Helen Taylor’s Preface
It
was in the year 1869 that impressed with the degree in which,
even during the last twenty years, when the world seemed wholly occupied with
other matters, the socialist ideas of speculative thinkers had spread among the
workers in every civilised country, Mr. Mill formed the design of writing a
book on Socialism. Convinced that the inevitable tendencies of modern society
must be to bring the questions involved in it always more and more to the
front, he thought it of great practical consequence that they should be
thoroughly and impartially considered, and the lines pointed out by which the
best speculatively-tested theories might, without prolongation of suffering on
one hand, or unnecessary disturbance on the other, be applied to the existing
order of things. He therefore planned a work which should go exhaustively
through the whole subject point by point; and the four chapters now printed are
the first rough drafts thrown down toward the foundation of that work. These
chapters might not, when the work came to be completely written out and then
re-written, according to the author’s habit, have appeared in the present
order; they might have been incorporated into different parts of the work. It
has not been without hesitation that I have yielded to the urgent wish of the
editor of this Review to give these chapters to the world; but I have complied
with his request because, while they appear to me to possess great intrinsic
value as well as special application to the problems now forcing themselves on
public attention, they will not, I believe, detract even from the mere literary
reputation of their author, but will rather form an example of the patient labour
with which good work is done.
Chapter 1
Introductory.
In
the great country beyond the Atlantic, which is now well-nigh the most powerful
country in the world, and will soon be indisputably so, manhood suffrage prevails.
Such is also the political qualification of France since 1848, and has become
that of the German Confederation, though not of all the several states
composing it. In Great Britain the suffrage is not yet so widely extended, but
the last Reform Act admitted within what is called the pale of the Constitution
so large a body of those who live on weekly wages, that as soon and as often as
these shall choose to act together as a class, and exert for any common object
the whole of the electoral power which our present institutions give them, they
will exercise, though not a complete ascendency, a very great influence on
legislation. Now these are the very class which, in the vocabulary of the
higher ranks, are said to have no stake in the country. Of course they have in
reality the greatest stake, since their daily bread depends on its prosperity.
But they are not engaged (we may call it bribed) by any peculiar interest of
their own to the support of property as it is, least of all to the support of
irregularities of property. So far as their power reaches, or may hereafter
reach, the laws of property have to depend for support upon considerations of a
public nature, upon the estimate made of their conduciveness to the general
welfare, and not upon motives of a mere personal character operating on the
minds of those who have control over the Government.
It
seems to me that the greatness of this change is as yet by no means completely
realised, either by those who opposed, or by those who effected our last
constitutional reform. To say the truth, the perceptions of Englishmen are of
late somewhat blunted as to the tendencies of political changes. They, have
seen so many changes made, from which, while only in prospect, vast
expectations were entertained, both of evil and of good, while the results of
either kind that actually followed seemed far short of what had been predicted,
that they have come to feel as if it were the nature of political changes not
to fulfill expectation, and have fallen into a habit of half unconscious belief
that such changes, when they take place without a violent revolution, do not
much or permanently disturb in practice the course of things habitual to the
country. This, however, is but a superficial view either of the past or of the
future. The various reforms of the last two generations have been at least as
fruitful in important consequences as was foretold. The predictions were often
erroneous as to the suddenness of the effects, and sometimes even as to the
kind of effect. We laugh at the vain expectations of those who thought that
Catholic emancipation would tranquilise Ireland, or reconcile it to British
rule. At the end of the first ten years of the Reform Act of 1832, few
continued to think either that it would remove every important practical
grievance, or that it had opened the door to universal suffrage. But five-and-
twenty years more of its operation have given scope for a large development of
its indirect working, which is much more momentous than the direct. Sudden effects
in history are generally superficial. Causes which go deep down into the roots
of future events produce the most serious parts of their effect only slowly,
and have, therefore, time to become a part of the familiar order of things
before general attention is called to the changes they are producing; since,
when the changes do become evident, they are often not seen, by cursory
observers, to be in any peculiar manner connected with the cause. The remoter
consequences of a new political fact are seldom understood when they occur,
except when they have been appreciated beforehand.
This
timely appreciation is particularly easy in respect to the tendencies of the
change made in our institutions by the Reform Act of 1867. The great increase
of electoral power which the Act places within the reach of the working classes
is permanent. The circumstances which have caused them, thus far, to make a
very limited use of that power, are essentially temporary. It is known even to
the most inobservant, that the working classes have, and are likely to have,
political objects which concern them as working classes, and on which they
believe, rightly or wrongly, that the interests or opinions of the other
powerful classes are opposed to theirs. However much of their pursuit of these
objects may be for the present retarded by want of electoral organisation, by
dissensions among themselves, or by their not having reduced as yet their
wishes into a sufficiently definite practical shape, it is certain as anything
in politics can be, that they will before long find the means of making their
collective electoral power effectively instrumental to the promotion of their
collective objects. And when they do so, it will not be in the disorderly and
ineffective way which belongs to a people not habituated to the use of legal
and constitutional machinery, nor will it be by the impulse of a mere instinct
of leveling. The instruments will be the press, public meetings and
associations, and the return to Parliament of the greatest possible number of
persons pledged to the political aims of the working classes. The political
aims will themselves be determined by definite political doctrines; for
politics are now scientifically studied from the point of view of the working
classes, and opinions conceived in the special interest of those classes are
organised into systems and creeds which lay claim to a place on the platform of
political philosophy, by the same right as the systems elabourated by previous
thinkers. It is of the utmost importance that all reflecting persons should
take into early consideration what these popular political creeds are likely to
be, and that every single article of them should be brought under the fullest
light of investigation and discussion, so that, if possible, when the time
shall be ripe, whatever is right in them may be adopted, and what is wrong
rejected by general consent, and that instead of a hostile conflict, physical
or only moral, between the old and the new, the best parts of both may be
combined in a renovated social fabric. At the ordinary pace of these great
social changes which are not effected by physical violence, we have before us
an interval of about a generation, on the due employment of which it depends
whether the accommodation of social institutions to the altered state of human
society, shall be the work of wise foresight, or of a conflict of opposite
prejudices. The future of mankind will be gravely imperiled, if great questions
are left to be fought over between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to
change.
And
the discussion that is now required is one that must go down to the very first
principles of existing society. The fundamental doctrines which were assumed as
incontestable by former generations, are now put again on their trial. Until
the present age, the institution of property in the shape in which it has been
handed down from the past, had not, except by a few speculative writers, been
brought seriously into question, because the conflicts of the past have always
been conflicts between classes, both of which had a stake in the existing
constitution of property. It will not be possible to go on longer in this
manner. When the discussion includes classes who have next to no property of
their own, and are only interested in the institution so far as it is a public
benefit, they will not allow anything to be taken for granted---certainly not
the principle of private property, the legitimacy and utility of which are
denied by many of the reasoners who look out from the standpoint of the working
classes. Those classes will certainly demand that the subject, in all its
parts, shall be reconsidered from the foundation; that all proposals for doing
without the institution, and all modes of modifying it which have the
appearance of being favorable to the interest of the working classes, shall
receive the fullest consideration and discussion before it is decided that the
subject must remain as it is. As far as this country (England) is concerned,
the dispositions of the working classes have as yet manifested themselves
hostile only to certain outlying portions of the proprietary system. Many of
them desire to withdraw questions of wages from the freedom of contract, which
is one of the ordinary attributions of private property. The more aspiring of
them deny that land is a proper subject for private appropriation, and have
commenced an agitation for its resumption by the state. With this is combined,
in the speeches of some of the agitators, a denunciation of what they call
usury, but without any definition of what they mean by the name; and the cry
does not seem to be of home origin, but to have been caught up from the
intercourse which has recently commenced through the Labour Congresses and the
International Society, with the continental Socialists who object to all
interest on money, and deny the legitimacy of deriving an income in any form
from property apart from labour. This doctrine does not as yet show signs of
being widely prevalent in Great Britain, but the soil is well prepared to receive
the seeds of this description which are widely scattered from those foreign
countries where large, general theories and schemes of vast promise, instead of
inspiring distrust, are essential to the popularity of a cause. It is in
France, Germany and Switzerland that anti-property doctrines in the widest
sense have drawn large bodies of working men to rally round them. In these
countries nearly all those who aim at reforming society in the interest of the
working classes profess themselves Socialists, a designation under which
schemes of very diverse character are comprehended and confounded, but which
implies at least a remodeling generally approaching to abolition of the
institution of private property. And it would probably be found that even in England
the more prominent and active leaders of the working classes are usually in
their private creed Socialists of one order another, though being, like most
English politicians, better aware than their continental brethren that great
and permanent changes in the fundamental ideas of mankind are not to be
accomplished by a coup de main, they direct their practical efforts
toward ends which seem within easier reach, and are content to hold back all
extreme theories until there has been experience of the operation of the same
principles on a partial scale. While such continues to be the character of the
English working classes, as it is of Englishmen in general, they are not likely
to rush headlong into the reckless extremities of some of the foreign Socialists,
who, even in sober Switzerland, proclaim themselves content to begin by simple
subversion, leaving the subsequent reconstruction to take care of itself; and
by, subversion they mean not only the annihilation of all, government, but
getting all property of all kinds out of the hands of the possessors to be used
for the general benefit; but in what mode, it will, they say, be time enough
afterwards to decide.
The
avowal of this doctrine by a public newspaper, the organ of an association (La
Solidarité) published at Neuchatel, is one of the most curious signs of the
times. The leaders of the English working men---whose delegates at the
congresses of Geneva and Bâle contributed much the greatest part of such
practical common sense as was shown there---are not likely to begin
deliberately by anarchy, without having formed any opinion as to what form of
society should be established in the room of the old. But it is evident that
whatever they do propose can only be property judged, and the grounds of the judgment
made convincing to the general mind, on the basis of a previous survey of the
two rival theories, that of private property andthat of Socialism, one or other
of which must necessarily furnish most of the premises in the discussion.
Before, therefore, we can usefully discuss this class of questions in detail,
it will be advisable to examine from their foundations the general questions
raised by Socialism. And this examination should be made without any hostile
prejudice. However irrefutable the arguments in favor of the laws of property
may appear to those to whom they have the double prestige of immemorial custom
and of personal interest, nothing is more natural than that a working man who
has begun to speculate on politics, should regard them in a very different
light. Having, after long struggles, attained in some countries and nearly
attained in others, the point at which, for them, at least, no further progress
to make in the department of purely political rights, is it possible that the
less fortunate classes among the “adult males” should not ask themselves
whether progress ought to stop there? Notwithstanding all that has been done,
and all that seems likely to be done in the extension of franchises, a few are
born to great riches, and the many to a penury made only more grating by
contrast. No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great
majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an
occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by
the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral
advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert.
That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have
hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary
evil? They are told so by, those who do not feel it---by those who have gained
the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that
despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy, were necessary. All the
successive steps that have been made by the poorer classes, partly won from the
better feelings of the powerful, partly extorted from their fears, and partly
bought with money, or attained in exchange for support given to one section of
the powerful in its quarrels with another, had the strongest prejudices opposed
to them beforehand; but their acquisition was a sign of power gained by the
subordinate classes, a means to those classes of acquiring more; it
consequently drew to those classes a certain share of the respect accorded to
power, and produced a corresponding modification in the creed of society
respecting them; whatever advantages they succeeded in acquiring came to be
considered their due, while, of those which they had not yet attained, they
continued to be deemed unworthy. The classes, therefore, which the system of
society makes subordinate, have little reason to put faith in any of the maxims
which the same system of society may have established as principles. Considering
that the opinions of mankind have been found so wonderfully flexible, have
always tended to consecrate existing facts, and to declare what did not yet
exist, either pernicious or impracticable, what assurance have those classes
that the distinction of rich and poor is grounded on a more imperative
necessity than those other ancient and long-established facts, which, having
been abolished, are now condemned even by those who formerly profited by them?
This cannot be taken on the word of an interested party. The working classes
are entitled to claim that the whole field of social institutions should be
re-examined, and every question considered as if it now arose for the first
time; with the idea constantly in view that the persons who are to be convinced
are not those who owe their ease and importance to the present system, but
persons who have no other interest in the matter than abstract justice and the
general good of the community. It should be the object to ascertain what
institutions of property would be established by an unprejudiced legislator,
absolutely impartial between the possessors of property and the non-possessors;
and to defend and justify them by the reasons which would really influence such
a legislator, and not by such as have the appearance of being got up to make
out a case for what already exists. Such rights or privileges of property as
will not stand this test will, sooner or later, have to be given, up. An
impartial hearing ought, moreover, to be given to all objections against
property itself. All evils and inconveniences attaching to the institution in
its best form ought to be frankly admitted, and the best remedies or
palliatives applied which human intelligence is able to devise. And all plans
proposed by social reformers, under whatever name designated, for the purpose
of attaining the benefits aimed at by the institution of property without its
inconveniences, should be examined with the same candor, not prejudged as
absurd or impracticable.
Chapter 2
Socialist Objections to the Present Order of Society.
“The restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison with the
present condition of the majority of the human race.”---J. S. MILL, Political
Economy, Book II., Chap. I., Sec. 3.
