SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO SOCIALISM
§ 1.
In the preceding eight chapters I have sought to give as plain and
full an account of the great generalizations of Socialism as I can,
and to make it clear exactly what these generalizations convey, and
how far they go in this direction and that. Before we go on to a brief
historical and anticipatory account of the actual Socialist movement,
it may be worth while to take up and consider compactly the chief
objections that are urged against the general propositions of
Socialism in popular discussion.
Now a very large proportion of these arise out of the commonest vice
of the human mind, its disposition to see everything as "yes" or "no,"
as "black" or "white," its impatience, its incapacity for a fine
discrimination of intermediate shades.[14] The queer old scholastic
logic still prevails remarkably in our modern world; you find Mr.
Mallock, for example, going about arranging his syllogisms, extracting
his opponent's "self-contradictions," and disposing of Socialism with
stupendous self-satisfaction in all the magazines. He disposes of
Socialism quite in the spirit of the young mediæval scholar returning
home to prove beyond dispute that "my cat has ten tails" and, given a
yard's start, that a tortoise can always keep ahead of a running man.
The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or
it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a
thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who
ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their
minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object
in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it
be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget
that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be
lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever
to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible
definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities
therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a
conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing
matter settled once for all.
[14] See "Scepticism of the Instrument," the Appendix to _A
Modern Utopia_. (Chapman & Hall.)
For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism "abolishes
property." He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called
"property" which must either be or not be, which is now, and which
will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical
education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly
rational to an untrained mind--and that is the usual case with the
Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks
in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own
bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in
possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that
delightful writer, who from altitudes of exhaustive misunderstanding
tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have--I forget his
exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain--no money of his own, no
home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is
effective nonsense in its way--but nonsense nevertheless. In my
preceding chapters I hope I have made it clear that "property" even
to-day is a very qualified and uncertain thing, a natural vague
instinct capable of perversion and morbid exaggeration and needing
control, and that Socialism seeks simply to give it a sharper, juster
and rationally limited form in relation to the common-weal.
Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism "abolishes the
family"--and with it, of course, "every sacred and tender
association," etc., etc. To that also I have given a chapter.
I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in these matters. The
tricks of deliberate falsification, forgery and falsehood that
discredit a few Conservative candidates and speakers in the north of
England and smirch the reputations of one or two London papers, are
due to a quite exceptional streak of baseness in what is on the whole
a straightforward opposition to Socialism. Anti-Socialism, as its name
implies, is no alternative doctrine; it is a mental resistance, not a
mental force. For the most part one is dealing with sheer intellectual
incapacity; with people, muddle-headed perhaps, but quite
well-meaning, who are really unable to grasp the quantitative element
in things. They think with a simple flat certitude that if, for
example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he
wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his
patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a
woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention
to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things
"straightforward" as they say--all or nothing. They think
qualifications or any quantitative treatment "quibbling," to be loudly
scorned, bawled down and set aside.
In controversy the temptations for a hot and generous temperament,
eager for victory, to misstate and overstate the antagonist's position
are enormous, and the sensible Socialist must allow for them unless he
is to find discussion intolerable. The reader of the preceding
chapters should know exactly how Socialism stands to the family
relations, the things it urges, the things it regards with
impartiality or patient toleration, the things it leaves alone. The
preceding chapters merely summarize a literature that has been
accessible for years. Yet it is extraordinary how few antagonists of
Socialism seem able even to approach these questions in a rational
manner. One admirably typical critic of a pamphlet in which I
propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third
chapter, found great comfort in the expression "brood mares." He took
hold of my phrase, "State family," and ran wild with it. He declared
it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but "brood
mares" for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a
glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; "human stud
farm" was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed
to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his
faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government _haras_. His
thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.
[15] What makes the expression particularly inappropriate in
my case is the fact that in my _Mankind in the Making_ there
is a clearly-reasoned chapter (Ch. II.) which has never been
answered, in which I discuss and, I think, conclusively
dispose of Mr. Francis Galton's ideas of Eugenics and
deliberate stirpiculture.
Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of
mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world
through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the
babe from the mother's breast and thrust it into an "Institution." He
said worse things than that--but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence.
Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite
sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very
wide berth indeed. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_; the revolting ideas
that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark
reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chastity and discipline seem
to have left intact in Father Phelan's soul.
The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting
into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a
critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and
usually with passion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea
included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of
Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these
controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that
critic's little proposition about your window curtains he chances to
say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the
common practice is to accuse him of not "sticking to his guns."
My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant
ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism,
confess this universal failing--albeit in a very different quality and
measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed
coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common
Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the
community being approved by a select committee of the County
Council--no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their
grooms--such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that
equestrian--I forget his name--the "brood-mare" gentleman who
denounced me in the _Pall Mall Gazette_; but their souls fly out in a
passion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the
advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly
and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately
recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped,
meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for
laughing--not that he would want to laugh--and austere exercises in
several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's
conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid,
frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of
us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute,
indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a
mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name,
number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming
uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round
lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling....
The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to
assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted
without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen
for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs,
and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is
presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with "This is
Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don't want this!"
And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by
these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to
the good old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he
will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four
ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care
are banished altogether from the earth, and when the "sense of humour"
and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things
will be in danger of perishing from disuse....
But the reader sees now what Socialism is in its essentials, the
tempered magnificence of the constructive scheme to which it asks him
to devote his life. It is a laborious, immense project to make the
world a world of social justice, of opportunity and full living, to
abolish waste, to abolish the lavish unpremeditated cruelty of our
present social order. Do not let the wit or perversity of the
adversary or, what is often a far worse influence, the zeal and
overstatement of the headlong advocate, do not let the manifest
personal deficiencies of this spokesman or that, distract you from the
living heart in Socialism, its broad generosity of conception, its
immense claim in kinship and direction upon your Good Will.
§ 2.
For the convenience of those readers who are in the position of
inquirers, I had designed at this point a section which was to contain
a list of the chief objections to Socialism--other than mere
misrepresentations--which are current now-a-days. I had meant at first
to answer each one fully and gravely, to clear them all up
exhaustively and finally before proceeding. But I find now upon
jotting them down, that they are for the most part already anticipated
by the preceding chapters, and so I will note them here, very
compactly indeed, and make but the briefest comment upon each.
There is first the assertion, which effectually bars a great number of
people from further inquiry into Socialist teaching, that _Socialism
is contrary to Christianity_. I would urge that this is the absolute
inversion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am convinced, a
practical Socialism if it is honestly carried out. This is not only my
conviction, but the reader, if he is a Nonconformist, can find it set
out at length by Dr. Clifford in a Fabian tract, _Socialism and the
Teaching of Christ_; and, if a Churchman, by the Rev. Stewart Headlam
in another, _Christian Socialism_. He will find a longer and fuller
discussion of this question in the Rev. R. J. Campbell's _Christianity
and Social Order_. In the list of members of such a Socialist Society
as the Fabian Society will be found the names of clergy of the
principal Christian denominations, excepting only the Roman Catholic
Church. It is said, indeed, that a good Catholic of the Roman
Communion cannot also be any sort of Socialist. Even this very general
persuasion may not be correct. I believe the papal prohibition was
originally aimed entirely at a specific form of Socialism, the
Socialism of Marx, Engels and Bebel, which is, I must admit,
unfortunately strongly anti-Christian in tone, as is the Socialism of
the British Social Democratic Federation to this day. It is true that
many leaders of the Socialist party have also been Secularists, and
that they have mingled their theological prejudices with their
political work. This is the case not only in Germany and America, but
in Great Britain, where Mr. Robert Blatchford of the _Clarion_, for
example, has also carried on a campaign against doctrinal
Christianity. But this association of Secularism and Socialism is only
the inevitable throwing together of two sets of ideas because they
have this in common, that they run counter to generally received
opinions; there is no other connection. Many prominent Secularists,
like Charles Bradlaugh and Mr. J. M. Robertson, are as emphatically
anti-Socialist as the Pope. Secularists and Socialists get thrown
together and classed together just as early Christians and criminals
and rebels against the Emperor were no doubt thrown together in the
Roman gaols. They had this much in common, that they were in conflict
with what most people considered to be right. It is a confusion that
needs constant explaining away. It is to me a most lamentable
association of two entirely separate thought processes, one
constructive socially and the other destructive intellectually, and I
have already, in Chapter VI., § 4, done my best to disavow it.
