It will, no doubt, be urged by some that whatever assistance is

afforded by the talents of the few to the industrial efforts of the

many, may be secured by a third means, which is neither slavery nor

yet the wage-system—that is to say, by what is called the system of

“co-operation.” Co-operative production, however, when it differs

in anything except in name from production as carried on under the

ordinary {164} wage-system, differs from it only in being the

wage-system under a thin disguise. For the ideal cooperative factory

is simply a factory in which all the shareholders are workers, and

all the workers are shareholders, and in which, being shareholders,

they elect their manager. Under such conditions, each of these

working shareholders may receive his remuneration under the form,

not of wages, but of profits. But if any shareholder, or any group

of shareholders, should systematically shirk working, or disobey the

manager’s orders, the whole, or a part of the payment that would be

otherwise due to him, would be withheld; for unless some regulation

of this kind were in force, it would be impossible to ensure any

co-operation amongst the co-operators, or any order, or any equality

of diligence. Each worker’s profits, then, are in reality his wages,

being essentially a payment which is made to him only on condition

that he performs certain specified tasks in a certain specified way.

We are thus brought back to the point from which we started—namely,

that there are two methods only by which, in the domain of industry,

the superior faculties of the few can direct the faculties of the

many: firstly, the capitalistic wage-system, which is the method of

inducement; secondly, slavery, complete or partial, which is the

method of coercion. And of the truth of this assertion the reader

shall now be presented with a highly interesting and curiously

conclusive proof, taken from the very last quarter in which he would

naturally expect to find {165} it. This proof is afforded us by the

schemes which, with ever-increasing clearness, have of recent years

been put forward by all the more thoughtful socialists.

These enthusiasts, who are still careful to tell us that they regard

the wage-system as the source of all social evils, have been slowly

coming to perceive that the ability with which the labour is directed

is as important a factor in production as the labour itself, which

is directed by it. They propose accordingly to regenerate the human

race by transferring the ownership of capital from private employers,

not to groups of factory-hands, as the “co-operators” propose, but to

the State; and by substituting for the private employers a hierarchy

of State officials. Now these officials, so far as the wage-system

is concerned, if they differed at all from private employers of

to-day, would and could differ from them in the following way only.

The present dispensers of wages assign the means of subsistence

to each worker in proportion to the exactness, intelligence, and

efficiency with which he obeys orders. The dispensers of wages under

socialism would dispense these means daily to every worker alike,

with no immediate reference to his industrial actions whatsoever; and

the direction of his actions would be a second, and wholly distinct

process.

That such is the case is shown, and indeed distinctly admitted, in

a preface to the American edition of _Fabian Essays_. It is there

stated that {166} with regard to the apportionment of the means

of subsistence, the only “_truly socialistic_” scheme is one which

would “_absolutely abolish_” all economic distinctions, “_and the

possibility of their again arising, by making an equal provision for

the maintenance of all an incident and an indefeasible condition of

citizenship, without any regard whatever to the relative specific

services of different citizens. The rendering of such services, on

the other hand, instead of being left to the option of the citizen,

with the alternative of starvation, would be required under one

uniform law or civic duty, precisely like other forms of taxation or

military service._”

Such, then, is the most advanced socialistic programme—the programme

of the men who have set themselves to devise an escape from

capitalism. An escape from capitalism it may be; but it is an escape

into complete slavery. For the very essence of the position of the

slave, as contrasted with the wage-labourer, so far as the direction

of his productive actions is concerned, is that he has not to work

as he is bidden in order to gain his livelihood, but that, his

livelihood being assured to him, he has to work as he is bidden in

order that he may avoid the lash, or some other form of punishment;

and amongst all the more thoughtful socialists there is now a

consensus of admission that the socialistic State would necessarily

have in reserve the severest pains and penalties for the idle and the

careless and the disobedient.

Since, then—let us once more repeat it—the {167} progress and

maintenance of economic civilisation depend, as even socialists are

now beginning to perceive, on the industrial actions of average men

being subjected to the control of exceptional men, and since this

control can be secured by two methods only—that of the wage-payer

and that of the slave-owner—it is evident that all progress and

civilisation implies the existence of either one system or the other,

and that socialists accordingly, in proportion as they reject the

wage-system, are obliged to replace it by what is essentially the

system of slavery.

We have thus far, however, dealt with but one half of our subject. We

have considered merely the means by which any one great man exercises

industrial control over the actions of a number of ordinary men. We

have still to consider the means by which the most efficient of the

great men get this control into their own hands, and take it out of

the hands of the less efficient.

Under the _régime_ of private capitalism this process is simple.

The fitness or efficiency of each great man is according to the

acceptability to the public of the goods or services which he offers

them. If the public are not pleased with these goods and services,

they do not buy or demand them; and the capital of the man by whom

they are offered, not being renewed by any money received, melts

in his hands, and with it his control over other men’s labour.

Meanwhile, by a converse process, the great men who offer goods and

services which the public desire {168} and find serviceable, renew

and increase by their payments the capital which has been disbursed

by him, and renew and increase his control over other men’s labour

along with it.

Now if the wage-system is the sole alternative to slavery as a means

by which the great man controls the actions of the ordinary man, it

is still more obviously the sole alternative to slavery as a means

by which one great man, in controlling them, shall compete against

another great man. Indeed, we may speak still more strongly. We may

say not only that it is the sole alternative means, but that it is

the sole efficient means. And if we desire a proof of this, all we

have to do is to repeat our former procedure, and consider how the

socialists propose to supply its place.

It is, no doubt, true that when we first begin this consideration

it does not appear that we should derive from it much direct

enlightenment; because, if we may go by what the socialists

themselves tell us, one of their principal objects is to abolish

competition altogether. Their protestations, however, with regard

to this matter betray a most curious and most amusing confusion of

thought. They declare that competition must be abolished because

it inflicts misery on the majority—that is to say, on the weakest

in what they call the “_cut-throat struggle_.” But, as was shown

at great length in the last chapter, competition means two, and

two absolutely distinct things—one being a struggle to live, the

other a struggle to dominate; and {169} the effects of the two on

the majority are altogether different. To this fundamental truth

the socialists are completely blind. The struggle to live, or, in

other words, the struggle to secure employment, no doubt, when it is

severe, does entail suffering on the strugglers. But this struggle,

though it often accompanies progress, under the capitalistic system

is not essential to it—as is shown by the fact that when such

progress is most rapid the struggle in question tends to disappear

altogether; for the competition is then amongst the employers to

find labour, rather than amongst the labourers to find employment.

Now if the struggle for employment could be obviated by any kind of

social reform, an indubitable benefit would, no doubt, be conferred

on the workers generally. But just as this struggle for work or

for existence—this struggle of one worker against another—is not

essential to the capitalistic wage-system, and certainly did not

originate with it, and just as that system would not necessarily be

abolished by its overthrow, so it is not the kind of competition

against which the socialists direct their main attacks. Their main

attacks are directed against the struggle between the wage-payers,

not the wage-earners—that is to say, against the struggle not for

existence, but for domination; and the struggle for domination

has on the workers generally no evil effects at all, except such

as are occasional and accidental. On the contrary, the workers

are as much interested in its maintenance as anybody; for {170}

not only does it inflict no injury on themselves, but to it that

progress in the processes of production is due on which their own

hopes depend, as much as do those of their employers. Accordingly,

the socialists, profound thinkers as they are, propose to abolish

the competition by which the workers benefit, because they confuse

it with the competition by which the workers suffer. The point,

however, which concerns us here is not that they have made a blunder

as to the kind of competition which they should attack, but that

the kind of competition which they declare themselves pledged to

abolish, as a thing accursed, and the root of all social evils, they

really reintroduce into their own programme, altered only by being

associated with the system of slavery, and by being robbed of its

practical efficiency, and robbed of nothing else.

For our contemporary socialists, who have at last come to perceive

that the productivity of labour depends on the ability with which

it is directed, perceive also the fact that, out of many possible

directors, some would direct it far more efficiently than others.

They also perceive the fact that the directors of labour, who,

according to their proposals, would be officials of the bureaucratic

State, could prove their efficiency only by practical experiment.

Now if all capital were, as socialists propose it should be, owned

by the State, and if all the means of subsistence were apportioned

amongst the citizens equally, without reference to the work performed

by them; and if all the directors of labour, whether inventors or

business {171} organisers, had to act as State officials, or else

not act at all, the practical experiments necessary to show which

officials were the fittest could be brought about only by the State

investing such and such of them with a quasi-military power over so

many regiments of labourers for such and such a time, which power

would be renewed if they could persuade the State to reappoint them,

or taken from them if the State should be persuaded that some other

men, their rivals, would employ this power more usefully. And this

is precisely what the proposals of the socialists come to. The whole

multitude of State officials who would direct socialistic industry

would, according to every socialistic programme, be appointed,

promoted, or degraded to the ranks of ordinary workers in accordance

with the efficiency shown by them in the practical command of labour.

Some socialists propose that these officials should owe their

appointment to a central governing body; others propose that they

should owe them to popular election; but in either case, appointment,

promotion, or degradation would necessarily and avowedly, if it did

not depend on favouritism, depend on the practical results which the

different men in question elicited from labour by their different

methods of directing it. In other words, the whole system of

socialistic production would involve and depend on competition; and

the only essential difference between this bureaucratic competition

under socialism and the competition of {172} capitalists which

socialists so furiously denounce, is that whilst the capitalists

obtain control over labour by means of wages, which control, by a

natural and automatic process, is gradually extinguished unless it

is used efficiently, the competitors for office under socialism

would obtain the same control by compulsory powers with which the

State would invest them, and which they would lose or retain at the

pleasure of some more or less arbitrary authority.

Competition, then, between the directors of labour—or, as it is here

defined, the struggle for industrial domination—is as much a part of

the theoretical _régime_ of socialism as it is a part of the actual

_régime_ of capitalism. The only differences between the two consist,

firstly, in the means by which labour is directed, coercion being

employed in one case, and in the other the inducement of wages; and,

secondly, in the means by which the fittest director is placed in

power, and the less fit deprived of it—an official body deciding the

matter in the one case, and the mass of the consuming public deciding

it in the other for themselves.

