Individualism and Socialism are discussed in the works of Hadley,

Veblen, Hobson, Spencer, Marx, George, already cited; cf. also Menger,

_The Right to the Whole Produce of Labor_, 1899; Ely, _Socialism and

Social Reform_, 1894; Bosanquet, _Individualism and Socialism_, in The

Civilization of Christendom, 1893; Fite, _The Theory of Democracy_,

International Journal of Ethics, xxviii. (1907), pp. 1-18; Huxley,

_Administrative Nihilism_, in Essays; Godwin's _Political Justice_,

1793, raised many of the fundamental questions. Recent representative

Individualistic works are: Spencer, _Social Statics_, _The Man versus

the State_, various essays in Vol. III. of Essays; Sumner, _What Social

Classes Owe to Each Other_, 1883; Donisthorpe, _Individualism_, 1889;

Harris, _Inequality and Progress_, 1897; Mallock, _Socialism_, 1907. On

Socialism: _Fabian Essays in Socialism_, edited by Shaw, London, 1890,

New York, 1891; Spargo, _Socialism_, 1906; Marx and Engels, _The

Communist Manifesto_, Eng. tr.; Reeve, _The Cost of Competition_, 1906;

Rae, _Contemporary Socialism_, 1891; Hunter, _Socialists at Work_, 1908;

Wells, _New Worlds for Old_, 1907.

FOOTNOTES:

[234] See above, pp. 428 f., 471-6, 483.

[235] In his later years Mill had much more confidence in the value of

social agency.

[236] See above, p. 437 f.

[237] See above, pp. 368 ff.

[238] W. H. Mallock, _Socialism_.

[239] Above, p. 472.

CHAPTER XXV

UNSETTLED PROBLEMS IN THE ECONOMIC ORDER (CONTINUED)

Sec. 4. THE THEORY OF PUBLIC AGENCY AND CONTROL

The various theories of public direction, including socialism in the

technical sense, are primarily interested in the just distribution of

goods. It is not so much "How many goods can be produced?" as "Who is to

get them?" Individualism was chiefly concerned in increasing public

wealth, assuming (in the case of the democratic individualists) that all

would get the benefit. Socialism is more concerned that the producing

persons shall not be sacrificed, and that each member shall benefit by

the result. Public agency and control might assert itself (1) as a

method of production, (2) as a method of distribution of goods and

returns, (3) as a method of property. It is important to note at the

outset that all civilized peoples have some degree of social direction

in each of these fields. (1) Practically all peoples collect taxes, coin

money, carry mails, protect life and property, and supply such

elementary demands as those for water and drainage, through State or

municipal agency instead of leaving it to private initiative. And in

every one of the instances the work was formerly done privately. (2)

Under distribution, all progressive peoples give education through the

State. Further, the benefits of the mail service are distributed not in

proportion to receipts, but on other principles based on social welfare.

(3) As a method of property-holding, all civilized peoples hold certain

goods for common use, and in the United States, after a period in which

it has been the policy to distribute for little or no compensation

public lands, public franchises, and public goods of all kinds, the

public policy is now not only to retain large tracts for forest reserve,

but to construct irrigation plants, and to provide public parks,

playgrounds, and other forms of property to be used for common

advantage. Just as the individualist does not necessarily carry his

doctrine to the extreme of dispensing with all social agency, at least

in the matters of public protection and public health, so the socialist

does not necessarily wish to abolish private property or private

enterprise. We have, then, to consider briefly the ethical aspects of

public agency for production, public control over distribution, public

holding of wealth.

Sec. 5. SOCIETY AS AGENCY OF PRODUCTION

The advantage claimed for society as an agent of production is not

primarily greater efficiency, although it is claimed that the present

method is enormously wasteful except where there already is private

monopoly. Nor is it in the social service rendered by providing great

variety of goods, and of the kinds most wanted. It is rather (1) that in

the case of public service enterprises, such as transportation or

lighting, fairness to the various shippers, localities, and other users

can be secured only through public control or operation. These services

are as indispensable to modern life as air or navigation. Only by public

agency can discrimination be avoided. (2) That the prizes to be gained

are here so enormous that bribery and corruption are inevitable under

private management. (3) That the profits arising from the growth of the

community belong to the community, and can only be secured if the

community owns and operates such agencies of public service as

transportation, communication, and in cities water supply and lighting.

(4) That the method of individualistic production is reckless of child

life and in general of the health of workmen. Great Britain is already

fearing a deterioration in physical stature and capacity. (5) The motive

of self-interest, relied upon and fostered by individualism, is

anti-social. How can morality be expected to improve when the

fundamental agency and method of business and industry is contradictory

to morality? (6) More complete socialism maintains that, under modern

capitalism, a disproportionate share is sure to fall to the capitalist,

and, more than this, to the great capitalist. Modern production is

complex and expensive. It requires an enormous plant; the capitalist,

not the workman, has the tools, and can therefore charge what he

pleases. The small capitalist cannot undertake competition with the

great capitalist, for the latter can undersell him until he drives him

from business, and can then recoup himself by greater gains. Hence the

only way to secure fair distribution is through social ownership of the

tools and materials for production.

=Private Interests and Public Welfare.=--Touching these points it may be

said that the public conscience is rapidly coming to a decision upon the

first five. (1) The public has been exploited, the officials of

government have been bribed, and individual members of society

discriminated against. The process of competition always involves

_vae victis_, but the particular factor which makes this not only hard

but unjust, is that in all these cases we have a quasi-public agency

(monopoly, franchise, State-aided corporation) used to give private

advantage. This must be remedied either by public ownership or public

control, unless the ethics of the struggle for existence is accepted.

The corruption which has prevailed under (2) must be met either by

public ownership or control, or by so reducing the value of such

franchises as to leave "nothing in it" for the "grafter" and his

co-operators. Vice--gambling, excessive use of drugs and liquors,

prostitution--is no doubt injurious to its victims, and when leagued

with public officials and yielding enormous corruption funds to debauch

politics, it is a public evil as well. But its victims are limited, and

its appearance not attractive to the great majority. The exploitation

and corruption practiced by the more generally successful and

"respectable" members of society, is far more insidious and

wide-reaching. It demoralizes not individuals only, but the standards of

society. As to (3) there is no doubt as to the rights of the matter.

Gains due to social growth should be socially shared, not appropriated

by a few. The only question is as to the best method of securing these

gains. European States and cities have gone much farther than the United

States along the line of public agency, and, while there is still

dispute as to the balance of advantage in certain cases, there is a

growing sentiment that the more intelligent and upright the community,

the more it can wisely undertake. The moral principle is that the public

must have its due. Whether it pays certain agents a salary as its own

officials, or a commission in the form of a moderate dividend, is not so

important.[240] But to pay a man or a small group of promoters a million

dollars to supply water or lighting or transportation, seems no more

moral than to pay such a salary to a mayor or counsel or superintendent

of schools. Taxpayers would probably denounce such salaries as robbery.

Such franchises as have for the most part been given in American cities

have been licenses to collect high taxes from the citizens for the

benefit of a few, and do not differ in principle from paying excessive

salaries, except as the element of risk enters. What is needed at

present in the United States is a larger number of experiments in

various methods of agency to see which type results in least corruption,

fairest distribution, and best service.

=Conditions of Labor.=--On the fourth point, the necessity of public

control to regulate child labor, the labor of women, sanitary

conditions, and the use of dangerous machinery, the public conscience is

also awakening. Decisions of the courts on the constitutionality of

regulating women's labor have been somewhat at variance. But the

recently announced decision[241] of the United States Supreme Court in

the "Oregon case" seems likely to be decisive of the principle that

women may be treated as a class. Freedom of contract cannot be regarded

as interfering with the right to establish reasonable precautions for

women's health. Woman may be protected "from the greed as well as from

the passion of man." The immorality of child labor under modern

conditions is also becoming clear. For the public to see child life

stunted physically, mentally, and morally by premature labor under the

exhausting, deadening, and often demoralizing conditions of modern

industry and business, is for the public to consent to wickedness. It

cannot leave this matter to the conscience of individual manufacturers

and parents, for the conscientious manufacturer is at a disadvantage,

and it might with as much morality consent to a parent's starving or

poisoning his child as to his injuring it in less violent manner. For a

society pretending to be moral to permit little children to be used up

or stunted under any plea of cheap production or support of parents, is

not above the moral level of those peoples which practice infanticide to

prevent economic stress. Indeed, in the case of a country which boasts

of its wealth, there is far less justification than for the savage. In

the case of provision against accident due to dangerous machinery, the

ethical principle is also clear. To throw all the burden of the

accidents incident to modern production upon the families of the

laborers is entirely unjust. To impose it upon the conscientious

manufacturer is no better, for it places him at a disadvantage. This is

a necessary--except so far as it can be minimized by safety

devices--part of the modern machine process. It ought to be paid for

either by all manufacturers, who would then shift it to the consumers in

the price of the goods, or by the public as a whole in some form of

insurance. European countries have gone much farther than the United

States in this direction. The theory that the employer is exempt if a

fellow workman contributes in any way to the accident has been applied

in the United States in such a way as to free employers, and thus the

public, from any share in the burden of a large part of

accidents--except as these entail poverty and bring the victim and his

family into the dependent class.

Moreover, it is only by public action that fair conditions of labor can

be secured in many trades and under many employers. For the single

workman has not the slightest chance to make conditions, and the union

has no effective means to support its position unless it represents a

highly skilled trade and controls completely the supply of labor. It may

go without saying that violence is wrong. But it is often ignored that

for a _prosperous society to leave the laborer no remedy but violence

for an intolerable condition is just as wrong_.

=Motives.=--(5) On the question of motives the collectivist theory is

probably over-sanguine as to the gain to be effected by external means.

It is difficult to believe that any change in methods would eliminate

selfishness. There is abundant exercise of selfishness in political

democracy, and even in families. Further, if it should be settled on

other grounds that competition in certain cases performs a social

service, it would then be possible for a man to compete with a desire

to serve the public, just as truly as it would be possible to compete

for selfish motives. That a process causes pain incidentally does not

necessarily pervert the motive of the surgeon or parent. It does, of

course, throw the burden of proof upon the advocate of the process.

Rivalry need not mean enmity if the rivals are on an equal footing and

play fair.

=Exploitation of Labor.=--(6) The question whether all capitalistic

production first exploits the laboring class, and then tends to absorb

or drive out of business the small capitalist, is not so easy of

decision. It seems to be easy to make a plausible statement for each

side by statistical evidence. There seems little doubt that the general

standard of living for laborers is rising. On the other hand, the number

of enormous fortunes seems to rise much faster, and there is an

appalling amount of poverty in the great cities. This is sometimes

attributed to thriftlessness or to excessively large families. A careful

study of an English agricultural community, where the conditions seemed

at least as good as the average, showed that a family could not have

over two children without sinking below the line of adequate food,

shelter, and clothing, to say nothing of medical attendance or other

comforts. In the United States there has been such a supply of land

available that the stress has not been so intense. Just what the

situation will be if the country becomes thickly settled cannot be

foretold. Professor J. B. Clark shows that the tendency in a static

society would be to give the laborer more and more nearly his

share--provided there is free competition for his services. The

difficulty is that society is not static and that a laborer cannot shift

at will from trade to trade and from place to place.

