CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY.
Christian socialism, as a doctrine which is preached to-day, might, for
anything that its name can tell us to the contrary, be as different from
ordinary socialism as is Christian Science from secular--as the science
of Mrs. Eddy is from the science of Mr. Edison. We can judge of it only
by examining the utterances of its leading exponents. For this reason,
although I had long been familiar with the utterances of persons who
call themselves Christian socialists in England, I felt bound to decline
an invitation to discuss the subject in America, unless I could be
furnished with some recent and formal version of the gospel as it is
preached there. Accordingly there was sent to me the precise kind of
document I desired. It formed the principal article in a journal called
_The Christian Socialist_. Its author was a clergyman,[17] and it was
entitled "The Gospel for To-day." It was what I expected that it would
be. It reproduced in almost every particular the thoughts and moods
distinctive of Christian socialists in England; and this article I will
here take as a text.
The writer, exhibiting a candour which many of his secular brethren
would do well to imitate, starts with an attack on all existing forms of
democracy, which are all, he says, based on a profound and fatal
fallacy. This is the assumption that all men are born equal, from which
assumption the practical conclusion is deduced that the best state of
society is one which will allow each of these so-called equal beings to
work out his own happiness as best he can for himself, with the minimum
of interference from his fellow-citizens or from the law. Now if, says
our author, men were born equal in reality, such an individualistic
democracy might perhaps work well enough. But men are not born equal.
The root of the difficulty lies here. In the economic sense, as in all
others, some men are incomparably more able than the great majority of
their fellows, and even among the exceptionally able some are much abler
than the others. Consequently, if the principles of modern
individualistic democracy and modern individualistic economics are
right, according to which the main motive of each should be to do the
best for himself with his own powers that he can--"if it is duty to
compete if competition is the life of trade, then the battle for self
must ever go grimly on. The strong must subdue the weak, the rich the
poor, the able the unable. Upon this basis the millionaire and the
multi-millionaire have a perfect right to roll up their untold millions,
even as the working-man has a right to seek the highest wages that he
can get. All in different ways are seeking their own; and the keenest
competitors are the best men. The prizes must go to the strongest and
the shrewdest. It is the survival of the fittest."
Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does Christian
socialism aim at? It does not aim at making men equal in respect of
their ability, for to do this would be quite impossible; but it aims at
producing an equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose
ability is most efficient to forgo all personal claims which are founded
on their own exceptional powers, so that the wealth which is at present
secured by these powers for themselves may in the future be divided
among the mass of their less able brethren.
Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish
is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals.
But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious
quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this
change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing
to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a
conversion _de luxe_ which is to be the privilege of the few only,
while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case,
from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal
life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic
concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has
reached before. The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world
are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food
offered by the devil. The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually
open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread
from heaven. In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the
sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of
riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only
the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing
them.
That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as
those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an
illustration obtruded on us by the author of "The Gospel for To-day."
The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom
of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the
present position of the clergy. "If we churchmen," he says, "want money
for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel. We
have to kneel to 'the steel kings and the oil kings,' merely because
they are rich men." Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of
things like this? Let us consider precisely what it is that our
Christian socialist complains about. He obviously does not mean that he
and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their
knees. The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give
them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when
it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors. This it is which
evidently sticks in the stomach of the humble follower of Christ whose
self-portraiture we are now considering; for, if we confine ourselves to
the Christian element in his teaching, he proposes to alter the existing
situation only by kindling in the "trust magnates" such a fire of
Christian philanthropy that they will have given him all he wants before
he has had time to ask for it, thus exonerating him from the duty of
saying "Thank you" for what he owes to another's goodness, and enabling
him to offer to the Lord that which has cost him nothing.
And what the author of "The Gospel for To-day" urges on behalf of
himself and his clerical brethren is precisely what he urges on behalf
of the less competent majority generally. Neither on them nor on the
Christian clergy does the gospel of Christian socialism urge the duty of
making any new sacrifice, or any new exertion, moral or physical, for
themselves. Just as the clergy are to learn no more of business than
they know now, but are to be relieved of the necessity for all prudence
as to ways and means, so is the ordinary labourer to work no longer, no
harder, and no better than he does now. On the contrary, his hours of
labour are to become ever less and less, and at the same time he is to
receive ever greater and greater wages. These are to be drawn from the
products, not of himself but of his neighbour: and although he will owe
them solely to the virtue which his neighbour exercises, he is,
according to the Christian socialist programme, to demand them as though
his own incompetence gave him a sacred right to them.
