Asserting it as he did, Bradlaugh represented a midway position between out-and-out Socialism and out-and-out Individualism. Time will show whether it was on the line to be taken by progressive reform. What is clear is that if energetically adopted it may soon lead to the complete overthrow of that land system which is the foundation of the reactionary party politics of this country. In his pamphlet on "The Land, the People, and the Coming Struggle," Bradlaugh put very clearly the social ideal he had in view. "The enormous estates of the few landed proprietors," he declared, "must not only be prevented from growing larger, they must be broken up. At their own instance, and gradually, if they will meet us with even a semblance of fairness, for the poor and hungry cannot well afford to fight; but at our instance, and rapidly, if they obstinately refuse all legislation." To this end he proposed, as we have seen, re-valuation of all lands, and a graduated land-tax, to press most heavily on the largest holdings. The Budget of 1894, although stopping short of graduation of the annual taxes, has made the first step towards them by graduating the death duties; and the further steps are probably not far off. The broad political problem of the future is the control of wealth distribution, to the end of making the rendering of services a condition of the enjoyment of services for all able-bodied persons; and it seems fairly clear that the easiest of the various possible main steps towards that consummation are the restriction of private property in land and the indirect or direct absorption of "economic rent" by the State, such adaptations being to the socialisation of other means of wealth production as the simple to the complex. And while Bradlaugh, as has been said, stipulated for gradual action even in the regulation of the land, he never refused to contemplate the nationalisation of its rent as an ultimate ideal.
§ 4.
It may now be easily inferred how Bradlaugh came to feel for the popular Socialism of the day a mixture of distrust and aversion. It was for him a flying off at a tangent from the right spiral line of progress. He had counted on seeing the slowly-won political power of the mass of the people turned to the enforcement of fundamental reforms in taxation and land-tenure, so as to better the life-conditions of the people in the mass; and he had trusted to a gradual learning of the lesson of family prudence, with the result of an immense saving of friction, waste, and misery. When he had got to the front of the political struggle, the needed reforms were still nearly all to make; and the great lesson of conjugal prudence was only beginning to be learned on a large scale. What was wanted, to his mind, was a combination of energy with patience. He had no belief in the possibility of raising the lot of vast masses of people to a high level suddenly by violent legislation for the direct transfer of all property from the "haves" to the "have-nots": he knew how enormously difficult it was to effect even the modifying measures for which he was working. But he believed that with persistent toil and good sense it might so be carried out that the life of the people should in the next generation be greatly improved, and the stress of their life materially lessened. Just at this stage, however, he saw the struggling people suddenly and vociferously appealed to by teachers who taught the uselessness of all gradual action; the futility of all preceding parliamentary effort; the impossibility of any improvement so long as private property in any of the means of production subsisted; the limitation of the alternatives to the whole loaf or no bread; the necessity of subjecting all industrial action whatever to collective control at one sweep; in a word, the absolute necessity of effecting at a stroke, by violence if need be, such a social and moral revolution as the world had never yet seen. Already the folly of all this is recognised by many even of those who resent Bradlaugh's popular exposure of it. Within ten years there has been developed in England a progressive Socialism which repudiates violence, substitutes evolution for revolution, proposes to utilise all the existing political machinery, is glad of gradual advance, is content to urge forward Radicalism, and modifies mathematical politics by biological conceptions. But Bradlaugh had to bear the brunt of the anger not only of the heated crowd who had shouted for the impossible, but of the new sentimental journalists who had patronised them.
First he had been constantly and violently abused, in the early days of his Parliamentary struggle, as being himself a Socialist, by people who knew nothing whatever about his life and doctrine; and his alleged Socialism was one of the pretexts on which some opposed his entry into the House of Commons. The nobleman who then represented the historic name of Percy took that line. A fair sample of the current tone on the subject among the ignorant rich is supplied by their votes vates sanctissima, the lady novelist "Ouida," in a letter to the Fortnightly Review,[114] in which she discussed the class politics of Italy. "It is the towns," she explained, "which are the centres of eagerness for unconsidered war, and the foolish credulity of bombastic Radicalism;" and she went on in her best-informed manner to particularise "the 'educated' cad of the Turin or Florence streets, who has heard just enough of Fourier and Bradlaugh to think that society ought to maintain at ease his ugly idleness." The idleness which felt sure of its beauty was naturally resentful. All the while, Bradlaugh was at sharp strife with the Socialists of the moment; and he soon came to be applauded for his course in this matter by the same precious upper-class opinion which had just imputed to him the views he assailed, while new assailants vituperated him as a traitor to principles he had never accepted. It is largely to his destructive criticism that the undefined fashionable Socialism of the present hour owes its comparative rationality;[115] but there is small thought of acknowledging the service.