As in all proposals for change
there are two elements to be Considered---that which is to be changed and that
which it is to be changed to---so in Socialism considered generally, and in
each of its varieties taken separately, there are two parts to be
distinguished, the one negative and critical, the other constructive. There is,
first the judgment of Socialism on existing institutions and practices and on
their results; and secondly, the various plans which it has propounded for
doing better. In the former, all the different schools of Socialism are at one.
They agree, almost to identity, in the faults which they find with the
economical order of existing society. Up to a certain point, also, they
entertain the same general conception of the remedy to be provided for those faults;
but in the details, notwithstanding this general agreement, there is a wide
disparity. It will be both natural and convenient, in attempting an estimate of
their doctrines, to begin with the negative portion, which is common to them
all, and to postpone all mention of their differences until we arrive at that
second part of their undertaking, in which alone they seriously differ.
This
first part of our task is by no means difficult; since it consists only in an
enumeration of existing evils. Of these there is no scarcity, and most of them
are by no means obscure or mysterious. Many of them are the veriest
common-places of moralists, though the roots even of these lie deeper than
moralists usually attempt to penetrate. So various are they that the only
difficulty is to make any approach to an exhaustive catalogue. We shall content
ourselves for the present with mentioning a few of the principal. And let one
thing be remembered by the reader. When item after item of the enumeration
passes before him, and he finds one fact after another which he has been
accustomed to include among the necessities of nature, urged as an accusation
against social institutions, he is not entitled to cry unfairness, and to
protest that the evils complained of are inherent in man and society, and are
such as no arrangement can remedy. To assert this would be to beg the very
question at issue. No one is more ready than Socialists to admit---they affirm
it indeed much more decidedly than truth warrants---that the evils they complain
of are irremediable in the present constitution of society. They propose to
consider whether any other form of society may be devised which would not be
liable to those evils, or would be liable to them in a much less degree. Those
who object to the present order of society, considered as a whole, and who
accept as an alternative the possibility of a total change, have a right to set
down all the evils which at present exist in society as part of their case,
whether these are apparently attributable to social arrangements or not,
provided they do not flow from physical laws which human power is not adequate,
or human knowledge has not, yet learned, to counteract. Moral evils, and such
physical evils as would be remedied if all persons did as they ought, are
fairly chargeable against the state of society which admits them; and are valid
as arguments until it is shown that any other state of society would involve an
equal or greater amount of such evils. In the opinion of Socialists, the
present arrangement of society, in respect to Property and the Production and
Distribution of Wealth, are, as means to the general good, a total failure.
They say that there is an enormous mass of evil which these arrangements do not
succeed in preventing; that the good, either moral or physical, which they
realise is wretchedly small, compared with the amount of exertion employed, and
that even this small amount of good is brought about by means which are full of
pernicious consequences, moral and physical.
First,
among existing social evils, may be mentioned the evil of Poverty, The
institution of Property is upheld and commended principally as being the means
by which labour and frugality are insured their reward, and mankind enabled to
emerge from indigence. It may be so; most Socialists allow that it has been so
in earlier periods of history. But if the institution can do nothing more or
better in this respect than it has hitherto done, its capabilities, they
affirm, are very insignificant. What proportion of the population, in the most
civilised countries of Europe, enjoy, in their own persons, anything worth
naming of the benefits of property? It may be said that but for property in the
hands of their employers they would be without daily bread; but though this be
conceded, at least their daily bread is all they have; and that often in
insufficient quantity; almost always of inferior quality; and with no assurance
of continuing to have it at all; an immense proportion of the industrious class
being at some period or other of their lives (and all being liable to become)
dependent, at least temporarily, on legal or voluntary charity. Any attempt to
depict the miseries of indigence, or to estimate the proportion of mankind, who
in the most advanced countries, are habitually given up, during their whole
existence, to its physical and moral sufferings, would be superfluous here.
This may be left to philanthropists, who have painted these miseries in colors
sufficiently strong. Suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilised
Europe, and even in England and France, is more wretched than that of most
tribes of savages who are known to us. It may be said that of this hard lot no
one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are
outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even
were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or
Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on
the condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to
death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or
nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape.
The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the
economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral
degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied of satisfied in
a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not
necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social
arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus
suffer are the weaker members of the community morally or physically, is to add
insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on
the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection
against suffering? If the mind and feelings of the prosperous were in a right
state, would they accept their prosperity if for the sake; of it even one person
near them was, for any other cause than voluntary fault, excluded from
obtaining a desirable existence?
One
thing there is, which if it could be affirmed truly, would relieve social
institutions from any share in the responsibility of these evils. Since the
human race has no means of enjoyable existence, or of existence at all, but
what it derives from its own labour and abstinence, there would be no ground
for complaint against society if every one who was willing to undergo a fair
share of this labour and abstinence could attain a fair share of the fruits.
But is this the fact? Is it not the reverse of the fact? The reward instead of
being proportioned to the labour and abstinence of the individual, is almost in
an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labour and abstain the
most. Even the idle, reckless and ill-conducted poor, those who are said with
most justice to have themselves to blame for their condition, often undergo
much more and severer labour, not only than those who are born to pecuniary
independence, but than almost any of the more highly remunerated of those who
earn their subsistence; and even the inadequate self-control exercised by the
industrious poor costs them more sacrifice and more effort than is almost ever
required from the more favored members of society. The very idea of
distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or
between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly
chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. It is true that the
lot of individuals is not wholly independent of their virtue and intelligence.;
these do really tell in their favor, but far less than many other things in
which there is no merit at all. The most powerful of all the determining
circumstances is birth. The great, majority are what they were born to be. Some
are born rich without work, others are born to a position in which they can
become rich by work, the great majority are born to hard work and poverty
throughout life, numbers to indigence. Next to birth the chief cause of success
in life is accident and opportunity. When a person not born to riches succeeds
in acquiring them, his own industry and dexterity have generally contributed to
the result; but industry and dexterity would not have sufficed unless there had
been also a concurrence of occasions and chances which falls to the lot of only
a small number. If persons are helped in their worldly career by their virtues,
so are they, and perhaps quite as often, by their vices; by servility and
sycophancy, by hard-hearted and close-fisted selfishness, by the permitted lies
and tricks of trade, by gambling speculations, not seldom by downright knavery.
Energies and talents are of much more avail for success in life than virtues;
but if one man succeeds by employing energy and talent in something generally
useful, another thrives by exercising the same qualities in out-generaling and
ruining a rival. It is as much as any moralist ventures to assert, that, other
circumstances being given, honesty is the best policy, and that with parity of
advantages an honest person has better chances than a rogue. Even this in many
stations and circumstances of life is questionable; anything more than this is
out of the question. It cannot be pretended that honesty, as a means of
success, tells for as much as a difference of one single step on the social
ladder. The connection between fortune and conduct is mainly this, that there
is a degree of bad conduct, or rather of some kinds of bad conduct, which
suffices to ruin any amount of good fortune; but the converse is not true: in
the situation of most people no degree whatever of good conduct can be counted
upon for raising them in the world, without the aid of fortunate accidents.
These evils, then---great poverty and, that poverty very little connected with
desert---are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society.
The second is human misconduct: crime, vice and folly, with all the sufferings
which follow in their train. For, nearly all the forms of misconduct, whether
committed toward ourselves or toward others, may be traced to one of three
causes; Poverty and its temptations in the many; idleness and désœuvrement in
the few whose circumstances do not compel them to work; bad education, or want
of education, in both. The first two must be allowed to be at least failures in
the social arrangements, the last is now almost universally admitted to be the
fault of those arrangements---it may almost be said the crime. I am speaking
loosely and in the rough, for a minuter analysis of the sources of faults of
character and errors of conduct would establish more conclusively the filiation
which connects them with a defective organisation of society, though it would
also show the reciprocal dependence of that faulty state of society on a
backward state of the human mind. At this point, in the enumeration of the
evils of society, the mere levelers Of former times usually stopped; but their
more far-sighted successors, the present Socialists, go farther. In their eyes
the very foundation of human life as at present constituted, the very principle
on which the production and repartition of all material products is now carried
on, is essentially vicious and anti-social. It is the principle of
individualism, competition, each one for himself and against all the rest. It
is grounded on opposition of interests, not harmony of interests, and under it
everyone is required to find his place by a struggle, by pushing others back or
being pushed back by them. Socialists consider this system of private war (as
it may be termed) between everyone and everyone, especially fatal in an
economical point of view and in a moral. Morally considered, its evils are
obvious. It is the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it makes
everyone the natural enemy of all others who cross his path, and everyone’s
path is constantly liable to be crossed. Under the present system hardly any
one can gain except by the loss or disappointment of one or of many others. In
a well constituted community everyone would be a gainer by every other person’s
successful exertions; while now we gain by each other’s loss and lose by each
other’s gain, and our greatest gains come from the worst sources of all, from
death, the death of those who are nearest and should be dearest to us. In its
purely economical operation the principle of individual competition receives as
unqualified condemnation from the social reformers as in its moral. In the
competition of labourers they see the cause of low wages; in the competition of
producers the cause of commercial ruin and bankruptcy; and both evils, they
affirm, tend constantly to increase as population and wealth make progress; no
person (they conceive) being benefited except the great proprietors of land,
the holders of fixed money incomes, and a few great capitalists, whose wealth
is gradually enabling them to undersell all other producers, to absorb the
whole of the operations of industry into their own sphere, to drive from the
market all employers of labour except themselves, and to convert the labourers
into a kind of slaves or serfs, dependent on them for the means of support, and
compelled to accept these on such terms as they choose to offer. Society, in
short, is traveling onward, according to these speculators, toward a new
feudality, that of the great capitalists.
As I
shall have ample opportunity in future chapters to state my own opinion on
these topics, and on many others connected with and subordinate to them, I
shall now, without further preamble, exhibit the opinions of distinguished
Socialists on the present arrangements of society, in a selection of passages
from their public writings. For the present I desire to be considered as a mere
reporter of the opinions of others. Hereafter it will appear how much of what I
cite agrees or differs with my own sentiments.
The
clearest, the most compact, and the most precise and specific statement of the
case of the Socialists generally against the existing order of society in the economical
department of human affairs, is to be found in the little work of M. Louis
Blanc, Organisation du Travail. My first extracts, therefore, on this
part of the subject shall be taken from that treatise.
“Competition
is for the people a system of extermination. Is the poor man a member of
society, or an enemy to it? We ask for an answer.”
“All
around him he finds the soil pre-occupied. Can he cultivate the earth for
himself? No; for the right of the first occupant has become a right of
property. Can be gather the fruits which the hand of God ripens on the path of
man? No; for like the soil, the fruits have been appropriated. Can he
hunt or fish? No; for that is a right which is dependent upon the government.
Can he draw water from a spring enclosed in a field? No; for the proprietor of
the field is, in virtue of his right to the field, proprietor of the fountain.
Can he, dying of hunger and thirst, stretch out his hands for the charity of
his fellow creatures? No; for there are laws against begging. Can he, exhausted
by fatigue and without a refuge, lie down to sleep upon the pavement of the
streets? No; for there are laws against vagabondage. Can he, flying from the
cruel native land where everything is denied him, seek the means Of living far
from the place where life was given him? No; for it is not permitted to change
your country except on certain conditions which the poor man cannot fulfill.
What then, can the unhappy man do? He will say, `I have hands to work with, I
have intelligence, I have youth, I have strength; take all this, and in return
give me a morsel of bread.’ This is what the working men do say. But even here
the poor man may be answered, `I have no work to give you.’ What is he to do
then?”
[elision]
“What
is competition from the point of view of the workman? It is work put up to
auction. A contractor wants a workman; three present themselves. `How much for
your work?’ `Half a crown; I have a wife and children.’ ‘`Well; and how much
for yours?’ `Two shillings: I have no children, but I have a wife.’ `Very well;
and now how much for you?’ `One and eightpence are enough for me; I am single.’
`Then you shall have the work.’ It is done; the bargain is struck. And what are
the other two workmen to do? It is to be hoped they will die quietly of hunger.
But what if they take to thieving? Never fear; we have the police. To murder?
We have got the hangman. As for the lucky one, his triumph is only temporary.
Let a fourth workman make his appearance, strong enough to fast every other day,
and his price will run down still lower; there will be a new outcast, a new
recruit for the prison perhaps!”
“Will
it be said that these melancholy results are exaggerated; that at all events
they are only possible when there is not work enough for the hands that seek
employment? But I ask, in answer, does the principle of competition contain, by
chance, within itself any method by which this murderous disproportion is to be
avoided? If one branch of industry is in want of hands, who can answer for it
that, in the confusion created by universal competition, another is not
overstocked? And if, out of thirty-four millions of men, twenty are really
reduced to theft for a living, this would suffice to condemn the principle.”
“But
who is so blind as not to see that under the system of unlimited competition,
the continual fall of wages is no exceptional circumstance, but a necessary and
general fact? Has the population a limit which it cannot exceed? Is it possible
for us to say to industry---industry given up to the accidents of individual
egotism and fertile in ruin---can we say: `Thus far shalt thou go, and no
farther?’ The population increases constantly: tell the poor mother to become
sterile, and blaspheme the God who made her fruitful, for if you do not the
lists will soon become too narrow for the combatants. A machine is invented:
command it be broken, and anathematise science, for if you do not, the thousand
workmen whom the new machine deprives of work will knock at the door of the
neighboring workshop, and lower the wages of their companions. Thus systematic
lowering of wages, ending in the driving out of a certain number of workmen, is
the inevitable effect of unlimited competition. It is an industrial system by
means of which the working classes are forced to exterminate one another.”
