and true

meliorism, in the best methods for repressing anti-social feelings, in

the formation of noble ideals of conduct, and in that religion which

unites mankind in the region of the heart and makes of their union a

living and growing social organism.

But while this is the aim of State education, the exact means adopted

may vary. Where parents are superior much may be left in their hands,

but inferior parents can never be permitted to train up children in

inferior ways at the risk of lowering social purity and health.

I believe the time will arrive when Government, acting on its right of

force and expediency, will take up and sequestrate the small class of

social units who, defective by nature and evil conditions, are unable to

control the injurious tendency to propagate their kind. This degraded

minority will be kindly dealt with and allowed all liberty not

inconsistent with the careful guarding of public safety. The object to

attain would be simply the putting an end to their evil stock.

In the matter of State education, as well as in that of State

interference with trade, objections are made on the ground of injustice.

“Why,” it is asked, “should a man without children be taxed to educate

the children of others? Is it not unjust that the earnings of the

prudent should be taken to save the imprudent from the consequences of

their own folly?” My answer is that besides being expedient, it is not

socially unjust and the argument rests on the fact that the rewards of

life depend upon the economic conditions of society much more than upon

individual effort or merit. The amount of a man’s income is determined

by forces not created by justice, and over which he has no personal

control. A clever physician may command the fee of a guinea a visit. Let

another competent man appear in the neighbourhood and charge half a

guinea, the first has to lower his fee or lose his patients, and if he

lowers his fee, the sum of the incomes of the two physicians sharing the

patients between them will be less than the amount of the single income

originally derived from that source. A man’s gains are what the

competitive system ordained by society permits him to seize, whether he

be working hard or not at all. Within these non-moral conditions an

appeal to justice is irrelevant. Outside the non-moral conditions, what

justice requires is that all men should be socially equal in respect of

two things, viz. liberty and the ordinary comforts of life.

If employers do not deem it unjust to lower wages, neither should they

deem it unjust were the State to lower their incomes to the precise

amount their employés receive. Society has in the past arbitrarily

arranged conditions that favour the few; why should it not now

arbitrarily rearrange these conditions favourably to the many? If we

take the average amount of all incomes to represent the sum each worker

might justly receive, we find that a number of people have far more than

this sum. The surplus represents then an “unearned increment” obtained

by force of circumstance. A still larger number of people, on the other

hand, are wholly unable to win, by any effort they may make, the above

average amount, even if they work hard and well all their lives. Is it

not just and reasonable that the more fortunate are required to give up

a portion of their “unearned increment” in order that in the interests

of society the children of the less fortunate should be educated? And,

again, the improvident and immoral are nature’s defective children. Does

not the highest religion demand that they should be tenderly dealt with

and spared—if that be possible—all the tortures that nature unaided

would bring upon them.

I believe that, under conscious evolution, the State will become in its

action more and more philanthropic, simply for this reason—its members

will become more and more humane and public-spirited.

Voluntary and State agency, however, will continue to co-exist. Each has

its peculiar merits and demerits, and each individual case to be dealt

with has its peculiar conditions. Science and experience must in each

case therefore decide which agency applies best. There is no foregone

conclusion that under State Socialism all private industries will

collapse. The principle of the system is that no method of industry,

hurtful to society as a whole, may exist, and the power of the State

shall be rigorously used to protect the interests of the whole, as

against conflicting individual interests. Even now it is felt, through

the growing democratic spirit, that for our public bodies to take

advantage of the struggle for employment of starving, hard-pressed men

and women, is a national disgrace. It will soon be a point of honour

with the nation to fix a minimum wage for public employés much above the

competitive rate. Some County Councils have already been moved to direct

that workers employed by them, or under their contracts, should be paid

trade-union wages. Parliament has in some cases acted similarly, and

when we remember that Government at this moment is the largest employer

of labour in the kingdom, we realize that its example in giving wages

determined more by equity than by competition will have a raising effect

upon wages in private employment.

