FOOTNOTES:
[15] Mr. G. Wilshire, in his criticism of the argument, as stated by me in America, says that, under the existing system, the consumer is not free to choose what goods he will buy, but has them thrust on him by the capitalist producer. Yet he, and socialists in general, complain at the same time of the competition between capitalists, which is simply a competition to supply what consumers most desire. Here and there, when no competition exists, one firm can force its goods, if they are of the nature of necessaries, on the local public. But under the existing system this is only an occasional incident. Under socialism it would be universal. When tobacco is a state monopoly, state tobacco is forced on the great mass of the people.
[16] Mr. G. Wilshire admits, on behalf of socialists, that the argument of this chapter is so far correct that no democracy can make men of ability exercise their ability if they do not wish to do so; and that if they wish for exceptional rewards they will be able to demand them. A Melba, he says, under socialism, would be able, if she wished for it, to get probably even higher remuneration than she does to-day. But, he continues, under socialism, such men and women, though they could get such rewards, will be so changed that they will not wish for them. A Melba will then sing for the mere pleasure of singing.
CHAPTER XI
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY.
Christian socialism, as a doctrine which is preached to-day, might, for anything that its name can tell us to the contrary, be as different from ordinary socialism as is Christian Science from secular—as the science of Mrs. Eddy is from the science of Mr. Edison. We can judge of it only by examining the utterances of its leading exponents. For this reason, although I had long been familiar with the utterances of persons who call themselves Christian socialists in England, I felt bound to decline an invitation to discuss the subject in America, unless I could be furnished with some recent and formal version of the gospel as it is preached there. Accordingly there was sent to me the precise kind of document I desired. It formed the principal article in a journal called The Christian Socialist. Its author was a clergyman,[17] and it was entitled "The Gospel for To-day." It was what I expected that it would be. It reproduced in almost every particular the thoughts and moods distinctive of Christian socialists in England; and this article I will here take as a text.
The writer, exhibiting a candour which many of his secular brethren would do well to imitate, starts with an attack on all existing forms of democracy, which are all, he says, based on a profound and fatal fallacy. This is the assumption that all men are born equal, from which assumption the practical conclusion is deduced that the best state of society is one which will allow each of these so-called equal beings to work out his own happiness as best he can for himself, with the minimum of interference from his fellow-citizens or from the law. Now if, says our author, men were born equal in reality, such an individualistic democracy might perhaps work well enough. But men are not born equal. The root of the difficulty lies here. In the economic sense, as in all others, some men are incomparably more able than the great majority of their fellows, and even among the exceptionally able some are much abler than the others. Consequently, if the principles of modern individualistic democracy and modern individualistic economics are right, according to which the main motive of each should be to do the best for himself with his own powers that he can—"if it is duty to compete if competition is the life of trade, then the battle for self must ever go grimly on. The strong must subdue the weak, the rich the poor, the able the unable. Upon this basis the millionaire and the multi-millionaire have a perfect right to roll up their untold millions, even as the working-man has a right to seek the highest wages that he can get. All in different ways are seeking their own; and the keenest competitors are the best men. The prizes must go to the strongest and the shrewdest. It is the survival of the fittest."
Such being the case, then, asks the writer, what does Christian socialism aim at? It does not aim at making men equal in respect of their ability, for to do this would be quite impossible; but it aims at producing an equality of a practical kind, by inducing the men whose ability is most efficient to forgo all personal claims which are founded on their own exceptional powers, so that the wealth which is at present secured by these powers for themselves may in the future be divided among the mass of their less able brethren.
Thus the crucial change which the Christian socialists would accomplish is identical with that contemplated by their secular allies or rivals. But the more completely it is invested with a definitely religious quality, the more lopsided, unstable, and self-stultifying is this change seen to be; the more obvious becomes the absurdity of proposing to reorganise the entire business of the world on the basis of a conversion de luxe which is to be the privilege of the few only, while the many are not only debarred, from the very nature of the case, from practising the renunciation in which the few are to find eternal life, but are actually urged to cherish their existing economic concupiscence, and raise it to a pitch of intensity which it never has reached before. The competent, to whose energies the riches of the world are due, are to put these riches away from them as though they were food offered by the devil. The incompetent, with thankless but perpetually open mouths, are to swallow this same food as though it were the bread from heaven. In other words, according to our Christian socialist, the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is involved in the enjoyment of riches, is not the enjoyment of material superfluities itself, but only the enjoyment of them by men who have been at the trouble of producing them.
