It will be said that this is a standard that is subject to a certain

variability; that a house may be considered unfit for habitation now

that our fathers would have been fain to occupy; that shoes seem an

indispensable element of humane living now, though, as Adam Smith

informs us, they were still only an optional decency in some parts of

Scotland in his time. But differences of this nature lead to no

practical difficulty, and the standard is fixity of measure itself when

compared with the indefinite claims that may be made in the name of

historical compensation, or wild theories of distributive justice, and

it makes a wholesome appeal to recognised obligations of humanity

instead of feeding a violent sense of unbounded hereditary wrong. At

all events, it presents the true equality--equality of moral

rights--over against the false equality of State socialism--equality of

material conditions; and it is able to present a better face against

that system, because it recognises a certain measure of material

conditions among the original moral rights. For this reason the English

theory of social politics is the best practical criterion for

discriminating between socialistic legislation and wholesome social

reforms. The State socialistic position cannot be advantageously

attacked from the ground of Mr. Spencer and the adherents of

_laissez-faire_, who merely say, Let misfortune and poverty alone;

whether remediable or irremediable, they are not the State's affairs.

The two theories nowhere come within range; but the English theory meets

State socialism at every point, almost hand to hand, for it admits the

State's competency to deal with poverty and misfortune, and to alter

men's material conditions to the extent needed for the practical

realization of their full moral rights.

III. _State Socialism and Social Reform._

On this English theory of social politics, the State, though not

socialist, is very frankly social reformer, and those schools of

opinion, which are usually thought to have been most averse to

Government intervention, have been among the most earnest in pressing

that _role_ upon the State. Cobden, I presume, may be taken as a fair

representative of the Manchester school, and Cobden, with all his love

of liberty, loved progress more, and thought the best Government was the

Government that did most for social reform. When he visited Prussia in

1838, he was struck with admiration at the paternal but improving rule

he found in operation there. "I very much suspect," he said, "that at

present for the great mass of the people Prussia possesses the best

Government in Europe. I would gladly give up my taste for talking

politics, to secure such a state of things in England. Had our people

such a simple and economical Government, so deeply imbued with justice

to all, and aiming so constantly to elevate mentally and morally its

population, how much better would it be for the twelve or fifteen

millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral

rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen!" So far from thinking, as

the Manchester man of polemics is always made to think, that the State

goes far enough when it secures to every man liberty to pursue his own

interest his own way, as long as he does not interfere with the

corresponding right of his neighbours, the Manchester man of reality

takes the State severely to task for neglecting to promote the mental

and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being to

establish not liberty alone, but every other necessary security for

rational progress. The theory of _laissez-faire_ would of course permit

measures required for the public safety, but what Cobden calls for are

measures of social amelioration. Provisions for the better protection of

person and property, as they exist, against violence or fraud, make up

but a small part of legitimate State duty, compared with provisions for

their better development, for enlarging the powers of the national

manhood, or the product of the national resources. The institution of

property itself is a provision for progress, and could never have

originated under the system of _laissez-faire_, which now makes it a

main branch of State work to defend it. In the form of permanent and

exclusive possession, it is undoubtedly a contravention of the equal

freedom of all to the use of their common inheritance, committed for the

purpose of securing their more productive use of it. It interferes with

their access to the land, and with the equality of their opportunities,

but then it enhances and concentrates the energies of the occupants, and

it doubles the yield of the soil. It promotes two objects, which are

quite as paramount concerns of the State as liberty itself--it improves

the industrial manhood of the nation, and it increases the productivity

of the natural resources; and institutions that conduce to such results

are not really infractions of liberty, but rather complements of it,

because they give people an ampler use of their own powers, and create,

by means of the increase of production they work, more and better

opportunities than those they take away.

Now the lines of legitimate intervention prescribed by the necessities

of progress, and already followed in the original institution of

property, will naturally, when extended through our complicated

civilization, include a very considerable and varied field of social and

industrial activity, and this has been all along recognised by the

English economists and statesmen. While opposed to the State doing

anything either moral or material for individuals, which individuals

could do better, or with better results, for themselves, they agreed in

requiring the State, first, to undertake any industrial work it had

superior natural advantages for conducting successfully; and second, to

protect the weaker classes effectively in the essentials of all rational

and humane living--in what Adam Smith calls "an undeformed and

unmutilated manhood"--not only against the ravages of violence or fear

or insecurity, but against those of ignorance, disease, and want. Smith,

we know, would even save them from cowardice by a system of military

training, and from fanaticism by an established Church, because, he

said, cowardice and fanaticism were as great deformities of manhood as

ignorance or disease, and prevented a man from having command of himself

and his own powers quite as effectually as violence or oppression. Laws

which give every man better command and use of his own energies are in

manifest harmony with liberty, and for the State to do such industrial

work as it has special natural advantages for doing is conformable with

the principle of free-trade itself, which has always prescribed to men

and nations as the best rule for their prosperity, that they should

concentrate their strength on the branches of industry they possess

natural advantages for cultivating, and give up wasting their labour on

less productive employment. Mr. Chamberlain is certainly wrong in

thinking over-government an extinct danger under democratic

institutions, a mere survival from times of oppression which haunts the

people still, though they are their own masters, with foolish fears of

over-governing themselves. In reality, the danger has much more probably

increased, as John Stuart Mill believed, for if we cannot over-govern

ourselves, we can very easily and cheerfully over-govern one another,

and a majority may impose its brute will with even less scruple than a

monarch; but however that may be, those who tremble most sincerely for

the ark of liberty cannot see any undue contraction of the field of

individual action in an extension of authority for either of the two

purposes here specified, for the purpose of undertaking industrial work

which private initiative cannot prosecute so advantageously, or of

making more secure to the weaker citizens those primary conditions of

normal humanity, which are really their natural right. The first of

these purposes is quite consistent with the principles of men like W.

von Humboldt, who contend that the best means of national prosperity is

the cultivation to the utmost of the individual energy of the people,

and who are opposed to Government interference because it represses or

supplants that energy. They welcome everything that tends to economize

and develop energy, to place things in the hands of those that can do

them best, and generally to increase the productive capacity of the

whole community. They believe that machinery, division of labour,

factory systems, keenest conditions of competition, however they may at

first seem to contract men's opportunities of employment, always end in

multiplying them, and, because they increase or economize the productive

powers of those actually employed, really expand the field of employment

for all. Now Government management would of course have a like operation

wherever Government management effected a like economy or increase in

the productive powers of society, and would really expand the field of

individual initiative which it appeared to contract; and those who

believe most in individual energy and its power of seeking out for

itself the most advantageous new outlets, will find least to complain of

in an intervention of authority which releases men from work ill-suited

to their powers to do, and sends them into work where their powers can

be more fruitfully occupied.

The second purpose of legitimate intervention seems even less open to

objection from that side. The State is asked to go in social reform only

as far as it goes in judicial administration--it is asked to secure for

every man as effectively as it can those essentials of all rational and

humane living which are really every man's right, because without them

he would be something less than man, his manhood would be wanting,

maimed, mutilated, deformed, incapable of fulfilling the ends of its

being. Those original requirements of humane existence are dues of the

common nature we wear, which, we cannot see extinguished in others

without an injury to our own self-respect, and the State is bound to

provide adequate securities for one of them as much as for another. The

same reason which justified the State at first in protecting person and

property against violence, justified it yesterday in abolishing slavery,

justifies it to-day in abolishing ignorance, and will justify it

to-morrow in abolishing other degrading conditions of life. The public

sense of human dignity may grow from age to age and be offended

to-morrow by what it tolerates to-day, but the principle of sound

intervention is all through the same--that the proposed measure is

necessary to enable men to live the true life of a man and fulfil the

proper ends of rational being. A thoughtful French writer defends State

intervention for the purpose of social amelioration as being a mere duty

of what he calls reparative justice. Popular misery and decadence, he

would say, is always very largely the result of bad laws and other bad

civil conditions, as we see it plainly to have been in the case of the

Irish cottiers, the Scotch crofters, and the rural labourers of England,

and when the community has really inflicted the injury, the community is

bound in the merest justice to repair it. And the obligation would not

be exhausted with the repeal of bad laws; it would require the positive

restoration to the declining populations of the conditions of real

prosperity from which they fell. But though this is a specific ground

which may occasionally quicken the State's remedial action with

something of the energy of remorse, it is no extension of its natural

and legitimate sphere of intervention, and the State might properly take

every measure necessary for the effectual restoration of a declining

section of the population to conditions of real prosperity on the broad

and simple principle already laid down, that the measure is necessary to

put those people in a position to fulfil their vocation as human beings.

Hopeless conditions of labour are as contrary to sound nature, and as

fatal to any proper use of man's energies, as slavery itself, and their

mere existence constitutes a sufficient cause for the State's

intervention, apart from any special responsibility the State may bear

for their historical origin. Even the measure of the required

intervention is no way less, for if its purpose is to preserve some

essential of full normal manhood, its only limit is that of being

effectual to serve the purpose. The original natural obligation of the

State needs no expansion then from historical responsibilities to cover

any effectual form of remedial action against the social decadence of

particular classes of the population, whether it be the constitution of

a new right like the right to a fair rent, the adoption of

administrative measures like the migration of redundant inhabitants, or

the provision of wise facilities for the rest by the loan of public

money.

It is plain, therefore, that we have here within the lines of accepted

and even "orthodox" English theory a doctrine of social politics which

gives the Government an ample and perfectly adequate place in the

promotion of all necessary social reform; and if we are all socialists

now, as is so often said, it is not because we have undergone any change

of principles on social legislation, but only a public awakening to our

social miseries. The Churches, for example, while they left Lord

Shaftesbury to fight his battles for the helpless alone, have now shared

in this social awakening, and show not only a general ardour to agitate

social questions, but even some pains to understand them; but the

Churches did not neglect Lord Shaftesbury fifty years ago, because they

thought his Factory Bills proceeded from unsound views of the State's

functions, but merely because their interest was not then sufficiently

aroused in the temporal welfare of the poor, and with all their

individual charities they responded little to the grievances of social

classes. We are all socialists now, only in feeling as much interest in

these grievances as the socialists are in the habit of doing, but we

have not departed from our old lines of social policy, and there is no

need we should, for they are broad enough to satisfy every claim of

sound social reform.

It is only when these lines are transgressed that, strictly speaking,

socialism begins; and though it is hopeless to think of confining the

vulgar use of the word to its strict signification, it is at least

essential to do so if we desire any clear or firm grasp of principle.