Now, apart from the fact that this gospel does resemble the Christian in
declaring that, while salvation can be achieved only by sacrifice, and
that so far as the majority are concerned their sacrifice must be
strictly vicarious, we might well pause to inquire how either of its two
messages--that of economic asceticism for the few, and of economic
concupiscence for the many--has any relation to the gospel of Christ at
all. According to any reasonable interpretation of the words and spirit
of Christ, a labourer's desire to enjoy the utmost that he himself
produces is no less legitimate than natural; but it hardly ranks as one
of the highest Christian virtues. How, we might ask, is it to acquire
this latter character by being turned into a desire for what is produced
by other people? Again, on the other hand, though according to most of
the churches Christ did not condemn the possession of superfluous wealth
as such, he certainly did not teach that the possession of it was
generally necessary to salvation. It might therefore be justly urged,
from the point of view of the few, that in proportion as Christ's
valuation of this transitory life was accepted by them, the duty of
melting down their own vases and candelabra in order that every
workman's spoon might have a thin plating of silver on it, would
constantly seem less and less, instead of more and more imperative. All
this might be urged, and more to the same effect; but we will content
ourselves with considering the matter under its purely practical aspect,
and asking how any Christian clergymen--men presumably sane and
educated--can propose, whether their programme be really Christian or
no, to reorganise society on the basis of a moral conversion which is
confined to the few only--which would exact from the able minority the
maximum of effort and mortification, and secure the maximum of idleness
and self-indulgence for the rest of the human race?
To this question it may be said that there are two answers. Admirable in
character as are multitudes of the Christian clergy, nobody will contend
that all of them are beyond reproach; nor will any such claim be made
for all those of them who profess socialism. And for some of this body
it is hardly open to doubt that the preaching of socialism is nothing
better than a species of ecclesiastical electioneering. In the language
of the political wire-puller, it affords them a good "cry" with which to
go to the people. Why, they say in effect, should you listen to the
agitator in the street, when we can give you something just as good from
the pulpit? What the message really means which they thus undertake to
deliver, they make no effort to understand. It will attract, or at least
they think so; and for the moment this is enough for them. Having
probably emptied their churches by talking traditional nonsense, they
are willing to fill them by talking nonsense that has not even the merit
of being traditional. We will not linger, however, over the case of men
like these. We will turn to that of others who are morally very much
more respectable, and whose condition of mind, moreover, is very much
more instructive. Of these we may take the author of "The Gospel for
To-day" as a type. He, we may assume, advocates his socialistic
programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical
manoeuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at
once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an
educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to
preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his
arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.
By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born
equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing
things as they are. But he sees them from a distance only, as though
they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely
simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual
configuration he has no idea whatever. Thus when he contemplates the
inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately
in two different forms--as genuine powers of production and as powers of
mere seizure--without his discerning where in actual life the operation
of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a
certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some
able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his
thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument
are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive. This is
shown by the fact that the two great productive enterprises which he
singles out as typical of modern wealth-getting generally are held up by
him as examples of acquisition pure and simple. "The steel kings," he
says, "did not invent steel. The oil kings did not invent oil." These
are the gifts of nature, which nature offers to all; but the strong men
abuse their strength by pushing forward and seizing them, and compelling
their weaker brethren to pay them a tribute for their use. Steel and
refined oil he evidently looks upon as two natural products. He has no
suspicion that, as any school-boy could have told him, steel is an
artificial metal which, as manufactured to-day, is one of the most
elaborate triumphs of modern industrial genius. As to the oil by the
light of which he doubtless writes his sermons, he apparently thinks of
it as existing fit for use in a lake, and ready to be dipped up by
everybody in nice little tin cans, if only the oil kings having got to
the lake first, did not by their superior strength frighten other people
away. Of the actual history of the production of usable oil, of the vast
and marvellous system by which it is brought within reach of the
consumers, of the by-products which reduce its price--all of them the
results of concentrated economic ability, and requiring from week to
week its constant and renewed application--the author of "The Gospel for
To-day" apparently knows nothing. The oil kings and the steel kings,
according to his conception of them, need merely refrain from the
exercise of their only distinctive power--that is to say, an exceptional
power of seizing; and every Christian socialist in New York and
elsewhere will have the same oil in his lamps that he has now, and a
constant supply of cutlery and all other forms of hardware, the sole
difference being that he will get them at half-price or for nothing, and
have the money thus saved to spend upon new enjoyments. And his
conception of ability, as connected with the output of steel and oil, is
his conception of ability as applied to the production of goods
generally.
