McCulloch quotes these words from Barton, but he quotes them to express his own view, and their teaching is very explicit on the duty of Government to the unemployed in seasons of commercial distress. In such seasons of "extraordinary privation" the State is called upon to take "effectual" measures—extraordinary measures, we may infer, if extraordinary measures were necessary—for the relief of the unemployed, not merely to save them from starvation, but to prevent them from losing established habits of "order, decency, and cleanliness"; from getting their feelings vitiated, their sensibilities impaired, so that they were in danger of remaining content with a worse standard of living, and sinking to a lower scale in the dignity of social and civilized being. In a word, it is held to be the duty of the State to prevent, if it can, the temporary reverses of the labouring class from resulting in its permanent moral decadence; and as the object of the State's intervention is to preserve the dignity, the self-respect, the moral independence and energy of the labouring class, the manner of the intervention, the choice of actual means and steps for administering the relief, must, of course, be governed by the same considerations. "The true secret of assisting the poor," says McCulloch, borrowing the words of Archbishop Sumner, "is to make them agents in bettering their own condition, and to supply them, not with a temporary stimulus, but with a permanent energy" (p. 475).
The same principles come out even more strongly in McCulloch's remarks on national education. He says, "the providing of elementary instruction for all classes is one of the most pressing duties of Government" (p. 473); and the elementary instruction he would provide would not stop at reading and writing, but would include even a knowledge of so much political economy as would explain "the circumstances which elevate and depress the rate of wages" (p. 474). It was the duty of Government to extirpate ignorance, because, "of all obstacles to improvement, ignorance was the most formidable"; and it was its duty to establish Government schools for the purpose, because charity schools impaired the self-respect and sense of independence which were themselves first essentials of all social improvement.
"No extension of the system of charity and subscription schools can ever fully compensate for the want of a statutory provision for the education of the public. Something of degradation always attaches to the fact of one's having been brought up in a charity school. The parents who send children to such an institution, and even the children, know that they have been received only because they are paupers unable to pay for their education; and this consciousness has a tendency to weaken that state of independence and self-respect, for the want of which the best education may be but an imperfect substitute. But no such feeling could operate on the pupils of schools established by the State" (p. 476).
There is no question with McCulloch about the right of the State to take steps to forward the moral progress, or to prevent the moral decadence, of the community—or any part of the community—under its care; that is simply its plain and primary duty, though there may be question with the State, as with other agencies, whether particular measures proposed for the purpose are really calculated to effect it.
After this long, and I fear tedious, account of the opinions of McCulloch, it would be needless to call more witnesses to refute those who so commonly accuse English economists of teaching an extreme individualism. For McCulloch may be said to be their own witness; they hold him up as the hardest and narrowest of a hard and narrow school; one of the ablest of them, Mr. J. K. Ingram, who writes McCulloch's memoir in the Encyclopædia Britannica, going so far as to accuse him of exhibiting "a habitual deadness in the study of social questions to all but material considerations." We have adduced enough to disprove that statement. The reader of McCulloch's writings is constantly struck to observe how habitually his judgment of a social question is governed by ethical rather than economic considerations, and how his supreme concern always seems to be to guard the labouring poor from falling into any sort of permanent decadence, and to place them securely on the lines of progressive elevation. But perhaps a word may be required about the Manchester school. Mr. Ingram states—and again his statement probably agrees with current prepossessions—that McCulloch occupied "substantially the same theoretic position as was occupied at a somewhat later period by the Manchester school" (Encyc. Brit., art. "Political Economy"). We have seen what McCulloch's theoretic position really was, and it is certainly not the Manchester doctrine of popular anathema; it is not the Manchesterismus of the German schools. But the Manchester men can scarcely be said to have properly had anything in the nature of a general theoretic position. They were not a school of political philosophy—they were a band of practical politicians leagued to promote particular reforms, especially two reforms in international policy which involved large curtailments of the rôle of Government—viz., free trade with other countries, and nonintervention in their internal affairs; but they were far from thinking that, because it would be well for the State to abstain from certain specific interferences, it would be well for it to abstain from all; or that if the State had no civilizing mission towards the people of other countries, it had therefore no civilizing mission towards its own. Cobden, for example—to go no farther—was a lifelong advocate of a national system of education; he was a friend of factory legislation for women and children, and, with respect to the poor, he taught in one of his speeches the semi-socialistic doctrine that the poor had the first right to maintenance from the land—that they are, as it were, the first mortgagees. The Manchester school is really nothing but a stage convention, a convenient polemical device for marking off a particular theoretical extreme regarding