[elision]
“If
there is an undoubted fact, it is that the increase of population is much more
rapid among the poor than among the rich. According to the statistics of
European population, the births at Paris are only one-thirty-second of the
population in the rich quarters, while in the others they rise to
one-twenty-sixth. This disproportion is a general fact, and M. Sismondi, in his
work on Political Economy, has explained it by the impossibility for the workmen
of hopeful prudence. Those only who feel themselves assured of the morrow can
regulate the number of their children according to their income; he who lives
from day to day is under the yoke of a mysterious fatality, to which he
sacrifices his children as he was sacrificed to it himself. It is true the
workhouses exist, menacing society with an inundation of beggars---what way is
there of escaping from the cause? … It is clear that any society where the
means of subsistence increase less rapidly than the numbers of population, is a
society on the brink of an abyss … Competition produces destitution; this is a
fact shown by statistics. Destitution is fearfully prolific; this is shown by
statistics. The fruitfulness of the poor throws upon society unhappy creatures
who have need of work and cannot find it; this is shown by statistics. At this
point society is reduced to a choice between killing the poor or maintaining
them gratuitously---between atrocity or folly.”
“According
to the Political Economists of the school of Adam Smith and Mon Say, cheapness
is the word in which may be summed up the advantages of unlimited competition.
But why persist in considering the affect of cheapness with a view only to the
momentary advantage of the consumer? Cheapness is advantageous to the consumer
at the cost of introducing the seeds of ruinous anarchy among the producers.
Cheapness is, so to speak, the hammer with which the rich among the producers
crush their poorer rivals. Cheapness is the trap into which the daring
speculators entice the hard workers. Cheapness is the sentence of death to the
producer on a small scale who has no money to invest in the purchase of
machinery that his rich rivals can easily procure. Cheapness is the great
instrument in the hands of monopoly; it absorbs the small manufacturer, the
small shopkeeper, the small proprietor; it is, in one word, the destruction of
the middle classes for the advantage of a few industrial oligarchs … Ought we,
then, to consider cheapness as a curse? No one would attempt to maintain such
an absurdity. But it is the specialty of wrong principles to turn good into
evil and to corrupt all things. Under the system of competition cheapness is
only a provisional and fallacious advantage. It is maintained only so long as
there is a struggle; no sooner have the rich competitors driven out their
poorer rivals than prices rise. Competition leads to monopoly, for the same
reason cheapness leads to high prices. Thus what has been made use of as a
weapon in the contest between the producers, sooner or later becomes a cause of
impoverishment among the consumers. And if to this cause we add the others we
have already enumerated, first among which must be ranked the inordinate
increase of the population, we shall be compelled to recognise the
impoverishment of the mass of the consumers as a direct consequence of
competition.”
“But
on the other hand, this very competition which tends to dry up the sources of
demand, urges production to over-supply. The confusion produced by the
universal struggle prevents each producer from knowing the state of the market.
He must work in the dark and trust to chance for a sale. Why should he check
the supply, especially as he can throw any loss on the workman whose wages are
so pre-eminently liable to rise and fall? Even when production is carried on at
a loss the manufacturers still often carry it on, because they will not let
their machinery, etc., stand idle, or risk the loss of raw material, or lose
their customers; and because productive industry as carried on under the
competitive system being nothing else than a game of chance, the gambler will
not lose his chance of a lucky stroke. Thus, and we cannot too often insist
upon it, competition necessarily tends to increase supply and to diminish
consumption; its tendency therefore is precisely the opposite of what is sought
by economic science; hence it is not merely oppressive but foolish as well.”
[elision]
“And
in all this, in order to avoid dwelling on truths which have become
commonplaces and sound declamatory from their very truth, we have said nothing
of the frightful moral corruption which industry, organised, or more properly
speaking disorganised as it is at the present day, has introduced among the
middle classes. Everything has become venal, and competition invades even the
domain of thought. The factory crushing the workshop; the showy establishment
absorbing the humble shop; the,, artisan who is his own master replaced by the
day-labourer; cultivation by the plough superseding that by the spade, and
bringing the poor man’s field under disgraceful homage to the money-lender;
bankruptcies multiplied; manufacturing industry transformed by the
ill-regulated extension of credit into a system of gambling where no one, not
even the rogue, can be sure of winning; in short a vast confusion calculated to
arouse jealousy, mistrust, and hatred, and to stifle, little by little, all
generous aspirations, all faith, self-sacrifice, and poetry---such is the
hideous but only too faithful picture of the results obtained by the
application of the principle of competition.”
The
Fourierists, through their principal organ, M. Considérant, enumerate the evils
of the existing civilisation in the following order: Firstly.---It
employs an enormous quantity of labour and of human power unproductively, or in
the work of destruction. Secondly.---They assert that even the industry
and powers, which in the present system are devoted to production, do not produce
more than a small portion of what they might produce if better employed and
directed.
“Who
with any good will and reflection Will not see how much the want of coherence,
the disorder, the want of combination, parceling out of labour and leaving it
wholly to individual action without any organisation, without any large or
general views, are causes which limit the possibilities of production and
destroy, or at least waste, our means of action? Does not disorder give birth
to poverty, as order and good management give birth to riches? Is not want of
combination a source of weakness, as combination is a source of strength? And
who can say that industry, whether agricultural, domestic, manufacturing,
scientific, artistic or commercial, is organised at the present day, either in
the state or in municipalities? Who can say that all the work which is carried
on in any of these departments is executed in subordination to any general
views, or with foresight, economy, and order? Or, again, who can say that it is
possible in our present state of society to develop, by a good education, all
the faculties bestowed by nature on each of its members; to employ each one in
functions which he would like, which he would be the most capable of, and
which, therefore, he could carry on with the greatest advantage to himself and
to others? Has it ever been so much as attempted to solve the problems
presented by varieties of character so as to regulate and harmonise the
varieties of employments in accordance with natural aptitudes? Alas! The Utopia
of the most ardent philanthropists is to teach reading and writing to
twenty-five millions of the French people! And in the present state of things
we may defy them to succeed even in that!”
“And
is it not a strange spectacle, too, and one which cries out in condemnation of
us, to see this state of society where the soil is badly cultivated, and
sometimes not cultivated at all; where man is ill-lodged, ill-clothed, and yet
where whole masses are continually in need of work, and pining in misery
because they cannot find it? Of a truth we are forced to acknowledge that if
the nations are poor and starving it is not because nature has denied the means
of producing wealth, but because of the anarchy and disorder in our employment
of those means; in other words, it is because society is wretchedly constituted
and labour unorganised.”
“But
this is not all, and you will have but a faint conception of the evil if you do
not consider that to all these vices of society, which dry up the sources of
wealth and prosperity, must be added the struggle, the discord, the war, in
short, under many names and many forms which society cherishes and cultivates
between the individuals that compose it. These struggles and discords
correspond in radical oppositions---deep-seated antinomies between the various
interests. Exactly in so far as you are able to establish classes and
categories within the nation; in so far, also, you will have opposition of
interests and internal warfare either avowed or secret, even if you take into
consideration the industrial system only.”
One of the leading ideas of
this school is the wastefulness and at the same time the immorality of the
existing arrangements for distributing the produce of the country among the
various consumers, the enormous superfluity in point of number of the agents of
distribution, the merchants, dealers, shopkeepers and their innumerable
employees, and the depraving character of such a distribution of occupations.
“It is evident that the interest
of the trader is opposed to that of the consumer and of the producer. Has he
not bought cheap and under-valued as much as possible in all his dealings with
the producer, the very same article which, vaunting its excellence, he sells to
you as dear as he can? Thus the interest of the commercial body, collectively
and individually, is contrary to that of the producer and of the
consumer---that is to say, to the interest of the whole body of society.”
“The
trader is a go-between, who profits by the general anarchy and the non-organisation
of industry. The trader buys up products, he buys up everything; he owns and
detains everything, in such sort that:---”
[elision]
“Firstly.---He
holds both production and consumption under his yoke, because both must
come to him either finally for the products to be consumed, or at first for the
raw materials to be worked up. Commerce with all its methods of buying, and of
raising and lowering prices, its innumerable devices, and its holding everything
in the hands of middle-men, levies toll right and left: it despotically
gives the law to Production and Consumption, of which it ought to be only the
subordinate.”
“Secondly.---It
robs society by its enormous profits---profits levied upon the consumer
and the producer, and altogether out of proportion to the services rendered,
for which a twentieth of the persons actually employed would be sufficient.”
“Thirdly.---It
robs society by the subtraction of its productive forces; taking off from
productive labour nineteen-twentieths of the agents of trade, who are mere
parasites. Thus, not only does commerce rob society by appropriating an
exorbitant share of the common wealth, but also by considerably diminishing the
productive energy of the human beehive. The great majority of traders would
return to productive work if a rational system of commercial organisation were
substituted for the inextricable chaos of the present state of things.”
“Fourthly.---It
robs society by the adulteration of products, pushed at the present day beyond
all bounds. And in fact, if a hundred grocers establish themselves in a town
where before there were only twenty, it is plain that people will not begin to
consume five times as many groceries. Hereupon the hundred virtuous grocers
have to dispute between them the profits which before were honestly made by the
twenty; competition obliges them to make it up at the expense of the consumers,
either by raising the prices as sometimes happens, or by adulterating the goods
as always happens. In such a state of things there is an end to good faith.
Inferior or adulterated goods are sold for articles of good quality whenever
the credulous customer is not too experienced to be deceived. And when the
customer has been thoroughly imposed upon, the trading conscience consoles
itself by saying, `I state my price; people can take or leave; no one is
obliged to buy.’ The losses imposed by the bad quality or the adulteration of
goods, are incalculable.”
“Fifthly.---it
robs society by accumulations, artificial or not, in consequence of
which vast quantities of goods collected in one place, are damaged and
destroyed for want of a sale. Fourier (Th. des Quat. Mouv., p. 334, 1st
ed.) says: The fundamental principle of the commercial systems, that of leaving
full liberty to the merchants, gives them absolute right of property over
the goods in which they deal; they have the right to withdraw them altogether,
to withhold or even to burn them, as happened more than once with the Oriental
Company of Amsterdam, which publicly burnt stores of cinnamon in order to raise
the price. What it did with cinnamon it would have done with corn but for the
fear of being stoned by the populace, it would have burnt some corn in order to
sell the rest at four times its value. Indeed, it actually is of daily
occurrence in ports, for provisions of grain to be thrown into the sea because
the merchants have allowed them to rot while waiting for a rise.I myself, when
I was a clerk, have had to superintend these infamous proceedings, and in one
day caused to be thrown into the sea some forty thousand bushels of rice, which
might have been sold at a fair profit had the withholder been less greedy of
gain. It is society that bears the cost of this waste, which takes place daily
under shelter of the philosophical maxim of full liberty for the merchants.”
“Sixthly.---Commerce
robs society, moreover, by all the loss, damage, and waste that follows from
the extreme scattering of products in millions of shops, and by the multiplication
and complication of carriage.”
“Seventhly.---It
robs society by shameless and unlimited usury---usury absolutely
appalling. The trader carries on operations with fictitious capital, much
higher in amount than his real capital. A trader with a capital of twelve
hundred pounds will carry on operations, by means of bills and credit, on a
scale of four, eight, or twelve thousand pounds. Thus he draws from capital which
he does not possess, usurious interest, out of all proportion with the
capital he actually owns.”
“Eighthly.---It
robs society by innumerable bankruptcies, for the daily accidents of our
commercial system, political events, and any kind of disturbance, must usher in
a day when the trader having incurred obligations beyond his means, is no
longer able to meet them; his failure, whether fraudulent or not, must be a
severe blow to his creditors. The bankruptcy of some entails that of others, so
that bankruptcies follow one upon another, causing widespread ruin. And it is
always the producer and the consumer who suffer; for commerce, considered as a
whole, does not produce wealth, and invests very little in proportion to the
wealth which passes through its hands. How many are the manufactures crushed by
these blows! how many fertile sources of wealth dried up by these devices, with
all their disastrous consequences! The producer furnishes the goods, the
consumer the money. Trade furnishes credit, founded on little or no actual
capital, and the different members of the commercial body are in no way
responsible for one another. This, in a few words, is the whole theory of the
thing.”
“Ninthly.---Commerce
robs society by the independence and irresponsibility which
permits it to buy at the epochs when the producers are forced to sell and
compete with one another, in order to procure money for their rent and
necessary expenses of production. When the markets are overstocked and goods
cheap, trade purchases. Then it creates a rise, and by this simple manœuvre
despoils both producer and consumer.”
“Tenthly.---It
robs society by a considerable drawing off of capital, which will return
to productive industry when commerce plays its proper subordinate part, and is
only an agency carrying on transactions between the producers (more or less
distant) and the great centers of consumption---the communistic societies. Thus
the capital engaged in the speculations of commerce (which, small as it is
compared to the immense wealth which passes through its hands, consists
nevertheless of sums enormous in themselves,) would return to stimulate
production if commerce was deprived of the intermediate property in goods, and
their distribution became a matter of administrative organisation.
