Part 15 (1/2)
[9] Roscher's ”Finanz-Wissenschaft,” p. 63.
[10] For proof of the position that the rate of wages is determined by the amount of production, see pp. 307-11.
CHAPTER XII.
THE AGRARIAN SOCIALISM OF HENRY GEORGE.
Mr. George sent his ”Progress and Poverty” into the world with the remarkable prediction that it would find not only readers but apostles.
”Whatever be its fate,” he says, ”it will be read by some who in their heart of hearts have taken the cross of a new crusade.... The truth I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends--those who will toil for it, suffer for it: if need be, die for it. This is the power of the truth” (p. 393). Mr. George's prediction is not more remarkable than its fulfilment. His work has had an unusually extensive sale; a hundred editions in America, and an edition of 60,000 copies in this country are sufficient evidences of that; but the most striking feature in its reception is precisely that which its author foretold; it created an army of apostles, and was enthusiastically circulated, like the testament of a new dispensation. Societies were formed, journals were devised to propagate its saving doctrines, and little companies of the faithful held stated meetings for its reading and exposition. It was carried as a message of consolation to the homes of labour. The author was hailed as a new and better Adam Smith, as at once a reformer of science and a renovator of society. Smith unfolded ”The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” but to Mr. George, we were told, was reserved the greater part of unravelling ”the nature and causes of the poverty of nations,” and if the obsolete science of wealth had served to make England rich, the young science of poverty was at length to make her people happy with the money. Justice and Liberty were to begin their reign, and our eyes were to see--to quote Mr. George's own words--”the City of G.o.d on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl”
(p. 392).
The fervour of this first reception may--as was perhaps only natural--have suffered some abatement since, but it affords a striking proof how largely modern society is disquieted by the results of our vaunted industrial civilization. Even those amongst us who are most unwilling to disparage the improvement that has really taken place during the last hundred years in the circ.u.mstances of the people, still cannot help feeling that the improvement has fallen far short of what might have been reasonably expected from the contemporaneous growth of resources and productive power. But numbers of people will not allow that any improvement has occurred at all, and deliver themselves to an unhappy and unwarranted pessimism on the whole subject. Because industrial progress has not extinguished poverty, they conclude that it has not even lessened it; that it has no power to lessen it; nay, that its real tendency is to aggravate it, that it increases wealth with the one hand, but increases want with the other, so that civilization has developed into a purely upper-cla.s.s feast, where the rich are grossly overfilled with good things, and the poor are sent always emptier and emptier away. Invention, they tell us, has followed invention; machinery has multiplied the labourer's productivity at least tenfold; new colonies have been founded, new markets and channels of commerce opened in every quarter of the globe; gold-fields have been discovered, free trade has been introduced, railways and ocean steamers have shortened time and s.p.a.ce themselves in our service. Each and all of these things have excited hopes of introducing an era of popular improvement, and each and all of them have left these hopes unfulfilled. They think, therefore, they now do well to despair, and they fortify themselves in their gloom by citing the opinion of Mr. Mill, that ”it is questionable whether all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being,” without observing that Mr. Mill immediately follows up that opinion by expressing the confident a.s.surance that it was ”in the nature and the futurity” of these inventions to effect that improvement. These gloomy views have in France received the name of _Sisyphism_, because they represent the working cla.s.s under the present industrial system as being struck with a curse like that of Sisyphus, always encouraged by fresh technical advantages to renewed expectations, and always doomed to see their expectations perish for ever.
Now, it was upon these despondent and burdened souls that Mr. George counted so confidently, and, as time has shown, so correctly, for his apostles and martyrs; and he counted so confidently upon them because he had himself borne their sorrows, and drunk of their despair, and because he now believed most entirely that his discoveries would bring ”inexpressible cheer” to their minds, as, in the same circ.u.mstances, they had already brought inexpressible cheer to his own. ”When I first realized,” he says, ”the squalid misery of a great city”--that is, of the latest and most characteristic product of industrial development--”it appalled and tormented me, and would not let me rest for thinking of what caused it and how it could be cured” (p. 395).
Poverty seemed to him to be most abounding and most intense in precisely the most advanced countries in the world. ”Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized--that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed--we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness” (p. 4). Nay, poverty, he thought, seemed ”to take a darker aspect” in every community at the very moment when it might be reasonably expected to brighten--at the moment when the community made a distinct advance in material civilization, when ”closer settlements and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world and greater utilization of labour-saving machinery make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth increases in consequence, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population” (p. 4). This process of impoverishment might, he says, escape observation in an old country, because such a country has generally contained from time immemorial a completely impoverished cla.s.s, who could not be further impoverished without going out of existence altogether, but in a new settlement like California, where he resided, poverty might be seen almost in the act of being produced by progress before one's very eyes.
