They tell us a great deal. For what is, and always has been, their stock moral indictment against the typical men of ability, the pioneers of commerce, the capitalistic directors of labour, the introducers of new inventions, the amplifiers of the world's wealth? Their chief indictment against such men has been this—that their exceptional ability, instead of being roused into action solely by the pleasure of benefiting their fellow-men, has been utterly dead and irresponsive to every stimulus but one; and that this has been personal greed, and personal greed alone. Its influence, they say, is as old as civilisation itself, and was as operative in the days when the prows of the Tyrian traders first ploughed their way beyond the pillars of Hercules, as it is to-day under the smoke-clouds of Manchester, of Pittsburg, and Chicago. Karl Marx for example, in a very interesting passage written in England about the time of the abolition of the Corn-laws, declared that the radical manufacturers, who professed to support that measure on the ground that it would secure cheap food for the people, were not moved in reality, and were not capable of being moved, by any desire but that of lowering the rate of wages, and thus increasing the surplus which they raked into their own pockets. In other words, the psychologists of socialism declare that, so far as the facts of human nature in the present and the past can teach us anything, the desire of exceptional wealth is just as inseparable from the temperament which, by some physiological law, accompanies the power of producing it, as "the joy in creation" is from the temperament of the great painter, or the love of a woman is from the lover's efforts to win her.
We thus see that those thinkers who, when they are dealing with an imaginary future, base all their hopes on the possibility of a complete elimination of a certain motive from a certain special class of persons, are the very men who are most vehement in declaring that in this special class of persons the motive in question is something so ingrained and inveterate that in no age or country has it ever been so much as modified.
Nor does the matter end here; for the amusing contradiction in which socialistic thought thus lauds itself, is emphasised by the fact that the socialists, when they turn from the few to the many, assume in the many, as an instinct of eternal justice, that precise desire for gain which, in the case of the few, they first denounce as a hideous and incurable disease, and then propose to cure as though it were the passing cough of a baby. For what is the bait with which, from its first beginnings till to-day, socialism has sought to secure the support of the general multitude? It is mainly, if not solely, the promise of increased personal gain, without any increased effort on the part of the happy recipients. With Marx and the earlier socialists, this promise took the form of declaring that every man has a sacred right to whatever he has himself produced, and that, all the wealth of the world being produced by manual labour, the labourers must never be satisfied until they have secured all of it. The more educated socialists of to-day, having gradually come to perceive that labour itself produces but a fraction of this wealth only, have had to alter the form of their promise, but they still adhere to its substance; and the altered form of the promise does but bring out more clearly the fact that they appeal to the desire of personal gain as the primary economic motive of the great majority of mankind. For, whereas the earlier socialists contented themselves with promising the labourer the whole of what he produced, and promising it on the ground that he had himself produced it, what the labourer is promised by the intellectual socialists of to-day is not only all that he has produced—which in most cases he gets already[14]—but a great deal more besides, which is admittedly produced by others.
We thus see that, according to these theorists, the kind of moral conversion which is to make socialism practicable is to be rigidly confined to one particular class; for, on the part of the majority, no change at all is required in order to make the socialistic evangel welcome. So far as they are concerned, the Old Adam is quite sufficient. None of us need much converting in order to welcome the prospect of an indefinite addition to our incomes, which will cost us nothing but the trouble of stretching out our hands to take it. Socialists often complain that, under the existing dispensation, there is one law for the rich and another law for the poor. They propose themselves to introduce a difference which goes still deeper, and to provide the few and the many, not only with two laws, but with two different natures, and two antithetic moralities. The morality of the many is to remain, as it always has been, comfortably based on the familiar desire for dollars. The morality of the few is to be based on some hitherto unknown contempt for them; and the class which the socialists fix upon as the subjects of this moral transformation, is precisely the class which they denounce as being, and as always having been, in respect of its devotion to dollars, the most notorious, and the most notoriously incorrigible.
That arguments such as these, culminating in an absurdity like this, and starting with the assumption that it is possible to animate a manufacturer's office with the spirit of soldiers facing an enemy's guns, should actually emanate from sane men would be unbelievable, if the arguments were not being repeated from day to day by men who, in some respects, are far from being incompetent reasoners. Indeed, many of them themselves would, it seems, be extremely doubtful with regard to the plasticity imputed by them to human nature, if it were not for a theory of society which is not peculiar to socialism. This is the theory that, in any community or nation in which each citizen is completely free to express his will by his vote, and realises the extent of the power which thus resides in him, the will of the majority has practically no limits to its efficiency, and will be able in the future to bring about moral changes, which are at present, perhaps, beyond the limits of possibility, but are only so because the means of effecting them have never yet been fully utilised. This theory of democracy we will consider in the following chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Mr. G. Wilshire, in criticising this argument as stated in one of my American addresses, declares that there would be nothing in socialism to prevent any great artist (such as a singer) from making an even larger fortune than he or she does now. But though a Melba, under the existing system, demands a large price for her services, under socialism all would be changed. Though she could get it, she would no longer want it. She would then want no reward but the mere joy of using her voice. And he infers that this change which would take place in the bosoms of great singers would repeat itself under the breast-pocket of every leader and organiser of commercial enterprise. It would be hard to find a better illustration of the purely fanciful reasoning commented on in the text.
[14] The question of how much labour, as such, produces in modern societies is discussed in a later chapter.