Now we may safely say that the _régime_ of industrial coercion, or

slavery, even though it should bear the name of socialism, is not in

these days possible. It is impossible for two reasons—one, that it

is out of harmony with the sentiments of the modern world; and the

other—equally strong, though not so generally avowed—that it is an

exceedingly clumsy and wasteful instrument of {173} competition.

We may, accordingly, dismiss it from our consideration; and such

being the case, there remains for us the absolute certainty that

if society is to make any further industrial advance, or if it is

to save itself from a relapse into industrial helplessness, the

capitalistic wage-system, and with it capitalistic competition, or,

in other words, the competitive struggle for domination, must both

of them be continued under some form or other; nor, although they

may be modified in an indefinite number of their details, is there

any apparent possibility of ever modifying them in any of their

essentials. Indeed, the great moral to be drawn from the facts that

have been here elucidated is that if any one institution in the

modern world threatens to be permanent, that institution is the

capitalistic wage-system; and all proposed alterations in it we

may set down as impossible in precise proportion as the socialists

attach value to them. The foolish dreamers who imagine that they can

overthrow it, consider only its outer aspect, and not the forces of

which it is the expression. It is perfectly true that this system

might at any given time, and in any given country, be paralysed or

reduced to ashes; but the forces that would overthrow it would be

essentially non-productive. The men who destroyed it would find

themselves powerless without it, and would be obliged to submit to,

and assist in, its reconstruction. For the outer form of capitalism

is not what capitalism is, any more than a painter’s brush is the

power that paints great pictures. Capitalism, in its essence, is

merely {174} the realised process of the more efficient members

of the human race controlling and guiding the less efficient;

capitalistic competition is the means by which, out of these more

efficient members, society itself selects those who serve it best;

and no society which intends to remain civilised, and is not prepared

to return to the direct coercion of slavery, can escape from

competition and the wage-system, under some form or other, any more

than it can stand in its own shadow.

With regard, then, to economic production, which, of all social

activities, is for the practical sociologist incomparably the most

important, what we have thus far seen is as follows. We have seen,

not that it is impossible—for this question has been expressly

postponed—that men may be made far more equal than they are now in

respect of the possession of wealth; but that whatever degree of

equality they may some day attain to in its possession, they can

never be otherwise than unequal in the parts played by them in its

production; that their inequality in productive power is of such a

kind as to render the industrial obedience of the larger number of

them to the minority the primary and permanent condition on which

economic progress is possible; that what feather-brained fanatics

call “_economic freedom_” would be merely another name for economic

helplessness; and that all the democratic formulas which for the

past hundred years have represented the employed as the producers of

wealth, and the capitalistic employers as the appropriators of it,

are, {175} instead of being, as they claim to be, the expressions of

a profound truth, related to truth only as being direct inversions

of it. Whatever appearances may seem to show to the contrary, it is

the few and not the many who, in the domain of economic production,

are essentially and permanently the chief repositories of power. That

this is so in the domain of intellect we have seen already. We will

now turn our attention to the domain of political government, and

consider the part played by the exceptional few there—the nature and

origin of their power, and the means by which it is exercised.

{176}

CHAPTER IV

THE MEANS BY WHICH THE GREAT MAN ACQUIRES POWER IN POLITICS

In discussing, with reference to political government, the means by

which the great man controls the actions of others, it will be found

that the point on which we shall have to concentrate our attention

differs somewhat from that which engaged it when we were discussing

the same question with reference to economic production. For all the

points which, with reference to the directors of industry, it was

necessary to establish in opposition to the sociological sophistries

of to-day are, with reference to the political governor, admitted

by all alike. Thus we shall find on reflection that the extremest

democratic reformer, no less than the aristocrat or the strict

upholder of autocracy, admits, firstly, that satisfactory governors

must be exceptional or great men; secondly, that the fittest great

men can be secured by competition only; and, thirdly, that however

they are appointed, and whatever may be the principles on which they

govern, their orders must in every case be enforced by virtually the

same {177} sanctions. The last of these three facts—namely, that the

commands of the governor must be enforced by some system of restraint

and punishment for the disobedient—is sufficiently plain to require

no further notice; but the two others, obvious as they really are,

are not perhaps generally realised, and it will be well to give a few

words to them.

That the efficient governor, though he need not always be a genius,

must in some respects, at all events, be a great or exceptional man,

is of course admitted by the advocates of autocracy, aristocracy,

or oligarchy. All that requires to be shown is that it is admitted

also by the thinkers who are most opposed to them—by socialists and

extreme democrats. This admission on their part is implied in the

notorious importance attached by them to the machinery of popular

election; for popular election is simply an elaborate means of

expressing the opinion of the people that out of so many possible

governors, this one or that one is endowed with greater capacity than

the others. If the capacities of all were equal, or if exceptional

capacity was not required, the _personnel_ of the government might

be chosen by casting lots. Next, as to the question of competition,

it must be obvious to every one that the popular election of

governors is not only an admission that some few men out of many are

greater or more capable than the rest, but is also, on the part of

the candidates for election themselves, competition in one of its

intensest and most sharply accentuated forms. {178}

Competition, indeed, is implicit in every form of government. Were

it absent in any, it would be absent in complete autocracies;

but even in these it is latent, and always ready to come into

operation; for the most absolute autocrat, if he happen to make

his rule sufficiently odious to a sufficient number of his

subjects,—“_postquam cerdonibus esse timendus cœperat_”—will, as

history shows us, be assassinated or got rid of somehow, and some

other candidate for power, probably an autocrat also, will be put in

his place, and will either retain or lose it, according as experiment

shows him to be a tolerable ruler, or the reverse. Here is political

competition in its most rudimentary form; but it is competition none

the less; and it generally involves a competition more advanced than

itself; for the most absolute autocrat is obliged to govern through

ministers; and these rise and fall according as experiment shows them

to be fitter or less fit for the accomplishment of their master’s

purposes. If, then, even the power of the autocrat rests ultimately

on competition and practical experiment, much more does the power

of government, under aristocratic and oligarchic constitutions.

Oligarchies invariably aim at ruling through their strongest

members; and which are the strongest is shown by experimental

competition only; whilst political democracy, under all its forms, is

experimental competition open and undisguised. A Gladstone remains

in power because, as his years of office succeed each other, he

satisfies the majority by the manner in which he governs them; and

his {179} power is taken from him when the majority cease to be

satisfied, not only because they are of opinion that he governs

badly, but because they are of opinion that a Disraeli will govern

better. A democracy, in fact, and an oligarchy, so far as competition

is concerned, differ merely in the way in which the competitors are

admitted to the arena, and in the number and character of the jury

which awards the prizes.

Since, then, with regard to the points just dealt with—namely, the

necessity for great men as governors, for the selection of the

fittest of them by competition, and for the use of coercion and

punishment as a means of enforcing orders—there is no essential

difference between the most extreme democracy and its opposites,

in what does that practical or theoretical difference between them

consist, by which most undoubtedly the former is distinguished from

the latter? The only essential point of difference between them lies,

not in their respective schemes or theories of the machinery of

government, or of their methods of electing governors, but in their

theory of the powers which election communicates to those elected.

An elected governor, whether chosen from a large or a small class,

is, according to the aristocratic or oligarchic theory, chosen

because he is personally wiser than those who elect him; and it is

theoretically his mission, within very wide limits, to follow his

own judgment, not that of the electors. The democratic theory is the

very reverse of this. The elected governor, {180} according to that

theory, is elected not because he is supposed to be wiser than his

constituents, but because he is supposed to be exceptionally capable

of understanding their precise wishes, and giving effect to each

of them. In the first of these two cases the governor is like the

physician whom the patient calls in, but whose orders he never thinks

of disputing. In the second, he is like the professional Spanish

letter-writer, whom the illiterate lover employs to put his passion

for him grammatically upon paper.

The only point, then, in which democracy can claim to differ

essentially, not only from autocracy, but from any form of

oligarchy, lies not in its form of government, but in the power

that is behind its government. This power, according to democratic

theorists, is the power of the mass of ordinary men, as definitely

opposed to exceptional men; and the exceptional men who are picked

out as governors would necessarily, in an ideal democracy, be

exceptional only for such qualities as practical activity and a

quick apprehension of the wishes of other people, which would enable

them to do what their many-headed master bade them; but they would

have to be wanting in any strength of mind or originality which

might prompt them to acts out of harmony with their master’s temper

at the moment, or what is the same thing, to any acts beyond their

master’s comprehension, even although such acts might be for his

future benefit. This is what the democratic theory, in its last

analysis, means. All exceptional will {181} is to be smothered or

over-ridden by the average will, as is expressed clearly enough in

the well-worn democratic formula—every man’s vote is to count for one

in government; no man’s vote is to count for more than one.

Now this theory of the relation of the great man to the many,

so far as regards the conduct of civil government, is identical

with the theory which, with a much wider application, Mr. Herbert

Spencer enunciates as the foundation of his sociological system.

As enunciated by Mr. Spencer we have already submitted it to

examination, and we have shown that, in every practical sense, it is

altogether fallacious, and that its acceptance renders all practical

sociology impossible. We will now proceed to show that, as applied

even to the most popular forms of government, it is as false as it is

when applied to social phenomena generally.

That the essential principle of democracy, as just described,

according to which the brain of the ideal ruler is merely a balance

for weighing the wills of multitudes, which are dropped into one

or other of its scales, like marbles—that this principle has ever

yet been completely realised, no democrat will perhaps venture to

maintain; but the whole democratic propagandism of the present day

implies, before all things else, that its complete realisation is

possible, and that every day “the peoples” are getting nearer to it.

