of sex would disappear with the masculine dominance from which it
resulted. When women need no longer depend on marriage for their
living or their social position, they will no longer be under any
great compulsion to make their sexual relations conform to standards
which have been adapted to suit the interests, desires and tastes of
men. Being economically independent of men, they will be at liberty to
consult their own interests, desires and tastes, in this as in other
matters. They may desire to preserve those habits of virginity before
marriage and chastity after it, which have been imposed upon them under
masculine dominance; but they will be under no external compulsion to
do so. When they have no longer a professional interest in conforming
to the conventional moral code, their sexual relations will cease to be
regarded as falling within the purview of morality at all; rather they
will be, as those of men have been, a question of manners. For when a
moral precept no longer has social or economic sanctions to enforce it,
its observance ceases to be a matter of worldly interest or expediency,
and becomes a matter of personal taste. Then, if it be not sound, it
will be repudiated; if it be sound, the individual who allows himself
to be guided by it will profit spiritually by doing so, because his
obedience will respond to his own instinct for what is good, rather
than to an external pressure.
The spiritual gain that will come through the release from bondage to
superstition, discrimination and taboo, is incalculable. Freed from her
slavery to catchwords, woman will be able to discover and appraise for
herself the true spiritual values which catchwords usually obscure.
Having no longer any need to preserve a fearful regard for what other
people may think of her, she will be at liberty to regulate her conduct
by what she wishes to think of herself; and hence she will be able to
cast aside the hypocrisy, duplicity and dissimulation that must be bred
in any class of people whose position in society depends not upon what
they are but upon what they appear to be. Having attained to the full
humanity which this emancipation implies, she will gain sufficient
respect for her sex to tolerate no discriminations against it. Thus we
may expect to see her sexual function of motherhood placed on a basis
of self-respect, and the barbarous injustice of illegitimacy relegated
to the limbo of forgotten abuses. Woman will for the first time undergo
the profound and weighty experience of responsibility to herself,
rather than to social institutions and arrangements which were made
for her, and whose nature is not such as to command the deference of a
free agent. Free from the tyranny of the expected, from the disabling
consequences of surveillance and repression, women will for the first
time be able to develop to their full stature as human beings, in
accordance with the law of spiritual growth which has so long been
thwarted and perverted by the usages of society.
I have given only a general idea of what economic freedom would do to
promote human happiness. Its effect upon the lives and characters of
men would be quite as emancipating as upon those of women; but this
I have not space to consider in detail. In passing, however, I might
remark that not the least of the benefits that men would gain by it
would be relief from the worry and humiliation which the support of
women so often involves at present. “I have taken mistreatment from
that conductor,” said a young musician recently, “that I never would
have stood for if I were single. But I have a wife, and that makes
us all cowards.” A free people would outgrow on the one hand the
sheepishness that fear of want begets, and on the other the arrogance
bred by consciousness of power. Men would no longer need endure
humiliation for the sake of keeping their jobs; and those over them
would be estopped from arrogance by the knowledge that they were
dealing with free men who were under no compulsion to tolerate it.
If it appear that I envisage utopian results from the institution of
economic freedom, let me assume the possibility that those spiritual
results which I foresee might not come about. If they did not come
about, however, their failure to do so would imply a profound and
inexplicable change for the worse in human nature; for if the world’s
history proves anything, it is that there is in mankind a natural
disposition to aspire toward what is ennobling and beautiful, and
that this disposition is favoured by economic security--especially
where it is not associated with irresponsible power--and thwarted by
involuntary poverty. Why is it that the middle classes are regarded as
the “backbone” of society, if not because they have had enough command
of wealth to enable the maintenance of health and a high standard of
education, without that excess and power which too often breed idleness
and arrogance? Leisure and abundance stimulate independence of spirit,
thought, education, creative activity. Penury leads to demoralization,
ignorance, dulness. This has been the world’s experience in the past.
“There is in man,” says Goethe, “a creative disposition which comes
into activity as soon as his existence is assured. _As soon as he has
nothing to worry about or to fear_, this semi-divinity in him, working
effectively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps materials
into which to breathe its own spirit.” Why should one assume that this
spirit will pass over the material offered by life itself and the
relations of human beings with one another? It has not done so in the
past. Throughout mankind’s long martyrdom of exploitation, through all
the struggling and hatred engendered thereby, this semi-divinity in
man has been leading him towards a more humane conception of life. The
spiritual peace and assurance resulting from economic justice would
set all human beings free not only to share in this conception but to
realize it--to establish upon earth that ideal life of man which, in
the words of George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he shall
one day come to know it.”
IV
The whole point of the foregoing, for present purposes, is this: It
is impossible for a sex or a class to have economic freedom until
everybody has it, and until economic freedom is attained for everybody,
there can be no real freedom for anybody. Without economic freedom,
efforts after political and social freedom are nugatory and illusive,
except for what educational value they may have for those concerned
with them. The women of the United States, having now got about all
that is to be had out of these efforts--enough at any rate, to raise
an uneasy suspicion that their ends are lamentably far from final--are
in a peculiarly good position to discern the nature of real freedom,
to see which way it lies, and to feel an ardent interest in what it
can do for them. My purpose, then, is not deliberately to discourage
their prosecution of any enfranchising measures that may lie in their
way to promote, and still less to disparage the successes that they
have already attained. It is rather to invite them thoughtfully to take
stock of what they have really got by these successes, to consider
whether it is all they want, and to settle with themselves whether
their collective experience on the way up from the status of a subject
sex does not point them to a higher ideal of freedom than any they have
hitherto entertained.
