INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRACY
The ascription of imaginary powers to the so-called "sovereign"
democracy, which are really beyond the reach of any kind of government
whatsoever, is, as I have said, a fallacy by no means peculiar to
Socialists. Socialists merely push it to its full logical consequences;
and I will begin with illustrating it by the arguments of a recent
writer who, professedly as a social conservative, has dealt in detail
with this precise question of the motives of the exceptional
wealth-producer, which has just now been engaging us. I refer to the
author of an essay in _The North American Review_, who hides his
personality under the cryptic initial "X," but who is said to be one of
the most cultivated and best-known thinkers now living in the United
States.
The subject of his essay is the growth, almost peculiar to that country,
not of large, but of those colossal fortunes, which have certainly had
no parallel in the past history of the world. The position of "X" is
that the growth of such fortunes is deplorable, partly because they are
possible instruments of judicial and political corruption, and partly
because they excite antagonism against private wealth in general by
exhibiting it to the gaze of the multitude in such monstrous and
grotesque proportions. In any case, says "X," "it is to the true
interest of the multimillionaires themselves to join those who are free
from envy in trying to remove the rapidly growing dissatisfaction with
their continued possession of these vast sums of money."
Now, though "X" hints that some of the fortunes in question may be open
to further reprehension, on the ground that they have been acquired
dishonestly, he by no means maintains that this opprobrium attaches
itself to the great majority of them. On the contrary, he admits that
the typical huge fortunes of America are based on the productive
activities of the remarkable men who have amassed them. The talents of
such men, he says, are essential to the prosperity of the country, and
it is necessary to stimulate such men to develop their talents to the
utmost by allowing them to derive for themselves some special reward for
their use of them; but he contends that the rewards which they are at
present permitted to appropriate are needlessly and dangerously
excessive, and ought therefore to be limited. But limited by what means?
It is his answer to this question that here alone concerns us.
The means, he says, by which these rewards may be limited are ready to
hand, and can be applied with the utmost ease. They are provided by the
democratic Constitution of the United States of America. "No one can
doubt, for example," he goes on to observe, "that, if the majority of
the voters of the State of New York chose to elect a governor of their
own way of thinking, they could readily enact a progressive taxation of
incomes which would limit every citizen of New York State to such income
as the majority of voters considers sufficient for him. And it would be
particularly easy," adds the writer, "to alienate the property of every
man at death, for it is only necessary to repeal the statutes now
authorising the descent of such property to the heirs and legatees of
the decedent." Here, then, according to "X," is an obvious way out of
the difficulty, the feasibility of which no one can doubt. A certain
minority of the citizens render services essential to the majority; but
these advantages are accompanied by a corresponding drawback. The
majority, by the simple use of their sovereign power as legislators, can
retain the former and get rid of the latter. The remedy is in their own
hands.
It would be difficult to imagine an illustration more vivid than this of
the error to which I am now referring--the common error of ascribing to
majorities in democratic communities powers which they do not possess,
and which, as I said before, no kind of government possesses, whether it
be that of a democracy or of an autocrat. That a majority of the voters
in any democratic country can enact any laws they please at any given
moment which happen to be in accordance with what "X" calls their then
"way of thinking," and perhaps enforce them for a moment, is no doubt
perfectly true. But life is not made up of isolated moments or periods.
It is a continuous process, in which each moment is affected by the
moments that have gone before, and by the prospective character of the
moments that are to come after. If it were not for this fact, the
majority of the voters of New York State, "by electing a governor of
their own way of thinking," might not only put a limit to the income
which any citizen might possess. It might do a great deal more besides.
It might enact a law which limited the amount which any citizen might
eat. It might limit everybody to two ounces a day. Besides enacting that
no father should bequeath his wealth to his children, it might enact
just as readily that no father should have the custody of his children.
It might enact, in obedience to the persuasions of some plausible quack,
that no one should take any medicines but a single all-curing pill.
There is nothing in the principles so solemnly laid down by "X" which
would render any of these enactments more impossible than those which he
himself contemplates. But if such enactments were made by the so-called
all-powerful majority, through a governor of their own way of thinking,
what would be the result? If a law forbade the citizens to eat enough
to keep themselves alive, it might perhaps be obeyed throughout Monday,
but it would be broken by Tuesday morning. A law which deprived fathers
of the care of their own children might just as well be a law which
decreed that no children should be born. A law which decreed that no
remedy but the same quack pill should be applied to any disease, whether
cholera, appendicitis, or small-pox, would be either disregarded from
the beginning, or would soon be repealed by a pestilence. In short, if
any one of these ridiculous laws were enacted, the very voters who voted
for it would disregard it as soon as they realised its consequences; and
the work which they did as legislators they would tear to pieces as men.