The facts, however, which are supposed to warrant this conclusion are

to be sought, not in the sphere of official government, but {182}

without it. They are to be sought not in the conduct of elected

legislators, but in the machinery by which they are elected, and,

above all, in those unofficial movements, meetings, and agitations

by which the prophets of democracy affirm that the great mass of the

people is learning to exert the power which was always latent in it,

and to express its will with regard to every question of government

as it arises, even if it has something yet to learn in the art of

securing that its governors shall carry out its commands. It is this

view of the situation which is expressed in the popular saying that

a constituency has elected a member, or that the people has elected

a parliament, with what is called a “mandate” to do some specified

thing or things—to break up the United Kingdom, to disestablish

the English Church, to penalise the drinking of a glass of beer on

Sundays, or to deprive our soldiers of protection against the most

malignant of contagious maladies.

Now the democrats, it must be admitted, are so far right, that a real

political power has come into existence which has no constitutional

connection with the men who nominally govern; and this is frequently

used with such efficiency, and with such definite purpose, that

official governors—men of most exceptional intellect—are compelled

by it to use their intellect for ends which they themselves condemn.

Here, then, in this external power, is to be found, if it is to

be found anywhere, the will of the many, as conceived of by the

theorists of {183} democracy, exerting itself independently of any

separate will of the few, and turning the powers of the few into its

willing or unwilling instruments.

Now perhaps the question which will in this place most naturally

suggest itself is whether this will of the many, however effectively

it may be exercised, is really a power that makes for civilisation

and progress, and whether it is not more likely to bring harm than

benefit to those very collections of ordinary men who exercise it.

And this question is, no doubt, extremely pertinent; but it is not

one that need engage our attention now. The fact which alone we are

now concerned to demonstrate is that the alleged will of the many is

not what democrats conceive it to be, and that it is not really the

will of the many at all.

For although there is much in the history of the present century to

warrant the assumption that the political will of the many is at

last emerging as a supreme and independent governing power, we shall

find that these movements and opinions, which seem, when viewed

superficially, to result from the spontaneous actions and spontaneous

thoughts of the many, really imply the influence of exceptional men,

just as much as those movements which are avowedly aristocratic in

origin; and that in the absence of these men the movements could

never have taken place, nor the opinions have ever assumed any

uniform and coherent shape.

To understand how this is, we need merely reflect upon the fact that

masses of men, as masses, can {184} only have a will at all when

their judgments with regard to certain particular questions happen

to be absolutely identical, and have thus a cumulative force, like

that of weights piled on one another above some substance which it

is desired to compress. Now, whatever may be the thoughts, wishes,

or opinions which spontaneously shape themselves in the minds of any

body of ordinary men—men various in training and temperament, and

none of them remarkable for wisdom—these never take a shape which

will give them any cumulative power unless amongst the ordinary

men there is some man more active than the rest, who weighs them,

compares them, eliminates what he thinks to be their discrepancies,

adds what is in his opinion necessary to their logical completion,

and clothes them in catching language, which appeals both to the

mind and to the memory. Not till this is done do the mass of persons

concerned realise how identical their opinions on a given question

are; and they then perceive them to be identical for an exceedingly

simple reason—that the exceptional man has made a mould for them,

into which they have all been run.

It is then, for the first time, that the mass of ordinary men become

conscious of corporate power; for then they become, with regard to

a given question, conscious for the first time that their opinions

are absolutely identical, and that in a certain given direction

their power is consequently cumulative. But the opinion of these

men, whose numbers give political force to it, is very far from

representing {185} the capacities of these men only. It represents

the capacities, the character, and very probably the personal designs

of the exceptional man who supplied that common mould to which the

unanimity of the other men’s opinions is due; and the one opinion

which thus comes to be held by all of them will not be precisely

the opinion that was originally held by any. The original opinion

of each will have undergone some modification. It will have been

softened, emphasised, developed, or other elements will have been

added to it, which would never have entered the mind of the ordinary

man naturally, and which even when admitted he does but imperfectly

understand. Thus whilst a political opinion expressed, or a political

demand made, by a body of ordinary men thus absolutely unanimous

seems at first sight a genuine expression of the will and the

capacities of the many, it always in part, and it very often mainly

represents capacities and purposes belonging to one man alone, the

many being practically little more than a phonograph, which repeats

his words to the world through an enormous resonator.

Let us take, for instance, the two questions of Free Trade and

Bimetallism. If any British Government were to revert to the system

of protection, it cannot be doubted that throughout the country there

would be meetings and demonstrations, at which every throat would

be unanimous in shouting condemnation of their conduct. America

has witnessed a precisely similar outburst in favour of a proposal

{186} to remonetise silver. The issues raised, however, both by

the free traders and the bimetallists, are of a kind so complicated

that exceedingly few people would be able even to describe their

nature clearly enough to satisfy the most lenient examiner who should

set them a paper in economics. The majority of those who declared

for bimetallism in America had as little to do with forming their

own opinions as the little boys would have in a preparatory school

who should shout their approval of some new emendation made by one

of their masters of a corrupt passage in Pindar; nor does that

British opinion in favour of free trade principles which has caused

our Government to adopt them, and would hinder or prevent their

repudiation, rest in the minds of the majority of those who hold it,

on any larger amount of original thought or knowledge. Ninety-nine

free traders out of a hundred would never have been free traders at

all if it had not been for the oratory of Cobden. The least-educated

portion of the citizens of the United States would never have howled

themselves hoarse over an intricate financial problem if it had

not been for the oratory and the singular activity of Mr. Bryan.

Indeed, what is oratory itself, which in all democracies, from that

of Athens downwards, has been essential to the work of government,

but an embodied expression of the fact that the many are powerless,

unless here and there some thinker will think for them, and give them

opinions which may form a mould or a nucleus for their own? Even a

{187} village meeting is never got together without the agency of

some one who is slightly more efficient than the rest. He need not

be wiser than they. He very frequently is not; but he has some gift

or other which qualifies him for taking the lead. His temperament

is more active, his words flow more freely, or he is hampered by

less insight into his own ignorance or imbecility; and his opinions

are the nucleus round which those of the rest form themselves, and

which generally imparts to them something of its own character, as a

vinegar plant does to the liquor in which it is immersed.

Without some such nuclei afforded to the many by the few, popular

thought is nebulous, and popular will unborn. An exceptional few

are essential even to those revolutionary movements which have

the destruction of the power of the few for their object. It is

impossible for the many to attack one set of superiors, except by

submitting themselves to the leadership or dictatorship of another

set; and although these last may to a certain extent represent the

multitude, it is usually just as true that the multitude represent

them. The multitude cannot even unite to influence those exceptional

persons to whom is entrusted the official work of government without

placing themselves under the influence of another set of exceptional

persons; and thus the extremest democracy will be found, if we

only look below the surface, to be neither more nor less than an

oligarchy disguised. It is, no doubt, true that those who actually

govern do in a certain {188} sense derive their power from the

many. They do so even in countries where the supreme governor is

an autocrat. In countries with a popular constitution they derive

their power from the many by an organised and conscious system;

but even in the extremest democracies the average men can exercise

their power only by constant processes of surrendering it into the

hands of exceptional men. They surrender it into the hands of the

exceptional men for the simple and enduring reason that, with very

few exceptions, which will be examined in another place, it comes

into existence only in the very act of surrendering it; and the many

accordingly place themselves in the hands of the few because, from

the very constitution of human nature, they cannot avoid doing so.

We thus see that even in that sphere of political action in which, if

anywhere, the many should be independent of the few, the many without

the few would have no power at all.

The apologists of democracy, however, have another argument left

them. They may contend that the exceptional men, who are necessary

to the development of the collective powers of ordinary men, though

each of them is constantly, with regard to particular questions,

following his own devices rather than the instructions of the

electorate, do on the whole, and in the long-run, substantially carry

out the intentions and devices of those who are theoretically their

masters; and that though they may do what their masters could never

have thought of for {189} themselves, yet they can never continue

to do anything of which their masters do not actually approve. Now

even were this representation of the case true, it would leave

untouched that broad and fundamental truth on which it is the primary

purpose of the present work to insist. It would leave untouched

the truth that the great mass of human beings are helpless without

the assistance of a minority more efficient than themselves. If

ninety-nine average men, through the aid of a hundredth man who is

exceptional, can develop and give effect to a collective will, which

is altogether their own, and originates entirely with themselves,

but if they can neither develop it nor give effect to it unless

the hundredth man lent them his services, the power of this one

man is as essential to the power of the ninety-nine, as it would

be if the orders which he executes had been largely originated by

himself; just as a lens is essential to the photographer’s camera

though its function is solely to focalise, not to colour, the rays

transmitted by it. Accordingly, even on the above hypothesis, the

modern democratic formula, which makes each man count for one, and

nobody count for more than one, would, if judged scientifically, be

absolutely and fundamentally false; for the power ascribed by it

to the accumulated faculties of equals would be really the power

of equals united with the power of a superior; and the difference

between the equals and the superior would be at once apparent

from this—that if one of the equals were subtracted, the power of

the whole {190} hundred would be diminished by one ninety-ninth

only; but if the one superior were subtracted, it would collapse

altogether. Thus the presence of the superior, and the terms on which

his services can be secured, would even in this case be subjects on

which the sociologist would be bound to bestow the same attention

as he bestows at present on the activities of the ordinary men; and

unless he should do this, his conclusions would be wholly valueless.

As a matter of fact, however, the hypothesis that the superior few

are ever the mere passive agents which the democratic theory assumes

them to be is false; and it is as a rule false in exact proportion to

the difficulty and importance of the cases to which it is applied.

