■•^ssSSte™ •ffissssw < Bcnyuifi Atfw r "' ■ " •paAvoaa'j tpitjAv oj 9vep aqj uo jo 'Aiopq p3draB5s ajBp jsbj sip uo ©tip si Jfooq siqx S0frC-3fr9 'ON *131— A1NO S1VM3N3* 'idaa nvoi amcnraoa hdiha. woth hshci ox Nranxra asn avq n THE SOCIAL PEOBLEM BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE CREED OF SCIENCE RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL. SECOND EDITION, REVISED. Crown 8vo. cloth, 6s. 'An able, thoughtful, and in literary respects a wholly admirable volume.'— British Quarterly Review. ' An opportune and ably-written work, which will assuredly be a help to many who are groping their way amongst the ruins of effete systems to some new ground of assurance and contentment No theme of first- rate importance is omitted, and yet the treatment is so lucid that a very Blender acquaintance with either Science or Philosophy will be found sufficient for comprehending the force of the arguments employed.' Westminster Review. 'This volume shows, in a very able as well as very interesting manner, the poverty of the higher philosophy of the men of physical science, and the absolute need for something better than they can give us in the supple- ment of their own science, which is so excellent in itself.'— Spectator. London : KEGAN PAUL, TKENCH, & CO. THE SOCIAL PEOBLEM IN ITS ECONOMICAL, MORAL, AND POLITICAL ASPECTS BY WILLIAM GEAHAM, MA. \\ PROFESSOR OF FOL1TICAL ECONOMY AND JURISPRUDENCE, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST AUTHOR OF 'THE CREED OF SCIENCE' LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1886 4 ^ -ant des remedes, ne put jamais re*parer les vices de la constitution : on rac- commodait sans cesse, au lieu qu'il eut fallu commencer par nettoyer l'aire et ecarter tous les vieux mat^riaux, com me fit Lycurgue a Sparte, pour elever eDsuite un bon edifice.' (De Vlntgaliti.) The doctrine of the Contrat Social, on the other hand, favours Collectivism and State Socialism. ON SOME HEROIC REMEDIES. 425 the Bar, which, ' by the hard bonds offered you to sign,' ' fatally compel you to be an impostor before entering ' — are evil, and there is no hope whatever of curing them by reforming methods after the approved pattern of Benthamee Eadicalism. In the ' Latter Day Pamphlets ' we have the very spirit and ideas of Eousseau, only expressed with a fervour and an energy of conviction, and accompanied by a power of denun- ciation, far beyond Eousseau's capacity, and hardly even attained by Isaiah or Jeremiah. To Carlyle Parliamentary Government was a proved failure, with its Windbag Captains steering the vessel of State into ' the belly of the abyss,' by the ' waltz of all the winds ' called breath of public opinion. Our National Church was a thing out of which the soul had long fled, a mask that glared on you ' with its glass eyes, in ghastly affectation of life,' long after religion had quite withdrawn from it, and behind the mask were ' only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumu- lation, driving their trade.' Literature was a mad foam ocean, the refuge of ' frustrate capacity,' and of • expatriated spiritualisms,' a province where no true literature was produced and where the sham literary genius was expected to amuse grown children. Democracy was a failure, the suffrage, our one hope of salvation, quite hopeless ; because only by a true king, a wise and capable man to reign over us, could we be saved. Our cure was nigh desperate, but unless the one remedy be found and applied, the final break-up and boiling over of the great deep of real anarchy was near. Now, when a man has reached this point, he is a revolutionist by principle ; when he sees all to be 426 SPECIAL REMEDIES. evil, and denounces it passionately and with all his energy, he is a revolutionist. He desires a change, wishes for it strongly ; wishes, if not for the destruction of the things he denounces, at least for their summary disappearance. Carlyle is thus a revolutionist at heart, but he is not an anarchist. On the contrary, anarchy was hateful to him, and it was because he considered our present system to be anarchy, as well as embodied imposture and cant, that he wished it abolished. The present so-called order was anarchy in his eyes, — ' anarchy plus the street constable,' — and it would be soon open anarchy without the street constable, if the true rulers were not found. We were a no-society, a society in a state of war, but cloaked war conducted under conditions of law and due rules of the game. As to the means of escape, Carlyle looked chiefly in the first instance to a moral change, and this having done its work, like the Hebrew prophets he looked to the virtuous single ruler, to the Cromwell in the seat of sovereignty ruling a people in judgment and justice, — to the 'one strong man in a blatant land who can rule and dare not lie.' But the Messiah of society Carlyle did not prophesy con- fidently. He sometimes seems to despond as to his appearing. But if he did not come, society was lost and would go down in anarchy. We have here three ideals, all of which would require revolution to realise them : the ideal of Karl Marx — the State the collective owner of the land and the means of production, with agricultural and indus- trial armies, democratically organised : the ideal of Carlyle — with the single wise ruler on the throne to execute judgment and regiment his people; thus dif- ON SOME HEEOIC .REMEDIES. 427 fering in making the single brain and will of the ruler essential to the State, the like holding in the sphere of labour, where the ' captain of industry ' command- ing his labourers is the ideal instead of the demo- cratically constituted co-operative group, electing its own manager like soldiers their captain : lastly, we have the vision of Bakunin and the anarchists, a little resembling Eousseau's State of Nature only more de- veloped — the commune embracing the village com- munity and the fraternal factory group — a peaceful idyllic vision seen across the stormy sky of anarchy and destruction ; where war is done with ; the scaffold abolished ; the prison, the penitentiary, and the work- house gone ; a calm and peaceful evening for our species, after a tempestuous and stormy day. Now of the three, supposing any of them were reached, the ideal of the anarchist is the most logical and the best conceived to guard against a return of the old evils For the State, the owner of all and the director of all labour, could not prevent the return of private property, as we have seen ; while even should the system last, the workers would have to be paid unequally. Moreover, the State authority could always extinguish liberty, so that probably the present evils would exist intensified. As for the Carlylean vision, the virtuous monarch dies even if we could get him, and his son is neither able nor virtuous ; and the new able man has to be sought for by the same painful methods as before. When you have him, like Cromwell, he is in the midst of ceaseless wars and broils ; and when he dies, his work, like Napoleon's, ' all goes down to the old pots and nettles.' The true part of Carlyle's teaching 428 SPECIAL REMEDIES. is that we require a moral and psychological change, and that accomplished, all other good things might come out of it. But such a change requires time, and, moreover, is not the thing chiefly emphasised by Carlyle. As to the ideal of Bakunin, with a few im- provements that might be suggested, it would not be so bad a one for the human species as a whole. In the commune we should all go up or down together. It would be a company with equal liability of all members, but the liability limited, and the advantages, great according to the communist, would be shared all round. As the anarchist says, the simple commune, once reached, with the State overthrown, it would not be easy for the State to raise itself again. But for this it is necessary that every State be overthrown simul- taneously ; for if even one be left upright, with its standing army, all the communes could be subjugated. So that the anarchists have their work cut out for them. As they say, quite logically, the revolution must be universal, first in Europe — and then, for fear the ' restoration ' would come perhaps from across the Atlantic, or haply from China — in all other countries. The only answer of the anarchists to this difficulty is that the communes would be federated for defence against the outside foe. But federation is already a loose kind of State organisation. Agree- ments, if they bind, are a kind of laws, especially if the majority would compel their observance ; if they do not bind, they would not serve for defensive purposes. The difficulty, truly, of the nihilist and anarchist is to get the amorphous commune, to get rid of the State, and then of all States. If the universal com- ON SOME HEROIC REMEDIES. 429 munity were come, it might be possible to keep in it, spite of the hazardous 'instability of the homo- geneous,' — the difficulty is to get to it. The an- archists avowedly cannot get to it save by the de- struction of all actual institutions, and these naturally object to being destroyed. The State, in self-defence, uses force, and hence the nihilist and anarchist, like Blanqui, so often finds himself inside a prison. The mad side of anarchism is not so much in its theory, which is a logical development of Eousseau's prin- ciples, as in the thought that it is possible to realise it by force, and the irrational thing in it (the same as in State collectivism) is the notion that men un- changed in disposition would not demand to be ' led back into Egypt,' and the bondage of the old State system with its adjuncts of property, religion, and the family. If the anarchists would have people enamoured of their final goal, they must cease their violent means — that is, they must cease to be anarchists, and, being already good logicians, and some of them high-minded enthusiasts with noble aims, they must try to act on the reason, the conscience, and the soul. They would do more on these lines than by killing monarchs or firing public buildings, criminal means which only provoke extreme repression. I can, however, conceive circumstances under which Nihilism would be the politics and even Nirvana the hope hereafter for the mass of men. Given a State worked in the interest of the few, the government in their hands, with the Law used as means to get and keep possession ; while new laws are 430 SPECIAL REMEDIES. made by the governing classes in their own interests, and to the hurt of the many ; where such policy, long pursued, has at last done its work, and left the few, rich, in possession of the land, the means of produc- tion, the government of the country with all its offices and places ; the many, poor, and wholly dependent on the rich for employment, without property, and with- out liberty save in name ; given a Church that for ages aided and abetted the powerful and the rich, by giving her sanction to their spoliations and by inculcating on the poor the duty of docile obedience, herself coming in for a share of the spoil, in a sort of conspiracy, not only against the political and social rights of man, but against the sacred rights of conscience and free inquiry ; given official philosophies and theories of society accommodated like the teachings of religion to the support and consecration of the existing order with all its evils ; given a long general darkness at length succeeded by the first dawn of light in the masses ; above all, let there be a large number of young men of the lower middle class, educated, but without careers or prospects ; let there be no word of reform, nor any hope of matters mending soon — and you have the general conditions under which a deep dislike of existing society, its institutions and laws, will be sure to be born, and a fitly prepared soil for the spirit of nihilism and anarchy to take up its abode with good hope of a prosperous future. Such are not quite our circumstances to-day. But such were very nearly our circumstances once, and that we escaped passing through the storm of anarchy when things were worst was partly owing to good luck, partly owing to the fact that we shortly afterwards, and not an ON SOME HEROIC REMEDIES. 