Stock-jobbing is the most odious form of this vice of commerce.
“Eleventhly.---It robs society by the
monopolising or buying up of raw materials. `For’ (says Fourier, Th. des
Quat. Mouv., p. 359, 1st ed.) `the rise in price on articles that are bought
up, is home ultimately by the consumer, although in the first place by the
manufacturers, who, being obliged to keep tip their establishments, must make
pecuniary sacrifices, and manufacture at small profits in the hope of better
days; and it is often long before they can repay themselves the rise in prices
which the monopoliser has compelled them to support in the first instance.’ …
“In
short, all these vices, besides many others which I omit, are multiplied by the
extreme complication of mercantile affairs; for products do not pass once only
through the greedy clutches of commerce; there are some which pass and repass
twenty or thirty times before reaching the consumer. In the first place the raw
material passes through the grasp of commerce before reaching the manufacturer
who first works it up; then it returns to commerce to be sent out again to be
worked into another form; and so on until it receives its final shape. Then it
passes into the hands of merchants, who sell to the wholesale dealers, and
these to the great retail dealers of towns, and these again to the little
dealers and the country shops; and each time that it changes hands, it leaves
something behind it.”
… “One
of my friends who was lately exploring the Jura, where much working in metal is
done, bad occasion to enter the house of a peasant who was a manufacturer of
shovels. He asked the price. `Let us come to an understanding,’ said the poor labourer,
not an economist at all, but a man of common sense; `I sell them for eight pence
to the trade, which retails them at one shilling and eight pence in the towns.
If you could find a means of opening a direct communication between the workman
and the consumer, you might have them for one shilling and two pence, and we
should each gain six pence by the transaction.”’
To a similar effect Owen, in
the Book of the New Moral World, part 2, chap. III.:
“The principle now in practice
is to induce a large portion of society to devote their lives to distribute
wealth upon a large, a medium, and a small scale, and to have it conveyed from
place to place in larger or smaller quantities, to meet the means and wants, of
various divisions of society and individuals, as they are now situated in
cities, towns, villages, and country places. This principle of distribution
makes a class in society whose business it is to buy from some parties
and to sell to others. By this proceeding they are placed under
circumstances which induce them to endeavor to buy at what appears at the time
a low price in the market, and to sell again at the greatest permanent profit
which they can obtain. Their real object being to get as much profit as gain
between the seller to, and buyer from them, as can be effected in their
transactions.”
“There
are innumerable errors in principle and evils in practice which necessarily
proceed from this method of distributing the wealth of society.”
“First.---A
general class of distributers is formed, whose interest is separated from, and
apparently opposed to, that of the individual from whom they buy and to whom
they sell.”
“Second.---Three
classes of distributers are made, the small, the medium, and the large buyers
and sellers; or the retailers, the wholesale dealers, and the extensive
merchants.”
“Third.---Three
classes of buyers thus created constitute the small, the medium, and the large
purchasers.”
“By
this arrangement into various classes of buyers and sellers, the parties are
easily trained to learn that they have separate and opposing interests, and
different ranks and stations in society. An inequality of feeling and condition
is thus created and maintained, with all the servility and pride which these
unequal arrangements are sure to produce. The parties are regularly trained in
a general system of deception, in order that they may be the more successful in
buying cheap and selling dear.”
“The
smaller sellers acquire habits of injurious idleness, waiting often for hours
for customers, and this evil is experienced often to a considerable extent,
even amongst the class of wholesale dealers. There are, also, by this
arrangement, many more establishments for selling than are necessary in the
villages, towns, and cities; and a very large capital is thus wasted without
benefit to society. And from their number opposed to each other all over the
country to obtain customers, they endeavor to undersell each other, and are
therefore continually endeavoring to injure the producer by the establishment
of what are called cheap shops and warehouses; and to support their character,
the master or his servants must be continually on the watch to buy bargains,
that is, to procure wealth for less than the cost of its production.”
“The
distributers, small, medium, and large, have all to be supported by the
producers, and the greater the number of the former compared with the latter,
the greater will be the burden which the producer has to sustain; for as the
number of distributers increases, the accumulation of wealth must decrease, and
more must be required from the producer.”
“The
distributers of wealth, under the present system, are a dead weight upon the
producers, and are most active demoralisers of society. Their dependent
condition, at the commencement of their task, teaches or induces them to be
servile to their customers, and to continue to be so as long as they are
accumulating wealth by their cheap buying and dear selling. But when they have
secured sufficient to be what they imagine to be an independence---to live
without business---they are too often filled with a most insolent pride, and
become insolent to their dependents.”
“The
arrangement is altogether a most improvident one for society, whose interest it
is to produce the greatest amount of wealth of the best qualities; while the
effect of the existing system of distribution is not only to withdraw great
numbers from producing, to become distributers, but to add to the cost of the
consumer all the expense of a most wasteful and extravagant distribution; the
distribution costing, to the consumer, many times the price of the original
cost of the wealth purchased.”
“Then,
by the position in which the seller is placed by his created desire for gain on
the one hand, and the competition he meets with from opponents selling similar
productions on the other, he is strongly tempted to deteriorate the articles
which he has for sale; and when these are provisions, either of home production
or of foreign importation, the effects upon the health, and consequent comfort
and happiness of the consumers, are often most injurious, and productive of
much premature death, especially among the working classes, who, in this
respect, are perhaps made to be the greatest sufferers, by purchasing the
inferior or low-priced articles.”
“The
expense of thus distributing wealth in Great Britain and Ireland, including
transit from place to place, and all the agents directly and indirectly engaged
in this department, is, perhaps, little short of one hundred millions annually,
without taking into consideration the deterioration of the quality of many of
the articles constituting this wealth, by carriage, and by being divided into
small quantities, and kept in improper stores and places, in which the
atmosphere is unfavorable to the keeping of such articles in a tolerably good,
and much less in the best, condition for use.”
In further illustration of the
contrariety of interests between person and person, class and class, which
pervades the present constitution of society, M. Considérant adds:---
“If the wine-growers wish for
free trade, this freedom ruins the producer of corn, the manufacturer of iron,
of cloth, of cotton, and----we are compelled to add----the smuggler and the
customs officer. If it is the interest of the consumer that machines should be
invented which lower prices by rendering production less costly, these same
machines throw out of work thousands of workmen who do not know how to, and
cannot at once find other work. Here, then, again is one of the innumerable
vicious circles of civilisation … for there are a thousand facts which prove
cumulatively that in our existing social system the introduction of any good
brings always along with it some evil.
“In
short, if we go lower down and come to vulgar details, we find that it is the
interest of the tailor, the shoemaker, and the hatter that coats, shoes, and
hats should be soon worn out; that the glazier profits by the hail-storms which
break windows; that the mason and the architect profit by fires; the lawyer is
enriched by law suits; the doctor by diseases; the wine-seller by drunkenness;
the prostitute by debauchery. And what a disaster would it be for the judges,
the police, and the jailers, as well as for the barristers and the solicitors,
and all the lawyers’ clerks, if crimes, offenses, and law suits were all at once
to come to an end.”
The following is one of the
cardinal points of this school:---
“Add to all this, that civilisation,
which sows dissension and war on every side; which employs a great part of its
powers in unproductive labour, or even in destruction; which furthermore
diminishes the public wealth by the unnecessary friction and discord it
introduces into industry; add to all this, I say, that this same social system
has for its special characteristic to produce a repugnance for work---a disgust
for labour.
“Everywhere
you hear the labourer, the artisan, the clerk complain of his position and his
occupation, while they long for the time when they can retire from work imposed
upon them by necessity. To be repugnant, to have for its motive and pivot
nothing but the fear of starvation, is the great, the fatal, characteristic of
civilised labour. The civilised workman is condemned to penal servitude. So
long as productive labour is so organised that instead of being associated with
pleasure it is associated with pain, weariness and dislike, it will always
happen that all will avoid it who are able. With few exceptions, those only
will consent to work who are compelled to it by want. Hence the most numerous
classes, the artificers of social wealth, the active and direct creators of all
comfort and luxury, will always be condemned to touch closely on poverty and
hunger; they will always be the slaves to ignorance and degradation; they will
continue to be always that huge herd of mere beasts of burden whom we see
ill-grown, decimated by disease, bowed down in the great workshop of society,
over the plough or over the counter, that they may prepare the delicate food,
and the sumptuous enjoyments of the upper and idle classes.”
“So
long as no method of attractive labour has been devised, it will continue to be
true that there must be many poor in order that there may be a few rich; a mean
and hateful saying, which we, hear every day quoted as an eternal truth from
the mouths of people who call themselves Christians or philosophers! It is very
easy to understand that oppression, trickery, and especially poverty, are the
permanent and fatal appanage of every state of society characterised by the
dislike of work, for, in this case, there is nothing but poverty that will
force men to labour. And the proof of this is, that if every one of the workers
were to become suddenly rich, nineteen-twentieths of all the work now done
would be abandoned.”
In the opinion of the
Fourierists, the tendency of the present order of society is to a concentration
of wealth in the hands of a comparatively few immensely rich individuals or
companies, and the reduction of all the rest of the community into a complete
dependence on them. This was termed by Fourier la féodalité industrielle.
“This feudalism,” says M.
Considérant, “would be constituted as soon as the largest part of the
industrial and territorial property of the nation belongs to a minority which
absorbs all its revenues, while the great majority, chained to the work bench
or labouring on the soil, must be content to gnaw the pittance which is cast to
them.”
This disastrous result is to be
brought about partly by the mere progress of competition, as sketched in our
previous extract by M. Louis Blanc; assisted by the progress of national debts,
which M. Considérant regards as mortgages of the whole land and capital of the
country, of which “les capitalistes prêteurs” become, in a greater and greater
measure, co-proprietors, receiving without labour or risk an increasing portion
of the revenues.
Chapter 3
The Objections Examined.
“The discussion that is now
required is one that must go down to the very first principles of existing
society.”---J. S. MILL.
It is impossible to deny that
the considerations brought to notice in the preceding chapter, make out a
frightful case either against the existing order of society, or against the
position of man himself in this world. How much of the evils should be referred
to the one, and how much to the other, is the principal theoretic question
which has to be resolved. But the strongest case is susceptible of
exaggeration; and it will have been evident to many readers, even from the
passages I have quoted, that such exaggeration is not wanting in the
representations of the ablest and most candid Socialists. Though much of their
allegations is unanswerable, not a little is the result of errors in political
economy; by which, let me say once for all, I do not mean the rejection of any
practical rules of policy which have been laid down by political economists: I
mean ignorance of economic facts, and of the causes by which the economic
phenomena of society as it is, are actually determined.
In
the first place it is unhappily true that the wages of ordinary labour in all
the countries of Europe are wretchedly insufficient to supply the physical and
moral necessities of the population in any tolerable measure. But when it is
further alleged that even this insufficient remuneration has a tendency to
diminish; that there is, in the words of M. Louis Blanc, une baisse continue
des salaires; the assertion is in opposition to all accurate information,
and to many notorious facts. It has yet to be proved that there is any country in
the civilised world where the ordinary wages of labour, estimated either in
money or in articles of consumption are declining; while in many they are, on
the whole, on the increase; and an increase which is becoming not slower, but
more rapid. There are, occasionally, branches of industry which are being
gradually superseded by something else, and in those, until production
accommodates itself to demand, wages are depressed; which is an evil, but a
temporary one, and would admit of great alleviation even in the present system
of social economy. A diminution thus produced of the reward of labour in some
particular employment, is the effect and the evidence of increased
remuneration, or of a new source of remuneration, in some other; the total and
the average remuneration being undiminished, or even increased. To make out an
appearance of diminution in the rate of wages in any leading branch of
industry, it is always found necessary to compare some month or year of special
depression at the present time, with the average rate, or even some
exceptionally high rate, at an earlier time. The vicissitudes are no doubt a
great evil, but they were as frequent and as severe in former periods of
economical history as now. The greater scale of the transactions, and the greater
number of persons involved in each fluctuation, may make the fluctuation appear
greater, but, though a larger population affords more sufferers, the evil does
not weigh heavier on each of them individually. There is much evidence of
improvement, and none that is at all trustworthy, of deterioration, in the mode
of living of the labouring population of the countries of Europe; when there is
any appearance to the contrary it is local or partial, and can always be traced
either to the pressure of some temporary calamity, or to some bad law or unwise
act of government which admits of being corrected, while the permanent causes
all operate in the direction of improvement.
M.
Louis Blanc, therefore, while showing himself much more enlightened than the
older school of levelers and democrats, inasmuch as he recognises the
connection between low wages and the over-rapid increase of population, appears
to have fallen into the same error which was at first committed by Malthus and
his followers, that of supposing that because population has a greater power of
increase than subsistence, its pressure upon subsistence must be always growing
more severe. The difference is that the early. Malthusians thought this an
irrepressible tendency, while M. Louis Blanc thinks that it can be repressed,
but only under a system of Communism. It is a great point gained for truth when
it comes to be seen that the tendency to over-population is a fact which
Communism, as well as the existing -order of society, would have to deal with.