The qualities which enable men to organise the opinions of others

are usually qualities which endow them with strong opinions of their

own; and in addition to their own opinions, these men, with their

exceptional vigour, have usually their own purposes also; and the

popular will, as put into execution by them, is always modified, and

very often metamorphosed, by what they themselves add to or subtract

from it. Still it must be admitted that, in spite of their dependence

on the few, the many can, and do to a great extent, impress their own

genuine will—the will and wishes of the average man as distinct from

the will and wishes of the man who is in any way exceptional—on the

exceptional men to whom their power is surrendered. The acts of the

governing few may never entirely represent {191} the will and wishes

of the average man, when these acts are considered as a whole; but

they may be forced to embody, and they generally do embody, a certain

element of what average men wish and will; and their character as a

whole is profoundly modified in consequence. The question then is

simply a question of degree. What is the extent—or rather what is the

utmost possible extent—of this genuine power of the many to make the

faculties of the exceptional few their servants? Is it great or small?

The reader will perceive that when this question is asked our

inquiry is gradually taking a new turn, and that having started with

asserting the claims of the great man as the author and sustainer of

both intellectual and economic progress, we are led, when we come to

consider him as an agent in the domain of politics, to inquire into

what is done by the average man, as well as into what is done by him.

And the reason for this is that in the domain of politics the many,

so far as direct and intentional influence is concerned, are actually

capable of playing a far larger part than they are in the domain of

speculation or of advanced economic production. A statesman like Mr.

Gladstone might, without absurdity, maintain that he had a mandate

from the many to grant home-rule to Ireland; but nobody could pretend

that any body of mechanics had given Watt a mandate to invent the

steam-engine, or that any one gave Newton a mandate to discover the

law of gravitation. And yet the reflection will {192} probably force

itself upon every reader that if the many play a part in politics

which is commensurate with that of the few, they play a part in

intellectual and economic progress also. It would be useless for

the few to unfold their thoughts and their discoveries to the many,

if the many were not, in various degrees, capable of assimilating

and responding to them. Still less could the great man of industry

realise his progressive inventions, or carry out his extending

schemes of business, if it were not that an indefinite number of

ordinary men—those “serviceable animals,” as Mr. John Morley calls

them—were endowed with capacities that enabled them to carry out his

bidding. What would Mahomet have done if he had not had followers?

What would Columbus have done if he had not had seamen? The reader,

accordingly, will inevitably be led to urge that in attributing to

the great men of the world the results which we have attributed to

them, our statements are unmeaning, unless they are accepted as

incomplete, and are understood to imply more than they have actually

expressed. If no progress of any kind could have taken place without

the many, surely, it will be argued, the many must have had some

share in producing it; and unless we can assert and discriminate

precisely what this share is—what are the phenomena of progress which

are due to the activity of ordinary men—it is meaningless to assert

that most of them are due to the activity of exceptional men.

And the larger part of this argument is perfectly {193} true. In

dealing with the activities of the few, we have taken those of the

many for granted. This general assumption, however, though inevitable

at the beginning of our inquiry, has been provisional only. To

any scientific conception of what is done exclusively by the few,

an equally scientific conception of what is done by the many is

essential. We must measure the former by the latter, as we measure

mountains by their respective heights above the sea-level. That such

a discrimination between the work of these two bodies is possible

may be doubted by some; and accordingly before we actually proceed

to undertake it, we will dispose of the arguments that will be, and

actually have been, advanced in proof of its impracticability, and

set forth the principles on which it must be, and obviously can be,

made.

{195}

BOOK III

{197}

CHAPTER I

HOW TO DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN THE PARTS CONTRIBUTED TO A JOINT PRODUCT

BY THE FEW AND BY THE MANY.

In the first chapter of his _Principles of Political Economy_ Mill

alludes to the question raised by certain thinkers, of “_whether

nature gives more assistance to labour in one kind of industry

than another_”; and he endeavours to show that the question is

useless and unanswerable. In every industry, he says, there would

be no product at all unless nature gave something and labour did

something. Each is “_absolutely indispensable_” and the part played

by each is consequently “_indefinite and incommensurable_.” “_When

two conditions_,” he proceeds, “_are equally necessary for producing

the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much of it is

produced by one, and so much by the other; it is like attempting to

decide which half of a pair of scissors has most to do in the act

of cutting, or which of the factors five and six contributes most

to the production of thirty_.” If this argument is applicable to

nature and labour as agents in the {198} production of commodities,

it is equally applicable to the few and the many as agents in the

production of social progress generally; and the crisp phrases

and illustrations which Mill employs in formulating it, put in

the clearest and most forcible manner possible the whole class of

objections referred to at the close of the last Book.

Mill brings the argument forward with special reference to

agriculture. Let us take, he says in effect, the products of any

farm; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of

it—the fields or the farm labourers. Now if all labour were equal,

and if there were only one farm in the world, or if every acre of

land, when the same labour was applied to it, yielded the same

amount of produce, this would, no doubt, be true. The actual state

of the case is, however, widely different. Acres vary very greatly

in fertility; and if the produce of one—the least fertile—when

cultivated by a given amount of labour, be symbolised by ten loaves,

the produce of others, when cultivated by the same labour, will be

symbolised by loaves to the number of twelve, fifteen, or twenty.

Here, then, we have a constant quantity of labour, which produces

ten loaves from each of the four acres in question; but when applied

to the first, it produces ten loaves only; when applied to the three

others, it produces two, or five, or ten loaves in addition. About

the first ten loaves, in each case, it is not possible to argue. So

far as they are concerned, the result is in each case the same; with

regard to them we cannot {199} make any comparison; and we must

admit that the parts played by land and labour in producing them

are “_indefinite and incommensurable_,” precisely as Mill says they

are. But the two, the five, or the ten extra loaves which result

when labour is applied to the second, the third, and the fourth acre

respectively, but do not result at all so long as it is applied only

to the first, constitute phenomena of a different order altogether.

The labour being in each of the four cases the same, and these

additional loaves resulting in three cases only, these additional

loaves are obviously not due to labour, but to certain additional

qualities present in the last three acres and not present in the

first. In other words, though in producing the loaves, or, as Mill

puts it, “_the effect_,” the parts played respectively by land and

labour are incommensurable so long as the land, the labour, and the

effect remain the same, the parts become immediately mensurable as

soon as the effect begins to vary, and one of the causes, and one of

the causes only, varies also.

This truth can be yet further elucidated by means of Mill’s two other

illustrations. If the two blades of a pair of scissors were made of

two different materials, and the one blade were of such a nature

that it was always of the same quality, and human ingenuity was not

capable of improving it, whilst the qualities of the other blade

varied with the skill devoted to its manufacture, and if one pair of

scissors should cut twenty yards of cloth in a minute, whilst another

cut only ten, the additional {200} efficiency of the more efficient

pair would, it is perfectly obvious, be due to that blade in respect

of which this pair differed from the pair which was less efficient,

not to the blade in respect of which both pairs were similar. Again,

let us take Mill’s case of the two numerals five and six. If five

is always to be the number multiplied, and six is always to be the

multiplier, it is true we cannot say which does most in producing

the result—thirty. But if the number to be multiplied remains always

five, whilst the multiplying number varies—if it is in one case six

and in another case ten,—and if the result of the multiplication

in the second case is not thirty but fifty, it is obvious that the

additional twenty which results from our multiplying by ten is due

not to any change in the number multiplied, but to the additional

four introduced into the number multiplying. To these illustrations

we may add two others—the movement of a modern bicycle and the

movement of a man running. A modern bicycle cannot be propelled

without a chain; and if there were only one kind of bicycle in the

world, Mill might fairly have said that it was meaningless and

useless to ask whether the wheels or the chain contributed most to

its velocity. But if there are two bicycles, with precisely similar

wheels, but with dissimilar chains, and if the same man riding on

one can accomplish ten miles an hour only, but on the other fifteen,

the common sense of every bicycle rider in the world will tell him

that the additional five miles are contributed entirely by the chain,

and {201} the patentees of the chain, we may be certain, will add

their valuable testimony to the fact. So with regard to running, Mill

might fairly have said that if we consider it in an abstract and

general sense, it is absurd to ask which contributes most to “_the

effect_”—the ground or the man that runs on it, because the first is

as indispensable to the man’s movement as is the second. But if two

men are racing each other over the same course, and one runs a mile

whilst the other runs only half, it is perfectly obvious that the

extra speed of the winner is contributed not by the ground, which for

both men is just the same, but by certain qualities in the winner

which the loser does not possess, or which the winner possesses in

larger measure than he.

Now in all questions connected with progressive social action the

effects which have to be considered are not general effects, such

as running at some indeterminate speed, each of which effects is

considered as being single of its kind, and which, in consequence,

cannot be compared with anything, but effects each kind of which

exhibits many comparable varieties, such as the running of several

men whose respective speeds are different. The whole error of Mill’s

argument depends on his failure to perceive this. He describes the

result of man’s labour applied to land—a result which we have for

convenience’ sake expressed in terms of loaves as “_the_ effect.”

He says “_nature and labour are equally necessary for producing the

effect at all_,” as though the same amount of land and {202} labour

must always result in the production of the same number of loaves. To

conceive and speak of the matter in this way is to ignore entirely

all the phenomena of progress—all the phenomena which differentiate

civilisation from savagery, and which it is the special function

of economics and of sociology to explain. Rent, for example, the

theory of which Mill states with extreme lucidity, and insists upon

with the utmost emphasis, arises from the fact that one man and one

acre of land, instead of producing something that can be described

generally as “_the_ effect,” produce in different cases effects that

are widely different—ten loaves when the acre is bad, twenty loaves

when the acre is good: and, in a similar way, when the acres are of

the same quality, twenty loaves will be produced by an acre if it

is cultivated by the methods of civilisation, and only ten by an

acre if it is cultivated by the methods of a savage. Now, just as

agricultural rent arises from different qualities in the soil, so

does agricultural progress arise from differences in the powers of

the men. It is measured by, and it consists of, not “_the_ effect,”

but a series of effects, similar indeed in kind, but continually

increasing in degree; and it is their differences in degree, not

their similarity in kind, that form for the economist the particular

subject to be considered.

