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NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF MODERN SOCIALISM
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
_SHORT STORIES_
The Plattner Story and others
Tales of Space and Time
The Stolen Bacillus and other Stories
Twelve Stories and a Dream
_ROMANCES_
The Time Machine
The Island of Dr. Moreau
The War of the Worlds
The Wonderful Visit
The Invisible Man
The First Men in the Moon
The Food of the Gods
The Sea Lady
When the Sleeper Wakes
In the Days of the Comet
_NOVELS_
Love and Mr. Lewisham
Kipps
_SOCIOLOGICAL AND SOCIALIST ESSAYS_
Anticipations
Mankind in the Making
A Modern Utopia
The Future in America
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A PLAIN ACCOUNT OF MODERN SOCIALISM
BY
H. G. WELLS
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1912
_Published March 1908.
Popular Edition Revised
June 1909. Reprinted
July 1909, Sept. 1922_
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
"Undiluted Atheism, theft and immorality.... I know of no language
sufficiently potent to express fully my absolute detestation of what I
believe to be the most poisonous doctrine ever put forward, namely
Socialism."
HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF RUTLAND.
"Let all parties then unite to defeat this insidious Socialism which
is threatening the country, and take immediate steps to expose and
bring it to light. The country may truly be said to be sleeping over a
veritable volcano which the next general election may precipitate,
unless steps are taken at once to bring this nightmare into the light
of day and force it out of its creeping nocturnal habits."
MR. DUDLEY S. A. COSBY in the _Westminster Review_.
"Many people think that it is possible to conduct a victorious
campaign with the single watchword 'Down with Socialism.' Well, I am
not fond of mere negatives. I do not like fighting an abstract noun.
My objection to Anti-Socialism as a platform is that Socialism means
so many different things. On this point I agree with Mr. Asquith. I
will wait before I denounce Socialism till I see what form it takes...
Socialism is not necessarily synonymous with robbery. Correctly used,
the word only signifies a particular view of the proper relation of
the State to its citizens, a tendency to substitute public for private
ownership, or to restrict the freedom of individual enterprise in the
interests of the public. But there are some forms of property which we
all admit should be public and not private, and the freedom of
individual enterprise is already limited by a hundred laws. Socialism
and Individualism,--I am not fond of these abstract phrases. There are
opposing principles which enter in various proportions into the
constitution of every civilized society. It is merely a question of
degree. One community is more Socialistic than another. The same
community is more Socialistic at one time than at another. This
country is far more Socialistic than it was fifty years ago, and for
most of the changes in that direction the Unionist or Tory Party is
responsible."
LORD MILNER.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE GOOD WILL IN MAN
II. THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM
III. THE FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
IV. THE SECOND MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
V. THE SPIRIT OF GAIN AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
VI. WOULD SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME?
VII. WOULD MODERN SOCIALISM ABOLISH ALL PROPERTY?
VIII. THE MIDDLE-CLASS MAN, THE BUSINESS MAN, AND SOCIALISM
IX. SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM
X. SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE
XI. REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
XII. ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
XIII. CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIALISM
XIV. SOME ARGUMENTS _AD HOMINEM_
XV. THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIALISM.
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
CHAPTER I
THE GOOD WILL IN MAN
§ 1.
The present writer has long been deeply interested in the Socialist
movement in Great Britain and America, and in all those complicated
issues one lumps together as "social questions." In the last few years
he has gone into it personally and studied the Socialist movement
closely and intimately at first hand; he has made the acquaintance of
many of its leaders upon both sides of the Atlantic, joined numerous
organizations, attended and held meetings, experimented in Socialist
politics. From these inquiries he has emerged with certain very
definite conclusions as to the trend and needs of social development,
and these he is now rendering in this book. He calls himself a
Socialist, but he is by no means a fanatical or uncritical adherent.
To him Socialism presents itself as a very noble but a very human and
fallible system of ideas and motives, a system that grows and
develops. He regards its spirit, its intimate substance as the most
hopeful thing in human affairs at the present time, but he does also
find it shares with all mundane concerns the qualities of inadequacy
and error. It suffers from the common penalty of noble propositions;
it is hampered by the insufficiency of its supporters and advocates,
and by the superficial tarnish that necessarily falls in our
atmosphere of greed and conflict darkest upon the brightest things. In
spite of these admissions of failure and unworthiness in himself and
those about him, he remains a Socialist.