The socialism of the present time extends the State's intervention from

those industrial undertakings it is fitted to manage well to all

industrial undertakings whatever, and from establishing securities for

the full use of men's energies to attempting to equalize in some way the

results of their use of them. It may be shortly described as aiming at

the progressive nationalization of industries with a view to the

progressive equalization of incomes. The common pleas for this policy

are, first, the necessity of introducing a distribution of wealth more

in accordance with personal merit by neutralizing the effects of chance,

which at present throw some into opulence without any co-operation from

their own labour, and press thousands into penury in spite of their most

honest exertions; and second, the advantage society would reap from the

mere economy of the resources at present wasted in unnecessary

competition. Both pleas are, however delusive; it is neither good nor

possible to suppress chance, and if competition involves some loss, it

yields a much more abounding gain.

A sense of the blind play of chance in all things human lies indeed

beneath all work of social relief. "Hodie mihi, cras tibi," wrote the

good Regent Murray over his lintel to avert the grudge of envy, and the

same feeling of the uncertainty of fortune quickens the thought of pity.

Men reflect how much of their own comfort they owe to good circumstances

rather than good deserts, and how much more bad circumstances have often

to do with poverty than bad guiding. To change these bad conditions so

far as to preserve for every man intact the essentials of common

progressive manhood is a proper object of social work. But while

mitigating the operation of chance to that extent is well, to try and

suppress its operation altogether would be injurious, even if it were

possible. For there is no pursuit under the sun in which chance has not

its part as well as skill, and skill itself is often nothing but a quick

grasp of happy chance. To discourage the alert from seizing good

opportunities on the wing, by confiscating the results and distributing

them among the languid and inactive, is the same thing as to discourage

them by like means from exerting all their industry in any other way. It

violates their individual right with no better effect than to cripple

the national production. They are entitled to the best conditions for

the successful use of their individual energies, and the best conditions

for the use of individual energies are the true securities for national

progress. The sound policy is not the greater equalization of

opportunities, but their greater utilization. It may be right to make

ships seaworthy and their masters competent navigators, but if one of

them gets delayed in a calm or disabled by a storm, while another has

caught a fair wind and is carried on to port, it would answer no good

purpose to equalize their gains for the mere correction of the

inequality in their opportunities. It would relax in both masters alike

the supreme essentials of all successful labour--activity, vigilance,

enterprise. State action with respect to the quips and arrows of fortune

ought to go as far but no farther than State action with respect to the

crimes and hostilities of men, or with respect to evil forces of nature

like those of infectious diseases--it ought to content itself with

effectually protecting the primary conditions of sound manhood against

their outrages. It may do what it can, not merely to relieve the

unfortunate in their extremity, but to prevent their coming to

extremity, to arrest, if possible, their decline, to check or soften the

trade fluctuations that often swamp them, and to facilitate their

self-recovery; but, when it goes on to suppress or equalize the

operation of fortune, it destroys the good with the evil, and even if it

removed the tares, would find it had only spoiled the harvest of wheat.

The present industrial system has its defects, but it certainly has one

immense advantage which would be forfeited under socialism--it tends to

elicit to their utmost the talents and energies alike of employers and

employed. The languor of the "Government stroke" and the slow mechanism

of a State department are unfavourable to an abundant production. The

general slackening of industry, and the extinction of those innumerable

sources of active initiative which at present are so busy pushing out

new and fruitful developments, are too great a price to pay for the

suppression of the evils of competition. To effect some economies in the

use of capital, we damage or destroy the forces by which capital is

produced, and really lose the pound to save the penny.

Even from the standing-point of a good distribution of wealth, if by a

good distribution we mean, not an equal distribution of the produce,

however small the individual share, but, what is surely much better, a

high general level of comfort, though considerable inequalities may

remain, then an abundant production is still the most indispensable

thing, for it is the most certain of all means to that high general

level of comfort. Even in those agricultural countries where this result

is promoted by a land system favouring peasant properties, the result is

largely due to the fact that occupying ownership is itself the best

condition for high production; and if we compare the principal modern

industrial nations, we shall find labour enjoying the best real

remuneration in those where the rate of production is highest, where

employers are most competent, machinery most perfected, and labour

itself personally most efficient. And, on the other hand, while the

general level of comfort rises under a policy that develops productivity

even at the risk of widening inequality, the general level of comfort

always sinks under the contrary policy which sacrifices productivity to

socialistic ideas and claims.

We have practical experience of the working of socialism in various

forms, and under the most opposite conditions of culture, and the

experience is everywhere the same. Custom in Samoa, for example, gives a

man a pretty strict right to go to his neighbour and requisition what he

wants, or even to quarter himself in the house without payment, as long

as he pleases. No one dares to refuse, for fear of losing credit and

suffering reproach. Originating as a well-meant refuge for the

distressed, the system has become still more a subterfuge for the lazy,

and Dr. Turner sums up his account of it by saying, "This communistic

system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a

canker-worm at the roots of individual and national progress." The

disheartening of the industrious has an even worse effect than the

encouragement of the indolent; the more they make, the more subject they

are to the imposition. The English agricultural labourers belong to a

very different state of society from the savages of Samoa. They are of

an energetic race, which if it does not positively love work, has

probably as little aversion to it as any nation in the world, and seems

often really to delight in the hardest exertion; but in England the

effect of giving the poor a similar socialistic right was precisely the

same as in Samoa. While we are supposed to have been advancing in

socialism with our Factory Acts, we were really retreating from it in

our Poor Law. The old English laws which for centuries first fixed

labourers' wages, and then made up the deficiencies of the wages, if

such occurred, out of the poor rates, were certainly socialistic, and

the commission that inquired into their working sixty years ago reported

that their worst effect had been to make the labourers such poor workers

that they were hardly worth the wages they got. The men were by law

unable to earn more if they worked more, or to lose anything if they

worked less, and so their very working powers drooped and withered. As

most modern socialists put their trust entirely in the old motive of

self-interest, and propose to pay every man according to his work, their

only resource against such a result would be a stern system of poor-law

administration, like the English, and that would of course involve a

departure from their favourite ideal of furnishing the dependent poor

with as decent and comfortable a living as the independent poor gain for

themselves by their work. The change from Samoa to rural England is

probably not so great as the change from rural England to Brook Farm and

the other experimental communities of the United States, companies of

cultivated and earnest people, coming from one of the best civilized

stocks, and settling under the favourable material conditions of a new

country for the very purpose of working out a socialist ideal. Yet in

these American communities, socialistic institutions led to precisely

the same results as they did in England and in Samoa, a slackening of

industry, and a deterioration of the general level of comfort. No doubt,

as Horace Greeley said, who knew these communities well, and lived for a

time in more than one of them, there came to them along with the lofty

souls, who are willing to labour and endure, "scores of whom the world

is quite worthy, the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the

headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle,

the good-for-nothing generally, who, finding themselves utterly out of

place, and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that

they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be." But the

proportion of difficult subjects would not be larger in Brook Farm or

New Harmony than it is in the ordinary world outside, and in these

communities they would be under the constant influence of leaders of

the highest character and an almost religious enthusiasm. If the new and

better economic motives, which romantic socialists like Mr. Bellamy

always assure us are to carry us to such great things as soon as the

suppression of the present pecuniary motive allows them to rise into

operation--if the love of work for its own sake, the sense of public

duty, the desire of public appreciation, could be expected to prevail

anywhere to any purpose, it would be among the gifted and noble spirits

who founded the community of Brook Farm. But the late W. H. Channing,

who was a member of the community and looked back upon it with the

tenderest feelings, explains its failure by saying: "The great evil, the

radical, practical danger, seemed to be a willingness to do work half

thorough, to rest in poor results, to be content amidst comparatively

squalid conditions, and to form habits of indolence."[8]

The idleness of the idle was one of the chief standing troubles in all

the socialistic experiments of the United States. Mr. Noyes gives us an

account of forty-seven communistic experiments which had been made under

modern socialist influences in the United States and had failed, while

Mr. Nordhoff, on the other hand, furnishes a like account of seventy-two

communities, established mainly under religious influences (fifty-eight

of them belonging to the Shakers alone), which have been not merely

social but economic successes, some of them for more than a hundred

years; and one is struck with the degree in which the idler difficulty

has contributed to the failure of the forty-seven, and in which the

continual and comparatively successful conflict with that difficulty by

means of their peculiar system of religious discipline has aided in the

success of the other seventy-two. Mr. Noyes is himself founder of the

Oneida community, and bases his descriptions of the rest on information

supplied by men who were members of the communities he describes, or on

the materials collected by Mr. Macdonald, a Scotch Owenite, who visited

most of the American communities for the purpose of describing them. No

causes of failure are more often mentioned by him than "too many

idlers" and "bad management." Not that industry was relaxed all round.

On the contrary, it seems to have been a peculiarity of the Owenite and

Fourierist communities, that the industrious wrought much harder (and in

most of them for much poorer fare) than labourers of ordinary life.

Macdonald was surprised at the marvellous industry he saw as he watched

them, and would say to himself: "If you fail, I will give it up, for

never did I see men work so well and so brotherly with each other." But

then a little way off he would come on people who "merely crawled about,

probably sick (he charitably suggests), just looking on like myself at

anything which fell in their way." A very common feeling among members

of these communities seems to have been that they were far more troubled

with idlers than the rest of the world, because their system itself

presented special attractions to that unwelcome class. "Men came," says

one of the Trumbull Phalanx, "with the idea that they could live in

idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and their ideas

were practically carried out, while others came with good heart for the

work." The same testimony is given about the Sylvania Association. "Idle

and greedy people," says the writer of this testimony, "find their way

into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening

others with too much labour, and in times of scarcity supplying

themselves with more than their allowance of various necessaries,

instead of taking less." Idle and greedy people, no doubt, did get into

these communities, but these idle and greedy people constitute, I fear,

a very large proportion of mankind, and the point is that socialistic

institutions unfortunately offer them encouragement and opportunity. The

experience of American communism directly contradicts John Stuart Mill's

opinion, that men are not more likely to evade their fair share of the

work under a socialistic system than they are now. That difficulty in

one form or another was their constant vexation. The members of Owen's

community at Yellow Springs belonged in general to a superior class; but

one of them, in stating the causes of the failure of that community,

says: "The industrious, the skilful, and the strong saw the products of

their labour enjoyed by the indolent, and the unskilled, and the

improvident, and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians

insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common

happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest field or

the workshop. A lecturer upon Natural Science insisted upon talking only

while others worked. Mechanics whose day's labour brought two dollars

into the common stock insisted that they should in justice work only

half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought only one."

