History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

A distinctive characteristic of modern industry is its alliance with science. This union dates from the French Revolution. One aim of the revolutionists was to put exact knowledge at the service of the industrial arts, and, by thus increasing the productive forces of society, to create an abundance for all, banish poverty from the earth, and advance civilization to a higher point than ever before reached.

And this alliance of industry and science has, in so far as mere production is concerned, more than met every expectation. Through the application of inventions and scientific knowledge to the various industrial processes, society’s powers of production have been increased threefold, tenfold, fifty-fold, in some arts even a thousandfold. Surely now all will be fed and clothed and sheltered.

But this vision of a millennium of well-being for all as the result of the union of science and industry has not come true. The great mass of the world’s toilers are underfed, ill-clad, and improperly housed. From the slums, from the dark and noisome tenements of our great cities, arises the bitter cry of children, ragged, wan, and hungry, robbed through the parents’ poverty of every delight and right of childhood. “The poverty of the workers,” cries Henry Demarest Lloyd in passionate protest, “is the sin of our age.”[728]

The divorce of modern industry and ethics: economic Machiavellism

The causes of this pitiful failure of the new industrialism, notwithstanding its capacity for enormous production, to provide for the wants of all is not far to seek. Our age, while uniting science and business, has divorced ethics and business, just as in the time of the Renaissance in Italy there was effected a divorce of ethics and politics. Political economists have taught that ethics has nothing to do with economics. And this economic Machiavellism of the schools has not been merely an academic thing; it has probably exerted as sinister an influence upon the modern industrial order as the political doctrines of Machiavelli exerted upon the diplomacy and governmental policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dominated by this philosophy our business life has become frankly unmoral—large sections of it grossly immoral.

The breakdown of the system

But economics and ethics can no more be divorced than politics and ethics. Machiavellism has succeeded no better in economics than in politics. “The system based on [this philosophy] is breaking down all over, in strikes, riots, panics, gluts, unemployed idleness, and class murder. It is breaking down not because the task of getting plenty for the body—and the soul—for every one out of the fruitful earth and the fellowship of man is an impossible task, but because the task is an impossible one of accomplishment—that or anything else in human affairs—by the devil’s code of selfishness instead of love, of solitary advantage instead of the good of all. By such a philosophy there could be no government, no family; and if it continues, there will ere long be no business. But it cannot continue.”[729]

Reforms whose aims are the moralization of the industrial order: (a) socialization of the unearned increment in land values

It cannot continue because there is a fast-growing conviction of the falsity of the philosophy of economic Machiavellism—an ever-growing recognition of the truth that the relationships of men in business, like all other human relationships, are conditioned by the moral law of human brotherhood. There are profound changes taking place in the moral feelings and judgments of men respecting many of the customs, principles, and institutions of the modern industrial order. There is a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very embodiment of unreason and injustice.

Among the economic institutions respecting which there is taking place such a change in moral judgment is that of absolute private property in land. Although this is an institution unknown to primitive peoples, in all the great civilizations of the past we find society based upon it. That the system, since it inevitably results in private monopoly, has contributed largely to the creation of that gross inequality in wealth which has characterized every advanced civilization known to history, and which has helped to prepare its downfall, does not admit of reasonable doubt. The monopolization of land by a class has been one source, and probably a main source, of the phenomenon in modern society of deepening poverty in the midst of growing wealth, of dehumanizing want for the many along with demoralizing luxury for the few. That in countries of large and thickening population a private monopoly in the arable land is the embodiment of a colossal and cruel wrong is incontrovertible. That a single class should be allowed to become the absolute owners of the soil and thereby acquire the legal right to exclude all others from it save on the condition that practically all that can be got from it by the hardest toil, save just enough for the bare subsistence of the laborer, shall be given over as rent to the holder of the land, is as great a moral wrong as to take directly from the worker the product of his toil by reducing him to bodily slavery. It is this gross inequity which has made the history of many countries, like much of the history of Ireland, a harrowing tragedy. The wrong, if not greater, is at least more obvious when the land thus monopolized is the site of a great city where the enormous ground values have been created not by any labor or expenditure on the part of the owners, but by the growth and enterprise of the community as a whole.