That sometimes capital exploits labor is merely to say that the buyer

sometimes gets the advantage. That capital usually has the advantage in

its greater resources may be admitted, but that it _invariably must_

seems an unwarranted deduction. The multiplication of wants widens

continually the number of occupations and thus increases the competition

for the service of the more skilled. In such cases some, at least, of

the sellers should be in a position to make a fair bargain. Indeed,

recent socialists do not advocate any such complete assumption by

society of all production as is presented in some of the socialistic

Utopias. Their principle is "that the State must undertake the

production and distribution of social wealth wherever private enterprise

is dangerous or less efficient than public enterprise."[242]

It is for those who do not believe in public control to prove that in

the great enterprises for the production of the necessaries of life, for

transportation, banking, mining, and the like, private enterprise is not

dangerous. The conduct of many--not all--of these enterprises in recent

years, not only in their economic aspects, but in their recklessness of

human life, health, and morality, is what makes socialism a practical

question. If it is adopted, it will not be for any academic or _a

priori_ reasons. It will be because private enterprise fails to serve

the public, and its injustice becomes intolerable. If business

enterprise, as sometimes threatens, seeks to subordinate political and

social institutions, including legislatures and courts, to economic

interests, the choice must be between public control and public

ownership. And if, whether by the inherent nature of legal doctrine and

procedure, or by the superior shrewdness of capital in evading

regulation, control is made to appear ineffective, the social conscience

will demand ownership. To subordinate the State to commercial interests

is as immoral as to make the economic interest supreme in the

individual.

As regards the relations between capital and labor, it argues an

undeveloped state of society that we have no machinery for determining

controversy as to what is a fair wage. In the long run, and on the

whole, supply and demand may give an approximately fair adjustment, but

our present method of fighting it out in doubtful cases is barbaric. The

issue is decided often by violence or the no less unmoral motive of

pressing want, instead of by the moral test of what is fair. And the

great third interest, the consumer, or the public at large, is not

represented at all. New Zealand, Canada, and some of the states in the

United States have made beginnings. The President undoubtedly commanded

general support in his position during the coal strike, when he

maintained that the public was morally bound to take some part in the

struggle.

Must not society be lacking in resources if its only resource is to

permit exploitation, on the one hand, or carry on all industry and

business itself, upon the other? To lose the flexibility, variety, and

keenness of interest secured by individual or associated enterprise,

would certainly be an evil. Early business was conducted largely by

kinship organizations. The pendulum has doubtless reached the other

extreme in turning over to groups, organized on a purely commercial

basis, operations that could be more equitably managed by city or state

agency. Most favor public agency in the case of schools. Railroads, gas

companies, and other monopolies are still subject to controversy. But

that an ideally organized society should permit associations and

grouping of a great many kinds as agencies for carrying on its work

seems a platform not to be abandoned until proved hopeless.

=Collective Agency is Not Necessarily Social.=--The socialist is

inclined to think that if the agency of production were the government

or the whole organized society this would give a genuine social agency

of control. This by no means follows. Party government and city

government in the United States have shown the fallacy of this. But even

apart from the possibility of a corrupt boss there is still a wide gap

between the collective and the socialized agency. For until the members

of society have reached a sufficiently high level of intelligence and

character to exercise voluntary control, and to cooperate wisely and

efficiently, there must be some central directing agency. And such an

agency will be morally external to a large number. It doesn't matter so

much what name this agent is called by--i.e., whether he is

"capitalist," or "government,"--so long as the control is external. In

general, individuals are still without the mutual confidence and public

intelligence which would enable them really to socialize the

mechanically collective process.

Sec. 6. THEORIES OF JUST DISTRIBUTION

Socialism as theory of distribution does not necessarily imply public

operation of production. By graded taxation the proceeds of production

might be taken by society and either held, used, or distributed on some

supposedly more equitable basis. To give point to any inquiry as to the

justice of a proposed distribution, it would be desirable to know what

is the present distribution. Unfortunately, no figures are accepted by

all students. Spahr's _Present Distribution of Wealth in the United

States_ estimates that seven-eighths of the families in the United

States own only one-eighth of the wealth, and that one per cent. own

more than the remaining ninety-nine per cent. This has been challenged,

but any estimate made by the economists shows such enormous

disproportion as to make it incredible that the present distribution can

be regarded as just on any definition of justice other than "according

to the principles of contract and competition." Suppose, then, the

question is raised, How can we make a just distribution?

=Criteria Proposed.=--The simplest, and at the same time most mechanical

and abstract, method would be to divide all goods equally. This would be

to ignore all moral and other differences, as indeed is practically done

in the suffrage. If all men are accounted equal in the State, why not in

wealth? It may be admitted that, if society were to distribute, it would

have to do it on some system which could be objectively administered. To

divide wealth according to merit, or according to efforts, or according

to needs, would be a far more moral method. But it is difficult to see

how, in the case of material goods or their money equivalent, such a

division could be made by any being not omniscient as well as absolutely

just. If we are to consider distribution as administered by society, we

seem reduced to the alternative of the present system or a system of

equality.

=1. The Individualistic Theory.=--It is indeed supposed by some that the

individualistic or competitive system distributes on a moral basis:

viz., according to merit. This claim would have to meet the following

criticisms:

(1) The first abstraction which this individualistic principle of

reward usually makes it that it gives a man credit for all he achieves,

or charges him with all his failures, without recognizing the threefold

origin of these achievements or failures. Heredity, society, personal

choice, have each had some share in the result. But, in considering the

ethics of competition upon this maxim, there is evidently no attempt to

discriminate between these several sources. The man born with industrial

genius, presented by society with the knowledge of all that has been

done in the past, and equipped by society with all the methods and tools

society can devise, certainly has an advantage over the man of moderate

talents and no education. To claim that the first should be justly

rewarded for his superiority would imply that the reception of one gift

constitutes a just claim for another.

(2) Secondly, the theory as applied to our present system is guilty of a

further abstraction in assuming that the chief, if not the only, way to

deserve reward is by individualistic shrewdness and energy.

(3) It measures desert by service rendered without taking any account of

motive or even of intent. The captain of industry performs an important

service to society; therefore, it is argued, he should be rewarded

accordingly, quite irrespective of the question whether he was aiming at

social welfare or at selfish gain. It may even be plausibly argued that

to reward men financially for good motives would be bribing men to be

honest. It is true that financial rewards will not make good citizens,

but this is irrelevant. The point is that whatever other

reasons,--expediency, difficulty of estimating intent and motive,--may

be urged for abstracting from everything but the result, the one reason

which cannot be urged is, such abstraction is just. A person has rights

only because he is a social person. But to call a man a social person

because he incidentally produces useful results, is to say that purpose

and will are negligible elements of personality.[243]

=2. Equal Division.=--The system of equal division is liable to the

following criticism. In their economic services men are not equal. They

are unequal not merely in talent and ability; not merely in the value of

their work; they are unequal in their disposition. To treat idle and

industrious, useless and useful, slow and quick alike is not equality,

but inequality. It is to be guilty of as palpable an abstraction as to

say that all men are equally free because they are not subject to

physical constraint. Real equality will try to treat like conditions

alike, and unlike character, efforts, or services differently.

There is, moreover, a psychological objection which would weigh against

an equal division even if such were regarded as just. The average man

perhaps prefers an economic order in which there are prizes and blanks

to an order in which every man draws out the same. He prefers an

exciting game to a sure but tame return of his investment. He may call

for a "square deal," but we must remember that a "square deal" in the

great American game from which the metaphor is taken is not designed to

make the game less one of chance. It is designed to give full scope to

luck and nerve. A game in which every player was sure to win, but also

sure to win just what he had put in, would be equitable, but it would

not be a game. An equal distribution might rob life of its excitement

and its passion. Possibly the very strain of the process develops some

elements of character which it would be unfortunate to lose.

Is there no alternative possible for society except an equality which is

external only, and therefore unequal, or an inequality which charges a

man with all the accrued benefits or evils of his ancestry? Must we

either recognize no moral differences in men, or else be more merciless

than the old orthodox doctrine of hereditary or imputed guilt? The

theological doctrine merely made a man suffer for his ancestors' sins;

the doctrine of unlimited individualism would damn him not only for his

ancestors' sins and defects, but for the injustice suffered by his

ancestors at the hands of others. The analysis of the sources of a man's

ability may give a clue to a third possibility, and it is along this

line that the social conscience of to-day is feeling its way.

=3. A Working Programme.=--A man's power is due (1) to physical

heredity; (2) to social heredity, including care, education, and the

stock of inventions, information, and institutions which enables him to

be more efficient than the savage; and finally (3) to his own efforts.

Individualism may properly claim this third factor. It is just to treat

men unequally so far as their efforts are unequal. It is socially

desirable to give as much incentive as possible to the full development

of every one's powers. But the _very same reason demands that in the

first two respects we treat men as equally as possible_. For it is for

the good of the social body to get the most out of its members, and it

can get the most out of them only by giving them the best start

possible. In physical heredity the greater part is, as yet, wholly

outside control, but there is an important factor which is in the sphere

of moral action, namely, the physical condition of the parents,

particularly of the mother. Conditions of food, labor, and housing

should be such that every child may be physically well born. In the

various elements included under social heredity society has a freer

hand. Not a _free_ hand, for physical and mental incapacity limit the

amount of social accumulation which can be communicated, but we are only

beginning to appreciate how much of the deficiency formerly acquiesced

in as hopeless may be prevented or remedied by proper food, hygiene, and

medical care. _Completely_ equal education, likewise, cannot be given;

not in kind, for not all children have like interests and society does

not want to train all for the same task; nor in quantity, for some will

have neither the ability nor the disposition to do the more advanced

work. But as, little by little, labor becomes in larger degree

scientific, the ratio of opportunities for better trained men will

increase, and as education becomes less exclusively academic, and more

an active preparation for all kinds of work, the interests of larger and

larger numbers of children will be awakened. Such a programme as this is

one of the meanings of the phrase "_equal opportunity_," which voices

the demand widely felt for some larger conception of economic and social

justice than now obtains. It would make formal freedom, formal

"equality" before the law, less an empty mockery by giving to every

child some of the power and knowledge which are the necessary

conditions of real freedom.

Society has already gone a long way along the line of giving an equal

share in education. It is moving rapidly toward broader conceptions of

education for all occupations--farming, mechanics, arts, trade,

business--as well as for the "learned professions." It is making a

beginning toward giving children (see the Report of the New York

Tenement House Commission) a chance to be born and grow up with at least

a living minimum of light and air. Libraries and dispensaries and public

health officials are bringing the science and literature of the world in

increasing measure into the lives of all. When by the better

organization of the courts the poor man has real, and not merely formal

equality before the law, and thereby justice itself is made more

accessible to all, another long step will be taken toward a juster

order. How far society can go is yet to be solved. But is it not at

least a working hypothesis for experiment, that society should try to

give to all its members the gains due to the social progress of the

past? How far the maxim of equal opportunity will logically lead it is

impossible to say. Fortunately, the moral problem is to work out new

ideals, not merely to administer old ones. Other possibilities of larger

justice are noticed under Sec. 8 below.