While the colony had nothing better than log cabins or cloth shanties, ”there was no dest.i.tution,” though there might be no luxury. But ”the tramp comes with the locomotive, and alm-houses and prisons are as surely the marks of 'material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches” (p. 4). ”In the United States it is clear that squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them everywhere, increase as the village grows to the city, and the march of development brings the advantages of improved methods of production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the Union that pauperism and distress are becoming most painfully apparent.
If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, it is not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children in her streets?” (p. 6). The prospect alarmed and agitated him profoundly. It deprived him, as it has deprived so many of the continental socialists, of all religious belief, for if the real order of things make an ever-deepening poverty to be the only destiny of the ma.s.s of mankind, it seemed vain to dream of a controlling Providence or an immortal life. ”It is difficult,” says he, ”to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation, which are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind, result from His enactments; while the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life, not the individual life, which is the object of human existence. Thus has vanished with many of us, and is still vanis.h.i.+ng with more of us, that belief which in the battles and ills of life affords the strongest support and deepest consolation” (p. 396).
The inquiry Mr. George undertook was consequently one of the most vital personal concern to himself, and we are glad to think that it has been the means of restoring to him the faith and hope he prizes so much. ”Out of this inquiry,” he tells us, ”has come to me something I did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives” (p. 395).
It may be ungracious to disturb a peace won so sorely and offered so sincerely to others, but the truth is, Mr. George has simply lost his faith by one illusion and recovered it again by another. He first tormented his brain with imaginary facts, and has then restored it with erroneous theories. His argument is really little better than a prolonged and, we will own, athletic beating of the air; but since both the imaginary facts and the erroneous theories of which it is composed have obtained considerable vogue, it is well to subject it to a critical examination. I shall therefore take up successively, first, his problem; second, his scientific explanation; and third, his practical remedy.
I. _Mr. George's Problem._
He states his problem thus:--”I propose to seek the law which a.s.sociates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth” (p. 8).
The first rule of scientific investigation is to prove one's fact before proceeding to explain it. ”There are more false facts than false theories in the world,” and a short examination whether a phenomenon actually exists may often relieve us from a long search after its law.
Mr. George, however, does not observe this rule. He seeks for the law of a phenomenon without first verifying the phenomenon itself--nay, apparently without so much as suspecting that it ought to be verified.
He a.s.sumes a particular view of the social situation to be correct, because he a.s.sumes it. But his a.s.sumption is a purely subjective and, as will presently be shown, delusive impression. We imagine our train to be going back when a parallel train is going faster forward, and we are apt to take the general condition of mankind to be retrograding when we fix our eyes exclusively on the rapid and remarkable enrichment of the fortunate few. What Mr. George calls ”the great enigma of our time” is just the enigma of the apparently receding train, and he proceeds to solve it by coiling himself in a corner and working out an elaborate explanation from his own inner consciousness ”by the methods of political economy,” instead of taking the simple and obvious precaution of looking out of the opposite carriage-window and testing, by hard facts, whether his impression was correct. Had he taken this precaution, had he resorted to an examination of the actual state of the facts, he would have found good reason to change his impression; he would have found that on the whole poverty is not increasing, that in proportion to population it is considerably less in the more advanced industrial countries than in the less advanced ones, and that he had simply mistaken unequal rates of progress for simultaneous movements of progress and decline. His impression, it must be admitted, is a prejudice of considerable currency; there are many who tell us, as he does, that want is growing _pari pa.s.su_ with wealth, and even gaining on it; that if the rich are getting richer, the poor are at the same time getting poorer; but it is a question of fact, and yet no one has ever seriously tried to prove the a.s.sertion by an appeal to fact. That Mr.
George should have neglected to submit it to such a test is the more remarkable, because he was, as he has told us, ”tormented” in mind by it, and because he acknowledges that it is a ”paradox”--_i.e._, against the reason of the case, and that it is also, to some extent at least, against appearances. He owns, for example, that ”the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised,” and that though the lowest cla.s.s may not share in these gains, yet even they have in some ways improved. ”I do not mean,” he says, ”that the condition of the lowest cla.s.s has nowhere nor in anything been improved, but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in no wise to improve the condition of the lowest cla.s.s in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is to still further depress the condition of the lowest cla.s.s. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society.
Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down” (p. 5). From this pa.s.sage it would appear that, according to Mr. George, the condition of all except the lowest cla.s.s has improved _in consequence of_ material progress, and that the condition of the lowest cla.s.s has improved _in spite of_ it. He does not undertake, it seems, to affirm of any cla.s.s that it has, as a matter of actual fact, become impoverished in the course of social development, but only that there is a tendency in the increase of productive power--in ”the new productive forces”--in ”material progress”--to impoverish the lower strata of society. But then he contends that these forces are practising exactly the same tendency on some of the highest strata, on cla.s.ses that we know have been growing richer and richer every day. For he tells us that these new forces, entering our social system like a wedge, depress all who happen to be on the wrong side; and we shall presently discover that this unhappy company on the wrong side of the wedge embraces many groups of persons who will be excessively astonished to learn that they are there. It includes, not only the poor labourers who live on wages, but the great capitalists who live on profits; the great cotton spinners, ironmasters, brewers, bankers, contractors; the very men, in short, of all the world, whom the new productive forces have most conspicuously and enormously enriched. I shall revert to this preposterous conclusion later on, but at present it is enough to say that a tide, which so many have swum against and swum to fortune, cannot be very formidable, and at all events can furnish no clue whatever to the possible condition of those who are exposed to it.