In other words, if we mean, by legislation, legislation which can be
permanently obeyed, the legislative sovereignty of democracies, which is
so commonly spoken of as supreme, is limited in every direction by
another power greater than itself; and this is the double power of
nature and of human nature. Just as all laws relating to the food which
men are to eat, and the drugs by which their maladies are to be cured,
must depend on the natural qualities of such and such physical
substances, so do the constitution and propensities of the concrete
human character limit legislation generally, and confine it within
certain channels.
This is what "X" and similar thinkers forget; and the nature of their
error is very pertinently illustrated by an observation of the English
jurist, Lord Coleridge, to which "X" solemnly refers, as corroborating
him in his own wisdom. "The same power," says Lord Coleridge, "which
prescribes rules for the possession of property can of course alter
them"; this power being the legislative body of whatever country may be
in question. It is easy to see the manner in which Lord Coleridge
reasons. Because, in any country, the formulation and enforcement of
laws have the will of the governing body as the proximate cause which
determines them, it seems to Lord Coleridge that, in this contemporary
will, the laws thus formulated and enforced have their ultimate cause
also. For example, according to him, the entire institution of property
in the State of New York is virtually a fresh creation of the voters
from year to year, and has nothing else behind it. But, in reality, all
this business of formulation and enforcement is a secondary process, not
a primary process at all. Lord Coleridge is simply inverting the actual
order of things. Half the existing "rules prescribed as to the
possession of property" have, for their ultimate object, the protection
of family life, the privacy of the private home, and the provision made
by parents for their children. But family life is not primarily the
creation of prescribed rules. It is the creation of instincts and
affections which have developed themselves in the course of ages.
Instead of the law creating family life, it is family life which has
gradually called into being--which has created and dictated--the rules
and sanctions protecting it. The same is the case with bequest,
marriage, and so forth. The conduct of civilised men is bound to conform
to laws, but the laws must first conform to general human practice. They
merely give precision to conduct which has a deeper origin than
legislation. Laws, in fact, may be compared to soldiers' uniforms.
These, within certain limits, may be varied indefinitely by a
war-office; but they all must be such as will adapt themselves to the
human body and its movements. The will of a government may prescribe
that the trousers shall be tight or loose, that they shall be black or
brown or bright green or vermilion. But no government can prescribe that
they shall be only three inches round the waist, or that the soldier's
sleeves shall start, not from the shoulders, but from the pockets of the
coat-tails. The human body is here a legislator which is supreme over
all governments; and just the same thing is true with regard to the
human character.
Now, the curious thing with regard to "X" is that he is all along
assuming this fundamental fact himself; though he utterly fails to put
two and two together, and see how this fact conflicts with the
omnipotence which he ascribes to legislation. Let us go back to the
assertion, which embodies his whole practical argument, that the
majority of the voters in New York State could, without interfering with
the activity of any one of its citizens, limit incomes in any manner
they pleased, and alienate with even greater ease the property of every
man at his death; and let us see what he hastens to say as the sequel to
this oracular utterance.
These powers of the sovereign majority, which he is apparently so
anxious to invoke, would, he says, be practically much less formidable
in their action than timid persons might anticipate. And why should they
be less formidable? "Because," says "X," "although each man, by reason
of his manhood alone, has an equal voice with every other man in making
the laws governing their common country, and regulating the distribution
of the common property ... yet immense and incalculable differences
exist in men's natural capacities for rendering honest service to
society. Encouragement should, therefore, be given to every man to use
all the gifts which he possesses to the fullest extent possible; and,
accordingly, reasonable accumulations and the descent of these should be
respected." They should, he says, be respected. Yes--but for what
reason? Because they encourage exceptional men, whose services are
essential to society, to develop and use their capacities to "the
fullest extent possible"; and this is merely another way of saying that,
without the motive provided by the possibility of accumulation and
bequest, the exceptional faculties would not be developed or used at
all. Moreover, the amounts which may be accumulated and bequeathed,
although they will be strictly limited, must, "X" says, be
considerable. He suggests that incomes should be allowed up to £8,000,
and bequeathable property up to £200,000. And here we come to a question
which is still more pertinent than the preceding. Why must the
permissible amounts of income and of bequeathable property be of
proportions such as those which he contemplates? Why does he not take
his bill and write down quickly £200 of income instead of £8,000, and
limit bequeathable property to £2,000 instead of £200,000? Because he
evidently recognises that the men whose possible services to society are
"immensely and incalculably greater" than those of the majority of their
fellow citizens would not be tempted by a reward which, reduced to its
smallest proportions, would not be very largely in excess of what was
attainable by more ordinary exertions. In his formal statement of his
case, he says that the amount of the reward would be entirely determined
by what _ought_ to be sufficient for the purpose in the estimation of
the voting majority; and he mentions the sums in question as those on
which they would probably fix. And it is, of course, quite imaginable
that the majority, in making either these or any other estimates, might
be right. But what "X" fails altogether to see is that, if the majority
of the citizens _were_ right, such sums would not be sufficient because
the majority of citizens happened to think that they ought to be. They
would be sufficient because they were felt to be sufficient by the
minority who were invited to earn them, at whose feelings the majority
would have made a shrewd or a lucky guess. A thousand men with
fishing-rods might meet in an inn parlour and vote that such and such
flies were sufficient to attract trout. But it lies with the trout to
determine whether or no he will rise to them. It is a question, not of
what the fishermen think, but of what the trout thinks; and the
fishermen's thoughts are effective only when they coincide with the
trout's.