_Socialism is pure Materialism, it seeks only physical
well-being_,--just as much as nursing lepers for pity and the love of
God is pure materialism that seeks only physical well-being.
_Socialism advocates Free Love._ This objection I have also disposed
of in Chapter VI., §§ 2 and 4.
_Socialism renders love impossible, and reduces humanity to the
condition of a stud farm._ This, too, has been already dealt with; see
Chapter III., §§ 2 and 5, and Chapter VI., §§ 2, 3, and 4. These two
objections generally occur together in the same anti-Socialist speech
or tract.
_Socialism would destroy parental responsibility._ This absurd
perversion is altogether disposed of in Chapter VI., § 3. It is a
direct inversion of current Socialist teaching.
§ 3.
_Socialism would open the way to vast public corruption._ This is
flatly opposed to the experience of America, where local
administration has been as little Socialistic and as corrupt as
anywhere in the world. Obviously in order that a public official
should be bribed, there must be some wealthy person outside the system
to bribe him and with an interest in bribing him. When you have a weak
administration with feeble powers and resources and strong
unscrupulous private corporations seeking to override the law and
public welfare, the possibilities of bribing are at the highest point.
In a community given over to the pursuit of gain, powerful private
enterprises will resort to corruption to get and protract franchises,
to evade penalties, to postpone expropriation, and they will do it
systematically and successfully. And even where there is partial
public enterprise and a competition among contractors, there will
certainly be, at least, attempts at corruption to get contracts. But
where the whole process is in public hands, where can the bribery
creep in; who is going to find the money for the bribes, and why?
It is urged that in another direction there is likely to be a
corruption of public life due to the organized voting of the
_employés_ in this branch of the public service or that, seeking some
advantage for their own service. This is Lord Avebury's bogey.[16]
Frankly, such voting by services is highly probable. The tramway men
or the milk-service men may think they are getting too long hours or
too low pay in comparison with the teachers or men on the ocean
liners, and the thing may affect elections. That is only human nature,
and the point to bear in mind is that this sort of thing goes on
to-day, and goes on with a vigour out of all proportion to the mild
possibilities of a Socialist _régime_. The landowners of Great
Britain, for example, are organized in the most formidable manner
against the general interests of the community, and constantly
subordinate the interests of the common-weal to their conception of
justice to their class; the big railways are equally potent, and so
are the legal profession and the brewers. But to-day these political
interventions of great organized services athwart the path of
statesmanship are sustained by enormous financial resources. The State
_employés_ under Socialism will be in the position of employing one
another and paying one another; the teacher, for example, will be
educating the sons of the tramway men up to the requirements of the
public paymaster, and travelling in the trams to and from his work;
there will be close mutual observation and criticism, therefore, and a
strong community of spirit, and that will put very definite limits
indeed upon the possibly evil influence of class and service interests
in politics.
[16] _On Municipal and National Trading_, by Lord Avebury.
(Macmillan & Co., 1907.)
_Socialism would destroy Incentive and Efficiency._ This is dealt with
in Chapter V. on the Spirit of Gain and the Spirit of Service.