There is not any danger, however, that the movement of taking over the

industries of the country by the State will stop short of the most

favourable point. As I write this chapter, the following paragraph has

appeared in a socialist journal of to-day: “It is proposed to establish

a gigantic trust to control the entire iron-producing interests of the

United States. This, of course, is eminently proper from an economic

view, as it is a clearly demonstrated fact that production on a large

scale is cheaper than production on a small scale. Carnegie, Rockefeller

and Morgan, proposers of the iron trust, are, from a certain standpoint,

benefactors of the race, inasmuch as they will demonstrate the

practicability of the co-operative idea on a national scale in

production. In due time the people will recognize the folly of allowing

these men to reap the whole profits, and the system will be readjusted.”

Another important public event was the introduction into the British

Parliament of an Employer’s Liability Bill. “This Bill proceeds,” said

its introducer, “on the principle that when a person for his own profit

sets in motion agencies which create risks for others, he ought to be

civilly responsible.” (_The Scotsman_ Report, May 4, 1897.) Now it goes

without saying that the iron trust, and all trusts and commercial rings

and monopolies, create the risk of a disastrous rise of prices to the

general public, and a consequent greater inequality of wealth possession

than even that from which we are suffering acutely to-day. A logical

executive, holding the above principle, will inevitably annex to the

State these huge outgrowths of the competitive system, will keep down

prices to the level required by the general interests, and apply profits

to the good of all.

That the time is not far distant when nationalization of the land will

take place, appears from the fact that many others besides socialists

advocate the measure. But we must not suppose that rent will be

abrogated. The State will impose a charge on the fertile and well

situated lands to create conditions that are fair not only to consumers

but to cultivators, whose labour in view of a given result must vary

according to the superiority or inferiority of soils and situations.

District Councils will in all probability organize agricultural labour,

the State only drawing a rent; while to present owners of the land

compensation will be made, and, if accustomed to work on the land,

salaried positions in the new order offered.

The rent exacted by the State may become the single form of taxation

necessary for purposes of administration and for organized labour

engaged on such service of the people as does not bring in any profit.

But when routine industries bearing on universal needs belong to the

State, profits will flow into the national exchequer. It will be

possible to gradually increase the State’s payment for labour as the

workers become more capable of elevating their standard of life and

consuming wisely; while the surplus profits will be available for the

organizing of new services to be rendered free.

The carriage and distribution of letters is a comparatively long

established State industry. The carriage of human beings should equally

become so. The State’s taking over of railways and the municipalities’

taking over of tramways cannot be much longer delayed.

Bread baking and distributing by Government employés is pre-eminently

desirable, to put an end to adulteration in a primary necessary of life

and to prevent the waste of energy which takes place in the present

disorganized system. Already there is such a general complaint of the

quality of bakers’ bread, that an approved method of baking from pure

flour under State control would be welcomed by all who perceive how the

racial blood is more or less poisoned and its vitality lowered by what

is called “the staff of life.” (A prolonged process of baking breaks up

the starch granules, and renders bread more digestible. The extra

expense and trouble precludes the adoption of this method by private

bakers.)

Again, the health of the nation suffers cruelly from poison germs

carried in the medium of milk. But when district councils have organized

agricultural labour, dairy produce will be distributed under strict

Government control. Emulation will spring up among local authorities all

over the country to excel one another in the arts of rapidly acquiring

and skilfully managing all industries that affect general health, and

thus raising the tide of life within the bounds of their jurisdiction.

With this aim broadly accomplished, the minor industries might safely be

left for some time in private hands and under a competition modified in

a greater degree than now by State inspection for the benefit of workers

and consumers.

Among services to be made free to the public, those of transit bulk

largely and should probably come first—free railway and steamship

service, free tramway and cable-car service, to be followed in time by a

more or less complete service of free entertainments calculated to

develop art and promote a happy, joyous life.

If we cast our thoughts forward and try to realize the action and

interaction of these altered social conditions upon society, we can

hardly mistake the nature of the changes humanity itself will undergo.

