Part 13 (1/2)
”Turn your attention to that series of teachings of Christ's which we call parables--comparisons, that is to say, between what Christ saw going on in the every-day world around Him and the Kingdom of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or merely a state in which people will be after death, then I challenge you to get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be established upon earth, then they all have a plain and beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of G.o.d and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words, 'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the birds.'”
And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this a.s.sertion that the ”Kingdom of Heaven” was and is a terrestrial ideal.
This is not simply the Christian ideal of society, it is the ideal of every right-thinking man, of every man with a full sense of beauty.
You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful Utopias of our own time, both, I glory to write, by Englishmen, the _News from Nowhere_ of William Morris, and Hudson's exquisite _Crystal Age_. Both these present practically Anarchist States, both a.s.sume idealized human beings, beings finer, simpler, n.o.bler than the heated, limited and striving poor souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of this present life. And the present writer, too--I must mention him here to guard against a confusion in the future--when a little while ago he imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually by the brush of a comet's tail,[20] was forced by the logic of his premises and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the world.
[20] _In the Days of the Comet._ (Macmillan & Co., 1906.) Anti-Socialist speakers and writers are in the habit of quoting pa.s.sages of a review from the _Times Literary Supplement_, published during the heat of the ”Book War,”
and promptly controverted, as though they were quotations from this book.
But the business of Socialism lies at a lower level and concerns immediate things; our material is the world as it is, full of unjust laws, bad traditions, bad habits, inherited diseases and weaknesses, germs and poisons, filths and envies. We are not dealing with magnificent creatures such as one sees in ideal paintings and splendid sculpture, so beautiful they may face the world naked and unashamed; we are dealing with hot-eared, ill-kempt people, who are liable to indigestion, baldness, corpulence and fluctuating tempers; who wear top-hats and bowler hats or hats kept on by hat-pins (and so with all the other necessary clothing); who are pitiful and weak and vain and touchy almost beyond measure, and very naughty and intemperate; who have, alas! to be bound over to be in any degree faithful and just to one another. To strip such people suddenly of law and restraint would be as dreadful and ugly as stripping the clothes from their poor bodies....
That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe--well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ”who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,” but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the school-room of true and n.o.ble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.
There is a graceful and all too little known fable by Mr. Max Beerbohm, _The Happy Hypocrite_, which gives, I think, not only the relation of Socialism to philosophic Anarchism, but of all discipline to all idealism. It is the story of a beautiful mask that was worn by a man in love, until he tired even of that much of deceit and, a little desperately, threw it aside--to find his own face beneath changed to the likeness of the self he had desired. So would we veil the greed, the suspicion of the self-seeking scramble of to-day under inst.i.tutions and laws that will cry ”duty and service” in the ears and eyes of all mankind, keep down the evil so long and so effectually that at last law will be habit, and greed and self-seeking cease for ever, from being the ruling impulse of the world. Socialism is the mask that will mould the world to that better Anarchism of good men's dreams....
But these are long views, glimpses beyond the Socialist horizon. The people who would set up Anarchism to-day are people without human experience or any tempering of humour, only one shade less impossible than the odd one-sided queer beings one meets, ridiculously inaccessible to laughter, who, caricaturing their Nietzsche and misunderstanding their Shaw, invite one to set up consciously with them in the business of being Overmen, to rule a world full of our betters, by fraud and force. It is a foolish teaching saved only from being horrible by being utterly ludicrous. For us the best is faith and humility, truth and service, our utmost glory is to have seen the vision and to have failed--not altogether.... For ourselves and such as we are, let us not ”deal in pride,” let us be glad to learn a little of this spirit of service, to achieve a little humility, to give ourselves to the making of Socialism and the civilized State without presumption--as children who are glad they may help in a work greater than themselves and the toys that have heretofore engaged them.
CHAPTER XII
ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
-- 1.
Marx gave to Socialism a theory of world-wide social development, and rescued it altogether from the eccentric and localized a.s.sociations of its earliest phases; he brought it so near to reality that it could appear as a force in politics, embodied first as the International a.s.sociation of Working Men, and then as the Social Democratic movement of the continent of Europe that commands to-day over a third of the entire poll of German voters. So much Marx did for Socialism. But if he broadened its application to the world, he narrowed its range to only the economic aspect of life. He arrested for a time the discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness, while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had any real knowledge of administration.
It was left chiefly to the little group of English people who founded the Fabian Society to supply a third system of ideas to the amplifying conception of Socialism, to convert Revolutionary Socialism into Administrative Socialism.