And what is true in this respect of production and progress in

agriculture is equally true of production and progress generally. The

former indeed are the simplest type of the latter, just as they are

{203} their original basis; and before we proceed farther, there is

one fact more in connection with them on which it is necessary for

the purposes of our present argument to insist. Of soils the same as

to area, but not the same as to quality, some, it has been said, will

produce ten loaves, some fifteen, some twenty; and soils may exist,

perhaps, which would produce only five. But in order that any soil

may be cultivated by human labour, it is necessary that the product

should be at least sufficient to keep the men alive who devote

their labour to cultivating it. No set of men, unless artificially

subsidised, could continue to cultivate any region if the product of

twelve months’ labour would support them for only three months. It

follows, therefore, from this truism that no soils can be cultivated

which will not yield to labour a certain minimum product. Now,

though this minimum is, in a certain sense, the product of labour

and of land jointly, for all purposes of practical reasoning it is

the product of labour alone. It is so because the sole object of

practical reasoning about the matter is to determine the principles

on which the product of the land is to be distributed; and with

regard to that minimum there can be no doubt or question. It must go

to the labourer, and it can go to no one else. The landlord, if there

be one, cannot take any part of it; for if he did, the labourer would

die, and there would cease to be any product to take. Labour, then,

in agriculture must be held for all practical purposes to produce the

whole of that minimum {204} resulting from its application to the

least productive soils which the labourer can live by cultivating;

and it is only in the case of soils which are more productive than

these, and which yield to similar labour a product above this

minimum, that land, apart from labour, can be said practically to

produce anything at all.

Now just as we can argue with regard to land and labour, so can we

argue with regard to the average men and the great men, and measure

what they contribute respectively to any given civilisation; for

just as a thousand men from some good soil will elicit twice the

produce they would be able to elicit from a bad soil, so from a bad

soil may a thousand average men manage to elicit, if directed by

some agricultural genius, twice the product which they would elicit

if left to themselves; and just as in the former case, according to

the principles above stated, we shall ascribe the smaller product to

labour without any reference to land, and ascribe to land the excess

only of the larger product over the smaller, so in the second shall

we ascribe the smaller product to the average men, and the excess of

the larger product over the smaller to the great man. We shall say,

in fact, that the great man produces so much of the product as comes

annually into existence when he directs the others, and disappears as

soon as he ceases to direct them.

Here, however, the original objection of Mill will suggest itself

again, though in a somewhat different form; for in spite of all that

has been {205} said, it still remains certain that the great man

could not produce this excess unless the average men were present to

carry out his directions; and the reader will possibly be disposed

to argue that the average men may be as reasonably credited with the

whole of the product except that insignificant fraction which the

great man could have produced without _them_, as the great man may be

credited with the whole of the product except that which the average

men could have produced without _him_.

Now this reasoning has a certain fanciful plausibility, but it is

absolutely devoid of any practical meaning; and in order to show

the reader how and why it is so, it will be necessary to direct his

attention to a certain fact which lies at the bottom of all practical

reasoning, but which few practical reasoners ever consciously

realise. All such reasoning is in its nature hypothetical, and can

be reduced to a statement that if such conditions are present,

such consequences will result; and that if existing conditions be

altered in any specified way, the results will exhibit a specified

and corresponding difference. If, however, this reasoning is to have

any practical value, one thing is essential to it—namely, that the

supposed alterations shall be at least approximately possible. No

practical conclusion, for instance, could possibly be drawn as to

machinery by considering what would happen if the properties of the

circle were to be changed, and different parts of the circumference

should be at different distances from the {206} centre. It is

equally evident that no practical conclusion as to the claims and

prospects of labour could be drawn by considering what would happen

if the labourers could live without food. Now since no food is

producible without labour, a population which does not labour is just

as impossible a conception as a population which does not require

to eat; and no practical conclusions can be arrived at by supposing

it to exist; but populations which have developed and submitted

themselves to no great men, not only can exist, but have existed, and

do exist to-day; and thus we are reasoning in a strictly practical

way when we consider what would be produced by the average men if the

great man ceased to direct them, but we are reasoning to no practical

purpose at all by considering what would happen if the average men

ceased to labour. The latter—or the majority of them—would have to

labour in any case, whether there were any great man to direct their

labour or no; and the supposition of their labouring is bound up with

the supposition of their existence. The sole practical alternatives

which can in the present case be conceived and reasoned from are

average men labouring under the direction of the great man’s talents,

or the same men labouring blindly as best they can by themselves.

These alternatives are being constantly exemplified in the actual

life of communities. We may see men to-day, not only amongst savages,

but amongst the peasantries of civilised countries, such as Russia,

India, and parts of Ireland and the Scottish islands, {207} who

are still almost independent of any intellect superior to their

own, and who maintain themselves by the exertion of man’s commonest

faculties only. We may see again populations who have been in the

same condition, but who, under great men’s guidance, become agents

in producing a civilisation which they could by themselves not only

not produce, but could, by themselves, hardly even imagine; and again

we may see how in more than one country the energies of the great

man, having worked these wonders for a time, become paralysed by

insecurity under a barbarous and predatory despotism, and how, as his

action ceases, the masses relapse again into their former condition

of relative inefficiency.

Accordingly, though the productivity of the average men, as distinct

from the great men, will be different in one race or region from

what it is in another, just as their diet will be and the other

necessaries of existence, yet within each community experience

furnishes us with comparisons which show us, roughly at all events,

how much the average men produce without the aid of the great

men, and how much the great men, by directing the average men,

add to this.† To calculate these amounts {208} with any approach

to exactness will, no doubt, be more difficult in some cases than

others, just as is the case with book-keeping in various businesses.

But it is enough to have shown the reader that, despite Mill’s

contention to the contrary, the calculation is one which is based on

the simplest and most indisputable principles, and that not only in

a theoretical, but in the most strictly practical sense, what great

men produce, when they co-operate with average men by directing them,

is the amount or degree in which the total result produced exceeds or

excels that which was produced by average men when unaided, and would

be again produced by them were the great man’s aid withdrawn.

† It is, of course, true that in densely populated countries and

in certain industries the average workmen, if left to themselves

suddenly, with no man of business ability to guide them, would be

unable to produce anything. But so long as the man of exceptional

talent employs them to produce anything, they contribute something

to the result, and must, for practical purposes, be held to produce

so much of it as will provide them with the means of living. If

it happens, as is sometimes the case, that the total value of the

profit is less than the workmen’s wages, the employer must either

alter the character of his product, so as to meet the public demand,

or he will otherwise be crushed out of existence as an employer, and

his workmen will pass under the control of some more able rival.

The absolute validity of this method of argument and calculation will

be yet more apparent to the reader when we pursue a step farther our

analysis of reasoning generally as applied to practical matters, and

consider it especially when it takes the form of a direct discussion

with regard to causes and effects. In the strictest sense of the word

it would plainly be quite impossible to specify fully the causes of

even effects of the simplest kind. The motion, for instance, of a

ball when a cricketer hits it, would, in any discussion of the game,

be said to have been caused by {209} the cricketer; but the entire

antecedents and conditions which have rendered this effect possible

comprise not only all the incidents of the cricketer’s past training,

but the history of cricket itself, and half the properties of matter.

It would be impossible and useless to specify all these. When we

say that anything is the cause of anything else, we are always

selecting that cause out of an indefinite number, on which, for the

purpose on hand, it is practically important that we should insist;

and the cause on which it is important that we should insist for

practical purposes will be found to be always one which, under the

circumstances in view, may or may not be present,‡—which a careless

person may neglect to introduce, or an ignorant person be persuaded

to take away; whilst those other causes whose presence is assumed by

all parties to the {210} discussion, and which no one proposes to

take away, or which no one is able to take away, or whose number,

if they were mentioned, would make all discussion impossible, are

passed over in silence, for there is no need to mention them. Thus

we all know that when a house is burnt to the ground the causes of

the phenomenon comprise the inflammable nature of timber, and indeed

the whole chemistry of combustion; but if an insurance office is

disputing the owner’s claim to compensation on the ground that the

owner set a light to it purposely, whilst the owner maintains that

the scullery-maid set it alight by accident whilst reading in bed a

novel of Belgravian life, the only causes that will be put forward

by the litigants will, let us say, be a candle alleged by the owner

to have ignited the scullery-maid’s pillow-case accidentally, and on

the other hand a match which is alleged by the agent of the insurance

office to have been applied by the owner to the drawing-room

curtains intentionally. Or again, let us take the case of a ship’s

chronometer. The reliability of a chronometer, any practical man will

tell us if we ask him about the matter, depends on the balance and

the escapement. It is the perfect “compensation” of the former and

what is called the “detachment” of the latter that differentiates

the chronometer from the ordinary lever watch; and these are

rightly said to be the causes of the chronometer’s superiority as

a time-keeper. But a balance and escapement of themselves will not

keep time at all. They are useless without a {211} main-spring and

a train of intervening wheel-work. But if any one were explaining

the causes of a chronometer’s exceptional accuracy he would never

think of mentioning these last at all. He would not dwell on the

properties of the coil of elastic steel, or on the interaction of

the ordinary toothed wheels, or on the steel axes which make their

interaction possible. And why would he omit these causes? He would

omit them because they would be assumed, because there would be no

discussion about them, and because they are implied in the existence

of all watches and chronometers equally. If, however, the case

were reversed—if all escapements and all balances were alike, and

there was no room for superiority except in the main-spring and the

wheel-work—the latter would be dwelt on, and the former would be

passed over, in any discussion that turned on the causes of accurate

time-keeping.

‡ It was his complete neglect of these considerations that

enabled Karl Marx to impose on himself and others his doctrine

that the value of commodities depended on the amount of average

labour embodied in them—a doctrine which is the most remarkable

intellectual mare’s nest of the century. It is perfectly true that

if all other circumstances were always equal—the demand for the

commodities in question, the ability with which average labour is

directed, and the assistance which the genius of the great inventors

gives to it—it is perfectly true that then the amount of average

labour embodied in various commodities would be the measure of their

value; for labour in that case would be the only variant. But, in

reality, the important variants are not average labour, but the

ability by which labour is directed. The efficiency of labour itself

is practically constant; and for the student of wealth-production

the principal force to be studied is the ability of the few, by

which the labour of the many is multiplied, and which only exerts

itself under special social circumstances.