And it is much to be rejoiced at that this necessity is admitted by the most
considerable chiefs of all existing schools of Socialism. Owen and Fourier, no
less than M. Louis Blanc, admitted it, and claimed for their respective systems
a pre-eminent power of dealing with this difficulty. However, this may be,
experience shows that in the existing state of society the pressure of
population on subsistence, which is the principal cause of low wages, though a
great, is not an increasing evil; on the contrary, the progress of all that is
called civilisation has a tendency to diminish it, partly by the more rapid
increase of the means of employing and maintaining labour, partly by the
increased facilities opened to labour for transporting itself to new countries
and unoccupied fields of employment, and partly by a general improvement in the
intelligence and prudence of the population. This progress, no doubt, is slow;
but it is much that such progress should take place at all, while we are still
only in the first stage of that public movement for the education of the whole
people, which when more advanced must add greatly to the force of the two
causes of improvement specified above. It is, of course, open to discussion
what form of society has the greatest power of dealing successfully with the
pressure of population on subsistence, and on this question there is much to be
said for Socialism; what was long thought to be its weakest point will perhaps,
prove to be one of its strongest. But it has no just claim to be considered as
the sole means of preventing the general and growing degradation of the mass of
mankind through the peculiar tendency of poverty to produce overpopulation.
Society, as at present constituted, is not descending into that abyss, but
gradually, though slowly, rising out of it, and this improvement is likely to
be progressive if bad laws do not interfere with it.
Next,
it must be observed that Socialists generally, and even the most enlightened of
them, have a very imperfect and one-sided notion of the operation of
competition. They see half its effects, and overlook the other half; they
regard it as an agency for grinding down every one’s remuneration; for obliging
every one to accept less wages for his labour, or a less price for his commodities,
which would be true only if every one had to dispose of his labour or his
commodities to some great monopolist, and the competition were all on one side.
They forget that competition is a cause of high prices and values as well as of
low; that the buyers of labour and commodities compete with one another as well
as the sellers; and that if it is competition which keeps the prices of labour
and commodities as low as they are, it is competition which prevents them from
falling still lower. In truth, when competition is perfectly free on both
sides, its tendency is not specially either to raise or to lower the price of
articles, but to equalise it; to level inequalities of remuneration, and to
reduce all to a general average, a result which, in so far as realised (no
doubt very imperfectly) is, on Socialistic principles, desirable. But if,
disregarding for the time that part of the effects of competition which
consists in keeping up prices, we fix our attention on its effect in keeping
them down, and contemplate this effect in reference solely to the interests of
the labouring classes, it would seem that if competition keeps down wages, and
so gives a motive to the labouring classes to withdraw the labour market from
the full influence of competition, if they can, it must on the other hand have
credit for keeping down the prices of the articles on which wages are expended,
to the great advantage of those who depend on wages. To meet this consideration
Socialists, as we said in our quotation from M. Louis Blanc, are reduced to
affirm that the low prices of commodities produced by competition are delusive,
and lead in the end to higher prices than before, because when the richest
competitor has got rid of all his rivals, he commands the market and can demand
any price he pleases. Now, the commonest experience shows that this state of
things, under really free competition, is wholly imaginary. The richest
competitor neither does nor can get rid of all his rivals, and establish
himself in exclusive possession of the market; and it is not the fact that any
important branch of industry or commerce formerly divided among many has
become, or shows any tendency to become, the monopoly of a few.
The
kind of policy described is sometimes possible where, as in the case of railways,
the only competition possible is between two or three great companies, the
operations being on too vast a scale to be within the reach of individual
capitalists; and this is one of the reasons why businesses which require to be
carried on by great joint-stock enterprises cannot be trusted to competition,
but when not reserved by the state to itself, ought to be carried on under
conditions prescribed, and from time to time varied by the state, for the
purpose of insuring to the public a cheaper supply of its wants than would be
afforded by private interest in the absence of sufficient competition. But in
the ordinary branches of industry no one rich competitor has it in his power to
drive out all the smaller ones. Some businesses show a tendency to pass out of
the hands of many small producers or dealers into a smaller number of larger
ones; but the cases in which this happens are those in which the possession of
a larger capital permits the adoption of more powerful machinery, more
efficient and more expensive processes, or a better organised and more
economical mode of carrying on business, and thus enables the large dealer
legitimately and permanently to supply the commodity cheaper than can be done
on the small scale; to the advantage of the consumers, and therefore of the labouring
classes, and diminishing, pro tanto, that waste of the resources of the
community so much complained of by Socialists, the unnecessary multiplication
of mere distributors, and of the various other classes whom Fourier calls the
parasites of industry. When this change is effected, the larger capitalists,
either individual or joint-stock, among whom the business is divided, are
seldom, if ever, in any considerable branch of commerce, so few as that
competition shall not continue to act between them; so, that the saving in
cost, which enabled them to undersell the small dealers, continues afterwards,
as at first, to be passed on, in lower prices, to their customers. The
operation, therefore, of competition in keeping down the price of commodities,
including those on which wages are expended, is not illusive but real, and, we
may add, is a growing, not a declining, fact.
But
there are other respects, equally important, in which the charges brought by
Socialists against competition do not, admit of so complete an answer.
Competition is the best security for cheapness, but by no means a security for
quality. In former times, when producers and consumers were less numerous, it
was a security for both. The market was not large enough, nor the means of
publicity sufficient to enable a dealer to make a fortune by continually
attracting new customers: his success depended on his retaining those that he
had; and when a dealer furnished good articles, or when he did not, the fact
was soon known to those whom it concerned, and he acquired a character for
honest or dishonest dealing of more importance to him than the gain that would
be made by cheating casual purchasers. But on the great scale of modern
transactions, with the great multiplication of competition and the immense
increase in the quantity of business competed for, dealers are so little
dependent on permanent customers that character is much less essential to them,
while there is also far less certainty of their obtaining the character they
deserve. The low prices which a tradesman advertises are known to a thousand,
for one who has discovered for himself or learned from others, that the bad
quality of the goods is more than an equivalent for their cheapness; while at
the same time the much greater fortunes now made by some dealers excite the
cupidity of all, and the greed of rapid gain substitutes itself for the modest
desire to make a living by their business, In this manner, as wealth increases
and greater prizes seem to be within reach, more and more of a gambling spirit
is introduced into commerce; and where this prevails not only are the simplest
maxims of prudence disregarded, but all, even the most perilous, forms of
pecuniary improbity receive a terrible stimulus. This is the meaning of what is
called the intensity of modem competition. It is further to be mentioned that
when this intensity has reached a certain height, and when a portion of the
producers of an article, or the dealers in it, have resorted to any of the
modes of fraud, such as adulteration, giving short measure, etc., of the
increase of which there is now so much complaint, the temptation is immense on
these to adopt the fraudulent practices, who would not have originated them;
for the public are aware of the low prices fallaciously produced by the frauds,
but do not find out at first, if ever, that the article is not worth the lower
price; and they will not go on paying a higher price for a better article, and
the honest dealer is placed at a terrible disadvantage. Thus the frauds begun
by a few, become customs of the trade, and the morality of the trading classes
is more and more deteriorated.
On
this point, therefore, Socialists have really made out the existence, not only
of a great evil, but of one which grows and tends to grow with the growth of
population and wealth. It must be said, however, that society has never yet
used the means which are already in its power of grappling with this evil. The
laws against commercial frauds are very defective, and their execution still
more so. Laws of this description have no chance of being really enforced
unless it is the special duty of some one to enforce them. They are specially
in need of a public prosecutor. It is still to be discovered how far it is
possible to repress by means of the criminal law a class of misdeeds which are
now seldom brought before the tribunals, and to which, when brought, the
judicial administration of this country is most unduly lenient. The most
important class, however, of these frauds, to the mass of the people, those
which affect the price or quality of articles of daily consumption, can be in a
great measure overcome by the institution of coöperative stores. By this plan
any body of consumers who form themselves into an association for the purpose,
are enabled to pass over the retail dealers and obtain their articles direct
from the wholesale merchants, or, what is better (now that wholesale
coöperative agencies have been established,) from the producers, thus freeing
themselves from the heavy tax now paid to the distributing classes, and at the
same time eliminate the usual perpetrators of adulterations and other frauds.
Distribution thus becomes a work performed by agents selected and paid by those
who have no interest in anything but the cheapness and goodness of the article;
and the distributers are capable of being thus reduced to the numbers which the
quantity of work to be done really requires. The difficulties of the Plan
consist in the skill and trustworthiness required in the managers, and the
imperfect nature of the control which can be exercised over them by the body at
large. The great success and rapid growth of the system prove, however, that
these difficulties are, in some tolerable degree, overcome. At all events, if
the beneficial tendency of the competition of retailers in promoting cheapness
is foregone, and has to be replaced by other securities, the mischievous
tendency of the same competition in deteriorating quality is at any rate got
rid of; and the prosperity of the coöperative stores shows that this benefit is
obtained not only without detriment to cheapness, but with great advantage to
it, since the profits of the concerns enable them to return to the consumers a
large percentage on the price of every article supplied to them. So far,
therefore, as this class of evils is concerned, an effectual remedy is already
in operation, which, though suggested by and partly grounded on socialistic
principles, is consistent with the existing constitution of property.
With
regard to those greater and more conspicuous economical frauds, or malpractices
equivalent to frauds, of which so many deplorable cases have become
notorious---committed by merchants and bankers between themselves or between
them and those who have trusted them with money, such a remedy as above
described is not available, and the only resources which the present
constitution of society affords against them are a sterner reprobation by
opinion, and a more efficient repression by the law. Neither of these remedies
has had any approach to an effectual trial. It is on the occurrence of
insolvencies that these dishonest practices usually come to light; the
perpetrators take their place, not in the class of malefactors, but in that of
insolvent debtors; and the laws of this and other countries were formerly so
savage against simple insolvency, that by one of those reactions to which the
opinions of mankind are liable, insolvents came to be regarded mainly as
objects of compassion, and it seemed to be thought that the hand both of law
and of public opinion could hardly press too lightly upon them. By an error in
a contrary direction to the ordinary one of our law, which in the punishment of
offences in general wholly neglects the question of reparation to the sufferer,
our bankruptcy laws have for some time treated the recovery for creditors of
what is left of their property as almost the sole object, scarcely any
importance being attached to the punishment of the bankrupt for any misconduct
which does not directly interfere with that primary purpose. For three or four
years past there has been a slight counter-reaction, and more than one
bankruptcy act has been passed, somewhat less indulgent to the bankrupt; but
the primary object regarded has still been the pecuniary interest of the
creditors, and criminality in the bankrupt himself, with the exception of a
small number of well marked offences, gets off almost with impunity. It may be
confidently affirmed, therefore, that, at least in this country, society has
not exerted the power it possesses of making mercantile dishonesty dangerous to
the perpetrator. On the contrary, it is a gambling trick in which all the
advantage is on the side of the trickster: if the trick succeeds it makes his
fortune, or preserves it; if it fails, he is at most reduced to poverty which
was perhaps already impending when be determined to run the chance, and he is
classed by those who have not looked closely into the matter, and even by many
who have, not among the infamous but among the unfortunate. Until a more moral
and rational mode of dealing with culpable insolvency has been tried and
failed, commercial dishonesty cannot be ranked among evils the prevalence of
which is inseparable from commercial competition.
Another
point on which there is much misapprehension on the part of Socialists, as well
as of Trades Unionists and other partisans of Labour against Capital, relates
to the proportions in which the produce of the country is really shared and the
amount of what is actually diverted from those who produce it, to enrich other
persons. I forbear for the present to speak of the land, which is a subject
apart. But with respect to capital employed in business, there is in the
popular notions a great deal of illusion. When for instance, a capitalist
invests £20,000 in his business and draws from it an income of suppose £2,000 a
year, the common impression is as if he was the beneficial owner both of the
£20,000 and the £2,000, while the labourers own nothing but their wages. The
truth, however, is that he only obtains the two thousand pounds on condition of
applying no part of the £20,000 to his own use. He has the legal control over
it, and might squander it if he chose, but if he did be would not have the
£2,ooo a year also. As long as he derives an income from his capital he has not
the option of withholding it from the use of others. As much of his invested
capital as consists of buildings, machinery and other instruments of
production, is applied to production and is not applicable to the support or
enjoyment of any one. What is so applicable (including what is laid out in
keeping up or renewing the buildings and instruments) is paid away to labourers,
forming their remuneration and their share in the division of the produce. For
all personal purposes they have the capital and he has but the profits which it
only yields to him on condition that the capital itself is employed in
satisfying, not his own wants, but those of labourers. The proportion which the
profits of capital usually bear to the capital itself (or rather to the
circulating portion of it) is the ratio which the capitalist’s share of the
produce bears to the aggregate share of the labourers. Even as his own share a
small part only belongs to him as the owner of capital. The portion of the
produce which falls to capital merely as capital is measured by the interest of
money, since that is all that the owner of capital obtains when he contributes
nothing to production except the capital itself. Now the interest of capital in
the public funds, which are considered to be the best security, is at the
present prices (which have not varied much for many years) about three and
one-third per cent. Even in this investment there is some little risk---risk of
repudiation, risk of being obliged to sell out at a low price in some
commercial crisis.
Estimating
these risks at one-third per cent., the remaining three per cent., may be
considered as the remuneration of capital, apart from insurance against loss.