In the past century, women have gained a great deal in the way of
educational, social and political rights. They have gained a fair
degree of economic independence. They are no longer obliged to “keep
silence in the churches,” as they still were at the beginning of the
nineteenth century; indeed, certain sects have even admitted them
to the ministry. The women who now enjoy this comparative freedom,
and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are indebted to
a long line of women who carried on the struggle--sometimes lonely
and discouraging--against political, legal, social and industrial
discrimination, and to the men, as well, who aided and encouraged them.
Thanks to the efforts of these pioneers, the women of today have a new
tradition to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those which women
were expected to observe in the past: the tradition of active demand
for the establishment of freedom. They will be none the less under
obligation to continue this demand when the freedom that shall remain
to be secured is of a kind not envisaged by their predecessors. Rather,
in the measure that they proceed beyond those ends that seemed ultimate
to their predecessors, they will prove that these built well; for the
best earnest of advancement is the attainment of an ever new and wider
vision of progress.
The organized feminist movement in England and America has concerned
itself pretty exclusively with securing political rights for women;
that is to say, its conception of freedom has been based on the
eighteenth century misconception of it as a matter of suffrage. Women
have won the vote, and now they are proceeding to use their new
political power to secure the removal of those legal discriminations
which still remain in force against their sex. This is well enough;
it is important that the State should be forced to renounce its
pretension to discriminate against women in favour of men. But even
if we assume that the establishment of legal equality between the
sexes would result in complete social and economic equality, we are
obliged to face the fact that under such a régime women would enjoy
precisely that degree of freedom which men now enjoy--that is to say,
very little. I have remarked that those who control men’s and women’s
economic opportunity control men and women. The State represents the
organized interest of those who control economic opportunity; and
while the State continues to exist, it may be forced to renounce
all legal discriminations against one sex in favour of the other
without in any wise affecting its fundamental discrimination against
the propertyless, dependent class--_which is made up of both men and
women_--in favour of the owning and exploiting classes. Until this
fundamental discrimination is challenged, the State may, without danger
to itself, grant, in principle at least, the claims to political and
legal equality of all classes under its power. The emancipation of
negroes within the political State has not notably improved their
condition; for they are still subject to an economic exploitation
which is enhanced by race-prejudice and the humiliating tradition of
slavery. The emancipation of women within the political State will
leave them subject, like the negro, to an exploitation enhanced by
surviving prejudices against them. The most that can be expected of
the removal of discriminations subjecting one class to another within
the exploiting State, is that it will free the subject class from
dual control--control by the favoured class and by the monopolist of
economic opportunity.
Even this degree of emancipation is worth a good deal; and therefore
one is bound to regret that it has no guarantee of permanence more
secure than legal enactment. Rights that depend on the sufferance of
the State are of uncertain tenure; for they are in constant danger of
abrogation either through the failure of the State to maintain them,
through a gradual modification of the laws on which they depend, or
through a change in the form of the State.[40] At the present moment
the third of these dangers, which might have seemed remote ten years
ago, may be held to be at least equally pressing with the other two.
It is a misfortune of the woman’s movement that it has succeeded in
securing political rights for women at the very period when political
rights are worth less than they have been at any time since the
eighteenth century. Parliamentary government is breaking down in
Europe, and the guarantees of individual rights which it supported are
disappearing with it. Republicanism in this country has not yet broken
down, but public confidence in it has never been so low, and it seems
certainly on the way to disaster. No system of government can hope
long to survive the cynical disregard of both law and principle which
government in America regularly exhibits. Under these circumstances, no
legal guarantee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, and the
women who rely upon such guarantees to protect them against prejudice
and discrimination are leaning on a broken reed. They will do well to
bear this in mind as they proceed with their demands for equality, and
to remember that however great may be their immediate returns from the
removal of their legal disabilities, they can hardly hope for security
against prejudice and discrimination until their natural rights, not
as women but as human beings, are finally established. This is to say
that if they wish to be really free they must school themselves in “the
magnificent tradition of economic freedom, the instinct to know that
without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting,
and that if economic freedom be attained, no other freedom can be
withheld.”
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Still, putting the shoe on the other foot, there is no denying
that discriminative legislation based on the Larger Good might as well
serve to secure to women privileges which would lead toward female
domination, as to create disabilities which would keep them at a
disadvantage compared with men. Even the United States Supreme Court
has been known to reverse itself.
[31] Land, that is, in the technical economic sense. It does not mean
the solid part of the earth’s surface--earth as distinguished from
water. It means the sum-total of natural resources.
[32] It is hardly necessary to go into the methods by which this
control is exercised. In a country where government is elected, as
in this, privilege controls through its contribution to party-funds,
through bribery, through economic pressure, and all the other means
which its control of economic opportunity puts at its disposal.
[33] Women and slaves were discriminated against in this country; and
in the State of California today, no person incapable of citizenship
may hold land--a provision which excludes Japanese and Chinese.
[34] A great deal is said about credit-monopoly, as if it were
something requiring a new and special kind of instrument to break up.
But what is credit? Merely a device for facilitating the exchange
of wealth, and all wealth is produced from land. The break-up of
land-monopoly would therefore at once break up credit-monopoly. Or,
putting it in another way, the one and only imperishable security is
land--all other forms of security finally run back to it. The break-up
of land-monopoly would therefore break up the monopoly of all the
secondary and derived forms of security upon which credit could be
based.
[35] There is recent precedent for this in American law. Under
the XVIII Amendment and the Volstead Act, the Federal Government
confiscated _ex post facto_ without a penny of compensation hundreds
of millions invested in the liquor business. All this, too, was
in labour-made property, not in law-made property, which greatly
strengthens the precedent.
[36] The Constitution of one of the Soviet Republics--I think it is
Georgia--begins something after this fashion: “It is the purpose of
this Government to abolish government.”
[37] The political placeholder must not be confused with those workers
in business, industry, or the arts who are not manual labourers, but
perform valid services which are exchangeable for wealth and justify
their being accounted productive workers.
