Part 10 (1/2)

The essential fallacy is always to declare that either a thing is A or it is not A; either a thing is green or it is not green; either a thing is heavy or it is not heavy. Unthinking people, and some who ought to know better, fall into that trap. They dismiss from their minds the fact that there is a tinge of green in nearly every object in the world, and that there is no such thing as pure green, unless it be just one line or so in the long series of the spectrum; they forget that the lightest thing has weight and that the heaviest thing can be lifted. The rest of the process is simple and has no relation whatever to the realities of life. They agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of Socialism, permit the exponent to extract absurdities therefrom as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat, and retire with a conviction that on the whole it is well to have had this disturbing matter settled once for all.

[14] See ”Scepticism of the Instrument,” the Appendix to _A Modern Utopia_. (Chapman & Hall.)

For example, the Anti-Socialist declares that Socialism ”abolishes property.” He makes believe there is a hard absolute thing called ”property” which must either be or not be, which is now, and which will not be under Socialism. To any person with a philosophical education this is a ridiculous mental process, but it seems perfectly rational to an untrained mind--and that is the usual case with the Anti-Socialist. Having achieved this initial absurdity, he then asks in a tone of bitter protest whether a man may not sleep in his own bed, and is he to do nothing if he finds a coal-heaver already in possession when he retires? This is the method of Mr. G. R. Sims, that delightful writer, who from alt.i.tudes of exhaustive misunderstanding tells the working-man that under Socialism he will have--I forget his exact formula, but it is a sort of refrain--no money of his own, no home of his own, no wife of his own, no hair of his own! It is effective nonsense in its way--but nonsense nevertheless. In my preceding chapters I hope I have made it clear that ”property” even to-day is a very qualified and uncertain thing, a natural vague instinct capable of perversion and morbid exaggeration and needing control, and that Socialism seeks simply to give it a sharper, juster and rationally limited form in relation to the common-weal.

Or again, the opponent has it that Socialism ”abolishes the family”--and with it, of course, ”every sacred and tender a.s.sociation,” etc., etc. To that also I have given a chapter.

I do not think much Anti-Socialism is dishonest in these matters. The tricks of deliberate falsification, forgery and falsehood that discredit a few Conservative candidates and speakers in the north of England and smirch the reputations of one or two London papers, are due to a quite exceptional streak of baseness in what is on the whole a straightforward opposition to Socialism. Anti-Socialism, as its name implies, is no alternative doctrine; it is a mental resistance, not a mental force. For the most part one is dealing with sheer intellectual incapacity; with people, muddle-headed perhaps, but quite well-meaning, who are really unable to grasp the quant.i.tative element in things. They think with a simple flat cert.i.tude that if, for example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things ”straightforward” as they say--all or nothing. They think qualifications or any quant.i.tative treatment ”quibbling,” to be loudly scorned, bawled down and set aside.

In controversy the temptations for a hot and generous temperament, eager for victory, to misstate and overstate the antagonist's position are enormous, and the sensible Socialist must allow for them unless he is to find discussion intolerable. The reader of the preceding chapters should know exactly how Socialism stands to the family relations, the things it urges, the things it regards with impartiality or patient toleration, the things it leaves alone. The preceding chapters merely summarize a literature that has been accessible for years. Yet it is extraordinary how few antagonists of Socialism seem able even to approach these questions in a rational manner. One admirably typical critic of a pamphlet in which I propounded exactly the same opinions as are here set out in the third chapter, found great comfort in the expression ”brood mares.” He took hold of my phrase, ”State family,” and ran wild with it. He declared it to be my intention that women were no longer to be wives but ”brood mares” for the State. Nothing would convince him that this was a glaring untruth. His mind was essentially equestrian; ”human stud farm” was another of his expressions.[15] Ridicule and argument failed to touch him; I believe he would have gone to the stake to justify his faith that Socialists want to put woman in the Government _haras_. His thick-headedness had, indeed, a touch of the heroic.

