In the great country beyond the Atlantic, which is now well-nigh the
most powerful country in the world, and will soon be indisputably so,
manhood suffrage prevails. Such is also the political qualification of
France since 1848, and has become that of the German Confederation,
though not of all the several states composing it. In Great Britain
the suffrage is not yet so widely extended, but the last Reform Act
admitted within what is called the pale of the Constitution so large a
body of those who live on weekly wages, that as soon and as often as
these shall choose to act together as a class, and exert for any
common object the whole of the electoral power which our present
institutions give them, they will exercise, though not a complete
ascendency, a very great influence on legislation. Now these are the
very class which, in the vocabulary of the higher ranks, are said to
have no stake in the country. Of course they have in reality the
greatest stake, since their daily bread depends on its prosperity. But
they are not engaged (we may call it bribed) by any peculiar interest
of their own, to the support of property as it is, least of all to the
support of inequalities of property. So far as their power reaches, or
may hereafter reach, the laws of property have to depend for support
upon considerations of a public nature, upon the estimate made of
their conduciveness to the general welfare, and not upon motives of a
mere personal character operating on the minds of those who have
control over the Government.
It seems to me that the greatness of this change is as yet by no means
completely realized, either by those who opposed, or by those who
effected our last constitutional reform. To say the truth, the
perceptions of Englishmen are of late somewhat blunted as to the
tendencies of political changes. They have seen so many changes made,
from which, while only in prospect, vast expectations were
entertained, both of evil and of good, while the results of either
kind that actually followed seemed far short of what had been
predicted, that they have come to feel as if it were the nature of
political changes not to fulfil expectation, and have fallen into a
habit of half-unconscious belief that such changes, when they take
place without a violent revolution, do not much or permanently disturb
in practice the course of things habitual to the country. This,
however, is but a superficial view either of the past or of the
future. The various reforms of the last two generations have been at
least as fruitful in important consequences as was foretold. The
predictions were often erroneous as to the suddenness of the effects,
and sometimes even as to the kind of effect. We laugh at the vain
expectations of those who thought that Catholic emancipation would
tranquilize Ireland, or reconcile it to British rule. At the end of
the first ten years of the Reform Act of 1832, few continued to think
either that it would remove every important practical grievance, or
that it had opened the door to universal suffrage. But five-and-twenty
years more of its operation had given scope for a large development of
its indirect working, which is much more momentous than the direct.
Sudden effects in history are generally superficial. Causes which go
deep down into the roots of future events produce the most serious
parts of their effect only slowly, and have, therefore, time to become
a part of the familiar order of things before general attention is
called to the changes they are producing; since, when the changes do
become evident, they are often not seen, by cursory observers, to be
in any peculiar manner connected with the cause. The remoter
consequences of a new political fact are seldom understood when they
occur, except when they have been appreciated beforehand.
This timely appreciation is particularly easy in respect to tendencies
of the change made in our institutions by the Reform Act of 1867. The
great increase of electoral power which the Act places within the
reach of the working classes is permanent. The circumstances which
have caused them, thus far, to make a very limited use of that power,
are essentially temporary. It is known even to the most inobservant,
that the working classes have, and are likely to have, political
objects which concern them as working classes, and on which they
believe, rightly or wrongly, that the interests and opinions of the
other powerful classes are opposed to theirs. However much their
pursuit of these objects may be for the present retarded by want of
electoral organization, by dissensions among themselves, or by their
not having reduced as yet their wishes into a sufficiently definite
practical shape, it is as certain as anything in politics can be, that
they will before long find the means of making their collective
electoral power effectively instrumental to the proportion of their
collective objects. And when they do so, it will not be in the
disorderly and ineffective way which belongs to a people not
habituated to the use of legal and constitutional machinery, nor will
it be by the impulse of a mere instinct of levelling. The instruments
will be the press, public meetings and associations, and the return to
Parliament of the greatest possible number of persons pledged to the
political aims of the working classes. The political aims will
themselves be determined by definite political doctrines; for politics
are now scientifically studied from the point of view of the working
classes, and opinions conceived in the special interest of those
classes are organized into systems and creeds which lay claim to a
place on the platform of political philosophy, by the same right as
the systems elaborated by previous thinkers. It is of the utmost
importance that all reflecting persons should take into early
consideration what these popular political creeds are likely to be,
and that every single article of them should be brought under the
fullest light of investigation and discussion, so that, if possible,
when the time shall be ripe, whatever is right in them may be adopted,
and what is wrong rejected by general consent, and that instead of a
hostile conflict, physical or only moral, between the old and the new,
the best parts of both may be combined in a renovated social fabric.
