The intellectual socialists of to-day, and many of their less educated followers, will strenuously deny this. They will declare that they, unlike their predecessors, recognise that directive ability is a true productive agent no less than ordinary labour is; and that able men, no less than the labourers, have rights which they may, if they choose, enforce with equal justice. And if we confine our attention to certain of their theoretical admissions, we need not go further than the pages of the present volume to remind ourselves that for this assertion there are ample, if disjointed, foundations. But the doctrine of modern socialism must be judged, not only by its separate parts, but also by the emphasis with which they are respectively enunciated, and by the mood of mind which, on the whole, it engenders among the majority of those who are affected by it; and, whatever its leading exponents may, on occasion, protest to the contrary, the main practical result which it has thus far produced among the masses has been to foment the impression, which is not the less efficacious because it is not explicitly formulated, that when labour and ability are disputing over their respective rights, ability comes into court with no genuine rights at all; and that, instead of representing (as it does) the knowledge, intellect, and energy to which the whole surplus values of the modern world are due, it represents merely a system of decently legalised theft from an output of wealth which would lose nothing of its amplitude, but would on the contrary still continue to increase were all exceptional energy, knowledge, and intellect deprived of all authority and starved out of existence to-morrow.
So long as such an impression prevails, and indeed until it is definitely superseded by one more in consonance with facts, no satisfactory social policy is practicable. Labour, as opposed to ability, may be compared to a man who believes that his tailor has overcharged him for a coat, and who disputes the account in a law court with a view to its reasonable reduction. In such a case it will be possible for him to obtain justice. The tailor's claim for £12 may be reduced to a claim for £10, or £8 5s., or £6 15s. 6d. But if the customer's contention is that he ought to get the coat for nothing, and that he does not in justice owe the tailor anything at all, he is making a demand that no law court could satisfy, and by a gratuitous misconception of his rights is doing all he can to preclude himself from any chance of obtaining them. The mood which socialism foments among the labouring classes is precisely analogous to the mood of such a man as this, and its results are analogous likewise. Its origin, however, being artificial and also obvious in its minutest particulars, the remedy for it, however difficult to apply, is not obscure in its nature. The mood in question results from a definite, a systematic, and an artificially produced misconception of the structure and the main phenomena, good and evil, of society as it exists to-day, and the different parts played by the different classes composing it. It has been the object of the present volume to expose, one after another, the individual fallacies of which this general misconception is the result, not with a view to suggesting that in society as it exists to-day there are no grave evils which a true social policy may alleviate, but with a view to promoting between classes, who are at present in needless antagonism, that sane and sober understanding with regard to their respective positions which alone can form the basis of any sound social policy in the future.
Of the individual demands or proposals now put forward by socialists, many point to objects which are individually desirable and are within limits practicable; but what hinders, more than anything else, any successful attempt to realise them is the fact that they are at present placed in a false setting. They resemble a demand for candles on the part of visitors at an hotel, who would have, if they did not get them, to go to bed in the dark—a demand which would be contested by nobody if it were not that those who made it demanded the candles only as a means of setting fire to the bed-curtains. The demands for old-age pensions, and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind. The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life of the whole.
We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil—partly because their very perverseness and their varying and accumulating absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism, no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the class of evils for which no alleviation is possible.
Even to suggest the manner in which these evils would be treated by a sound and scientific statesmanship would be wholly beyond the scope of a volume such as the present, for this reason, if for no other, that, as has been said already, the evils in question are not one but many, each demanding special and separate treatment, just as ophthalmia demands a treatment other than that demanded by whooping-cough. But one general observation may be fitly made, in conclusion, which will apply to all of them. These remedies cannot be included under the heading of any mere general augmentation of the pecuniary reward of labour taken in the aggregate. The portion of the national dividend which goes to labour now, in progressive countries such as Great Britain, Germany, and America, is immensely greater than it was a hundred years ago, and unless industrial progress is arrested its tendency is to rise still further. The main evils to which a scientific statesmanship should address itself arise from the incidental conditions under which this dividend is spent—conditions, largely improvable, which at present deprive it of its full purchasing power. Of this I will give one example—the present structure of great industrial towns. It cannot be doubted that, if the sums now spent on the construction and maintenance of insanitary slums and alleys were employed in a scientific manner, a rent which has now to be paid for accommodation of the most degrading kind would suffice to command, on the strictest business principles, homes superior to those which, if its amount were doubled, would hardly be forthcoming for the labourer in most of our existing streets; while the purchasing power of the existing income of labour would be increased concurrently, and perhaps to a yet greater extent if much of the education, which now has no other effect than of generating impracticable ideas as to the abstract rights of man, were devoted to developing in men and women alike a greater mastery of the mere arts of household management.
But in merely mentioning these subjects I am transgressing my proper limits. I mention them only with a view to reminding the reader once more that the object of this volume is not to suggest, or supply arguments for maintaining that existing conditions are perfect, or that socialists are visionaries in declaring that they are capable of improvement. Its object has been to expose that radical misconception of facts which renders demands visionary that would not be visionary otherwise, and to stimulate all sane and statesmanlike reformers by helping them to see, and also to explain to others, that the improved conditions which socialism blindly clamours for are practicable only in proportion as they are dissociated from the theories of socialism.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Like all generalisation dealing with complex matters, this must be qualified by individual exceptions. For example, men who have made fortunes for themselves, and have added to the world's stock, by work in the gold-fields, have been in many cases labourers, directing their own efforts by their own intelligence. But some men have been exceptional in one or other of two ways—either in propinquity to the scene of action, or (and this is the more common case) in handihood, determination, and courage. It is not every one who has it in him to go in search of gold to Alaska.