_ON THE REASONS WHY MAN IS NOT ALTOGETHER A BRUTE._
The Arabs have a story of a man who desired to test which of his three
sons loved him most. He sent them out to see which of the three would
bring him the most valuable present. The three sons met in a distant
city, and compared the gifts they had found. The first had a carpet on
which he could transport himself and others whithersoever he would. The
second had a medicine which would cure any disease. The third had a
glass in which he could see what was going on at any place he might
name. The third used his glass to see what was going on at home: he saw
his father ill in bed. The first transported all three to their home on
his carpet. The second administered the medicine and saved the father's
life. The perplexity of the father when he had to decide which son's
gift had been of the most value to him illustrates very fairly the
difficulty of saying whether land, labor, or capital is most essential
to production. No production is possible without the co-operation of
all three.
We know that men once lived on the spontaneous fruits of the earth,
just as other animals do. In that stage of existence a man was just
like the brutes. His existence was at the sport of Nature. He got what
he could by way of food, and ate what he could get, but he depended on
finding what Nature gave. He could wrest nothing from Nature; he could
make her produce nothing; and he had only his limbs with which to
appropriate what she offered. His existence was almost entirely
controlled by accident; he possessed no capital; he lived out of his
product, and production had only the two elements of land and labor of
appropriation. At the present time man is an intelligent animal. He
knows something of the laws of Nature; he can avail himself of what is
favorable, and avert what is unfavorable, in nature, to a certain
extent; he has narrowed the sphere of accident, and in some respects
reduced it to computations which lessen its importance; he can bring
the productive forces of Nature into service, and make them produce
food, clothing, and shelter. How has the change been brought about? The
answer is, By capital. If we can come to an understanding of what
capital is, and what a place it occupies in civilization, it will clear
up our ideas about a great many of these schemes and philosophies which
are put forward to criticise social arrangements, or as a basis of
proposed reforms.
The first beginnings of capital are lost in the obscurity which covers
all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the
case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever
started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find
some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of
real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that
man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and
everything we know about the primitive man shows us that he did not
reflect. No doubt accident controlled the first steps. They may have
been won and lost again many times. There was one natural element which
man learned to use so early that we cannot find any trace of him when
he had it not--fire. There was one tool-weapon in nature--the flint.
Beyond the man who was so far superior to the brutes that he knew how
to use fire and had the use of flints we cannot go. A man of lower
civilization than that was so like the brutes that, like them, he could
leave no sign of his presence on the earth save his bones.
The man who had a flint no longer need be a prey to a wild animal, but
could make a prey of it. He could get meat food. He who had meat food
could provide his food in such time as to get leisure to improve his
flint tools. He could get skins for clothing, bones for needles,
tendons for thread. He next devised traps and snares by which to take
animals alive. He domesticated them, and lived on their increase. He
made them beasts of draught and burden, and so got the use of a
natural force. He who had beasts of draught and burden could make a
road and trade, and so get the advantage of all soils and all climates.
He could make a boat, and use the winds as force. He now had such
tools, science, and skill that he could till the ground, and make it
give him more food. So from the first step that man made above the
brute the thing which made his civilization possible was capital. Every
step of capital won made the next step possible, up to the present
hour. Not a step has been or can be made without capital. It is labor
accumulated, multiplied into itself--raised to a higher power, as the
mathematicians say. The locomotive is only possible today because, from
the flint-knife up, one achievement has been multiplied into another
through thousands of generations. We cannot now stir a step in our life
without capital. We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or
employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could
build a palace or a factory without capital. We have ourselves, and we
have the earth; the thing which limits what we can do is the third
requisite--capital. Capital is force, human energy stored or
accumulated, and very few people ever come to appreciate its importance
to civilized life. We get so used to it that we do not see its use.
The industrial organization of society has undergone a development with
the development of capital. Nothing has ever made men spread over the
earth and develop the arts but necessity--that is, the need of getting
a living, and the hardships endured in trying to meet that need. The
human race has had to pay with its blood at every step. It has had to
buy its experience. The thing which has kept up the necessity of more
migration or more power over Nature has been increase of population.
Where population has become chronically excessive, and where the
population has succumbed and sunk, instead of developing energy enough
for a new advance, there races have degenerated and settled into
permanent barbarism. They have lost the power to rise again, and have
made no inventions. Where life has been so easy and ample that it cost
no effort, few improvements have been made. It is in the middle range,
with enough social pressure to make energy needful, and not enough
social pressure to produce despair, that the most progress has been
made.
At first all labor was forced. Men forced it on women, who were drudges
and slaves. Men reserved for themselves only the work of hunting or
war. Strange and often horrible shadows of all the old primitive
barbarism are now to be found in the slums of great cities, and in the
lowest groups of men, in the midst of civilized nations. Men impose
labor on women in some such groups today. Through various grades of
slavery, serfdom, villeinage, and through various organizations of
castes and guilds, the industrial organization has been modified and
developed up to the modern system. Some men have been found to denounce
and deride the modern system--what they call the capitalist system. The
modern system is based on liberty, on contract, and on private
property. It has been reached through a gradual emancipation of the
mass of mankind from old bonds both to Nature and to their fellow-men.
Village communities, which excite the romantic admiration of some
writers, were fit only for a most elementary and unorganized society.
They were fit neither to cope with the natural difficulties of winning
much food from little land, nor to cope with the malice of men. Hence
they perished. In the modern society the organization of labor is high.
Some are land-owners and agriculturists, some are transporters,
bankers, merchants, teachers; some advance the product by manufacture.
It is a system of division of functions, which is being refined all the
time by subdivision of trade and occupation, and by the differentiation
of new trades.