Sec. 7. OWNERSHIP AND USE OF PROPERTY

The public wealth may be controlled and used in four ways: It may be (1)

Privately owned and used; (2) Privately owned and publicly used; (3)

Publicly held, but privately used; (4) Publicly held and commonly used.

The individualist would have all wealth, or as much as possible, under

one of the first two forms. The tendency in the United States until very

recently has been to divest the public of all ownership. The socialist,

while favoring private ownership and use of the more strictly personal

articles, favors the public holding of much which is now privately

owned--notably the land, or the instruments of production--as versus the

holding of these by private or corporate persons. Or, again, it may be

maintained that while individuals should be allowed to accumulate as

much property as they can, they should not be allowed to transmit it

entirely to their heirs.

=Value of Private Property.=--The individualist may properly point to

the psychological and historical significance of private property, which

has been stated in a preceding chapter (p. 490). He may say that the

evils there mentioned as attendant upon private property do not belong

to the property in itself, but to the exaggerated love of it. He may

admit that the present emphasis of attention upon the ownership of

wealth, rather than upon intellectual or aesthetic or social interests,

is not the highest type of human endeavor. But he urges that the

positive values of property are such that the present policy of placing

no check upon property should be maintained. In addition to the indirect

social value through the power and freedom given to its owners, it may

be claimed that the countless educational, charitable, and philanthropic

agencies sustained by voluntary gifts from private property, are both

the best method of accomplishing certain socially valuable work, and

have an important reflex value in promoting the active social interest

of those who carry them on. Nor is the force of this entirely broken by

the counter claim that this would justify keeping half the population in

poverty in order to give the other half the satisfaction of charity. No

system short of absolute communism can abolish the need of friendly

help.

=Defects and Dangers in the Present System.=--The first question which

arises is: If property is so valuable morally, how many are profiting by

it under the present system, and how many are without its beneficent

effects? Is the number of property-owners increasing or diminishing? In

one of the morally most valuable forms of property, the number of those

who profit is certainly decreasing relatively: _viz._, in the owning of

homes. The building of private residences has practically ceased in New

York and many other cities except for the very rich. With the increasing

value of land the owning of homes is bound to become more and more rare.

Only the large capitalist can put up the apartment house. In the

ownership of shops and industries the number of owners has relatively

decreased, that of clerks has increased. The wage-workers in cities are

largely propertyless. The management of industries through corporations

while theoretically affording opportunity for property has yet, as Judge

Grosscup has pointed out forcibly, been such as to discourage the small

investor, and to prompt to the consumption of wages as fast as received.

The objection to individualism on this ground would then be as before,

that it is not individual enough.

An objection of contrary character is that the possession of property

releases its owner from any necessity of active effort or service to the

public. It may therefore injure character on both its individual and its

social side. Probably the absolute number of those who refrain from any

social service because of their property is not very large, and it may

be questioned whether the particular persons would be socially very

valuable under any system if they are now oblivious to all the moral

arguments for such activity and service.

A more serious objection to the individualistic policy is the enormous

power allowed to the holders of great properties. It has been estimated

that a trust fund recently created for two grandchildren will exceed

five billion dollars when handed over. It is easily possible that some

of the private fortunes now held may, if undisturbed, amount to far

more than the above within another generation. Moreover, the power of

such a fortune is not limited to its own absolute purchasing value. By

the presence of its owners upon directorates of industrial,

transportation, banking, and insurance corporations the resources of

many other owners are controlled. A pressure may be exerted upon

political affairs compared with which actual contributions to campaign

funds are of slight importance. The older theory in America was that the

injury to the private character of the owners of wealth would negative

the possible dangers to the public, since possession of large wealth

would lead to relaxation of energy, or even to dissipation. It was

assumed that the father acquired the fortune, the son spent it, and thus

scattered it among the many, and the grandson began again at the bottom

of the ladder. Now that this theory is no longer tenable, society will

be obliged to ask how much power may safely be left to any individual.

It must be recognized that the present management of such natural

resources as forests under the regime of private property has been

extremely wasteful and threatens serious injury to the United States.

Individual owners cannot be expected to consider the welfare of the

country at large, or of future generations; hence the water power is

impaired and the timber supply of the future threatened.

Finally it must be remembered that many of the present evils and

inequities in ownership are not due necessarily to a system of private

property, but rather to special privileges possessed by classes of

individuals. These may be survivals of past conquests of arms as in

Europe, or derived by special legislation, or due to a perfectly

unconscious attitude of public morals which carries over to a new

situation the customs of an early day. Mill's famous indictment of

present conditions is not in all respects so applicable to America as to

the older countries of Europe, but it has too much truth to be omitted

in any ethical consideration.

"If the choice were to be made between communism with all its

chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings

and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily

carried with it, as a consequence, that the produce of labor

should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio

to the labor,--the largest portions to those who have not worked

at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal,

and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work

grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and

exhausting bodily labor cannot count with certainty on being able

to earn even the necessaries of life,--if this, or communism, were

the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of

communism would be but as dust in the balance. But to make the

comparison applicable, we must compare communism at its best with

the regime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might

be made. The principle of private property has never yet had a

fair trial in any country." (_Polit. Econ._, Book II., ch. i.)

Sec. 8. PRESENT TENDENCIES

=Individualistic Foundations.=--The general tendency up to very recent

time in the United States has been decidedly individualistic, both in

the policy concerning the method of holding property, and in the legal

balance between vested property rights and the social welfare. Public

lands were granted on easy terms to homesteaders; mines as well as soil

were practically free to the prospector; school fund lands were in most

cases sold for a song instead of being kept for the public. So general

has been the attitude that all wealth ought to be in private hands that

it has been difficult to convict men who have fraudulently obtained vast

tracts of public land. The magnitude of the operation has given

"respectability" to the beneficiaries. The taxing power has done little

to maintain adjustment. In this, as in many other respects, the policy

of the United States has been far more individualistic than that of

Great Britain. The latter has graded income and inheritance taxes. In

the United States, on the other hand, the Federal taxation bears more

heavily on the poor as they are the large body of consumers,--not, of

course, in the sense that the individual poor man pays more than the

individual rich man, but in the sense that a million of dollars owned by

a thousand men pays more than a million owned by one man. Legally, the

Constitution of the United States and certain of its amendments gave

private rights extraordinary protection, especially when contracts were

construed to mean charters, as well as private contracts. The public

welfare was conceived to reside almost solely in private rights.[244]

=Increased Recognition of Public Welfare.=--Recent policy and legal

decisions show a decided change. Reserves of forest lands have been

established. Water-supplies, parks, and many other kinds of property

have been changed from private to public ownership. The question as to

mines has been raised. Graded inheritance taxes have been established in

some states, and the question of graded income taxes is likely to be

more generally considered unless some other form of taxation based on

the social values given to land, or franchises, or other forms of

property seems more equitable. The Supreme Court in recent decisions

"has read into the constitution two sweeping exceptions to the

inviolability of property rights."[245] One is that of public use.

"Whenever the owner of a property devotes it to a use in which the

public has an interest, he in effect grants to the public an interest in

such use, and must to the extent of that use submit to be controlled by

the public for the common good so long as he maintains the use." The

second exception is that of the police power which in 1906 (204 U. S.,

311, 318) was declared to extend "to so dealing with the conditions

which exist in the state as to bring out of them the greatest welfare of

its people." The application of this broad principle is still in an

uncertain condition, but there can be no question that it recognizes a

changed situation. When people are living in such interdependence as in

the collective life of to-day, it is no longer possible to locate public

welfare in any such preponderating degree in private rights as was

justified under the conditions of a new country a century ago. Says

Professor Smith:

"On the fundamental question of the relation of public policy to

private property rights the [Supreme] Court has abandoned the

individualist views with which the founders of the constitution

were imbued; and in its doctrines of the public use and the police

power it has distinctly accepted what may be termed, in the

literal and proper sense of the word, the socialist view. In so

doing, it has unquestionably expressed the dominant opinion of the

American people. The American people does not accept the

collectivist theory; it believes in private property; but it

recognizes that rights of property must yield, in cases of

conflict, to the superior rights of society at large."

If some of the means set forth above for securing juster distribution

were adopted, the first step toward Mill's demand[246] would be met. If

the community should reap the return for its own growth, if taxation

should be so arranged as to fall most heavily on those best able to pay

rather than on those who are most honest or least able to evade, it

would seem rational to hold that society will find a way to continue the

four forms of control now existing, making such shifts as changing

conditions require.

Some of these shiftings are already evident and give promise of greater

justice without loss of any of the benefits accruing from private

property.

=Social Justice through Economic, Social, and Scientific Progress.=--Not

all moral advance comes "with observation," or by political agency. The

economic process is providing in certain lines a substitute for

property. Science and invention, which are themselves a fine

illustration of the balance and interaction between individual and

social intelligence, individual effort and social cooperation, are

making possible in many ways a state of society in which men have at

once greater freedom and greater power through association, greater

individual development and greater socialization of interests, less

private property but greater private use and enjoyment of what is

common.

The substitute for property provided by the economic process itself is

permanence or security of support. If the person can count definitely

upon a future, this is equivalent to the security of property. And

through the organization of modern industry supplemented by insurance

and pensions, either state, institutional, or in corporations, or in

mutual benefit associations, there has been on the whole, a great

increase of security, although it is still unfortunately true that the

wage-worker may in most cases be dismissed at any moment, and has

virtually no contract, or even any well-assured confidence of continued

employment.

It is a mutual cooperation of economic, social, and scientific factors

which has brought about a great increase of individual use and enjoyment

through public ownership. This _has placed many of the things which make

life worth living within the enjoyment of all_, and at the same time

given a far better service to the users than the old method of private

ownership. _In this change lies, perhaps, the greatest advance of

justice_ in the economic sphere, and a great promise for the future.

There was a time when if a man would sit down on a piece of ground and

enjoy a fine landscape, he must own it. If he would have a plot where

his children might play, he must own it. If he would travel, he must

carry his own lantern, and furnish his own protection from thieves. If

he would have water, he must sink his own well. If he would send a

letter, he must own or hire a messenger. If he would read a book, he

must not merely own the book, but own or hire the author or copyist. If

he would educate his children, he must own or hire the tutor. We have

learned that public parks, public lighting and water works, public

libraries, and public schools, are better than private provision.

The objection which comes from the individualist to this programme is

that it does too much for the individual. It is better, urges

individualism, to stimulate the individual's activity and leave his

wants largely unsatisfied than to satisfy all his wants at the expense

of his activity. But this assumes that what is done through public

agencies is done for the people and not by the people. A democracy may

do for itself what an aristocracy may not do for a dependent class. The

greatest demoralization at the present time is not to those who have

not, but to those who appropriate gains due to associated activity,

complacently supposing that they have themselves created all that they

enjoy.