_Socialism is economically unsound._ The student of Socialism who
studies--and every student of Socialism should study very
carefully--the literature directed against Socialism, will encounter a
number of rather confused and frequently very confusing arguments
running upon "business" or "economic" lines. In nearly all of these
the root error is a misconception of the nature and aim of Socialist
claims. Sometimes this misconception is stated and manifest, often it
is subtly implied, and then it presents the greatest difficulties to
the inexpert dialectician. I find, for instance, Mr. W. H. Lever, in
an article on Socialism and Business in the _Magazine of Commerce_ for
October 1907, assuming that there will be no increase in the total
wealth of the community under Socialism, whereas, as my fourth chapter
shows, Socialist proposals in the matter of property aim directly at
the cessation of the waste occasioned by competition through the
duplication and multiplication of material and organizations (see for
example the quotation from Elihu, p. 69), and at the removal of the
obstructive claims of private ownership (see p. 65) from the path of
production. If Socialism does not increase the total wealth of the
community, Socialism is impossible.
Having made this assumption, however, Mr. Lever next assumes that all
contemporary business is productive of honest, needed commodities, and
that its public utility and its profitable conduct measure one
another. But this ignores the manifest fact that success in business
now-a-days is far more often won by the mere salesmanship of mediocre
or inferior or short-weight goods than it is by producing exceptional
value, and the Kentish railways, for example, are a standing contrast
of the conflict between public service and private profit-seeking. But
having committed himself to these two entirely unsound assumptions, it
is easy for Mr. Lever to show that since Socialism will give no more
wealth, and since what he calls Labour, Capital and the Employer (_i.e._
Labour, Plant and Management) are necessary to production and must
be maintained out of the total product, there will be little more,
practically, for the Labourer under Socialist conditions than under
the existing _régime_. Going on further to assume that the Owner is
always enterprising and intelligent and public-spirited, and the State
stupid (which is a quite unjustifiable assumption), he shows their
share may even be less. But the whole case for the Socialist
proposals, the student must bear in mind, rests upon the recognition
that private management of our collective concerns means chaotic and
socially wasteful management--however efficient it may be in
individual cases for competitive purposes--and that the systematic
abolition of the parasitic Owner from our economic process implies the
replacement of confusion by order and an immense increase in the
efficiency of that economic process. Socialism is economy. If the
student of Socialism does not bear this in mind, if once he allows the
assumption to creep in that Socialism is not so much a proposal to
change, concentrate and organize the economic process, as one to
distribute the existing wealth of the country in some new manner, he
will find there is a bad case for Socialism.
It is an amusing and I think a fair comment on the arguments of Mr.
Lever that a year or so ago he was actually concerned--no doubt in the
interests of the public as well as his own--in organizing the
production and distribution of soap so as to economize the waste and
avoid the public disservice due to the extreme competition of the soap
dealers. He wanted to do in the soap industry just exactly what
Socialism wants to do in the case of all public services, that is to
say he wanted to give it the economic advantages of a Great Combine.
In some directions the saving to the soap interest would have been
immense; all the vast expenditure upon newspaper advertisements, for
example, all the waste upon competing travellers would have been
saved. Whether the public would have benefited greatly or not is
beside the present question; Mr. Lever and other great soap
proprietors would certainly have benefited enormously. They would have
benefited by working as a collective interest instead of as
independent private owners. But in this little experiment in what was
really a sort of voluntary Socialism for particular ends, Mr. Lever
reckoned without another great system of private adventurers, the
halfpenny newspaper proprietors, who had hitherto been drawing large
sums from soap advertisement, and who had in fact been so far
parasitic on the public soap supply. One group of these papers at once
began a campaign against the "Soap Trust," a campaign almost as noisy
and untruthful as the anti-Socialist campaign. They accused Mr. Lever
of nearly every sort of cheating that can be done by a soap seller,
and anticipated every sort of oppression a private monopolist can
practise. In the end they paid unprecedented damages for libel, but
they stopped Mr. Lever's intelligent and desirable endeavours to
replace the waste and disorder of our existing soap supply by a simple
and more efficient organization. Mr. Lever cannot have forgotten these
facts; they were surely in the back of his mind when he wrote his
"Socialism and Business" paper, and it is a curious instance of the
unconscious limitations one may encounter in a mind of exceptional
ability that he could not bring them forward and apply them to the
problem in hand.