Let us take one case more. A man is hanging by a rope which is

fastened to a spike of rock, and is looking for samphire or birds’

eggs on the face of a sheer cliff. It is suddenly perceived by some

of his friends on the summit that the rope is frayed a yard or two

above his head. They are anxious for his safety; and if any one asked

them why, they would answer, Because his life depends on the rope

not breaking. Let us suppose, however, that the rope is perfectly

strong, but that the spike of rock, it is attached to shows signs

of being about to fall. The man’s friends in that case will explain

{212} their anxiety by saying that his life depends not on the rope

but on the rock. In either case it would literally depend on both,

and on a thousand other things beside; but in either case one cause

only is mentioned, or calls for mention, and that is the cause whose

cessation or continuance is doubtful. For similar reasons, and in a

similar sense, great men are said to be the causes of all that is

done or produced in the communities to which they belong, beyond a

certain minimum which, even when not insignificant, is stationary;

for though the efforts of the average men are essential to the

production of this addition to the minimum, just as they are to the

production of the minimum itself, there is no question of their

efforts coming to an end unless the men come to an end also; whereas

the activities of the great men require special circumstances for

their development, and constitute the only productive force which

modern democratic activity practically tends to paralyse, or at all

events diminish or impede.

But there is yet another method, still more necessary to be

described, by which we are able to differentiate the respective

products of these two classes of men—a method which will assist us

not only to assign to each a certain portion of one joint effect, but

also to particularise many of the elements of which each portion is

composed. This method will be explained more fully in the following

chapter, but it will be well to give a general and preliminary

explanation of it here. It is founded on the two {213} following

propositions, which, when once they have been considered, will be

seen to be self-evident. Whatever the many contribute to the social

conditions of a community, either in the way of industrial production

or of the formation of habits and sentiments, consists of effects

produced by those traits or faculties of human nature in which all

members of that community are approximately and practically equal.

Thus the fact that all men are alike obliged to eat, and that all

parents as a rule have a preference for their own offspring, are

facts which determine much in the conditions of all societies. On

the other hand the social effects which are produced exclusively by

the few are effects produced by certain traits and faculties which,

though possibly possessed in a rudimentary state by all men, are

appreciably and efficiently developed in the persons of the few only.

The dramas of Shakespeare, though in a sense they are eminently

national, could never have been produced had Shakespeare possessed no

gifts except such as were possessed at the time by the English nation

at large. The discoveries of Newton, the inventions of Watt and

Stephenson, similarly were produced by powers that were indefinitely

above the average. It is needless to say that they could not have

been produced otherwise. If we will but reflect carefully on obvious

truths like these, we shall see that civilisations are woven out of

two kinds of materials, the one originating in traits common to the

community generally, the other in traits confined to a {214} more or

less numerous minority; and even when the two are most closely woven

together we shall be able to follow out and identify the different

threads, which never can lose the trace of their different and

opposite origins.

{215}

CHAPTER II

THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF PURELY DEMOCRATIC ACTION, OR THE ACTION OF

AVERAGE MEN IN CO-OPERATION.

The great-man theory as held by the conventional historian, and

expressed by Carlyle and others in those vehement formulas which

have so justly excited the ridicule of Mr. Herbert Spencer, errs not

because it emphasises the fact that the great man is the sole cause

of progress in the sense that no progress could have taken place

without him, but because it ignores the fact that the ordinary men of

his time, being the tools with which he works, or the instrument on

which he plays, the result is conditioned not only by his capacities,

but by theirs; just as the kind of music that can be produced by a

pianist is determined not only by his own skill, but by the character

of the piano also. Writers like Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, and

with him the whole school of socialists, impressed by the obvious

fact that the many do something, never pause to inquire what they

do, or how much they do, or how little, but rush to the conclusion

that {216} the many do everything. This conclusion is even more

meaningless than the doctrine which it is intended to contradict. The

many do something, and they do what is of extreme importance; but

its importance is strictly limited, and is indeed only intelligible

through its limitations, just as the character of a profile is

intelligible only through its outlines. The object, therefore, of

the sociological inquirer must be to discover precisely what these

limitations are. The methods by which the discovery is to be made

have been already indicated. Let us now go on to apply them. They

are of two kinds. One consists of an examination of what, in any

domain of activity, the many would produce, if the influence of the

few were absent. The other consists in an examination of the kind of

faculties which the production of such or such a result implies. If

these faculties are common to all, we say the result is produced by

the many; if the faculties are rare, we say it is produced by the few.

The practical validity of both these kinds of reasoning is shown by

the following imaginary, but not impossible case. A hundred Russian

workmen, all of them loyal to the Czar, are employed by a citizen

of Moscow to enlarge a subterranean cellar, and another hundred are

employed to fill it with heavy wine-cases. A week after the work

is completed the Czar is driving outside, and, as he passes the

citizen’s house, is killed by an explosion from below. The so-called

cellar was a mine, the wine-cases were filled with dynamite. Now

if all {217} those who were concerned in the production of this

catastrophe were tried, it is perfectly evident that the part played

by the workmen would be sharply separated from that played by the man

employing them; and that, though they no doubt would have contributed

something to the result, they would have contributed nothing to its

essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that if the

designed and attained result had been not criminal, but beneficent,

the elements in it that made it glorious would be the product of the

man who planned and intended it, and not of the workmen who blindly

obeyed his orders, neither knowing nor caring what the result would

be. Let us take another case of a somewhat different character.

When a spontaneous cheer bursts from a thousand people, the volume

of sound is obviously the unadulterated product of the many. On

the other hand, when a thousand people with ordinarily good voices

are so trained and organised as to sing a chorus out of _Israel in

Egypt_, the peculiar qualities which render the sounds produced by

them valuable, obviously imply the existence of the musical genius of

Handel, or in other words, faculties which belong to hardly one man

in a million, and are thus the product not of the many, but of one.

And now let us turn to the actual facts of life, and the kinds

of activity on which progress and civilisation depend, and let

us apply our two analytical methods to these. It is needless to

repeat, after what has been said in a previous chapter, that it is

{218} impossible, in a case like this, to examine social activity

as a whole. Such activity is of various kinds, and each must be

dealt with separately. Let us begin, then, with two—the activity of

economic production, and the activity which results in the growth of

speculative knowledge. The first affords us the clearest illustration

of how to discriminate the product of the many by considering what

it would shrink to were the influence of the few absent. The second

affords us the clearest illustration of how to discriminate the

product of the many by considering the nature of the faculties which

the production of the result implies.

To begin with production, then, let us take the case of the United

Kingdom, and consider the amount per head that was annually produced

by the population a hundred years ago. This amount was about £14. At

the present time it is something like £35, and the purchasing power

of money has so increased with the cheapening of commodities, that

the excess of the latter sum over the former is far greater than it

seems. Now, if we attribute the entire production of this country, at

the close of the last century, to common or average labour (which is

plainly an absurd concession), we shall gain some idea of what the

utmost limits of the independent productivity of the ordinary man

are; for the ordinary man’s talents as a producer, when directed by

nobody but himself, have, as has been said already, not appreciably

increased in the course of two thousand years, and have certainly

not increased {219} within the past three generations. The only

thing that has increased has been the concentration on the ordinary

man’s productive talents of the productive talents of the exceptional

man. The talents of the exceptional man, in fact, have been the only

variant in the problem; and, accordingly, the minimum which these

talents produce is the total difference between £14 and £35. This sum

is no mere piece of fanciful ingenuity. Parts of it are being done

daily before our eyes, and its practical character is being shown in

the most conclusive manner, when the profits of a business decline

on the death of some head or partner, or when some declining town is

restored to its old prosperity by some man of industrial genius, who

starts in it some new manufacture.

And now let us pass from industrial activity to intellectual, and

apply to this our second method of analysis. Of purely intellectual

results, or, as Mill calls them, “_advances in speculative

knowledge_,” the most striking examples are to be found in the

mathematical sciences. To the advances made in these it is not only

certain but obvious, that the many have contributed nothing, because

even of that section of mankind which has some mathematical aptitude

the majority are unable even to appreciate them completely when

they are made; much less do they possess the powers to make them.

No one would contend that the books of Euclid are the result of the

faculties possessed by every average school-boy, or of the kind of

man into which the average school-boy grows. We may indeed dismiss

{220} purely intellectual progress as the domain in which the

efficiency of the many stands absolutely at zero.

Let us pass now to the domain of political government, and consider

to what extent the faculties of the many, as distinct from those of

the few, are capable of operating there. This inquiry resolves itself

mainly into the question of how much the many can do to direct the

activity of the few, the activity of the few being presupposed; but

it will be well to consider first how much, if anything, the many

can accomplish, or the faculties of ordinary men can accomplish,

without any assistance from exceptional faculties whatsoever. In the

domain of politics, which is here meant to include all organised

action of a public and political character, as well as the making and

the administration of laws, the only positive functions or actions

which can be performed by the co-operation of the average faculties

of men, or by absolute and unadulterated democracy, are very simple

destructive actions and the formulation of, and the insistence on,

very simple demands. Of the destructive actions referred to we shall

find an excellent example in the lynching of a negro who has outraged

some white American girl, or in such an act as the burning of the

Tuileries by the communists. In each of these actions the feelings

of those who take part in it are as nearly as possible identical.

In the first, all of the men are equal in their sense of righteous

indignation; in the second, they are all equal in their feeling

of blind rebellion; and no special skill is in either case {221}

required by any one of them. It is true that even in such cases as

these there will most probably be leaders, of some sort, but they

will be leaders by accident, and the others will be their comrades

rather than their subordinates. Of the simple demands which the many

can formulate and insist upon unaided, we may take as an example a

demand for the abolition of a tax which distresses in an obvious way

multitudes of men equally; or a demand for the continuance of a war,

in which the issues at stake are sufficiently apparent to anybody who

can read a newspaper. The protest against the tax by the multitudes

of men whom it harasses, and the national demand, when it arises, for

the continuance of such a war, are phenomena which are absolutely

democratic. They are each the sum of a number of spontaneous feelings

and reasonings. They do not require any leader to stimulate them; and

all who contribute to their force do so in an equal degree.