That this is what the message of Christian socialism comes to, little as those who deliver it realise the fact themselves, is shown by an illustration obtruded on us by the author of "The Gospel for To-day." The evils of the existing situation, and its remoteness from the Kingdom of Christ, are, he says, exemplified in a very special way by the present position of the clergy. "If we churchmen," he says, "want money for our own purposes, we have to go to the trust magnates and kneel. We have to kneel to 'the steel kings and the oil kings,' merely because they are rich men." Now, how would Christian socialism alter a state of things like this? Let us consider precisely what it is that our Christian socialist complains about. He obviously does not mean that he and his brother clergymen have to approach the trust magnates on their knees. The utmost he can mean is that, if they want these men to give them money, they have to ask for it as a gift, and presumably make, when it is given, some acknowledgment to the donors. This it is which evidently sticks in the stomach of the humble follower of Christ whose self-portraiture we are now considering; for, if we confine ourselves to the Christian element in his teaching, he proposes to alter the existing situation only by kindling in the "trust magnates" such a fire of Christian philanthropy that they will have given him all he wants before he has had time to ask for it, thus exonerating him from the duty of saying "Thank you" for what he owes to another's goodness, and enabling him to offer to the Lord that which has cost him nothing.
And what the author of "The Gospel for To-day" urges on behalf of himself and his clerical brethren is precisely what he urges on behalf of the less competent majority generally. Neither on them nor on the Christian clergy does the gospel of Christian socialism urge the duty of making any new sacrifice, or any new exertion, moral or physical, for themselves. Just as the clergy are to learn no more of business than they know now, but are to be relieved of the necessity for all prudence as to ways and means, so is the ordinary labourer to work no longer, no harder, and no better than he does now. On the contrary, his hours of labour are to become ever less and less, and at the same time he is to receive ever greater and greater wages. These are to be drawn from the products, not of himself but of his neighbour: and although he will owe them solely to the virtue which his neighbour exercises, he is, according to the Christian socialist programme, to demand them as though his own incompetence gave him a sacred right to them.
Now, apart from the fact that this gospel does resemble the Christian in declaring that, while salvation can be achieved only by sacrifice, and that so far as the majority are concerned their sacrifice must be strictly vicarious, we might well pause to inquire how either of its two messages—that of economic asceticism for the few, and of economic concupiscence for the many—has any relation to the gospel of Christ at all. According to any reasonable interpretation of the words and spirit of Christ, a labourer's desire to enjoy the utmost that he himself produces is no less legitimate than natural; but it hardly ranks as one of the highest Christian virtues. How, we might ask, is it to acquire this latter character by being turned into a desire for what is produced by other people? Again, on the other hand, though according to most of the churches Christ did not condemn the possession of superfluous wealth as such, he certainly did not teach that the possession of it was generally necessary to salvation. It might therefore be justly urged, from the point of view of the few, that in proportion as Christ's valuation of this transitory life was accepted by them, the duty of melting down their own vases and candelabra in order that every workman's spoon might have a thin plating of silver on it, would constantly seem less and less, instead of more and more imperative. All this might be urged, and more to the same effect; but we will content ourselves with considering the matter under its purely practical aspect, and asking how any Christian clergymen—men presumably sane and educated—can propose, whether their programme be really Christian or no, to reorganise society on the basis of a moral conversion which is confined to the few only—which would exact from the able minority the maximum of effort and mortification, and secure the maximum of idleness and self-indulgence for the rest of the human race?