In discussing Socialism with very various sorts of people he has
necessarily had, time after time, to encounter and frame a reply to a
very simple seeming and a really very difficult question: "What is
Socialism?" It is almost like asking "What is Christianity?" or
demanding to be shown the atmosphere. It is not to be answered fully
by a formula or an epigram. Again and again the writer has been asked
for some book which would set out in untechnical language, frankly and
straightforwardly, what Socialism is and what it is not, and always he
has hesitated in his reply. Many good books there are upon this
subject, clear and well written, but none that seem to tell the whole
story as he knows it; no book that gives not only the outline but the
spirit, answers the main objections, clears up the chief ambiguities,
covers all the ground; no book that one can put into the hands of
inquiring youth and say: "There! that will tell you precisely the
broad facts you want to know." Some day, no doubt, such a book will
come. In the meanwhile he has ventured to put forth this temporary
substitute, his own account of the faith that is in him.[1]
[1] As I pass these proofs I am reminded that Mr. J. R.
MacDonald has in the press _Socialism_ (Jacks, Edinburgh)--a
general account of the movement. From Mr. Kirkup's _An
Enquiry into Socialism_ and from _Fabian Essays_ (the Fabian
Society, London) a good idea of the general Socialist
position may also be obtained.
Socialism, then, as he understands it, is a great intellectual
process, a development of desires and ideas that takes the form of a
project--a project for the reshaping of human society upon new and
better lines. That in the ampler proposition is what Socialism claims
to be. This book seeks to expand and establish that proposition, and
to define the principles upon which the Socialist believes this
reconstruction of society should go. The particulars and justification
of this project and this claim, it will be the business of this book
to discuss just as plainly as the writer can.
§ 2.
Now, because the Socialist seeks the reshaping of human society, it
does not follow that he denies it to be even now a very wonderful and
admirable spectacle. Nor does he deny that for many people life is
even now a very good thing....
For his own part, though the writer is neither a very strong nor a
very healthy nor a very successful person, though he finds much
unattainable and much to regret, yet life presents itself to him more
and more with every year as a spectacle of inexhaustible interest, of
unfolding and intensifying beauty, and as a splendid field for high
attempts and stimulating desires. Yet none the less is it a spectacle
shot strangely with pain, with mysterious insufficiencies and
cruelties, with pitfalls into anger and regret, with aspects
unaccountably sad. Its most exalted moments are most fraught for him
with the appeal for endeavour, with the urgency of unsatisfied wants.
These shadows and pains and instabilities do not, to his sense at
least, darken the whole prospect; it may be indeed that they intensify
its splendours to his perceptions; yet all these evil and ugly aspects
of life come to him with an effect of challenge, as something not to
be ignored but passionately disputed, as an imperative call for
whatever effort and courage lurks in his composition. Life and the
world are fine, but not as an abiding place; as an arena--yes, an
arena gorgeously curtained with sea and sky, mountains and broad
prospects, decorated with all the delicate magnificence of leaf
tracery and flower petal and feather, soft fur and the shining wonder
of living skin, musical with thunder and the singing of birds; but an
arena nevertheless, an arena which offers no seats for idle
spectators, in which one must will and do, decide, strike and strike
back--and presently pass away.
And it needs but a cursory view of history to realize--though all
knowledge of history confirms the generalization--that this arena is
not a confused and aimless conflict of individuals. Looked at too
closely it may seem to be that--a formless web of individual hates and
loves; but detach oneself but a little, and the broader forms appear.