So long, then, as society desires to get the best work out of its
citizens, and so long as some men are, in the words of "X," "immensely
and incalculably" more efficient than the great mass of their fellows,
and so long as their efficiency requires, as "X" admits that it does,
some exceptional reward to induce these men to develop it, these men
themselves, in virtue of their inherent characters, must primarily
determine what the reward shall be; and not all the majorities in the
world, however unanimous, could make a reward sufficient if the
particular minority in question did not feel it to be so. The majority
might, by making a sufficient reward unattainable, easily prevent the
services from being rendered at all; but, unless they are to forgo the
services, the majority can only obtain them on terms which will, in the
last resort, depend on the men who are to render them.
Now, in what I have been urging thus far--which practically comes to
this, that the sovereignty popularly ascribed to democratic majorities
is an illusion--not socialists only, but other advocates of popular
government also, will alike be against me, as the promulgator of some
blasphemous paradox. It will be easy, however, to show them that their
objections are quite mistaken, and that the exceptional powers of
dictation which have just been ascribed to a minority are so far from
being inconsistent with the real powers of the majority that the latter,
when properly understood, are seen to be their complement and their
counterpart. For, though socialists and thinkers like "X" ascribe to
majorities powers which they do _not_ possess, we shall find that
majorities do actually possess others, in some ways very much greater,
of which such thinkers have thus far taken no cognisance at all. I have
said that minorities can dictate their own terms to majorities which
desire to secure their services, the reason being that the former are
alone competent to determine what treatment will supply them with a
motive to exert themselves. What holds good of minorities as opposed to
majorities holds good in essentials, though in a somewhat different
form, of majorities as opposed to such minorities.
Let us turn again to a matter to which I have referred already--namely,
the family life of the citizens of any race or nation. This results from
propensities in a vast number of human beings which, although they are
similar, are in each case independent. These propensities give rise to
legislation, the object of which is to prescribe rules by which their
satisfaction may be made secure; but the propensities are so far from
originating in legislation that no legislation which seriously
interfered with them would be tolerated. Socialists themselves have
continually admitted this very thing. The Italian socialist, Giovanni
Rossi, for instance, who attempted about fifteen years ago to found a
socialistic colony in Brazil--an attempt which completely
failed--attributed its failure largely to this particular cause--namely,
the impossibility of inducing the colonists to conform to any rules of
the community by which family life was interfered with. Here we have an
example of democracy in its genuine form, rendering powerless what
affected to be democratic legislation. We have the cumulative power of
similar human characters compelling legislation to limit itself to what
these characters spontaneously demand. And now let us go a step--a very
short step--further. The family propensities in question show their
dictatorial power, not only in the limitations which they impose on
positive laws, but also in the character which they impose on the
material surroundings of existence, especially in the material structure
of the dwellings of all classes except the lowest. All are constructed
with a view to keeping the family group united, and each family group
separate from all others. Further, if the natural family propensities
thus affect the structure of the dwelling, other propensities, more
various in detail, but in each case equally spontaneous, determine what
commodities shall be put into it.
And this fact brings us back to our own more immediate subject--namely,
the power of the few and of the many in the sphere of economic
production. The man of exceptional industrial capacity becomes rich in
the modern world by producing goods, or by rendering services, which
others consume or profit by, and for which they render him a return.
But, in order that they may take, and render him this return for what he
offers them, the goods and the services must be such that the many
desire to have them. All the highest productive ability that has ever
been devoted to the business of cheapening and multiplying commodities,
or rendering social services, would be absolutely futile unless these
commodities and services satisfied tastes or wants existing in various
sections of the community. The eliciting of such wants or tastes depends
very often, and in progressive communities usually, on a previous supply
of the commodities or services that minister to them--as we see, for
example, in the case of tobacco, of the telegraph, and of the bicycle;
but, when once the demands have been elicited, they are essentially
democratic in their nature. Each customer is like a voter who
practically gives his vote for the kind of goods which he desires to
have supplied to him. He gives his vote under no compulsion. He is under
the manipulation of no party or wire-puller; and the men by whose
ability the goods are cheapened and multiplied are bound to determine
their character by the number of votes cast for them.[15]
Thus, while--so long as the productivity of labour is intensified, as it
is in the modern world, by the ability of the few who direct labour--the
labouring majority can never be free in their technical capacity of
producers, they are free, and must always remain free, in respect of
their tastes as consumers. In other words, demand is essentially
democratic, while supply, in proportion to its sustained and enhanced
abundance, is essentially oligarchic.
