Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 2

by Alfred Russel Wallace; Sir James Marchant

To those who lived in the midst of this vast industrial system, or were a part of it, it seemed natural and inevitable that there should be rich and poor; and this belief was enforced on the one hand by the clergy, and on the other by political economists, so that religion and science agreed in upholding the competitive and capitalistic system of society as the only rational and possible one. Hence it came to be believed that the true sphere of governmental action did not include the abolition of poverty. It was even declared that poverty was due to economic causes over which governments had no power; that wages were kept down by the "iron law" of supply and demand; and that any attempt to find a remedy by Acts of Parliament only aggravated the disease. During the Premiership of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman this attitude was, for the first time, changed. On numerous occasions Sir Henry declared that he held it to be the duty of a government to deal with problems of unemployment and poverty.

In 1908 three great strikes, coming in rapid succession—those of the Railway and other Transport Unions, the Miners, and the London Dock Labourers—brought home to the middle and upper classes, and to the Government, how completely all are dependent on the "working classes." This [pg 147] and similar experiences showed us that when the organisation of the trade unions was more complete, and the accumulated funds of several years were devoted to this purpose, the bulk of the inhabitants of London, and of other great cities, could be made to suffer a degree of famine comparable with that of Paris when besieged by the German army in 1870.

Wallace's watchword throughout these social agitations was "Equality of Opportunity for All," and the ideal method by which he hoped to achieve this end was a system of industrial colonisation in our own country whereby all would have a fair, if not an absolutely equal, share in the benefits arising from the production of their own labour, whether physical or mental.[51]

With regard to the education of the people, especially as a stepping-stone to moral and intellectual reform, Wallace believed in the training of individual natural talent, rather than the present system of general education thrust upon every boy or girl regardless of their varying mental capacities. He also urged that the building-up of the mind should be alternated with physical training in one or more useful trades, so that there might be, not only at the outset, but also in later life, a choice of occupation in order to avoid the excess of unemployment in any one direction.

In his opinion, one of the injurious results of our competitive system, having its roots, however, in the valuable "guilds" of a past epoch, was the almost universal restriction of our workers to only one kind of labour. The result was a dreadful monotony in almost all spheres of work, the extreme unhealthiness of many, and a much larger amount of unemployment than if each man or woman were regularly trained in two or more occupations. In addition to two of what are commonly called trades, [pg 148] every youth should be trained for one day a week or one week in a month, according to the demand for labour, in some of the various operations of farming or gardening. Not only would this improve the general health of the workers, but it would also add much to the interest and enjoyment of their lives.

"There is one point," he wrote, "in connection with this problem which I do not think has ever been much considered or discussed. It is the undoubted benefit to all the members of a society of the greatest possible diversity of character, as a means both towards the greatest enjoyment and interest of association, and to the highest ultimate development of the race. If we are to suppose that man might have been created or developed with none of those extremes of character which now often result in what we call wickedness, vice, or crime, there would certainly have been a greater monotony in human nature, which would, perhaps, have led to less beneficial results than the variety which actually exists may lead to. We are more and more getting to see that very much, perhaps all, the vice, crime, and misery that exists in the world is the result, not of the wickedness of individuals, but of the entire absence of sympathetic training from infancy onwards. So far as I have heard, the only example of the effects of such a training on a large scale was that initiated by Robert Owen at New Lanark, which, with most unpromising materials, produced such marvellous results on the character and conduct of the children as to seem almost incredible to the numerous persons who came to see and often critically to examine them. There must have been all kinds of characters in his schools, yet none were found to be incorrigible, none beyond control, none who did not respond to the love and sympathetic instruction of their teachers. It is therefore quite possible that all the evil in the world is directly due [pg 149] to man, not to God, and that when we once realise this to its full extent we shall be able, not only to eliminate almost completely what we now term evil, but shall then clearly perceive that all those propensities and passions that under bad conditions of society inevitably led to it, will under good conditions add to the variety and the capacities of human nature, the enjoyment of life by all, and at the same time greatly increase the possibilities of development of the whole race. I myself feel confident that this is really the case, and that such considerations, when followed out to their ultimate issues, afford a complete solution of the great problem of the ages—the origin of evil."[52]

Closely allied with the welfare of the child is another "reform" with which Wallace's name will long be associated. That is his strong denunciation of Vaccination. For seven years he laboured to show medical and scientific men that statistics proved beyond doubt the futility of this measure to prevent disease. A few were converted, but public opinion is hard to move.

In his ideal of the future, Dr. Wallace gave a large and honoured sphere to women. He considered that it was in the highest degree presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital and most sacred of all human relationships, regardless of the fact that our present phase of social development is not only extremely imperfect, but, as already shown, vicious and rotten to the core. How could it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the sexes which shall be best alike for individuals and for the race in a society in which a large proportion of our women are forced to work long hours daily for the barest subsistence, with an almost total absence of the rational pleasures of life, for the want of which thousands are driven into uncongenial marriages [pg 150] in order to secure some amount of personal independence or physical well-being. He believed that when men and women are, for the first time in the course of civilisation, equally free to follow their best impulses; when idleness and vicious and hurtful luxury on the one hand, and oppressive labour and the dread of starvation on the other, are alike unknown; when all receive the best and broadest education that the state of civilisation and knowledge will admit; when the standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the best among us, and that standard is systematically inculcated in the young—then we shall find that a system of truly "Natural Selection" (a term that Wallace preferred to "Eugenics," which he utterly disliked) will come spontaneously into action which will tend steadily to eliminate the lower, the less developed, or in any way defective types of men, and will thus continuously raise the physical, moral, and intellectual standard of the race.

He further held that "although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection or sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women were economically independent, where all were fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of unmarried from choice would increase. It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner was encountered." [pg 151]

But this choice, he considered, would be further strengthened by the fact that, with the ever-increasing approach to equality of opportunity for every child born in our country, that terrible excess of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially, due to various preventable causes, would disappear, and change the present majority of women to a majority of men. This would lead to a greater rivalry for wives, and give to women the power of rejecting all the lower types of character among their suitors.