_Socialism is unbusinesslike._ See Chapter VIII., §§ 2 and 3.
§ 4.
_Socialism would destroy freedom._ This is a more considerable
difficulty. To begin with it may be necessary to remind the reader
that absolute freedom is an impossibility. As I have written in my
_Modern Utopia_:--
"The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in
importance and grows with every development of modern thought.
To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial.
Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely
separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important
things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence
upon individuality and upon the significance of its
uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until
at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life,
that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the
choiceless things live in absolute obedience to law. To have
free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the
subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work
and offspring is its objective triumph. But for all men, since
man is a social creature, the play of will must fall short of
absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a
despot who is absolutely and universally obeyed. Then to will
would be to command and achieve, and within the limits of
natural law we could at any moment do exactly as it pleased us
to do. All other liberty is a compromise between our own
freedom of will and the wills of those with whom we come in
contact. In an organized state each one of us has a more or
less elaborate code of what he may do to others and to
himself, and what others may do to him. He limits others by
his rights and is limited by the rights of others, and by
considerations affecting the welfare of the community as a
whole.
"Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians
would say, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the
essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in
truth, a general prohibition in a State may increase the sum
of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does
not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man
is more free where there is least law, and more restricted
where there is most law. A socialism or a communism is not
necessarily a slavery, and there is no freedom under
anarchy....
"It follows, therefore, in a modern Utopia, which finds the
final hope of the world in the evolving interplay of unique
individualities, that the State will have effectually chipped
away just all those spendthrift liberties that waste liberty,
and not one liberty more, and so have attained the maximum
general freedom."...
That is the gist of the Socialist's answer to this accusation. He asks
what freedom is there to-day for the vast majority of mankind? They
are free to do nothing but work for a bare subsistence all their
lives, they may not go freely about the earth even, but are prosecuted
for trespassing upon the health-giving breast of our universal mother.
Consider the clerks and girls who hurry to their work of a morning
across Brooklyn Bridge in New York, or Hungerford Bridge in London; go
and see them, study their faces. They are free, with a freedom
Socialism would destroy. Consider the poor painted girls who pursue
bread with nameless indignities through our streets at night. They are
free by the current standard. And the poor half-starved wretches
struggling with the impossible stint of oakum in a casual ward, they
too are free! The nimble footman is free, the crushed porter between
the trucks is free, the woman in the mill, the child in the mine. Ask
them! They will tell you how free they are. They have happened to
choose these ways of living--that is all. No doubt the piquancy of the
life attracts them in many such cases.
Let us be frank; a form of Socialism might conceivably exist without
much freedom, with hardly more freedom than that of a British worker
to-day. A State Socialism tyrannized over by officials who might be
almost as bad at times as uncontrolled small employers, is so far
possible that in Germany it is practically half-existent now. A
bureaucratic Socialism might conceivably be a state of affairs
scarcely less detestable than our own. I will not deny there is a
clear necessity of certain addenda to the wider formulæ of Socialism
if we are to be safeguarded effectually from the official. We need
free speech, free discussion, free publication, as essentials for a
wholesome Socialist State. How they may be maintained I shall discuss
in a later chapter. But these admissions do not justify the present
system. Socialism, though it failed to give us freedom, would not
destroy anything that we have in this way. We want freedom now, and we
have it not. We speak of freedom of speech, but to-day, in innumerable
positions, Socialist _employés_ who declared their opinions openly
would be dismissed. Then again in religious questions there is an
immense amount of intolerance and suppression of social and religious
discussion to-day, especially in our English villages. As for freedom
of action, most of us, from fourteen to the grave, are chased from
even the leisure to require freedom by the necessity of earning a
living....