=Another Great Advance is the Change in What Makes Up the Chief Values

of Life.=--In early times the values of life were largely found in food,

clothing, personal ornaments, bodily comfort, sex gratifications.

Enjoyment of these involved exclusive possession and therefore property.

But with the advance of civilization an increasing proportion of life's

values falls in the mental realm of sharable goods.

Satisfaction in knowledge, in art, in association, in freedom, is not

diminished, but increased when it is shared. The educated man may have

no more property than the illiterate. He has access to a whole system of

social values. He has freedom; he has a more genuinely independent type

of power than accrues from the mere possession of things. The society

of the future will find a part of its justice in so adjusting its

economic system that all may enter as fully as possible into this more

social world.

=Methods of Social Selection.=--Finally, recognizing all the value of

the competitive process in the past as a method of selecting ability, it

must be regarded as crude and wasteful. It is like the method of blind

trial and error which obtains in the animal world. The method of ideas,

of conscious use of means to secure ends, is the more effective and the

more rational. Society now is gaining the scientific equipment which may

allow the substitution of the more effective and less wasteful method.

It should discover and educate capacity instead of giving merely a

precarious encouragement to certain special types.

Sec. 9. THREE SPECIAL PROBLEMS

Three special problems may be noticed about which moral judgment is as

yet uncertain: The open versus the closed shop, the capitalization of

corporations, and the "unearned increment."

=1. The Open versus the Closed Shop.=--In certain industries in which

the workmen are well organized they have made contracts with employers

which provide that only union men shall be employed. Such a shop is

called a closed shop, in distinction from an "open shop" in which

non-union men may be employed in part or altogether. The psychological

motive for the demand for the closed shop is natural enough: the union

has succeeded in gaining certain advantages in hours or wages or both;

this has required some expense and perhaps some risk. It is natural to

feel that those who get the advantage should share the expense and

effort, and failing this, should not be admitted to the shop. If the

argument stopped here it would be insufficient for a moral justification

for two reasons. First, joining a union involves much more than payment

of dues. It means control by the union in ways which may interfere with

obligations to family, or even to the social order. Hence, to exclude a

fellow workman from the opportunity to work because he--perhaps for

conscientious reasons--would not belong to the union, could not be

justified unless the union could make it appear that it was maintaining

a social and not merely a group interest. Second, in some cases unions

have sought to limit output. In so far as this is done not for reasons

of health but to raise prices, the union is opposing the interest of

consumers. Here again the union must exhibit a social justification if

it is to gain social approval.

On the other hand it may be noted that the individualist of the second

sort--who believes in the competitive struggle as a moral process--has

no ground on which to declare for "open shop." Exactly the same

principle which would permit combination in capital and place no limit

on competitive pressure, provided it is all done through free contracts,

can raise no objection against combinations of laborers making the best

contracts possible. When a syndicate of capitalists has made a highly

favorable contract or successfully underwritten a large issue of stock,

it is not customary under the principle of "open shop" to give a share

in the contract to all who ask for it, or to let the whole public in "on

the ground floor." Nor are capitalists accustomed to leave a part of the

market to be supplied by some competitor for fear such competitor may

suffer if he does not have business. When the capitalist argues for the

open shop upon the ground of freedom and democracy, it seems like the

case of the mote and the beam.

An analogy with a political problem may aid: Has a nation the right to

exclude (or tax heavily) goods or persons from other countries? May it

maintain a "closed shop"? The policy of the American colonists and of

the United States has varied. The Puritans maintained a "closed shop"

on religious lines. They came to this country to maintain a certain

religion and polity. They expelled several men who did not agree with

them. The United States excludes Chinese laborers, and imposes a tariff

which in many cases is intended to be prohibitive against the products

of other countries. This is done avowedly to protect the laborer, and in

so far as it is effective it closes the shop. The maxim "This is a white

man's country" is a similar "closed shop" utterance. On moral grounds

the non-union man is in the same category as the man of alien race or

country. What, if anything, can justify a nation or smaller group from

excluding others from its benefits? Clearly the only conditions are (1)

that the group or nation is existing for some morally justifiable end,

which (2) would be endangered by the admission of the outsiders. A

colony established to work out religious or political liberty would be

justified in excluding a multitude who sought to enter it and then

subvert these principles. If a union is working for a morally valuable

end, e.g., a certain standard of living which is morally desirable, and

if this were threatened by the admission of non-union men, the closed

shop would seem to be justified. If the purpose were merely to secure

certain advantages to a small group, and if the open shop would not

lower the standard but merely extend its range of benefits, it is hard

to see why the closed shop is not a selfish principle--though no more

selfish than the grounds on which the tariff is usually advocated.

=2. The Capitalization of Corporations=, especially of public service

corporations, is a matter on which there is a difference of policy in

different states, owing probably to uncertainty as to the morality of

the principles involved. The two theories held are: (a) Companies should

issue capital stock only on the basis of money paid in; dividends then

represent a return on actual investment. (b) Companies may issue

whatever stock they please, or whatever they expect their income will

enable them to pay dividends upon; dividends will then represent return

for valuable privileges, or for some utility to be marketed. In behalf

of this latter view it may be claimed that if the company pays dividends

the investors have nothing to complain of, and if it sells its products

or transportation at market rates, the consumer has nothing to complain

of.

So far as the relations between corporation and investor are concerned,

the issues are simple. If the stocks are issued with no expectation that

they will give any return, merely to "sell," it is pure dishonesty, of

the same type which under cruder conditions sold spavined horses or made

counterfeit money, and now assumes the more vulgar type of dealing in

"green goods." The fact that fictitious capital can be publicly

advertised, gives it a financial but not a moral advantage. This,

however, would have such decided limitations, credulous as human nature

is, that if fictitious capital paid no dividends it would soon have no

market. Hence, for the far-seeing promoter, the pressure is toward

making some at least of the fictitious capital pay dividends. What is

the principle in this case? If we are dealing with a new and untried

mode of production or public service, the case is simply that of any

speculation. If a proposed product has a possible utility, but at the

same time involves so much risk that in the long run only half of such

enterprises will succeed, society may consider it worth offering a

profit equal to fifty per cent. in order to pay for the risk. If, on the

other hand, the income is to derive from valuable public franchises, or

from the growth of the community and its necessities, the case is

different. Here there is little, if any, risk for which it is fair for

society to pay. The excessive capital beyond the cost is designed to

disguise the rate of profit, and therefore conceal from the community

the cost of the goods or service. If the public demands cheaper rates it

is told that the company is now paying only a fair dividend upon its

stock.[247] The usual method of capitalizing many enterprises of a

quasi-public sort is to issue bonds to cover the cost of construction or

plant, and then one or more series of stocks which are known as

"velvet." In part these stocks may represent a work of organization

which is a legitimate public service, but in many cases they represent

devices for transferring public wealth to private property. Enormous

sums have been taken from the public in this manner. The element which

makes this method particularly obnoxious is that the quasi-public

corporations are given a monopoly by the community and then take

advantage of this to capitalize indefinitely the necessities of a

growing community. In this case the conception of public service is lost

sight of in the "dazzling possibility of public exploitation."[248]

Few methods of extorting wealth have equaled this. In some cases bribery

of public officials has added an item of expense to be collected later

from the public. When the various forms of public service or protected

industry were first projected there was risk involved. It was necessary

to offer inducements to capital to engage in them. It was desirable to

have railroads, gas, water, express service. But as the factor of risk

has been eliminated, the public tires of paying double prices, and a

"fair" return must be estimated on the basis of actual rather than

fictitious capital. The public has come to have a clear idea as to the

morality of such practices as have been employed in letting contracts

for public buildings at prices far above market value. The New York City

courthouse and Pennsylvania capitol offer familiar examples. Does it

differ materially from such practices when a company charges the public

an excessive price for transportation or lighting, and when State or

municipal authorities authorize by franchise or monopoly such excessive

charges? Probably the conscience of the next century, if not of the next

generation, will fail to see the superior moral quality of the latter

procedure.

=3. The "Unearned Increment."=--This term is applied most frequently to

the increase in land value or franchise value which is due, not to the

owner, but to the growth of the community. A tract of land is bought at

a price fixed by its value as farm land. A city grows up. The owner of

the land may have been active in the building up of industry, but he may

not. An increase of values follows, which is due to the growth of the

community. Shall the owner have it all, or shall the community have it

all, or shall there be a division? The growth in value of a franchise

for gas, electric lighting, transportation, presents the same problem.

It is not usually recognized, however, that the same principle is found

in every increase of value due to increasing demand. The logical basis

for distinction would seem to be that in some cases increase of demand

calls out competition, and the price is lowered; the public thus

receives its share in lower cost. In other cases, notably those first

mentioned, there can be no competition, the price is therefore not often

lowered unless by legislative action, and the whole benefit goes to the

owner of land or franchise. As regards land, the case is much stronger

in Europe, for land titles were originally gained there largely by

seizure, whereas in America private titles have been largely through

purchase.

Individualism, according as it argues from the platform of natural

rights or from that of social welfare, would claim either that

individuals should have all the increase because they have a right to

all they can get under a system of free contracts, or that it is for the

social welfare to allow them all they can get since private property is

public wealth. From the standpoint of natural rights the reply would

seem to be unanswerable: the community gives the increased value; it

belongs to the community. From the standpoint of social welfare the

answer is not so simple. It might, for example, be socially desirable to

encourage the owners of farming land by leaving to them the increase in

value due to the growth of the country, whereas city land-owners might

need no such inducement. Investors in a new form of public service

corporation might need greater inducements than would be fair to those

in enterprises well established. But, although details are complex, the

social conscience is working toward this general principle: the

community should share in the values which it produces. If it cannot do

this by cheaper goods and better service, it must by graded taxation, by

ownership, or by some other means. The British government has already

considered a measure for ascertaining the land values in Scotland as a

preliminary step toward adjustment of this question.

FOOTNOTES:

[240] Boston has an ingenious method of dividing profits. The company

which supplies gas must lower the price of gas in proportion as it

increases its rate of dividends.

[241] February 24, 1908.

[242] Spargo, _Socialism_, 220-27.

[243] _Philosophical Review_, xiv., 370 f.

[244] Cf. J. A. Smith, _The Spirit of American Government_, 1907.

[245] I have followed in this paragraph the discussion of Professor

Munroe Smith, _Van Norden's Magazine_, February, 1908. For a full

history see E. Freund, _The Police Power_, 1905.

[246] Above, p. 554.

[247] As in the case of gas in New York City, where the court has

decided that the public cannot refuse to pay interest on the value of

the franchise--its own gift.

[248] Cf. Hadley, _Economics_, p. 159.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XXV

PROFESSOR SEAGER'S PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL LEGISLATION WITH SPECIAL

REFERENCE TO WAGE-EARNERS

In the conviction that in the field of social legislation the United

States is behind the more progressive countries of Europe, Professor

Henry R. Seager, of Columbia University, presented the following

_Outline_ for discussion at a meeting of the American Association for

Labor Legislation, December 30, 1907. It is reproduced with his consent

as giving concrete expression to several of the principles advocated in

the foregoing chapters.