This new development was essentially the outcome of the reaction of its broad suggestions of economic reconstruction upon the circle of thought of one or two young officials of genius, and of one or two persons upon the fringe of that politic-social stratum of Society, the English ”governing cla.s.s.” I make this statement, I may say, in the loosest possible spirit. The reaction is one that was not confined to England, it was to some extent inevitable wherever the new movement in thought became accessible to intelligent administrators and officials.
But in the peculiar atmosphere of British public life, with its remarkable blend of individual initiative and a lively sense of the State, this reaction has had the freest development. There was, indeed, Fabianism before the Fabian Society; it would be ingrat.i.tude to some of the most fruitful social work of the middle Victorian period to ignore the way in which it has contributed in suggestion and justification to the Socialist synthesis. The city of Birmingham, for example, developed the most extensive process of munic.i.p.alization as the mere common-sense of local patriotism. But the movement was without formulae and correlation until the Fabians came.
That unorganized, unpaid public service of public-spirited aristocratic and wealthy financial and business people, the ”governing cla.s.s,” which dominated the British Empire throughout the nineteenth century, has, through the absence of definite cla.s.s boundaries in England and the readiness of each cla.s.s to take its tone from the cla.s.s above, that ”Sn.o.bbishness” which is so often heedlessly dismissed as altogether evil, given a unique quality to British thought upon public questions and to British conceptions of Socialism.
It has made the British mind as a whole ”administrative.” As compared with the American mind, for example, the British is State-conscious, the American State-blind. The American is no doubt intensely patriotic, but the nation and the State to which his patriotism points is something overhead and comprehensive like the sky, like a flag hoisted; something, indeed, that not only does not but must not interfere with his ordinary business occupations. To have public spirit, to be aware of the State as a whole and to have an administrative feeling towards it, is necessarily to be accessible to constructive ideas--that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the history of thought in Victorian Great Britain, one sees a constant conflict of this administrative disposition with the individualistic commercialism of the aggressively trading and manufacturing cla.s.s, the cla.s.s that in America reigns unchallenged to this day. In the latter country Individualism reigns unchallenged, it is a.s.sumed; in the former it has fought an uphill fight against the traditions of Church and State and has never absolutely prevailed. The political economists and Herbert Spencer were its prophets, and they never at any time held the public mind in any invincible grip. Since the eighties that grip has weakened more and more. Socialistic thought and legislation, therefore, was going on in Great Britain through all the Victorian period. Nevertheless, it was the Fabian Society that, in the eighties and through the intellectual impetus of at most four or five personalities, really brought this obstinately administrative spirit in British affairs into relation with Socialism as such.
The dominant intelligence of this group was Mr. Sidney Webb, and as I think of him thus coming after Marx to develop the third phase of Socialism, I am struck by the contrast with the big-bearded Socialist leaders of the earlier school and this small, active, unpretending figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the gla.s.ses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice. He emerged as a Colonial Office clerk of conspicuous energy and capacity, and he was already the leader and ”idea factory” of the Fabian Society when he married Miss Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a Conservative Member of Parliament, a girl friend of Herbert Spencer, and already a brilliant student of sociological questions. Both he and she are devotees to social service, living laborious, ordered, austere, incessant lives, making the employment of secretaries their one extravagance, and alternations between research and affairs their change of occupation.
A new type of personality altogether they were in the Socialist movement, which had hitherto been richer in eloquence than discipline.
And during the past twenty years of the work of the Fabian Society through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. a.s.suming the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that statement of intention for granted, _how is the thing to be done_?
They put aside the glib a.s.surances of the revolutionary Socialists that everything would be all right when the People came to their own; and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of chest notes and red flags. They insisted that the administrative and economic methods of the future must be a secular development of existing inst.i.tutions, and inaugurated a process of study--which has long pa.s.sed beyond the range of the Fabian Society, broadening out with the organized work of the New University of London, with its special School of Economics and Political Science and of a growing volume of university study in England and America--to the end that this ”_how?_” should be answered....
The broad lines of the process of transition from the present state of affairs to the Socialist state of the future as they are developed by administrative Socialism lie along the following lines.
1. The peaceful and systematic taking over from private enterprise, by purchase or otherwise, whether by the national or by the munic.i.p.al authorities as may be most convenient, of the great common services of land control, mining, transit, food supply, the drink trade, lighting, force supply and the like.
2. Systematic expropriation of private owners by death-duties and increased taxation.
3. The building up of a great scientifically organized administrative machinery to carry on these enlarging public functions.