The same evil, according to R. D. Owen, contributed to the fall of New

Harmony; "there was not disinterested industry," he says, "there was not

mutual confidence." A lady who was a member of the Marlboro' Association

in Ohio, a socialistic experiment that lasted four years and then

failed, attributes the failure to "the complicated state of the business

concerns, the amount of debt contracted, and the feeling that each would

work with more energy, for a time at least, if thrown upon his own

resources, with plenty of elbow-room, and nothing to distract his

attention."

The magnitude of this difficulty only appears the greater when we turn

from the forty-seven socialistic experiments which have failed to the

seventy-two which have thriven. The Shakers and Rappists are undoubtedly

very industrious people, who, by producing a good article, have won and

kept for years a firm hold of the American market, and being, in

consequence of their institution of celibacy, a community of adult

workers exclusively, every man and every woman being a productive

labourer, the wonder is they are not wealthier and more prosperous even

than they are. Their economic prosperity is based, as economic

prosperity always is and must be, on their general habits of industry,

and the natural tendency of socialistic arrangements to relax these

habits is in their case effectually, though not without difficulty,

counteracted by their religious discipline. Idleness is a sin; next to

disobedience to the elders, no other sin is more reprobated among them,

because no other sin is at once so besetting and so dangerous there, and

the conquest and suppression of idleness is a continual object of their

vigilance, and of their ordinary devotional practice. Mr. Nordhoff

publishes a few of their most popular hymns, and one is struck with the

space the cultivation of personal industry seems to occupy in their

thoughts. "Old Slug," as they delight to nickname the idler, is the "Old

Adam" of the Shakers, and a public sentiment of hatred and contempt for

the indolent man is sedulously fostered by them. As they not only work,

but also live under one another's constant supervision, and within

earshot of one another's criticism, they more than replace the eye of

the master by the keener and more sleepless eye of moral and social

police. And if all this discipline fails, they have the last resource of

expulsion. They easily make the idler too uncomfortable to remain. "They

have," says Mr. Nordhoff, "no difficulty in sloughing off persons who

come with bad or low motives." They exercise, in short, the power of

dismissal, the last sanction in ordinary use in the old state of

society. Not that they make any virtue of strenuous labour. They work

moderately, and avoid anything like fatigue or exhaustion. They frankly

acknowledged to Mr. Nordhoff, once and again, that three hired men taken

in from the ordinary world would do as much work as five or six of their

members. Their wants are few and simple, and they are satisfied with the

moderate exertion that suffices to supply them; but they will tolerate

no shirking of that in any shape or form, and this alone saves them from

disaster. The experiences of these successful Shaker and Rappist

communities serve, therefore, to show, even better than the experiences

of the unsuccessful Owenite and Fourierist communities, the gravity that

the idleness difficulty would assume in a general socialistic _regime_,

which possessed nothing in the nature of the power of dismissal, and in

which we could not calculate either on the formation of an effective

public opinion against idleness, or on its effective application if it

were formed. The men who founded the unsuccessful communities were far

superior to the Shakers in business ability and education, and they had

more money to begin their experiments with, but where they failed the

Shakers have succeeded through the indirect economic effects of their

rigorous religious discipline. But the evidence is as plain in the one

case as in the other as to the natural, and even powerful, effect of

socialistic arrangements in relaxing the industry of many sorts and

conditions of men.

The same sources of evidence prove with equal clearness the development

under socialistic institutions of two other concurrent causes of

decline. I have already quoted Mr. Channing's statement that the Brook

Farm community showed a disposition to be content with comparatively

squalid conditions of life. Mr. Nordhoff would probably not use the word

squalid of anything he saw in the Shaker and Rappist communities he

describes, except perhaps in certain instances of the state of the

public streets; and in some points, such as the scrupulous cleanness of

the interior of their houses, he would set them far above their

neighbours--you could eat your dinner, he says, off their floors. Still

the people he found everywhere content, if not exactly with squalid,

certainly with poor and dull and rough conditions of life, much poorer,

duller, and rougher than they might easily be. They enjoyed equality,

security from harassing anxiety for the morrow, abundance even for their

limited wants, independence from subjection to a master, but they were

weak in the ordinary springs of progress. The spirit of material

improvement was not much abroad among them. Give me the stationary state

of society and contentment, you may exclaim; but then even this

stationary state is only maintained in these sequestered communities by

the constant play of peculiar religious influences which cannot be

counted on everywhere, and it would soon change into a declining state

in the great seething world outside if it were not effectively

counter-worked by the most powerful incentives to progress. Now the same

equalizing social arrangements which destroy one of the most essential

of these incentives by guaranteeing men the results of industry without

its exertion, enfeeble a second by predisposing them to rest content

with the lower conditions of life to which they are reduced.

A third cause of decline to which the American experience shows

socialistic institutions to be incident is a certain weakness in the

management, produced sometimes by divided counsels, sometimes by the

delay involved in getting the sanction of a Board to every little detail

of business, and sometimes by a difficulty which we find also

shattering similar experiments in France, that men were raised to the

Committee by their gifts of persuasion rather than their gifts of

administration. Well-meaning persons, with a great itch for managing

things, and a great turn for bungling them, for whom there is, under the

present order of society, a considerable safety-valve in philanthropy,

contrive in a socialistic community to get appointed on the Council of

Industry, and play sad havoc with the common good. While they preached

and wasted, the really practical men who, with better power of talk,

might have confounded them, could only sulk and grumble, and eventually

lost heart in their work, and all interest and confidence in the

concern. This had much to do, according to Mr. Meeker, an old

Fourierist, with the ruin of the North American Phalanx, one of the most

important of the transatlantic experiments, and it was the main cause

apparently of the downfall of the community of Coxsackie--"They had many

persons engaged in talking and law-making who did not work at any useful

employment; the consequences were that after struggling on for between

one and two years the experiment came to an end." A socialist State

would probably have as many difficulties with this bustling but

unsatisfactory class of persons as a socialist Phalanx, nor would the

evils of divided counsels and departmental delays be a whit milder; and

the extension of State management to branches of work for which it had

not otherwise some sort of special natural qualification would have the

same kind of ruinous operation.

In spirit and effect, therefore, as may be palpably seen from these

actual experiments, the equalizing institutions of socialism stand quite

apart from the very restricted use of State management and the remedial

or invigorating legislation that a sound social policy prescribes. When

England is accused of heading the nations in the race of State

socialism, because England has nationalized the post and telegraph

service, and passed a series of factory and agrarian Acts for the

protection of the weaker classes of the people, the accusation is made

without proper discrimination. It is not the frequency of the

intervention, but its purpose and consequences that make it socialistic.

If the post is better managed by the State than by private initiative,

if the factory and agrarian laws merely reinstate weaker classes in the

conditions essential for a normal human life, and neither seek nor

produce that equalization of the differences of fortune or skill which

is fatal to any high and progressive general level of comfort, then

there is no State socialism in it at all. State management is not pushed

beyond the limit of efficiency, nor popular rights beyond the positive

claims of social justice. Let us go a little further into detail.

IV. _State Socialism and State Management._

What are the conditions of efficient State administration? The State

possesses several natural characteristics which give it a decided

advantage as an industrial manager, some for one branch of work, some

for another. It has stability, it has permanency, and it has--what is

perhaps its principal industrial superiority--unrivalled power of

securing unity of administration, since it is the only agency that can

use force for the purpose. On the other hand, it has one great natural

defect, its want of a personal stake in the produce of the business it

conducts, its want of that keen check on waste and that pushing

incentive to exertion which private undertakings enjoy in the eye and

energy of the master. This is the great taproot from which all the usual

faults of Government management spring--its routine, red-tape spirit,

its sluggishness in noting changes in the market, in adapting itself to

changes in the public taste, and in introducing improved methods of

production. Government servants may very generally be men of a higher

stamp and training than the servants of a private company, but they are

proverbial, on the one hand, for a certain lofty disdain of the humble

but valuable virtue of parsimony, and, on the other, for an

unprogressive, unenterprising, uninventive administration of business.

Now the branches of industry which the State is fitted to carry on are

of course those in which its great fault happens to have small scope for

play, and in which its great merit or merits have great scope for play;

those, for example, which gain largely in efficiency or economy by a

centralized administration, and suffer little harm comparatively from a

routine one. That is the reason Governments always manage the postal

service well. In post-office work the specific industrial superiority of

Government carries its maximum of advantage, and its specific industrial

defect does its minimum of injury. The carrying and delivery of letters

from one part of the empire to another require, for efficiency, a single

co-ordinated system, and, on the other hand, those operations themselves

are of so unvariable and routine a character that little harm is done by

their being carried on in a routine spirit; they involve so little

capital expenditure--the entire capital of the department in England is

only L80,000--that the opportunity for waste and corruption is slight;

and being conducted much more largely under the public eye than the

affairs of other departments of State, they are consequently subject to

the constant and interested criticism of the people whose wants they are

meant to satisfy. The same reason explains why Government dockyards and

arms factories are always managed so unsatisfactorily. There is, on the

one hand, no need in them for any higher unity of administration than is

wanted in any ordinary single business establishment; but, on the other,

progressiveness and adaptability are of the first moment, routine and

obstruction to improvement being indeed among their worst dangers. Then

the risk of prodigality and corruption is high, for their capital

expenditure is great, and the check of public criticism very distant and

ineffectual. So exceptional a business is the post, that the telegraphs,

though managed by the same department, have never been managed with the

same success. They were bought at first at a ransom, they have involved

an increasing loss nearly ever since, and the public have to pay

practically as much for their telegrams--perhaps more--than the public

of the United States pay to their telegraph companies. Even in the

postal department, Government administration shows the usual official

slowness in adopting much-needed and even lucrative reforms. Of this, a

good example occurred only the other day. It was not until a Boys'

Messenger Company was already in the field and doing the work, that the

Postmaster-General was brought to recognise, as he said, "the

desirability of providing a more rapid means of transmitting single

letters for short distances and under special circumstances than at

present exists."