[38] This is not to be taken as a contradiction of what I have said in
Chapter I concerning the argument that women wanted to be subjected.
No class ever voluntarily accepts subjection; but when it has been
subjected by one means or another, the ignorance that its subjection
breeds may cause it to become passively acquiescent in the injustice of
its position. It is worth noting that so long as the _idea_ of slavery
is tolerated, slaves may accept their position with a certain fatalism,
much as the vanquished force in war accepts its defeat.
[39] It is not to be understood that all male workers, individually or
in union, take this attitude; but that it does exist among them I have
already shown.
[40] This is not to be taken as contradicting the earlier statement
that women would not renounce without a struggle the rights they have
gained. The world can not move toward freedom without carrying women
along; they would not tolerate a dual movement, towards freedom for men
and slavery for themselves. But when the general movement is away from
freedom, as the movement of political government is at present, the
rights of women are endangered along with those of men.
CHAPTER VII
SIGNS OF PROMISE
Superficially it may seem that the present is an inappropriate time
to suggest that either women or men go deliberately out of their way
to undertake a process of self-education in the meaning of freedom.
The dominant spirit among us is not only not hospitable to the idea
of freedom; it is openly inimical to the idea. The United States is
the richest and most powerful country in the world. It is in the midst
of the most interesting experiment ever seen in the simplification
of human life. It is undertaking to prove that human beings can live
a generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the reflective
intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and in a proper use of the
word without emotions, so long as they may see the prospect of a
moderate well-being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under the
spell of a great number of mechanical devices for the enhancement of
comfort, convenience and pleasure. This experiment is so universal and
so preoccupying that while it is going on there would seem to be no
chance to get any consideration for so unrelated a matter as freedom.
Hence the only current notion of freedom is freedom to live and behave
as the majority live and behave and to desire what the majority desire;
and notions which diverge from this have not been under stronger
suspicion and disapproval since the eighteenth century than they are
in this country today. Not that any one, probably, fears any degree of
liberty for himself, but every one has a nervous horror of too much
liberty for others. Most people no doubt feel that they themselves
would know exactly what to do with freedom and therefore might be
safely trusted with any measure of it; it is the possible social effect
of other people’s liberty that they dread. No idea, probably, is more
distrusted and feared among us at the present time than that of freedom
for someone else.
The dominant spirit at present--the spirit which gives tone to our
society--is diametrically opposed to the spirit of freedom. It is a
spirit of coercion and intolerance. Politically this spirit finds
expression in a pronounced reaction from the “progressivism” which had
gained so much support before the war; in an enormous strengthening of
“the cohesive power of public plunder,” with a consequent reversion
to the regimentation of strict party-government; in outrages committed
by government, with popular approval--or at least indifference--upon
the persons and property of people suspected of economic unorthodoxy;
and in a cynical disregard by both government and populace of those
guarantees of individual liberty which were wrested from government
by more liberty-loving generations than our own. It is evident also
in the development of extra-governmental organizations committed to
a programme of violence actuated by religious bigotry, race-hatred,
or inflamed chauvinism, such as the Hackenkreutzers and Fascists
abroad--for the spirit of intolerance is not confined to the United
States--and the Ku Klux Klan in this country; movements which,
although they imply no menace to the exploiting classes themselves,
do constitute a menace, at present imperfectly perceived, to the
established organization through which those classes exercise
exploitation, and an extremely threatening danger to the lives and
liberties of millions among the governed.
Economically the spirit of coercion is in evidence in the struggles
for advantage between capital and labour, each trying to force the
other to its own terms; in attempts by employers to break up defensive
organization among their workers; and in such laws as the Criminal
Syndicalism Acts, most of which give criminal character to membership
in an organization professing radical economic doctrine. Socially
it is reflected in such laws as the Eighteenth Amendment and the
Volstead Act, and in puerile and evil-minded attempts at censorship of
individual conduct, of public amusement, and of literature and art.
In religion it is manifest in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan,
in the current controversy between Fundamentalism and Modernism in
the Protestant churches, and in the attempt sponsored by bigoted and
influential church-organizations to stop by edict the progress of
biological and anthropological science, because it threatens the tenure
of established superstitions. It is likewise evident in the concern
of those organizations with such social behaviour of individuals as
must rationally be held indifferent, and their efforts to get their
particular code of conduct enforced through sumptuary law.
The recrudescence of this spirit is the immediate result of war, which
always brings it about. War embodies in its crudest form the doctrine
of government by violence; and when war is dominant, therefore,
the ideals of justice and liberty, which are directly opposed to
it, become so unpopular that those who continue to profess them are
liable to persecution by government and by their war-mad compatriots.
Governments, which never grant their citizens more freedom of opinion
and action than is absolutely necessary in order to get themselves
tolerated, take advantage of this war-spirit to revoke, in practice
if not in law, those guarantees of individual rights which it suits
their purpose to dispense with. When the popular orgy of patriotic
bloodthirst and intolerance is over, and the populace begins to get
back to sanity, it finds government more securely fixed upon its back
than ever, and prepared to ride it without that easy rein and that
sparing of the spur which fear compels. Thus it is that the Governments
of the Western world, since the war, have been carrying on their
imperialist activities abroad and persecuting dissenters at home, with
an excess of cynicism which would have been effectively reprehended by
public opinion before the war.
The chief reason why this policy of force continues to command a large
measure of popular support is because fear of bolshevism has taken the
place of that fear of the enemy which unifies public opinion behind
Governments in war-time. Economic interests immediately consolidated
against the influence of the Russian Revolution precisely as they did
against that of the French Revolution, and in the same way. Governments
have done all in their power to inculcate fear of this influence upon
their peoples; and in this they command the assistance of practically
the whole institutional organization of their respective countries.