He makes, however, one exception. There is, he admits, one form of
ability which does actually add to the wealth of the modern world, and
may possibly be credited with producing the largest part of it. This is
the faculty of invention. Here, at last, we seem to be listening to the
language of sober sense. But let us see what follows. Inventors, our
author proceeds, being the types of exceptional ability which is really
beneficent and productive, are precisely the men who afford us our
surest grounds for believing in the possibility of that moral conversion
which socialism proposes to effect among able men at large. For what, he
says, as a fact do we find the inventors doing? They invent, he says,
for the pure love of inventing, or else from a desire to do good to
their fellow creatures. The thought of money for themselves never enters
into their minds. The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only
when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself
on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to
work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these
appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of
abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson
which is easier; for while these noble men, the inventors, have no wish
to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel
kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take. Competition, in
short, as it actually exists to-day--the competition which Christian
socialism will abolish--is simply a competition in taking; and in order
to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have
but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give
others a chance equal to their own.
Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the
facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it,
which is worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is
false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the
disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is
purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as
every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally
distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest
over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately
bring them, or by a greed which will sell them for a trifle, provided
this be paid immediately. In the second place, inventions, even the
greatest, so long as they represent the power of invention merely, are
utterly deficient in all practical value. So long as they exist nowhere
except in the author's brain, or drawings, or in descriptions, or even
in the form of models, they might, so far as the world is concerned,
have never existed at all. In the former cases they are dreams; in the
last case they are toys. They are brought down into the arena of actual
life only when, like souls provided with bodies, they cease to be ideas
or toys, and become machines or contrivances manufactured on a
commercial basis; and in order to effect successfully this practical
transformation, countless processes and countless faculties are involved
other than those comprised in intellectual invention itself.
There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for
realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in
the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor
only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and
men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his
inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally
himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the
author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising
and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise
have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such
as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all
they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth
nothing.
Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and
especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much
naïveté by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of
the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made
product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a
means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines,
which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will,
like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples.
He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the
inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while
the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in,
that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he
covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and
does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and
that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save
society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.
Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our
clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in
this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type
of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect
of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of
the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities
accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious
language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile
intensity because it is never restrained by fact.
Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are
ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature
and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of
modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the
case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus
ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or
scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a
roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists--that is to say, in so
far as they differ from other reformers--they are men aiming at
something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to
represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must
necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual
life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist
believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see
that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is
put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The
system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on
red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has
zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in
intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he
imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to
disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run
he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cushion, which if pushed
down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the
bank infallibly ends in reasserting itself. The system-monger fails to
see this for one reason only--that, having disguised, he thinks that he
has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so
far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them
now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the
economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they
propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of
conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect
this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result
as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers.
But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or
argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some
fundamental fact--or, rather, of one protean fact--by which socialistic
thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift
their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that
out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of
equals.
Two illustrations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will
show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy
of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is
located, it is the essential factor in their argument.
In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute
or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier
socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral
doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a
matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is
produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact,
the only producers of wealth are the mass of manual labourers, and
that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced
by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go
to the labourers, and that all labourers were entitled to approximately
equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same
conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic,
likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of
production--having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and
that some men produce incalculably more than others--they have, in order
to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to
supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their
predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and
introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx
contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable,
the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them,
and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human
being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference
between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier
socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with
common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was
pressed into the service of socialism only by being associated with a
false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer
theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical
programme, only by associating it with a false moral psychology. In each
case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a
fallacy somewhere--a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a
table-cloth--no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from
the premises.