It ought of course to be acknowledged that State management in England

is tried under the very worst possible conditions, inasmuch as it is

tied to the fortunes and exigencies of political party. No business

could be expected to thrive where the supreme control is placed in the

hands of a good parliamentary debater, who knows nothing about the

special work of the department he undertakes; where, even at that, this

inexperienced hand is changed for another inexperienced hand every three

or four years; where policy shifts without continuity, to dodge the

popular breeze of to-day, or to catch the popular breeze of to-morrow;

and where the actual incumbent of office, is always able to evade

censure by throwing the responsibility on his predecessors, who are out

of office. Well may a sagacious man like Mr. Samuel Laing, with large

experience of administration both in the affairs of State and of private

companies, exclaim: "I often think what the result would be if the

railway companies managed their affairs on the same principles as the

nation applies to its naval and military expenditure. Suppose the

Brighton Board were turned out every three years, and a new Board came

in with new views and a new policy, and new men at the head of the

locomotive, traffic, and other spending departments, how long would it

be before expenses went up and dividends down?" If State management is

to succeed--if it is to have fair play--it must be entirely divorced

from party fortunes, while subject, of course, to the criticism of

Parliament, under some system like that adopted in Victoria for the

management of the railways. In such circumstances the question of the

advisability of Government assuming the management of any industry, is a

question of balancing the probable gains from the greater unity of the

administration against the probable losses from its greater inertia.

There are some exceptional branches of industry in which Government does

better than private persons, because private persons have too little

interest to do the work well, or even to do it at all, and there are

others in which the State's very want of personal interest is its

advantage instead of its drawback. Forestry is the best example of the

first sort. One generation must plant, and another cut down, so that the

present owner is often unwilling to incur the expense of a speculation

of which he is unlikely to live to reap the fruits; but the natural

permanence of the State leads it to do more justice to this important

branch of production, and experience everywhere shows that State forests

are more productive than private ones. In Prussia and Belgium they are

nearly twice as productive. The average annual produce of all forests in

Prussia (including State forests) is 0.36 thaler per Morgen, but the

produce of State forests alone is 0.66 thaler per Morgen. In Belgium the

produce of all forests is 19.33 francs per hectare, and of State forests

34.42 francs.[9] The erection of lighthouses is also a public service,

which falls to the State because of individual inability; it cannot be

undertaken in any way to make it remunerative to private adventurers.

The best example of an industrial work for which the State's want of

personal interest is its advantage is the Mint. Nobody would trust the

stamp of a private assayer as he trusts the stamp of the Government,

because the private assayer could never succeed in placing his personal

disinterestedness so absolutely above the suspicion of fraud. The policy

of the official attestation of the quality of commodities is often

disputed on the ground that it discourages improvement above the pass

standard, but it is never doubted that if a brand is wanted, the brand

to command most confidence is the brand of the Crown. Our own

Government, out of the infinity of commodities offered for sale, attests

none but six--butter, herrings, plate, gun barrels, chains, and

anchors--articles in which the dangers of deterioration probably exceed

the chances of improvement, and in the case of some of these six there

is a strong feeling abroad that the State's intervention is doing more

harm than good. Scotch herrings have suffered lately in the German

markets, because they were worse cured than the Norwegian, and the

herring brand was blamed for the unprogressiveness of the cure. This

class of interventions, therefore, is neither numerous now, nor likely

to become very numerous in the future.

A more important class of undertakings in which the State's industrial

advantage lies in its superiority to the temptations of self-interest,

is that of industries which naturally assume something of the character

of a monopoly, and in which self-interest lacks both the check on its

rapacity, and the spur to its activity supplied by effective

competition. It is true of more things than railways that when

combination is possible, competition is impossible, and the growth of

syndicates, trusts and pooling arrangements at the present day has led

to considerable agitation for State interference, especially in the case

of commodities like salt and coal, which are necessaries of life. Our

experience of these things is as yet limited, but so far as it has gone

it seems to show that the public dangers dreaded from them are apt to be

exaggerated. The combinations fear to raise the price to the public so

high as to provoke competition, and in most cases in America have not

raised it at all, drawing their advantage rather from the reduction in

expense of management, and the saving of capital; and the State would

not be likely to manage industries producing for the markets any better

than, or even so well as, the more keenly interested board of private

directors. But if the balance of evidence seems against public

management in this class of monopolies, it stands, I think, decidedly in

favour of public management in another and not unimportant class. The

gas and water supply of towns is a monopoly, and though the point is not

undisputed, it appears to answer better on the whole in public than in

private hands, because the management has no interest to serve except

the interest of the public. Experience has not been everywhere the same,

but usually it has been that under municipal control the quality of the

gas has been improved and the price reduced. But this is municipal

management of course, not State management, and the difference is

material, inasmuch as municipal management, in the case of gas and water

supply, is the management of the production of things of general

consumption under the direct control of the very people who consume

them, so that it is constantly exposed to effective public criticism,

perhaps as good a substitute as things admit of for the eye of the

master. The natural defect of public management is so mitigated by this

circumstance, that probably of all forms of public management, municipal

management is the best, and when applied to branches of production that

tend to become monopolies at any rate, it answers well. The question is

entirely different with proposals that are sometimes made for converting

into municipal monopolies branches of production--such, for example, as

the bread supply of the community--which are carried on by individual

management under effective competition. To do as well as joint-stock

management uncontrolled by competition is one thing; to do as well as

individual management subject to competition is another; and so long as

public management replaces nothing but the former class of enterprises,

which are in any case a sort of natural monopolies, it will never

contract the vast field of individual enterprise to any very serious

extent.

When we pass from municipal monopolies to State monopolies, the problem

becomes more grave. The two largest current proposals of this kind are

those of land nationalization and railway nationalization. The former

proposal, though much more noisily advocated than the other, has

incomparably the weaker case. For apart altogether from the mischief of

making every rent settlement a political question, and looking at the

matter merely in its economic aspect, land, of all things, is that which

is least suited for centralized administration, and yields its best

results under the minute concentrated supervision of individual and

occupying ownership. The magic of property is now a proverbial phrase;

it is truer of land than anything else, and it merely means that for

land interested administration is everything, comprehensive

administration nothing, that the zeal of the resident owner to improve

his own land knows no limit, whereas the obstructive forces of routine

and official inertia have nowhere more power to blight than in land

management. In Adam Smith's time, as he mentions in the "Wealth of

Nations," the Crown lands were everywhere the least productive lands in

their respective countries, and the experience is the same still. It is

so even in Prussia, in spite of its economical and skilled bureaucracy.

Professor Roscher says it is a common remark in Germany that Crown lands

sell for a greater number of years' purchase than other lands, because

they are known to be less improved, and are therefore expected to yield

better results to the energy of the purchaser, and he quotes official

figures for 1857, showing that the domain land of Prussia had not risen

in value so much as the other land in the country. Great expectations

are often entertained from the unearned increment, though there is not

likely to be much of that in agricultural land for years to come; but

what is a much more important consideration for the community is the

earned increment, and under State management the earned increment would

infallibly decline. Of course, this does not exclude the necessity of

strict State control, so far as required by justice, humanity, and the

growth and comfort of the general community. Under land nationalization

here I have not considered schemes which do not give the State any real

ownership in the land more than it at present enjoys, or, at any rate,

place no real management of the land in its hands. The rival schemes of

Mr. A. R. Wallace and Mr. Henry George are really only more or less

objectionable methods of increasing the land-tax.

The question of a State railway is not so easily determined. There are

certainly few branches of business where unity of administration is more

advantageous, or where the public would benefit more from affairs being

conducted from the public point of view of developing the greatest

amount of gross traffic, instead of from the private point of view of

making the greatest amount of net profit. A railway differs from other

enterprises, because it affects all others very seriously for good or

ill; it may for the sake of more profit give preferences that are

hurtful to industrial development, or deny facilities that are essential

to it. A private company may find it more profitable to carry a less

quantity at a high rate than a greater quantity at a low, and it cannot

be expected to run a line that does not pay, though the general

community might benefit greatly more by the increase of traffic which

the line creates than covers the loss incurred by running it. Now it is

impossible to exaggerate the importance of having a public work like a

railway, which can help or hinder every trade in the land, conducted

from a public point of view instead of a private, and the present

discussion in this country on rates and fares points to the desirability

of changes to which private companies are not likely to resort of their

own accord, nor the railway commission to be able to compel them. But,

on the other hand, it is equally impossible to exaggerate the risks of

the undertaking. The post office, with its capital of L80,000, is a

plaything to the railways with their capital of L800,000,000, and their

revenue little short of that of the State itself. The operations are of

a most varied nature, and only some of them could be exposed to

effective criticism. The mere transaction of purchase excites in many

minds a not unreasonable fear. If Government made a bad bargain with the

telegraph companies, it would be sure to make a worse with the railway

companies, who are fifty times more powerful; and besides, it would very

likely have to borrow its money at a higher figure, for though it could

borrow two millions at 3 per cent., it could not therefore borrow eight

hundred millions, for the simple reason that the number of people who

want 3 per cent. is limited, most holders of stock preferring

investments which, though more risky, offer a prospect of more gain. If

in trying to balance these weighty _pros_ and equally weighty _cons_ one

turns to the experience of State railways, he will find that as yet it

affords few very sure or decisive data, because it varies in the

different countries and times, and has been very differently

interpreted.

Of the Continental State railways, those of Belgium and Germany are

usually counted the most favourable examples. But Mr. Hadley, in his

excellent work on Railway Transportation, shows that the State lines of

Belgium were conducted in an extremely slovenly, perfunctory way until

1853, when private lines began to increase and compete with them, and

that though the low rates which this competition was the means of

introducing still remain after the private lines have been largely

bought out, there has been, on the other hand, latterly a decline in the

profits of the State system, an increasing tendency to slackness and

inertia in the management, and growing complaints of creating posts to

reward political services, and manipulating accounts to suit Government

exigencies. In Germany the rates are certainly low and the management

economical, but complaints are made that less is done for the

encouragement of the national resources, and unprofitable traffic is

more severely declined than by the private railways. On the whole,

probably the best State railway system is that of Victoria; charging low

rates, self-supporting, offering every encouragement to industrial

development; and the opinion of England will probably be largely

determined by further observation of that experiment.