Socialism, as I have stated it thus far, and as it is commonly stated,
would give economic liberty to men and women alike, it would save them
from the cruel urgency of need, and so far it would enormously enlarge
freedom, but it does not guarantee them political or intellectual
liberty. That I frankly admit, and accept as one of the
incompletenesses of contemporary Socialism. I conceive, therefore, as
I shall explain at length in a later chapter, that it is necessary to
supplement such Socialism as is currently received by certain new
propositions. But to admit that Socialism does not guarantee freedom,
is not to admit that Socialism will destroy it. It is possible, given
certain conditions, for men to be nearly absolutely free in speech, in
movement, in conduct; enormously free, that is, as compared with our
present conditions, in a Socialist State established upon the two
great propositions I have formulated in Chapters III. and IV. So that
the statement that Socialism will destroy freedom is a baseless one of
no value as a general argument against the Socialist idea.
§ 5.
_Socialism would reduce life to one monotonous dead level!_ This in a
world in which the majority of people live in cheap cottages, villa
residences and tenement houses, read halfpenny newspapers and wear
ready-made clothes!
_Socialism would destroy Art, Invention and Literature._ I do not know
why this objection is made, unless it be that the objectors suppose
that artists will not create, inventors will not think, and no one
write or sing except to please a wealthy patron. Without his opulent
smile, where would they be? Well, do not let us be ungrateful; the
arts owe much to patronage. Go to Venice, go to Florence, and you will
find a glorious harvest of pictures and architecture, sown and reaped
by a mercantile plutocracy. But then in Rome, in Athens, you will find
an equal accumulation made under very different conditions. Reach a
certain phase of civilization, a certain leisure and wealth, and art
will out, however the wealth may be distributed. In certain sumptuous
directions art flourishes now, and would certainly flourish less in a
Socialist State; in the gear of ostentatious luxury, in private
furniture of all sorts, in palace building, in the exquisite
confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of
books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of
undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution,
in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is
quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage
and limit æsthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile
plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a
gracious natural type of cottage or beautiful clothing for the common
people, and no mercantile plutocracy will ever tolerate a literature
of power. If the coming of Socialism destroys arts, it will also
create arts; the architecture of private palaces will give place to an
architecture of beautiful common homes, cottages and colleges, and to
a splendid development of public buildings, the Sargents of Socialism
will paint famous people instead of millionaires' wives, poetry and
popular romantic literature will revive. For my own part I have no
doubt where the balance of advantage lies.
It seems reasonable to look to the literary and artistic people
themselves for a little guidance in this matter. Well, we had in the
nineteenth century an absolute revolt of artists against
Individualism. The proportion of open and declared Socialists among
the great writers, artists, playwrights, critics, of the Victorian
period was out of all proportion to the number of Socialists in the
general population. Wilde in his _Soul of Man under Socialism_, Ruskin
in many volumes of imperishable prose, Morris in all his later life,
have witnessed to the unending protest of the artistic spirit against
the rule of gain. Some of these writers are not, perhaps, to be
regarded as orthodox Socialists in the modern sense, but their disgust
with and contempt for Individualist competition is entirely in the
vein of our teaching.
Even this Individualistic country of ours, after the shameful shock of
the Great Exhibition of 1851, decided that it could no longer leave
art to private enterprise, and organized that systematic government
Art Teaching that has, in spite of its many defects, revolutionized
the æsthetic quality of this country. And so far as research and
invention go, one may very reasonably appeal to such an authority on
the other side, as the late Mr. Beit, of Wernher Beit & Co. The
outcome of his experience as an individualist financier was to
convince him that the only way to raise the standard of technical
science in England, and therewith of economic enterprise, was by the
endowment of public teaching, and the huge "London Charlottenburg"
rises--out of his conviction. Even Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie
admit the failure of Individualism in this matter by pouring money
into public universities and public libraries. All these heads of the
commercial process confess by such acts just exactly what this
objection of the inexperienced denies, that is to say the power of the
State to develop art, invention and knowledge; the necessity that this
duty should be done if not by, then at any rate through, the State.
Socialism may very seriously change the direction of intellectual and
æsthetic endeavour; that one admits. But there is no reason whatever
for supposing it will not, and there are countless reasons for
supposing that it will, enormously increase the opportunities and
encouragements for æsthetic and intellectual endeavour.
