“A primitive society,” if it is to become powerful in war—this Mr. Spencer admits—must have a great leader to direct it. But what precisely is it that such a leader is and does? Such a leader leads, because he is one mind or personality impressing for the moment its superior qualities on many minds or personalities. He supplies the fighting men of his society with an intelligence not their own—often with a courage, a presence of mind, and a resolution. He dictates to them the directions in which their feet are to carry them; the manner in which they are to group themselves; the movements of their hands and arms. He gives the word, and a thousand men dig trenches. He gives the word again, and a thousand men wield swords; now he makes them advance; now he makes them halt; and the measure of his greatness as a leader is to be found in those results which, by directing the action of all these men, he elicits from it.
And now from the triumphs of war let us turn to those of peace. “These,” says Mr. Spencer, “unlike the former, make their appearance unobtrusively, without the aid of any king or legislator.” It may, no doubt, be true that they do appear unobtrusively in the sense that they are not accompanied by trumpets and drums and tom-toms. A factory for the production of toffee, or of trimmings for ladies’ petticoats does not require an Ivan the Terrible to direct it, nor are Mr. Spencer’s sentences as he writes them punctuated by discharges of artillery. But if the essence of kingship and {59} leadership is to command the actions of others, the larger part of the progressive activities of peace, and the arts and products of civilisation, result from and imply the influence of kings and leaders, in essentially the same sense as do the successes of primitive war, the only difference being that the kings are here more numerous, and though they do not wear any arms or uniforms, are incomparably more autocratic than the kings and czars who do.
As a particularly clear illustration of this important truth, let us take Mr. Spencer himself, and place him before his own eyes as an autocratic king or ruler. In certain respects he is so; and it is only because he is so that he has been able to give, through his books, his thoughts and theories to the world. For let us examine any one of his volumes and consider what it is, in so far as it differs from any other volume—let us say from a treatise on the cutting of trousers, or an attack on the Spencerian philosophy—which is printed in similar type on pages of the same size. It differs solely in the order in which the letters have been arranged by the hands of the compositors; and its value as a work of philosophy consequently depends altogether on a certain complicated series of movements which the hands of the compositors have made. And how has this prolonged series of minute movements been secured? It has been secured by the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer, through his manuscript, has given the compositors a prolonged series of orders, which their hands, day after day, have been obliged to obey {60} passively. He has been as absolute a master of all their professional actions as ever was the most arbitrary general of the professional actions of his soldiery; and there is absolutely no difference in point of command and obedience between the compositors who, at Mr. Spencer’s bidding, put into type the words “homogeneity” and “the Unknowable” and the Guards who charged the French at the bidding of the Duke of Wellington.
Precisely the same thing is true of all scientific inventions—not indeed of inventions as mere ideas and discoveries, but of inventions and discoveries applied practically to the service of civilisation. The mere discovery of certain properties belonging to material substances, or the thinking out of some new machine or process, may be the work of one man, who has command over nobody except himself. But the moment he proceeds to make his machine or process useful—to apply it to the purpose of actual business or manufacture—he is obliged to secure for himself an entire army of mercenaries, who act under his orders in precisely the same way as soldiers act under the orders of the military leader, or as the compositors act under the orders of Mr. Spencer. When the electric telegraph was supplemented by the invention of the telephone, telephones were produced, and could have been produced, only by a multitude of men performing a series of manual actions which were different in detail from anything they had performed before, and which, if it had not been for the inventor, would never {61} have been performed at all. They filed or they cast pieces of metal into new shapes; with these pieces of metal they connected in new order pieces of other materials, such as wood and vulcanite, the shape of these last being new and special also; and every piece of material shaped or connected with another piece was the exact resultant of so many manual movements made in passive obedience to the inventor’s autocratic orders. It was only because his orders were obeyed with such humble fidelity and completeness that these movements resulted in telephones, enriching the world with a new convenience, and not in the old-fashioned telegraphic machines, or in penholders, or vulcanite inkstands, or even in useless heaps of shavings and brass filings. And the same is the case with every invention or contrivance which has helped to build up the fabric of modern material civilisation.
Civilisation, however, even in its most material sense, does not consist of contrivances and inventions only. “The one operation,” says Mill, “of putting things into fit places . . . is all that man does, or can do, with matter. He has no other means of acting on it than by moving it.” But valuable as this formula is, it is not sufficiently comprehensive; for there is another economic process which, to the ordinary mind at all events, is hardly suggested by such a phrase as “to move matter.”
The process referred to consists in the moving of men. What is meant by the distinction here drawn is this—that the industrial efficiency of a community {62} does not depend solely on the muscles of the manual workers being given a right direction, so that they shall shape material objects in such and such a way; but it depends also on the movements which are prescribed to the men, being prescribed to the men best fitted to perform them, and being prescribed to them in such order that when each movement has to be made, the men told off to make it shall be ready to make it at the moment. Here we see part of the secret of the success of the great contractor.
The importance of these considerations becomes all the clearer to us when we reflect on the fact that the mere production of commodities, and the production of the means of production, form but a part of the processes which advance, maintain, and indeed constitute civilisation. A part almost equally large consists in the rendering of various personal services, which often, no doubt, involve the utilisation of improved appliances, but which almost as often are neither more nor less than the performance of actions of a simple and ordinary kind, the merit and demerit, the wastefulness or the economy of which depend on their being performed with absolute punctuality and despatch. A good example of this is the case of a large hotel. Whether a large hotel is carried on at a profit or at a loss depends almost entirely on this question of personal management. The success of a successful manager does not depend on his capacity for inventing new methods of waiting, of cooking, or of making beds. It depends on his {63} capacity for organising his staff of cooks, waiters, and chamber-maids. This is well expressed by that most significant American saying, “He’s a smart man, but he couldn’t keep a hotel”; the meaning being that one of the most important, and at the same time one of the rarest faculties required for maintaining a complicated civilisation like our own is the faculty by which, given a number of tasks, one man governs a number of men in the act of cooperatively performing them.
Examples of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied, but those just adduced are quite sufficient to prove the sole point insisted on at the present moment—namely, that whatever be the part (and Mr. Spencer admits it to be “all-important”) which the great man plays as a leader in primitive warfare, a part precisely similar in kind is played by other great men in the peaceful processes, and, above all, in the progress of civilisation.
And now, having dealt with this point, let us turn to Mr. Spencer’s other contention—his contention namely that, whatever the part may be, and however seemingly important, which the great man plays in producing social changes, he is, in any case, nothing but their “proximate initiator”;—that “they have their chief cause in the generations he descended from”;—and that if there is to be anything like a real and scientific explanation of them, it must be sought in the aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen, and not in the great man’s personality as revealed to us by any {64} records of his life, or by any analysis of his peculiar faculties.
We have already seen in a general way how this feat of merging the great man in “the aggregate of conditions out of which he has arisen” is performed by Mr. Spencer himself. Let us now turn for a moment to three other writers who, though differing from him as to certain of his conclusions, have with regard to this particular point done little else than popularise and apply his teaching.