At the ordinary pace of those great social changes which are not
effected by physical violence, we have before us an interval of about
a generation, on the due employment of which it depends whether the
accommodation of social institutions to the altered state of human
society, shall be the work of wise foresight, or of a conflict of
opposite prejudices. The future of mankind will be gravely imperilled,
if great questions are left to be fought over between ignorant change
and ignorant opposition to change.
And the discussion that is now required is one that must go down to
the very first principles of existing society. The fundamental
doctrines which were assumed as incontestable by former generations,
are now put again on their trial. Until the present age, the
institution of property in the shape in which it has been handed down
from the past, had not, except by a few speculative writers, been
brought seriously into question, because the conflicts of the past
have always been conflicts between classes, both of which had a stake
in the existing constitution of property. It will not be possible to
go on longer in this manner. When the discussion includes classes who
have next to no property of their own, and are only interested in the
institution so far as it is a public benefit, they will not allow
anything to be taken for granted--certainly not the principle of
private property, the legitimacy and utility of which are denied by
many of the reasoners who look out from the stand-point of the working
classes. Those classes will certainly demand that the subject, in all
its parts, shall be reconsidered from the foundation; that all
proposals for doing without the institution, and all modes of
modifying it which have the appearance of being favorable to the
interest of the working classes, shall receive the fullest
consideration and discussion before it is decided that the subject
must remain as it is. As far as this country is concerned, the
dispositions of the working classes have as yet manifested themselves
hostile only to certain outlying portions of the proprietary system.
Many of them desire to withdraw questions of wages from the freedom of
contract, which is one of the ordinary attributions of private
property. The more aspiring of them deny that land is a proper subject
for private appropriation, and have commenced an agitation for its
resumption by the State. With this is combined, in the speeches of
some of the agitators, a denunciation of what they term usury, but
without any definition of what they mean by the name; and the cry does
not seem to be of home origin, but to have been caught up from the
intercourse which has recently commenced through the Labor Congresses
and the International Society, with the continental Socialists who
object to all interest on money, and deny the legitimacy of deriving
an income in any form from property apart from labor. This doctrine
does not as yet show signs of being widely prevalent in Great Britain,
but the soil is well prepared to receive the seeds of this
description which are widely scattered from those foreign countries
where large, general theories, and schemes of vast promise, instead of
inspiring distrust, are essential to the popularity of a cause. It is
in France, Germany, and Switzerland that anti-property doctrines in
the widest sense have drawn large bodies of working men to rally round
them. In these countries nearly all those who aim at reforming society
in the interest of the working classes profess themselves Socialists,
a designation under which schemes of very diverse character are
comprehended and confounded, but which implies at least a remodelling
generally approaching to abolition of the institution of private
property. And it would probably be found that even in England the more
prominent and active leaders of the working classes are usually in
their private creed Socialists of one order or another, though being,
like most English politicians, better aware than their Continental
brethren that great and permanent changes in the fundamental ideas of
mankind are not to be accomplished by a _coup de main_, they direct
their practical efforts towards ends which seem within easier reach,
and are content to hold back all extreme theories until there has been
experience of the operation of the same principles on a partial scale.
While such continues to be the character of the English working
classes, as it is of Englishmen in general, they are not likely to
rush head-long into the reckless extremities of some of the foreign
Socialists, who, even in sober Switzerland, proclaim themselves
content to begin by simple subversion, leaving the subsequent
reconstruction to take care of itself; and by subversion, they mean
not only the annihilation of all government, but getting all property
of all kinds out of the hands of the possessors to be used for the
general benefit; but in what mode it will, they say, be time enough
afterwards to decide.