To this question it may be said that there are two answers. Admirable in character as are multitudes of the Christian clergy, nobody will contend that all of them are beyond reproach; nor will any such claim be made for all those of them who profess socialism. And for some of this body it is hardly open to doubt that the preaching of socialism is nothing better than a species of ecclesiastical electioneering. In the language of the political wire-puller, it affords them a good "cry" with which to go to the people. Why, they say in effect, should you listen to the agitator in the street, when we can give you something just as good from the pulpit? What the message really means which they thus undertake to deliver, they make no effort to understand. It will attract, or at least they think so; and for the moment this is enough for them. Having probably emptied their churches by talking traditional nonsense, they are willing to fill them by talking nonsense that has not even the merit of being traditional. We will not linger, however, over the case of men like these. We will turn to that of others who are morally very much more respectable, and whose condition of mind, moreover, is very much more instructive. Of these we may take the author of "The Gospel for To-day" as a type. He, we may assume, advocates his socialistic programme, not because he thinks that to do so is a shrewd clerical manœuvre, but because he honestly believes that his programme is at once Christian and practicable. How does it come about, then, that an educated man like himself can believe in, and devote himself to preaching, doctrines so visionary and preposterous? Let us examine his arguments more minutely, and we shall presently find our answer.
By his vigorous denunciation of the doctrine that all men are born equal, he shows us that he is capable to a certain extent of seeing things as they are. But he sees them from a distance only, as though they were a range of distant mountains whose aspect is falsely simplified and constantly changed by clouds, and of whose actual configuration he has no idea whatever. Thus when he contemplates the inequalities of men's economic powers, these appear to him alternately in two different forms—as genuine powers of production and as powers of mere seizure—without his discerning where in actual life the operation of the one ends and the operation of the other begins: and, though for a certain special purpose he admits, as we shall see presently, that some able men are able in the sense of being exceptionally productive, his thoughts and his feelings alike through the larger part of his argument are dominated by the idea that ability is merely acquisitive. This is shown by the fact that the two great productive enterprises which he singles out as typical of modern wealth-getting generally are held up by him as examples of acquisition pure and simple. "The steel kings," he says, "did not invent steel. The oil kings did not invent oil." These are the gifts of nature, which nature offers to all; but the strong men abuse their strength by pushing forward and seizing them, and compelling their weaker brethren to pay them a tribute for their use. Steel and refined oil he evidently looks upon as two natural products. He has no suspicion that, as any school-boy could have told him, steel is an artificial metal which, as manufactured to-day, is one of the most elaborate triumphs of modern industrial genius. As to the oil by the light of which he doubtless writes his sermons, he apparently thinks of it as existing fit for use in a lake, and ready to be dipped up by everybody in nice little tin cans, if only the oil kings having got to the lake first, did not by their superior strength frighten other people away. Of the actual history of the production of usable oil, of the vast and marvellous system by which it is brought within reach of the consumers, of the by-products which reduce its price—all of them the results of concentrated economic ability, and requiring from week to week its constant and renewed application—the author of "The Gospel for To-day" apparently knows nothing. The oil kings and the steel kings, according to his conception of them, need merely refrain from the exercise of their only distinctive power—that is to say, an exceptional power of seizing; and every Christian socialist in New York and elsewhere will have the same oil in his lamps that he has now, and a constant supply of cutlery and all other forms of hardware, the sole difference being that he will get them at half-price or for nothing, and have the money thus saved to spend upon new enjoyments. And his conception of ability, as connected with the output of steel and oil, is his conception of ability as applied to the production of goods generally.
He makes, however, one exception. There is, he admits, one form of ability which does actually add to the wealth of the modern world, and may possibly be credited with producing the largest part of it. This is the faculty of invention. Here, at last, we seem to be listening to the language of sober sense. But let us see what follows. Inventors, our author proceeds, being the types of exceptional ability which is really beneficent and productive, are precisely the men who afford us our surest grounds for believing in the possibility of that moral conversion which socialism proposes to effect among able men at large. For what, he says, as a fact do we find the inventors doing? They invent, he says, for the pure love of inventing, or else from a desire to do good to their fellow creatures. The thought of money for themselves never enters into their minds. The selfish desire for money makes its appearance only when the strong man whose ability is merely acquisitive thrusts himself on the scene, buys the inventors' inventions up, and then proceeds "to work them for all they are worth." These mere seizers of wealth, these appropriators of the inventions of others, need but to learn a lesson of abnegation which the inventors have learned already, or rather a lesson which is easier; for while these noble men, the inventors, have no wish to take what they produce, the majority of able men, such as the steel kings and the oil kings, need merely forbear to take. Competition, in short, as it actually exists to-day—the competition which Christian socialism will abolish—is simply a competition in taking; and in order to abolish it, the strong men, when they have taken a fair share, have but to stand aside, to become as though they were weak, and so give others a chance equal to their own.