The sister colony of New Zealand has made a successful experiment in

another department of industrial enterprise, life insurance, for which

Government management indeed is highly adapted, because, in the first

place, it is a business in which absolute security is of the last

consequence, and there is no security like Government guarantee; and in

the second, it is a business in which the calculations of the whole

administration are virtually matters of mechanical routine. The

Government office was only opened in 1871, under the influence of a

widespread distrust of private offices, caused by recent bankruptcies,

and it now transacts one-third of the life insurance business of the

colony; it has probably tended to encourage life insurance, for while

there are only 26 policies per 1000 of population in the United Kingdom,

there are 80 per 1000 in New Zealand, and its management is much cheaper

than that of any other insurance company in the colony, except the

Australian United. The proportion of expenses to revenue in the

Australian United is 13.66 per cent., in the Government Office 17.23,

and in none of the other companies (whose gross business, however, is

much smaller) is it under 43.02.

Adam Smith thought there were only four branches of enterprise which

were fitted to be profitably conducted by a joint-stock company. We have

seen in our day almost every branch of industry conducted by such

companies, and an idea is often expressed that whatever a joint-stock

company can do, Government can do at least quite as well, because the

defect of both is the same. The defect is the same, but Government has

it in larger measure. Joint-stock management is certainly much less

productive in most industries than private management. The Report of the

Massachusetts Labour Bureau for 1878 contains some curious statistics on

the subject. There were then in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,

10,395 private manufacturing establishments, employing in all 166,588

persons, and 520 joint-stock manufacturing establishments, employing

101,337 persons, and the private establishments, while they paid a much

higher average rate of wages than the joint-stock, produced at the same

time not far from twice as much for the capital invested. The average

wages per head in the private establishments was 474.37 dollars a year,

and in the joint-stock was 383.47 dollars a year; while the produce per

dollar of capital was 2.58 dollars' worth in the private, and 1.37

dollars' worth in the joint-stock, and though part of this difference is

attributed to the circumstance that private manufacturers sometimes hire

their factories and companies do not, the substance of it is believed to

be due to the inferiority of the joint-stock management. Anyhow, that

circumstance could have no influence in producing the very marked

difference in the wages given by the two classes of enterprise, and the

higher wages would not, and could not, be given unless the production

was higher. If all the industries of the country, then, were put under

joint-stock management, the result would be (1) a general reduction in

the amount produced, and (2) a consequent reduction in the general

remuneration of the working classes, and the general level of natural

comfort; and the result would be still worse under universal Government

management. One of the labourer's greatest interests is efficient

management, and if he suffers from the replacement of individual

employers by joint-stock companies, he would suffer much more by the

replacement of both by the State, excepting only in those few

departments of business for which the State happens to possess peculiar

advantages and aptitude.

V. _State Socialism and Popular Right._

The limits of the legitimate intervention of the public authority with

respect to the moral development of the community are prescribed by a

different rule from those with respect to its material development.

Efficiency is still, indeed, a governing consideration, for perhaps more

measures for popular improvement fail from sheer ineffectuality than

from any other reason. The history of social reform is strewn thick with

these dead-letter measures. There is a cry and a lamentation, and a

feeling that something must be done; and an Act of Parliament is passed

containing injunctions which no Act of Parliament can enforce, or which

address themselves to mere accidental circumstances, and leave the real

causes of the evil entirely unaffected. And there would be no

impropriety in describing impracticable or ill-directed legislation of

this kind as being socialistic, for, besides the old association of

socialism with impracticable schemes, impracticable legislation is

always unjust legislation, and unjust legislation for behoof of the

labouring class is essentially socialistic. Every State interference

necessarily involves a certain restriction of the liberty or other

general rights of some class of persons; and although this restriction

would be perfectly justifiable if it actually secured the prior or more

urgent right of another and perhaps much more numerous class of persons,

it is injustice, and nothing but injustice, when it merely hurts the

former class without doing any good to the latter. It may hurt both

classes even--well-meaning meddling often does; but what I desire to

bring out here is that labour legislation, which may have been entirely

just and free from socialism in its intention, may be unjust and full of

socialism in its result. We may therefore, without any fault, include

under the head of State socialism that common sort of proposal which,

without urging any wrong claim, merely asks the State to do the wrong

thing--to do either something it cannot do at all, or something that

will not answer the purpose intended. It is socialistic not because it

is impracticable, but because it is unjust.

Since well-meant legislation may thus become urgent, and therefore

socialistic for want of result, it is plain that the efficiency of the

intervention is a very important consideration in determining the

State's duty with respect to popular rights. But the primary

consideration here is the extent of the moral claim which the

individual, by reason of his weakness, has upon the resources of

society, and it is upon that consideration that the division of

conflicting political theories on the subject turns. All the several

theories are agreed that the enlargement of popular rights, when the

enlargement is required by a just popular claim, is entirely within the

proper and natural province of the State; where they differ, and differ

seriously, is partly in their views of the justice of particular

elements in the popular claim of the time being, but more especially in

their whole conception of the nature and extent of the popular claim in

general. There are still some persons to be found contending that there

are no such things as natural rights, and there are plenty who cannot

hear the words without a sensation of alarm. But it is now generally

admitted, even by those who adopt the narrowest political theories, that

legal rights are merely the ratification of moral rights already

existing, and that the creation of new legal rights for securing the

just aspirations of ill-protected classes of the people belongs to the

ordinary daily duties of all civil government. Mr. Spencer very readily

admits that some of the latest constituted rights in this country--the

new seamen's right of the Merchant Shipping Act, and the new women's

right of the Married Women's Property Act--are perfectly justifiable for

the prevention in the one case of seamen being fraudulently betrayed

into unseaworthy ships, and in the other of women being robbed of their

own personal earnings. But then the new rights which he would most

condemn--the right to public assistance, the right to education, the

right to a habitable dwelling, the right to a fair rent--are quite as

susceptible of justification on the ground of natural justice as either

the right to a seaworthy ship or the right to one's own earnings. Mr.

Spencer's theory errs by unduly contracting men's natural claim. They

have a right to more than equal freedom; they have a right, to use

Smith's phrase, to an undeformed and unmutilated humanity, to that

original basis of human dignity which it is the business of organized

society to defend for its weaker members against the assaults of fortune

as well as the assaults of men. That is what I have called, for the sake

of distinction, the English theory of social politics. On the other

hand, socialism unduly extends this claim. The right to fair wages is

one thing; the State could not realize it, but it at least represents no

unjust aspiration; but the right to an equal dividend of the national

income, claimed by utopian socialists, including Mr. Bellamy at the

present day, and the right to the full produce of labour claimed by the

revolutionary socialists, and meaning, as explained by them, the right

to the entire product of labour and capital together, are really rights

to unfair wages, and the whole objection to them is that they are at

variance with social justice. If we keep these distinctions in view, we

shall be able to discriminate between interventions of authority which

are innocent, and interventions which are tainted with State socialism.

Take an illustration or two, 1st, of interventions for settling the

claims of the poor in society in general, and 2nd, of interventions for

adjusting the differences between one class and another, between

employer and labourer, between landlord and tenant, and the like.

1. Under the first head, the most important question is the question of

public assistance. Prince Bismarck created a considerable European

sensation when he first announced his new social policy in 1884, by

declaring in favour of the three claims of labour, which have been so

commonly regarded as the very alpha and omega of social revolution--the

right to existence for the infirm, the right to labour for the

able-bodied, and the right to superannuation for the aged. "Give the

labourer," he said, "the right to labour when he is able-bodied; give

him the right to relief when he is sick; give him the right to

maintenance when he is old; and if you do so--if you do not shrink from

the sacrifice, and do not cry out about State socialism whenever the

State does anything for the labourer in the way of Christian

charity--then I believe you will destroy the charm of the Wyden (_i.e._,

Social Democratic) programme." These three rights are really two, the

right of relief when one is sick and of maintenance when one is old

being only different phases of the right to existence. Now the right to

existence and the right to labour are in themselves both perfectly just

claims, but the construction Prince Bismarck gave them passed decidedly

over into State socialism.

The right to existence is seldom called in question. Malthus, it is

true, said a man had a right to live only as he had a right to live a

hundred years--_if he could_. He might as well have argued that a man

had a right to escape murder only as he had a right to escape murder for

a hundred years--_if he could_. It is really because he cannot that he

has the right--it is because he cannot protect himself against violence

that he has a right to protection from the State, and because, and as

far as, he cannot protect himself against starvation that he has a just

claim upon the State for food. And his claim is obviously bounded in the

one case as in the other by the ability of society. If society cannot

protect him, it is of course absurd to talk of any right to its

protection, but if society can, society ought. To suffer a

fellow-citizen to die of hunger is felt by a civilized community to be

at least as just a disgrace to its government as it would be to leave

him a prey to the knife of the assassin, or to the incursions of

marauders from over the enemy's border. But as the State furnishes

protection against human violence by its courts of justice, and against

disease by its sanitary laws, so it furnishes protection against famine

and indigence by its legal provision of relief. The claim of the

perishing stands on the same footing as any other claim which is an

admitted right of man to-day; it is a claim to an essential condition of

normal manhood--to existence itself. But then, if the right to existence

must be admitted, it can only be admitted where the individual is, for

whatever reason, unable to make provision for himself, and it can only

be admitted in such measure and form as will not discourage other

individuals from trying to make independent provision for themselves

before their day of disability comes, because that, in turn, is the way

prescribed by normal manhood and true human dignity.

What State socialists claim, however, is not the right to existence, but

the right to decent and comfortable existence--the right to the style of

living which is customary among the independent poor. The labourer

ought, in their eyes, to be treated as a public servant, and his sick

pay and his pension ought both to be commensurate with the claims and

dignity of honest labour. Now it is of course impossible not to

sympathize much with this view, but the difficulty is that if you make

assisted labour as good as independent labour, you shall soon have more

assisted labour than you can manage, you shall have weakened the push,

energy, and forethought of your labouring class, you shall have really

done much to destroy that very dignity of labour which you desire to

establish. The State may probably, with great advantage, do more for

working-class insurance than it at present does. It could conduct the

business of the burial benefit and the superannuation benefit better

than any private company or friendly society, because it could offer a

surer guarantee and the business is routine; Mr. Gladstone's excellent

annuity scheme has remained sterile only because it has not been pushed,

and the canvasser and collector are indispensable in working-class

insurance. But the socialist proposal is that the State ought to give

every man a pension after a certain age, irrespectively altogether of

his own contributions. Mr. Webb is one of its most recent advocates,

and, according to the useful figures he has taken the trouble to obtain,

there are in the United Kingdom 1,700,000 persons over sixty-five years

of age, of whom 1,300,000 contrive to pension themselves, either by

their own savings or the assistance of their families, while the

remaining 400,000 are supported by the rates at an average cost of ten

guineas a year. Mr. Webb's proposal is that in order to save the

feelings of the 400,000 dependants you are to make the other 1,300,000

persons dependants along with them, and give ten guineas a year all

round. But you cannot make a public dole a pension by merely calling it

a pension. A pension is a payment made by one's actual employer for work

done--it is wages, and the man who has earned his own pension, or has

provided it by his own saving, feels himself and is an independent man.

