THE SOCIAL REFORMERS
It may seem strange to class social reforms under the wider heading of
Socialistic Theories, and the only justification for doing so is that
which we have already put forward in defence of the whole book; namely,
that the term "socialistic" has come to bear so broad an interpretation
as to include a great deal that does not strictly belong to it. And it
is only on the ground of their advocating State interference in the
furtherance of their reforms that the reformers here mentioned can be
spoken of as socialistic.
Of course there have been reformers in every age who came to bring to
society their own personal measures of relief. But in the Middle Ages
hardly a writer took pen in hand who did not note in the body politic
some illness, and suggest some remedy. Howsoever abstruse might be the
subject of the volume, there was almost sure to be a reference to
economic or social life. It was not an epoch of specialists such as is
ours. Each author composed treatises in almost every branch of learning.
The same professor, according to mediaeval notions, might lecture to-day
on Scripture, to-morrow on theology or philosophy, and the day after on
natural science. For them a university was a place where each student
learnt, and each professor taught, universal knowledge. Still from time
to time men came to the front with some definite social message to be
delivered to their own generation. Some were poets like Langland, some
strike-leaders like John Ball, some religious enthusiasts like John
Wycliff, some royal officials like Pierre du Bois.
This latter in his famous work addressed to King Edward I of England
(_De Recuperatione Sancte Terre_), has several most interesting and
refreshing chapters on the education of women. His bias is always
against religious orders, and, consequently, he favours the suppression
of almost every conventual establishment. Still, as these were at his
own date the only places where education could be considered to exist at
all, he had to elaborate for himself a plan for the proper instruction
of girls. First, of course, the nunneries must be confiscated by
Government. For him this was no act of injustice, since he regarded the
possessions of the whole clerical body as something outside the ordinary
laws of property. But having in this way cleared the ground of all
rivals, and captured some magnificent buildings, he can now go forward
in his scheme of education. He insists on having only lay-mistresses,
and prescribes the course of study which these are to teach. There
should be, he held, many lectures on literature, and music, and poetry,
and the arts and crafts of home life. Embroidery and home-management are
necessities for the woman's work in after years, so they must be
acquired in these schools. But education cannot limit itself to these
branches of useful knowledge. It must take the woman's intelligence and
develop that as skilfully as it does the man's. She is not inferior to
him in power of reason, but only in her want of its right cultivation.
Hence the new schools are to train her to equal man in all the arts of
peace. Such is the main point in his programme, which even now sounds
too progressive for the majority of our educational critics. He appeals
for State interference that the colleges may be endowed out of the
revenues of the religious houses, and that they may be supported in such
a fashion as would always keep them abreast of the growing science of
the times. And when, after a schooling of such a kind as this, the girls
go out into their life-work as wives and mothers, he would wish them a
more complete equality with their men-folk than custom then allowed. The
spirit of freedom which is felt working through all his papers makes him
the apostle of what would now be called the "new woman."
After him, there comes a lull in reforming ideas. But half a century
later occurs a very curious and sudden outburst of rebellion all over
Europe. From about the middle of the fourteenth century to the early
fifteenth there seemed to be an epidemic of severe social unrest. There
were at Paris, which has always been the nursery of revolutions, four
separate risings. Etienne Marcel, who, however, was rather a tribune of
the people than a revolutionary leader, came into prominence in 1355;
he was followed by the Jacquerie in 1358, by the Maillotins in 1382, and
the Cabochiens in 1411. In Rome we know of Rienzi in 1347, who
eventually became hardly more than a popular demagogue; in Florence
there was the outbreak of Ciompi in 1378; in Bohemia the excesses of
Taborites in 1409; in England the Peasant Revolt of 1381.