Here, indeed, we have a conception, or rather a vague picture, of the facts of modern industry, and of human nature as connected with it, which is worthy of a man from dreamland. Every detail mentioned is false. Every essential detail is omitted. In the first place, the disinterested inventor, from whose behaviour our author reasons, is purely a figment of his own clerical brain. Inventors in actual life, as every one knows who has had occasion to deal with them, are generally distinguished by an insane desire for money, by the wildest over-estimates of the wealth which their inventions will ultimately bring them, or by a greed which will sell them for a trifle, provided this be paid immediately. In the second place, inventions, even the greatest, so long as they represent the power of invention merely, are utterly deficient in all practical value. So long as they exist nowhere except in the author's brain, or drawings, or in descriptions, or even in the form of models, they might, so far as the world is concerned, have never existed at all. In the former cases they are dreams; in the last case they are toys. They are brought down into the arena of actual life only when, like souls provided with bodies, they cease to be ideas or toys, and become machines or contrivances manufactured on a commercial basis; and in order to effect successfully this practical transformation, countless processes and countless faculties are involved other than those comprised in intellectual invention itself.
There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the author of "The Gospel for To-day" conceives of as simply monopolising and "working for all they are worth" contrivances which would otherwise have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth nothing.
Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much naïveté by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines, which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will, like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples. He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.
Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it is never restrained by fact.
Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists—that is to say, in so far as they differ from other reformers—they are men aiming at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cushion, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in reasserting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only—that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them now recognise, like the author of "The Gospel for To-day," that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers. But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact—or, rather, of one protean fact—by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals.
Two illustrations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument.
In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact, the only producers of wealth are the mass of manual labourers, and that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go to the labourers, and that all labourers were entitled to approximately equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic, likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of production—having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and that some men produce incalculably more than others—they have, in order to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable, the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them, and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was pressed into the service of socialism only by being associated with a false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical programme, only by associating it with a false moral psychology. In each case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a fallacy somewhere—a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a table-cloth—no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from the premises.
And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable, and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there, under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them. And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to reassert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove.
The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a class no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispassionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like "patriotism" in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often "the last refuge of a scoundrel," or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the passionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these?
The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their constitutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.
To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an inflammation of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the "rough and tumble" of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed," it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.
But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of grass grow where one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them.
At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations—the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two classes, those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it. Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter. These two classes are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways. One of these classes takes men and nature as they are. With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other class, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this class is composed—the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacæ the waters in which would have to run uphill.
The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will—the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men—is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been illustrated in the preceding chapters by a systematic analysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.
The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only—that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently associate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless multitudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They are three in number, and are as follows:
The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer, and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers associated in any given industry, each produces, with few and unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that, even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact, and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds. With this question I shall deal in the following chapter.
The second relates to those forms of individual income which are covered by the word interest, when used in a comprehensive sense. It being admitted by the later socialists, in opposition to the earlier, that the directive ability of the few is, in the modern world, a productive agency no less truly than labour is, many of these socialists are now anxious to concede that the man of ability is entitled to such values, no matter how large, as are due to the active exercise of his own exceptional powers; but they contend that, as soon as his personal activity ceases, his claim to any influx of further wealth should therewith cease also. Let him spend his accumulations, they say, on his own gratifications as he will; but neither he nor his descendants can be suffered in moral justice to hold or apply them in such a manner that they will renew themselves, and yield an income to recipients who do nothing to make them fructify. To numbers of people who repudiate most of the socialistic programme, this doctrine as to interest appeals as at once just and practicable. If the state could appropriate all incomes due to interest, as distinct from those which represent the product of active ability, an enormous fund would, they think, be available for general distribution, and the ideals of socialism, in so far as they are practicable or desirable, might thus be realised by other than socialistic means. This argument, likewise, will have its own chapter—or rather two chapters—allotted to it.
The third of these arguments or proposals which, though not in themselves socialistic, are popularly associated with socialism, relates to equality of opportunity. To this also I will devote a separate chapter.