The ends to be aimed at in any programme of social legislation

are:

I. To protect wage-earners in the continued enjoyment of standards

of living to which they are already accustomed.

II. To assist them to attain to higher standards of living.

_I. Measures to protect prevailing standards of living._

The principal contingencies which threaten standards of living

already acquired are: (1) industrial accidents; (2) illness; (3)

invalidity and old age; (4) premature death; (5) unemployment.

These contingencies are not in practice adequately provided

against by wage-earners themselves. In consequence the losses they

entail, in the absence of any social provision against them, fall

with crushing force on the families which suffer from them, and

only too often reduce such families from a position of

independence and self-respect to one of humiliating and

efficiency-destroying social dependency. The following remedies

for the evils resulting from this situation are suggested.

(1) Employers' liability laws fail to provide adequate indemnity

to the victims of industrial accidents because in a large

proportion of cases no legal blame attaches to the employer and

because litigation under them is costly and uncertain in its

outcome. Adequate indemnification must be sought along the line of

workmen's compensation for all industrial accidents at the expense

of the employer (the British system) or of compulsory accident

insurance (the German system). The former seems to accord better

with American ideas and traditions.

(2) The principle of workmen's compensation may be extended to

include indemnity for loss of wages due to trade diseases.

Provision against illness not directly traceable to the employment

must be sought either in compulsory illness insurance or in

subsidized and state-directed sick-insurance clubs. Trade unions

may assume the functions of such clubs in organized trades. The

latter plan seems better suited to present American conditions

than compulsory illness insurance.

(3) Provision against invalidity and old age may be through

compulsory old age insurance, or through state old age pensions.

The latter, though more costly, are believed to be better suited

to American conditions, when hedged about by proper restrictions,

than compulsory old age insurance with the elaborate

administrative machinery which it entails.

(4) Premature death may be provided against by an extension of the

machinery for caring for the victims of industrial accident and of

illness to provide for their families when accident or illness

results fatally.

(5) Provision against losses due to unemployment is attended with

great difficulties because unemployment is so frequently the

consequence of incapacity or of disinclination for continuous

labor. The most promising plan for providing against this evil

appears to be through subsidizing and supervising trade unions

which pay out-of-work benefits to stimulate this side of their

activity. Public employment bureaus and industrial colonies for

the unemployed may also help to alleviate the evil of

unemployment.

* * * * *

Adequate social provision against these five contingencies along

the lines suggested, would, it is believed, go a long way towards

solving the problem of social dependency. If these concessions

were made to the demands of social justice, a more drastic policy

towards social dependents than public opinion will now sanction

might be inaugurated with good prospect of confining social

dependency to the physically, mentally, and morally defective.

_II. Measures to elevate standards of living._

The primary conditions essential to rising standards of living are

energy and enterprise on the part of wage-earners and

opportunities to make energy and enterprise count in the form of

higher earnings. The principal contributions which social

legislation may make to advancing standards of living in the

United States are believed to be: (1) measures serving to

encourage saving for future needs on the part of wage-earners by

providing safe investments for savings; (2) measures protecting

wage-earners from the debilitating effects of an unregulated

competition; (3) measures serving to bring within the reach of all

opportunities for industrial training. Standards of living will

also be advanced, of course, by nearly all measures calculated to

promote the general well-being, such as tax and tariff-reform

legislation, laws safeguarding the national domain, the public

regulation of corporations, especially those with monopolistic

powers, etc., but these are not usually classed under the head of

social legislation.

(1) The greatest present need under this head is for a postal

savings bank like those of European countries. The advantages of a

postal savings bank over privately managed banks are the wider

distribution of places of deposit, post-offices being located in

every section of the country, and the greater confidence

depositors would feel in such a bank. Once established the postal

savings bank might enter the insurance field, as has the British

postal savings bank, not as a rival of privately managed insurance

companies, but to bring to every wage-earner the opportunity to

secure safe insurance. Next to providing itself opportunities for

safe investment and insurance, the government has an important

duty to perform in supervising the business of privately managed

savings banks and insurance companies. Notwithstanding the

progress made in recent years in the United States in this field,

there is still something left for social legislation to

accomplish.

(2) If energy and enterprise are to be kept at a maximum,

wage-earners must be protected from exhausting toil under

unhealthful conditions. Skilled wage-earners can usually protect

themselves through trade unions, but unskilled workers, women and

children, require legal protection. Under this head belong,

therefore, the familiar types of protective labor laws. The

following may be specified:

(a) Laws prohibiting the employment of children below fourteen in

all gainful pursuits. Such laws should be uniform throughout the

United States and rigidly enforced by means of employment

certificates based on convincing evidence of age and physical

examination to determine fitness. As provision for free public

education is made more adequate to present needs the minimum age

may be advanced perhaps to sixteen.

(b) Laws limiting the hours of labor of young persons over

fourteen. Protection here should extend to eighteen, at least in

factory employments, and employment certificates should be

required of all under that age.

(c) Laws limiting the hours of labor of women. In the regulation

of women's work in the United States the principal needs are

uniformity and machinery for efficient enforcement. The last is

facilitated by the plan of specifying in the law the working

period for the protected classes, and American courts must be

brought to see the reasonableness (administratively) of such

prescriptions. The nine-hour day and prohibition of night work set

a high enough standard until greater uniformity and more efficient

enforcement shall have been secured.

(d) Prescriptions in regard to sanitation and safety appliances.

General prescriptions in regard to ventilation, etc., need to be

made more exact, and much more attention needs to be given to the

special regulation of dangerous trades, the existence of which has

been largely ignored thus far in American legislation.

(3) The chief reason for restricting the labor of children and

young persons is to permit the physical and mental development of

childhood and youth to proceed unhampered and to ripen into

strong, vigorous, and efficient manhood and womanhood. To attain

this end, it is necessary to provide not only for wholesome living

conditions and general free public education, but also for special

industrial training for older children superior to the training

afforded in modern factories and workshops. The apprenticeship

system now fails as a method of industrial training, even in those

few trades which retain the forms of apprenticeship. There is

urgent social need for comprehensive provision for industrial

training as a part of the public school system, not to take the

place of the training now given to children under fourteen, but to

hold those between fourteen and sixteen in school. As this need is

supplied the period of compulsory school attendance may gradually

be extended up to the sixteenth year. The guiding principle of

such industrial training should be that it is the function of

free public education in the United States not only to prepare

children to lead useful, well-rounded and happy lives, but to

command the earnings without which such lives are impossible.

The above programme of social legislation is urged as a step

towards realizing that canon of social justice which demands for

all equal industrial opportunities. It is believed that it will

also help to raise the standard of citizenship in the country by

making both wage-earners and employers more intelligent, more

efficient, and more truly democratic. Thus it will serve to

prepare the way for such further industrial reorganization as may

be found desirable.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FAMILY

The family in its moral aspects has one end, the common good of all its

members, but this has three aspects. (1) Marriage converts an attachment

between man and woman, either of passion or of friendship, into a

deliberate, intimate, permanent, responsible union for a common end of

mutual good. It is this common end, a good of a higher, broader, fuller

sort than either could attain in isolation, which lifts passion from the

impulsive or selfish to the moral plane; it is the peculiar intimacy and

the peculiar demands for common sympathy and co-operation, which give it

greater depth and reach than ordinary friendship. (2) The family is the

great social agency for the care and training of the race. (3) This

function reacts upon the character of the parents. Tenderness, sympathy,

self-sacrifice, steadiness of purpose, responsibility, and activity, are

all demanded and usually evoked by the children. A brief sketch of the

development of the family and of its psychological basis, will prepare

the way for a consideration of its present problems.

Sec. 1. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF THE MODERN FAMILY

The division of the sexes appeals to the biologist as an agency for

securing greater variability, and so greater possibility of adaptation

and progress. It has also to the sociologist the value of giving greater

variety in function, and so a much richer society than could exist

without it. Morally, the realization of these values, and the further

effects upon character noted above, depend greatly upon the terms under

which the marriage union is formed and maintained. The number of parties

to the union, the mode of forming it, its stability, and the relations

of husband and wife, parents and children, while in the family relation,

have shown in western civilization a tendency toward certain lines of

progress, although the movement has been irregular and has been

interrupted by certain halts or even reversions.

=The Maternal Type.=--The early family, certainly in many parts of the

world, was formed when a man left his father and mother to "cleave unto

his wife," that is, when the woman remained in her own group and the man

came from his group to live with her. This tended to give the woman

continued protection--and also continued control--by her own relatives,

and made the children belong to the mother's clan. As recent

ethnologists seem inclined to agree, this does not mean a matriarchal

family. The woman's father and brothers, rather than the woman, are in

the last analysis the authority. At the same time, at a stage when

physical force is so large a factor, this type of family undoubtedly

favors the woman's condition as compared with the next to be mentioned.

=The Paternal Type.=--When the woman leaves her own group to live in the

house of her husband, it means a possible loss of backing and position

for her. But it means a great gain for the influence which insures the

wife's fidelity, the father's authority over the children and interest

in them, and finally the permanence of the family. The power of the

husband and father reached its extreme among western peoples in the

patriarchate at Rome, which allowed him the right of life and death. At

its best the patriarchal type of family fostered the dignity and power

of a ruler and owner, the sense of honor which watched jealously over

self and wife and children to keep the name unsullied; finally the

respective attitudes of protector and protected enhanced the charm of

each for the other. At its worst it meant domineering brutality, and

either the weakness of abject submission or the misery of hopeless

injustice.

Along with this building up of "father right" came variations in the

mode of gaining a wife. When the man takes a wife instead of going to

his wife, he may either capture her, or purchase her, or serve for her.

In any of these cases she may become to a certain extent his property as

well as his wife. This does not necessarily imply a feeling of

humiliation. The Kafir women profess great contempt for a system in

which a woman is not worth buying. But it evidently favors a commercial

theory of the whole relation. The bride's consent may sometimes be a

necessary part of the transaction, but it is not always.

=Effects of Father Right.=--This family of "father right" is also likely

to encourage a theory that the man should have greater freedom in

marriage than the woman. In the lowest types of civilization we often

find the marital relations very loose from our point of view, although,

as was noted in Chapter II., these peoples usually make up for this in

the rigidity of the rules as to who may marry or have marriage

relations. With some advance in civilization and with the father right,

we are very apt to find polygamy permitted to chiefs or those who can

afford it, even though the average man may have but one wife. In certain

cases the wives may be an economic advantage rather than a burden. It

goes along with a family in which father and children are of first

importance that a wife may even be glad to have her servant bear the

children if they may only be reckoned as hers. The husband has thus

greater freedom--for polyandry seems to have been rare among civilized

peoples except under stress of poverty. The greater freedom of the

husband is likely to appear also in the matter of divorce. Among many

savage peoples divorce is easy for both parties if there is mutual

consent, but with the families in which father right prevails it is

almost always easier for the man. The ancient Hebrew might divorce his

wife for any cause he pleased, but there is no mention of a similar

right on her part, and it doubtless did not occur to the lawgiver. The

code of Hammurabi allows the man to put away the mother of his children

by giving her and her children suitable maintenance, or a childless wife

by returning the bride price, but a wife who has acted foolishly or

extravagantly may be divorced without compensation or kept as a slave.