One perceives something that goes on, that is constantly working to
make order out of casualty, beauty out of confusion; justice,
kindliness, mercy out of cruelty and inconsiderate pressure. For our
present purpose it will be sufficient to speak of this force that
struggles and tends to make and do, as Good Will. More and more
evident is it, as one reviews the ages, that there is this as well as
lust, hunger, avarice, vanity and more or less intelligent fear to be
counted among the motives of mankind. This Good Will of our race,
however arising, however trivial, however subordinated to individual
ends, however comically inadequate a thing it may be in this
individual case or that, is in the aggregate an operating will. In
spite of all the confusions and thwartings of life, the halts and
resiliencies and the counter strokes of fate, it is manifest that in
the long run human life becomes broader than it was, gentler than it
was, finer and deeper. On the whole--and now-a-days almost
steadily--things _get better_. There is a secular amelioration of
life, and it is brought about by Good Will working through the efforts
of men.
Now this proposition lies quite open to dispute. There are people who
will dispute it and make a very passable case. One may deny the
amelioration, or one may deny that it is the result of any Good Will
or of anything but quite mechanical forces. The former is the commoner
argument. The appeal is usually to what has been finest in the past,
and to all that is bad and base in the present. At once the unsoundest
and the most attractive argument is to be found in the deliberate
idealization of particular ages, the thirteenth century in England,
for example, or the age of the Antonines. The former is presented with
the brightness of a missal, the latter with all the dignity of a Roman
inscription. One is asked to compare these ages so delightfully
conceived, with a patent medicine vendor's advertisement or a
Lancashire factory town, quite ignoring the iniquity of mediæval law
or the slums and hunger and cruelty of Imperial Rome.
But quite apart from such unsound comparisons, it is, we may admit,
possible to make a very excellent case against our general assertion
of progress. One can instance a great number of things, big and
little, that have been better in past times than they are now; for
example, they dressed more sumptuously and delightfully in mediæval
Venice and Florence than we do--all, that is, who could afford it;
they made quite unapproachably beautiful marble figures in Athens in
the time of Pericles; there is no comparison between the brickwork of
Verona in the twelfth century and that of London when Cannon Street
Station was erected; the art of cookery declined after the splendid
period of Roman history for more than a thousand years; the Gothic
architecture of France and England exceeds in nobility and quality and
aggregated beauty, every subsequent type of structure. This much, one
agrees, is true, and beyond disputing. The philosophical thought of
Athens again, to come to greater things, was at its climax, more free,
more finely expressed than that of any epoch since. And the English of
Elizabeth's time was, we are told by competent judges, a more gracious
and powerful instrument of speech than in the days of Queen Anne or of
Queen Victoria.
So one might go on in regard to a vast number of things, petty and
large alike; the list would seem overwhelming until the countervailing
considerations came into play. But, as a matter of fact, there is
hardly an age or a race that does not show us something better done
than ever it was before or since, because at no time has human effort
ceased and absolutely failed. Isolated eminence is no proof of general
elevation. Always in this field or that, whether it was in the binding
of books or the enamelling of metal, the refinement of language or the
assertion of liberty, particular men have, by a sort of necessity,
grasped at occasion, "found themselves," as the saying goes, and done
the best that was in them. So always while man endures, whatever else
betide, one may feel assured at this or that special thing some men
will find a way to do and get to the crown of endeavour. Such
considerations of decline in particular things from the standard of
the past do not really affect the general assertion of a continuous
accumulating betterment in the lot of men, do not invalidate the hopes
of those who believe in the power of men to end for ever many of the
evils that now darken the world, who look to the reservoirs of human
possibility as a supply as yet scarcely touched, who make of all the
splendour and superiorities of the past no more than a bright promise
and suggestion for the unborn future our every act builds up, into
which, whether we care or no, all our achievements pour.