431 hour too soon, under radical reforming impulsion, set about changing things. We have been on this the only safe course for some time, but we must do more and move faster. For the picture above drawn, the conditions of nihilistic development above given, still correspond sufficiently closely to our actual case and social situation to make the latter full of danger against which the only safeguard is more complete and thorough reform ! which is also called for on grounds of justice. 1 Happily our reformers of local government shadow forth in the 1 parish,' the integral social unit, something faintly resembling, but more real and less 'amorphous' than, the commune. And, what is more remark- able, Sir Charles Dilke's ideal is the Anglo-Saxon village before the Conquest. The parish or township on his scheme is to have certain powers of government, including probably the power to buy up and grant allotments ; and thus may be partly realised the most rational part of the anarchist's dream without destruction, and much to the health of the State. But if what we have formerly said be sound, it would be a mis- take to make the village community of 1,000 years ago a model to be aimed at, because, first, that community was a semi-servile one; and secondly, the outside environment, social and civilised, of the village or township, as well as the internal life and social relations of its inhabitants, have so totally changed, that it would in fact be impossible to call into life anything closely resembling the proposed original model. The attempt to evoke such an extinct social organism would fail for various reasons, the chief of which we have already stated in connection with the proposed recalling to life of the Highland village community (p. 314). This, however, is merely said to deprecate a misleading model, not to discountenance urgently needed reforms adapted to existing wants and complying with existing conditions. 432 CHAPTER III. Malthus. § i. We come now to the fundamental and famous specific for poverty, known as Malthusianism, upon which it is necessary to say something, because eminent men have advocated it, and some still advocate it, and though somewhat discredited as a remedy, if we omitted to consider it some might say we had missed the true cause and ignored the only cure of poverty and the social ills attending it. For the rest, the topic is in itself one of great importance as well as one of much difficulty and delicacy. According to Malthus, and Mill his most eminent disciple, the cause of low wages in the working classes, and of poverty generally, was a too redund- ant population, the c pressure of population on the means of subsistence,' as they express it ; and the remedy was ' prudential restraint,' either by absti- nence from marriage or due restraint on the possible number of children on the part of those already married. ' Intemperance,' to use Mill's word, in the way of introducing more children than a certain permissible number was the cause, and must be dis- couraged first by opinion and finally by law. MALTHUS. 433 If wages are low and poverty prevails, it is because there are too many born compared with the pro- ductive powers of the country. Let this excess be restrained by abstinence from marriage and from the begetting of children. Intemperance in this direction is worse than any other intemperance, inasmuch as it results in calling into existence ' swarms of creatures who are sure to be miserable and certain to be depraved,' and who moreover would be an increasing strain on the resources of the more fortunate, compeHed by the Poor Laws to support them in extreme cases ; in so much that without restraint the increasing numbers would at last drag all down to the abyss of poverty, ' civilisation and all that places mankind above a nest of ants or a colony of beavers having perished in the interval.' Such is the evil and the danger, such its cause, and such the remedy, according to Mill. Not going quite the length of Hamlet in the scene with Ophelia — 6 We will have no more marriages ' — the Malthusian contents himself with laying down the principle that there must be a limitation in marriages, first by opinion, and finally by law. Men in the working classes must not marry till they have a reasonable hope of rearing a family, limited in numbers, to be as well off as themselves. As to the middle classes, they have, to their benefit, been long practically influenced by Malthusianism, and there is little need to emphasise its teaching in their regard. This pretty scheme of Malthus and Mill in its entirety is nothing less than an heroic attempt to keep the sexes asunder, for although it only forbids marriage it is evident, the object being to prevent too F F 434 SPECIAL KEMEDIES. many children from being born, that the prohibition must be understood in a much wider sense, and as ap- plicable to children born outside the married condition as well as in it ; in short, it implies either that the sexes shall not come together at all, or if they do that children beyond a certain number shall not be born. Now the conditions seem both somewhat hard and would be impossible were it not that, in fact, a qualified dispensation is happily allowed to the select ones on whom devolves the honour and responsi- bility of keeping up existing numbers, for this is always granted by the Malthusian, though somewhat grudgingly by Mill. 1 A relaxation of the rule is also allowed to those who are best off in each class, or to those sufficiently well off to afford the luxury and to incur the responsibility. But if, as Mill argues, those in the large lowest sections of labour are all badly off together, then it would seem to follow that none of them should marry till their wages were raised — a form of combination hardly likely to be entered into at present, as Mill himself allows, though not without better hope as regards the future. § 2. Now I do not oppose the Malthusian remedy on the extreme ground taken by some that no country is at present too populous for its resources, or that no country ever has been too populous. The first is very disputable and the second is easily refuted by 1 Logically, Mill could hardly allow it ; for if labourers, badly paid as he say 8, forbore to marry till wages were raised, they might have to forbear for good, with resulting total failure in the crop of labourers. MALTHUS. 435 history, which continually shows to us migrating hordes moving off from over-peopled places to regions where people were fewer, or at least where if they were numerous they might be conquered. Over- population of special regions and movement to other regions is indeed the leading fact of history up to our day. Neither do I oppose it on the theory of Mr. George — namely, that the greater the number the greater the wealth produced, which is only true up to a certain density of population, but does not apply to an indefinite increase of population, because if true it would allow of increase till there was no more standing room ; nor yet on the theory of Herbert Spencer, before whose serene and confident optimism all evils go down abashed or transform themselves into good — the theory that redundant population is good, and has been good through history, as the source of civilisations, and if it ever ceases to be a good we shall get a deliverance which he indicates and promises — because at the present time, with which we are chiefly concerned, it is a questionable good in the total, which must result in the annihilation of the savage or semi-civilised and inferior races, and in the expatriation of the superior. To the species as a whole, the elimination of its inferior types may in the end be a good ; but it is clearly not a good to the races doomed to extinction if they lose life, the only good — unless, indeed, on the theory. that life is not a good thing. Nor can the accompanying processes, militant and other, be considered altogether morally good by the philosopher of Evolution. Finally, I do not deny that we may have, even in these countries, even in England, too great a population in the next fifty F F 2 436 SPECIAL REMEDIES. years, as we should now have had such result were it not for a past emigration. What I affirm is that Malthusianism offered as a remedy is simply away from the facts of the case. It is a remedy that is no remedy, because, first, as Cairnes, himself a Malthusian, admits, there is no chance of its being applied by the patient ; next, and still more, if it were applied to the extent recom- mended, the cure would be still worse than the disease. It would bring, or be accompanied by, still worse evils than those it is intended to take away. I affirm that on a large scale Malthusianism has never been put in practice as matter of fact in any modern country since it was first preached, 1 not even in France, so greatly eulogised by Mill as our exemplar ; further, that it could not be put in practice, the forces opposed to it being too great, including, not merely, as Mill supposes, an over- charged animal instinct confined to one sex, but religious teaching, human nature, and the all but unanimous voice of the opposite sex, on which last cardinal point, I venture to think, Mill was under a decided delusion in regarding women as favourable to Malthus, so far as his doctrine implies non-marriage. It is most certain from experience in the total 1 The case of Bavaria, mentioned by Mill, might be urged as an ex- ception, because there is a sort of State Malthusianism there in the pro- hibition of marriage unless under certain conditions. But in Bavaria, where marriage is made difficult, it is found there is an. exceedingly high percentage of illegitimate children ; that is, there is the worse social evil of a class of outcasts under a social stigma, and without the ordinary civil rights ; a class which if very numerous would constitute a social peril, because they would have a genuine grievance, until law and opinion removed it ; so that the prohibition of marriage would be in fact either useless or dangerous. MALTHUS. 