It is perfectly obvious that a series of social disturbances of this
nature could not leave the economic literature of the succeeding period
quite as placid as it had found it. We notice now that, putting away
questions of mere academic character, the thinkers and writers concern
themselves with the actual state of the people. Parliament has its
answer to the problem in a long list of statutes intended to muzzle the
turbulent and restless revolutionaries. But this could not satisfy men
who set their thought to study the lives and circumstances of their
fellow-citizens. Consequently, as a result, we can notice the rise of a
school of writers who interest themselves above all things in the
economic conditions of labour. Of this school the easiest exponent to
describe is Antonino of Florence, Archbishop and canonised saint. His
four great volumes on the exposition of the moral law are fascinating as
much for the quotations of other moralists which they contain, as for
the actual theories of the saint himself. For the Archbishop cites on
almost every page contemporary after contemporary who had had his say on
the same problems. He openly asserts that he has read widely, taken
notes of all his reading, has deliberately formed his opinions on the
judgments, reasoned or merely expressed, of his authors. To read his
books, then, is to realise that Antonino is summing up the whole
experience of his generation. Indeed he was particularly well placed for
one who wished for information. Florence, then at the height of its
renown under the brilliant despotism of Cosimo dei Medici, was the scene
where the great events of the life of Antonino took place. There he had
seen within the city walls, three Popes, a Patriarch of Constantinople,
the Emperors of East and West, and the most eminent men of both
civilisations. He had taken part in a General Council of the Church, and
knew thinkers as widely divergent as Giovanni Dominici and Æneas Sylvius
Piccolomini. He was, therefore, more likely than most to have heard
whatever theories were proposed by the various great political statesmen
of Europe, whether they were churchmen or lawyers. Consequently, his
schemes, as we might well expect, are startlingly advanced.
He begins by attacking the growing spirit of usury, and the resulting
idleness. Men were finding out that under the new conditions which
governed the money market it was possible to make a fortune without
having done a day's work. The sons of the aristocracy of Florence, which
was built up of merchant princes, and which had amassed its own fortunes
in honest trading, had been tempted by the bankers to put their wealth
out to interest, and to live on the surplus profit. The ease and
security with which this could be done made it a popular investment,
especially among the young men of fashion who came in, simply by
inheritance, for large sums of money. As a consequence Florence found
itself, for the first time in its history, beginning to possess a
wealthy class of men who had never themselves engaged in any profession.
The old reverence, therefore, which had always existed in the city for
the man who laboured in his art or guild, began to slacken. No longer
was there the same eagerness noticeable which used to boast openly that
its rewards consisted in the consciousness of work well done. Instead,
idleness became the badge of gentility, and trade a slur upon a man's
reputation. No city can long survive so listless and languid an ideal.
The Archbishop, therefore, denounced this new method of usurious
traffic, and hinted further that to it was due the fierce rebellion
which had for a while plunged Florence into the horrors of the
Jacquerie. Wealth, he taught, should not of itself breed wealth, but
only through the toil of honest labour, and that labour should be the
labour of oneself, not of another.
Then he proceeded to argue that as upon the husband lies the labour of
trade, the greater portion of his day must necessarily be passed outside
the circle of family life. The breadwinner can attend neither to works
of piety nor of charity in the way he should, and, consequently, to his
wife it must be left to supply for his defects. She must take his place
in the church, and amid the slums of the poor; she must for him and his
lift her hands in prayer, and dispense his superfluous wealth in
succouring the poverty-stricken. For the Archbishop will have none of
the soothing doctrine which the millionaire preaches to the mob. He
asserts that poverty is not a good thing; in itself it is an evil, and
can be considered to lead only accidentally to any good. When,
therefore, it assumes the form of destitution, every effort must be made
to banish it from the State. For if it were to become at all prevalent
in a nation, then would that people be on the pathway to its ruin. The
politicians should therefore make it the end of their endeavours--though
this, it may be, is an ideal which can never be fully brought to
realisation--to leave each man in a state of sufficiency. No one, for
whatever reason, should be allowed to become destitute. Even should it
be by his own fault that he were brought low, he must be provided for by
the State, which has, however, in these circumstances, at the same time,
the duty of punishing him.