Many evils have been overcome, much order and beauty and scope for
living has been evolved since man was a hairy savage holding scarcely
more than a brute's intercourse with his fellows; but even in the
comparatively short perspective of history, one can scarcely deny a
steady process of overcoming evil. One may sneer at contemporary
things; it is a fashion with that unhappily trained type of mind which
cannot appreciate without invidious comparison, so poor in praise that
it cannot admit worth without venting a compensatory envy; but of one
permanent result of progress surely every one is assured. In the
matter of thoughtless and instinctive cruelty--and that is a very
fundamental matter--mankind mends steadily. I wonder and doubt if in
the whole world at any time before this an aged, ill-clad woman, or a
palpable cripple could have moved among a crowd of low-class children
as free from combined or even isolated insult as such a one would be
to-day, if caught in the rush from a London Council school. Then, for
all our sins, I am sure the sense of justice is quicker and more
nearly universal than ever before. Certain grave social evils, too,
that once seemed innate in humanity, have gone, gone so effectually
that we cannot now imagine ourselves subjected to them; the cruelties
and insecurities of private war, the duel, overt slavery, for example,
have altogether ceased; and in all Western Europe and America chronic
local famines and great pestilences come no more. No doubt it is still
an unsatisfactory world that mars the roadside with tawdry
advertisements of drugs and food; but less than two centuries ago,
remember, the place of these boards was taken by gibbets and
crow-pecked, tattered corpses swinging in the wind, and the heads of
dead gentlemen (drawn and quartered, and their bowels burnt before
their eyes) rotted in the rain on Temple Bar.
The world is now a better place for a common man than ever it was
before, the spectacle wider and richer and deeper, and more charged
with hope and promise. Think of the universal things it is so easy to
ignore; of the great and growing multitude, for example, of those who
may travel freely about the world, who may read freely, think freely,
speak freely! Think of the quite unprecedented numbers of well-ordered
homes and cared-for, wholesome, questioning children! And it is not
only that we have this increasing sea of mediocre well-being in which
the realities of the future are engendering, but in the matter of
sheer achievement I believe in my own time. It has been the cry of the
irresponsive man since criticism began, that his own generation
produced nothing; it is a cry that I hate and deny. When the dross has
been cleared away and comparison becomes possible, I am convinced it
will be admitted that in the aggregate, in philosophy and significant
literature, in architecture, painting and scientific research, in
engineering and industrial invention, in statecraft, humanity and
valiant deeds, the last thirty years of man's endeavours will bear
comparison with any other period of thirty years whatever in his
history.
And this is the result of effort; things get better because men mean
them to get better and try to bring betterment about; this progress
goes on because man, in spite of evil temper, blundering and vanity,
in spite of indolence and base desire, does also respond to Good Will
and display Good Will. You may declare that all the good things in
life are the result of causes over which man has no control, that in
pursuit of an "enlightened self-interest" he makes things better
inadvertently. But think of any good thing you know! Was it thus it
came?
§ 3.
And yet, let us not disguise it from ourselves, for all the progress
one can claim, life remains very evil; about the feet of all these
glories of our time lurk darknesses.
Let me take but one group of facts that cry out to all of us--and will
not cry in vain. I mean the lives of little children that are going on
now--as the reader sits with this book in his hand. Think, for
instance, of the little children who have been pursued and tormented
and butchered in the Congo Free State during the last year or so,
hands and feet chopped off, little bodies torn and thrown aside that
rubber might be cheap, the tyres of our cars run smoothly, and that
detestable product of political expediency, the King of the Belgians,
have his pleasures. Think too of the fear and violence, the dirt and
stress of the lives of the children who grow up amidst the lawless
internal strife of the Russian political chaos. Think of the emigrant
ships even now rolling upon the high seas, their dark, evil-smelling
holds crammed with humanity, and the huddled sick children in
them--fleeing from certain to uncertain wretchedness. Think of the
dreadful tale of childish misery and suffering that goes on wherever
there are not sane factory laws; how even in so civilized a part of
the world as the United States of America (as Spargo's _Bitter Cry of
the Children_ tells in detail) thousands of little white children of
six and seven, ill fed and often cruelly handled, toil without hope.
And in all agricultural lands too, where there is no sense of
education, think of the children dragging weary feet from the filthy
hovels that still house peasants the whole world over, to work in the
mire and the pitiless winds, scaring birds, bending down to plant and
weed. Even in London again, think just a little of the real
significance of some facts I have happened upon in the Report of the
Education Committee of the London County Council for the year 1905.
The headmaster of one casually selected school makes a special return
upon the quality of the clothing of his 405 children. He tells of 7.4
per cent. of his boys whose clothing was "the scantiest
possible--_e.g._ one ragged coat buttoned up and practically nothing
found beneath it; and boots either absent or represented by a mass of
rags tied upon the feet"; of 34.8 per cent. whose "clothing was
insufficient to retain animal heat and needed urgent remedy"; of 45.9
per cent, whose clothing was "poor but passable; an old and perhaps
ragged suit, with some attempt at proper underclothing--usually of
flannelette"; thus leaving only 12.8 per cent. who could, in the
broadest sense, be termed "well clad."