On the security of a mortgage four per cent. is generally obtained, but in this
transaction there are considerably greater risks---the uncertainty of titles to
land under our bad system of law the chance of having to realise the security
at a great cost in law charges; and liability to delay in the receipt of the
interest, even when the principal is safe. When mere money, independently of
exertion yields a larger income, as it sometimes does, for example, by shares
in railway or other companies, the surplus is hardly ever an equivalent for the
risk of losing the whole, or part, of the capital by mismanagement, as in the
case of the Brighton Railway, the dividend of which, after having been six per
cent. per annum, sunk to from nothing to one and one-half per cent., and shares
which had been bought at 120 could not be sold for more than 43. When money is
lent at the high rates of interest one occasionally hears of, rates only given
by spendthrifts and needy persons, it is because the risk of loss is so great
that few who possess money can be induced to lend to them at all. So little
reason is there for the outcry against “usury” as one of the grievous burdens
of the working classes. Of the profits, therefore, which a manufacturer or
other person in business obtains from his capital no more than about three per
cent. can be set down to the capital itself. If he were able and willing to
give up the whole of this to his labourers, who already share among them the
whole of his capital as it is annually reproduced from, year to year, the
addition to their weekly wages would be inconsiderable. Of what he obtains
beyond three per cent. a great part is insurance against the manifold losses he
is exposed to, and cannot safely be applied to his own use, but requires to be
kept in reserve to cover those losses when they occur. The remainder is
properly the remuneration of his skill and industry---the wages of his labour
of superintendence. No doubt if he is very successful in business these wages
of his are extremely liberal, and quite out of proportion to what the same
skill and industry would command if offered for hire. But on the other hand he
runs a worse risk than that of being out of employment: that of doing the work
without earning anything by it, of having the labour and anxiety without the
wages. I do not say that the drawbacks balance the privileges, or that he
derives no advantage from the position that makes him a capitalist and employer
of labour, instead of a skilled superintendent letting out his service to
others; but the amount of his advantage must not be estimated by the great
prizes alone. If we subtract from the gains of some the losses of others and
deduct from the balance a fair compensation for the anxiety, skill and labour
of both, grounded on the market price of skilled superintendence, what remains
will be, no doubt, considerable, but yet, when compared to the entire capital
of the country, annually reproduced and dispensed in wages, it is very much
smaller than it appears to the popular imagination; and were the whole of it
added to the share of the labourers it would make a less addition to their
share than would be made by any important invention in machinery, or by the
suppression of unnecessary distributers and other “parasites of industry.” To
complete the estimate, however, of the portion of the produce of industry which
goes to remunerate capital, we must not stop at the interest earned out of the
produce by the capital actually employed in producing it, but must include that
which is paid to the former owners of capital which has been unproductively
spent and no longer exists, and is paid, of course, out of the produce of other
capital. Of this nature is the interest of national debts, which is the cost a
nation is burdened with for past difficulties and dangers, or for past folly or
profligacy of its rulers, more or less shared by the nation itself. To this
must be added the interest on the debts of land owners and other unproductive
consumers; except so far as the money borrowed may have been spent in
remunerative improvement of the productive powers of the land. As for landed
property itself---the appropriation of the rent of land by private
individuals---I reserve, as I have said, this question for discussion
hereafter; for the tenure of land might be varied in any manner considered desirable:
all the land might be declared the property of the State, without interfering
with the right of property in anything which is the product of human labour and
abstinence.
It
seemed desirable to begin the discussion of the Socialist question by these
remarks in abatement of Socialist exaggerations, in order that the true issues
between Socialism and the existing state of society might be correctly
conceived. The present system is not, as many Socialists believe, hurrying us
into a state of general indigence and slavery from which only Socialism can
save us. The evils and injustices suffered under the present system are great,
but they are not increasing; on the contrary the general tendency is toward
their slow diminution. Moreover the inequalities in the distribution of the
produce between capital and labour, however they may shock the feeling of
natural justice, would not by their mere equalisation afford by any means so
large a fund for raising the lower levels of remuneration as Socialists, and many
besides Socialists, are apt to suppose. There is not any one abuse or injustice
now prevailing in society by merely abolishing which, the human race would pass
out of suffering into happiness, What is incumbent on us is a calm comparison
between two different systems of society, with a view of determining which of
them affords the greatest resources for overcoming the inevitable difficulties
of life. And if we find the answer to this question more difficult and more
dependent upon intellectual and moral conditions, than is usually thought, it
is satisfactory to reflect that there is time before us for the question to
work itself out on an experimental scale by actual trial. I believe we shall
find that no other test is possible of the practicability or beneficial
operation of Socialist arrangements; but that the intellectual and moral
grounds of Socialism deserve the most attentive study, as affording in many
cases the guiding principles of the improvements necessary, to give the present
economic system of society its best chance.
Chapter 4
The Difficulties of Socialism.
Among
those who call themselves Socialists, two, kinds of persons may be
distinguished. There are, in the first place, those whose plans for a new order
of society---in which private property and individual competition are to be
superseded and other motives to action substituted---are on the scale of a
village community or township, and would be applied to an entire country by the
multiplication of such self-acting units; of this character are the systems of
Owen and Fourier, and the more thoughtful and philosophic Socialists generally.
The other class, who are more a product of the continent than Great Britain and
may be called the revolutionary Socialists, propose to themselves a much bolder
stroke. Their scheme is the management of the whole productive resources of the
country by one central authority, the general government. And with this view
some of them avow as their purpose that the working classes, or somebody in
their behalf, should take possession of all the property of the country and
administer it for the general benefit.
Whatever
be the difficulties of the first of these two forms of Socialism, the second
must evidently involve the same difficulties and many more. The former, too,
has the great advantage that it can be brought into operation progressively,
and can prove its capabilities by trial. It can be tried first on a select
population, and extended to others as their education and cultivation permit.
It need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an engine of
subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of
reconstruction. It is not so with the other: the aim of that is to substitute
the new rule for the old at a single stroke, and to exchange the amount of good
realized under the present system, and its large possibilities of improvement,
for a plunge without any preparation into the most extreme form of the problem
of carrying on the whole round of the operations of social life without the
motive power which has always hitherto worked the social machinery. It must be
acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of their own
private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification---who
would forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of
their only present means of preserving it, and would brave the frightful
bloodshed and misery that would ensue if the attempt was resisted---must have a
serene confidence in their own wisdom on the one hand and a recklessness of
other people’s sufferings on the other, which Robespierre and St. Just,
hitherto the typical instances of those united attributes, scarcely came up to.
Nevertheless this scheme has great elements of popularity which the more
cautious and reasonable form of Socialism has not; because what it professes to
do it promises to do quickly, and holds out hope to the enthusiastic of seeing
the whole of their aspirations realised in their own time and at a blow.
The
peculiarities, however, of the revolutionary form of Socialism will be most
conveniently examined after the considerations common to both the forms have
been duly weighed.
The
produce of the world could not attain anything approaching to its present
amount, nor support anything approaching to the present number of its
inhabitants, except upon two conditions: abundant and costly machinery,
buildings and other instruments of production; and the power of undertaking
long operations and waiting a considerable time for their fruits. In other
words, there must be a- arge accumulation of capital, both fixed in the
implements and buildings, and circulating, that is, employed in maintaining the
labourers and their families during the time which elapses before the
productive operations are completed and the products come in. This necessity
depends on physical laws, and is inherent in the conditions Of human life; but
these requisites of production, the capital, fixed and circulating, of the
country (to which has to be added the land, and all that is contained in it)
may either be the collective property of those who use it, or may belong to
individuals; and the question is, which of these arrangements is most conducive
to human happiness. What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership
by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production;
which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among
the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down
by the community. Socialism by no means excludes private ownership of articles
of consumption; the exclusive right of each to his or her share of the produce
when received, either to enjoy, to give, or to exchange it. The land, for
example, might be wholly the property of the community for agricultural and
other productive purposes, and might be cultivated on their joint account, and
yet the dwelling assigned to each individual or family as part of their
remuneration might be as exclusively theirs, while they continued to fulfill
their share of the common labours, as any one’s house now is; and not the
dwelling only, but any ornamental ground which the circumstances of the
association allowed to be attached to the house for purposes of enjoyment. The
distinctive feature of Socialism is not that all things are in common, but that
production is only carried on upon the common account, and that the instruments
of production are held as common property. The practicability then of
Socialism, on the scale of Mr. Owen’s or M. Fourier’s villages, admits of no
dispute. The attempt to manage the whole production of a nation by one central
organisation is a totally different matter; but a mixed agricultural and
manufacturing association of from two thousand to four thousand inhabitants
under any tolerable circumstances of soil and climate would be easier to manage
than many a joint-stock company. The question to be considered is, whether this
joint management is, likely to be as efficient and successful as the
managements of private industry by private capital. And this question has to be
considered in a double aspect: the efficiency of the directing mind, or minds,
and that of the simple work people. And in order to state this question in its
simplest form, we will suppose the form of Socialism to be simple communism,
i.e., equal division of the produce among all the sharers, or, according to M.
Louis Blanc’s still higher standard of justice, apportionment of it according
to difference of need, but without making any difference of reward according to
the nature of the duty nor according to the supposed merits or services of the
individual. There are other forms of Socialism, particularly Fourierism, which
do, on considerations of justice or expediency, allow differences of
remuneration for different kinds or degrees of service to the community; but
the consideration of these may be for the present postponed.
The
difference between the motive powers in the economy of society under private
property and under communism would be greatest in case of the directing minds.
Under the present system, the direction being entirely in the hand of the
person or persons who own (or are personally responsible for) the capital, the
whole benefit of the difference between the best administration and the worst
under which the business can continue to be carried on accrues to the person or
persons who control the administration: they reap the whole profit of good
management except so far as their self-interest or liberality induces them to
share it with their subordinates; and they suffer the whole detriment of mismanagement
except so far as this may cripple their subsequent power of employing labour.
This strong personal motive to do their very best and utmost for the efficiency
and economy of the operations, would not exist under Communism; as the managers
would only receive out of the produce the same equal dividend as the other
members of the association, what would remain would be the interest common to
all in so managing affairs as to make the dividend as large as possible; the
incentives of public spirit, of conscience, and of the honor and credit of the
managers. The force of these motives, especially when combined, is great. But
it varies greatly in different persons, and is much greater for some purposes
than for others. The verdict of experience, in the imperfect degree of moral
cultivation which mankind have yet reached, is that the motive of conscience
and that of credit and reputation, even when they are of some strength, are, in
the majority of cases, much stronger as restraining than as impelling forces---are
more to be depended on for preventing wrong, than for calling forth the fullest
energies in the pursuit of ordinary occupations. In the case of most men the
only inducement which has been found sufficiently constant and unflagging to
overcome the ever-present influence of indolence and love of ease, and induce
men to apply themselves unrelaxingly to work for the most part in itself dull
and unexciting, is the prospect of bettering their own economic condition and
that of their family; and the closer the connection of every increase of
exertion with a corresponding increase of its fruits, the more powerful is this
motive. To suppose the contrary would be to imply that with men as they now
are, duty and honor are more powerful principles of action than personal
interest, not solely as to special acts and forbearances respecting which those
sentiments have been exceptionally cultivated, but in the regulation of their
whole lives; which no one, I suppose, will affirm. It may be said that this
inferior efficacy of public and social feelings is not inevitable---is the
result of education. This I am quite ready to admit, and also that there are
even now many individual exceptions to the general infirmity. But before these
exceptions can grow into a majority, or even into a very large minority, much
time will be required. The education of human beings is one of the most
difficult of all arts, and this is one of the points in which it has hitherto
been least successful; moreover, improvements in general education are
necessarily very gradual, because the future generation is educated by the
present, and the imperfections of the teachers set an invincible limit to the
degree in which they can train their pupils to be better than themselves. We
must therefore expect, unless we are operating upon a select portion of the
population, that personal interest will for a long time be a more effective
stimulus to the most vigorous and careful conduct of the industrial business of
society than motives of a higher character. It will be said that at present the
greed of personal gain by its very excess counteracts its own end by the
stimulus it gives to reckless and even dishonest risks. This it does, and under
Communism that source of evil would generally be absent. It is probable,
indeed, that enterprise either of a bad or of a good kind would be a deficient
element, and that business in general would fall very much under the dominion
of routine; the rather, as the performance of duty in such communities has to
be enforced by external sanctions, the more nearly each person’s duty can be
reduced to fixed rules, the easier it is to hold him to its performance. A
circumstance which increases the probability of this result is the limited
power which the managers would have of independent action. They would of course
hold their authority from the choice of the community, by whom their function
might at any time be withdrawn from them; and this would make it necessary for
them, even if not required by the constitution of the community, to obtain the
general consent of the body before making any change in the established mode of
carrying on the concern. The difficulty of persuading a numerous body to make a
change in their accustomed mode of working, of which change the trouble is
often great, and the risk more obvious to their minds than the advantage, would
have a great tendency to keep things in their accustomed track. Against this it
has to be set, that choice by the persons who are directly interested in the
success of the work, and who have practical knowledge and opportunities of
judgment, might be expected on the average to produce managers of greater skill
than the chances of birth, which now so often determine who shall be the owner
of the capital. This may be true; and though it may be replied that the
capitalist by inheritance can also, like the community, appoint a manager more
capable than himself, this would only place him on the same level of advantage
as the community, not on a higher level. But it must be said on the other side
that under the Communist system the persons most qualified for the management
would be likely very often to hang back from undertaking it. At present the
manager, even if he be a hired servant, has a very much larger remuneration
than the other persons concerned in the business; and there are open to his
ambition higher social positions to which his function of manager is a
stepping-stone. On the Communist system none of these advantages would be
possessed by him; he could obtain only the same dividend out of the produce of
the community’s labour as any other member of it; he would no longer have the
chance of raising himself from a receiver of wages into the class of
capitalists; and while he could be in no way better off than any other labourer,
his responsibilities and anxieties would be so much greater that a large
proportion of mankind would be likely to prefer a less onerous position. This
difficulty was foreseen by Plato as an objection to the system proposed in his
Republic, of community of goods among a governing class; and the motive on
which be relied for inducing the fit persons to take on themselves, in the
absence of all the ordinary inducements, the cares and labours of government,
was the fear of being governed by worse men. This, in truth, is the motive
which would have to be in the main depended upon; the persons most competent to
the management would be prompted to undertake the office to prevent it from
falling into less competent hands. And the motive would probably be effectual
at times when there was an impression that by incompetent management the
affairs of the community were going to ruin, or even only decidedly
deteriorating. But this motive could not, as a rule, expect to be called into
action by the less stringent inducement of merely promoting improvement; unless
in the case of inventors and schemers eager to try some device from which they
hoped for great and immediate fruits; and persons of this kind are very often
unfitted by over-sanguine temper and imperfect judgment for the general conduct
of affairs, while even when fitted for it they are precisely the kind of person
against whom the average man is apt to entertain a prejudice, and they would
often be unable to overcome the preliminary difficulty of persuading the
community both to adopt their project and to accept them as managers.