With the destruction of the frightful incubus of poverty, human hearts

will no longer be wrung by anguish, bitterness, despair. With

opportunity freely afforded for regular employment and its ample reward,

for decent and wholesome living, and a civic life brightened by many

pure pleasures, the degrading and false excitements will cease to

allure. Drunkenness, vice, crime will greatly diminish. Instead of the

desperate struggle for bread and all that appertains to an animal life

pure and simple, a new struggle will arise—a benign, inspiring emulation

to attain to and acquire the noble qualities of humanity, the

distinctive characteristics of, not the lower animal, but the higher

spiritual man.

Respecting the form of government in a Socialistic State, I cannot do

better than quote Mr. J. A. Hobson: “A developed organic democracy will

have evolved a specialized ‘head,’ an expert official class, which shall

draft laws upon information that comes to them from innumerable sources

through class and local representation, and shall administer the

government, subject to protests similarly conveyed.” “The conditions of

a really effective expert officialism are two: such real equality of

educational opportunities as shall draw competent officials from the

whole people; and such a growth of public intelligence and conscience as

shall establish the real final control of government for society in its

full organic structure.” (_Contemporary Review_, February, 1902.)

_PART II_

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE SUBJECT

The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the

vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are

changed for better or worse.—NATHAN ALLEN, M.D., LL.D.

CHAPTER I

THE LAW OF POPULATION

The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no

political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages

of the terrible monster over-multiplication all other riddles sink

into insignificance.—HUXLEY.

No human life can be maintained without food, and no healthy individual

life can be maintained without good food in sufficient quantity;

therefore, the relation of numbers to the actual food supply—in other

words, the Population Question—stands at the threshold of our social

inquiries and at the base of all social reform.

At the beginning of last century, Malthus, who knew nothing of

evolution, expounded the doctrine that man tends to increase more

rapidly than the means of subsistence; that population and food, like

two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side,

but the pace or natural rate of increase of the former is so immensely

superior to that of the latter that it is necessarily greatly checked.

And the checks are of two kinds. They are either positive—that is,

deaths occur from famine, accident, war or disease, and keep down the

population so that the means of subsistence are just sufficient to

enable the poorer classes barely to exist; or they are preventive—that

is, fewer births take place than man is capable of causing.

This doctrine was a fertile germ of thought in the mind of Charles

Darwin. He, while conscious to some extent of the process of evolution,

was grappling with the great problems of differentiation and genesis of

species. How came it that the life which is assumed to develop from low

and simple to the highest and most complex forms everywhere exhibited

breaks, or sudden changes, in the apparently natural order? Darwin

perceived that a key to the enigma lay in the marvellous fecundity of

organisms. Each group reproduced its kind in overflowing numbers, and

accidental conditions destroyed individuals and groups that failed to

secure sufficient food or to protect themselves from enemies. Here were

factors of progress, but factors by no means admirable—a murderous

slaughter of the weak, a frantic struggle for existence, culminating in

violent death or slow starvation, ultimately in extinction.

Nevertheless, the medal had two sides, for the race is to the swift, the

battle to the strong; bread is the portion of the wise, favour the

reward of skill. Should we feel surprise that in a semi-theological and

metaphysical era, rather than a scientific one, Darwin formulated his

great discovery in terms suggesting not a cruel, but a beneficent

Nature? His law of natural selection, or survival of the fittest,

established itself in many minds as a sacred principle that man could

neither deny nor seek to counteract.