Taking want of personal cleanliness as the next indication of neglect
at home, 11 per cent. of the boys are reported as "very dirty and
verminous"; 34.7 per cent. whose "clothes and body were dirty but not
verminous"; 42.5 per cent, were "passably clean, for boys," and only
"12 per cent. clean above the average."
Eleven per cent. verminous; think what it means! Think what the homes
must be like from which these poor little wretches come! Better,
perhaps, than the country cottage where the cesspool drains into the
water supply and the hen-house vermin invades the home, but surely
intolerable beside our comforts! Give but a moment again to the
significance of the figures I have italicized in the table that
follows, a summarized return for the year 1906 of the "Ringworm"
Nurses who visit the London Elementary Schools and inspect the
children for various forms of dirt disease.
----------------------------------------------------------------
| | Number of | | | |
| Departments. | children | Clean. | Partially | Verminous. |
| | examined. | | cleansed. | |
|--------------|-----------|-----------------------------------|
| Boys . | 34,345 | 32,726 | 847 | 1,139 |
| Girls . | 36,445 | 22,476 | 4,426 | 12,003 |
| Infants . | 42,140 | 6,675 | 2,661 | _29,675_ |
| Mixed . | 5,855 | 4,886 | 298 | 897 |
| Special . | 977 | 624 | 133 | 296 |
|--------------|-----------|----------|-----------|------------|
| Total . | 119,762 | 67,387 | 8,365 | 44,010 |
----------------------------------------------------------------
Does not this speak of dirt and disorder we cannot suffer to continue,
of women ill trained for motherhood and worked beyond care for
cleanliness, of a vast amount of preventable suffering? And these
figures of filth and bad clothing are paralleled by others at least
equally impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, anæmia and
every other painful and wretched consequence of neglect and
insufficiency. These underfed, under-clothed, undersized children are
also the backward children; they grow up through a darkened, joyless
childhood into a grey, perplexing, hopeless world that beats them down
at last, after servility, after toil, after crime it may be and
despair, to death.
And while you grasp the offence of these facts, do not be carried away
into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such
dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure.
Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's
cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken,
mediæval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved,
neglected little ones about the feet of this fine time, in spite of a
thousand other disorders and miseries almost as cruel, the fact
remains that this age has not only more but a larger percentage of
healthy, happy, kindly-treated children than any age since the world
began; that to look back into the domestic history of other times is
to see greater squalor and more suffering.
Why! read the tombstones and monuments in any old English church,
those, I mean, that date from earlier than 1800, and you will see the
history of every family, of even the prosperous county families,
_laced_ with the deaths of infants and children. Nearly half of them
died. Think, too, how stern was the upbringing. And always before
these days it seemed natural to make all but the children of the very
wealthy and very refined, fear and work from their earliest years.
There comes to us too, from these days, beautiful furniture, fine
literature, paintings; but there comes too, much evidence of harsh
whippings, dark imprisonments and hardly a children's book, hardly the
broken vestige of a toy. Bad as things are, they are better--rest
assured--and yet they are still urgently bad. The greater evil of the
past is no reason for contentment with the present. But it is an
earnest for hoping that our efforts, and that Good Will of which they
are a part and outcome, may still go on bearing fruit in perpetually
dwindling misery.
§ 4.