Communistic management would thus be, in all probability, less favorable than
private management to that striking out of new paths and making immediate
sacrifices for distant and uncertain advantages, which, though seldom
unattended with risk, is generally indispensable to great improvements in the
economic condition of mankind, and even to keeping up the existing state in the
face of a continual increase of the number of mouths to be fed.
We
have thus far taken account only of the operation of motives upon the managing
minds of the association. Let us now consider how the case stands in regard to
the ordinary workers.
These,
under Communism, would have no interest, except their share of the general
interest, in doing their work honestly and energetically. But in this respect
matters would be no worse than they now are in regard to the great majority of
the producing classes. These being paid by fixed wages, are so far from having
any direct interest of their own in the efficiency of their work, that they
have not even that share in the general interest which every worker would have
in the Communistic organisation. Accordingly, the inefficiency of hired labour,
the imperfect manner in which it calls forth the real capabilities of the labourers,
is matter of common remark. It is true that a character for being a good
workman is far from being without its value, as it tends to give him a
preference in employment, and sometimes obtains for him higher wages. There are
also possibilities of rising to the position of foreman, or other subordinate
administrative posts, which are not only more highly paid than ordinary labour,
but sometimes open the way to ulterior advantages. But on the other side is to
be set that under Communism the general sentiment of the community, composed of
the comrades under whose eyes each person works, would be sure to be in favor
of good and hard working, and unfavorable to laziness, carelessness and waste.
In the present system not only is this not the case, but the public opinion of
the workman class often acts in the very opposite direction: the rules of some
trade societies actually forbid their members to exceed a certain standard of
efficiency, lest they should diminish the number of labourers required for the
work; and for the same reason they often violently resist contrivances for
economising labour. The change from this to a state in which every person would
have an interest in rendering every other person as industrious, skillful, and
careful as possible (which would be the case under Communism) would be a change
very much for the better. It is, however, to be considered that the principal
defects of the present system in respect to the efficiency of labour may be
corrected, and the chief advantages of Communism in that respect may be
obtained by arrangements compatible with private property and individual com
petition. Considerable improvement is already obtained by piece-work, in the
kinds of labour which admit of it. By this the workman’s personal interest is
closely connected with the quantity of work be turns out---not so much with its
quality, the security for which still has to depend on the employer’s
vigilance; neither does piece-work carry with it the public opinion of the
workman class, which is often, on the contrary, strongly opposed to it, as a
means of (as they think) diminishing the market for labourers. And there is
really good ground for their dislike of piece-work, if, as is alleged, it is a
frequent practice of employers, after using piece-work to ascertain the utmost
which a good workman can do, to fix the price of piece-work so low that by
doing that utmost he is not able to earn more than they would be obliged to
give him as day wages for ordinary work.
But
there is a far more complete remedy than piece-work for the disadvantages of
hired labour, viz: what is now called industrial partnership---the admission of
the whole body of labourers to a participation in the profits, by distributing
among all who share in the work, in the form of a percentage on their earnings,
the whole or a fixed portion of the gains after a certain remuneration has been
allowed to the capitalist. This plan has been found of admirable efficacy, both
in this country and abroad. It has enlisted the sentiments of the workmen
employed on the side of the most careful regard by all of them to the general
interest of the concern; and by its joint effect in promoting zealous exertion,
and checking waste, it has very materially increased the remuneration of every
description of labour ill the concerns in which it has been adopted. It is
evident that this system admits of indefinite extension and of an indefinite
increase in the share of profits assigned to the labourers, short of that which
would leave to the managers less than the needful degree of personal interest
in the success of the concern. It is even likely that when such arrangements
become common, many of these concerns would at some period or another, on the
death or retirement of the chiefs, pass by arrangement into the state of purely
coöperative associations.
It
thus appears that as far as concerns the motives to exertion in the general
body, Communism has no advantage which may not be reached under private
property, while as respects the managing heads it is at a considerable
disadvantage. It has also some disadvantages which seem to be inherent in it,
through the necessity under which it lies of deciding in a more or less
arbitrary manner questions which, on the present system, decide themselves,
often badly enough, but spontaneously.
It
is a simple rule, and under certain aspects a just one, to give equal payment
to all who share in the work. But this is a very imperfect justice unless the
work also is apportioned equally. Now the many different kinds of work required
in every society are very unequal in hardness and unpleasantness. To measure
these against one another, so as to make quality equivalent to quantity, is so
difficult that Communists generally propose that all should work by turns at
every kind of labour. But this involves an almost complete sacrifice of the
economic advantages of the division of employments, advantages which are indeed
frequently over-estimated (or rather the counter considerations are
under-estimated) by political economists, but which are nevertheless, in the
point of view of the productiveness of labour, very considerable, for the
double reason that the coöperation of employment enables the work to distribute
itself with some regard to the special capacities and qualifications of the
worker, and also that every worker acquires skill and rapidity in one kind of
work by confining greater himself to it. The arrangement, therefore, which is
deemed indispensable to a just distribution would probably be a very
considerable disadvantage in respect of production. But further, it is still a
very imperfect standard of justice to demand the same amount of work from every
one. People have unequal capacities of work both mental and bodily, and what is
a light task for one is an insupportable burden to another. It is necessary,
therefore, that there should be a dispensing power, an authority competent to
grant exemptions from the ordinary amount of work, and to proportion tasks in
some measure to capabilities. As long as there are any lazy or selfish persons
who like better to be worked for by others than to work, there will be frequent
attempts to obtain exemptions by favor or fraud, and the frustration of these
attempts will be an affair of considerable difficulty, and will by no means be
always successful. These inconveniences would be little felt, for some time at
least, in communities composed of select persons, earnestly desirous of the
success of the experiment; but plans for the regeneration of society must consider
average human beings, and not only them but the large residuum of persons
greatly below the average in the personal and social virtues. The squabbles and
ill-blood which could not fail to be engendered by the distribution of work
whenever such persons have to be dealt with, would be a great abatement from
the harmony and unanimity which Communists hope would be found among the
members of their association. That concord would, even in the most fortunate
circumstances, be much more liable to disturbance than Communists suppose. The
institution provides that there should be no quarreling about material
interests; individualism is excluded from that department of affairs. But there
are other departments from which no institutions can exclude it: there will still
be rivalry for reputation and for personal power. When selfish ambition is
excluded from the field in which, with most men, it chiefly exercises itself,
that of riches and pecuniary interest, it would betake itself with greater
intensity to the domain still open to it, and we may expect that the struggles
for pre-eminence and for influence in the management would be of great
bitterness when the personal passions, diverted from their ordinary channel,
are driven to seek their principal gratification in that other direction. For
these various reasons it is probable that a Communist association would
frequently fail to exhibit the attractive picture of mutual love and unity of
will and feeling which we are often told by Communists to expect, but would often
be torn by dissension and not unfrequently broken up by it.
Other
and numerous sources of discord are inherent in the necessity which the
Communist principle involves, of deciding by the general voice questions of the
utmost importance to every one, which on the present system can be, and are,
left to individuals to decide, each for his own case. As an example, take the
subject of education. All Socialists are strongly impressed with the
all-importance of the training given to the young, not only for the reasons
which apply universally, but because their demands being much greater than
those of any other system upon the intelligence and morality of the individual
citizen, they have even more at stake than any other societies on the
excellence of their educational arrangements. Now under Communism these
arrangements would have to be made for every citizen by the collective body,
since individual parents, supposing them to prefer some other mode of educating
their children, would have no private means of paying for it, and would be
limited to what they could do by their own personal teaching and influence. But
every adult member of the body would have an equal voice in determining the
collective system designed for the benefit of all. Here, then, is a most
fruitful source of discord in every association. All who had any opinion or
preference as to the education they would desire for their own children, would
have to rely for their chance of obtaining it upon the influence they could
exercise in the joint decision of the community.
It
is needless to specify a number of other important questions affecting the mode
of employing the productive resources of the association, the conditions of
social life, the relations of the body with other associations, etc., on which
difference of opinion, often irreconcilable, would be likely to arise. But even
the dissensions which might be expected would be a far less evil to the
prospects of humanity than a delusive unanimity produced by the prostration of
all individual opinions and wishes before the decree of the majority. The
obstacles to human progression are always great, and require a concurrence of
favorable circumstances to overcome them; but an indispensable condition of
their being overcome is, that human nature should have freedom to expand
spontaneously in various directions, both in thought and practice; that people
should both think for themselves and try experiments for themselves, and should
not resign into the hands of rulers, whether acting in the name of a few or of
the majority, the business of thinking for them, and of prescribing how they
shall act. But in Communist associations private life would be brought in a
most unexampled degree within the dominion of public authority, and there would
be less scope for the development of individual character and individual
preferences than has hitherto existed among the full citizens of any state
belonging to the progressive branches of the human family. Already in all
societies the compression of individuality by the majority is a great and
growing evil; it would probably be much greater under Communism, except so far
as it might be in the power of individuals to set bounds to it by selecting to
belong to a community of persons like-minded with themselves.
From
these various considerations I do not seek to draw any inference against the
possibility that Communistic production is capable of being at some future time
the form of society best adapted to the wants and circumstances of mankind. I
think that this is, and will long be, an open question, upon which fresh light
will continually be obtained, both by trial of the Communistic principle under
favorable circumstances, and by the improvements which will be gradually
effected in the working of the existing system, that of private ownership. The
one certainty is, that Communism, to be successful, requires a high standard of
both moral and intellectual education in all the members of the
community---moral, to qualify them for doing their part honestly and energetically
in the labour of life under no inducement but their share in the general
interest of the association, and their feelings of duty and sympathy towards
it; intellectual, to make them capable of estimating distant interests and
entering into complex considerations, sufficiently at least to be able to
discriminate, in these matters, good counsel from bad. Now I reject altogether
the notion that it is impossible for education and cultivation such as is
implied in these things to be made the inheritance of every person in the
nation; but I am convinced that it is very difficult, and that the passage to
it from our present condition can only be slow. I admit the plea that in the
points of moral education on which the success of Communism depends, the
present state of society is demoralising, and that only a Communistic
association can effectually train mankind for Communism. It is for Communism,
then, to prove, by practical experiment, its power of giving this training.
Experiments alone can show whether there is as yet in any portion of the
population a sufficiently high level of moral cultivation to make Communism
succeed, and to give the next generation among themselves the education
necessary to keep up that high level permanently. If Communist associations show
that they can be durable and prosperous, they will multiply, and will probably
be adopted by successive portions of the population of the more advanced
countries as they become morally fitted for that mode of life. But to force
unprepared populations into Communistic societies, even if a political
revolution gave the power to make such an attempt, would end in disappointment.
If
practical trial is necessary to test the capabilities of Communism, it is no
less required for those other forms of Socialism which recognise the
difficulties of Communism and contrive means to surmount them. The principal of
these is Fourierism, a system which, if only as a specimen of intellectual
ingenuity, is highly worthy of the attention of any student, either of society
or of the human mind. There is scarcely an objection or a difficulty which
Fourier did not foresee, and against which he did not make provision,
beforehand by self-acting contrivances, grounded, however, upon a less high
principle of distributive justice than that of Communism, since he admits
inequalities of distribution and individual ownership of capital, but not the
arbitrary disposal of it. The great problem which he grapples with is, how to
make labour attractive, since, if this could be done, the principal difficulty
of Socialism would be overcome. He maintains that no kind of useful labour is
necessarily or universally repugnant, unless either excessive in amount or
devoid of the stimulus of companionship and emulation, or regarded by mankind
with contempt. The workers in a Fourierist village are to class themselves
spontaneously in groups, each group undertaking a different kind of work and
the same person may be a member not only of one group but of any number; a
certain minimum having first been set apart for the subsistence of every member
of the community, whether capable or not of labour, the society divides the
remainder of the produce among the different groups, in such shares as it finds
attract to each the amount of labour required, and no more; if there is too great
a run upon particular groups it is a sign that those groups are
over-remunerated relatively to others; if any are neglected their remuneration
must be made higher. The share of produce assigned to each group is divided in
fixed proportions among three elements--- labour, capital, and talent; the part
assigned to talent being awarded by the suffrages of the group itself, and it
is hoped that among the variety, of human capacities all, or nearly all, will
be qualified to excel in some group or other. The remuneration for capital is
to be such as is found sufficient to induce savings from individual
consumption, in order to increase the common stock to such point as is desired.