It is right to maintain the 400,000--whether out of national or

parochial funds is a detail--but sound policy would rather aim at

raising the 400,000 to be as the 1,300,000, than at lowering the

1,300,000 to the level of the 400,000. With Mr. Webb it is not a

question of giving the 400,000 better allowances than they receive at

present--which might be most reasonably entertained--but it is a mere

question of not suffering them to be looked down on by the 1,300,000 who

have fought their own way, and that is not possible, nor, with all

respect for them, is it, from a public point of view, desirable. It is

right to support those who cannot support themselves, but it is neither

right nor wise to remove all distinction between the dependent poor and

the independent.

But the line between State socialism and sound social politics in the

matter of public assistance may perhaps be better shown in another

branch of Poor Law administration--the right to labour for the

able-bodied. The socialist right to labour is the right of the

unemployed to get labour in their own trades and at good or current

rates of wages. That is the right which Bismarck substantially admitted

in his famous speech. He said there was a crowd of suitable undertakings

which the State could establish to furnish the unemployed with a fair

day's wage for a fair day's work. It is also practically the right which

prevailed in England between 1782, when Gilbert's Act abolished the old

workhouse test, and 1835, when the new Poor Law restored it. Gilbert's

Act gave the able-bodied poor the right (1) to obtain from the guardians

work near their own residence and suited to their respective strength

and capacity; (2) to receive for their labour all the money earned by

it; and (3) if that sum fell short of their requirements, to have the

difference made up out of the parochial funds. The effect of that, as we

know, was, that public relief became too desirable, the dependants on it

multiplied, the poor rate rose, the wages of labour fell, the very

efficiency of the labourer himself withered, and the new Poor Law

reverted to the workhouse test, which, harsh though it was considered to

be, was in reality a necessary defence of the character and comfort of

the labouring class from further decadence.

To provide the unemployed with work in their own trades is only to

increase the evil you wish to remedy, for the very existence of the

unemployed shows that those particular trades are slack at the time,

that there is no demand for the articles they produce, and consequently

any attempt by the State to throw fresh supplies of these articles on

the already over-stocked market can have no other effect than to

increase the depression and turn out of employ the men that are still at

work. Paying relief work at the common market rate of wages is attended

with the same objection. The remedy only aggravates the disease, and

what ought to be merely the labourer's temporary resource against

adversity tends to grow into his regular staff of life. Relief wages,

while sufficient for the family's support, should remain below the

current rates so as to give the labourer an effective inducement to seek

better employment as soon as better employment can possibly be obtained.

The true and natural defence against misfortune is the man's own

personal exertion and provision, and the purpose of the public

intervention is to stimulate and assist, not to supplant, that _vis

medicatrix naturae_.

But under these limitations a right to labour is a just claim of the

unfortunate. It is admitted in the English Poor Law, and it is admitted

in the Scotch parochial practice, which constructively considers want of

employment a form of sickness or accident, and it requires in both

countries to be better realized than it is. 1st: although it is

unadvisable to give every man work at his own trade, and although the

choice of trades for relief purposes is attended with as much difficulty

as the choice of those for prison labour is found to be, yet certainly

the circle of relief trades ought to be extended beyond stone-breaking

and oakum-picking. Socialists themselves are among the foremost in

complaining of the competition of prison labour with honest labour,

although they fail to see that precisely the same objection attends the

competition of relieved labor in public workshops with unrelieved labour

in regular private employment. The kind of work most free from objection

on this score would probably be the production of articles now imported

from abroad, and there are a great many trades in which, while we make

most of their products at home, we import particular articles or sorts

of articles for one reason or another. Some of these might be found

suitable for the purpose in view. Or the men in the public workshops

might be employed in making a variety of things used in public offices,

imperial or local. 2nd: what is even more important, a distinction ought

to be made between the industrious poor and that residuum of confirmed

failures for whom the stoneyard test is really intended, and the former

ought not to be made to feel themselves any way degraded in their work,

their small remuneration being trusted to act as a sufficient preventive

against their permanent dependence on the public for employment. 3rd:

then a third and most important requisite is to supplement the public

provision of work with a public provision of information about the

demand for labour over the country from day to day, so as not merely to

support the men in adversity, but to facilitate their restoration to

their normal condition of prosperity.

For we ought to recognise that though the problem of the unemployed is

not, as many persons imagine, one of increasing gravity in our

time--although, on the contrary, if we go back thirty years, sixty

years, or a hundred years, we always find worse complaints and more

distressing sufferings from that cause than at present, yet it is

certainly a constant problem. The unemployed we have always with us, and

even their numbers vary less from time to time than we are apt to

suppose. Trades dependent on fine weather are, of course, slack in

winter, but then trades dependent on fashion are slack in summer, while

there are some large trades--such as the shoemakers--that are made brisk

by bad weather. Even a general commercial crisis which throws the

workpeople of many trades idle, makes those of others busy. The building

trades are always busy in bad times, because money and labour are then

cheap, and the opportunity is seized of building or extending factories,

and laying down plant of every description. It was so to a very

remarkable extent during the Lancashire cotton distress of 1862; it was

so all over England in the depression of 1877-78, and the same fact was

observed again in Scotland, and commented upon by the factory inspector

in 1886. Other trades are brisker in a crisis for less happy causes,

_e.g._, the bakers for the melancholy reason that the working classes

are more generally driven from meat to bread. These natural corrections

or compensations elicited by the depression itself prevent the numbers

of the unemployed from growing so very much larger in a crisis than in

ordinary times that their case would not be overtaken satisfactorily by

the general systematic provision of relief work, if that were once

established. The excess is met now so effectually by a few special local

efforts, that we have sometimes far fewer able-bodied paupers in bad

years than in good. The number of able-bodied paupers was very much less

in the bad years 1876-1878 than in the good years immediately after

them, or in the still better years immediately before them. The problem

being, then, so largely constant from season to season, and from cycle

to cycle, ought clearly to be solved by a permanent and systematic

provision.

The same principle which governs this right to labour--the principle of

preventing degradation and facilitating self-recovery--governs other

social legislation for the unfortunate besides the Poor Law. It lies at

the bottom of the homestead exemptions of America, and our own

prohibition of arrestment of tools and wages for debt, and our

occasional measures for cancelling arrears. It is the principle laid

down by Pitt when he said that no temporary occasion should be suffered

to force a British subject to part with his last shilling. He had a

right to his last shilling, because he had a right to an undegraded

humanity. The last shilling stopped his fall, and perhaps helped him to

rise again.

Many persons will admit the right to public assistance, because it seems

limited to saving men from extremities, who will see nothing but

socialism of a perilous sort in other public provisions, for which

popular claims are advanced. Schools, museums, libraries, parks, open

spaces, footpaths, baths, are certainly means of intellectual and

physical life, which keep the manhood of a community in normal vigour;

but, it will be asked, if the State once begins to supply such things,

where is it to stop? Is free education to go beyond the primary

branches? What length are you to go? is the question Mr. Spencer always

raises as a bar to your going at all. But the same question of degree

can be raised about everything, about the duties Mr. Spencer himself

imposes upon the State as really as about those he refuses to sanction.

In the matter of protection, for instance, how many policemen are we

required to detail to a district? Or how great an army and navy are we

to maintain? During the excitement about the Jack the Ripper murders

there was much clamour about the police being too few, and we are

subject to periodical panics as to our imperial defences, in the course

of which no two persons agree in answering the question, what length are

we to go? The question can only be settled of course by measuring the

length of our necessities with the length of our purse, and the same

class of considerations rules in the other case, the importance and cost

of the given provision to a community of such education and culture,

together with the impossibility of getting it adequately supplied

without public agency. The opinion of the time may vary as to what is

essential for a whole and wholesome manhood, and its resources may vary

as to what may be easily borne to supply it; but the same variation

takes place with respect to the duties of national defence, or the

administration of justice. The objection is therefore nothing more or

less than the very ancient and famous logical fallacy with which the

Greek sophists used to nonplus their antagonists. As in other affairs,

the problem so far will settle itself practically as it goes along, and

the important distinction to bear in mind is that to give every man the

essential conditions of all humane living is a very different kind of

aim from giving every man the same share in the national production, or

a lien on his neighbour's luck or industry or alertness.

2. From rights realizing general claims of the unfortunate on society at

large, let us now pass to rights realizing special claims of certain

weaker classes of society against certain stronger classes. The most

typical examples of this sort of legislation are the intervention of the

State between buyer and seller, between landlord and tenant, between

employer and labourer, for the judicial determination of a fair price, a

fair rent, or fair wages, or for the regulation of the conditions of

labour, and tenure of land. Professor Sidgwick declares the Irish and

Scotch Land Acts, which provide for the judicial determination of a fair

rent, to be the most distinctively socialistic measures the English

Legislature has yet passed; but in reality these Land Acts are not a bit

more socialistic than the laws which fix a fair price for railway rates

and fares, and much less socialistic than the old usury Acts which

sought to determine fair interest. Such interferences with freedom of

contract as these are, of course, only justifiable when the absence of

effective competition places the real power of settlement of terms

practically in the hands of one side alone, and conduces, therefore,

inevitably to the serious injury and oppression of the other. Parliament

controls railway charges because the railway companies enjoy a monopoly

of most important business, and might use their monopoly to wrong the

public, and when Parliament is asked, as it sometimes is, to discourage

corners, rings, syndicates, or pooling combinations, it is on the ground

that these various agencies are attempts, more or less successful, to

exclude competition for the purpose of exacting from the public more

than a fair price. On the other hand, the reason why we have given up

fixing fair interest now is because we have come to see that

competition, being very effective among money-lenders, fixes it far

better for us without the intervention of the law, and, of course, an

unnecessary interference with freedom of contract is nothing but

pernicious. But, although for ordinary commercial loans the competition

of lenders is a sufficient security for the fair treatment of borrowers,

it affords no protection against extortion to the very necessitous man,

who must accept any terms or starve. His poverty leaves him no proper

freedom to make a contract, and the law still condemns oppressive rates

of usury, to which, as the Apothecary says in "Romeo and Juliet," the

poor man's poverty, but not his will, consents. In such a case,

accordingly, an authoritative prescription of fair interest is only a

necessary requirement of justice and humanity.

