A Critical Examination of Socialism

by W. H. Mallock

Thirdly, with regard to equality of opportunity for those whose main ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by their own hand, but to achieve some position which will enable them to prescribe tasks to others, and thus do justice to their real or supposed talents by the construction of great machines, or the organisation of great enterprises—in other words, with regard to those persons whose ambition is to obtain what are called the prizes of life, and who think themselves treated unjustly if they find themselves unable to gain them—we have seen that to provide equal opportunities for all or even for most of these, is in the very nature of things impossible. The fundamental reason of this, let me say once more, is the fact that the number of men possessing sufficient talent to conceive ambitious schemes of one kind or another far exceeds the number of those whose talents are capable of producing any useful results; and to give to this majority opportunities of testing their projects by experiment would be merely to deplete the resources of the entire nation for the sake of demonstrating to one particular class that abortive talents are worse than no talents at all.

Here we are in the presence of a fact far wider than this special manifestation of it. In the animal and the vegetable world, no less than in the human, the successes of nature are the siftings of its partial failures; and in order to secure such services as are really productive it must always be necessary to squander opportunities to a certain extent in the testing of talents which ultimately turn out to be barren. But cases of this kind may, at all events, be reduced to a minimum; and the reduction of their number is possible, because they are largely an artificial product. In order to understand how this is, we must go back again to the question of equality of opportunity in education, and consider it under an aspect which has not yet engaged our attention.

We started with supposing the establishment of a system of education which would offer to all the same books and teachers, and also—for this was part of our assumption—equal leisure to profit by them; and we noted how soon opportunities would cease to be equal on account of the different uses which would be made of them by different students. What must now be noted is that as matters have been conducted hitherto, attempts to make educational opportunities equal do tend to produce an equality of a certain kind. Though they have no tendency to equalise powers of achievement, they tend to produce an artificial equality of expectation. In order to elucidate the nature of this fact, and its significance, I cannot do better than quote a passage from Ruskin, admirable for its trenchant felicity, which, since it occurs in a book much admired by socialists, may be commended to their special attention.[29] Economic demand, Ruskin says, is the expression of economic desires; but the constitution of human nature is such that these desires are divisible into two distinct kinds—desires for the commodities which men "need," and desires for commodities which they "wish for." The former arise from those appetites and appetencies in respect of which all are equal. They are virtually a fixed quantity, and the economic commodities requisite for their healthy satisfaction constitute a minimum which is virtually the same for all men. The latter, instead of being fixed, are capable of indefinite variation, and in these—the desires for what men "wish for" but do not "need"—we have the origin "of three-fourths of the demands existing in the world." "These demands are," he proceeds, "romantic. They are founded on visions, idealisms, hopes, and affections, and the regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart."

With the demands which originate in men's equal needs we are not concerned here. It is impossible to modify them appreciably either by education or otherwise; but the desires or wishes which Ruskin so happily calls "romantic" vary in intensity and character to an almost indefinite degree, not only in different individuals, but also in the same individuals when submitted to different circumstances. Those of them, indeed, which are most generally felt are often, to speak strictly, not so much desires as fancies; and while the image of their fulfilment may please or amuse the imagination, their non-fulfilment produces no sense of want. So long as they are merely fancies, they raise no practical question. They raise a practical question only when their insistence is such that their non-fulfilment produces an active sense of privation; and whether in the case of any given individual they reach or do not reach this pitch of intensity depends upon two things. One of these is the individual's congenital temperament, his talents, his strength of will, and the vividness or vagueness of his imagination. Education, understood in its more general sense, is the other. Now, men varying as they do in respect of their congenital characters, the strength of their romantic wishes bears naturally some proportion to their own capacities for attempting to satisfy these wishes for themselves. Few men, for example, have naturally a strong wish for conditions which will enable them to exercise exceptional power, unless they are conscious of possessing exceptional powers to exercise. Hence, though this consciousness is in many cases deceptive, the struggle of men for power is confined within narrow limits, and the disappointments which embitter those who fail to attain it are naturally confined within narrow limits also. So long as matters stand thus, the majority of men are unaffected. But wishes which are naturally confined to exceptional men, who are more or less capable of realising them, are susceptible by education of indefinite extension to others who are not so qualified; and in the case of these last, the results which they produce are different. They multiply the number of those who demand preferential opportunities, in order that they may enter on a struggle in which they must ultimately fail.

They multiply the number of those, to a still greater extent, who demand that positions or possessions shall be somehow provided for them by society, without reference to any struggle on their own part at all. The artificial diffusion of "wish" among these two distinguishable classes is thus accomplished by education in somewhat different ways; but the modus operandi is in one respect the same in both. It consists of an artificial enlarging, in the case of all individuals alike, of the ideas entertained by them of their natural social rights; and an active craving is thus generalised for possessions and modes of life, which nine men out of ten would otherwise have never wasted a thought upon, and which not one out of ten can possibly make his own. How easily this idea of rights is susceptible of enlargement by teaching, and how efficient it is in creating a desire where none would have existed otherwise, is vividly illustrated by those not infrequent cases in which men, who for half their lives have considered themselves fortunate in the possession of moderate affluence, have suddenly been led to suppose themselves the heirs of peerages or great estates, and have died insane or bankrupt in consequence of their vain endeavours to secure rank or property which, had it not been for a purely adventitious idea, would have affected their hopes and wishes no more than the moon did. It is precisely in this manner that much of the education of to-day operates in consequence of current attempts to equalise it[30]; and since education is the cause of the evils here in question, it is in some reform of education that we must hope to find a cure. What the general nature of this reform would be can be indicated in a few words. It would not involve a reversal, it would involve a modification only, of the principle now in vogue, and can, indeed, best be expressed by means of the same formula, if we do but add to it a single qualifying word—that is to say, the word "relative" prefixed to the word "equality," when we speak of equality of opportunity as the end at which we ought to aim. Let me explain my meaning.