The ties by which all are held together are those of free co-operation
and contract. If we look back for comparison to anything of which
human history gives us a type or experiment, we see that the modern
free system of industry offers to every living human being chances of
happiness indescribably in excess of what former generations have
possessed. It offers no such guarantees as were once possessed by some,
that they should in no case suffer. We have an instance right at hand.
The Negroes, once slaves in the United States, used to be assured care,
medicine, and support; but they spent their efforts, and other men took
the products. They have been set free. That means only just this: they
now work and hold their own products, and are assured of nothing but
what they earn. In escaping from subjection they have lost claims.
Care, medicine, and support they get, if they earn it. Will any one say
that the black men have not gained? Will any one deny that individual
black men may seem worse off? Will any one allow such observations to
blind them to the true significance of the change? If any one thinks
that there are or ought to be somewhere in society guarantees that no
man shall suffer hardship, let him understand that there can be no such
guarantees, unless other men give them--that is, unless we go back to
slavery, and make one man's effort conduce to another man's welfare. Of
course, if a speculator breaks loose from science and history, and
plans out an ideal society in which all the conditions are to be
different, he is a law-giver or prophet, and those may listen to him
who have leisure.
The modern industrial system is a great social co-operation. It is
automatic and instinctive in its operation. The adjustments of the
organs take place naturally. The parties are held together by
impersonal force--supply and demand. They may never see each other;
they may be separated by half the circumference of the globe. Their
co-operation in the social effort is combined and distributed again by
financial machinery, and the rights and interests are measured and
satisfied without any special treaty or convention at all. All this
goes on so smoothly and naturally that we forget to notice it. We think
that it costs nothing--does itself, as it were. The truth is, that this
great co-operative effort is one of the great products of
civilization--one of its costliest products and highest refinements,
because here, more than anywhere else, intelligence comes in, but
intelligence so clear and correct that it does not need expression.
Now, by the great social organization the whole civilized body (and
soon we shall say the whole human race) keeps up a combined assault on
Nature for the means of subsistence. Civilized society may be said to
be maintained in an unnatural position, at an elevation above the
earth, or above the natural state of human society. It can be
maintained there only by an efficient organization of the social effort
and by capital. At its elevation it supports far greater numbers than
it could support on any lower stage. Members of society who come into
it as it is today can live only by entering into the organization. If
numbers increase, the organization must be perfected, and capital must
increase--_i.e._, power over Nature. If the society does not keep up
its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it
falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose,
and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members.
Hence human society lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and
those who have most interest that this strain be successfully kept up,
that the social organization be perfected, and that capital be
increased, are those at the bottom.
The notion of property which prevails among us today is, that a man has
a right to the thing which he has made by his labor. This is a very
modern and highly civilized conception. Singularly enough, it has been
brought forward dogmatically to prove that property in land is not
reasonable, because man did not make land. A man cannot "make" a
chattel or product of any kind whatever without first appropriating
land, so as to get the ore, wood, wool, cotton, fur, or other raw
material. All that men ever appropriate land for is to get out of it
the natural materials on which they exercise their industry.
Appropriation, therefore, precedes labor-production, both historically
and logically. Primitive races regarded, and often now regard,
appropriation as the best title to property. As usual, they are
logical. It is the simplest and most natural mode of thinking to regard
a thing as belonging to that man who has, by carrying, wearing, or
handling it, associated it for a certain time with his person. I once
heard a little boy of four years say to his mother, "Why is not this
pencil mine now? It used to be my brother's, but I have been using it
all day." He was reasoning with the logic of his barbarian ancestors.
The reason for allowing private property in land is, that two men
cannot eat the same loaf of bread. If A has taken a piece of land, and
is at work getting his loaf out of it, B cannot use the same land at
the same time for the same purpose. Priority of appropriation is the
only title of right which can supersede the title of greater force. The
reason why man is not altogether a brute is, because he has learned to
accumulate capital, to use capital, to advance to a higher organization
of society, to develop a completer co-operation, and so to win greater
and greater control over Nature.
It is a great delusion to look about us and select those men who occupy
the most advanced position in respect to worldly circumstances as the
standard to which we think that all might be and ought to be brought.
All the complaints and criticisms about the inequality of men apply to
inequalities in property, luxury, and creature comforts, not to
knowledge, virtue, or even physical beauty and strength. But it is
plainly impossible that we should all attain to equality on the level
of the best of us. The history of civilization shows us that the human
race has by no means marched on in a solid and even phalanx. It has had
its advance-guard, its rear-guard, and its stragglers. It presents us
the same picture today; for it embraces every grade, from the most
civilized nations down to the lowest surviving types of barbarians.
Furthermore, if we analyze the society of the most civilized state,
especially in one of the great cities where the highest triumphs of
culture are presented, we find survivals of every form of barbarism and
lower civilization. Hence, those who today enjoy the most complete
emancipation from the hardships of human life, and the greatest command
over the conditions of existence, simply show us the best that man has
yet been able to do. Can we all reach that standard by wishing for it?
Can we all vote it to each other? If we pull down those who are most
fortunate and successful, shall we not by that very act defeat our own
object? Those who are trying to reason out any issue from this tangle
of false notions of society and of history are only involving
themselves in hopeless absurdities and contradictions. If any man is
not in the first rank who might get there, let him put forth new energy
and take his place. If any man is not in the front rank, although he
has done his best, how can he be advanced at all? Certainly in no way
save by pushing down any one else who is forced to contribute to his
advancement.
It is often said that the mass of mankind are yet buried in poverty,
ignorance, and brutishness. It would be a correct statement of the
facts intended, from an historical and sociological point of view, to
say, Only a small fraction of the human race have as yet, by thousands
of years of struggle, been partially emancipated from poverty,
ignorance, and brutishness. When once this simple correction is made in
the general point of view, we gain most important corollaries for all
the subordinate questions about the relations of races, nations, and
classes.