437 that Malthusianism has not been put in practice, not even in the most populous countries, which is itself an argument against it from the universal human experience and universal human instincts, though, of course, individuals at all times have abstained from marriage on prudential as well as on other grounds. But, apart from what experience shows as universal fact, a knowledge of human nature (in this coerced by great Mother Nature, extremely conservative on a matter relating to the preservation of the species) should teach us that there is not the smallest chance of Malthusianism prevailing. So long as human nature is as it is, the doctrine of Malthus will fail, and this, relating to the further life of the species, is about the last part of human nature where we may look for a change. Something greater than human nature is here at work : mighty universal Nature, who insists before all else on the life of her choicest species Men and women can indeed refrain from marry- ing — especially the men — but the question goes much deeper than marriage — and this is the side insuf- ficiently dwelt on by Mill. The question is, Can the sexes, after a certain age, be prevented from coming together in such wise that children are likely to be born? — the sexes observe, and not individuals of either sex, because social science has to do with the rule, and not with the exceptions. And the answer to this — a question partly of physiology, partly of biology, on which last point the whole animated creation gives a most decided hint by way of answer, even to the Malthusian — the answer being assumed to be very decidedly in the negative, the only re- maining question whether they come together in 438 SPECIAL REMEDIES. marriage or some other relation having different legal consequences to the children is a question as to which brings the less moral and social miseries with it. I repeat it that mere abstinence from marriage would not bring the desired Malthusian end of fewer children, because the children may be born outside the mar- ried state, and, if some were forbidden by law to marry, children would be born in greater numbers than now. It is a question of marriage, or of men and women living together without marriage, or of something worse than either for both the working and the entire population of a country, promiscuous intercourse of the sexes. But even of the two former alternatives marriage is decidedly the better and the wholesomer morally for the working classes as for the whole social body, so closely bound up with them in moral health as in material wealth. If children are to be born in either case, better that they be born inside the married state, though this applies with less force the lower we descend the grades of labour, because where there is no property the children suffer no legal disabilities, nor are they in the lower ranks thought to be under any social stigma if thus born, the practice being, in fact, too general to per- mit such feelings to arise. As we ascend the scale of labour men marry, though they do not marry so early as those in the lower ranks. They marry be- cause, apart from the influence of religion, the state of lawful marriage is thought to be more respectable, and because their children will be under no legal disabilities in the matter of property or otherwise. ' But it is not necessary for children to be born outside wedlock any more than in it,' the Malthusian MALTHUS. 439 will probably say. Well, then, how to prevent it? What is your specific ? Chastity ? But men will not be chaste, at least not chaste in the Malthusian sense ; they never have been, never will be. Science can predict this with great confidence of the species in the total (and all Nature gives her significant analogies) so long as the proposition remains true that ' man is an animal ' ; and no resolutions passed at St. James's Hall or elsewhere in favour of sexual morality will alter the fact. We still then ask the Malthusian for his specific. Promiscuous intercourse, regulated and made safe by the State, would hardly do for our working classes (and the Malthusian question chiefly concerns them, as the greater number). Or shall we say exposure of infants, or Dean Swift's remedy for excessive population in Ireland, or a little of each, including fewer marriages ? On the whole, I should recommend honest marriage as decidedly the best of all for working men, even though many and serious objections there are against early marriages and many children. It seems, on the whole, to have least evils connected with it, though it might, if a man were very poor, bring many evils with it. For the social residuum, containing the lowest poor, I would not recommend marriage were there any means of preventing its members from procreating children outside the married state. That the lowest poor, and thieves, and beggars, and worthless loafers should breed swarms of children is an unmixed social evil, and especially bad for the children, for at this point one is obliged to be both a Malthusian and a pessimist — to say that life under such conditions is an evil rather than a gift. But there is no use in 440 SPECIAL REMEDIES. preaching Malthusianism to these degraded and reck- less classes. They cannot be coerced without worse consequences, opinion does not act on them, and counsel is lost on most of them . The lowest poor, so long as they are so, and the sickly, diseased, and deformed of all classes, should refrain from marriage, but we must trust first to the growth of a sounder general sentiment for restraining them rather than to legal penalties. §3. According to Mill, ' the restraints on population, so far as the habits of the labouring classes are con- cerned, may be considered as non-existent ; most of them marry as early and have as large families as they can ' ; and this assertion still holds good. Con- sequently Malthusianism, his great remedy, has not touched them. The remedy then has failed because those most chiefly concerned, the labouring classes, on whom the population chiefly depends, refuse to apply it. But there is a reason, not yet adverted to, over and above the imperfection of human nature, which has prevented the labourer from taking the teaching of Malthus to heart. The labouring poor are induced to marry and to have children because a large family may save them in their old age from the workhouse, instead of sending them into it sooner. A man childless, when past his work, will go into the work- house for certain unless he has been unusually frugal ; but children may save him, and meantime he has lived the natural human life as well. Let the MALTHUS. . 441 Malthusian meditate on this side of the matter a little. When a man is getting past his work, if he have grown-up sons or daughters they will very often be able to support him, and they will mostly do so if they can, and the more children the greater the chance that some of them will be able to keep him. If he have six children he will have twice as good a chance of being saved as if he had only three. All of them will not be doing badly, and those who do well will make efforts to keep their old parents out of ' the House,' while those who are not able will be at least no burden on them. Doubtless there was required a greater effort to rear the large family at first, but by degrees the elder begin to be self-supporting, and when they are grown up they will, in proportion to their ability, repay their parents. Such at least is the parents' hope, and in this hope they are in a large proportion of cases not deceived, especially as the burden on the children not being a long-enduring one, they will make greater efforts to bear it. That is one consideration which tells against Mal- thusianism. Another is this. Why should the labour- ing classes, with all their hardships and privations, deprive themselves of that which chiefly sweetens and makes human their lives? Why, even on lower ground, should they deny themselves gratifications which fortunately they can have as well as the high- placed, and which cannot be taken from them, like most other pleasures which cost money? From all which things I infer that it is preaching to the winds and waves to inculcate Malthusianism on the working classes, as even Cairnes himself, a disciple of 442 SPECIAL REMEDIES. Mill and a Malthusian in principle, 1 admits in his last work. The agricultural labourer, the factory operative, the miner, the town mechanic, the great bulk of the workers will not listen to the voice of the charmer, come he (or she) in whatsoever guise. They have a logic of their own on this point ; they are philosophers, fatalists, above all they are human beings, and the Purpose of the Universe and great Nature have a mighty hand in the matter which no Malthusian is ever likely to render less potent. And even if all the male sex agreed together for Malthusianism there is still another influence to be reckoned with which will surely count for something — the opposite sex — and the ladies to the last woman would vote against Malthus. Mill seems to think differently, but I cannot help thinking him astray in this important point in the question. They are at least much more pledged to the institution of marriage than men. Thus, then, finally, we have against Mal- thusianism religion, human nature, and the vote of the sex cast solid, as it would be if the question were put to the vote. Judge, then, what chance it has of success. A much greater prophet than Malthus went against marriage — the mighty prophet of the East, who came, as his followers say, ' to put an end to sorrow.' But Buddha was a pessimist, and knew what he was about. He was convinced that life was an essential evil, and he consistently opposed marriage as the source and fountain of further life. In his great revolt against life, in his tremendous idea and 1 At least, in his early work on the Logical Method of Political Economy, he includes the principle of Malthus as one of the fundamental principles of the science on which all its coDclusions hang. MALTHUS. 443 scheme of salvation, to lead the species out of life into Nirvana, it was an essential point (as it is with his modern disciple Schopenhauer) to ' kill the instinct to live,' and as a consequent to extinguish desire which prompts to sexual approaches. It was a great idea, though indifferently successful in the populous East. As for Mai thus, he was not a pessimist, but an optimist. He did not wish to kill the instinct to live, but only to repress the instinct which is the product and typical expression of the former, the instinct to continue life. Malthus was therefore doubly bound to fail, as well by want of logic as by want of knowledge of human nature. Even Buddha failed to slay the instinct to live here on the earth, and especially in Southern and Eastern Asia, to which his doctrine was addressed. There the earth teems with irrepressible human life, in spite of its evils, greater still than in Western Europe. Much more will the smaller prophet fail, so long as there are two new worlds, America and Australia, still largely unoccupied, and able for a long time yet to support the surplus population of our race. Doubtless a day may come when the earth will all be fully peopled, although as a fact it has hitherto peopled very slowly, and some countries have become unpeopled. Such a day may come, as a day may come when all our coal may be used up. And both eventualities would be very serious. But both are a good way off, for one consolation ; moreover, some saving chance may always turn up in the interim. Some substitute for coal might be extorted from Nature by Science, just as coal itself was found when wood began to fail for fuel. And something might be discovered 444 SPECIAL REMEDIES. to save us from the danger of over-population at that distant date. Several things may be conceived which would mitigate the danger. Amongst other mitiga- tions Herbert Spencer thinks that increased brain development and greater draft of the vital energy for intellectual purposes will gradually lead to a lessening population in future ; in other words, that the species generally will put on more of the philosopher and the savant, and let the animal gradually die ; that more books and theories will be produced and fewer children. And there may be hope in this quarter, though it is to be feared that the remedy will be too late, considering that alterations of physiological function are very slow on evolution principles. It will be slow, but perhaps the peopling of the whole globe will be still slower, considering that there is such a thing as decrease of population in many lands from unknown causes, and that in the last resort, as Hobbes says, there is the sword, the old thinner of population, the positive check of Malthus. There is a faint hope, however, in Herbert Spencer's theory. Let us cherish it for want of better as regards the distant future. Meantime our case is not hopeless. We have increased steadily in population since Malthus wrote in 1798, but we have increased in wealth still more. Nor has population at all trod closer in the wake of subsistence. When worst comes to worst we must bethink ourselves. At present probably not one- third of the labourers are engaged in producing mere subsistence. They do it for the rest as well as for themselves, they do it abundantly, and we are far as yet from the condition of a besieged city whose first care is to have sufficient food. MALTHUS. 