It seems to me that the whole spirit and quality of both the evil and
the good of our time, and of the attitude not simply of the Socialist
but of every sane reformer towards these questions, was summarized in
a walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the Thames
Embankment, from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster. We had dined
together and we went there because we thought that with a fitful moon
and clouds adrift, on a night when the air was a crystal air that
gladdened and brightened, that crescent of great buildings and steely,
soft-hurrying water must needs be altogether beautiful. And indeed it
was beautiful; the mysteries and mounting masses of the buildings to
the right of us, the blurs of this coloured light or that, blue-white,
green-white, amber or warmer orange, the rich black archings of
Waterloo Bridge, the rippled lights upon the silent-flowing river, the
lattice of girders and the shifting trains of Charing Cross
Bridge--their funnels pouring a sort of hot-edged moonlight by way of
smoke--and then the sweeping line of lamps, the accelerated run and
diminuendo of the Embankment lamps as one came into sight of
Westminster. The big hotels were very fine, huge swelling shapes of
dun dark-grey and brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and
fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand windows with
light and the indistinct, glowing suggestions of feasting and
pleasure. And dim and faint above it all and very remote was the
moon's dead wan face veiled and then displayed.
But we were dashed by an unanticipated refrain to this succession of
magnificent things, and we did not cry, as we had meant to cry, how
good it was to be alive! We found something else, something we had
forgotten.
Along the Embankment, you see, there are iron seats at regular
intervals, seats you cannot lie upon because iron arm-rests prevent
that, and each seat, one saw by the lamplight, was filled with
crouching and drooping figures. Not a vacant place remained, not one
vacant place. These were the homeless, and they had come to sleep
here. Now one noted a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw
hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him
at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded, frock-coated,
collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long
white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some
nightmare, awakened, clutched with a bony hand at the bony throat, and
sat up and stared angrily as we passed. The wind had a keen edge that
night even for us who had dined and were well clad. One crumpled
figure coughed and went on coughing--damnably.
"It's fine," said I, trying to keep hold of the effects to which this
line of poor wretches was but the selvage; "it's fine! But I can't
stand _this_."
"It changes all that we expected," admitted my friend, after a
silence.
"Must we go on--past them all?"
"Yes. I think we ought to do that. It's a lesson, perhaps--for trying
to get too much beauty out of life as it is--and forgetting. Don't
shirk it!"
"Great God!" cried I. "But must life always be like this? I could
die--indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river
now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these
things--into the future; a dead commanding hand insisting with a
silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should
cease, and cease for ever."
"But it does cease! Each year its proportion is a little less."
I walked in silence, and my companion talked by my side.
"We go on. Here is a good thing done, and there is a good thing done.
The Good Will in man----"
"Not fast enough. It goes so slowly--and in a little while we too must
die----"
"It can be done," said my companion.
"It could be avoided," said I.
"It shall be in the days to come. There is food enough for all,
shelter for all, wealth enough for all. Men need only know it and will
it. And yet we have this!"
"And so much like this!" said I....
So we talked and were tormented.
And I remember how later we found ourselves on Westminster Bridge,
looking back upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that
reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and
by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived
that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious
remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear
to us the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present
nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the
fuller life, the banishment of suffering, to come.
"We want all the beauty that is here," said my friend, "and more also.
And none of these distresses. We are here--we know not whence nor
why--to want that and to struggle to get it, you and I and ten
thousand others, thinly hidden from us by these luminous darknesses.
We work, we pass--whither I know not, but out of our knowing. But we
work--we are spurred to work. That yonder--those people are the
spur--for us who cannot answer to any finer appeal. Each in our
measure must do. And our reward? Our reward is our faith. Here is my
creed to-night. I believe--out of me and the Good Will in me and my
kind there comes a regenerate world--cleansed of suffering and sorrow.
That is our purpose here--to forward that. It gives us work for all
our lives. Why should we ask to know more? Our errors--our
sins--to-night they seem to matter very little. If we stumble and roll
in the mud, if we blunder against each other and hurt one another----"
"We have to go on," said my friend, after a pause.
We stood for a time in silence.
One's own personal problems came and went like a ripple on the water.
Even that whisky dealer's advertisement upon the southern bank became
through some fantastic transformation a promise, an enigmatical
promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was
indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed
not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on
her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious
splendours, beyond her throned presence jewelled with links and points
and cressets of fire, crowned with stars, robed in the night, hiding
cruelties, I caught a moment's vision of the coming City of Mankind,
of a city more wonderful than all my dreaming, full of life, full of
youth, full of the spirit of creation....
