Now, in what I have been urging thus far—which practically comes to this, that the sovereignty popularly ascribed to democratic majorities is an illusion—not socialists only, but other advocates of popular government also, will alike be against me, as the promulgator of some blasphemous paradox. It will be easy, however, to show them that their objections are quite mistaken, and that the exceptional powers of dictation which have just been ascribed to a minority are so far from being inconsistent with the real powers of the majority that the latter, when properly understood, are seen to be their complement and their counterpart. For, though socialists and thinkers like "X" ascribe to majorities powers which they do not possess, we shall find that majorities do actually possess others, in some ways very much greater, of which such thinkers have thus far taken no cognisance at all. I have said that minorities can dictate their own terms to majorities which desire to secure their services, the reason being that the former are alone competent to determine what treatment will supply them with a motive to exert themselves. What holds good of minorities as opposed to majorities holds good in essentials, though in a somewhat different form, of majorities as opposed to such minorities.
Let us turn again to a matter to which I have referred already—namely, the family life of the citizens of any race or nation. This results from propensities in a vast number of human beings which, although they are similar, are in each case independent. These propensities give rise to legislation, the object of which is to prescribe rules by which their satisfaction may be made secure; but the propensities are so far from originating in legislation that no legislation which seriously interfered with them would be tolerated. Socialists themselves have continually admitted this very thing. The Italian socialist, Giovanni Rossi, for instance, who attempted about fifteen years ago to found a socialistic colony in Brazil—an attempt which completely failed—attributed its failure largely to this particular cause—namely, the impossibility of inducing the colonists to conform to any rules of the community by which family life was interfered with. Here we have an example of democracy in its genuine form, rendering powerless what affected to be democratic legislation. We have the cumulative power of similar human characters compelling legislation to limit itself to what these characters spontaneously demand. And now let us go a step—a very short step—further. The family propensities in question show their dictatorial power, not only in the limitations which they impose on positive laws, but also in the character which they impose on the material surroundings of existence, especially in the material structure of the dwellings of all classes except the lowest. All are constructed with a view to keeping the family group united, and each family group separate from all others. Further, if the natural family propensities thus affect the structure of the dwelling, other propensities, more various in detail, but in each case equally spontaneous, determine what commodities shall be put into it.
And this fact brings us back to our own more immediate subject—namely, the power of the few and of the many in the sphere of economic production. The man of exceptional industrial capacity becomes rich in the modern world by producing goods, or by rendering services, which others consume or profit by, and for which they render him a return. But, in order that they may take, and render him this return for what he offers them, the goods and the services must be such that the many desire to have them. All the highest productive ability that has ever been devoted to the business of cheapening and multiplying commodities, or rendering social services, would be absolutely futile unless these commodities and services satisfied tastes or wants existing in various sections of the community. The eliciting of such wants or tastes depends very often, and in progressive communities usually, on a previous supply of the commodities or services that minister to them—as we see, for example, in the case of tobacco, of the telegraph, and of the bicycle; but, when once the demands have been elicited, they are essentially democratic in their nature. Each customer is like a voter who practically gives his vote for the kind of goods which he desires to have supplied to him. He gives his vote under no compulsion. He is under the manipulation of no party or wire-puller; and the men by whose ability the goods are cheapened and multiplied are bound to determine their character by the number of votes cast for them.[15]
Thus, while—so long as the productivity of labour is intensified, as it is in the modern world, by the ability of the few who direct labour—the labouring majority can never be free in their technical capacity of producers, they are free, and must always remain free, in respect of their tastes as consumers. In other words, demand is essentially democratic, while supply, in proportion to its sustained and enhanced abundance, is essentially oligarchic.
Now, that demand is essentially democratic, and depends on the tastes and characters of those by whom the demands are made, nobody will be inclined to deny. But if we turn our attention from society, taken as a whole, to the exceptionally able minority on whom the business of supply depends, we shall find that these men, in their turn, form similarly a small democracy in themselves, and make, as suppliers, their own demands also—a demand for an economic reward, or an amount of personal wealth, not, indeed, necessarily equal to the amount of wealth produced by them, but bearing a proportion to it which is, in their own estimation, sufficient. This demand made by the exceptional producer rests on exactly the same basis as does that of the average customer. It rests on the tastes and characters of the men who make it; and it is just as impossible for the many to decide by legislation that the few shall put forth the whole of their exceptional powers for the sake of one reward, when what they want is another, as it is for the few to make the many buy snuff when they want tobacco, or buy green coats when they want black. [16]
That such is the case will, to those who may be inclined to doubt it, become more evident if they consider with more attention than they are generally accustomed to exercise what the main attraction of great wealth is for the men who in the modern world are the producers of it on the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers—the people who principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is—are the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it. They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for purely sensual self-indulgence—especially for the eating and drinking of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in their personal habits, been abstemious and even niggardly to a degree which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing forces of the community. They feel the machine respond to their own exceptional management of it; they see the output of wealth varied and multiplied at their will; and thus the results of their specialised power as producers are neither more nor less than this same internal power converted into an external, an indeterminate and universalised form; and the reason why they will never produce wealth merely in order to be deprived of it is that no one will exercise power merely in order to lose it, and allow it to pass into the hands of other people. These men, as experience, especially in America, shows us, are constantly willing to use this power for the benefit of their kind generally; but this is no more a sign that they would be willing to allow it to be forcibly taken from them than the fact that a man is willing to give a shilling to a beggar in the street is a sign that he would allow the beggar to steal it out of his waistcoat-pocket.
So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power as affects the material circumstances of mankind, these differences in power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily assert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society; and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish, which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months' experience. An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found in an unlikely place—namely, a work written some years ago by a socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist, who was also an accomplished naturalist—the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is called The Woman Who Did.
The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of such an embarrassing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another, and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her daughter—and he does this with considerable skill—as developing from her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war. "Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us read this passage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness of socialism.
But the arguments at the service of socialism are not exhausted yet. Even if voting majorities should be unable to transform human nature, that men of power shall become willing to exert their power only in order that they may be deprived of it, there is a class of socialists who declare that what is impossible with mere human democracy, will be rendered possible by the divine influence of a rightly preached Christianity. To Christian socialists, as such, I have as yet made no special reference; nor will it be necessary now to be very prolix in our dealings with them; but in their attitude and their equipment for the task of effecting an economic revolution, they throw so strong a light on the character of contemporary socialism generally that a brief consideration of their gospel will be interesting and highly instructive, and will fitly lead us to the conclusion of this part of our argument.