There is other and far better reason for this propaganda than the
mere need of a new bogey with which to cow the timorous and keep the
disaffected under control. The idea of freedom which bolshevist Russia
has launched is a distinct menace to political government and its
beneficiaries, the owning classes. If the expropriated and exploited
masses in other countries once get it through their heads that their
primary interest is not political but economic, the days of political
government will be numbered. The propaganda against bolshevism is
therefore inspired by two motives: the wish to frighten peoples into
approving suppression of those suspected of political and economic
heresy, and the wish to divert attention from the idea behind the
Russian Revolution through the moral effect of real or supposititious
misbehaviour by the Revolutionary Government. It is a curious twist of
human psychology that makes supposed outrages committed by a foreign
Government five thousand miles away appear to justify actual and
equal outrages by one’s own Government in one’s own country; and a
proletarian dictatorship five thousand miles away appear to justify a
dictatorship of the exploiting classes at home. The Soviet Government’s
alleged mistreatment of political dissenters is easily made effective
in ranging popular opinion in this country behind governmental
persecution and deportation of communists and anarchists. Reports of
Red terror in Russia reconcile public opinion--or at least that portion
of it which is articulate--to the reign of a White terror here. It
would appear that the desirability of dictatorship and terrorism is
not in question, but their colour. Civilized persons, perhaps, would
find little to choose between Red terror and White terror, or a Red
dictatorship and a White; they would probably elect to dispense with
terrorism and dictatorship altogether; but civilized persons have
nothing to do with framing the policies of government, and almost
nothing to do with the formation of majority-opinion.
Superficially, then, an invitation to contemplate freedom seems
untimely. The cause of freedom is neither popular nor fashionable;
therefore it may seem unduly optimistic to expect that there will soon
be an interest in it deep enough or general enough to move many people
to inquire seriously into its meaning or its desirability. Such a study
would imply a critical reappraisal of institutions to which fear of
change impels the majority to cling with a tenacity out of proportion
to the benefits to be derived from their preservation. In this country
this fear of change is especially strong because, as I have remarked
before, the exactions of monopoly have not yet advanced to the point
of choking industry. Moreover, opportunities to enjoy monopoly are not
as extensively pre-empted here as they are elsewhere; and therefore
the chances of the individual to share in the loot of industry are
much better. This fact tends to keep a great many people loyal to
an economic and political order which offers them a chance, however
remote, to live by the earnings of other people, and to make them
inhospitable to an idea of freedom which threatens that chance. There
is another factor, too, which must be taken into account, as explaining
the hostility of our proletariat towards an experiment in proletarian
government which might be expected to gain their tolerance if not their
sympathetic interest: that factor is the tendency of human beings to
prefer an immediate temporary well-being to an ultimate permanent
well-being conditioned on the acceptance of immediate hardship or
uncertainty. “_Après nous le déluge_” is a sentiment by no means
peculiar to dissolute and irresponsible monarchs. Humankind has always
shown a perfect willingness to let posterity pay its bills and atone
for its misdeeds. Labour at present is comparatively well off in this
country; and it is significant that just those sections of it that are
most advantageously situated are strongest in their opposition to the
bolshevist experiment, namely: the unions in the American Federation
of Labour. One can not unreservedly condemn their attitude; there is
much to be said for it. In a society organized as ours is, the mere
loss of a job is, as I have remarked elsewhere, terrible enough to keep
one’s thoughts from wandering on burning ground. The labourer stands
to lose through any radical economic readjustment quite as much as
the monopolist, that is, his all. If his all be sufficient to keep him
from want, he will naturally regard with apprehension any proposal to
take it away for the moment, even for the sake of his own possible
future advantage. The poor man, especially if he have a family, is
likely to feel that a present sufficiency is worth much more than
a future surplus. It is only when people have literally nothing to
lose but their chains that they can face without fear the prospect of
revolutionary change. If the existing economic order remains in force,
that time will come in this country as it came in pre-revolutionary
France, and something over a century later in pre-revolutionary
Russia; and when it does, there will be plenty of active interest
in freedom, and of underground movements to bring it about by
revolutionary methods. But at present the “dissidence of Dissent and
the protestantism of the Protestant religion,” the Anti-Saloon League,
the one-hundred-per-centers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Republican
party, are in unapproachable ascendancy.
This does not greatly matter. Force and proscription are in the
long run invariably ineffectual against an idea. The idea released
by the American and French revolutions--the idea of the right of
individual self-expression in politics--prevailed over the combined
forces of European feudalism; and the idea released by the Russian
Revolution will prevail over the combined forces of European and
American imperialism. For ideas can be fought neither with armies nor
with persecutions; nor can attention be for ever diverted from them.
The only thing that has effective force against an idea is a better
one. Whether or not the Soviet Government succeeds in getting beyond
dictatorship to the establishment of economic justice in Russia is
not really important. If it should fail, its failure will not halt
the progress of the idea that human freedom is fundamentally a matter
of economics. Not even that acceptance in principle and denial in
practice which is the chief characteristic of Liberal policy, can
permanently defeat it. Sooner or later it will penetrate into human
consciousness; it will become part of that consciousness; and it
will prevail. Whether or not it will prevail during this era of the
world’s history is another question, whose answer will depend upon the
readiness of mankind to assimilate and be actuated by it. If it is not
assimilated in time to prevent the ruin of European civilization, then
its ultimate victory will take place in a future era, when European
civilization has followed the way of other civilizations to oblivion.