But he remarks that the cause of poverty is more often the unjust rate
of wages. The competition even of those days made men beat each other
down in clamouring for work to be given them, and afforded to the
employers an opportunity of taking workers who willingly accepted an
inadequate scale of remuneration. This state of things he considered to
be unjustifiable and unjust. No one had any right to make profit out of
the wretchedness of the poor. Each human being had the duty of
supporting his own life, and this he could not do except by the hiring
of his own labour to another. That other, therefore, by the immutable
laws of justice, when he used the powers of his fellow-man, was obliged
in conscience to see that those powers could be fittingly sustained by
the commodity which he exchanged for them. That is, the employer was
bound to take note that his employees received such return for their
labour as should compensate them for his use of it. The payment promised
and given should be, in other words, what we would now speak of as a
"living wage." But further, above this mere margin, additional rewards
should be added according to the skill of the workman, or the dangerous
nature of his employment, or the number of his children. The wages also
should be paid promptly, without delay.
But it may sometimes happen that the labour which a man can contribute
is not of such a kind as will enable him to receive the fair
remuneration that should suffice for his bodily comfort. The saint is
thinking of boy-labour, and the case of those too enfeebled by age or
illness to work adequately, or perhaps at all. What is to be done for
them? Let the State look to it, is his reply. The community must, by the
law of its own existence, support all its members, and out of its
superfluous wealth must provide for its weaker citizens. Those,
therefore, who can labour harder than they need, or who already possess
more riches than suffice for them, are obliged by the natural law of
charity to give to those less favourably circumstanced than themselves.
St. Antonino does not, therefore, pretend to advocate any system of
rigid equality among men. There is bound to be, in his opinion, variety
among them, and from this variety comes indeed the harmony of the
universe. For some are born to rule, and others, by the feebleness of
their understanding or of their will, are fitted only to obey. The
workman and servant must faithfully discharge the duties of their trade
or service, be quick to receive a command, and reverent in their
obedience. And the masters, in their turn, must be forbearing in their
language, generous in their remuneration, and temperate in their
commands. It is their business to study the powers of each of those whom
they employ, and to measure out the work to each one according to the
capacity which is discoverable in him. When a faithful labourer has
become ill, the employer must himself tend and care for him, and be in
no hurry to send him to a hospital.
About the hospitals themselves he has his own ideas, or at least he has
picked out the sanest that he can find in the books and conversation of
people whom he has come across. He insists strongly that women should,
as matrons and nurses, manage those institutions which are solely for
the benefit of women; and even in those where men also are received, he
can see no incompatibility in their being administered by these same
capable directors. He much commends the custom of chemists in Florence
on Sundays, feast-days, and holidays of opening their dispensaries in
turn. So that even should all the other shops be closed, there would
always be one place open where medicines and drugs could be obtained in
an emergency.
The education of the citizens, too, is another work which the State must
consider. It is not something merely optional which is to be left to the
judgment of the parent. The Archbishop holds that its proper
organisation is the duty of the prince. Education, in his eyes, means
that the children must be taught the knowledge of God, of letters, and
of the arts and crafts they are to pursue in after life.
Again, he has thought out the theory of taxation. He admits its
necessity. The State is obliged to perform certain duties for the
community. It is obliged, for example, to make its roads fit for
travelling, and so render them passable for the transfer of merchandise.
It is bound to clear away all brigandage, highway robbery, and the like,
for were this not done, no merchant would venture out through that
State's territory, and its people would accordingly suffer.
Hence, again, he deduces the need for some sort of army, so that the
goods of the citizens may be secured against the invader, for without
this security there would be no stimulus to trade. Bridges must be
built, and fords kept in repair. Since, therefore, the State is obliged
to incur expenses in order to attain these objects, the State has the
right, and indeed the duty, to order it so that the community shall pay
for the benefits which it is to receive. Hence follows taxation.
But he sees at once that this power of demanding forced contributions
from wealthy members of society needs safeguarding against abuse. Thus
he is careful to insist that taxation can be valid only when it is
levied by public authority, else it becomes sheer brigandage. No less is
it to be reprobated when ordered indeed by public authority, but not
used for public benefit. Thus, should it happen that a prince or other
ruler of a State extorted money from his subjects on pretence of keeping
the roads in good order, or similar works for the advantage of the
community, and yet neglected to put the contributions of his people to
this use, he would be defrauding the public, and guilty of treason
against his country. So, too, to lay heavier burdens on his subjects
than they could bear, or to graduate the scale in such a fashion as to
weigh more heavily on one class than another, would be, in the ruler, an
aggravated form of theft. Taxation must therefore be decreed by public
authority, and be arranged according to some reasonable measure, and
rest on the motive of benefiting the social organisation.