[15] What makes the expression particularly inappropriate in my case is the fact that in my _Mankind in the Making_ there is a clearly-reasoned chapter (Ch. II.) which has never been answered, in which I discuss and, I think, conclusively dispose of Mr. Francis Galton's ideas of Eugenics and deliberate stirpiculture.

Then a certain Father Phelan of St. Louis, no doubt in a state of mental exaltation as honest as it was indiscriminating, told the world through the columns of an American magazine that I wanted to tear the babe from the mother's breast and thrust it into an ”Inst.i.tution.” He said worse things than that--but I set them aside as pulpit eloquence.

Some readers, no doubt, knew better and laughed, but many were quite sincerely shocked, and resolved after that to give Socialism a very wide berth indeed. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_; the revolting ideas that disgusted them were not mine, they came from some hot dark reservoir of evil thoughts that years of chast.i.ty and discipline seem to have left intact in Father Phelan's soul.

The error in all these cases is the error of overstatement, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because a critic declares your window curtains too blue, saying, therefore, and usually with pa.s.sion, that he wants the whole universe, sky and sea included, painted bright orange. The inquirer into the question of Socialism will find that an almost incurable disease of these controversies. Again and again he will meet with it. If after that critic's little proposition about your window curtains he chances to say that on the whole he thinks an orange sky would be unpleasant, the common practice is to accuse him of not ”sticking to his guns.”

My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism, confess this universal failing--albeit in a very different quality and measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the community being approved by a select committee of the County Council--no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their grooms--such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that equestrian--I forget his name--the ”brood-mare” gentleman who denounced me in the _Pall Mall Gazette_; but their souls fly out in a pa.s.sion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and pa.s.sionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent antic.i.p.ation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped, meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for laughing--not that he would want to laugh--and austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute, indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling....

The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to a.s.sume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with ”This is Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don't want this!”

And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to the good old grimy world he knows, thanking G.o.d beyond measure that he will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care are banished altogether from the earth, and when the ”sense of humour”

and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things will be in danger of peris.h.i.+ng from disuse....

But the reader sees now what Socialism is in its essentials, the tempered magnificence of the constructive scheme to which it asks him to devote his life. It is a laborious, immense project to make the world a world of social justice, of opportunity and full living, to abolish waste, to abolish the lavish unpremeditated cruelty of our present social order. Do not let the wit or perversity of the adversary or, what is often a far worse influence, the zeal and overstatement of the headlong advocate, do not let the manifest personal deficiencies of this spokesman or that, distract you from the living heart in Socialism, its broad generosity of conception, its immense claim in kins.h.i.+p and direction upon your Good Will.

-- 2.

For the convenience of those readers who are in the position of inquirers, I had designed at this point a section which was to contain a list of the chief objections to Socialism--other than mere misrepresentations--which are current now-a-days. I had meant at first to answer each one fully and gravely, to clear them all up exhaustively and finally before proceeding. But I find now upon jotting them down, that they are for the most part already antic.i.p.ated by the preceding chapters, and so I will note them here, very compactly indeed, and make but the briefest comment upon each.