But the moment we come to cases of any complexity the situation

changes. If the negro’s guilt could be established only by

inference, the lynchers would have to be convinced of it by some

clever advocate. If the lynching itself were a matter of extreme

difficulty, the lynchers would require to be commanded by the boldest

and shrewdest of their number. If the tax protested against were

indirect, if its injurious effects were hard to detect and realise,

and if it were capable of being represented as less injurious than

any other, men of exceptional {222} activity and exceptional

sharpness would be required to rouse the sufferers to a perception

of what caused their suffering. In other words, democracy, the many,

or the faculties possessed by the many, are incapable of initiation

in any complex matter, or of carrying out any course of complex

action when initiated; and we may sum up the case by saying that all

corporate action in politics is less and less purely democratic in

proportion as the questions dealt with are less and less simple.

Now, as a matter of fact, in any civilised country the majority

of the measures which the Government has to devise and carry out,

however simple in appearance, are very far from simple in reality.

Even when their details are few, the good or the bad effects of

them are certain to depend on a great variety of circumstances,

with regard to which ordinary faculties can form no independent

judgment; and if ordinary men are to express any judgment on such

measures at all which is not put into their mouths by others and

then uttered by rote, these measures must be placed before them by

talented interpreters and advocates, who will reduce the details to

a real or apparent simplicity and invest their alleged results with

charm and an air of certainty.† Accordingly, when we approach the

{223} question from the point of view of the many, we do nothing

but arrive at the same conclusion to which we were brought when we

approached it from the point of view of the few. We arrive, that

is to say, at the conclusion that, if we mean by government the

devising, the passing, and the administration of this and of that

measure, the genuine power of the many, even under the most popular

constitution, becomes less and less in proportion as the greatness

and the civilisation of the country increase. The voice of the many

is heard as loudly as ever; but what guides the voice is not the

personality that seems to utter it. What guides it is a handful of

men, exceptionally active, though not always exceptionally wise. The

voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

† This truth is strikingly illustrated by the history of the Home

Rule agitation in Ireland. Whether Home Rule would be advantageous

for the British Empire or for Ireland is a very complicated

question, and the demand for it consequently never became

genuinely popular until it was identified with the simplest of all

aspirations—the non-payment of rent.

And here before pursuing the subject farther let us look back for a

moment, and consider the point in our argument at which we have now

arrived. We have seen, then, that in the domain of modern industrial

activity the many, if we estimate the total produced in terms of

value, produce only an insignificant portion of the total. We have

seen that in the domain of intellectual and speculative progress the

many literally produce or achieve nothing. We have seen that in the

devising and administration of governmental measures the many are

powerful in proportion as the issues are exceptionally simple—that is

to say, in proportion as they are few and far between.

Now the reader may think that this brings us to {224} the end of our

inquiry; but it only brings us to the beginning of what is really

the important part of it. For though these conclusions, so far as

they go, are absolutely true, they by no means dispose of the whole

question which is before us, nor do they really reduce the social

power of the many to such small dimensions as they at first sight

seem to do. Thus speculative knowledge, though the many contribute

nothing to its progress, itself contributes nothing to progress until

the many are affected by it, and respond somehow to its stimulus;

economic production, when regarded merely as an affair of quantity

or as an accumulation of values—a process in which the part played

by the many is humble—does not represent that process in its true

social entirety; nor is civil government wholly an affair of measures

which are devised, discussed, amended, demanded, opposed, carried,

or rejected from year to year. We shall find, accordingly, that, in

spite of what has just been said, there is room in social life for

the operation of the genuine will of the many—of pure, spontaneous,

and unadulterated democracy. We shall find that the power of this

will, though it is in certain directions incalculably less than it is

at present generally believed to be, is paramount in domains where

its action is not generally recognised at all; and the nature of its

action here will throw a remarkable light on the nature of all action

which is in a true sense democratic. Of the domains of activity here

referred to, the most important are those of religion and family

life. {225}

Every religion, regarded as a body of doctrines and observances,

with the special habits of mind and dispositions of the heart which

are appropriate to them, which has ever influenced great masses of

mankind, is mainly a result of pure democratic action. It is true

that in the establishment of the great religions of the world another

agency has played a great part also. In no other sphere has the

influence of great individuals been so vast and so far-reaching as

in this. The mere mention of such personages as Christ, Buddha, and

Mahomet will make us realise that such is the case; and to these we

may add the missionaries, saints, and theologians who have spread

and explained the respective gospels entrusted to them, and given

by their saintly lives examples of the value of their teaching.

But whilst nowhere is the power of the few—of the very few—more

conspicuous than in the domain of religion, nowhere is the power of

the many more conspicuous also. No religion has ever grown, become

established, and influenced the lives of men unless its doctrines and

its spirit have appealed to those wants of the heart and soul which

have been shared, to a degree approximately equal, by all members

of the communities, nations, or races amongst whom the religion in

question has become established.

The truth of this statement is not in the least invalidated if we

apply it to a religion which we assume to have been supernaturally

revealed. Indeed, the clearest example of its truth may be found

in the phenomenon of Christianity. Whether we {226} attribute the

doctrines of Christianity to a natural or a supernatural source, it

will be equally plain in either case that they have found acceptance

amongst men because there was something inherent in the nature of

each individual Christian which naturally responded to them. Even

the staunchest Protestant who takes his stand most exclusively on

the Bible will be unable to deny that Protestant Christianity, as

it exists, represents not merely an assent to a number of bare

propositions uttered by Christ, or made with regard to Him by His

disciples, but also the subjective interpretation given to these

by each believer as he assents to them. Thus the doctrine of the

Atonement would never have been accepted by men, it would never

even have conveyed any meaning to them, if there had not been

something in their nature corresponding to a sense of sin; and the

universal effect which, for a time at least, this doctrine had on

all the Western nations and on all classes alike, showed that this

something which corresponded with the sense of sin was one of those

characteristics in which all men were approximately equal, and that

the acceptance of the doctrine was therefore a true act of democracy.

But the clearest illustration of the truth thus insisted on is to

be found, not amongst the varying and conflicting doctrines of

Protestantism, which represent theoretically the direct result of

the revealed truths of the Bible on each believer individually, but

in Christianity as represented by the Church of Rome. According to

ordinary Protestant opinion, {227} the doctrines of the Church

of Rome represent a structure built up by the misguided ingenuity

of priests, and imposed by them on a credulous and passive laity;

but so far, at all events, as the more important doctrines are

concerned, the very reverse is the case really. It has been the

world of ordinary believers that has imposed its beliefs on the

priests; not the priests that have imposed them on the world of

ordinary believers. Let us take, for instance, the Catholic doctrine

of the Eucharist, or the beliefs implied in the _cultus_ of the

Virgin Mary. That the sacramental elements were actually the body

and blood of Christ, that the Redeemer who died on the cross for

each individual sinner entered under the form of these elements into

each sinner’s body—entered bearing the stripes on it by which the

sinner was healed, and mixing with the sinner’s blood the divine

blood that had been shed for him—this was the belief of the common

unlettered communicant long before priests and theologians had, by

the aid of Aristotle, explained the assumed miracle as a process

of transubstantiation; and longer still before their philosophic

explanation was, by the ratification of any general Council, given

its place amongst the definite teachings of the Church. Similarly,

the devotion to the Virgin Mary first sprang up amongst the mass of

believers naturally, because the idea of God’s mother, with all her

motherly love, with all her virgin purity, and with all her human

sorrows allied so closely to omnipotence, touched countless hearts

{228} in a way which was in all cases practically similar; just as

the offer of a helping hand would make a similar appeal to each one

of a multitude of men drowning. The official teaching of the Church

with regard to the Virgin’s sinlessness, and the degree of worship

which is her due, has been the work, no doubt, of the few, not of

the many—of priests, of theologians, of Councils, of the spiritual

aristocracy; but the doctrines which they have thus defined have been

no more fabricated by themselves than the wines, good or bad, which a

peasantry have made for centuries, are made by the chemist of to-day,

who at last undertakes to analyse them.

It has been said that the part which democracy plays in the

development of religion is shown us by the Church of Rome with

greater distinctness than it is by any other great communion of

believers; and the reason is that no other great communion of

believers shows us with so much precision the part played by an

aristocracy, and thus leaves the part played by democracy with so

sharply defined a frontier. The Roman Church alone is in possession

of a complete machinery by which all the pious opinions of the whole

body of its members—the opinions which have spontaneously shaped

themselves in the minds of innumerable Christians as the result of

a multitude of independent spiritual experiences, and which, when

sufficiently manifested, have been studied by various theologians,

and reduced by them to logical and coherent forms—shall be finally

submitted to one great representative {229} Council. This Council

considers how far they are consistent with doctrines already defined,

and with one another, and how far, explicitly or implicitly, there

is any warrant for them in the Scriptures. It ends with rejecting

some, whilst others are reconciled and affirmed by it; and then these

last are added to the authoritative teachings of the Church. But the

Council, with the Pope included in it, is nothing more than a lens

by which the rays originating in the democracy of the faithful are

focalised and made to transmit a clear and coherent picture; and

the Roman Catholic religion, regarded as a body of doctrines which

have actually influenced the spiritual lives of men, is a magnified

picture, projected, as it were, upon the sky, of those secret but

common elements of the human mind and heart, in virtue of which all

men are supposed to be equal before God, and which unite the faithful

into one class, instead of graduating them into many.