445 In the case of the middle classes, especially the lower and larger portion, the question of Malthu- sianism presents itself somewhat differently, and the subject is more complicated. In fact, no general rule can be unreservedly laid down, and, as usual, there is only a choice after a balance of good and evil. If these classes wish their children to maintain their own social position, they must not have too many children, because the number of places to be filled is limited. There should not be more in a family than the parent can reasonably hope to bring up, educate, and find a place for, taking the sum of chances into consideration. At present the struggle for the good places is keen ; in the coming de- mocracy it will be still keener, because, owing to the spread of cheap education, each class will be ex- posed to the competition of the higher section of the class beneath, partly swelled by the select from all the classes beneath. Many fenced-in pursuits and social preserves will be broken in upon. Some re- served seats will not be permitted, and though this will be partly good for the struggling middle class, by throwing open more places to competition, it will make the competition keener and closer, and will necessitate many exclusions. The number of open- ings and places will happily increase from a different cause — from the increase of wealth and material progress — but they will not increase sufficiently for an indefinite increase of candidates. What, then, are the middle classes to do to hold their ground ? The numbers must be restrained. Some of them must 446 SPECIAL REMEDIES. therefore either keep single, or keep single for a considerable time, or if they marry they must not have large families. There is perhaps one other alternative. They might run their chance on a narrow income, but if they do, they will have to lower their standard of living, and, in general, culti- vate simpler and less expensive tastes and ways of life — a thing, in many cases, both desirable and possible, but in regard to which they will have to be seconded by the ladies. Happily, however, this is becoming more possible, both because in these days of general awakening the ladies have also ' awoke to consciousness' of the realities of life, and because they are now, as suits their awakened state, receiving a more rational and less ornamental education than formerly. The single state is not without its serious draw- backs even for the males, and it entails serious social consequences ; because, as already intimated, it by no means necessarily implies a life of complete non- intercourse with the other sex. The contrary rather is the rule. And then we have one or other of two formidable social evils : we have increased illegitimate children; — a class most unjustly and harshly used by society because not born in lawful marriage ; a class deprived, too, of a father's care, to indulge the father's selfishness ; a class banned from birth, whose eternal grievance and quarrel with society Edmund, in ' Lear,' has spoken, and to whom Edmund's question ' Where- fore base ? ' continually recurs ; in short, a most dangerous class of social outcasts, shaped by nature to be anarchists and leaders of such, both because they are victims of law and social institutions, and MALTHUS. 447 because they are frequently of great natural capacity and spirit, and the very ones that in Plato's Eepublic would have been picked out as amongst the most promising. Malthus in the middle classes means an increased number of these, as well as more foundling hospitals, neglected children, and massacres of the infants. And there is the other alternative of promiscuous intercourse (probably resorted to as well as concubin- age), though proscribed by Malthus and Senior ; the chief cause of the mournful procession of fine women on the town, because it is in the long run the demand that brings them, and the demand chiefly of the un- married men of the middle class, as in most cases it was one of these that was the first cause of the woman's lapse. Nor is it a good sort of life for the man himself : no love ; the finest thing in life missed ; the best and most natural kind of society impossible ; the man himself grown selfish, heartless, materialised, unless he has partly saved his soul, and kept his heart alive the while, by some unselfish public service. Yes, assuredly he has had something to pay for his ease in money matters, his pleasant club life and society, and his general freedom from care and responsibility ; not wholly a success his sort of life either, as with regret- ful pang he sometimes feels. It is not altogether a good state for him, nor is it a natural state for society ; instinctively we think of Eome in the age of Augustus, when the well-to-do also held back from marriage, and the retrospect and comparison is not reassuring. # We have only a choice of evils, and no, general rule 448 SPECIAL REMEDIES. is possible; but this much I must finally say, that most men in the middle classes would have lived a happier life had they been married. But in the lower section of it the question of the children comes in, and rightly; and here it can only be said, if the means seem too narrow or are precarious, men had better either postpone marriage or refrain altogether from it. For a few, abstinence from marriage is a virtue, for those, namely, who refrain that they may devote themselves the better and with more undivided force to higher ends good for the world. These are the true and great communists, amongst whom, as Bacon tells us, some of the greatest servants of their species have been found ; and they, and perhaps also clergymen for a similar reason, may refrain from marriage with the minimum of drawbacks and with the greatest good results. 449 CHAPTER IV. SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION. Such then, finally, as it seems to me, are the several remedies — political, economical, moral, and social — that our case requires : and all will be required. Not so, according to the empiric who usually has a single vaunted remedy, upon whose merits he enlarges while triumphantly demonstrating the worthlessness of all others. The way of the statesman or the social philosopher is different. He weighs each separate remedy to see if any virtue be in it, and he combines in his prescription as much of each in due proportion as he finds good. The most comprehensive and simple prescription of all was Laissez-faire ', and, moreover, a pleasant remedy for those who so far had won the prizes and held the winning cards. Let the Government but stand aside in all matters of trade and industry, let industry be free and contracts free, let each one be free to follow his own interest, and a happy and harmonious result will follow : the greatest sum of wealth and the best of all possible distributions of it. Such the theory, but not such the results of it, after something like fifty years of trial. Not even such the results after unfair restrictions on the labourer made in the G G 450 SPECIAL REMEDIES. interest of the employer were removed ; nay, not even such when Laissez-faire was partly departed from and restrictions placed on the employers. Laissez- faire while it lasted in its purity helped to heap up masters' fortunes, and had it long continued would have sapped the nation's physical strength and energies and destroyed its morals, would at last have resulted in a materialised plutocracy and a degraded prole- tariate, unless indeed the latter, before its spirit and physique had been broken, had risen in terrible insur- rection, a result that would have been more likely. We have discussed trades-unions, profit-sharing and co-operative production as means of elevation of the working classes, and of giving them a fairer share of the joint produce of labour and capital ; and we have seen that the trades-unions can effect a distri- bution of wealth within limits more favourable to the higher sections of the labourers, though at the cost, sometimes of the lower ranks of unemployed labour, sometimes of the public, sometimes of the employers, while if the latter accepted combination frankly, they and their hands, with partly common interests, could shut out competitors and keep up wages and profits at the expense of the public, including this time excluded capitalists as well as excluded labourers. The tendency of profit-sharing is in the same direc- tion, because profit-sharing is the point to which trades-unionism, accepted by the masters, tends ; and both tend to keep up wages amongst the elite of the artisans. They tend in fact to make a sort of upper class or aristocracy of labour, cut off from the general body of labour, in which there would be nothing to regret, but all the contrary, were it not SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 451 that it likewise tends to swell the circle left outside, the unionists of which are depending on the union funds, while the non-unionists are hanging over the abyss of pauperism. There is undoubtedly a new dis- tribution of wealth effected, but not one of unmixed good, because while solving a portion of our social problem it makes the other and harder half of it still more difficult to deal with. While saving so many in the Union boat, the others outside in the waters are left to sink. Co-operative production promises more in future in the way of solution, but not in the near future. As between it and the present system it is a question of balancing the advantages and drawbacks incidental to each, supposing co-operation had sur- mounted the initial financial difficulties. On the one side the individual owner is interested, intelligent and responsible, and therefore more likely to make the business successful, but less interested in his workers than in his profits and pressed by competition to lower wages ; on the other, a group of independent men with a voice in their own management, and with profits divided amongst themselves ; the produce and its money proceeds most probably less in the long run from less efficient management, but the men their own masters, with neither heart-burnings nor fear of dismissal. On the whole one would say it would be a desirable state of things to have as much of the field of labour occupied by co-operation as can sus- tain itself, first against home competition, next against foreign competition, though the second result would generally follow from the first. But the difficulty, as stated, is to make a successful beginning in the midst G 6 2 452 SPECIAL REMEDIES. of a competitive regime that by its essence seeks to shut it out — how to establish itself alongside a system whose existence it avowedly threatens. Here the difficulty that one does not see a way of getting over for an indefinite period without the help of the State, judiciously and moderately afforded in the way of loan to associations that have shown a faculty of self- help. Perhaps such would be less likely to seek its aid ; if so, that is so far well ; but also the success of co-operation, the one specific of Mill and Cairnes, will be very long or indefinitely delayed. It remains to say, that the Government themselves might try the experiment on a moderate scale with some of the un- employed, though probably such an experiment will not be soon. In regard to the land question we have seen that a peasant proprietary should, to a moderate extent, be aimed at, and that now, the large farming system having partially broken down, is the happy time to try it with most advantages to all ; it being the land- lord's interest to sell or let in small holdings, the land too, naturally going for less price or rent, and thus coming within possible reach (with due State assist- ance) of a class of small holders drawn from the rural population, or from quondam agricultural labourers who have migrated to the towns. The creation of peasant properties, small holdings, labourers' allot- ments would, as we have seen, be attended with very great advantages, national, social, and moral, without specially considering the economical side of things. In that aspect we have seen that a peasant