The public determination of fair rent stands on precisely the same

ground. The rent of large farms, like the interest on ordinary

commercial loans, may be safely left to be settled by commercial

competition, because large farms are taken by men of capital as a

business speculation, and landlords cannot exact more rent than the

farms will bear without driving capital out of agriculture into other

branches of production, and so reducing the demand for that class of

farms to an extent that will bring the rent down to its proper level

again. But the rent of small holdings, like the interest on loans to

persons in extremity, is ruled by other considerations. Cottier tenants,

between their numbers and their necessities, are continually driven into

offering rents the land can never be made to pay, and thereby incurring

for the rest of their days the burden of a lengthening chain of arrears

little better than Oriental debt-slavery. Other work is hard to find;

the land being limited in supply is a natural monopoly; and the State

merely steps in to save the tenantry from the injurious effects of their

own over-competition for an essential instrument of their labour, and,

through their labour, of their very existence. The interference,

therefore, is perfectly justifiable if the machinery it institutes can

carry out the purpose efficiently, and there is this difference between

a court for fixing rent and a court for fixing the price of bread, or

beer, or labour, that it is only doing work which in the natural course

of things is very usually done by periodical and independent valuation,

instead of by the ordinary higgling of the market. It has always been

the custom on many large estates to call in a valuator from the outside

for the revision of the rents, and a valuator appointed by the Crown

cannot be expected to do the work any less effectively than a valuator

appointed by the landlord. Moreover, the tendency of opinion seems to be

towards the simplication of the process by some self-working scheme, a

sliding scale for apportioning an annual rent to the annual production.

State intervention in the determination of the rate of wages is often

proposed either for the purpose of settling trade disputes on the

subject, or for the purpose of suppressing what is called starvation

wages and fixing a legal minimum rate. As for arbitration in trade

disputes, the object is, of course, in no way socialistic, for it is

strictly allied with the ordinary judicial work of the State, and a

public and permanent tribunal would probably answer the purpose much

better than a private and merely occasional one; for even although it

might not be able to enforce its judgments in all cases by compulsion on

the parties, it would be more likely than the other to command their

confidence and secure by its moral authority their voluntary submission,

and this authority would increase with the experience of the court.

In certain cases compulsory arbitration seems to be required. There are

trades in which the public interest may require strikes to be

prohibited, in order to prevent a whole community suffering grave

privations, perhaps being starved of its supply of a necessary of life.

The Trades Union Act imposes express restrictions on combinations among

the labourers at gas and water works, and the recent railway strike in

Scotland, which not only paralyzed trade for a time, but stopped the

supply of coal to whole districts in the middle of the severest winter

of the last part of the century, suggested to many minds the propriety

of similar interference in railway disputes. But if the State interfered

to stop the strike, the State must needs in equity interfere to decide

upon the cause of quarrel. And happily these are the very cases which

are best fitted for compulsory arbitration, because the trades concerned

are not subject to the market fluctuations to which other trades are

liable, and are therefore better suited for fixed settlements of

definite and considerable duration.

But what socialists claim is a universal determination of normal wages,

so as to give every man the full product of his labour, as the full

product of his labour is understood upon their theory. For the present,

however, they are content to ask for at least the establishment of a

legal minimum rate of wages; in fact, an international minimum rate of

wages and an international eight hours working day are the two demands

on which their agitation is in the meantime most strenuously

concentrated. In their recent policy they have reverted to the kind of

remedies they used to speak of with such lofty disdain as mere

palliatives, and have only preserved their separate identity from other

reformers by asking for these palliatives in their least practicable

form. An international compulsory minimum wage is impossible, for even a

national one is so, and that is the only objection, but a very

sufficient one, to the proposal. If you could wipe out starvation wages

by passing an Act of Parliament, let the Act be passed to-morrow, for

starvation wages is surely the worst and most exasperating of all the

enemies of humane living. To starve for want of power to work is bad; to

starve for want of work is worse; but to work and yet starve, to work a

long, long day without obtaining the bread that should be its natural

reward, is a third and worst degree of misfortune, for it mocks the

fitness and equity of things, and seizes the mind like a wrong. If it is

right to suppress starvation by law, it would seem more right still to

suppress starvation wages; and if the socialist contention were in the

least true, that in consequence of the "iron and cruel law" all wages

are starvation wages, and all work sweaters' work, that work and starve

is the inevitable rule under the present system of things, there would

be no good answer to their demand for the abolition of the present

system of things. But as a matter of fact working and starving is the

condition of only exceptional groups of workpeople, and the right to a

minimum wage, in the sense of a wage above starvation point, would have

no bearing on the great majority of the labouring classes, inasmuch as

they stand already on a considerably higher level of remuneration.

Ought the State, however, to fix a legal minimum of wages for the

protection of the exceptional groups of workpeople to whose situation

such a measure might have relation? The objection to this course comes

less from want of justice in the claim than from want of power in the

State to realize it. The fixing of a legal minimum rate of wages is a

task which it is beyond the State's power to accomplish, except by

paying up the minimum out of its own funds; for, though the law fixed a

minimum to-morrow, it could not compel employers to engage workmen at

that minimum; and if employers found it unprofitable to do so, the only

effect of the legislation would be to throw numbers of men out of work,

and make their maintenance at the legal minimum an obligation of the

public treasury. Of the results of paying wages out of the rates we have

had plenty of experience. To suppress starvation wages in this way by

direct statute is merely impossible, however, and there would be no

taint of socialism in it, if it could be done. Much less can the like

objection be made against any milder remedies. The only danger is that

they would not prove effectual, and would address themselves to false

causes. Take the sweating system of the East End of London, in which,

bad conditions of labour always going together, we find starvation wages

combined with long hours and unwholesome work-rooms. Two of the

favourite remedies are the abolition of sub-contracting and the

prohibition of pauper Jewish immigration; but neither of these things is

the cause of sweating. The sweating contractor of the East End is not a

sub-contractor at all; he is the only contractor in the business, and

even if he were a sub-contractor, we know that sub-contractors often pay

far better wages than the chief contractor can, because they know their

men better, and get better work out of them.

A temporary increase in the Jewish immigration may occasion a temporary

aggravation of the difficulty, but the permanent causes lie elsewhere,

and even in the way of aggravation a matter of a thousand Jews more, or

a thousand Jews less, cannot play an all-important part in a system

affecting some hundred thousand workpeople. Sweating is no more incident

to Jewish labour than to English labour. The cheap clothing trade of

Birmingham is certainly in the hands of Jews, yet sweating is--or at

least was when the factory inspector reported in 1879--absolutely

unknown. The wages, he said, were good, the hours were not long, and

there were no overcrowded dens. On the other hand, sweating has not only

been for years endemic in the East End of London, but has even appeared

in a very acute form, apart from any alien influence, in the tailoring

trade in Melbourne, the paradise of working people, as it is sometimes

not unjustly denominated. The sweating there was conducted largely by

ladies who took in bands of learners, and, according to the evidence

before the Shopkeepers' Commission, of 1883, every second house in some

of the suburbs was a shop of that kind. There was an excessive influx of

labour into that trade, because little other work could be found for

women who entertained, as they do generally in that colony, a prejudice

against both factory labour and domestic service. On the other hand,

this overflow was diverted in Birmingham into other channels by the

comparative abundance of light employments the district afforded. But

apart from temporary or local circumstances that serve to aggravate

things or alleviate them, the tailor trade is everywhere naturally

subject beyond all others to over-competition: (1) because the work can

be done at home; (2) because it can be learnt in a few weeks or months

well enough to earn starvation wages in a long day at some sorts of

work; (3) because it needs as little capital for the contractor to start

business as it needs training for the operatives; and (4) because the

operatives being scattered about in their own homes, or in small

workshops here and there, have a natural difficulty in coming to any

concerted action that might otherwise mitigate the effects of the

over-competition, and if there is any general remedy for sweating, it

must deal with these causes. To replace homework by common work in

wholesome workshops, as far as that can be done, might interfere with

what some poor persons found a convenient resource, but would do no harm

to the working class generally. The work it was less convenient for some

to do would be done by others. The change would remove at once one of

the evils of sweating--the unhealthy work-places--and it would

contribute to remove the others, first by facilitating combination, and

second by improving the personal efficiency of the labourer and the

amount of his production. Dr. Watts, of Manchester, speaking from long

experience, tells us in his "Facts of the Cotton Famine" (p. 44) that

"men often care more about being employed in a good mill (_i.e._, a mill

with plenty of room, air, and light) than about the exact price per

pound for spinning, or per piece for weaving, for they know practically

what is the effect of these conditions upon the weekly wages." Various

measures have been suggested which have some such end in view--the

compulsory registration of the contractor's workrooms and his

outworkers, the requiring him to provide workshops for all his hands,

the joint liability of the clothier with him for the wholesomeness of

the workplaces, the erection of public workshops where workpeople may be

accommodated for hire; they may be open to various objections--and there

is no space to indicate or discuss them here--but if they are effectual

for the purpose contemplated, that purpose saves them at least from the

reproach of socialism.

The international compulsory eight hours day is attended with like

difficulty. The eight hours day is no necessary plank of socialism,

though socialists have at present united to demand it. Rodbertus, the

most learned and scientific of modern socialists, always contended that

the normal working-day ought not to be of uniform length, but should

vary inversely with the relative strain of the several trades, and Mr.