The process of assimilation is even now at work; with what
effectiveness one may deduce from the strength and determination of
the forces arrayed against it. It was no love for the Czar and the
Russian nobility that caused the Allied Governments to spend millions
of dollars in support of Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, just as it was
no love for Louis XVI and the French nobility that sent the Duke of
Brunswick into France at the head of the Allies’ army. It was fear of
the idea which animates the Bolshevist Government. It was not because
the Allied Governments hated Germany less but because they hated the
Bolsheviki more that they failed to assent to the Soviet Government’s
proposal to surrender Petrograd and Moscow, establish a front in the
Ural mountains, and continue the war against Germany. It was not their
belief in self-determination, but their desire to interpose a buffer
State between the embattled proletariat of Russia and the embattled
imperialists of Western Europe, that caused them to erect Poland into
an independent State. Nor has anything but the most pressing economic
necessity moved any one of the Western Governments to treat with the
cynical realists of Moscow, who have repeatedly embarrassed Allied
politicians by their persistent abstinence from the hypocritical cant
of the diplomat who has predatory designs to justify. Nor was it any
sudden access of friendliness for Germany, or any noble superiority
to sectional jealousies and nationalist ambitions, that moved these
same Governments to sign the agreement of Locarno; it was, rather, a
desire to make common cause against a Government whose avowed purpose
is to destroy the privileged interests by and for which they themselves
exist. Need anyone suppose that they would do all these things if they
believed that the Russian idea could be localized? Not even the desire
of their privilegees to exploit the natural wealth of Russia could
have brought about a Locarno agreement. It was their sense of a common
danger that overcame their mutual jealousies and distrust; the danger
that the proletarians of their own countries may, as their miseries
increase, be moved to emulate the proletarians of Russia, that a sense
of class-solidarity may overcome traditional and national antipathies,
and move them to unite for the purpose of casting off their chains.
There are tendencies in post-war Europe and America which must be
disturbing to the politician who knows how to interpret them, if
there be such a politician; tendencies far more significant of future
developments than the mere existence of organized revolutionary
minorities or the activities of single communists or anarchists, and
much more difficult to cope with. Chief among these is a growing
disrespect for government; the progress of a healthy cynicism
concerning its nature and purpose, and a promising disregard of
those sumptuary laws which do not meet with the convictions or
desires of citizens. This tendency is by no means confined to any
disaffected group or class. The citizen who is most patriotic, and
most wholeheartedly with his Government in its attempts to coerce
other people, may not scruple to evade its attempts to coerce himself.
There is no articulate sentiment in this country, for example, against
the income-tax law; yet there are few citizens who will not evade its
incidence if possible, and feel themselves quite justified in doing so.
Or again, who has not heard people comfortably provided with contraband
liquor remark that they believe prohibition to be an excellent thing
for the country in general? People may support the policies of a
Government who entertain no illusions whatever about the nature of its
personnel--or about the policies themselves for that matter--but who
support them as a matter of self-interest or because they see nothing
better to do. But all this does not augur especially well for the hold
of government upon the loyalty or imagination of the governed. It is
a truism that the Government which tries to enforce one law to which
its citizens do not subscribe, thereby engenders disrespect for all
law, and thus weakens its authority. Again, the citizen who supports
his Government through self-interest or inertia may oppose it through
self-interest or because his inertia has been overcome. If he does not
support it through respect, its hold upon him is tenuous and uncertain.
As for the growing numbers of the disaffected, they show their loss
of faith in so-called representative government, and their sense of
helplessness, by a practice of non-co-operation which is none the less
real because it is spontaneous and unorganized. The number of qualified
voters who abstain from using the ballot grows with every election;
and this is not surprising, since every voter of any intelligence
knows precisely what interests control government, and precisely
what measure of self-determination his apparent choice between rival
candidates involves. Even the old faith in Liberalism, or the belief
that the masses may get some voice in government through “putting good
men in office,” is not what it once was. Liberalism displayed its true
colours during the war, and since the war it has not been able to
fool a great many of the people even part of the time. It is worthy
of note that every war-Government of 1914 was a Liberal Government
except Russia’s. Mr. Wilson was a Liberal if there ever was one; and
Mr. Wilson’s Administration led the American people into a costly war
which was of practical moment to only an infinitesimal minority of
our population, and used the opportunity created by war-hysteria to
perpetrate the most high-handed outrages against dissenters from his
war-policy. Mr. Wilson may have been sincerely insincere, as one clever
critic put it; but whether he was so or not, he gave the American
people a thorough, high-priced lesson in the essential hypocrisy of
Liberalism. Mr. Wilson, and his fellow-Liberals of Europe, showed
the world that the real interests of Liberalism and those of Toryism
are identical, and that when those interests are endangered it is
impossible to distinguish between Liberal and Tory behaviour.
It has, indeed, become abundantly clear since the war that a
realignment of forces is inevitable; a realignment which shall
represent not merely two factions differing slightly in regard to
the non-essentials of government but one in the fundamental purpose
of furthering economic exploitation; but a realignment which shall
represent the cleavage which exists already, and will be widened
as time goes on, between those who wish to perpetuate economic
exploitation and those who wish it abolished. The remark which
one frequently hears, that the two great parties in this country
represent the same interests, means that they are both maintained by,
and directly represent, the interest of monopoly which is engaged
in exploiting industry. Their superficial differences, even, are
notoriously insignificant, and fundamentally their interests and
their source of power are identical. The logical cleavage, therefore,
is between members of those two parties with all mere Liberals and
reformers, on the one side, and advocates of economic justice on the
other. It is really too late for compromise; too late for government
to do everything for the exploited masses except get off their backs,
as the German Imperial Government did so admirably before the war.
Governments have become too corrupt and too ruthless, and the interests
behind them too greedy, to perceive the wisdom of such a course. If
the policy of coercion is in the ascendancy, if the executive arm
of political government is everywhere usurping the function of the
legislative arm, if parliamentarism and republicanism seem about
to merge into dictatorship, it is because the ruling classes are
much more aware of the coming struggle than are those classes whose
interests will range them on the other side; and if many people now
support government whose interests are against it, it is because
they have not yet awakened to a realization of their true position.
