Next, with regard to the pursuit of speculative knowledge, though this, and more especially pure scientific discovery, may form the basis of all productive effort, it is very far from being a form of productive effort itself. It has, on the contrary, no necessary connection with it. It does not even belong to the region in which such effort operates. {298} Scientific truths, as apprehended by the mere seeker after speculative knowledge, are like powerful spirits secluded in some distant star; and, for any effect which they have on the processes of economic production, they might just as well have never been discovered at all. Before they can be applied to practical purposes they have to be mastered and digested by a new class of men altogether, who value them not for themselves, but solely for the use they can be put to. Thus, in order that speculative truths may be connected with productive effort, they must pass out of the hands of the men who first discovered them, and be made over to men whose motive in acquiring them will emphatically not be desire of the mere pleasure of intellectual acquisition, but the desire of some marketable products with a calculable pecuniary value, in the production of which a knowledge of the truths in question will help them. Thus speculative activity, just like artistic creation, in exact proportion as it connects itself with the ordinary processes of wealth-production, ceases to find its motive in the desire of self-realisation, and claims to be rewarded by the possession of the objective results produced by it.
And now let us turn from the motives which consist in the desire of self-realisation to those which consist in the desire of the approbation or the homage of others. This desire, which exercises a great influence on the artist, and often also on the seeker after speculative truth, concurrently with the {299} desire of pure self-realisation, exhibits its force most signally when it is the motive of military heroism; and the readiness with which a soldier will risk his life for honour—honour which brings with it nothing besides itself, excepting perhaps a medal and a scrap of ribbon—has been said by socialistic writers to afford a conclusive proof that any practical work, no matter how laborious, and more particularly the work of the great wealth-producer, will be willingly undertaken for the sake of the same reward. “The soldier’s subsistence is certain,” writes a well-known contemporary enthusiast. “It does not depend upon his exertions. At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism. He will dare anything for glory, and value a bit of bronze which is ‘the reward of valour’ far more than a hundred times its weight in gold.” The implication, of course, is that what men will do in war they will do in peaceful industry; and the writer adds, in order to point this moral, “yet many of the private soldiers come from the worst of the population.” This passage is quoted with rapture by another socialistic theorist, who exclaims, “Let those especially notice this last point who fancy we must wait till men are angels before socialism be practical.” And even so well-trained a thinker as Mr. Frederic Harrison has argued, from the readiness with which men die in battle for their country, that they will be equally willing to deny themselves or suffer martyrdom for universal humanity.
To all these ideas and arguments there is one {300} answer to be made. They are all founded on a failure to perceive the fact that military activity is in many respects a thing apart, and depends on psychological, and indeed on physiological processes which have no counterpart in the domain of ordinary effort. That such is the case can be seen very easily by following out the train of argument suggested by Mr. Harrison. Mr. Harrison sees that in ordinary life a man will not deliberately run the risk of being killed except for the sake of a cause or person to which or whom he is profoundly and indescribably attached. Indeed his attachment is presumably in proportion to the risk he is prepared to run. And such being the case in the field of ordinary life, Mr. Harrison assumes it must be the case on the field of battle also, and that the soldier’s willingness to risk death in fighting for a cause or country proves that this cause or country is inexpressibly dear to him. And in certain cases—when a country is in desperate straits, and everything hangs on the issue of a single battle—this inference would be doubtless just; but that it is not so generally is shown by the notorious fact that some of the bravest and most reckless soldiers ever known to history have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for another. Thus until Mr. Harrison can show us that men in ordinary life will wear themselves out for either of two opposed objects indifferently, or that they will risk death as willingly for a plain woman as for a pretty one, it is obvious that men’s willingness to risk death in war implies no corresponding {301} willingness to risk it cutting trousers, and is for certain reasons a phenomenon standing by itself.
That this is so is shown even more strikingly by the fact to which the two other writers just quoted point with so much complacency. This fact is the soldier’s undoubted willingness to pursue his calling for pay which seems strikingly incommensurate with his risks. His conduct in this respect is, no doubt, remarkable, especially when compared with that of men in the domain of peaceful industry. When any industrial occupation is in question a workman will expect special wages if it is one which presents a likelihood of his often hurting his thumb; but soldiers will risk the probability of being tortured and blown to pieces for wages which would hardly induce a peasant to hoe a turnip-field. This is no indication of any abnormal poverty amongst the classes from whom the army is mainly recruited, for the same phenomenon is constantly observable amongst men who are not under the necessity of working for their living at all. Amongst such men are numbers who in time of actual war will eagerly give up a life of leisure and luxury for the certainty of hardship and the probability of death—men who for the sake of anything else but fighting would hardly, without a struggle, run the risk of a bad dinner. But what these facts really suggest to us is not the insane conclusion that because soldiers act differently from other men, other men may be counted on to act like soldiers. On the contrary, what they suggest is the question {302} why men will do as soldiers what no one will do in any other capacity, and what soldiers themselves will cease to do as soon as they become commissionaires.