The woman may also claim a divorce "if she has been economical and has

no vice and her husband has gone out and greatly belittled her." But if

she fails to prove her claim and appears to be a gadder-about, "they

shall throw that woman into the water." India and China have the

patriarchal family, and the Brahmans added the obligation of the widow

never to remarry. Greater freedom of divorce on the part of the husband

is also attended by a very different standard for marital faithfulness.

For the unfaithful husband there is frequently no penalty or a slight

one; for the wife it is frequently death.

=The Roman Family.=--The modern family in western civilization is the

product of three main forces: the Roman law, the Teutonic custom, and

the Christian Church. Early Roman law had recognized the extreme power

of the husband and father. Wife and children were in his "hand." All

women must be in the _tutela_ of some man. The woman, according to the

three early forms of marriage, passed completely from the power and hand

of her father into that of her husband. At the same time she was the

only wife, and divorce was rare. But by the closing years of the

Republic a new method of marriage, permitting the woman to remain in the

_manus_ of her father, had come into vogue, and with it an easy theory

of divorce. Satirists have charged great degeneracy in morals as a

result, but Hobhouse thinks that upon the whole the Roman matron would

seem to have retained the position of her husband's companion,

counselor, and friend, which she had held in those more austere times

when marriage brought her legally under his dominion.[249]

=The Germanic Family.=--The Germanic peoples recognized an almost

unlimited power of the husband. The passion for liberty, which Caesar

remarked as prevalent among them, did not seem to require any large

measure of freedom for their women. In fact, they, like other peoples,

might be said to have satisfied the two principles of freedom and

control by allotting all the freedom to the men and all, or nearly all,

the control to the women. Hobhouse thus summarizes the conditions:

"The power of the husband was strongly developed; he might expose

the infant children, chastise his wife, dispose of her person. He

could not put her to death, but if she was unfaithful, he was,

with the consent of the relations, judge and executioner. The wife

was acquired by purchase from her own relatives without reference

to her own desires, and by purchase passed out of her family. She

did not inherit in early times at all, though at a later period

she acquired that right in the absence of male heirs. She was in

perpetual ward, subject, in short, to the Chinese rule of the

three obediences, to which must be added, as feudal powers

developed, the rule of the king or other feudal superior. And the

guardianship or _mundium_ was frankly regarded in early law rather

as a source of profit to the guardian than as a means of defense

to the ward, and for this reason it fetched a price in the market,

and was, in fact, salable far down in the Middle Ages. Lastly, the

German wife, though respected, had not the certainty enjoyed by

the early Roman Matron of reigning alone in the household. It is

true that polygamy was rare in the early German tribes, but this,

as we have seen, is universally the case where the numbers of the

sexes are equal. Polygamy was allowed, and was practiced by the

chiefs."

=Two Lines of Church Influence.=--The influence of the church on

marriage and family life was in two conflicting lines. On the one hand,

the homage and adoration given to Mary and to the saints, tended to

exalt and refine the conception of woman. Marriage was, moreover,

treated as a "sacrament," a holy mystery, symbolic of the relation of

Christ and the church. The priestly benediction gave religious

sacredness from the beginning; gradually a marriage liturgy sprang up

which added to the solemnity of the event, and finally the whole

ceremony was made an ecclesiastical instead of a secular function.[250]

The whole institution was undoubtedly raised to a more serious and

significant position. But, on the other hand, an ascetic stream of

influence had pursued a similar course, deepening and widening as it

flowed. Although from the beginning those "forbidding to marry" had been

denounced, it had nearly always been held that the celibate life was a

higher privilege. If marriage was a sacrament, it was nevertheless held

that marriage made a man unfit to perform the sacraments. Woman was

regarded as the cause of the original sin. Marriage was from this

standpoint a concession to human weakness. "The generality of men and

women must marry or they will do worse; therefore, marriage must be made

easy; but the very pure hold aloof from it as from a defilement. The law

that springs from this source is not pleasant to read."[251] It must,

however, be noted that, although celibacy by a selective process tended

to remove continually the finer, more aspiring men and women, and

prevent them from leaving any descendants, it had one important value

for woman. The convent was at once a refuge, and a door to activity.

"The career open to the inmates of convents was greater than any other

ever thrown open to women in the course of modern European

history."[252]

Two important contributions to the justice of the marriage relation, and

therefore to the better theory of the family, are in any case to be set

down to the credit of the church. The first was that the consent of the

parties was the only thing necessary to constitute a valid marriage.

"Here the church had not only to combat old tradition and the authority

of the parents, but also the seignorial power of the feudal lord, and it

must be accounted to it for righteousness that it emancipated the woman

of the servile as well as of the free classes in relation to the most

important event of her life."[253] The other was that in maintaining as

it did the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage, it held that its

violation was as bad for the husband as for the wife. The older theories

had looked at infidelity either as an injury to the husband's property,

or as introducing uncertainty as to the parenthood of children, and this

survives in Dr. Johnson's dictum of a "boundless" difference. The

feelings of the wife, or even of the husband, aside from his concern for

his property and children, do not seem to have been considered.

The church thus modified the Germanic and Roman traditions, but never

entirely abolished them, because she was divided within herself as to

the real place of family life. Protestantism, in its revolt from Rome,

opposed both its theories of marriage. On the one hand, the Reformers

held that marriage is not a sacrament, but a civil contract, admitting

of divorce. On the other hand, they regarded marriage as the most

desirable state, and abolished the celibacy of the clergy. The

"subjection of women," especially of married women, has, however,

remained as the legal theory until very recently. In England it was the

theory in Blackstone's time that "The very being or legal existence of

the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated

and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection,

and cover, she performs everything." According to the old law, he might

give her "moderate correction." "But with us in the politer reign of

Charles II., this power of correction began to be doubted." It was not

until 1882, however, that a married woman in England gained control of

her property. In the United States the old injustice of the common law

has been gradually remedied by statutes until substantial equality in

relation to property and children has been secured.

Sec. 2. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE FAMILY

The psychology of family life may be conveniently considered under two

heads: that of the husband and wife, and that of parents and children,

brothers and sisters.

1. The complex sentiment, love, which is found in the most perfect

family life, is on the one hand (1) a feeling or emotion; on the other

(2) a purpose, a will. Both these are modified and strengthened by (3)

parenthood and (4) social and religious influences.

=(1) The Emotional and Instinctive Basis.=--As feeling or emotion love

may have two roots. A mental sympathy, based on kindred tastes and

interests, is sometimes present at the outset, but in any case it is

likely to develop under the favoring conditions of a common life,

particularly if there are either children or a common work. But it is

well known that this is not all. A friend is one thing; a lover another.

The intimacy involved requires not only the more easily described and

superficial attraction of mind for mind; it demands also a deeper

congeniality of the whole person, incapable of precise formulation,

manifesting itself in the subtler emotional attitudes of instinctive

reaction. This instinctive, as contrasted with the more reflective,

attraction is frequently described as one of opposites or contrasting

dispositions and physical characteristics. But this is nothing that

enters into the feeling as a conscious factor. The only explanation

which we can give in the present condition of science is the biological

one. From the biological point of view it was a most successful venture

when Nature, by some happy variation, developed two sexes with slightly

different characters and made their union necessary to the continuance

of life in certain species. By uniting in every new individual the

qualities of two parents, the chances of variation are greatly

increased, and variation is the method of progress. To keep the same

variety of fruit the horticulturist buds or grafts; to get new varieties

he plants seed. The extraordinary progress combined with continuity of

type, which has been exhibited in the plant and animal world, has been

effected, in part at least, through the agency of sex. This long process

has developed certain principles of selection which are instinctive.

Whether they are the best possible or not, they represent a certain

adjustment which has secured such progress as has been attained, and

such adaptation to environment as exists, and it would be unwise, if it

were not impossible, to disregard them. Marriages of convenience are

certainly questionable from the biological standpoint.

But the instinctive basis is not in and of itself sufficient to

guarantee a happy family life. If man were living wholly a life of

instinct, he might trust instinct as a guide in establishing his family.

But since he is living an intellectual and social life as well,

intellectual and social factors must enter. The instinctive basis of

selection was fixed by conditions which contemplated only a more or

less limited period of attachment, with care of the young for a few

years. Modern society requires the husband and wife to contemplate

life-long companionship, and a care for children which implies capacity

in the father to provide for a great range of advantages, and in the

mother to be intellectual and moral guide and friend until maturity. To

trust the security of these increased demands to instinct is to invite

failure. Instinct must be guided by reason if perfect friendship and

mutual supplementation in the whole range of interests are to be added

to the intenser, but less certain, attraction.

=(2) The Common Will.=--But whether based on instinct or intellectual

sympathy, no feeling or emotion by itself is an adequate moral basis for

the life together of a man and a woman. What was said on p. 249, as to

the moral worthlessness of any _mere_ feeling abstracted from will,

applies here. Love or affection, in the only sense in which it makes a

moral basis of the family, is not the "affection" of psychological

language--the pleasant or unpleasant tone of consciousness; it is the

resolute purpose in each to seek the other's good, or rather to seek a

_common_ good which can be attained only through a common life involving

mutual self-sacrifice. It is the good will of Kant specifically directed

toward creating a common good. It is the formation of a small "kingdom

of ends" in which each treats the other "as end," never as means only;

in which each is "both sovereign and subject"; in which the common will,

thus created, enhances the person of each and gives it higher moral

dignity and worth. And, as in the case of all purpose which has moral

value, there is such a common good as the actual result. The disposition

and character of both husband and wife are developed and supplemented.

The male is biologically the more variable and motor. He has usually

greater initiative and strength. Economic and industrial life

accentuates these tendencies. But alone he is apt to become rough or

hard, to lack the feeling in which the charm and value of life are

experienced. On the other hand, the woman, partly by instinct, it may

be, but certainly by vocation, is largely occupied with the variety of

cares on which human health, comfort, and morality depend. She tends to

become narrow, unless supplemented by man. The value of emotion and

feeling in relation to this process of mutual aid and enlargement, as in

general, is, as Aristotle pointed out, to perfect the will. It gives

warmth and vitality to what would otherwise be in any case partial and

might easily become insincere. There was a profound truth which underlay

the old psychology in which "the heart" meant at once character and

passion.

=(3) The Influence of Parenthood.=--Nature takes one step at a time. If

all the possible consequences of family life had to be definitely

forecasted, valued, and chosen at the outset, many would shrink. But

this would be because there is as yet no capacity to appreciate new

values before the actual experience of them. "Every promise of the soul

has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want."