Bellamy, under his system of absolute equality of income, makes

differences in the hours of labour answer the purpose of regulating the

choice of occupation, and preventing too many persons running into the

easier trades, and too few into the harder. Nor, indeed, apart from the

element of universal compulsion, has the eight hours day anything of

socialism in it at all. In some trades it is probably a simple necessity

for protecting the workpeople in normal conditions of health; but above

all its sanitary benefits it would confer upon the workpeople of every

trade alike the much grander blessing of admitting them to a reasonable

share of the intellectual, social, domestic, religious, and political

life of their time. If the State could bestow upon them this sovereign

blessing without forcing them to accept a reduction of wages, which

might deprive them of things even more essential for their elevation,

and which would only breed among them an intolerable discontent, by all

means let the State declare the glad decree. But experience shows that

in matters of this kind the State--and especially the democratic

State--is a very limited agent, and cannot successfully enforce its

decrees upon unwilling trades. In certain special cases, when the short

day is demanded for the purpose of averting admitted dangers to health,

as with the miners, or for the safety of the public, as with the railway

service, there is a recognised stringency of obligation which is

exceptional; but in the great run of trades the question is virtually

one of mere preference between an hour's leisure and an hour's pay, and

in these circumstances a law has too little moral authority behind it to

be practically enforceable by penalties in the absence of decided

working-class opinion in its favour in the affected trades. In Victoria

more than fifty separate trades have obtained the eight hours day

without any parliamentary assistance, and almost the only remaining

trades which do not yet enjoy it are the very trades which have been

protected by an eight hours Factory Act since 1874. As soon as the Act

was passed, the operatives, men and women both, petitioned the Chief

Secretary for its suspension, and it has remained in suspended animation

to this day. A democratic government cannot risk incurring the

discontent of a body of the people merely to prevent them from working

an hour more when they want to earn a little more. California has had an

Eight Hours Act on the statute-book for even a longer period, but it has

remained a mere dead letter, because employers began to pay wages by the

hour or the piece, and the men found they did not earn so much in the

short day as they used to earn in the long. The same thing has happened

in others of the American States, and the friends of the eight hours

movement in that country are beginning to think that the reason their

long and often hot struggle has hitherto been so fruitless is because

they have been wasting their strength in political agitation when they

ought to have been cultivating and organizing opinion among the working

class themselves trade by trade. The weakness of statutory eight hours

movements has generally flowed from two sources. One is that what their

promoters really wanted was not shorter hours, but more wages. Numbers

of them sought only to shorten regular time in order to lengthen

overtime, and numbers more got themselves persuaded that a general

reduction of hours was the grand means of effecting a general rise of

wages, either by removing the competition of the unemployed, or in some

other way; and it has often been only the few--always the very _elite_

of labour--who fought for the eight hours day because they valued the

leisure enough to make, if necessary, some little sacrifice for so noble

a boon. When, therefore, wages, instead of rising, begin to get reduced,

general disappointment is inevitable, and they get reduced--and reduced

lower than they otherwise might be--through the second weakness of such

movements, which is simply this, that a trades union which is not strong

enough to get an eight hours day by their own unaided efforts, without

the assistance of the law, is not strong enough to prevent their wages

from sinking, and in this matter the law can do nothing to help them.

The eight hours day can only be an abiding possession if it come through

the successive growth of opinion and organization in one trade after

another. The history of the movement in Victoria is the history of such

successive triumphs of opinion and organization; as soon as a trade has

come to want the eight hours day earnestly enough to be willing to

sacrifice something for it, the trade has always got it. In the result

they have had to sacrifice very little; scarce one of them suffered a

fall of wages by the change, for the simple reason that there was no

serious fall in their daily production. The difference between the ten

hours day and the eight hours day in Victoria was not two hours, but

only three-quarters of an hour, for--at least in the important

trades--the old day was ten hours, with an hour and a quarter off for

meals; and in eight hours with only one break the men probably did near

as much as they did before in the eight hours and three-quarters with a

double break. Still, most of the trades took twenty or five-and-twenty

years before they ventured to join the movement; and though no country

in the world is so much under the control of working-class opinion as

Victoria, the proposal of a general legal eight hours day which has

repeatedly come before the Legislature has never been carried into law.

In one sense the eight hours day is the least socialistic of all reforms

proposed in the interest of the working class, for it is impossible to

make the other classes of society pay for the boon. It may not, perhaps,

be quite certain that there will be anything to pay for it at all, for

many people assure us production will suffer nothing by the change, and

some promise us it will be even increased. But one thing at least is

certain: if there is anything to pay, it is the working classes

themselves who in the end will and must pay it. The reduction can make

no great difference to employers, except on running contracts, or where

for any reason they refuse to keep their plant in use by an extra shift,

for in the matter of wages they will do under an eight hours system

exactly what they do now--pay the men for the amount of work they get

out of them and no more; and as they thus produce their goods at the old

cost, they can export them at the old price. It need not, therefore,

have any permanent effect worth speaking of on the general trade of the

country. But if the men do less, their wages will be less too,[10] and

nothing can long keep them what they were. This wages question is the

eight hours question; and while it is a question for the men more than

for the masters, it is essential they should keep clear of all

misconception in deciding it.

There is no way of getting ten hours' pay for eight hours' work except

by doing the work of ten hours in the eight. An Eight Hours Act would

give working men no new power to raise the rate of wages; and if they

cannot by combination get twelve hours' pay for ten hours' work to-day,

they cannot by combination get ten hours' pay for eight hours' work

to-morrow. It is, indeed, a very current delusion, that a restriction of

production must increase wages by necessitating the employment of the

unemployed, whose competition tends at present to prevent wages from

rising. But that effect could only occur if the same demand for

commodities remained, and although that might be the case if the

restriction were confined to a single branch of industry, while all the

rest continued to produce as much as before, it would not be so if the

restriction were carried out simultaneously all round. The various

trades are one another's customers; the commodities one supplies

constitute the demand for the labour of the others; and if the supply is

reduced all round, the demand will be reduced all round. To say there is

at any moment a fixed amount of work that has to be done whatever the

produce of the labour, is, as Professor Marshall very happily observes,

to set up a Work Fund Dogma exactly analogous to the old Wages Fund

Doctrine of the schools, and, he might have added, a dogma even more

dangerous to the prosperity of the working-man. Yet the idea is abroad;

it appears in the trade-union policy of "making work"--that is, making

work for to-morrow by not doing it to-day; it is a kind of mercantilist

delusion of the present century, by which each trade is to cut some

advantage for itself out of the sides of the others until they all come

to practise the trick in turn and fall to mysterious ruin together.

If the eight hours day is to raise wages, it will not be by limiting

production, but by improving it. That the productivity of labour is

capable of improving--nay, that it is certain to improve to such an

extent as to earn by-and-by more wages in an eight hours day than it now

does in a ten--is scarce matter of doubt. Apart from the influence of

machinery and invention, there is a great reserve of personal

efficiency, especially in English labour, still capable of development.

Mr. Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, said that he noticed when

watching his men at work, that most of them spent at least two-thirds of

their time, not in working, but in criticising their work with the

square and the straight-edge, which the few dexterous workmen among them

almost never required to use. An increase of dexterity might, therefore,

make up for a reduction of the day in these trades even to four hours.

But the present question is about the probable effect of the reduction

itself upon the efficiency of labour, and experience certainly does not

justify those who declare that it would increase the daily product. The

effect of a reduction from ten hours or nine to eight is, of course, an

entirely different question from the effect of a reduction from twelve

or thirteen to ten, because the last two hours' labour in a very long

and exhausting day may bear little comparison with the last two hours of

a shorter day; and of the exact effect of the particular reduction from

ten to eight we possess but scanty evidence, though much might easily be

obtained, one would think, from establishments that run, as many do, ten

hours in summer and eight hours in winter, or ten hours in busy times

and eight hours in slack. We have some American evidence of this sort,

but it is very contradictory, a few employers saying that quite as much

work was done in the eight hours as in the ten, and others that as much

would have been done had the men made a better use of their leisure,

while several more complained that the men really did less, and that

their energies were positively slackened under the short hours--this

also perhaps being a result of the use they made of their leisure. In

Victoria the production seems to have been reduced a little, but really

so little as to have no very perceptible results, and the leisure is

used so well that the working class have made a distinct rise in the

scale of being, and have developed a remarkable love of outdoor sports,

and spare energy enough to produce some of the most famous cricketers

and scullers in the world. There are some trades in which it is possible

for production to diminish and yet wages to remain the same, because the

difference can be thrown into the price of the product. These are trades

supplying a commodity in general and necessary demand of which the

consumers will stand a very considerable rise in the price before they

will seriously shorten their purchases. Coal is a good example of such a

commodity, and the miners are therefore very happily situated for the

adoption of an eight hours day. They are more able than most other

trades to prevent such a measure from resulting in any fall of wages,

and consequently a legal enactment on the subject is less likely with

them to create subsequent disappointment, and remain dead letter. They

need State help in the matter less than most trades, for they are strong

and well organized; but an Eight Hours Act would be more easily enforced

among them. Very few trades, however, are in this exceptional position.

On the whole, the risk of material loss incurred by the reduction is

slight compared with the certainty and greatness of the moral gain; the

material loss will, in any case, be soon made up by industrial

improvements, if things progress as they are doing; and if the reduction

is more likely to come through the union and organization of the trades

themselves rather than by either national or international action, the

trades at least need have no serious fear to make the venture.

The idea of settling questions of this kind by international action,

which was started at first from the side of the employers as a

convenient obstructive, but has since been taken up with great zeal by

the young German Emperor and the socialists, is obviously delusive. It

ignores the possibilities of the case, for who, in the first place, is

to adjust the complicated details of this international handicap, and if

they were adjusted, who is to enforce them? No country is likely to be

very strict in enforcing those parts of the settlement by which it lost

some point of advantage, and those are the only parts for which any such

settlement was wanted at all. Besides, international labour treaties are

quite unnecessary. Experience all over the world shows that a short-hour

State suffers nothing in the competition with a long-hour State. When

Massachusetts became a ten-hour State, her manufacturers never found

themselves at any disadvantage in competing with those of the

neighbouring eleven-hour States of New England, and they would have

still less to fear from rivals who employed, not the same Anglo-Saxon

labour as they did themselves, but the less efficient labour of Germany

or France. The ten-hour day was its own reward. It improved the

efficiency of the workpeople to the degree where, in concert with

improvements in the management, also due to the shortening of the day,

the product of ten hours in Massachusetts was equal to the product of

eleven elsewhere. If the same result were to follow the adoption of an

eight hours day, which, however, has still to be tested by experiment,

there is of course no more reason why one country should wait for

another in adopting the eight hours day than in adopting the policy of

free trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] It is only fair to this eminent man to remember that his mature

opinions must not be looked for in his essay, "Ideen zu einem Versuch

die Graenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen," which was written

in his early youth, and never published until after its author's death.

Although in this work he condemns all State education, he lived to be a

famous Minister of Education himself, and to take a great part in

establishing the Prussian system of public instruction.

[8] Frothingham's "W. H. Channing: a Memoir," p. 18.

[9] Roscher's "Finanz-Wissenschaft," p. 63.

[10] For proof of the position that the rate of wages is determined by

the amount of production, see pp. 307-11.