The increasing cynicism of the governed concerning the nature and
purposes of government really marks an important advance toward the new
alignment of forces. It is not a long step from the realization that
government does not represent the general interest, to a discovery of
the direction in which that interest lies.
Along with this cynicism go other signs of a changing attitude. There
is a conspicuous falling off of faith in what might be called the
unofficial adjuncts of government, namely: the press and the pulpit.
The changing attitude towards organized religion was recognized and
defined in the Pope’s recent Encyclical Letter condemning the progress
of laicism in all the countries of the Christian world, and the
accompanying tendency to discuss Christianity as if it were merely
one of the historical faiths, like Mohammedanism or Buddhism, instead
of the only true, revealed religion. It is recognized also in the
attempts to which I have alluded above, by certain Protestant sects in
this country to secure laws forbidding the teaching of the theory of
evolution. It is true that science and the printing-press have robbed
a secularized church of its main source of influence over the minds of
men, the one by discovering and proclaiming the natural laws behind
those phenomena which ignorance attributed to benign or evil spirits;
and the other by facilitating the general dissemination of knowledge.
The Church can no longer effectively appeal to fear. For a church which
very early became a class-organization, and one of the large-scale
promoters and beneficiaries of economic exploitation, this is a serious
thing. Its promises and its comminations are becoming alike ineffectual
in face of mankind’s growing concern with the spiritual effect of
involuntary poverty and wretchedness upon the human spirit in this
present world. The modern cynicism towards paternalism in government
and industry finds its counterpart in cynicism concerning organized
Christianity. In an age which questions the justice of mankind’s
arbitrary division into classes, such an Encyclical as that of Pope
Leo XIII which enjoined masters to be lenient and the subject masses
to be patient is already an anachronism; and the injunction put by the
Church of England upon candidates for confirmation to order themselves
lowly and reverently unto all their betters is more likely to arouse
antagonism than to win compliance. The churches do not understand the
new psychology with which they have to deal. They are offering dogmatic
creeds to an age which is suspicious of all dogma; they are upholding
traditional moral criteria in an age when the foundations of factitious
morality are being generally scrutinized by the light of reason and
knowledge; they are preaching salvationist doctrine in terms which no
longer edify or recommend themselves to serious attention. All this
is merely to say that organized religion, like political government,
remains static in the midst of flux; and like political government
it faces a spontaneous and widespread if entirely unorganized popular
movement of non-coöperation.
As for that large majority of prosperous newspaper-concerns which are
stigmatized in socialist literature as the “kept press,” they have
been so over-eager in the partisanship of their editorial writing and
in the colouring of their news or its manufacture out of whole cloth,
that there is discernible a decided change in the popular attitude
towards them. The power of the printed word is still great out of
all proportion to its weight; but editorial pronouncements, if they
are read at all, are by no means swallowed as the undiluted milk of
the word, as they were in the day when Horace Greeley used daily in
the _Tribune_ to dictate opinion to a large section of the American
public. It is significant that since the advertising department has
come to take precedence over the editorial department, there has been
a decided falling-off in respect for journalism and a marked decrease
in the number of honest and able people who take up journalistic
work. This was to be expected. The modern newspaper is essentially
an advertising medium, and its editorial writing and presentation of
news must conform to its general character. Under these circumstances
men of intellectual ability and integrity are no longer attracted by
such work, as they are no longer, for an analogous reason, attracted
to governmental office or to the pulpit. The consequent deterioration
in journalistic personnel contributes further to the newspaper’s loss
of prestige--again as in the case of the personnel of government and
of the churches. As all those institutions lose the power to command
respect and allegiance, they progressively lose power to attract able
and honest minds to their service; and as they lose this power of
attraction, their power to command respect progressively dwindles; and
thus by alternate reactions they tend to disintegration. To return to
the press, it is symptomatic of the loss of popular faith in its moral
and intellectual character that people buy this newspaper or that so
largely because of special features--local news, sporting news, this
person’s column or that person’s cartoons. It is no exaggeration to say
that the overwhelming majority of Americans look to their newspapers
not for information but for entertainment or excitement; a fact which
is amply attested by the amount of space devoted to special features,
comic strips and cheap stories, and above all by the extraordinary
success of a new tabloid type of newspaper devoted almost exclusively
to pictures, accompanied by the most sensational kind of backstairs
gossip. In the parlance of the street, the modern newspaper is “giving
’em what they want”; and while the preference is a sad reflection
on public taste, its gratification is an equally sad reflection on
the quality and standing of American journalism. The newspaper, in
short, as I have said, no longer informs or guides opinion; it purveys
amusement.
The same deterioration, with concomitant loss of prestige, that is
proceeding in government, the church and the press, is evident in
educational institutions. This is a natural and inevitable development,
since education is so largely under political control. The powers
which control government are in control of education; and those powers
quite naturally will not tolerate any teaching which even implies a
revaluation of the existing economic, political or social organization.
This intolerance is effective even in institutions not under direct
control by the State; for those institutions are largely dependent on
wealthy benefactors, and wealth is almost entirely in control of people
who have a direct interest in the preservation of the established
order. Under these circumstances, the primary purpose of education,
which is to develop the mind and help it to independent progress along
the paths of truth and reason, is rendered impossible of fulfilment;
and our schools have pretty generally substituted for this purpose
another and lower one which is calculated neither to embarrass nor
offend the powers on which they depend. This is the vocational purpose.
Thus they have ceased to be centres of culture, and become centres of
training whose object is to turn out graduates who shall resemble one
another as closely as possible in all things save in special vocational
training. As Professor Jerome Davis recently expressed it, our colleges
are turning out machine-made minds. The deterioration in the personnel
of the teaching profession is consequently quite as marked as that
in government, the churches and the press. Independence of spirit is
not tolerated by school-directors and boards of regents. Teaching,
moreover, being held in little respect by the State, to whose interests
it is obviously inimical if prosecuted intelligently and seriously, is
so poorly paid that people who can possibly do better elsewhere are
naturally unwilling to become teachers. It is needless to dwell upon
the demoralizing and vulgarizing effect of these circumstances on the
schools themselves and those who attend them. It is too obvious and
has been already too often discussed, to require consideration here.