Now, that demand is essentially democratic, and depends on the tastes
and characters of those by whom the demands are made, nobody will be
inclined to deny. But if we turn our attention from society, taken as a
whole, to the exceptionally able minority on whom the business of supply
depends, we shall find that these men, in their turn, form similarly a
small democracy in themselves, and make, as suppliers, their own demands
also--a demand for an economic reward, or an amount of personal wealth,
not, indeed, necessarily equal to the amount of wealth produced by them,
but bearing a proportion to it which is, in their own estimation,
sufficient. This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on
exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer. It rests on
the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as
impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put
forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward,
when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many
buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want
black.[16]
That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it,
become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are
generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great
wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on
the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers--the people who
principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are
the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it.
They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but
they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those
powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason
about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what
wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in
consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently,
on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels
when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it
seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for
purely sensual self-indulgence--especially for the eating and drinking
of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to
caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a
huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently
shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in
their personal habits, been abstemious and even niggardly to a degree
which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who
value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single
human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the
fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of
the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact
that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by
experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise
of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing
forces of the community. They feel the machine respond to their own
exceptional management of it; they see the output of wealth varied and
multiplied at their will; and thus the results of their specialised
power as producers are neither more nor less than this same internal
power converted into an external, an indeterminate and universalised
form; and the reason why they will never produce wealth merely in order
to be deprived of it is that no one will exercise power merely in order
to lose it, and allow it to pass into the hands of other people. These
men, as experience, especially in America, shows us, are constantly
willing to use this power for the benefit of their kind generally; but
this is no more a sign that they would be willing to allow it to be
forcibly taken from them than the fact that a man is willing to give a
shilling to a beggar in the street is a sign that he would allow the
beggar to steal it out of his waistcoat-pocket.
So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power
as affects the material circumstances of mankind, these differences in
power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily
assert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society;
and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by
a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now
repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish,
which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months'
experience. An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found
in an unlikely place--namely, a work written some years ago by a
socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least
a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning
powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in
general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning
futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist,
who was also an accomplished naturalist--the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is
called _The Woman Who Did_.
The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of
marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's
degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly
respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living
with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the
humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a
daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so
disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother
at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of
such an embarrassing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a
model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its
main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a
number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly
insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which
socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general
principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another,
and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more
important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the
bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her
daughter--and he does this with considerable skill--as developing from
her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive
sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the
mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war.
"Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the
child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the
child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower
and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he
proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents
that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and
impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the
bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they
cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us
read this passage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it
forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the
party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent
error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence
to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens
of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of
congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness
of socialism.
But the arguments at the service of socialism are not exhausted yet.
Even if voting majorities should be unable to transform human nature,
that men of power shall become willing to exert their power only in
order that they may be deprived of it, there is a class of socialists
who declare that what is impossible with mere human democracy, will be
rendered possible by the divine influence of a rightly preached
Christianity. To Christian socialists, as such, I have as yet made no
special reference; nor will it be necessary now to be very prolix in our
dealings with them; but in their attitude and their equipment for the
task of effecting an economic revolution, they throw so strong a light
on the character of contemporary socialism generally that a brief
consideration of their gospel will be interesting and highly
instructive, and will fitly lead us to the conclusion of this part of
our argument.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his criticism of the argument, as stated by me
in America, says that, under the existing system, the consumer is _not_
free to choose what goods he will buy, but has them thrust on him by the
capitalist producer. Yet he, and socialists in general, complain at the
same time of the competition between capitalists, which is simply a
competition to supply what consumers most desire. Here and there, when
no competition exists, one firm can force its goods, if they are of the
nature of necessaries, on the local public. But under the existing
system this is only an occasional incident. Under socialism it would be
universal. When tobacco is a state monopoly, state tobacco is forced on
the great mass of the people.
[16] Mr. G. Wilshire admits, on behalf of socialists, that the argument
of this chapter is so far correct that no democracy can make men of
ability exercise their ability if they do not wish to do so; and that if
they wish for exceptional rewards they will be able to demand them. A
Melba, he says, under socialism, would be able, if she wished for it, to
get probably even higher remuneration than she does to-day. But, he
continues, under socialism, such men and women, though they could get
such rewards, will be so changed that they will not wish for them. A
Melba will then sing for the mere pleasure of singing.