Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

CHAPTER VII

"EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY"

Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as long as class rule continues. Henry George, for example, recognizes that his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step towards real democracy, as long as classes persist.

That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States is now admitted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable other, by no means Socialistic, observers.

"The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind that he must remain a wage earner. He has given up the hope of a kingdom to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also by salaried brain workers. Large prizes still exist, and their influence is still considerable over the minds of young men. But, as was pointed out recently in an editorial of the Saturday Evening Post, they are "just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the children of the well-to-do.

To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns. The universal outcry for more farm labor can only mean that such laborers are becoming relatively fewer because they are giving up the hope that formerly kept them in the country, namely, that of becoming farm owners. Already Mr. George K. Holmes of the United States Bureau of Statistics estimates that in the chief agricultural section of the country, the North Central States, a man must be rich before he can become a farmer, and so rapidly is this condition spreading to other sections that Mr. Holmes feels that the only hope of obtaining sufficient farm labor is to persuade the children of the farmers to remain on the farms.

"Fifty years ago," said McClure's Magazine in a recent announcement, which sums up some of the chief elements of the present situation, "we were a nation of independent farmers and small merchants. To-day we are a nation of corporation employees." There can be no question that we are seeing the formation in this country of very definitely marked economic and social classes such as have long prevailed in the older countries of Europe. And this class division explains why the political democracies of such countries as France, Switzerland, the United States, and the British Colonies show no tendency to become real democracies. Not only do classes defend every advantage and privilege that economic evolution brings them, but, what is more alarming, they utilize these advantages chiefly to give their children greater privileges still. Unequal opportunities visibly and inevitably breed more unequal opportunities.

The definite establishment of industrial capitalism, a century or more ago, and later the settlement of new countries, brought about a revolutionary advance towards equality of opportunity. But the further development of capitalism has been marked by steady retrogression. Yet nearly all capitalist statesmen, some of them honestly, insist that equality of opportunity is their goal, and that we are making or that we are about to make great strides in that direction. Not only is the establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be about the demand for political, economic, or social equality.

It may be that the economic positions in society occupied by men and women who have now reached maturity are already to some slight degree distributed according to relative fitness; and, even though this fitness is due, not to native superiority, but to unfair advantages and unequal opportunity, it may be that a general change for the better is here impossible until a new generation has appeared. But there is no reason, except the opposition of parents who want privileges for their children, why every child in every civilized country to-day should not be guaranteed by the community an equal opportunity in public education and an equal chance for promotion in the public or semi-public service, which soon promises to employ a large part if not the majority of the community. No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners, children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate rôles filled by their parents.

But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved. Mr. John A. Hobson, for example, believes that the present British government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the more or less democratic collectivism Mr. Hobson and other British Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously decrease the relative opportunities of the masses, and make them less equal than they are to-day.