Parental affection is not usually present until there are real children

to evoke it. At the outset the mutual love of husband and wife is

enough. But as the first, more instinctive and emotional factors lose

relatively, the deeper union of will and sympathy needs community of

interest if it is to become permanent and complete. Such community of

interest is often found in sharing a business or a profession, but under

present industrial organization this is not possible as a general rule.

The most general and effective object of common interest is the children

of the family. As pointed out by John Fiske, the mere keeping of the

parents together by the prolongation of infancy in the human species has

had great moral influence. Present civilization does not merely demand

that the parents cooperate eight or ten years for the child's physical

support. There has been a second epoch in the prolongation. The parents

now must cooperate until the children are through school and college,

and in business or homes of their own. And the superiority of children

over the other common interests is that in a different form the parents

repeat the process which first took them out of their individual lives

to unite for mutual helpfulness. If the parents treat the children not

merely as sources of gratification or pride, but as persons, with lives

of their own to live, with capacities to develop, the personality of the

parent is enlarged. The affection between husband and wife is enriched

by the new relationship it has created.

=(4) Social and Religious Factors.=--The relations of husband and wife,

parent and child, are the most intimate of personal relations, but they

are none the less relations of social interest. In fact, just because

they are so intimate, society is the more deeply concerned. Or, to put

it from the individual's standpoint, just because the parties are

undertaking a profoundly personal step, they must take it as members of

a moral order. The act of establishing the family signifies, indeed, the

entrance into fuller participation in the social life; it is the

assuming of ties which make the parties in a new and deeper sense

organic parts of humanity. This social and cosmic meaning is

appropriately symbolized by the civil and religious ceremony. In its

control over the marriage contract, and in its prescriptions as to the

care and education of the children, society continues to show its

interest. All this lends added value and strength to the emotional and

intellectual bases.

=2. Parent and Child.=--The other relationships in the family, those of

parents and children, brothers and sisters, need no elaborate analysis.

The love of parents for children, like that of man and woman, has an

instinctive basis. Those species which have cared for their offspring

have had a great advantage in the struggle for existence. Nature has

selected them, and is constantly dropping the strains of any race or set

which cares more for power, or wealth, or learning than for children.

Tenderness, courage, responsibility, activity, patience, forethought,

personal virtue--these are constantly evoked not by the needs of

children in general, but by the needs of our own children. The

instinctive response, however, is soon broadened in outlook and deepened

in meaning. Intellectual activity is stimulated by the needs of

providing for the physical welfare, and, still more, by the necessity of

planning for the unfolding mind. The interchange of question and answer

which forces the parent to think his whole world anew, and which with

the allied interchange of imitation and suggestion produces a give and

take between all members of the family, is constantly making for

fluidity and flexibility, for tolerance and catholicity. In the

thoughtful parent these educative influences are still further enriched

by the problem of moral training. For in each family, as in the race,

the need of eliciting and directing right conduct in the young is one of

the most important agencies in bringing home to the elders the

significance of custom and authority, of right and wrong. It is natural

enough, from one standpoint, to think of childhood as an imperfect

state, looking forward for its completeness and getting its value

because of its rich promise. But the biologist tells us that the child

is nearer the line of progress than the more developed, but also more

rigidly set, man. And the lover of children is confident that if any age

of humanity exists by its own right, and "pays as it goes," it is

childhood. It is not only meet, but a joy, that the fathers labor for

the children. Many, if not most, of the objects for which men and women

strive and drudge seem less satisfactory when obtained; because we have

meanwhile outgrown the desire. Children afford an object of affection

which is constantly unfolding new powers, and opening new reaches of

personality.[254] Conversely, an authority which is also tender,

patient, sympathetic, is the best medium to develop in the child

self-control. The necessity of mutual forbearance where there are

several children, of sharing fairly, of learning to give and take, is

the best possible method of training for membership in the larger

society. In fact, from the point of view of the social organism as a

whole, the family has two functions; as a smaller group, it affords an

opportunity for eliciting the qualities of affection and character which

cannot be displayed at all in the larger group; and, in the second

place, it is a training for future members of the larger group in those

qualities of disposition and character which are essential to

citizenship.[255]

Sec. 3. GENERAL ELEMENTS OF STRAIN IN FAMILY RELATIONS

=Difference in Temperament.=--While there are intrinsic qualities of men

and women that bring them together for family life, and, while there is

in most cases a strong reenforcement afforded by the presence of

children, there are certain characteristics which tend just as

inevitably to produce tension, and those forces of tension are

strengthened at the present time by certain economic, educational, and

cultural conditions. The differences between men and women may be at the

basis of their instinctive attraction for each other; they certainly

have possibilities of friction as well. A fundamental difference

already noted is that the male is more variable, the female more true to

the type. Biologically at least, the _varium et mutabile_ is applied by

the poet to the wrong sex. Applied to the mind and disposition, this

means probably not only a greater variation of capacity and temper as a

whole,--more geniuses and also more at the other extreme than among

women,--but also a greater average mobility.

=Differences Accentuated by Occupation.=--From the early occupations of

hunting and fishing, to the modern greater range of occupations, any

native mobility in man has found stimulation and scope, as compared with

the energies of women which have less distinct differentiation and a

more limited contact with the work of others. And there is another

industrial difference closely connected with this, which has been

pointed out by Ellis,[256] and Thomas.[257] Primitive man hunted and

fought. Much of primitive industry, the prototype, so far as it existed,

of the industrial activity of the modern world, was carried on by woman.

Industrial progress has been signalized by the splitting off of one

phase of woman's work after another, and by the organization and

expansion of this at the hands of man. Man's work has thus become more

specialized and scientific; woman's has remained more detailed, complex,

and diffused. Her work in the family of ordering the household, caring

for the children, securing the health and comfort of all its members,

necessarily involves personal adjustment; hence it resists system. As a

result of the differentiation man has gained in greater and greater

degree a scientific and objective standard for his work; woman neither

has nor can have--at least in the sphere of personal relations--the

advantage of a standard. Business has its ratings in the quantity of

sales or the ratio of net profits. The professions and skilled trades

have their own tests of achievement. A scientist makes his discovery, a

lawyer wins his case, an architect builds his bridge, the mechanic his

machine; he knows whether he has done a good piece of work, and respects

himself accordingly. He can appeal from the man next to him to the

judgment of his profession. Conversely, the standard of the trade or

profession helps to lift the individual's work. It is a constant

stimulus, as well as support. A woman's work in the family has no such

professional stimulus, or professional vindication. If the family is

lenient, the work is not held up to a high level. On the other hand, it

must make its appeal to the persons immediately concerned, and if they

do not respond, the woman feels that she has failed to do something

really worth while. If her work is not valued, she feels that it is not

valuable. For there is no demonstrative proof of a successful home any

more than there is of a good work of art. It is easy enough to point out

reasons why the picture or the home should please and satisfy, but if

the work itself is not convincing, no demonstration that similar works

have satisfied is of any avail.

The way in which men and women come into contact with others is another

element in the case. Man comes into contact with others for the most

part in an abstract way. He deals not with men, women, and children, but

with employers or employed, with customers or clients, or patients. He

doesn't have to stand them in all their varied phases, or enter into

those intimate relations which involve strain of adjustment in its

fullest extent. Moreover, business or professional manner and etiquette

come in to relieve the necessity of personal effort. The "professional

manner" serves the same function in dealing with others, which habit

plays in the individual life; it takes the place of continual

readjustment of attention. When a man is forced to lay this aside and

deal in any serious situation as "a human being," he feels a far greater

strain. The woman's task is less in extension, but great in intension.

It obliges her to deal with the children, at any rate, as wholes, and a

"whole" child is a good deal of a strain. If she does not see the whole

of the husband, it is quite likely that the part not brought home--the

professional or business part of him--is the most alert, intelligent,

and interesting phase. The constant close-at-hand personal relations,

unrelieved by the abstract impersonal attitude and the generalizing

activity which it invites, constitute an element of strain which few men

understand, and which probably few could endure and possess their souls.

The present division of labor seems, therefore, to make the man

excessively abstract, the woman excessively personal, instead of

supplementing to some extent the weak side of each.

=Difference in Attitude toward the Family.=--As if these differences in

attitude based on disposition and occupation were not enough, we have a

thoroughgoing difference in the attitude of men and women toward the

very institution which invites them. The man is ready enough to assent

to the importance of the family for the race, but his family means not

an interference with other ambitions, but usually an aid to their

fulfillment. His family is one interest among several, and is very

likely subordinate in his thought to his profession or his business. In

early ages to rove or conquer, in modern life to master nature and

control her resources or his fellowmen--this has been the insistent

instinct which urges even the long-tossed Ulysses from Ithaca and from

Penelope again upon the deep. Woman, on the other hand, if she enters a

family, usually abandons any other ambition and forgets any acquired art

or skill of her previous occupation. To be the mistress of a home may be

precisely what she would choose as a vocation. But there is usually no

alternative if she is to have a home at all. It is not a question of a

family in addition to a vocation, but of a family _as_ a vocation. Hence

woman must regard family life not merely as a good; it must be _the_

good, and usually the exclusive good.

If, then, a woman has accepted the family as the supreme good, it is

naturally hard to be in perfect sympathy with the man's standard of

family life as secondary. Of course a completer vision may find that a

division of labor, a difference of function, may carry with it a

difference in standards of value; the mastery of nature and the

maintenance of the family may be neither an absolute good in itself, but

each a necessity to life and progress. But neither man nor woman is

always equal to this view, and to the full sympathy for the relative

value of the other's standpoint. Where it cuts closest is in the

attitude toward breach of faith in the family tie. Men have severe codes

for the man who cheats at cards or forges a signature, but treat much

more leniently, or entirely ignore, the gravest offenses against the

family. These latter do not seem to form a barrier to political,

business, or social success (among men). Women have a severe standard

for family sanctity, especially for their own sex. But it would probably

be difficult to convince most women that it is a more heinous offense to

secrete a card, or even with Nora in _The Doll's House_, to forge a

name, than to be unfaithful. It is not meant that the average man or

woman approves either form of wrongdoing, but that there is a difference

of emphasis evidenced in the public attitude. In view of all these

differences in nature, occupation, and social standard it may be said

that however well husband and wife may love each other, few understand

each other completely. Perhaps most men do not understand women at all.

Corresponding to the "psychologist's fallacy," whose evils have been

depicted by James, there is a "masculine fallacy" and a "feminine

fallacy."

=Difference in Age.=--The difference in age between parents and children

brings certain inevitable hindrances to complete understanding. The most

thoroughgoing is that parent and children really stand concretely for

the two factors of continuity and individual variation which confront

each other in so many forms. The parent has found his place in the

social system, and is both steadied and to some extent made rigid by the

social tradition. The child, though to some extent imitating and

adopting this tradition, has as yet little reasoned adherence to it. The

impulses and expanding life do not find full expression in the set ways

already open, and occasionally break out new channels. The conservatism

of the parent may be a wiser and more social, or merely a more hardened

and narrow, mode of conduct; some of the child's variations may be

irrational and pernicious to himself and society; others may promise a

larger reasonableness, a more generous social order--but meanwhile

certain features of the conflict between reason and impulse, order and

change, are constantly appearing. Differences in valuation are also

inevitable and can be bridged only by an intelligent sympathy. It is

easy to consider this or that to be of slight importance to the child

when it is really his whole world for the time. Even if he does "get

over it," the effect on the disposition may remain, and affect the

temper or emotional life, even though not consciously remembered.