CHAPTER II
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF SOCIALISM
The fundamental idea upon which Socialism rests is the same
fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is
carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will
and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may
be done in the world. It is an assertion that things are in their
nature orderly, that things may be computed, may be calculated upon
and foreseen. In the spirit of this belief Science aims at a
systematic knowledge of material things. "Knowledge is power,"
knowledge that is frankly and truly exchanged--that is the primary
assumption of the _New Atlantis_ which created the Royal Society and
the organization of research. The Socialist has just that same faith
in the order, the knowableness of things and the power of men in
co-operation to overcome chance; but to him, dealing as he does with
the social affairs of men, it takes the form not of schemes for
collective research but for collective action and the creation of a
comprehensive design for all the social activities of man. While
Science gathers knowledge, Socialism in an entirely harmonious spirit
criticizes and develops a general plan of social life. Each seeks to
replace disorder by order.
Each of these systems of ideas has, of course, its limits; we know in
matters of material science that no calculated quantity is ever exact,
no outline without a fogging at the edge, no angle without a curve at
the apex; and in social affairs also, there must needs always be
individuality and the unexpected and incalculable. But these things do
not vitiate the case for a general order, any more than the different
sizes and widths and needs of the human beings who travel prevent our
having our railway carriages and seats and doors of a generally
convenient size, nor our sending everybody over the same gauge of
rail.
Now Science has not only this in common with Socialism that it has
grown out of men's courageous confidence in the superiority of order
to muddle, but these two great processes of human thought are further
in sympathy in the demand they make upon men to become less
egotistical and isolated. The main difference of modern scientific
research from that of the middle ages, the secret of its immense
successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every
fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships
explained. In a sense scientific research is a triumph over natural
instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive, that makes
a man keep knowledge to himself and use it slyly to his own advantage.
The training of a scientific man is a training in what an illiterate
lout would despise as a weakness; it is a training in blabbing, in
blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible and as
soon as possible what it is he has found. To "keep shut" and
bright-eyed and to score advantages, that is the wisdom of the common
stuff of humanity still. To science it is a crime. The noble practice
of that noble profession medicine, for example, is to condemn as a
quack and a rascal every man who uses secret remedies. And it is one
of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human
possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three
centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and
for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of
knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out
by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon,
Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the
culminating peaks of a nearly limitless Oberland of devoted toiling
men, men one could list by the thousand. The rest have had the
smallest meed of fame, small reward, much toil, much abandonment, of
pleasure for their lot. One thing ennobles them all in common--their
conquest over the meanness of concealment, their systematic
application of energy to other than personal ends!
And that, too, Socialism pre-eminently demands. It applies to social
and economic relationships the same high rule of frankness and
veracity, the same subordination of purely personal considerations to
a common end that Science demands in the field of thought and
knowledge. Just as Science aims at a common organized body of
knowledge to which all its servants contribute and in which they
share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social
order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their
common enemy is the secret-thinking, self-seeking man. Secrecy,
subterfuge and the private gain; these are the enemies of Socialism
and the adversaries of Science. At times, I will admit, both Socialist
and scientific man forget this essential sympathy. You will find
specialized scientific investigators who do not realize they are, in
effect, Socialists, and Socialists so dull to the quality of their own
professions, that they gird against Science, and are secretive in
policy. But such purblind servants of the light cannot alter the
essential correlation of the two systems of ideas.
Now the Socialist, inspired by this conception of a possible frank and
comprehensive social order to which mean and narrow ends must be
sacrificed, attacks and criticizes the existing order of things at a
great number of points and in a great variety of phraseology. At all
points, however, you will find upon analysis that his criticism
amounts to a declaration that there is wanting a sufficiency of
CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN. That in the last resort is what he always comes
to.
He wants a complete organization for all those human affairs that are
of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard,
that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things,
of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business,
of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender
and spread are chaotic and undisciplined, so badly done that here is
enormous hardship, and there enormous waste, here excess and
degeneration, and there privation and death. He declares that for
these collective purposes, in the satisfaction of these universal
needs, mankind presents the appearance and follows the methods of a
mob when it ought to follow the method of an army. In place of
disorderly individual effort, each man doing what he pleases, the
Socialist wants organized effort and a plan. And while the scientific
man seeks to make an orderly map of the half-explored wilderness of
fact, the Socialist seeks to make an orderly plan for the
half-conceived wilderness of human effort.