proprietor or a small tenant at a ' fair rent ' could cultivate where a farmer for a profit could not ; and where land SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 453 is idle, and men are idle, it is better to have the land cultivated by the idle men than not at all. Nay, it would be doubly better to bring together these two factors of production, else useless or worse, the poor land and the poor men who can afford to work hardest on ungrateful soil, because otherwise the land produces nothing, and the man also producing nothing still draws on the general resources. Allotments, as Mill says, enable labourers to grow their own poor- rates, much more if there be small holdings as well as allotments. As regards the unemployed in general, the reserve army of labour, the worn-out veterans of labour, the criminal classes, and generally the social residuum — the sorest part of the problem, and where lies all its stress and strain — it is a question both of prevention and of cure, the former more especially. And pre- vention will partly depend on the labourers in the lowest grade above the gulf obtaining higher wages at such times as they are employed ; and this is their due, because if their labour is socially necessary they should get enough to live upon, one job with another. It will depend partly on the relief of the labour market by drawing some back to the small holdings or allot- ments in the country, one reform reacting beneficially on and making possible another, the like being true of emigration. It will depend very much on early lessons of thrift and prudence, which should be impressed upon the children by parents and teachers, in pursuance of a more rational plan of primary education. By State help, self-help, education, emigration, the great social gangrene may be pre- vented from spreading, and it may be finally abolished. 454 SPECIAL REMEDIES. But it will be difficult. It will task our statesmen, try our reformers, exhaust our philanthropists ; but let them bend to it. It is the greatest of works, a labour for a Hercules, a task almost for a God if such were sent to earth. Nay, it was the very problem that chiefly exercised the soul of Christ, and as in life it was ever present with Him, so in death it was beside Him in the person of the thief on the cross, society's victim, but forgiven by Him. Deeper remedies than any yet hazarded may yet have to be tried for this branch of the problem. The State, in addition to providing for the un- employed and used-up poor, may have at last to take the restraint of population in its own hands, may have to restrict a fatal liberty to prevent the flood of diseased frames and degraded minds. It can only be indicated here that very radical remedies may have to be tried ; radical both in the way of finding employment for those already here, and for preventing a surplusage of the lower types from appearing here. Much better that Mill's ' swarms of beings likely to be miserable and certain to be depraved ' should keep in Nirvana, in the sphere of the Unconscious when well there ; better not to see the sunshine in the fatal surroundings destined for them here. But more will have yet to be said on this dark and serious side of the question. We turn to a more cheerful side and a more hopeful topic. A better education would do much for all the working classes and something for the very lowest. It would give access to careers, provide ladders of escape for the better ones from their surroundings. Education, as well as land and capital, and more than SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 455 either, requires diffusion. It is wanted for all, from the struggling sections of the middle class down to the very lowest. The question of free education, though much debated for the hour, is unimportant. Free it should be to those who cannot afford to pay for it ; for the others they should, as I have argued, have the benefit of more educational funds than they now have, and, that agreed to, the smaller question whether a man pays directly or only indirectly his children's pence is insignificant. To the drastic schemes of land nationalisation we have not been able to agree, still less to the sweeping and heroic schemes for the nationalisation of land, capital, and all things above the ground or beneath it, visible and invisible, money, credit, machinery, mines. Both kinds of nationalisation would be robbery. The second, even could it be temporarily done, would be accompanied with an evolution of Chaos in volume sufficient to rejoice the very heart of Milton's ' Anarch Old ' as nothing has rejoiced it since man appeared on the planet. We should re- quire a violent revolution and civil war to get to universal nationalisation, and a counter-revolution to get back ; and after a possibly long time, in which it would not be pleasant to live and rear a family, the old order of private property and industry would return once more, much blood having been drawn meantime in the collision and whirl of the human atoms during the anarchic period. Nor would Malthus be a safe and sure specific, Malthusianism being, as we have seen, beside the question, or not going to its depth ; the amount of practical truth in it being that labourers should not 456 SPECIAL REMEDIES. marry too early, nor have too large families, and that those in the lowest stratum should not have children at all. §2. J One further remedy there is, on which it is neces- sary that we say a little more before concluding. We have seen, that all the remedies run up into moral considerations, and imply higher moral ideas in men ; that even the real remedies, co-operation, education, political reforms, economical reforms, State help, self-help would be more efficacious if men were morally better ; that if they were morally better all necessary reform, political and social, would come as a matter of course; and that if men, especially those in the higher places, do not receive a moral awakening there may come social convulsions, even though it be proved to demonstration that such would merely involve all alike, rich and poor, in a general wreck. All would thus seem to turn finally on the question, Can men be made morally better ? And truly when the case is thus put there are not wanting causes for the gravest apprehensions in regard to the future. When one reflects what the average of mankind is to-day, what our species, self-regarding by its very essence, is at best, what our actual society is at this its latest hour of development, with its egoism in- tensified by the ethics of the market and of industry ; when one considers the general moral tone of society, its real working code of morality as distinct from the ethics of the schools, its low theory of life, its false valuation of the things good and evil of life, its lost SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIO ideal of heroism, its relaxed standard of honour, its forgotten notions of duty ; above all when we re- flect that religious belief — the last reserve force to strengthen and support morality, so liable to give way under pressure of excessive self-interest — has itself broken down ; — one cannot affect to be over-sanguine, or pretend to be without serious apprehension as to the future of society. Our practical working ethics, as distinct from the ethics of the schools, often grand enough, is narrowed to the lowest egoism and the coarsest moral mate- rialism. The notion of duty, paramount and impera- tive, especially of a duty to those in the classes beneath, has all but died away from the sou]s of those in the superior classes. The very perception of what is just is all but obscured — a still more alarming state of things, because it implies that now the disease has reached a vital place ; that the moral sense and the brain together are touched ; that the conscience, the shower of right and wrong, can no longer be trusted ; that there is corruption in the court, and that the judge has been bribed. What do I owe my hands but wages according to contract ? asks the employer. What do I owe these hinds, or my countrymen gene- rally? says the landlord. Nothing at all, but my countrymen would owe me something more if price of corn or profits in the great centres of industry would only increase. The notion that the rich employer owes more to his hands than is in the contract, that he owes kindly feelings to those by whose labour he lives, together with other things that naturally flow from these ; and that he and the landlord and all rich men owe something more than they can ever hope to 458 SPECIAL REMEDIES. pay — to science, to civilisation, to mankind generally, but especially to the living generation of their own countrymen, as the present usufructuaries of the bless- ings of civilisation — such a notion has hardly ever arisen in the minds of any, save a rare individual here and there, whose bright example only further shows the general moral darkness, the deadness of conscience, and want of public spirit. These men, who have drawn so much, owe much ; but only a rarely exceptional man acknowledges the debt and by means of hospital, scientific college, or other bounty, distributes again to his countrymen and civilisation part of what through them he has gathered. Nor is the low moral tone confined to the rich. It is universal — in the middle classes, in the working classes, in the lowest poor — but with this difference, that in each grade as we descend there is the more excuse for it, till at last, for the lowest poor, the van- quished, and the finally prostrate, the victims of ex- treme necessity, a moral obligation can hardly be said to exist ; a fact which constitutes a part of our future social dangers. We shall certainly require both a moral awaken- ing and a religious awakening to make the required change of state ; we shall have to get a wholly new conception of the meaning of life, of the duties of life, nay, of the very possibilities of life, even of the plea- sures and promises of life from the egoistic stand- point, which last consideration may be hoped to have some weight with those who would not hear any other appeal. Strange as it may seem, I believe that most of the rich and greatly placed have missed the best things in SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 459 life ; that even on their own principles they have badly i worked their egoism in practice, and have not realised | the highest kind or the largest surface of enjoyable things. They have certainly passed by the best in quality, which assuredly does not consist in delicate meats and choice wines, in the flattery of syco- phants, guests, or clients, or the consciousness of fine houses, carriages, and footmen ; or, rising higher yet, in deer forests, country seats and parks ; or, highest of all, a seat in Parliament, or even a place amongst the peers. Some of these no doubt are fine things, but there are even finer yet, though perhaps not attain- able on the road of the money-seeker. On the theory of enlightened egoism the mammonist money-maker has missed the finest things, and the true follower of Epicurus would look upon his highest conquests with contempt. But for the money- hunter it may be said he follows what he feels to be his summum bonum, and does not rise to the finer fancy-flies he does not relish. True ; but not the less has he missed the highest things. As for the idle rich, they have en- joyed still less than the working rich. They had a great chance of making much of life. And what have they generally made of it? What have they got out of life, so full for them of great possibilities, of high pleasure and satisfaction, either exclusive of others or inclusive ? They have got weariness, pain, satiety of material sweets, ruined nerves ; all relish of life gone. They stretched forth their hands to pluck the seeming blooming apples, and found, not sweet- ness, but ashes inside, or rottenness. They have got ennui, melancholies without names, a weariness, 