The avowal of this doctrine by a public newspaper, the organ of an
association (_La Solidarite_ published at Neuchatel), is one of the
most curious signs of the times. The leaders of the English
working-men--whose delegates at the congresses of Geneva and Bale
contributed much the greatest part of such practical common sense as
was shown there--are not likely to begin deliberately by anarchy,
without having formed any opinion as to what form of society should be
established in the room of the old. But it is evident that whatever
they do propose can only be properly judged, and the grounds of the
judgment made convincing to the general mind, on the basis of a
previous survey of the two rival theories, that of private property and
that of Socialism, one or other of which must necessarily furnish most
of the premises in the discussion. Before, therefore, we can usefully
discuss this class of questions in detail, it will be advisable to
examine from their foundations the general question raised by
Socialism. And this examination should be made without any hostile
prejudice. However irrefutable the arguments in favor of the laws of
property may appear to those to whom they have the double prestige of
immemorial custom and of personal interest, nothing is more natural
than that a working man who has begun to speculate on politics, should
regard them in a very different light. Having, after long struggles,
attained in some countries, and nearly attained in others, the point at
which for them, at least, there is no further progress to make in the
department of purely political rights, is it possible that the less
fortunate classes among the "adult males" should not ask themselves
whether progress ought to stop there? Notwithstanding all that has been
done, and all that seems likely to be done, in the extension of
franchises, a few are born to great riches, and the many to a penury,
made only more grating by contrast. No longer enslaved or made
dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of
poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to
conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident
of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral
advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of
desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against
which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in
believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by those who do not
feel it--by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life.
But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the
privileges of oligarchy were necessary. All the successive steps that
have been made by the poorer classes, partly won from the better
feelings of the powerful, partly extorted from their fears, and partly
bought with money, or attained in exchange for support given to one
section of the powerful in its quarrels with another, had the strongest
prejudices opposed to them beforehand; but their acquisition was a sign
of power gained by the subordinate classes, a means to those classes of
acquiring more; it consequently drew to those classes a certain share
of the respect accorded to power, and produced a corresponding
modification in the creed of society respecting them; whatever
advantages they succeeded in acquiring came to be considered their due,
while, of those which they had not yet attained, they continued to be
deemed unworthy. The classes, therefore, which the system of society
makes subordinate, have little reason to put faith in any of the maxims
which the same system of society may have established as principles.
Considering that the opinions of mankind have been found so wonderfully
flexible, have always tended to consecrate existing facts, and to
declare what did not yet exist, either pernicious or impracticable,
what assurance have those classes that the distinction of rich and poor
is grounded on a more imperative necessity than those other ancient and
long-established facts, which, having been abolished, are now condemned
even by those who formerly profited by them? This cannot be taken on
the word of an interested party. The working classes are entitled to
claim that the whole field of social institutions should be
re-examined, and every question considered as if it now arose for the
first time; with the idea constantly in view that the persons who are
to be convinced are not those who owe their ease and importance to the
present system, but persons who have no other interest in the matter
than abstract justice and the general good of the community. It should
be the object to ascertain what institutions of property would be
established by an unprejudiced legislator, absolutely impartial between
the possessors of property and the non-possessors; and to defend and to
justify them by the reasons which would really influence such a
legislator, and not by such as have the appearance of being got up to
make out a case for what already exists. Such rights or privileges of
property as will not stand this test will, sooner or later, have to be
given up. An impartial hearing ought, moreover, to be given to all
objections against property itself. All evils and inconveniences
attaching to the institution in its best form ought to be frankly
admitted, and the best remedies or palliatives applied which human
intelligence is able to devise. And all plans proposed by social
reformers, under whatever name designated, for the purpose of attaining
the benefits aimed at by the institution of property without its
inconveniences, should be examined with the same candor, not prejudged
as absurd or impracticable.