the task of the State; but the persons in actual life who were presumed to compose the school were no more, all of them, adherents of that theory than Scotchmen, off the stage, have all short kilts and red hair. And as for that theory itself, the theory of laissez-faire, it has never in England been really anything more than it is now, the plea of alarmed vested interests stealing an unwarranted, and I believe an unwelcome, shelter under the ægis of economic science. English economists, from Smith to McCulloch, from McCulloch to Mr. Sidgwick, have adhered with a truly remarkable steadiness to a social doctrine of a precisely contrary character—a social doctrine which, instead of exhibiting any unreasonable aversion to Government interference, expressly assigns to Government a just and proper place in promoting the social and industrial development of the community. In the first place, in the department of production, they freely allow that just as there are many industrial enterprises in the conduct of which individual initiative must, for want of resources or other reasons, yield to joint-stock companies, so there are others for which individuals and companies alike must give place to the State, because the State is by nature or circumstances better fitted than either to conduct them satisfactorily; and in the next place, in the department of distribution, while rating the moral or personal independence of the individual as a supreme blessing and claim, they have no scruple in calling on the State to interfere with the natural liberty of contract between man and man, wherever such interference seems requisite to secure just and equitable dealing, to guard that personal independence itself from being sapped, or to establish the people better in any of the other elementary conditions of all humane living. We sometimes take pride at the present day in professing a distrust for doctrinaire or metaphysical politics, and we are no doubt right; but that reproach cannot justly be levelled against the English economists. They were not Dutch gardeners trying to dress the world after an artificial scheme; that is more distinctive of the social systems they opposed. Their own system indeed was to study Nature, to discover the principles of sound natural social growth, and to follow them; but they had no idea on that account of leaving things to grow merely as they would, or of renouncing the help of good husbandry. They had, as we have seen, a positive doctrine of social politics, which required from the State much more than the protection of liberty and the repression of crime; they asked the State to undertake such industrial work as it was naturally better fitted to perform than individuals or associations of individuals, and they asked the State to secure to the body of the citizens the essential conditions of a normal and progressive manhood.
Now this doctrine—which may be called the English doctrine of social politics—seems to furnish a basis of considerable practical value for discriminating between a wholesome and effective participation by Government in the work of social reform, on the one hand, and those pernicious and dangerous forms of intervention on the other, which may be correctly known by the name of State socialism.
II. The Nature and Principle of State Socialism.
Few words are at present more wantonly abused than the words socialism and State socialism. They are tossed about at random, as if their meaning, as was said of the spelling of former generations, was a mere affair of private judgment. There is, in truth, a great deal of socialism in the employment of the word; little respect is paid to the previous appropriation of it; and especially since it has become, as has been said, hoffähig, men press forward from the most unlikely quarters, claim kindred with the socialists, and strive for the honour of being called by their name. Many excellent persons, for example, have no better pretext to advance for their claim than that they also feel a warm sentiment of interest in the cause of the poor. Churchmen whose duties bring them among the poor are very naturally touched with a sense of the miseries they observe, and certain of them, who may perhaps without offence be said to love the cause well more than wisely, come to public platforms and declare themselves socialists—socialists, they will sometimes explain, of an older and purer confession than the Social Democratic Federation, but still good and genuine socialists—merely because the religion they preach is a gospel of moral equality before God, and of fraternal responsibility among men, whose very test in the end is the test of human kindness—"Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me." But socialism is not a feeling for the poor, nor yet for the responsibilities of society in connection with their poverty; it is neither what is called humanitarianism, nor what is called altruism; it is not an affair of feeling at all, but of organization, and the feeling it breathes may not be altruistic. The revolutionary socialists of the Continent, for instance, are animated by as vigorous a spirit of self-interest and an even more bitter class antagonism than a trade union or a land league. They fight for a particular claim of right—the utterly unjustifiable claim to the whole product of labour—and they propose to turn the world upside down by a vast scheme of social reconstruction in order to get their unjust, delusive, and mischievous idea realized. The gauge of their socialism, therefore, must, after all, be looked for in their claim and their remedy, and not in the vague sympathies of a benevolent spectator who, without scrutinizing either the one or the other, thinks he will call himself a socialist because he feels that there is much in the lot of the poor man that might be mended, and that the rich might be very properly and reasonably asked to make some sacrifices for their brethren's sake out of their abundance. The philanthropic spectator suffers from no scarcity of words to express his particular attitude if he desires to do so; why then should he not leave socialists the enjoyment of their vocable?
