A Life of Walt Whitman

by Henry Bryan Binns

We can see now that, though it may prelude a reconstruction of human society and relations in all their different phases, it is itself destructive rather than constructive. We recognise that it does not bring equality of opportunity to all, as its earlier observers had predicted;[661] but that, on the contrary, it destroys much of the meaning of opportunity; the control of capital which is the motive power of modern industrial life, falling more and more into the hands of a small group of legatees, on whose pleasure the rest of the community tends to become dependent for its livelihood.

And we see the results of this new economic condition in the character of the populations of those vast cities into which the Industrial Revolution is still gathering the peoples of Europe and America. Among these, the spirit of individual enterprise and initiative is continually choked by the narrow range of their opportunity. Their lives become the melancholy exponents of that theory of the specialisation of industry against which the humanitarians of the age have all inveighed.

Serious as it was becoming in the New World, the Labour Question had not yet, in Whitman’s time, assumed an aspect so menacing as in the Old. Even to-day the proportion of Americans engaged in agriculture is four times as large as that which rules in Great Britain; and except in the North Atlantic States, the rural population does not seem to be actually losing ground;[662] though its increase is much less rapid than that of the urban districts, into which more than a third of the population is now gathered, as against a fifth at the close of the war, or an eighth in the middle of the century. At the time of Whitman’s death nearly three-quarters of the total number of American farmers were the owners of their farms; and it was in these working proprietors, with the similar body of half-independent artisans who were owners of their houses, that he placed his social faith. These were, as we have seen, the men whom he regarded as citizens in the fullest sense.[663]

In this view he was doubtless influenced by Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy he seems to have studied soon after its appearance in 1848. Roughly speaking, Mill had supplemented the teaching of Adam Smith, that individual liberty is the one sure foundation for the wealth of nations, by describing the proper sphere of social intervention in industrial matters. His picture of the future industry—the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers selected and removable by themselves—has been quoted as the socialist ideal.[664]

And Mill was deeply influenced by the early Socialists.[665] Their activity in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century was so remarkable that it must have come under the notice of Whitman. Robert Owen, intoxicated with what was perhaps a rather shallow conception of the great truth of human perfectibility, had spent his life and wealth in unsuccessful but most suggestive social experiments. No less optimistic were his French contemporaries, St. Simon and Fourier.

In striking contrast with them and their doctrinaire systems, Proudhon, the peasant, who presents not a few points of agreement with Whitman, looked forward to voluntarism as the final form of society, and detested alike the theoretic elaboration and the sexual lubricity of his amiable but, on the whole, unpractical compatriots.

The failure of the risings of 1848, and the succeeding period of reaction, checked the socialist movement,[666] and social reform was left for awhile to middle-class Liberalism, with its philanthropic ignorance of the real needs of the workers; until, in the last generation, the demands of labour, the pressure of poverty and the aspirations of social enthusiasts, have together furnished the motive power for a further struggle for the collectivist ideal of “intelligent happiness and pleasurable energy” for all.[667]

This recent movement was at first most unequally yoked with an unbeliever in the brilliant, fatalistic theory of Karl Marx. Marx was a year older than Whitman; his acute Hebrew intellect was trained under the Hegelian system of thought, but he was apparently destitute of the finer historic sense, as well as of Hegel’s idealism.[668] The humanitarian character of the social movement is now once more sweeping it far beyond his formulas; but in Whitman’s time the Marxian theory dominated Socialism.

In Long Island and New York, during the period of Whitman’s youth, the social condition was, on the whole, free from serious disorders, save those incident upon growth and rapid development. The spirit of Elizabethan enterprise, the practical achievement of brave and ardently conceived ideas, ruled in that democratic society wherein his habit of mind was shaped, and of which it was in large degree a natural product. Whitman’s youth and early manhood were little touched by evidences of any social disease so deep-seated as to encourage ideas of revolution. It is true that the vested interests of the slave party made themselves felt in New York; but neither to him nor to the “Free-soil” party did the anti-slavery movement suggest that other change which the political title they adopted brings so vividly before the mind to-day. “Free-soil” had for him no definitely Socialistic significance.