Now this conception, carried into the field of economics, confused the

minds of men engaged in the study of facts and problems of human life

and progress. Political economists had to contemplate a social strife

and struggle for existence among men as fierce and relentless as that

holding sway in the brute kingdom. And in this struggle society as a

whole stood on the side of external nature as opposed to the mass of

striving individuals. A genetic, spontaneously developed system of

industry favoured a high birth-rate that kept wages low, an unscrupulous

exploitation of labour in the interests of capital, a wholesale

slaughter of infants, a crushing out or trampling down of the weak, and

a perpetual grinding of the face of the poor, while, simultaneously,

wealth was multiplying and capital becoming concentrated and easy of

control by the so-called princes of industry. Conditions of life to the

great mass of the people were fraught with constant misery; yet, since

Darwin had demonstrated—in his _Origin of Species_, published in

1858—that a struggle for existence eventuates in the survival of the

fittest, enlightened thinkers, with a few rare exceptions, accepted the

cruel facts of industrial life without any conscious moral revolt from

the system.

“_Laissez-faire_” was the logical outcome of Darwinian law applied to

human affairs, and Darwin’s authority dominated the public mind of the

period. Christianity was teaching the principle that the poor would be

with us always; a poet cheerfully sang “God’s in His Heaven; All’s right

with the world; All’s love and all’s law,” and political economists

expounded the laws of demand and supply, of rent, of wages, of profits,

of interest, etc., without one hint or surmise that man himself was

bound to interfere with the action of derivative laws, to modify or even

annul them.

Meanwhile an instinct of sympathy, rudimentary in primitive man, was

steadily growing and strengthening during all the transitions of tribal,

village-communal, feudal and national life, in the stormy militant

epoch, till the moment arrived when it compelled man’s interference.

Spontaneously, impulsively, individual philanthropy interposed between a

suffering humanity on the one hand, and on the other external nature and

a social system that were alike relentless. It supported the weak and

helped the unfit to survive. It deliberately selected the half-starved,

the diseased, the criminals, and enabled them to exist and propagate.

Finally it forced society to make laws subversive of the policy of

“_laissez-faire_,” thereby introducing a new order of things,

irrespective of all doctrinaire principles or authoritative teaching.

That new order of things is socialism, and the genesis of socialism is

distinctly to be traced to the vital element in human nature—unselfish

sympathy.

The rise and progress of philanthropic action carries momentous issues

in various directions, both unfavourable and favourable to human

welfare. It has made the law of natural selection and survival of the

fittest obsolete for us as applied to man. It tends to a lowering of the

level of average health and a gradual _degenerating of the race_ through

selection of the unfit, and through the power of hereditary

transmission. It counteracts the positive or destructive checks to the

increase of population, and thereby extends the area of general misery.

Nevertheless, at the same time, it increases the strength and the

solidarity of human society, and becomes a new law of life. That law may

be called “Sympathetic Selection” and “Survival of the Gentle.” Darwin

in 1878 acknowledged its existence. He recognized it as a law in human

society superseding that of Natural Selection and Survival of the

Fittest.

In 1801 the population of England and Wales was 8,892,536, or let us say

about nine millions. Eighty years later it had risen to about twenty-six

millions! The increase showed an accelerated rate according to the

census returns. Whereas in the ten years between 1841 and 1851 the

percentage of increase was 12·65, in those from 1861 to 1871 it was

13·19, and between 1871 and 1881 it was 14·34. In the United Kingdom in

1900 there has been an increase of 18 per cent. since 1880.

Now Malthus had pointed out that with conditions of life comparatively

favourable, and an increase of food supply comparatively easy,

population was found to double itself in twenty-five years or less. Our

numbers during these eighty years had been, roughly speaking, trebled!

and the increase took place under conditions not favourable but

unfavourable to the bulk of the nation. Manufacturing industries had

enabled us to purchase food from abroad, and consequently a larger

number of children survived. Food, however, cannot always be forthcoming

in greater and greater abundance from countries that need more and more

of their own food supply, and which, by manufacturing for themselves,

are gradually reducing their demand for our manufactured commodities.

Notwithstanding this patent fact, there are social reformers to-day who

persist in ignoring the population difficulty, and there are thinkers

who, basing their views on Herbert Spencer’s dictum that “man’s

fertility will be checked by his individuation,” pass it over lightly.