For this peculiarity in the soldier’s conduct there are three separate reasons. One is the strictness of military discipline, which socialistic reformers would hardly find popular if they tried to introduce it into factories and contractors’ yards. A second is the peculiar character of the circumstances in which the soldier is placed when his courage is most severely taxed—circumstances which render the attempt to evade peril almost as difficult, and often more perilous than facing it, and which in ordinary life would be intolerable if they did not happen to be impossible. But the most important reason is this—and the others without it would be non-existent—that the instinct of fighting is inherent in the very nature of the dominant races, and it will always prompt numbers to do for the smallest reward what they could hardly, in its absence, be induced to do for the largest. This immemorial instinct has been wrought into our blood and nerves by the innumerable thousands of years that have made us what we are; and all the battles of their fathers are pulsing in men’s veins to-day. These instincts, no doubt, are more controlled than formerly, and not so frequently roused; but they are still there. They are ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and the sight of a regiment marching draws cheers from the most democratic crowd. Here is the {303} reason why the soldier, though he submits himself to the most direct coercion, never considers himself, and never is considered a slave; and military activity will always be a thing apart, and for purposes of argument will never be comparable to industrial, till human nature undergoes so radical a change that men will as eagerly risk being killed by unfenced machinery in a cotton-mill as they will being killed by a bullet or a bayonet on the field of battle. Here again the facts for which the socialists reason are indubitable; but the inference which the socialists draw from them is altogether illusory.
It remains, however, to add that the desire of mere honour—of honour unaccompanied by any extrinsic advantages—has an efficiency which is strictly limited in the domain even of military activity itself. It may move men, in the act of fighting, to the highest and most heroic actions; but history shows us that it has not been found sufficient to elicit the sustained intellectual efforts of the General, bent on achieving some great and monumental conquest—efforts in which all the excitement of the actual fighter is wanting, and in which the coolest calculation plays as large a part as courage. The Cæsars and Napoleons of the world have certainly not, as a rule, been content, when they have crushed their enemies and augmented the magnificence of their country, with the gift of a medal or two, and the privilege of ending their days in the modest uniform of commissionaires opening {304} shop doors. If, then, the mere honour of being a great conqueror is insufficient to stimulate the activities by which great conquests are achieved, a man is hardly likely to consecrate his entire faculties to wealth-production merely that he may enjoy the honour of being known as the proud producer of so many miles of calico, or millions of pots of jam.
There is, therefore, in the present operations of those motives, for which the socialists attempt to claim a universal efficiency, as little to suggest that as motives to exceptional wealth-production they will ever supersede the desire of exceptional possession, as there is in the present operations of the desire of exceptional wealth-possession to show that it is losing its power, or is at all likely to be superseded. The final demonstration of this truth, however, yet remains to be given.
The socialists, in dealing with this question of motive, have been led into the curious blunders which have just now been exposed by their singularly childish conception of what men’s actual motives are. They divide motives into various well-known classes, and, so far as it goes, their procedure is here correct. Their error is that they conceive of man as a being on whom these motives, as a rule, act separately; whereas in reality the very reverse is the case. Acts which are due to any single motive are not the rule, but the exception. For instance, even though artistic creation and the pursuit of truth are motived in the case of many men by the pleasure which the work brings them, some of the greatest {305} artists and thinkers, with whom this motive was certainly powerful, have been motived by the desire of pecuniary reward also. It is enough to mention the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, Rubens, Turner, and Scott. And with the desire of honour the desire of pecuniary reward is found to mix itself yet more often and readily than it does with the mere passion for artistic or for speculative work itself. The psychological fact, however, which we must here notice is this—that the pecuniary reward, though it seems theoretically to be in contrast to any genuine desire for other men’s approbation, or for the pleasure brought to the worker by the work itself, instead of destroying the force of those other motives, increases it, just as the admixture of a certain amount of alloy makes gold and silver more valuable for artistic purposes. And now, having observed this, let us turn back to the consideration of the desire of pecuniary reward as the principal motive of wealth-production, and endeavour to make our analysis of it more complete.
As the reader will recollect, the doctrine that all exceptional exertions in wealth-production are motived solely by the desire of exceptional wealth as such, although it is the doctrine imputed by the socialists to their opponents, has been said already to be a very imperfect rendering of any doctrine as to the subject which their opponents would actually maintain; and the reason why it is imperfect is simply that wealth as such is not the object for which wealth is really sought by most of those men whom the {306} desire of it most powerfully influences. For wealth as such, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, is wealth regarded as a means of personal self-indulgence. It stands for the finest wines, the richest food, the softest beds, the most luxurious furniture—for everything that can caress the senses and enervate the mind and body. And no doubt its power of securing all these things to its possessors is one of the qualities which render it an object of desire. But it is only one; and though it is the most obvious of them, it is not the chief. The subordinate place which it occupies is conclusively shown by the fact that a very few thousands a year would suffice to provide a man with every pleasure or luxury that his own senses could appreciate; and yet men are often more eager, after these few thousands have been secured by them, to pass this point of opulence than they ever were in reaching it. Many men, moreover, who have surrounded themselves with pomp and splendour are indifferent to the gratification of their own senses altogether. Though their luncheon tables may groan under every imaginable delicacy, they will themselves eat a slice or two of cold ham, no better or worse than would have been secured them for a shilling in a cheap restaurant. Their own beds will be no softer than those of prosperous clerks; and, surrounded by cushioned sofas, they will sit upon straight-backed chairs.
The principal reasons for which wealth is sought are not pleasures of the senses, but pleasures of the mind and the imagination; and of these pleasures {307} there are three principal kinds. One of them is the pleasure of power, which in their analysis of human motives the socialists conveniently overlook; and the two others happen to be the very pleasures by the desire of which the socialists themselves declare the exceptional wealth-producers are to be principally marked in the future—namely, the pleasures of self-realisation and the pleasures of social honour. Wealth is coveted by all really great wealth-producers, not in preference to these, but as a means to all or one of them. To many of our great wealth-producers, with their strong practical faculties, wealth would be nothing if it brought to them no accession of influence; to many it would be nothing if it did not bring them the means of indulging their tastes, as distinct from their physical appetites; to nearly all it would be nothing if they did not, or if they did not hope it would, secure for them the approbation and the respectful homage of others.