There is first the a.s.sertion, which effectually bars a great number of people from further inquiry into Socialist teaching, that _Socialism is contrary to Christianity_. I would urge that this is the absolute inversion of the truth. Christianity involves, I am convinced, a practical Socialism if it is honestly carried out. This is not only my conviction, but the reader, if he is a Nonconformist, can find it set out at length by Dr. Clifford in a Fabian tract, _Socialism and the Teaching of Christ_; and, if a Churchman, by the Rev. Stewart Headlam in another, _Christian Socialism_. He will find a longer and fuller discussion of this question in the Rev. R. J. Campbell's _Christianity and Social Order_. In the list of members of such a Socialist Society as the Fabian Society will be found the names of clergy of the princ.i.p.al Christian denominations, excepting only the Roman Catholic Church. It is said, indeed, that a good Catholic of the Roman Communion cannot also be any sort of Socialist. Even this very general persuasion may not be correct. I believe the papal prohibition was originally aimed entirely at a specific form of Socialism, the Socialism of Marx, Engels and Bebel, which is, I must admit, unfortunately strongly anti-Christian in tone, as is the Socialism of the British Social Democratic Federation to this day. It is true that many leaders of the Socialist party have also been Secularists, and that they have mingled their theological prejudices with their political work. This is the case not only in Germany and America, but in Great Britain, where Mr. Robert Blatchford of the _Clarion_, for example, has also carried on a campaign against doctrinal Christianity. But this a.s.sociation of Secularism and Socialism is only the inevitable throwing together of two sets of ideas because they have this in common, that they run counter to generally received opinions; there is no other connection. Many prominent Secularists, like Charles Bradlaugh and Mr. J. M. Robertson, are as emphatically anti-Socialist as the Pope. Secularists and Socialists get thrown together and cla.s.sed together just as early Christians and criminals and rebels against the Emperor were no doubt thrown together in the Roman gaols. They had this much in common, that they were in conflict with what most people considered to be right. It is a confusion that needs constant explaining away. It is to me a most lamentable a.s.sociation of two entirely separate thought processes, one constructive socially and the other destructive intellectually, and I have already, in Chapter VI., -- 4, done my best to disavow it.

_Socialism is pure Materialism, it seeks only physical well-being_,--just as much as nursing lepers for pity and the love of G.o.d is pure materialism that seeks only physical well-being.

_Socialism advocates Free Love._ This objection I have also disposed of in Chapter VI., ---- 2 and 4.

_Socialism renders love impossible, and reduces humanity to the condition of a stud farm._ This, too, has been already dealt with; see Chapter III., ---- 2 and 5, and Chapter VI., ---- 2, 3, and 4. These two objections generally occur together in the same anti-Socialist speech or tract.

_Socialism would destroy parental responsibility._ This absurd perversion is altogether disposed of in Chapter VI., -- 3. It is a direct inversion of current Socialist teaching.

-- 3.

_Socialism would open the way to vast public corruption._ This is flatly opposed to the experience of America, where local administration has been as little Socialistic and as corrupt as anywhere in the world. Obviously in order that a public official should be bribed, there must be some wealthy person outside the system to bribe him and with an interest in bribing him. When you have a weak administration with feeble powers and resources and strong unscrupulous private corporations seeking to override the law and public welfare, the possibilities of bribing are at the highest point.

In a community given over to the pursuit of gain, powerful private enterprises will resort to corruption to get and protract franchises, to evade penalties, to postpone expropriation, and they will do it systematically and successfully. And even where there is partial public enterprise and a compet.i.tion among contractors, there will certainly be, at least, attempts at corruption to get contracts. But where the whole process is in public hands, where can the bribery creep in; who is going to find the money for the bribes, and why?

It is urged that in another direction there is likely to be a corruption of public life due to the organized voting of the _employes_ in this branch of the public service or that, seeking some advantage for their own service. This is Lord Avebury's bogey.[16]

Frankly, such voting by services is highly probable. The tramway men or the milk-service men may think they are getting too long hours or too low pay in comparison with the teachers or men on the ocean liners, and the thing may affect elections. That is only human nature, and the point to bear in mind is that this sort of thing goes on to-day, and goes on with a vigour out of all proportion to the mild possibilities of a Socialist _regime_. The landowners of Great Britain, for example, are organized in the most formidable manner against the general interests of the community, and constantly subordinate the interests of the common-weal to their conception of justice to their cla.s.s; the big railways are equally potent, and so are the legal profession and the brewers. But to-day these political interventions of great organized services athwart the path of statesmans.h.i.+p are sustained by enormous financial resources. The State _employes_ under Socialism will be in the position of employing one another and paying one another; the teacher, for example, will be educating the sons of the tramway men up to the requirements of the public paymaster, and travelling in the trams to and from his work; there will be close mutual observation and criticism, therefore, and a strong community of spirit, and that will put very definite limits indeed upon the possibly evil influence of cla.s.s and service interests in politics.

[16] _On Munic.i.p.al and National Trading_, by Lord Avebury.