Generally speaking, however, the public conscience is now aroused, and

enlightened men and women are tolerably well alive to the fundamental

nature and the grave importance of the population question.

“In some parts of the United States of America,” says an able writer,

“population has actually doubled itself, apart from immigration, in

twenty-five years; and this in the face of the ordinary retarding

influences. If such a rate of increase upon the present population of

the whole globe were to prevail for only 250 years, there would be left

but one square yard of standing room for each individual.”

Again: “If we grant that a scientific treatment of crops would enable

food supplies to keep pace with population, and for this purpose

supposing that all the land in the planet Jupiter were available for a

market garden, it would not ultimately be want of food but want of room

that would put a stop to the increase of the multitude.” But further,

the above author—a mathematician—examines what the potentiality of

increase represents on the supposition that each individual merely died

the natural death of old age. “Under such favourable conditions as the

absence of war, famine and disease, the race might treble its numbers in

thirty years. To show the significance of the numerical law, let us

imagine it to operate undisturbed 3,000 years upon the progeny of a

single pair. The number of human beings finally existing would be

expressed by twice the 100th power of 3. An easy computation will show

that if these people were packed together, allowing six cubic feet of

space for each person, they would fill up the whole solar system in

every direction, and extend beyond it to a distance 430 times that of

the planet Neptune. In fact, a solid sphere of human beings would be

formed having a diameter of 2,400,000,000,000 miles. Such considerations

lead us to realize the absolute inevitableness of Nature’s checks upon

reproduction.” (_Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism_, by

George Shoobridge Carr, M.A., Cantab.)

Turning now from scientific speculation to recognized authority in

practical politics, let me quote from a paper read at the

Registrar-General’s office on March 18, 1890, by Dr. William Ogle,

Superintendent of Statistics: “The population of England and Wales is,

as we all know, growing in a most formidable manner, and though persons

may differ in their estimates of the time when that growth will have

reached its permissible limits, no one can doubt that, if the present

rate of increase be maintained, the date of that event cannot possibly

be very remote.”

Premising that the rate of increase is not due to the birth-rate only,

but also to a fall in the death-rate, and that voluntary philanthropy

and State interference influence the latter, we pass to the

consideration of conditions that affect the marriage-rate—consequently

the birth-rate—in the artisan and labouring classes, composing the bulk

of the nation. The Registrar-General, in his report for the year 1876,

wrote as follows: “The state of trade and national industry is

strikingly exhibited in the fluctuations of the marriage-rate of the

last nine years.... The period of commercial distress, which began about

the middle of 1866 and continued during five years ... influenced the

marriage-rates of these years, which were 17·5, 16·5, 16·1, 15·9, 16·1

and 16·7 (in the 1,000) respectively. In 1872 and 1873 the working

classes became excited under the rapid advance of wages and the

diminution of the hours of labour, and the marriage-rates rose to 17·5

and 17·6 respectively.” In his report for 1881 the Registrar-General

again accentuated this important point: “The marriage-rate reflects with

much accuracy the condition of public welfare.” And further on: “The

birth-rate was at its maximum in 1876, and fell uninterruptedly from

that date year by year in natural accordance with the corresponding

decline in the marriage-rate.” These years represented another period of

commercial depression. We have here then incontrovertible proof of the

national tendency. The mass of our people increase their numbers so soon

as they are more comfortable, and the marriage-rate for each year may be

called the pulse or indicator of the nation’s economic well-being. Its

fluctuations coincide with the upward and downward movements of

commercial activity.

In this connexion we have also to note that the most rapid growth of our

population is taking place in the great industrial centres, the mining,

manufacturing and trading districts; and the type that there prevails is

necessarily affecting the British race.