4G0 SPECIAL REMEDIES. a satiety of life. They also are in a kind of sickness and earthly state of torment, insomuch that many of them would almost change with the condition of the lowest pariah. And it is hardly doubtful after all that their sufferings are the worst. Such grand com- pensation great and benignant Mother Nature has, such even-handed justice she will have, in spite of social arrangements. And here again is an inner principle of justice in the fibres of Nature, in the centre of things — a moral order where we did not look for it. They have not got the real relish of life and its joys that mighty Nature, great in secret compensa- tions, gives to the genuine worker ; above all, to the higher worker, be he thinker, artist, savant, creator, inventor. Nay, they have not even the simple plea- sures that the artisan or day labourer, with his sound sleep, good digestion, and honest heart, and warm for his comrades, may enjoy. The idle rich have gone to despair, as the hard- working but greedy and grasping rich have reaped vanity — even after reaching the crown of ambition and the seat in the House, because when there he is commonly of little account, being for most part destitute of the knowledge, culture, and ideas — things little rated till he finds the want of them — that would distinguish him there. The great simple pleasures have been passed by, could not be enjoyed. And is it not just, great Nature ! that the rich should not have all ; that there are great gifts that cannot be monopolised, cannot be made into a property ; that cannot even be got by those who think only of money or the pleasures that money can buy ? There are simple things but great SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 461 things that you have haply given or given the means of attaining — enthusiasm, health of body, a cheerful mind, the love of nature, of knowledge, of one's kind, the delight in man and woman. Here are great things, precious things, pleasures to be had cheap, comparatively, but only by those who do not love wealth too keenly or pursue it too absorbingly, the pursuit of the one forbidding that of the other. These also are reserved prizes, ' out of the competition/ res extra commercium, not open to all, but only to the select of Nature who have not gone too far from her ways ; and here again is compensation in the deep economy of Nature. Religion — the last coercive force after morality and law, the final thing on which Society was wont to rest for compelling men to do their duty — religion is in still worse case than morals, is indeed in the very gravest condition, and in one for which there is no parallel in history but one, and that a faint one, its state in the Roman Empire when Christianity was first preached. It has become mechanical, a rhapsody of words ; a thing that in the form of orthodox dogma and doctrine ceases more and more to be believed in by thinking men. Nay, the unbelief has reached the working classes, and unless the doctrine is reformed the unbelief will become universal. It is not merely that the doctrines are more and more discredited, but the suspicion gains amongst the labouring classes that the doctrines have been accommodated to the masters of the world, and not without a show of reason. The rich and powerful classes, not too highly rated in the Gospel, have ever insisted on having their gloss on its teaching intro- 462 SPECIAL REMEDIES. duced, and not without effect. Their influence has made itself felt in commentary and catechism, even in the ' duty to our neighbour,' as improved upon the gospel rendering. Eeligion in the course of her history has also become ' opportunist.' The plain and manifest words of the Gospel oft repeated to prevent mistakes, the most clear and unmistakable texts and most above suspicion otherwise have been either emptied of their meaning, or, what has been equally efficacious, the emphasis has been withdrawn from where the Founder put it and laid on other places. And thus the unimportant or dubious has set aside the essential, a matter on which the Christian Socialists, who, like Maurice, affirm the communistic basis of Christianity, will one day assuredly have a hearing and probably a triumph, at least if Christianity is to become once more a living and a general power in the world. The Church has missed or ignored the meaning of Christ for centuries, has in consequence taken away the life out of the gospels, as well as out of the prophets. The Fathers of the Church knew the meaning, and it was a long time before the early Christian Church lost sight of Christ's social teaching. It was, however, gradually lost sight of, in main measure. Strange ; because there is no man who brings a sane and unbiassed understanding to the reading of the gospels, still less to Isaiah and Jeremiah, without perceiving that what Christ and the Prophets equally aimed at was to bring in social justice, or ' righteousness,' as it is rendered. None can doubt, few but know, that the kingdom of heaven with Christ meant at first (and probably to the last) a so- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 463 ciety on earth with changed social conditions, in which the cruel social inequalities would be redressed ; in- equalities which mark the latest stages of a nation's history, and which in Judasa, in Christ's time, where men were * standing idle all day in the market place,' because no man had hired them, and where Dives and Lazarus were familiar social types, were as marked as now. No Church nor man can possibly explain away all the many texts in the synoptical Gospels pointing significantly in this one direction : the de- nunciations of the rich ; the advice to the rich young man whose only drawback was his wealth ; the terrible parable of the rich man in torment and the poor in heaven ; the parable of the rich man, who had 6 much goods laid up for many years ' of selfish enjoyment, but who was not rich towards God ; all turning on the vanity of riches, their demoralising power, and the general injustice of their acquisition. The Christian Church, as M. de Laveleye well says, can never get rid of its socialistic base. The doctrines of communism and of equality are in the gospels, and they cannot be treated as of no significance without shaking the authority of the other portions, and of Christianity generally, to its foundation. The gospels are read daily in the churches, and the prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — and yet the majority of the clergy of all denominations whose sacred business it is to know their drift and meaning, especially where it is so clear, have been either too blind to see or too prudent to proclaim the real social and moral teaching of Christ, to ignore which is simply to ignore all that refers to the earthly salvation of man, which assuredly was of capital 4 464 SPECIAL REMEDIES. importance in the mind of the Founder of Christianity. The priests — though happily not all — have passed by the most pregnant words, the full meaning and reach ! of them have been missed, while doctrines of doubt- ful authority have been substituted and accentuated, whether from want of light or as part of a deliberate policy it is for them to explain. Hence, once again, this sad result seen under the sun : the gospel of social righteousness perverted, the way and rule of life obscured, and religion made of no effect in enjoin- ing a just conduct of life in this world. If, then, all reforms turn finally on men being morally raised, our prospect would not seem the brightest. A society without real religion, with its nominal religion adapted and accommodated, with- out morality other than egoism, and not even enlightened egoism, whose spiritual guides, political rulers, and social chiefs have been, almost to our days, in a kind of tacit combination to work injus- tice, as the princes, priests, and prophets of Judah, in the days of Ezekiel, had all joined together to do evil ; with its people, whether products of the system or revolters from it, of like disposition with its rulers, — such a society would not seem to be in a very hopeful way. On the contrary, one would say that it was in a very alarming state, and on the whole that if it does not change it would merit the destruction that the revolutionists and anarchists threaten, and that Carlyle prophesied, would one day come unless it changed. § 3. 6ur case would, in truth, be hopeless, and the fate of society to go down in prolonged dissolution sure, were SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 465 it not that in fact a change has come over the spirit of all, and that the picture we have drawn, though still generally true, is becoming less and less true. We are receding from the state of things described, and the chief question is, Are we leaving it behind us sufficiently fast and to a sufficient extent ? Our comfort is that things have been worse, far worse. Our hope is that we may improve more and more now that we are in the altered course. At all events we are departing from the evil state of things described. For the past fifty years our face has been set in the opposite direction ; nor has the nation ever looked backward except for a moment now and then. Something considerable has been already gained. The people have been admitted to political power, a matter of first moment only just settled after a long struggle. The State has become filled with the spirit of democracy. Law has been reformed in the interests of all, and good laws passed in the interest and for the protection of the people. Many things have been done for the working classes, and an enlarged spirit of philanthropy and charity has embraced the case of the most hopeless. The Church even has been reforming herself, has begun to conceive her work differently. She too has felt the rising tide of democracy, and is returning to the neglected side of Christian ethics, the social and moral teaching of the Gospel. And assuredly not an hour too soon, perhaps not soon enough, considering that the murmur, ' Give an account of your stewardship,' is beginning to be heard. • At the present hour there is a moral awakening and a deepening ferment, a movement all along the H H 466 SPECIAL REMEDIES. line, a movement full of hope. The Church is being filled with the new spirit. Our parliamentary candidates are full of it. Philosophy — dropping her mill-horse round of thrashing exhausted meta- physical issues — is turning her eyes to earth, is con- descending to regard that remarkable entity called Society; a thing well worthy her regards if only for a change, now that long familiarity with the Absolute must at last have produced a sense of monotony from want of variety. All this is matter for hope. Parliament, the Church, Law, Philosophy, Literature are becoming filled with a spirit, new, and of hopeful augury ; whether from pity, remorse, generosity, ap- prehension, or a mixture of all together, we need not stop to inquire. Even Society on its most shining heights is moved, remembers that the poor exist, and has got considerably beyond the social philosophy of the too-famous French princess who wondered why they didn't eat loaves. • This is the time, now that the tide suits, to set our sails again towards Utopia ; the time for states- men, philosophers, and moralists on the side of justice to strike their strongest with hope of the happiest results ; the time for all well-wishers of their kind, and their country, to work together ; the time when much may be done, much hoped for. There is at least sufficient wisdom and virtue amongst us, if duly gathered and applied, to start on the right lines for the solution of Society's formidable problem, and let us hope sufficient courage and per- severance to keep in the course once entered. But the future is shrouded. We only know from the past that there is an element of ' unreason ' in the course of SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 467 history, proceeding