Man has demonstrated his ability to resist Nature and to progress along lines that are diametrically opposed to those of natural evolution. The whole fabric of human civilization is an answer to the millionaire's argument. The natural principle of the survival of the fittest is no longer at work. Man has put an end to it. The lion and the tiger no longer reign in the jungle nor the white ant in the Pampas. Man, alone, determines which animals shall live and which shall disappear. The weak in our own race no longer perish; mercy comes to their rescue. The strong are no longer the only ones to perpetuate the type; marriage protects the weak husband in his marital rights as well as the strong. Climate no longer determines survival; man has made himself master of climate, and indeed works most effectually to-day in latitudes which at an earlier stage were peopled only by savages.
At every point where man touches Nature he has reversed the natural process.
The unfit no longer perish, the fit no longer alone survive. Man is no longer the necessary result of the natural environment: he makes his own environment; and if he be wise enough he can so modify it as to modify himself with it. When, if ever, he so modifies it as to eliminate those elements in it which stimulate vice, then he will have realized the word of the Gospel, "Ye are Gods."
§ 5. Can Human Nature Be Changed by Law?
It is currently urged and has become a sort of maxim that human nature cannot be changed by law. Not only is this quoted by the bourgeois in his argument against the Socialist, but even Henry George has fallen into this error. Indeed, it is this error that prevented Henry George from adopting Socialism and left him the distinguished founder of an inadequate philosophy. For the most superficial knowledge of history will suffice to demonstrate its untruth. Human nature has already been profoundly changed by law; by the institution of marriage, by education, by property. This has already been sufficiently discussed to make it unnecessary further to comment on it.[205] It does not, however, seem sufficient to point out the profound modification of human nature by law in the past in order to persuade the bourgeois that humanity can still further be modified by law in the future; for a thousand instances can be quoted of efforts to change human nature by law that have failed, and it is argued very illogically that because in many instances they have failed, they must always fail. Then, too, there remains in the minds of all influenced by Herbert Spencer, the profound error that society is an organism and must be allowed to grow; whereas on the contrary, a very little study demonstrates that society differs from an organism in essential points.[206]
No society can exist without some law of association. The law may be a natural one, as in the case of myxomycetes; or it may be an artificial one, as in the case of the United States constitution; or it may be both, as indeed is the case in every human society.
This law of association is called "government." Strictly speaking, in a political sense government means only that law of association which is promulgated and enforced by the supreme power of the state; but human society is controlled by a double system of laws—one written, whether in judicial decisions or in express statute, and the other not written, because it resides in the mass of the citizens under conditions which baffle description. This last is imperfectly rendered in the English word "custom," is more definitely expressed in the French word moeurs, and is admirably conveyed by Horace in the words
Quid leges sine moribus
Vanae proficiunt?
The essential characteristic of custom is that, however controlling it may be in fact, it does not enjoy the sanction of legislative enactment or executive decree; indeed, it often arises out of opposition to law; as where in the Western states game laws remain unenforced, because public opinion supports the ranchman's defence of necessity; and sometimes again where, though a law be in itself proper, a community declines to avail itself of the law, as in the custom that discredited divorce in the early Roman Republic.
Now, the importance of this moral or sometimes immoral sense that makes custom independently of law, must not be underestimated—for it is in many respects superior to law for evil or for good; and it differs from law in the essential fact that it grows almost imperceptibly, whereas law, in the strict sense of the word, is the result of judicial decision or legislative enactment—both acts of deliberation—or so purporting to be. The question naturally arises then whether, in so far as society develops along the line of custom, it does not follow the process of growth rather than that of construction.