The logical end of all action is happiness; and happiness, so far as it depends on economic conditions at all, is an equation between desire and attainment. The capacities of men being unequal, and the objects of desire which they could, under the most favourable circumstances, make their own, being unequal likewise, the ideal object of education, as a means to happiness, is twofold. It is, on the one hand, so to develop each man's congenital faculties as to raise them to their maximum power of providing him with what he desires; and on the other hand to limit his desires, by a due regulation of his expectations, to such objects as his faculties, when thus developed, render approximately if not completely attainable. Thus, relatively to the individual, the ideal object of education is in all cases the same; but since individuals are not equal to one another, education, if it is to perform an equal service for each, must be in its absolute character to an indefinite extent various; just as a tailor, if he is to give to all his customers equal opportunities of being well dressed, will not offer them coats of the same size and pattern. He will offer them coats which are equal only in this—namely, their equally successful adaptation to the figures of their respective wearers.

Of course, so to graduate any actual course of education that in the case of each individual it is the best which it is possible to conceive for him—that it should at once enable him to make the most of his powers, and "regulate," as Ruskin says, "his imagination and his hopes" in accordance with them, would require a clairvoyance and prevision not given to man; but the end here specified—namely, an equality of opportunity which is relative—is the only kind of equality which is even theoretically possible; and it is one, moreover, to which a constant approximation can be made. The absolute equality which is contemplated by socialists, and by others who are more or less vaguely influenced by socialistic sentiment, is, on the contrary, an ideal which either could not be realised at all, or which, in proportion as it was realised, would be ruinous to the nation which provided it, and would bring nothing but disappointment to those who were most importunate in demanding it. The only conceivable means, indeed, by which it could be extended beyond the first few years of life, would be by a constant process of handicapping—that is to say, by applying to education the same policy that trade-unions apply to ordinary labour. If one bricklayer has laid more bricks than his fellows, he virtually has to wait until the others have caught him up. Similarly, if equality of opportunity, other than an equality that is relative, were to be maintained in the sphere of education, a clever boy who had learned to speak German in a year would have to be coerced into idleness until every dunce among his classmates could speak it as well as he; and a similar process would be repeated in after-life. This policy, as has been pointed out already, is, even if wasteful, not ruinous in the sphere of ordinary labour—a fact which shows how wide the difference is between the ordinary faculties, as applied to industry, and the exceptional; but no one in his senses, not even the most ardent apostle of equality, would dream of recommending its application to efforts of a higher kind, and demand that the clever boys should periodically be made to wait for the stupid, or that the best doctor in the presence of a great pestilence should not be allowed to cure more patients than the worst one.

If, then, it is, as it must be, the ideal aim of social arrangements generally to enable each to raise his capacities to their practical maximum, and adjust his desires and his expectations to the practical possibilities of attainment, "relative equality of opportunity," firstly in education and secondly in practical life, is a formula which accurately expresses the means by which this end is to be secured; but the absolute equality which is contemplated by socialists and others is an ideal which, the moment we attempted to translate it into terms of the actual, would begin to fall to pieces, defeating its own purpose; and there is nothing in socialism, were socialism otherwise practicable, any more than there is the existing system, which would obviate this result.

Indeed, it may be observed further that, though the idea of equality of opportunity in general is not inconsistent with a socialistic scheme of society, as socialists of the more thoughtful kind have now come to conceive of it, it belongs distinctively to the domain of the fiercest individual competition. For in so far as socialism differs from ordinary individualism, it differs from it in this—that, instead of encouraging each man to do his utmost because what he gets will be proportionate to what he does, it aims at establishing a greater equality in what men get by making this independent of whether they do much or little; in which case the main concern of the individual would be the certainty of getting what he wanted, not the opportunity of producing it.

The three ideas or conceptions, then, which have engaged our attention in this and the three preceding chapters—namely, the idea that labour does, as a statistical fact, produce far more in values than it at present gets back in wages; the idea that the mass of the population could permanently augment its resources by confiscating all dividends as fast as they became due, and the idea that it is possible to provide for unequal men, for more than a moment of their lives, equal opportunities of experimenting with their real or imaginary powers, are ideas, indeed, which have all the vices characteristic of socialistic thought; but the first and the third have no necessary connection with socialism, and the second is not peculiar to it. We will now return to it as a system of exclusive and distinctive doctrines, and sum up, in general terms, the conclusions to which our examination of it is calculated to lead far-seeing and practical men, and more especially active politicians.