in part from human nature and in part from what is called Chance. Man is an imperfect being, having in him both good and evil. He is com- bative and selfish, as well as generous and just at times. What he holds he will not surrender. Justice puts in her plea in vain. The unforeseen occurs, and thus, in spite of its quantum of working wisdom and virtue, society may get into a state of war and anarchy through the attempt to bring in justice. Hitherto we have escaped this peril, owing to our sensible political instincts, our habits of compromise and sense of fair play. If such still prevail, all may go well. But there are also grounds of apprehension, for now the struggle of opposed interests is about to enter on a more critical stage, and to be carried on at closer quarters. Con- fusion and even revolution may be ahead for us, from which only wisdom and knowledge and a spirit and sense of justice in the higher classes, as well as good sense and knowledge in the lower, can save us. It may be that Justice is appointed to come in in this way ; — by struggle, perhaps by violent struggles. We hope it may not be so, we expect it will not be so ; but even should it be so ordained, the end, however long delayed, will not be the disappearance of the race in mutual annihilation. It will and must finally be a nearer ap- proach to social righteousness ; and at last, though it may be far off, when hatred and anger shall have died out, as they have already partly died ; when love and charity, that really exist, shall be widely spread; when the barbarian and the brute dying within us shall be wholly dead ; when, in short, the human species has worked up to it, and has fitted itself for H H 2 468 SPECIAL REMEDIES. it, the reign of peace, the happy republic, the king- dom of heaven shall come on the earth. That is the goal seen by the wise from of old ; and the species has already got more than half way to it since it first started on its unpromising career. And what chiefly keeps us back ? Want of love and charity ; too much regard for self, too little regard for others, the latter partly a necessary consequence of our present conception of life and scheme of society. But society will change, is changing, and if social arrangements, which at present repress and smother the native love in our hearts for our fellows, were corrected, this innate love would get its chance and would shine forth. Here, in short, is our case. Love for others, which would solve all and be the c fulfilling of the law,' cannot come largely into life whilst excessive egoism and self-love is fostered and made necessary by the existing state of things. Love, if we had it sufficiently, would save us, would prevent the present evils and preclude future ones ; but our present system and the present evils prevent the love which would destroy them. And here, once more, we are in the old circle of social and moral contra- dictions. How to get out or how to reconcile them? That Love and Charity may live and reign, it is necessary first to aim at and to bring in Justice. This is the first step and the immediate task, and it is a work chiefly for statesmen, philosophers, and preachers of righteousness. The more Justice, old as society, and a minimum of it even necessary for an evil society, becomes diffused through society and all its relation:* and institutions, the more love and charity SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 469 will come in, because the conditions necessary for their larger life will become possible. And the more they come in the more they will facilitate and hasten the remainder of the struggle for a wider Justice. Egoism will indeed still exist ; but it will grow less narrow as it becomes more enlightened, when it dis- covers that what is got from others does not always make richer, that what is given to others does not always make poorer. The grasping ego will grow less, the giving ego will grow larger. Besides, the better ego will expand in other directions, where its expansion does not take from, but rather adds to, the expansion of other egos, because happily there are things which can be enjoyed by many where one's enjoyment is not lessened but heightened by the simultaneous enjoyment of others. The enlightenment of the ego will come from knowledge, its expansion from right education, the spirit of the age, and in part from the grace of nature or of God, for it is partly a gift. It is, however, a pos- sible gift. Many have had it, and more might have it if the germs of better things existing in many were duly cultivated. Thus then finally, by the spread of Justice, by the incoming of light and knowledge, by the extinction of narrow egoism and the expansion of that larger egoism which is compatible with and even inclusive of the love of others, Love and Charity will grow more and more, and will at last, in conjunction with and as the crown of all the others, bring in the King- dom of Heaven here on Earth — without in Society, and within in the soul. 470 SPECIAL REMEDIES. Such is the goal. We have already started for it once more, with more than former hopes, and with light and wisdom and the spirit of justice in our leaders — and particularly our political ones — we may make some considerable progress towards it even within this generation. APPENDIX. ON THE RELATIVITY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. I have already referred, p. 346, to Professor Sidgwick's * Principles of Political Economy ' as an important contribu- tion to the science. I must here add that in my opinion it contains the best analysis of our existing economic order, as well as the most careful and complete discussion of funda- mental principles and conceptions, that has yet been given, and much superior in the latter respect to Professor Cairnes' efforts in the same direction as contained in his ' Definition and Logical Method,' and in his * Leading Principles newly Expounded.' Mill's work, great as it is, is in some respects behind our present knowledge, not on a level with present economic facts, and, on the central matter of all — the wages question — is both erroneous and defective, because he does not deal with the actually existing facts and determining conditions. He is wrong in assuming that the problem of wages can be solved by his Wage-Fund theory. And he does not deal with existing facts when he assumes competi- tion amongst the workers as a general fact governing the determination of wages. Professor Sidgwick's work deals with existing facts while correcting the theory of Mill. But further contributions to our new economic library will be required from economic students, and especially contributions from the historical point of view, in order that the important truth, but lately perceived, be duly impressed — the truth that all economic science is relative, 472 APPENDIX. that each stage of social evolution and progress has its own special economic conditions and characteristics, the explana- tion and systematic expression of which constitutes its special and appropriate political economy, or special applica- tion of such economic theory. And not only has each stage in the history of progressive communities its own political economy, but the like holds of each conceivable type of society, between and including the two extremes of com- munism and individualism in whatever age or country they may be found. The general principle is that each successive stage in the social evolution of a community presents a greater complexity and a larger number of economic facts and conditions to be dealt with in our theory, while some of the old conditions change wholly, cease to be, and are succeeded by new ones, thus rendering necessary an ever new — generally an enlarged — scientific theory. And when old conditions cease, a corres- ponding part of the old theory becomes useless, and the solu- tion of the old problem henceforth has only interest for the student of history. To exemplify : In the early village community, there was no private property and little or no contracts. There were no private accumulations, consequently no capital in the hands of individuals ; no interest on money or goods, no in- heritance. There was little division of labour, no buying and selling, no exchange, save very rarely with outside tribes or communities. There was no State and no taxes. There was small production, mainly agricultural, and there was no distribution, save that made by the head men or chief according to individual wants, somewhat like that made to-day in the family group. Consequently wages, profits, inte- rest, rent, prices, in our sense, did not exist, and hence our present political economy would find itself wholly inapplicable to the facts of the case. A very much simpler theory, and one which would not take long to write out, would suffice. The Feudal period — with its inalienable landed property held on condition of military service, its graduated vil- leinage with labour dues in place of money rent, its serfs, APPENDrx. 473 its soldiers, its wars, its peculiar production and distribution, its narrow sphere of exchange — would require another and a different theory to interpret its economic facts and explain its conditions ; the indefinite period following the decline of feudalism, including the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the golden age of English labour, with the villeins eman- cipated and turned into hired labourers, the Church and monasteries dispensing poor relief, and the yeomen prosperous and numerous, would require another. Again, the age of the Tudors, the whole sixteenth century in fact, would require a fresh and enlarged theory to take in both the altered and the new facts ; the clearances by the great landowners, the depression of the yeomen, the increasing foreign trade, the monopolies, the restraints on production and the free move- ment of labourers. And the like holds of the Stuart period and of later stages till we come to our own century and age. This truth of the relativity of economic theories being borne in mind, we can understand why Adam Smith's great work, though explaining tolerably well the economic circum- stances of England and Scotland during the eighteenth century, should require both correction and supplement to apply to the circumstances of Ricardo's generation, so greatly changed by the Industrial Eevolution. For the age after the industrial revolution Kicardo may be said to have written the * Political Economy,' au age of production on the large scale, of extended banking and enormously expanded foreign trade, circumstances which required a corresponding expan- sion of economic theory to take them in, only the germs of which are given by Adam Smith. Kicardo evolved the theory for this larger and more complicated set of facts and con- ditions, including a theory of foreign trade, although Smith at moments comes close upon nearly every one of Ricardo's pecu- liar theories and ideas. In fact, with the divination of genius he saw the future tendency though he could not write out the corresponding theory with such clearness as Kicardo, who lived when the tendency was accomplished. Accord- ingly he throws out most of the ideas of Kicardo, mixed with others, leaving only to the latter the labour of selection and of further development. 