That and no other is the essential Socialist idea.
But do not let this image mislead you. When the Socialist speaks of a
plan, he knows clearly that it is impossible to make a plan as an
architect makes a plan, because while the architect deals with dead
stone and timber, the statesman and Socialist deal with living and
striving things. But he seeks to make a plan as one designs and lays
out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and
beautiful vistas open and weeds and foulness disappear. Always a
garden plan develops and renews itself and discovers new
possibilities, but what makes all its graciousness and beauty possible
is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the
waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder clips and the hoe. That
is the sort of plan, a living plan for things that live and grow, that
the Socialist seeks for social and national life.
To make all this distincter I will show the planlessness of certain
contemporary things, of two main sets of human interests in fact, and
explain what inferences a Socialist draws in these matters. You will
then see exactly what is meant when we deny that this present state of
affairs has any constructive plan, and you will appreciate in the most
generalized form the nature of the constructive plan which Socialists
are making and offering the world.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST MAIN GENERALIZATION OF SOCIALISM
§ 1.
The first--the chief aspect of social life in relation to which the
Socialist finds the world now planless and drifting, and for which he
earnestly propounds the scheme of a better order, is that whole side
of existence which is turned towards children, their begetting and
upbringing, their care and education. Perpetually the world begins
anew, perpetually death wipes out failure, disease, unteachableness
and all that has served life and accomplished itself; and to many
Socialists, if not to all, this is the supreme fact in the social
scheme. The whole measure of progress in a generation is the measure
in which the children improve in physical and mental quality, in
social co-ordination, in opportunity, upon their parents. Nothing else
matters in the way of success if in that way the Good Will fails.
Let us now consider how such matters stand in our world at the present
time, and let us examine them in the light of the Socialist spirit. I
have already quoted certain facts from the London Education
Committee's Report, by which you have seen that by taking a school
haphazard--dipping a ladle, as it were, into the welter of the London
population--we find more than eighty in the hundred of the London
children insufficiently clad, more than half unwholesomely
dirty--eleven per cent. verminous--and more than half the infants
infested with vermin! The nutrition of these children is equally bad.
The same report shows clearly that differences in clothing and
cleanliness are paralleled with differences in nutrition that are
equally striking.
"The 30 boys of the lowest class showed considerable failure
to reach the average weight for their age of the school; the
average shortage per boy for his age being as much as .7
kilogram. The effect upon weight was more striking than upon
height, as the average failure in height was one centimetre.
The 141 boys of the next class worked out at exactly the
average. The 49 well-clad boys showed an average excess per
age-weight of .54 kilogram and age-height of 1.8 centimetres."
And who can doubt the amount of mental and moral dwarfing that is
going on side by side with this physical shortage?
Now, it may be argued that this is not a fair sample of our general
population, that these facts have been culled from a special section
of the population, that here we are dealing with the congestion of
London slums and altogether exceptional conditions. This is not so.
The school examined was not from a specially bad district. And it
happens that the entire working-class population of one typical
English town, York, has been exhaustively studied by Mr. B. S.
Rowntree, and here are some facts from his result that quite confirm
the impression given by the London figures.
"It was quite impossible to make a thorough examination of the
physical condition of all the children, but as they came up to
be weighed and measured, they were classified under the four
headings, 'Very Good,' 'Good,' 'Fair,' or 'Bad,' by an
investigator whose training and previous experience in similar
work enabled her to make a reliable, even if rough,
classification....
"'Bad' implies that the child bore physical traces of
underfeeding and neglect.
"The numbers classified under the various heads were as
follows:--
BOYS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Very Good, | Good, | Fair, | Bad,
| per cent. | per cent. | per cent. | per cent.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Section 1 (poorest) | 2.8 | 14.6 | 31. | 51.6
Section 2 (middle) | 7.4 | 20.1 | 53.7 | 18.8
Section 3 (highest) | 27.4 | 33.8 | 27.4 | 11.4
GIRLS.
Section 1 (poorest) | 2.1 | 14.6 | 31. | 52.3