For that we have only one resort. It is a plain question of fact--is poverty really increasing? Are the poor really getting poorer? And this can only be competently decided by the ordinary inductive evidence of facts. The data of this kind which we possess for settling the question may not be so exact as would be desirable, but there is no higher tribunal to which we can appeal. The question must be answered by them, or not answered at all.
Now any data we have all conduct to the conclusion that poverty is not increasing. If poverty were increasing with the increase of wealth, it would show itself either in an increase of pauperism, or in a decline in the general standard of living among the labouring cla.s.ses, or in a fall in the average duration of life, and these symptoms would be most acute in the countries that are most wealthy and progressive. Now, let us take England as a crucial case of a country in a very advanced stage of industrial development. Is English pauperism greater now than it was before the ”new productive forces” entered the country? Is the general standard of living among the labouring cla.s.ses lower? Is the average duration of life less? Are poverty and the various symptoms of poverty more acute in England than in more backward countries?
In a foot-note to the pa.s.sage last quoted from his book, Mr. George explains that the improvement he recognises in the lot of the lowest cla.s.s does not consist in greater ability to obtain the necessaries of life. Does he mean, because more things are now reckoned among the necessaries of life? If so, we fear there is no chance of that difficulty being removed, nor indeed is there any reason for desiring it to be so. Men's wants will always increase with their incomes, and the struggle to make both ends meet may in that case indefinitely continue.
But the fact remains that they have more wants satisfied than before, that they realize a higher standard of life, and that is the mark, and indeed the substance, of a more diffused comfort and civilization. It is true that as the general standard of living rises, people feel the pinch of poverty at a higher level than before, and become pauperized for the want of comforts that are now necessary, but which formerly few ever dreamt of possessing. To have no shoes is a mark of extreme indigence to-day; it was the common lot a century ago. People may be growing in general comfort, and yet their ability to obtain necessaries remain stationary, because their customary circle of necessaries may be always widening. The real sign of an advancing poverty is when the circle of recognised necessaries is getting narrow, and yet men have more difficulty in obtaining them than before; in other words, 1st, when the average scale of living falls; and 2nd, when a larger proportion of the people are unable to obtain it, reduced though it be. Now, in England, the contrary has happened; the general standard of living has risen, and the proportion of those who are unable to obtain it has declined.
In a preceding chapter I adduced evidence to show how greatly improved the working-cla.s.s standard of living now is from what it was two hundred years ago, in the good old times socialist writers like to sing of, when men had not yet sought out many inventions and the world was not oppressed by the large system of production. But let us tap the line between then and now at what point we may, and we find the same result; the tendency is always to a better style of living. Mr. Giffen, for example, in his address, as President of the Statistical Society, on 20th November, 1883, compares the condition of the working cla.s.ses to-day with their condition half a century since, and concludes from official returns that while the sovereign goes as far as it did then in the purchase of commodities, money wages have increased from 30 to 100 per cent., and, at the same time, the hours of labour have been reduced some 20 per cent. Except butcher-meat and house-rent, every other element of the working man's expenditure is cheaper, and butcher-meat was fifty years ago hardly an element of his expenditure at all, and the kind of house he then occupied was much inferior, as a rule, to what he occupies now, bad as the latter may in many cases be.
But while the general standard of comfort has been rising, the proportion of the population who are unable to obtain it has been diminis.h.i.+ng. I have already stated that King estimated the number of persons in receipt of relief in England and Wales in 1688 at 900,000.
Now in 1882 the average number in receipt of relief at one and the same time was, according to official returns, 803,719; and if we are right in doubling that figure to find the whole number of paupers relieved in the course of the year (that being the proportion borne in Scotland), then we may conclude that there are some 1,600,000 paupers in England and Wales at the present day. That is to say, with nearly five times the population, we have less than twice the pauperism. The result is far from being entirely gratifying; a million and a half of paupers (with more than half as many again in Ireland and Scotland) const.i.tute a very grave problem, or rather ganglion of problems; but the fact supplies a decisive enough refutation of the pessimist idea that the actual movement of pauperism has been one of increase instead of one of decrease.
During these two hundred years there is no period in which wealth and productive power multiplied more rapidly than the last thirty years, and, therefore, if Mr. George's ideas were correct, there is no period that should show such a marked increase of pauperism. What do we find?