474 APPENDIX. To Eicardo, however, belongs the honour of having written the ' Political Economy ' for his own generation, at least in England, his work having been vaunted by the elder Mill and in part by the younger, as well as by De Quincy and many others, as a new economic revelation. The praise was somewhat exaggerated, but he did at least give an im- proved theory of wages, profits, prices, and a new theory of foreign trade, if not also of rent. But still Eicardo's theory of wages only applies to the case of labourers in his own age, the age before the repeal of the Combination Laws (1824). Even with Mill's corrections, though theoretically true, it ceases to apply generally ; it is not the formula which gives wages, because Eicardo's hypothesis of competition between labourers does not hold under a trades' union regime ; while further, the Eicardian theory of rent — the great discovery — irrefragably true in theory, true hypothetically, and true for England in Eicardo's time, is ceasing more and more to apply to England, because, first, the price of corn, on which the theory hinges and with reference to which it was framed, is now ruled, not as the th eory assures us, by the English, but by the American cost of production ; while again, corn is ceasing, through the American competition and free trade, to be our chief agri- cultural produce, and the theory of rent cannot be easily expressed or proved or worked with reference to cattle-rear- ing or other agricultural industries. Possibly the theory of rent might be adapted to these cases, but it would require much modification, and the most we could hope to get finally would be the lame generalisation that rent is the surplus above ordinary profits. Again : J. S. Mill wrote the * Political Economy ' for his generation, or from 1848 to about the time of his death, at which time, or before it, the spirit of revolt broke out against his authority, the leaders being Professors Jevons, Cliffe Leslie, and Mr. Thornton. Since then there has been a kind of economic anarchy — a return to the ' state of nature ' and pre-economic history, where each man enjoys the liberty of unfettered freedom of speculation, in spite of a APPENDIX. 475 last great effort made by Professor Cairnes to bring back the wanderers within the orthodox economic fold. In vain : we shall never go back to the old faith. Cairnes himself felt it when writing his last book. Laissez-faire he partly gives up. Malthus, he feels, is beside the question ; and the present industrial order is hopeless, he considers. In truth, the dissenters have reason, considering that the two main postulates underlying the orthodox doctrine, on which the theories of wages, profits, rents, and prices rest in such wise that a change in the postulates necessitates a corre- sponding change in the theories, have ceased, and are ceasing more and more, to be generally true. For, coming to particulars, they have within recent years ceased to hold, in the case of rents, in Ireland, no longer determined by free contract and competition, and they have long ceased to hold in the matter of wages, now determined by trades- unions, that is, by a body of workers contracting with a single employer, sometimes — competition being suspended in both camps — with a body of employers ; in either case the result being different from that under the assumption of Mill and Eicardo, of a contract between individual employers and individual workers, with mostly competition between the workers to get work, and occasionally between employers to get workers. There is thus need of a new theory of wages, and all the more as Mill himself, a candid man, more in love with truth than wedded to his own theories, before his death ad- mitted the defect in his theory of wages. And the theory that we want is one that will rightly interpret the facts, explain the causes, express the laws, now actually operative before our eyes. Before writing out a theory of distribution as it might be, or ought to be, it is, before all, necessary to be able to write one out for the existing economic and industrial order, now and here, an attempt at which — in the second part of this work — has been made, though to furnish such theory of distribution as it now is, is not the main object of my book. From the point of view of the relativity of economic doctrine to time and social conditions we can further see, 476 APPENDIX. though this time our glance is forward, that if Co-operative Production should ever become a general success we should require a new theory of political economy, at least so far as regards wages, profits, and distribution generally. But given the conditions, we can forescope the resulting economic order, and solve by anticipation the chief problems — some of which would even be simplified. The deductive method and our old Political Economy have at least given us this power, taught us this much. Thus, under co-operative production, competition would only exist between productive group and productive group in the same industry (because it will be a long time indeed before all the groups will merge all competition and divide equally amongst all), normal prices would be ruled as before, mainly by cost of production, and market price, by supply and demand, — by the varying quantities of commodities and services offered, compared with the varying wants and money of purchasers; that is, there would be competition in the case of buyers and sellers, as well as between group and group, nation and nation ; but contract would no longer determine wages of individuals at all, as it now does in part, and the only labourers' contracts would probably be those relating to the terms of admission into their special co-operative associations. Wages would be determined by fair division of the total price of product, profits being absorbed in wages, and both together varying with the quantity and quality of produce in conjunction with prices at home and abroad. From the same point of view, viz. the relativity of economic doctrine, we might usefully deal with a crop of daily recur- ring fallacies or confusions of thought, e.g., when the fixing of rents in Ireland or Scotland is objected to, on the ground that it is ' contrary to the principles of political economy ; ' or when the attempt of trades-unions to get higher wages by bringing pressure to bear on the employer is objected to. on the ground that it is ' against the laws of political economy.' Now, of course, all can see that the fixing of fair rents, or the attempt to get higher wages through union combina- tions, is not contrary to the principles of political economy, APPENDIX. 477 but both are indeed very decidedly contrary to freedom of contract and competition, the assumed postulates of political economy. It is a somewhat skilful form of fallacy, because, in the loose sense of the word ' principles,' both fair rents and union-raised wages are contrary to the principles of political economy, that is, if the principles include the postulates from which it starts. What the objectors should say, but which it would not suit them to say, is, that they are contrary to the hitherto accepted postulates of political economy — postulates too widely assumed, even by Eicardo and Mill, as both allow, which have been further narrowed since by the actions of tenant farmers and trade-unionists, and which will probably be narrowed still more, even though the alarming thing should result, that the principles of political economy (that is, the old postulates) are treated with less respect. Political economy has itself nothing to say as to the Tightness or wrongness, the policy or impolicy, of restricting contracts. Neither it nor any other science is competent to examine the principles on which it rests. Hence any criti- cism of its fundamental postulates must come from another quarter, from a different order of ideas, from the sciences of politics and morals. What political economy has to see to is, that in any given age, it does not rashly lay down a postulate not generally true, else it runs in danger of being only a hypothetical science, whose hypotheses, and the in- ferences that hang on them, are possibly only realised inside Saturn's rings or on Jupiter's belts. Our present political economy, or rather the orthodox economy of Eicardo and Mill, assumes general competition and free contracts ; but these two things had in their time no divine right other than the fact that they generally existed (being partly caused or kept up by law) ; they are now becoming more and more restricted, one result being that the conclusions of the orthodox political economy will suffer through non- correspondence with facts. But political economy will not suffer. It will simply see to its postulates, and start from new ones, possibly less general, but more in agreement with the actual facts. 478 APPENDIX. But a proposal might also be contrary to a conclusion of economic science, e.g., the proposal of ' fair traders ' to tax imports in certain cases : which is opposed to the conclusion that free-trade, even ' one-sided,' is best for England on the whole. The proposal here is not contrary merely to a pos- tulate of political economy too widely laid down, and one which the science is not concerned to defend, it is contrary to a theory of English political economy logically deduced from true principles aud facts indisputable — the theory, namely, that protective duties would be bad for the English nation on the whole ; first, because such duties form a tax on all buyers for the benefit of a particular class ; and secondly, because our economic circumstances are such that the chief and the only considerable industry that needs any protection against foreign competition could not be protected without raising the price of corn and bread, so that protection would be chiefly a tax on the poorer classes for the benefit of the agricultural interest, and particularly of landlords. The argu- ment against protection, however, only applies in all its force and in all its fulness to England ; because if we consider the case of a country that could be undersold in its own markets in respect of each of its staple productions, such country would have to choose between protection of these industries against the underselling foreign country, or general low profits to the home producer, and perhaps, if the under- selling country were sufficiently strong, the surrender and ruin, one by one, of all the attacked home industries. And a single great producing and underselling nation, as respects each industry, might suffice to dislocate and destroy all of them, against which there would seem no remedy except to shut out the superior nation, or at least to neutra- lise its advantage, by protective duties. To which the abso- lute free trader replies that even in such case the home industry would only have to be contracted or less profits sub- mitted to. But suppose this universal, suppose each industry contracted, what is the displaced labour and capital to do ? By the orthodox theory capital and labour is to be applied to the industries that each country has most advantage in, APPENDIX. 479 and in the case supposed there is none in which it has an advantage, and no new advantageous one to try. What is to be done ? In such circumstances, the dread by each inte- rest of its own ruin or injury has generally in other countries resulted in protection, and when a country is under a protec- tive regime it is for various reasons nearly impossible to escape from it. This applies to an old country anxious to save its old industries from being destroyed or injured, but a similar line of argument applies in the case of a new and vigorous country or colony to the nurture of an industry for which it is exceptionally suited, but which might and probably would be undersold and destroyed at its birth without such fostering. And thus the free-trade argument only applies completely to the circumstances of England, and has to bend to imperious exigencies in the cases of other nations — thus furnishing another instance of the necessity of qualifying economic theories by con- siderations of time, place, and circumstances. PRINTED BY SFOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON $X t fet- o <6 2- ^ J 6^ *■ 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to w hich ,r£pesyed. Renewed books are subject to lmincdUe (£©1. 4jM t '6ttRT NW 1 7 bfc -io PW R ECT> LP DEC 1J 1959 RECEIVED ^23 70 5APR'6|RT LOAf K t ~^~ - m y^a. $* *$* DEC i 2003 & j - ■ '■'■- ;..-> MAR 1 1 1963 WJV30t9S8 t Ll) 2 1A-50m-4,'59 General Library University of California Berkeley * Wff*