Probably, also, most parents do not realize how early a crude but

sometimes even passionate sense for "fairness" develops, or how

different the relative setting of an act appears if judged from the

motives actually operative with the child, and not from those which

might produce such an act in a "grown-up." Most parents and children

love each other; few reach a complete understanding.

Sec. 4. SPECIAL CONDITIONS WHICH GIVE RISE TO PRESENT PROBLEMS

In addition to the more general conditions of family life, there are

certain conditions at present operative which give rise to special

problems, or rather emphasize certain aspects of the permanent problems.

The family is quite analogous to political society. There needs to be

constant readjustment between order and progress, between the control of

the society and the freedom of the individual. The earlier bonds of

custom or force have to be exchanged in point after point for a more

voluntary and moral order. In the words of Kant, heteronomy must

steadily give place to autonomy, subordination of rank or status to

division of labor with equality in dignity. The elements of strain in

the family life at present may fairly be expected to give rise

ultimately to a better constitution of its relations. The special

conditions are partly economic, partly educational and political, but

the general process is a part of the larger growth of modern

civilization with the increasing development of individuality and desire

for freedom. It is sometimes treated as if it affected only the woman or

the children; in reality it affects the man as well, though in less

degree, as his was not the subordinate position.

=The Economic Factors.=--The "industrial revolution" transferred

production from home to factory. The household is no longer as a rule an

industrial unit. Spinning, weaving, tailoring, shoemaking, soap-making,

iron- and wood-working, and other trades have gone to factories. Men,

young unmarried women, and to some extent married women also, have gone

with them. Children have lost association with one parent, and in some

cases with both. The concentration of industry and business leads to

cities. Under present means of transportation this means apartments

instead of houses, it means less freedom, more strain, for both mother

and children, and possible deteriorating effects upon the race which as

yet are quite outside any calculation. But leaving this uncertain field

of effects upon child life, we notice certain potent effects upon men

and women.

It might be a difficult question to decide the exact gains and losses

for family life due to the absence of the man from home during the day.

On the one hand, too constant association is a source of friction; on

the other, there is likely to result some loss of sympathy, and where

the working-day is long, an almost absolute loss of contact with

children. If children are the great natural agencies for cultivating

tenderness and affection, it is certainly unfortunate that fathers

should be deprived of this education. The effect of the industrial

revolution upon women has been widely noted. First of all, the opening

of an increasing number of occupations to women has rendered them

economically more independent. They are not forced to the alternative of

marriage or dependence upon relatives. If already married, even although

they may have lost touch to some extent with their former occupation,

they do not feel the same compulsion to endure intolerable conditions in

the home rather than again attempt self-support. An incidental effect of

the entrance of women upon organized occupations, with definite hours

and impersonal standards, is to bring out more strongly by contrast the

"belated" condition of domestic work. It is difficult to obtain skilled

workers for an occupation requiring nearly double the standard number of

hours, isolation instead of companionship during work, close personal

contact with an employer, a measure of control over conduct outside of

the hours on duty, and finally the social inferiority implied by an

occupation which has in it survivals of the status of the old-time

servant. Indeed, the mistress of the house, if she "does her own work,"

doesn't altogether like her situation. There is now no one general

occupation which all men are expected to master irrespective of native

tastes and abilities. If every male were obliged to make not only his

own clothing, including head- and foot-wear, but that of his whole

family, unassisted, or with practically unskilled labor, there would

probably be as much misfit clothing as there is now unsatisfactory

home-making, and possibly there would be an increase of irritability and

"nervousness" on the one side and of criticism or desertion on the

other, which would increase the present strain upon the divorce courts.

To an increasing number of women, the position of being

"jack-at-all-trades and master-of-none" is irritating. The conviction

that there is a great waste of effort without satisfactory results is

more wearing than the actual doing of the work.

For the minority of women who do not "keep house," or who can be

relieved entirely of domestic work by experts, the industrial revolution

has a different series of possibilities. If there is a decided talent

which has received adequate cultivation, there may be an opportunity for

its exercise without serious interference with family life, but the

chances are against it. If the woman cannot leave her home for the

entire day, or if her husband regards a gainful occupation on her part

as a reflection upon his ability to "support the family," she is

practically shut out from any occupation. If she has children and has an

intelligent as well as an emotional interest in their welfare, there is

an unlimited field for scientific development. But if she has no regular

useful occupation, she is not leading a normal life. Her husband very

likely cannot understand why she should not, in the words of Veblen,

perform "vicarious leisure" for him, and be satisfied therewith. If she

is satisfied, so much the worse. Whether she is satisfied or not, she is

certainly not likely to grow mentally or morally in such an existence,

and the family life will not be helped by stagnation or frivolity.

In certain classes of society there is one economic feature which is

probably responsible for many petty annoyances and in some cases for

real degradation of spirit. When the family was an industrial unit, when

exchange was largely in barter, it was natural to think of the woman as

a joint agent in production. When the production moved to factories and

the wage or the wealth was paid to the man and could be kept in his

pocket or his check-book, it became easy for him to think of himself as

"supporting" the family, to permit himself to be "asked" for money for

household expenses or even for the wife's personal expenses, and to

consider money used in these ways as "gifts" to his wife or children.

Women have more or less resistingly acquiesced in this humiliating

conception, which is fatal to a real moral relation as well as to

happiness. It is as absurd a conception as it would be to consider the

receiving teller in a bank as supporting the bank, or the manager of a

factory as supporting all the workmen. The end of the family is not

economic profit, but mutual aid, and the continuance and progress of the

race. A division of labor does not give superiority and inferiority.

When one considers which party incurs the greater risks, and which works

with greater singleness and sincerity for the family, it must pass as

one of the extraordinary superstitions that the theory of economic

dependence should have gained vogue.

=Cultural and Political Factors.=--Educational, cultural, and political

movements reenforce the growing sense of individuality. Educational and

cultural advance strengthens the demand that woman's life shall have as

serious a purpose as man's, and that in carrying on her work, whether in

the family or without, she may have some share in the grasp of mind, the

discipline of character, and the freedom of spirit which come from the

scientific spirit, and from the intelligent, efficient organization of

work by scientific methods. Political democracy draws increasing

attention to personal dignity, irrespective of rank or wealth.

Increasing legal rights have been granted to women until in most points

they are now equal before the law, although the important exception of

suffrage still remains for the most part. Under these conditions it is

increasingly difficult to maintain a family union on any other basis

than that of equal freedom, equal responsibilities, equal dignity and

authority. It will probably be found that most of the tension now

especially felt in family life--aside from those cases of maladaptation

liable to occur under any system--results either from lack of

recognition of this equality, or from the more general economic

conditions which society as a whole, rather than any particular family,

must meet and change.

Sec. 5. UNSETTLED PROBLEMS: (1) ECONOMIC

The family as an economic unit includes the relation of its members to

society both as producers and as consumers.

=The Family and Production.=--We have noted the industrial changes which

have seemed to draw the issue sharply between the home and outside

occupations. We have seen that the present organization of industry,

business, and the professions has separated most of the occupations from

the family, so that woman must choose between family and a specific

occupation, but cannot ordinarily combine the two. We have said that in

requiring all its women to do the same thing the family seems to exclude

them from individual pursuits adapted to their talents, and to exclude

them likewise from the whole scientific and technical proficiency of

modern life. Is this an inevitable dilemma? Those who think it is divide

into two parties, which accept respectively the opposite horns. The one

party infers that the social division of labor must be: man to carry on

all occupations outside the family, woman to work always within the

family. The other party infers that the family life must give way to the

industrial tendency.

(1) The "domestic theory," or as Mrs. Bosanquet styles it, the

"pseudo-domestic" theory, is held sincerely by many earnest friends of

the family in both sexes. They feel strongly the fundamental necessity

of family life. They believe further that they are not seeking to

subordinate woman to the necessities of the race, but rather to give her

a unique position of dignity and affection. In outside occupations she

must usually be at a disadvantage in competition with men, because of

her physical constitution which Nature has specialized for a different

function. In the family she "reigns supreme." With most women life is

not satisfied, experience is not full, complete consciousness of sex and

individuality is not attained, until they have dared to enter upon the

full family relations. Let these be preserved not merely for the race,

but especially for woman's own sake. Further, it is urged, when woman

enters competitive occupations outside the home, she lowers the scale of

wages. This makes it harder for men to support families, and therefore

more reluctant to establish them. Riehl urges that not only should

married women remain at home; unmarried women should play the part of

"aunt" in some one's household--he says _alte Tante_, but it is not

necessary to load the theory too heavily with the adjective.

(2) The other horn of the dilemma is accepted by many writers,

especially among socialists. These writers assume that the family

necessarily involves not only an exclusively domestic life for all

women, but also their economic dependence. They believe this dependence

to be not merely a survival of barbarism, but an actual immorality in

its exchange of sex attraction for economic support. Hence they would

abandon the family or greatly modify it. It must no longer be

"coercive"; it will be coercive under present conditions.

=Fallacies in the Dilemma.=--Each of these positions involves a fallacy

which releases us from the necessity of choosing between them. The root

of the fallacy in each case is the conception that the economic status

determines the moral end, whereas the moral end ought to determine the

economic status.

The fallacy of the pseudo-domestic theory lies in supposing that the

home must continue its old economic form or be destroyed. What is

essential to the family is that man and wife, parents and children,

should live in such close and intimate relation that they may be

mutually helpful. But it is not essential that present methods of house

construction, domestic service, and the whole industrial side of home

life be maintained immutable. There is one fundamental division of labor

between men and women. The woman who takes marriage at its full scope

accepts this. "The lines which it follows are drawn not so much by the

woman's inability to work for her family in the outside world--she

constantly does so when the death or illness of her husband throws the

double burden upon her; but from the obvious fact that the man is

incapable of the more domestic duties incident upon the rearing of

children."[258] But this does not involve the total life of a woman, nor

does it imply that to be a good wife and mother every woman must under

all possible advances of industry continue to be cook, seamstress,

housemaid, and the rest. True it is that if a woman steps out of her

profession or trade for five, ten, twenty years, it is in many cases

difficult to reenter. But there are some occupations where total absence

is not necessary. There are others where her added experience ought to

be an asset instead of a handicap. A mother who has been well trained

ought to be a far more effective teacher in her wholesome and

intelligent influence. She ought to be a more efficient manager or

worker in the great variety of civic and social enterprises of both paid

and unpaid character. There is no doubt that the present educational and

social order is suffering because deprived of the competent service

which many married women might render, just as women in their turn are

suffering for want of congenial occupation, suited to their capacities

and individual tastes. A growing freedom in economic pursuit would

improve the home, not injure it. For nothing that interferes with normal

development is likely to prove beneficial to the family's highest

interest.