And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier
socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from
those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the
nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between
speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the
absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable,
and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier
can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at
present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever
argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there,
under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their
arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.
And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and
ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to
their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on
every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the
logical basis of that which they desire to prove.
The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body
of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class
no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn
to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which
dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the
whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the
answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is
easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism"
in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a
scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such
cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally
and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually
above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the
passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting,
to be accounted for in the case of men like these?
The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their
temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high
capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of
mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely
similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the
abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of
their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending
accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable
with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of
mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he
knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with
regard to their condition or quality.
To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the
faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive
of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though
naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional
over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow
a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_
of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into
intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men
accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders
them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with
the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is
for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the
details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot
be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome
talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of
the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no
reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that
class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men
who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are
hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its
details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical
knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own
vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and
furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed,"
it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a
locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form
any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of
its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the
socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry,
or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely
spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.
But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they
would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory
only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to
life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen,
who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find
that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically
deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless
could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by
some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to
enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present
pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of grass grow where
one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the
commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the
systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way
from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some
city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that
the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to
do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not
wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in
the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle,
which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a
maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world
at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they
cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike
in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in
the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the
doing of them.
At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject
at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been
putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own
studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of
men are divided into two classes, _those who dream about reforming the
industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone
advance and accomplish it_. Here we have the conclusion of the whole
matter. These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect
one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the
industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two
contrasted ways. One of these classes takes men and nature as they are.
With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with
the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in
seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone
can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other class,
occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what
can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this
class is composed--the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its
fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of
ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur
sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge
of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage,
and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with
arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and
magnificent cloacæ the waters in which would have to run uphill.
The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will--the
theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the
social equalisation of economically unequal men--is a theory which, in
minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in
proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected
completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has
been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of
all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case
from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.
The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is
qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of
those that are crucial only--that is to say, of those arguments used by
socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that
programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter
of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only,
the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate
others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but
which nevertheless multitudes of men who call themselves socialists
regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it;
and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They
are three in number, and are as follows:
The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer,
and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According
to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers
associated in any given industry, each produces, with few and
unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable
product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of
it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have
seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited
to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further
right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that,
even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at
present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all
industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by
him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact,
and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible
basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be
estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds.
With this question I shall deal in the following chapter.
The second relates to those forms of individual income which are covered
by the word interest, when used in a comprehensive sense. It being
admitted by the later socialists, in opposition to the earlier, that the
directive ability of the few is, in the modern world, a productive
agency no less truly than labour is, many of these socialists are now
anxious to concede that the man of ability is entitled to such values,
no matter how large, as are due to the active exercise of his own
exceptional powers; but they contend that, as soon as his personal
activity ceases, his claim to any influx of further wealth should
therewith cease also. Let him spend his accumulations, they say, on his
own gratifications as he will; but neither he nor his descendants can be
suffered in moral justice to hold or apply them in such a manner that
they will renew themselves, and yield an income to recipients who do
nothing to make them fructify. To numbers of people who repudiate most
of the socialistic programme, this doctrine as to interest appeals as at
once just and practicable. If the state could appropriate all incomes
due to interest, as distinct from those which represent the product of
active ability, an enormous fund would, they think, be available for
general distribution, and the ideals of socialism, in so far as they are
practicable or desirable, might thus be realised by other than
socialistic means. This argument, likewise, will have its own
chapter--or rather two chapters--allotted to it.
The third of these arguments or proposals which, though not in
themselves socialistic, are popularly associated with socialism, relates
to equality of opportunity. To this also I will devote a separate
chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] While these pages were being corrected for the press, a number of
utterances have been made by English clerics--Episcopalian and
Nonconformist--precisely similar in purpose and spirit to those of the
author here quoted.