The number and ingenuity of the contrivances for meeting minor difficulties, and
getting rid of minor inconveniences, is very remarkable. By means of these
various provisions it is the expectation of Fourierists that the personal
inducements to exertion for the public interest, instead of being taken away,
would be made much greater than at present, since every increase of the service
rendered would be much more certain of leading to increase of reward than it is
now, when accidents of position have so much influence. The efficiency of labour,
they therefore expect, would be unexampled, while the saving of labour would be
prodigious, by diverting to useful occupations that which is now wasted on
things useless or hurtful, and by dispensing with the vast number of
superfluous distributors, the buying and selling for the whole community being
managed by a single agency. The free choice of individuals as to their manner
of life would be no further interfered with than would be necessary for gaining
the full advantages of coöperation in the industrial operations. Altogether,
the picture of a Fourierist community is both attractive in itself and requires
less from common humanity than any other known system of Socialism; and it is
much to be desired that the scheme should have that fair trial which alone can
test the workableness of any new scheme of social life.
The
result of our review of the various difficulties of Socialism has led us to the
conclusion that the various schemes for managing the productive resources of
the country by public instead of private agency have a case for trial, and some
of them may eventually establish their claims to preference over the existing
order of things, but that they are at present workable only by the élite of
mankind, and have yet to prove their power of training mankind at large to the
state of improvement which they presuppose. Far more, of course, may this be
said of the more ambitious plan which aims at taking possession of the whole
land and capital of the country, and beginning at once to administer it on the
public account. Apart from all consideration of injustice to the present
possessors, the very idea of conducting the whole industry of a country by
direction from single centre is so obviously chimerical that nobody ventures to
propose any mode in which it should be done;* and it can hardly be doubted that
if the revolutionary Socialists attained their immediate object, and actually
had the whole property of the country at their disposal, they would find no
other practicable mode of exercising their power over it than that of dividing
it into portions, each to be made over to the administration of a small
Socialist community. The problem of management which we have seen to be so
difficult even to a select population well prepared beforehand, would be thrown
down to be solved as best it could by aggregations united only by locality, or
taken indiscriminately from the population, including all the malefactors, all
the idlest and most vicious, the most incapable of steady industry,
forethought, or self-control, and a majority, who though not equally degraded,
are yet, in the opinion of Socialists themselves, as far as regards the
qualities essential for the success of Socialism, profoundly demoralised by the
existing state of society. It is saying but little to say that the introduction
of Socialism under such conditions could have no effect but disastrous failure,
and its apostles could have only the consolation that the order of society as
it now exists would have perished first, and all who benefit by it would be
involved in the common ruin---a consolation which to some of them would
probably be real, for if appearances can be trusted the animating principle of
too many of the revolutionary Socialists is hate; a very excusable hatred of
existing evils, which would vent itself by putting an end to the present system
at all costs even to those who suffer by it, in the hope that out of chaos
would arise a better Kosmos, and in the impatience of desperation respecting
any more gradual improvement. They are unaware that chaos is the very most
unfavorable position for setting out in the construction of a Kosmos, and that
many ages of conflict, violence, and tyrannical oppression of the weak by the
strong must intervene; they know not that they would plunge mankind into the
state of nature so forcibly described by Hobbes (Leviathan, Part I, ch. XIII),
where every man is enemy to every man.
“In such condition there is no
place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no
culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of the commodities that may be
imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing
such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no
account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all,
continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor,
nasty brutish and short.”
If the poorest and most wretched members of a so-called civilised
society are in so bad a condition as every one would be in that worst form of
barbarism produced by the dissolution of civilised life, it does not follow
that the way to raise them would be to reduce all others to the same miserable
state. On the contrary, it is by the aid of the first who have risen that so
many others have escaped from the general lot, and it is only by better organisation
of the same process that it maybe hoped in time to succeed in raising the
remainder.
THE IDEA OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
NOT FIXED BUT VARIABLE.
The
preceding considerations appear sufficient to show that an entire renovation of
the social fabric, such as is contemplated by Socialism, establishing the
economic constitution of society upon an entirely new basis, other than that of
private property and competition, however valuable as an ideal, and even as a prophecy
of ultimate possibilities, is not available as a present resource, since it
requires from those who are to carry on the new order of things qualities both
moral and intellectual, which require to be tested in all, and to be created in
most; and this cannot be done by an Act of Parliament, but must be, on the most
favorable supposition, a work of considerable time. For a long period to come
the principle of individual property will be in possession of the field; and
even if in any country a popular movement were to place Socialists at the head
of a revolutinary government, in however many ways they may violate private
property the institution itself would survive, and would either be accepted by
them or brought back by their expulsion, for the plain reason that people will
not lose their hold of what is at present their sole reliance for subsistence
and security until a substitute for it has been got into working order. Even
those, if any, who have shared among themselves what was the property of others
would desire to keep what they had acquired, and to give back to property in
the new hands the sacredness which they had not recognised in the old.
But
though, for these reasons, individual property has presumably a long term
before it, if only of provisional existence, we are not, therefore, to conclude
that it must exist during that whole term unmodified, or that all the rights
now regarded as appertaining to property belong to it inherently, and must
endure while it endures. On the contrary, it is both the duty and the interest
of those who derive the most direct benefit from the laws of property to give
impartial consideration to all proposals for rendering those laws in any way
less onerous to the majority. This, which would in any case be an obligation of
justice, is an injunction of prudence also, in order to place themselves in the
right against the attempts which are sure to be frequent to bring the Socialist
forms of society prematurely into operation.
One
of the mistakes oftenest committed, and which are the source of the greatest
practical errors in human affairs, is that of supposing that the same name
always stands for the same aggregation of ideas. No word has been the subject
of more of this kind of misunderstanding than the word property. It denotes, in
every state of society, the largest power of exclusive use or exclusive control
over things (and sometimes, unfortunately, over persons) which the law accords,
or which custom in that state of society recognises; but these powers of exclusive
use and control are very various and differ greatly in different countries and
in different states of society.
For
instance, in the early states of society, the right of property did not include
the right of bequest. The power of disposing of property by will was in most
countries of Europe a rather late institution; and long after it was introduced
it continued to be limited in favor of what were called natural heirs. Where
bequest is not permitted, individual property is only a life interest. And in
fact, as has been so well and fully set forth by Sir Henry Maine in in his most
instructive work on ancient law, the primitive idea of property was that it
belonged to the family, not to the individual. The head of the family had the
management and was the person who really exercised the proprietary rights. As
in other respects, so in this, he governed the family with nearly despotic
power. But he was not free so to exercise his power as to defeat the
co-proprietors of the other portions; he could not so dispose of the property
as to deprive them of the joint enjoyment or of the succession. By the laws and
customs of some nations the property could not be alienated without the consent
of the male children; in other cases the child could by law demand a division
of the property and the assignment to him of his share, as in the story of the
Prodigal Son. If the association kept together, after the death of the head
some other member of it, not always his son, but often the eldest of the
family, the strongest, or the one selected by the rest, succeeded to the
management and to the managing rights, all the others retaining theirs as
before. If, on the other hand, the body broke up into separate families, each
of these took away with it a part of the property, I say the property, not the
inheritance, because the process was a mere continuance of existing rights, not
a creation of new; the manager’s share alone lapsed to the association.
Then,
again, in regard to proprietary rights over immovables (the principal kind of
property in a rude age), these rights were of very varying extent and duration.
By the Jewish law property in immovables was only a temporary concession; on
the Sabbatical year it returned to the common stock to be redistributed; though
we may surmise that in the historical times of the Jewish state this rule in ay
have been successfully evaded. In many countries of Asia, before European ideas
intervened, nothing existed to which the expression property in land, as we
understand the phrase, is strictly applicable. The ownership was broken up
among several distinct parties, whose rights were determined rather by custom
than by law. The government was part owner, having the right to a heavy rent.
Ancient ideas and even ancient laws limited the government’s share to some
particular fraction of the gross produce, but practically there was no fixed
limit. The government might make over its share to an individual, who then
became possessed of the right of collection and all the other rights of the
state, but not those of any other private person connected with the soil. These
private rights were of various kinds. The actual cultivators, or such of them
as had been long settled on the land, had a right to retain possession; it was
held unlawful to evict them while they paid the rent---a rent not in general
fixed by agreement, but by the custom of the neighborhood. Between the actual
cultivators and the state, or the substitute to whom the state has transferred
its rights, there were intermediate persons with rights of various extent.
There were officers of government who collected the state’s share of the
produce, sometimes for large districts, who though bound to pay over to
government all they collected, after deducting a percentage, were often
hereditary officers. There were also, in many cases, village communities,
consisting of the reputed descendents of the first settlers of a village, who
shared among themselves either the land or its produce according to rules
established by custom, either cultivating it themselves or employing others to
cultivate it for them, and whose rights in the land approached nearer to those
of a landed proprietor, as understood in England, than those of any other party
concerned. But the proprietary right of the village was not individual, but
collective; inalienable (the right of individual shares could only be sold or
mortgaged with the consent of the community,) and governed by fixed rules. In
mediæval Europe almost all land was held from the sovereign on tenure of
service, either military or agricultural; and in Great Britain even now, when
the services as well as all the reserved rights of the sovereign have long
since fallen into disuse or been commuted for taxation, the theory of the law
does not acknowledge an absolute right of property in land in any individual;
the fullest landed proprietor known to the law, the freeholder, is but a “tenant”
of the crown. In Russia, even when the cultivators of the soil were serfs of
the landed proprietor, his proprietary right in the land was limited by right
of theirs belonging to them as a collective body, managing its own affairs, and
with which he could not interfere. And in most of the countries of continental
Europe, when serfage was abolished or went out of use, those who had cultivated
the land as serfs remained in possession of rights as well as subject to
obligations. The great land reforms of Stein and his successors in Prussia
consisted in abolishing both the rights and the obligations, and dividing the
land bodily between the proprietor and the peasant, instead of leaving each of
them with a limited right over the whole. In other cases, as in Tuscany, the
metayer farmer is virtually co-proprietor with the landlord, since custom,
though not law, guarantees to him a permanent possession and half the gross
produce, so long as he fulfills the customary conditions of his tenure. Again,
if rights of property over the same things are of different extent in different
countries, so also are they exercised over different things. In all countries
at a former time, and in some countries still, the right of property extended
and extends to the ownership of human beings. There has often been property in
public trusts, as in judicial offices and a vast multitude of others in France
before the Revolution; there are still a few patent offices in Great Britain,
though I believe they will cease by operation of law on the death of the
present holders; and we are only now abolishing property in army rank. Public
bodies, constituted and endowed for public purposes, still claim the same
inviolable right of property in their estates which individuals have in theirs,
and though a sound political morality does not acknowledge this claim, the law
supports it. We thus see that the right of property is differently interpreted,
and held to be of different extent, in different times and places; that the
conception entertained of it is a varying conception, has been frequently
revised, and may admit of still further revision. It is also to be noticed that
the revisions which it has hitherto undergone in the progress of society have
generally been improvements. When, therefore, it is maintained, rightly or
wrongly, that some change or modification in the powers exercised over things
by the persons legally recognised as their proprietors would be beneficial to
the public and conducive to the general improvement, it is no good answer to
this merely to say that the supposed change conflicts with the idea of
property. The idea of property is not some one thing identical throughout
history and incapable of alteration, but is variable like all other creations
of the human mind; at any given time it is a brief expression denoting the
rights over things conferred by the law or custom of some given society at that
time; but neither on this point nor on any other has the law and custom of a
given time and place a claim to be stereotyped forever. A proposed reform in
laws or customs is not necessarily objectionable because its adoption would
imply, not the adaptation of all human affairs to the existing idea of
property, but the adaptation of the existing ideas of property to the growth
and improvement of human affairs. This is said without prejudice to the
equitable claim of proprietors to be compensated by the state for such legal
rights of a proprietary nature as they may be dispossessed of for the public
advantage. That equitable claim, the grounds and the just limits of it, are a
subject by itself, and as such will be discussed hereafter. Under this
condition, however, society is fully entitled to abrogate or alter any
particular right of property which on sufficient consideration it judges to
stand in the way of the public good. And assuredly the terrible case which, as
we saw in a former chapter, Socialists are able to make out against the present
economic order of society, demands a full consideration of all means by which
the institution may have a chance of being made to work in a manner more
beneficial to that large portion of society which at present enjoys the least share
of its direct benefits.
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