This analysis of what may be called the natural history of

Catholicism may be thought, perhaps, to have little appreciable

connection with those social or sociological problems which at

present agitate the world, and give to the theory of democracy its

main practical interest. But neither Catholicism nor religion at

large has been referred to here for its own sake. They have been

referred to because the case of religion affords a singularly clear

illustration of the essential nature of democratic action generally,

because it helps us to understand that action in the affairs of

ordinary life, and {230} because it shows us very vividly how

democracy, as a political power, operates outside the domain to which

it is popularly supposed to be confined.†

† The political power of the religious beliefs of a community can be

seen at a glance when we consider our own government of India. Our

government there, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a government

of the few, not a government of the many; and yet the religion or

religions of the many impose limitations on our legislators as

stringent as any that could be imposed on them by any number of

formal mandates.

And now let us turn again to a nation’s family life, and consider it

in the light which the case of Catholicism throws on the question

of what, essentially, democratic action is. The religious life of a

Catholic is meritorious only when the beliefs and dispositions of

heart which his religion requires of him are spontaneous. No doubt

they may have been developed in him by some stimulus from without,

but it is essential that, when once present in him, they should draw

their life from himself. A saint may rouse a sinner to repentance,

but the repentance in its minutest details must be the sinner’s own

work. He must be his own overseer, he must be his own taskmaster.

In economic production this is not so. A bricklayer may contribute

to the building of some exquisite cathedral without any sympathy

with the architect’s intentions, and indeed without any knowledge

of them; but a man cannot be a true Christian unless Christ’s will

becomes his, and unless the beliefs suggested from without are seized

on by his own soul, and made a part of himself by his soul’s {231}

spontaneous workings. Thus the common religious opinions of the

mass of devout Catholics are, theoretically at all events, the sum

of a number of independent opinions, which agree because they result

from a number of similar but independent experiences. Here we have

the essence of democratic action—namely, a natural coincidence of

conclusions, which happen to be identical, not because those who hold

them have allowed their thinking to be done for them by the same

thinkers, but because with regard to the points in question they

naturally themselves think and feel identically.

Now the home or family lives of the citizens of any race or nation

owe their points of identity to essentially the same causes.

They result from propensities in a vast multitude of men which,

although they are similar, are independent. The structure of the

family differs amongst different races. Amongst some it is based

on polygamy; amongst others on monogamy; but no matter what its

details in either case may be, the government, however autocratic,

accommodates itself to the family life of the people; not the family

life of the people to the laws and the dictation of the government.

It will be enough to confine ourselves to the Western or progressive

races, amongst whom family life has its basis in monogamy. Advocates

of socialism often distinctly say, and the principles of socialism

beyond all doubt require, that the family, as now existing, shall

be practically broken up; and that whilst the union of the parents

is {232} made terminable with an ease unapproached at present, the

multiplication of children shall be regulated by State authority,

and that the children themselves shall be reared by the State rather

than by the parents. For both these arrangements there are many

obvious arguments, which are from the point of view of the socialist

quite unanswerable. If the State binds itself to provide for all the

children that are born, it is bound to claim some control over the

number of them that shall be thrown on its hands. If the State is

to be the sole employer and sole director of labour, it must settle

the number of children that shall be educated for each branch of

industry. If the solidarity of feeling requisite to make socialism

possible is ever to be obtained, it can be obtained only by fusing

into one those family groups now so obstinately separate. But here

the socialists encounter one of their great stumbling-blocks.‡ In

theory the advocates of the extremest and most complete democracy,

they are baffled by the habits and character of the very masses to

whom they address themselves. There may be unhappy homes, and there

may be unnatural parents, but the masses, as a whole, will not listen

to any proposal for invading the privacy of the home or for tampering

with the parental tie. Any average {233} mother would, when it

came to the point, tear out the eyes of any socialist legislator

who, under pretext of increasing her weekly wages, should seriously

attempt to snatch her children out of her arms. Similar resistance

would be offered to any attempt to modify, beyond certain limits, the

institution of marriage, or to interfere in any way with the habits

of a people’s home life. These habits give rise to legislation by the

few, but they do not originate in it. The legislation of the few, on

the contrary, has so to shape itself as to protect those modes of

life and institutions which these habits naturally produce; and the

laws that do this, no matter who devises and administers them, come

into being under genuinely democratic dictation. It is a genuinely

democratic power which maintains them unaltered, or imposes its own

limits on any modification of them which may be made.

‡ The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, who attempted in 1890 to

found a socialistic colony in Brazil (an attempt which completely

failed), attributes his failure largely to the tenacity with which

his followers clung to family life. “If I had the power,” he writes,

“to banish the greatest afflictions of this word, plagues, wars,

famines, etc. etc., I would renounce it, if instead I could suppress

the family.”

The effects, however, of the natural similarities of men’s family

lives are not to be found only in the domain of laws and government.

They confront us even more openly in the material surroundings of

our existence, especially in the structure of the dwellings of all

classes except the lowest. The detached cottage as well as the large

mansion, the row of cottages each with its separate door, and the

tenement of three rooms, are in one respect all alike. They are

constructed and arranged in accordance with those propensities which

keep the members of the family group united, and each family group

separate from all others. Nor do matters end here; {234} for if the

propensities which result in family life affect the structure of the

dwelling, other tastes or propensities equally spontaneous determine

what commodities shall be put in it. It is true that these tastes are

different in different social classes; it is true also that they have

not, so far as their details are concerned, as deep a root in our

nature as the propensities which give its character to the family.

They are stimulated, sustained, and modified by constant suggestions

from without, by circumstances, and by tastes which, within limits,

vary greatly; but they are all alike in this, that when they become

efficient, or, in other words, take definite shape as a want, the

want has become a part of the man who feels it, and is for the time

as spontaneous as are the family instincts themselves.

The influence, however, of men’s spontaneous wants is not confined to

the house and household appliances, but extends itself over the whole

domain of economic products. And here we are brought back again to

another portion of the ground which we have already traversed. We are

brought back to the domain of economic production; but brought back

with eyes opened to a new order of facts.

Now before we proceed to a consideration of these, let us

recapitulate what has been said with regard to this subject already.

The main fact which was dwelt upon in our previous examination of it

was the fact that in wealth-production all but the earlier advances

are due, both in their achievement and their maintenance, to the few,

{235} and to the few alone. The practical validity of this reasoning

has been shown in the preceding chapter, and defended against the

common objections sure to be brought against it; and just now it

was reinforced incidentally when we were considering the influence

of the many on the doctrines of the Church of Rome; for whilst the

essentially democratic origin of these doctrines was insisted on, it

was shown that the religion of the Catholic democracy could have no

organic growth, no definition nor cohesion without the aristocracy of

theologians and the machinery of popes and councils. It was further

pointed out that if even in the development of religion the many

are dependent on the exceptional powers of the few, in the process

of economic production they are incalculably more dependent. For

whilst Catholicism represents the ideas of the multitude, analysed,

perfected, and carried out by the few, advanced economic production,

such as the production of a beautiful cathedral, represents the

ideas of the few carried out in partial or complete ignorance by the

multitude.

Attention must now be called to certain further facts which

constitute the final evidence of the truth of the same conclusions.

The facts now referred to are those of contemporary trade unionism.

These are supposed by many of the trade unionists and their

sympathisers to show the growth of democratic power in the domain

of production generally. What they do in reality is to exhibit

its essential limitations. They {236} show this in a way which

is hidden from the careless thinker by a curiously inaccurate and

misleading use of language. Trade unionism is constantly described

as the organisation of Labour. In reality it is nothing of the

kind. It is an organisation of labourers; and that, as we shall

see, is a totally different thing; for where labourers are spoken

of under the collective name of Labour, they are so spoken of with

special and exclusive reference to the phenomena which they manifest

when actually exerting themselves in production. Were the same men

organised for some ethical or religious purpose, they would be spoken

of not as Labour, but as the National or Popular Conscience. The

organisation of Labour is the setting men to perform a large variety

of correlated productive tasks, and prescribing to each man what his

own task shall be. But the organisation of labourers that has been

brought about by trade unionism is of a precisely opposite kind, and

has a precisely opposite end. Its end is not production, but the

cessation of production; not the prescribing, the devising, and the

allotting of tasks, but the taking men away from them. In a word,

it is the organisation not of production, but of obstruction; nor

does the fact that the trade unions have succeeded in organising the

latter give so much as a hint that they would be able to organise

the former. Even if they could do so, it would be the leaders, not

the men, that performed the feat—a new race of employers separating

themselves from the body of the employed; and this fact is oddly

enough acknowledged {237} by the very men who are apparently most

blind to it. For one of the arguments most frequently used to show

the practicability of industrial democracy is based on the unusual

ability manifested by the officials of the trade unions in managing

strikes and great demonstrations of strikers. Must not these men, it

is asked, have very exceptional capacities who can gather together

their thousands at the shortest possible notice, and march them into

Hyde Park through the crowded thoroughfares of London? And it is

perfectly true that many of the trade union leaders are, in their own

way, men with remarkable and exceptional characteristics. But, in the

first place, the more that their admirers magnify them, the more do

they detract from the democratic character of trade unionism; and in

the second place, if a man is necessarily exceptional because he can

so far organise some thousands of men as to march them occasionally

into an enclosure where they walk about sucking oranges, how much

more exceptional must be the abilities that can organise similar

men, day after day, for the performance of the most intricately

adjusted tasks, in such a way that their efforts shall result in

an Atlantic liner! Trade unionism, then, whatever the ability of

its leaders, does not represent democratic action in the actual

process of economic production at all; and instead of pointing to any

development of such action in the future, merely helps to show us

that no such development is to be looked for.

Such being the case, then, the facts that now {238} claim our

attention will, when they are first stated, wear an appearance

of paradox; for though the power of democracy, in the advanced

processes of production, is smaller than it is in any other kind

of social activity, abstract thought and discovery alone excepted,

yet it exercises an influence on production none the less, which

is as purely democratic in character and as far-reaching in its

consequences as that which it has ever exercised over the doctrines

of any religion.