The citizens therefore who are elected to settle the incidence of
taxation must be careful to take account of the income of each man, and
so manage that on no one should the burden be too oppressive. He
suggests himself the percentage of one pound per hundred. Nor, again,
must there be any deliberate attempt to penalise political opponents, or
to make use of taxation in order to avenge class-oppression. Were this
to be done, the citizens so acting would be bound to make restitution to
the persons whom they had thus injured.
Then St. Antonino takes the case of those who make a false declaration
of their income. These, too, he convicts of injustice, and requires of
them that they also should make restitution, but to the State. An
exception to this, however, he allows. For if it happens to be the
custom for each to make a declaration of income which is obviously below
the real amount, then simply because all do it and all are known to do
it, there is no obligation for the individual to act differently from
his neighbours. It is not injustice, for the law evidently recognises
the practice. And were he, on the other hand, to announce his full
yearly wage of earnings, he would allow himself to be taxed beyond the
proper measure of value. But to refuse to pay, or to elude by some
subterfuge the just contribution which a man owes of his wealth to the
easing of the public burdens, is in the eyes of the Archbishop a crime
against the State. It would be an act of injustice, of theft, all the
more heinous in that, as he declares with a flash of the energy of
Rousseau, the "common good is something almost divine."
We have dwelt rather at length on the schemes of this one economist, and
may seem, therefore, to have overlooked the writings of others equally
full of interest. But the reason has been because this Florentine
moralist does stand so perfectly for a whole school. He has read
omnivorously, and has but selected most of his thoughts. He compares
himself, indeed, in one passage of these volumes, to the laborious ant,
"that tiny insect which wanders here and there, and gathers together
what it thinks to be of use to its community." He represents a whole
school, and represents it at its best, for there is no extreme dogmatism
in him, no arguing from grounds that are purely arbitrary, or from _a
priori_ principles. It is his knowledge of the people among whom he had
laboured so long which fits him to speak of the real sufferings of the
poor. But experience requires for its being effectually put to the best
advantage, that it should be wielded by one whose judgment is sober and
careful. Now, St. Antonino was known in his own day as Antonino the
Counsellor; and his justly-balanced decision, his delicately-poised
advice, the straightness of his insight, are noticeable in the masterly
way in which he sums up all the best that earlier and contemporary
writers had devised in the domain of social economics.
There is, just at the close of the period with which this book deals, a
rising school of reformers who can be grouped round More's _Utopia_.
Some foreshadowed him, and others continued his speculations. Men like
Harrington in his _Oceana_, and Milton in his _Areopagitica_, really
belong to the same band; but life for them had changed very greatly, and
already become something far more complex than the earlier writers had
had to consider. There seemed no possibility of reforming it by the
simple justice which St. Antonino and his fellows judged to be
sufficient to set things back again as they had been in the Golden Age.
The new writers are rather political than social. For them, as for the
Greeks, it is the constitution which must be repaired. Whereas the
mediaeval socialists thought, as St. Thomas indeed never wearied of
repeating, that unrest and discontent would continue under any form of
government whatever. The more each city changed its constitution, the
more it remained the same. Florence, whether under a republic or a
despotism, was equally happy and equally sad. For it was the spirit of
government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers,
made the State what it happened to be.
In this the modern sociologist of to-day finds himself more akin with
the mediaeval thinkers than with the idealists of the parliamentary era
in England, or of the Revolution in France. These fixed their hopes on
definite organisations of government, and on the exact balance of
executive and legislative powers. But for Scotus, and Wycliff, and St.
Antonino, the cause of the evil is far deeper and more personal. Not in
any form of the constitution, nor in any division of ruling authority,
nor in its union under a firm despot, nor in the divine right of kings,
or nobles, or people, was security to be found, or the well-ordering of
the nation. But peace and rest from faction could be achieved with
certainty only on the conditions of strict justice between man and man,
on the observance of God's commandments.