What I do wish to note is the fact that this educational system does
not escape criticism and distrust; and that the most interesting and
promising manifestation of this distrust is evident not among outsiders
or alumni, but among undergraduates. Too much may not be expected of
it, but the “youth-movement” which is afoot among students may not be
disregarded; it is symptomatic of a critical attitude and a spirit of
revolt which may not be wholly without effect.
These are negative signs of progress, if one will, but none the less
impressive for that. They indicate a growing sense of discomfort in
the environment provided by established institutions, and a loss of
faith in those institutions as they deteriorate under the spread of
their own corruption. On the positive side one may cite the growing
power of economic organization, and its tendency to displace political
organization. The appearance in the American Congress of a group known
as the “farm-bloc” is an interesting instance of this tendency.
Here is a group of political representatives with whom an economic
interest is frankly placed ahead of political affiliation. They are
primarily neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither conservatives
nor progressives; they are primarily representative of a producing
group. As such, they stand for a departure from the theory of
representative political government, which assumes that representation
shall be not industrial but geographic. According to this theory, the
representatives from each arbitrarily fixed geographical unit are
supposed to represent the interests of all the citizens within that
unit. This evidently leaves out of account not only the fact that
economic interests are primarily industrial or occupational and only
secondarily and fortuitously sectional, but also the fact that the
economic interests within a given area may be mutually inimical. In
practice, of course, political representatives have really represented
the dominant economic interest within their allotted territory, the
interest which has exercised the strongest political influence; but
since in theory they must represent all interests, they have not
been able to represent that dominant interest openly, but have had
to resort to subterfuge and dishonesty. Even the members of the
farm-bloc, were they representing districts where agriculture was
not the dominant industry, would no doubt be less open in their
espousal of its interest. None the less they have dared, in disregard
of party-discipline, to form a bloc which stands squarely for the
interest of a producing class; and in doing so they have taken a step
towards the system of industrial representation which has of late
made great strides in European countries, more especially in Russia
and Germany. Although the group which has taken this step may be
unimportant politically, save when a close division chances to throw
the balance of power into its hands, the step it has taken is of the
utmost importance; for if economic representation should proceed until
it eventually superseded geographical representation, the change would
not only involve the destruction of the bipartisan machine which
controls government in this country; it would naturally bring about
an open alignment of the producing interests against the interests of
exploitation, and thus make clear the final and fundamental issue of
which I have spoken--the question whether economic exploitation is to
be perpetuated or abolished.
A good deal of non-political organization shows the same trend. The
growth of co-operation, for example, in production, marketing, and
consumption, is evidence of an attempt to evade through group-action
those exactions of government’s beneficiaries against which the single
individual is powerless to protect himself. The growth of offensive
and defensive organization among capitalists on the one side and
workers on the other, not only implies recognition of the primary
importance of economic interests and the value of co-operation among
groups whose economic interests are identical; it implies also an
acknowledgment that neither capital nor labour receives from government
what it will accept as adequate protection of its interests--as, of
course, neither can, since the interest that government exists to
protect--the interest of monopoly--is directly inimical to both.
Moreover, as this organization becomes international in scope it
constitutes a negation of the political differences which bolster up
rival national organizations. That it has not yet become strong enough
to prevent nationalistic wars, is true; but this is because the fact
that war is a clash, not of rival producing interests, but of rival
exploiting interests has not yet become sufficiently clear to overcome
a specious patriotism and the traditional distrust and prejudice
which governments have assiduously inculcated upon the governed.
The producing classes are really behind the exploiting classes in
discovering that their interests are pretty much the same, whatever
their various nationalities may be. Governments have always co-operated
when any rebellious move by the governed in any country threatened the
established economic and political order; as they co-operated in the
Holy Alliance against France, or in a similar alliance against Russia,
and as they are now co-operating in the League of Nations against
the exploited classes in all countries. When the exploited classes
understand their own position as clearly as the exploiting classes have
understood theirs, organization for defense and offense will no longer
be national and vertical but horizontal and international. The real
issue will be drawn at last. Hence the tendency of capital and labour
toward international organization along the lines of economic interest
is an extremely hopeful sign that the producing classes are beginning
to realize that their major interests are not political but economic,
and that the quarrels of Governments are injurious to those interests;
that they are beginning to outgrow the narrow nationalism which has
facilitated their exploitation in the past, and made it possible to pit
them against one another in the quarrels of rival exploiting classes.
II
All these signs of disaffection under the old order of things and the
gropings towards a new, do not imply, of course, any growth of the
spirit of freedom, or any new consciousness of its nature. They do
indicate, however, the progress of a temper which, when it shall have
become more pervasive and more deeply rooted, will be hospitable to
the doctrine of freedom. Discontent with the established order must
necessarily precede any serious move toward its displacement by a new
order; and discontent, while it is by no means dominant at present,
is widespread enough to cause Governments a good deal of anxiety.
The very tightening of the grip of government which is evident in
the present tendency to suppress legislative bodies, and in ruthless
persecution of economic dissenters, is, as I have already remarked, a
sure indication of the extent and strength of the dissenting forces.