§ 6.
_Socialism would arrest the survival of the Fittest._ Here is an
objection from quite a new quarter. It is the stock objection of the
science student. Hitherto we have considered religious and æsthetic
difficulties, but this is the difficulty of the mind that realizes
clearly the nature of the biological process, the secular change in
every species under the influence of its environment, and is most
concerned with that. Species, it is said, change--and the student of
the elements of science is too apt to conclude that this change is
always ascent in the scale of being--by the killing off of the
individuals out of harmony with the circumstances under which the
species is living. This is not quite true. The truer statement is that
species change because, allowing for chance and individual exceptions,
only those individuals survive to reproduce themselves who are fairly
well adjusted to the conditions of life; so that in each generation
there is only a small proportion of births out of harmony with these
conditions. This sounds very like the previous proposition, but it
differs in this that the accent is shifted from the "killing" to the
suppression of births, that is the really important fact. In any case,
then, the believer in evolution holds that the qualities encouraged by
the environment increase in the species and the qualities discouraged
diminish. The qualities that have survival value are not always what
we human beings consider admirable--that is a consideration many
science students fail to grasp. The remarkable habits of all the
degenerating crustacea, for example, the appetite of the vulture, the
unpleasing personality of the common hyæna, all that less charming
side of Mother Nature that her scandalized children may read of in
Cobbold's _Human Parasites_, are the result of survival under the
pressure of environment, just as much as the human eye or the wing of
an eagle. Let the objector therefore ask himself what sort of
"fittest" are surviving now.
The plain answer is that under our present conditions the
_Breeding-Getter_ wins, the man who can hold and keep and reproduce
his kind. People with the instinct of owning stronger than any other
instinct float out upon the top of our seething mass, and flourish
there. Aggressive, intensely acquisitive, reproductive people--the
ignoble sort of Jew is the very type of it--are the people who will
prevail in a social system based on private property and mercantile
competition. No creative power, no nobility, no courage can battle
against them. And below--in the slums and factories, what will be
going on? The survival of a race of stunted toilers, with great
resisting power to infection, contagion and fatigue, omnivorous as
rats....
Don't imagine that the high infantile death rate of our manufacturing
centres spares the fine big children. It does not. Here is the
effectual answer to that. It is taken from the Report of the Education
Committee of the London County Council for the year 1905, and it is
part of an account of an inquiry conducted by the headmaster of one
school in a poor neighbourhood.
"The object of the inquiry was to discover the causes of
variation in the physical condition of children within the
limits of this single school. Each of the 405 boys was
carefully weighed and measured without boots, a note was made
of the condition of the teeth, and a general estimate of the
personal cleanliness and sufficiency of clothing as a basis
for determining the home conditions of neglect or otherwise
from external evidence. The teacher of each class added an
estimate of mental capacity." (Here follow tabular
arrangements of results, and height and weight charts.)
"... It may be noted in the heights and weights for each age
that the curve is not a continuous line of growth, but that at
some ages it springs nearer to, and at others sinks further
from, the normal. The greatest effect upon the life capital of
the population is produced by the infantile mortality, which
in some years actually kills off during the first year one in
five of all children born; the question naturally arises what
is its effect upon the survivors--do the weakly ones get
killed off and only the strong muddle through, or does the
adverse environment which slaughters one in five have a
maiming effect upon those left?... When the infantile
mortality for the parish in which the school is situate was
charted above the physique curve, an absolute correspondence
is to be observed. The children born in a year when infantile
mortality is low show an increased physique, rising nearest to
the normal in the extraordinary good year 1892; and those born
in the years of high mortality show a decreased physique....
It appears certain, therefore, that in years of high infantile
mortality the conditions, to which one in five or six of the
children born are sacrificed, have a maiming effect upon the
other four or five."
_The fine big children are born in periods of low infantile
mortality_, that is the essential point.