By the Parliamentary return of marriages, births and deaths registered

in England and Wales in the year 1881, it appeared that in different

districts the percentages of marriages varied considerably. It was

greater in the mining, manufacturing and trading districts than in the

farming districts, and much higher in London than in the provinces. In

the district comprising Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bedford,

Cambridge, the rate equalled twelve persons per annum for each thousand

of the population. In London it was eighteen persons for each thousand,

and in the divisions which comprise Yorkshire and Lancashire the rate

was sixteen and seventeen persons to each thousand. As regards births,

the proportions stated were somewhat similar. In London there were

thirty-five births to one thousand of the population, whilst in the

southeastern division there were only thirty-one; but the rate rose

again to thirty-five and thirty-six in the great manufacturing districts

of the Midlands and the North.

Dr. Ogle’s examination of statistics on the subject shows that this

state of things has continued, in its main features, up to the present

day. “Men marry,” he says, “in greater numbers when trade is brisk. The

fluctuations in the marriage-rate follow the fluctuations in the amount

of industrial employment.” “The rates vary very greatly in the different

registration counties.” “In London the rate is invariably high. Almost

all the counties in which the marriage-rate is high are counties in

which the population is also high of women engaged in industrial

occupations, and therefore presumably in receipt of independent wages,

while all the counties in which the marriage-rate is very low are also

counties in which but a very small population of the women are

industrially occupied.” The general drift of the figures leads to the

conclusion that early marriage is most common where there is the largest

amount of employment for women.

The age at which marriage takes place is examined by Dr. Ogle as “a

subject of scarcely less importance than the rate in its bearing upon

the growth of the population.” And the point is of special interest in

view of the fact that delayed marriage was valued by Malthus as a

desirable preventive check. Dr. Ogle finds that the lowest average age

at marriage for both bachelors and spinsters, viz., 25·6 and 24·2

respectively, was in 1873, the year in which the marriage-rate was

highest; and from that date to the present time the ages have gone up

gradually but progressively in harmony with the general decline in the

marriage-rate. In 1888 the average age of bachelors at marriage was 26·3

years, and of spinsters was 24·7.

Observe of late years there has been a slight decline of the

marriage-rate and a certain retardation of marriage, consequently the

birth-rate has fallen, but says Dr. Ogle, “so also has the death-rate,

and almost in equal amount; so that the balance between the two, or

natural increment of the population, has practically scarcely changed.

We may,” he observes, “dismiss altogether the notion that any adequate

check to the increase of population is hereafter to be found in

retardation of marriage. Such retardation may defer the day when a

stationary population will be necessary, but, when that day has come,

will be insufficient to prevent further growth. If a stationary

population is to be obtained by simple diminution of the marriage-rate,

that rate would have to be reduced 45 per cent. below the lowest point

it has ever yet reached. In short, almost one-half of those who marry

would have to remain permanently celibate. This seems as hopeless a

remedy as the retardation.” He makes clearer still this important

matter: “If one-quarter of the women who now marry were to remain

permanently celibate, and the remaining three-quarters were to retard

their marriages for five years, the birth-rate would be reduced to the

level of the present death-rate. It is manifest that if the growth of

population is hereafter to be arrested ... by increase of permanent

celibacy, or by retardation of marriage, these remedies will have to be

applied on a scale so enormously in excess of any experience as to

amount to a social revolution.”

What, then, is the present position?

Population tends to increase faster than actual subsistence. Obviously

it cannot outrun the supply of food because people cannot live upon

nothing. There ensues therefore a state of chronic starvation among the

most helpless, and premature deaths keep population reduced to the means

of subsistence.

Let us glance at facts concerning London alone. London now contains over

4,300,000 persons. Three hundred thousand of these earn less than 18s.

per week per family, and live in a chronic state of want. One person in

every five will die in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum.

Moreover, the percentage is increasing. Considering that comparatively

few of the deaths are those of children, it is probable that one of

every four London adults will be driven into these refuges to die.

One in every eleven of the whole population is a pauper. One in every

five of persons over 65 is a pauper. The appalling statistics of the

pauperism of the aged are carefully concealed in all official returns.