When those people who now endure the harassment of governmental waste
and industrial exploitation, shall perceive that relief is to be
gained not through futile political reforms aimed at amelioration of
their lot, but through a radical readjustment of the whole economic
system--when, in other words, they realize “what is to be done”--then
and not before, will come the real test of the tenacity of the old
order and the strength of the forces moving towards the new. On its
side the old order will have governmental organization and armed
forces, and the enormous influence of the superstitious tendency to
regard as right that which is established, supporting the interest of
a compact, wealthy, and highly organized exploiting class. The new
order will have on its side the newly realized need of the majority
without whose acquiescence a highly organized minority can not long
maintain itself in power. The issue will depend, obviously, not only
on the intelligence, ability and determination of the majority’s
leaders, but upon their clear understanding of the issue involved. If
they compromise, as the leaders of the French Revolution compromised,
the cause of justice will be lost, and the most that will be gained
will be a shifting of privilege. The Western world is faced at present
with the alternative of establishing an enduring civilization on the
sure foundation of economic justice, or of sinking back into barbarism
through a long series of civil and international struggles for
possession of the power to exploit. If it follow the latter course, its
civilization will go the way of the civilization of Egypt, Greece, and
Rome; and its vitality, like theirs, will so decrease under the dual
drain of exploitation and war that it will eventually fall, as they
fell, an easy prey to some strong external force.
The task before those who wish to avert this fate, whose passionate
desire is to bring about an enduring civilization based on the solid
foundation of economic justice, is the task of educating themselves in
the nature of freedom, of learning to face freedom without fear, and
of communicating to others their understanding and their courage. The
women of today, especially in this country, are in a peculiarly good
position to undertake this task. They enjoy unprecedented advantages
in the way of social and intellectual autonomy, and of educational
opportunity. They have emerged successful from a long struggle for
political equality with men, and they are still engaged in an organized
effort to secure legal equality. Thus they have their hand in, as it
were, with the work of removing the artificial disabilities which
organized society imposes on a subject class in order to keep it
subject; and this work should have engendered in those who have been
active in it a healthy resentment of social injustice and a sense
of the value of freedom to the human spirit. They will still have,
moreover, even after legal equality is won, a considerable number of
discriminations to combat, which should operate against the temptation
to regard their fight as won, and to relax the vigilance which is
always necessary to preserve individual rights against encroachment by
organized society. The organizations through which they have worked
remain intact; it is for them to determine whether those organizations
shall continue as mere agencies for political lobbying or whether they
will carry on the demand for freedom to its logical end.
The fact that women are in a good position to inquire into the nature
of freedom offers, of course, no earnest that they will do so. In spite
of the reasonableness of such a course, they may content themselves
with trying to effect the ultimate equality of the sexes through
political measures which in their nature can never effect it--provided,
that is, that events do not move too fast for even a serious trial
of such inept methods. A good deal of mirth has already been aroused
in certain quarters by trivial and futile reform-measures which women
politicians have sponsored. If this sort of thing shall prove to be the
sum-total of women’s contribution to social problems, it will merely
prove that they are quite as incapable of an intelligent understanding
of those problems as men have hitherto shown themselves to be. If
women are now in a good position to school themselves in the tradition
of economic freedom, the men of Europe and America have been in an
equally good position to do so since the political revolutions of the
eighteenth century, and as yet they have given no very encouraging
signs of progress. However much one may hope that women will make a
better showing, it would be unfair to expect it of them; for they
are but now emerging from the mental and spiritual condition induced
by centuries of subjection. If, therefore, they fail to grasp their
opportunity to contribute to the process of education which must
precede the establishment of economic justice; if they are content to
fix their minds upon this or that special aspect of social freedom or
of political freedom, instead of looking steadily towards economic
freedom--economic freedom for men and women alike--the judicious critic
may lament their failure or disparage their tactics, but he can hardly
attribute either to any stupidity or incapacity peculiar to their sex,
since it is through the same failure and the same tactics that men have
brought civilization to the critical state in which it is at present.
The great point, however, is that if they fail they are sure to pay
for their failure a higher price than men will pay. As they have more
to gain from freedom than men, so they have more to lose than men if
the Western world shall fail to establish its civilization on the
firm basis of economic justice. In the relapse into barbarism which
must attend the ultimate breakdown of economic and social life under
the monopolistic system, physical force will be even more strongly
ascendant than it is at present; and when physical force dominates,
the ideals of justice and liberty are, as I have already remarked,
without effective influence--the only right is might. The well-being
of women depends in very great measure on the prevalence of those
ideals; for when force is dominant, woman’s physical disadvantage as
the child-bearing sex places her in a position to be more readily
subjected and exploited than man. Because of this disadvantage she
was the first victim of exploitation; because of it, she will be the
last to escape; and because of it she will be the greater sufferer
from exploitation so long as exploitation shall be the basis of the
economic and social order. There is potential tragedy in the fact
that the Western world has become civilized enough to perceive the
injustice involved in women’s subjection only when the economic
order which determines its social life has become so corrupt that it
threatens the destruction of civilization, with all such gains in
humanity as civilization has yielded. Women have equality almost within
their grasp; they may lose it if this civilization shall follow the
path of its predecessors to ruin and oblivion. There is one way to
avert this tragedy, and one only--the way of economic justice. If the
women who have been active in the struggle to emancipate their sex
shall enlarge their conception of freedom, and with it the scope of
their demand, they can help mightily to preserve civilization through
the establishment of justice. If they could win their sex away from
the exploded formulas of the eighteenth century and bring them to
understand that political and social freedom without economic freedom
are utterly illusory, that true freedom proceeds from economic justice,
and that justice and freedom offer the only hope for the salvaging of
this civilization, they would have won half of humanity, and that would
be a contribution of no small value. One thing is certain: the question
of freedom for women can not proceed much farther as an independent
issue. It has reached the point where it must necessarily merge in the
greater question of human freedom. Upon the fate of the greater cause,
that of the lesser will depend. It is for feminists to choose whether
they will merge the feminist in the humanist, or whether they will play
at political and social make-believe while the issue is being decided,
and either suffer in the event the consequences of a failure which they
shall have made no effort to avert, or enjoy the benefits of a success
which they shall have done nothing to attain.