So that anyhow, since the fittest under present conditions is
manifestly the ratlike, the survival of the fittest that is going on
now is one that it is highly desirable to stop as soon as possible,
and so far Socialism _will_ arrest the survival of the fittest. But
that does not mean that it will stop the development of the species
altogether. It will merely shift the incident of selection and
rejection to a new set of qualities. I think I have already hinted
(Chapter VI., § 2) that a State that undertakes to sustain all the
children born into it will do its best to secure good births. That
implies a distinct bar to the marriage and reproduction of the halt
and the blind, the bearers of transmissible diseases and the like. And
women being economically independent will have a far freer choice in
wedlock than they have now. Now they must in practice marry men who
can more or less keep them, they must subordinate every other
consideration to that. Under Socialism they will certainly look less
to a man's means and acquisitive gifts, and more to the finer
qualities of his personality. They will prefer prominent men, able
men, fine, vigorous and attractive persons. There will, indeed, be far
more freedom of choice on either side than under the sordid conditions
of the present time. I submit that such a free choice is far more
likely to produce a secular increase in the beauty, the intellectual
and physical activity and the capacity of the race, than our present
haphazard mercenariness.
The science student will be interested to read in this connection _The
Ethic of Free Thought_ (A. & C. Black, 1888), _Socialism in Theory and
Practice_ (1884), and _The Chances of Death, and other Studies in
Evolution_ (Arnold, 1897), by Karl Pearson. Professor Pearson is not
in all respects to be taken as an authoritative exponent of Modern
Socialism, and he is associated with no Socialist organization, but
his treatment of the biological aspect is that of a specialist and a
master.
§ 7.
_Socialism is against Human Nature._ This objection I have left until
last because, firstly, it is absolutely true, and secondly, it leads
naturally to the newer ideas that have already peeped out once or
twice in my earlier chapters and which will now ride up to a
predominance in what follows, and particularly the idea that an
educational process and a moral discipline are not only a necessary
part, but the most fundamental part of any complete Socialist scheme.
Socialism is against Human Nature. That is true, and it is equally
true of everything else; capitalism is against human nature,
competition is against human nature, cruelty, kindness, religion and
doubt, monogamy, polygamy, celibacy, decency, indecency, piety and sin
are all against human nature. The present system in particular is
against human nature, or what is the policeman for, the soldier, the
debt-collector, the judge, the hangman? What means the glass along my
neighbour's wall? Human nature is against human nature. For human
nature is in a perpetual conflict; it is the Ishmael of the universe,
against everything, and with everything against it; and within, no
more and no less than a perpetual battleground of passion, desire,
cowardice, indolence and good will. So that our initial proposition as
it stands at the head of this section, is, as an argument against
Socialism, just worth nothing at all.
None the less valuable is it as a reminder of the essential
constructive task of which the two primary generalizations of
Socialism we have so far been developing are but the outward and
visible forms. There is no untutored naturalness in Socialism, no
uneducated blind force on our side. Socialism is made of struggling
Good Will, made out of a conflict of wills. I have tried to let it
become apparent that while I do firmly believe not only in the
splendour and nobility of the Socialist dream but in its ultimate
practicality, I do also recognize quite clearly that with people just
as they are now, with their prejudices, their ignorances, their
misapprehensions, their unchecked vanities and greeds and jealousies,
their crude and misguided instincts, their irrational traditions, no
Socialist State can exist, no better State can exist, than the one we
have now with all its squalor and cruelty. Every change in human
institutions must happen concurrently with a change of ideas. Upon
this plastic, uncertain, teachable thing Human Nature, within us and
without, we have, if we really contemplate Socialism as our
achievement, to impose guiding ideas and guiding habits, we have to
co-ordinate all the Good Will that is active or latent in our world in
one constructive plan. To-day the spirit of humanity is lost to
itself, divided, dispersed and hidden in little narrow distorted
circles of thought. These divided, misshapen circles of thought are
not "human nature," but human nature has fallen into these forms and
has to be released. Our fundamental business is to develop the human
spirit. It is in the enlargement and enrichment of the average circle
of thought that the essential work and method of Socialism is to be
found.