There is often at the bottom of this sentimental patronage of socialism the not unchivalrous but mistaken idea that the ordinary self-interest of the world has been glorified by economists into a sacred and all-sufficing principle which it would be interfering with the designs of Providence to restrict, and that therefore it is only right to side with socialism as a protest against the position taken by the apologists of the present system of things, without being understood to commit one's self thereby to the particular system which socialism may propose to put in its place. But while the economists think very rightly that self-interest must always be regarded as the ordinary guide of life, and that the world cannot be reasonably expected to become either better, or better off, if everybody were to look after other people's interests (which he knows nothing about) instead of looking after his own (of which he at least knows something), they are far from showing any indifference to the danger of self-interest running into selfishness. On the contrary, they have constantly insisted—as the evidence I have already produced abundantly proves—that where the self-interest of the strongly placed failed to subject itself spontaneously to the restraints of social justice and the responsibilities of our common humanity, it was for society to step in and impose the restraints that were just and requisite, and to do so either by public opinion or by public authority in the way most likely to be practicable and effectual. Another thing our sentimental friends forget is that the socialists of the present day have no thought of substituting any other general economic motive in the room of self-interest. If they had their schemes realized to-morrow, men would still be paid according to the amount of their individual work, and each would work so far for his own hand. His daily motive would be his individual interest, though his scope of achievement would be severely limited by law with the view of securing a better general level of happiness in the community. The question between economists and socialists is not whether the claims of social justice are entitled to be respected, but whether the claims which one or other of them make really are claims of social justice or no. Still, so firm is the hold taken by the notion that the socialists are the special champions of social justice, that one of our most respected prelates has actually defined socialism in that sense. The Bishop of Rochester (now of Winchester), in his Pastoral Letter to his Clergy at the new year of 1888, takes occasion, while warning the younger brethren against the too headlong philanthropy which "scouts what is known as the science of political economy," to describe socialism as "the science of maintaining the right proportion of equity and kindness while adjudicating the various claims which individuals and society mutually make upon each other." In reality, socialism would be better defined as a system that outsteps the right proportion of equity and kindness, and sets up for the masses claims that are devoid of proportion and measure of any kind, and whose injustice and peril often arise from that very circumstance.
If bishops carry the term off to one quarter, philosophers carry it to another. Some identify socialism with the associative principle generally, and see it manifested in the growth of one form of organization as much as in the growth of another, or at most they may limit it to the intervention of the associative principle in things industrial, and in that event they would consider a joint-stock company, or a co-operative store, or perhaps a building like Queen Anne's Mansions, or the common-stair system of Scotland, to be as genuine exhibitions of socialism as the collectivism or anarchism of the Continental factions or the State monopolies of Prince Bismarck. But a joint-stock company is no departure from—it is rather an extension of—the present régime of private property, free competition, and self-interest; and why should it be described by the same name as a system whose chief pretension is to supersede that régime by a better? Another very common definition of socialism—perhaps the most common of all, and the last to which I shall refer here—is that socialism is the general principle of giving society the greatest possible control over the life of the individual, in contradistinction to the opposite principle of individualism, which is taken to be the principle of giving the individual the greatest possible immunity from the control of society. Any extension of the authority of the State, any fresh regulation of the transactions of individual citizens, is often pronounced to be socialistic without asking what the object or nature of the regulations may be. Socialism is identified with any enlargement, and individualism with any contraction, of the functions of government. But the world has not been made on this socialist principle alone, nor on this individualist principle alone, and it can neither be explained nor amended by means of the one without the other. Abstractions of that order afford us little practical guidance. The socialists of real life are not men who are bent on increasing Government control for the mere sake of increasing Government control. There are broad tracts of the individual's life they would leave free from social control; they would give him, for example, full property in his house and furniture during his lifetime, and the right to spend his income, once he had earned it, in his own way. Their scheme, if carried out, might be found to compel them to restrict this latter right, but their own desire and belief undoubtedly is that the individual would have more freedom of the kind then than he has now. They seek to extend Government control only because, and only so far as, they believe Government control to be necessary and fitted to realize certain theories of right and well-being which they think it incumbent on organized society to realize; and consequently the thing that properly characterizes their position is not so much the degree of their confidence in the powers of the State as the nature of the theories of right for which they invoke its intervention. And just as socialists do not enlarge the bounds of authority from the mere love of authority, so their opponents do not resist the enlargement from the mere hatred of authority. They raise no controversy about the abstract legitimacy of Government encroachments on the sphere of private capital or of legal enlargements of the rights or privileges of labour. There is no socialism in that; the socialism only comes in when the encroachments are made on a field where Government administration is unlikely to answer, and where the rights conferred are rights to which labour can present no just and reasonable claim.