Certainly he had struck hard, and this not merely because he was iniquitously and ferociously attacked by Socialists generally.[116] He saw the new doctrine appealing to and applauded by, not the clear-headed and self-controlled workers, but the neurotic, the noisy, the passionate, the riotous. Instead of meetings of men at once earnest and orderly, such as he had gathered and addressed for so many years, meetings at which debate could go on without disorder, he saw gatherings of wildly excited men, who could not listen to opposition, who could not sit still in their seats when their view were countered, and who turned a public debate into a public disturbance. Significantly enough, the one town in which the Socialist party, even when pretty numerous, can be trusted to give an opponent a fair hearing, is Northampton, where for so many years he disciplined the workers to orderly activity, and to self-control under extreme provocation. No cause ever needed such discipline more than that of Socialism. It is quite reasonable to plead for consideration for men whose life is hard, and who see idlers at their ease; but extenuating circumstances do not affect the stream of tendency; and no amount of sympathy with the luckless can make up for want of judgment in those who undertake to lead them. And to talk, as so many of the Socialist talkers did a dozen or less years ago, of resorting to physical force, to revolutionise society, was only to expose the luckless to new disaster.
Whether all Bradlaugh's argumentation against Socialist theory will hold good is another question. It is probable that the extreme statements of Socialist doctrine with which he had to deal led him latterly to define his Individualism at times more sharply than before. Not many years before his death he declined to dub himself either Individualist or Socialist. He sought to legislate for an evolving society, conditioned by all sorts of anomalous survivals; and he must prescribe for each juncture or trouble in view of all the facts of the case. As he put it in his pamphlet on "Parliament and the Poor":—
"All progressive legislation in this country is necessarily compromise. It is not possible to legislate on hard and fast lines of principle alone. A state of things has grown up through generations which can only be gradually changed. The expedient has to be considered in all lawmaking. Legal interpretations of right have received judicial sanction, which have become so much part of our general political and social system that sudden reversal would be attended often with the gravest mischief. Temporary concessions have usually to be made on the one side, to win consent from the other, to a sure step in advance; but no compromise is final."
But the affirmation by Socialists of principles which seemed to make an end of self-reliance and self-determination led him to offer definitions of the sphere of Government; and while his concrete decisions—as in the case of the Eight Hours movement—will probably be found to be in all cases sagacious, it may be that political science will yet endorse action which he declined to contemplate. His practical justification is that his Socialist adversaries always argued the case in vacuo, and demanded the nationalisation of all the means of production, and, by consequence, the State determination of all destinies, at a time when not only is the public in the terms of the case still largely predatory and anti-social in instinct, but the Socialists themselves are divided by incurable animosities. Mr Hyndman chose to debate with him on the issue, "Will Socialism benefit the English People?"—"if resorted to here and now" being implied. Only when it is asked, "Can we evolve up to Socialism?" will Bradlaugh's rebuttal be got rid of.
What may perhaps be urged against him, as against land nationalisers from Mill onwards, is that the theory which makes land the main matter is partly undermined by the economic evolution in which agricultural land values in this country have receded, the food supply being more and more derived from abroad, in return for exported goods. On this head, however, it may here suffice to answer that that is in all likelihood a temporary phase; that in any case, English industry rests on the coal supply, which is a matter of land in the economic sense; and that a Socialism which thinks to maintain a forever increasing population, on the basis of a mere national workshop system, is much more short-sighted than the doctrine which makes the land the fulcrum of all industrial movement.
There is just one criticism of Bradlaugh's politics which the present writer will not undertake to meet, since it raises a point on which he was driven to differ from him. It is the objection to the optimistic assumption that the mass of the people can surmount the trouble of chronic trade-depression by means of thrift. This was perhaps the one touch of uncritical optimism in Bradlaugh's political system. He argued that the workers could acquire all necessary capital for themselves by simple saving. "You can earn it," he tells them, at the close of his lecture on "Capital and Labour,"—"the Rothschilds' wealth, the Overstones' wealth, the Barings' wealth—you, the millions, if you are only loyal to yourselves and to one another, may put all this into your own Savings Banks, and your own friendly societies, and your own trades unions, within a dozen years. You accumulate it for others: you can do it for yourselves." The answer to this is that the capital in question depends for its continuance on the continuance of industrial production, and of the demand for the product; whereas, if the workers were to stint their consumption to the extent of saving great masses of capital from wages, they would to that extent check their total production, unless, that is, the other classes increase their consumption to a balancing extent; which, however, they could not conceivably do. Even if the birth-rate be so checked as to lessen the nett population, the increasing power of machinery would so far balance the lessened supply of labour that the tactic of parsimony on a large scale would defeat itself. At present the successful savers are so in virtue of the ill-luck of other investors and the non-saving of the mass. Saving all round would neutralise itself, since the saving could only be profitably invested in production to meet increasing demand, whereas in the terms of the case there would be decreasing demand. It is spending that keeps the machine going, not saving.