In 1885 Canon Blackley found that 42·7 per cent. of deaths of persons

over 60 in twenty-five rural parishes were those of paupers. Very many

children in the Board Schools go to school without sufficient food

unless supplied gratuitously. Over 30,000 persons in London have no home

but the fourpenny “doss-house” or the causal ward. (_Fabian Tracts_,

Nos. 10 and 17.)

The death-rate of children in the poorest districts of the East End of

London is three times as great as among the rich at the West End. In

barbarous ages the death-rate was, as far as we can learn, far higher

than now, and even now the death-rate of children in Russia is extremely

high.

We have little cause to rejoice in the absence of famine, pestilence and

war so long as the lowering of the death-rate—by sanitation, the

hospital system and the outcome generally of sympathetic

feeling—increases the proportion of human beings in a state of chronic

want, and produces a gradual enfeeblement and deterioration of the human

race. Yet it is inconceivable that rationalized man could withhold his

efforts to reduce the death-rate in the future because of the fatal

effects of his philanthropic action in the past.

Darwin acknowledged this dilemma. In the year 1878 he somewhat sadly

wrote: “The evils that would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy

in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing

them to survive and procreate.” Ten years later Professor Huxley wrote:

“So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization

which has ever been devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of

wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the

reproduction within itself in its intensest form of that struggle for

existence, the limitation of which is the object of society.”

(_Nineteenth Century_, February, 1888.)

Further than this he did not go; Huxley, like Darwin, brings us up to

the dilemma and leaves us there. Not such, however, is the position of

all scientific men in the present day. “We stand on the threshold of a

new departure in social evolution,” says the author already quoted, “a

new and potent factor in the process is about to make itself felt. This

factor is man’s intellect.... The intelligence of man will act

intelligently; population will not be subjected to mere haphazard

restriction; it will be regulated with a wise adaptation of means to an

end.” (_Social Evolution and the Evolution of Socialism_, G. S. Carr,

pp. 65, 66.) Man’s intelligence already perceives the right policy to

pursue. It is to lower the birth-rate, to limit births to a proportion

conformable with the food supply; in other words, to create a painless,

instead of a painful, equalization of births and deaths.

Is there any other means of escape from the existent dilemma? I answer,

there is none. Emigration has sometimes been regarded as an efficient

check to over-population, and Dr. Ogle allows that “hitherto some of the

excess of births over deaths has been met by emigration, or rather by

excess of emigration over immigration; but never on such a scale as to

free the country from more than one-twentieth part of its redundant

growth.” Moreover, this minimum of good is counterbalanced by evil, for

emigration “carries off the more vigorous and enterprising of our

working men to the necessary deterioration of the residue left at home.”

And further: “The facilities for successful emigration are yearly

diminishing; the time must inevitably come—sooner or later—when this

means of reducing our population will altogether fail us.”

In view of the obvious tendency of better conditions—when brought

about—to create a reduction of the death-rate and an acceleration of the

birth-rate, eventuating in an increase of general misery, neither

Malthus, Darwin, Huxley, nor any other great teacher of the past, has

given us applicable and available counsel. There only remains for us now

to consider Herbert Spencer’s opinion regarding this all-important

matter. He is credited with the demonstration of a law of population

wider than the laws discerned by Malthus and Darwin. The law is this:

“Other things equal, multiplication and individuation vary inversely,

i.e. the rate of reproduction of all living things becomes lowered as

the development is raised, and conversely.” (Lecture on “Claims of

Labour,” Edin., 1886, Patrick Geddes.)

We have to do with this so-called law in respect only of its bearing on

practical action. The corollary deduced from it is: Individuate, educate

and refine your masses, for the rate of increase will fall as organisms

rise in the scale of culture.

Now what are our prospects of any rapid advance in individuation

(development and culture) among the seething masses of a people who are

helpless and frightfully overcrowded by the action of the very law which

individuation is to counteract? In how long a period will the process be

likely to take effect? It is on the answer to these questions that the

worth of the principle as a law of practical guidance for humanity must

depend.