Part 6 (1/2)

There are cases, no doubt, in which the practical talents necessary for realising an invention and the faculty of invention itself coexist in the same man; but the inventor, when this happens, is not an inventor only. He is not only a master of ideas; he is a master of things and men. Such a combination is, however, far from common. As a rule, if his inventions are to be of any use to the world, the inventor must ally himself with men of another type, and these are the very men whom the author of ”The Gospel for To-day” conceives of as simply monopolising and ”working for all they are worth” contrivances which would otherwise have been given to the world gratis. He does not see that, if men such as the steel kings and the oil kings did not work inventions for all they are worth, the inventions themselves would be practically worth nothing.

Let the reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much navete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and locomotive-engines, which the citizens of America would otherwise be able to take at will, like a bevy of school-children helping themselves from a heap of apples.

He imagines that inventions, as they form themselves in the head of the inventor, leap direct into use, without any intervening process; while the inventor himself is a being so superior to the world he works in, that the rapture of being allowed to work for it is the only reward he covets, that he has never dreamed of such selfish things as profits, and does not even know the meaning of a patent or a founder's share; and that the oil kings and the steel kings and all other able men, will save society by following in the footsteps of this chimera.

Such are the wild, childish, and disconnected ideas entertained by our clerical author of the world which he proposes to reform; and he is in this respect not peculiar. On the contrary he is a most favourable type of Christian socialists generally; and Christian socialists, in respect of their mental and moral equipment, are simply secular socialists of the more modern and educated type, with their ignorances and credulities accentuated, but not otherwise altered, by the solemnities of religious language, and a vague religious sentiment which achieves a facile intensity because it is never restrained by fact.

Socialists, in short, of all schools, are socialists because they are ignorant of, or fail to apprehend, certain facts or principles of nature and of human nature which are essential to the complicated process of modern productive industry; or it is perhaps a truer way of putting the case to say that they could not be socialists unless they were thus ignorant. In this they resemble the devisers of perpetual motions, or scientific and infallible systems for breaking the bank at a roulette-table. In so far as they are socialists--that is to say, in so far as they differ from other reformers--they are men aiming at something which is in its nature impracticable; and in order to represent it to themselves and others as practicable, they must necessarily ignore or fail to understand something which, in actual life, stands in the way of its being so. The perpetual-motionist believes that a perpetual motion is practicable, because he fails to see that out of no machine whatever is it possible to get more force than is put into it, and that one pound-weight will not wind up another. The system-monger sees that if a succession of similar stakes are placed on red or black, or any one of the thirty-six numbers, the bank always has zero in its favour; but by placing a number of stakes simultaneously in intricate combinations, or by graduating them according to results, he imagines that he can invert the situation, when all he can do is to disguise it. He often disguises it most effectually; but in the long run he does no more. Like a protuberance in an air cus.h.i.+on, which if pushed down in one place reappears in another, the original advantage of the bank infallibly ends in rea.s.serting itself. The system-monger fails to see this for one reason only--that, having disguised, he thinks that he has eliminated, a fundamental fact of the situation. Socialists, in so far as they are socialists, reason in the same way. Though most of them now recognise, like the author of ”The Gospel for To-day,” that the economic efficiencies of men are in the highest degree unequal, they propose out of an inequality of functions to produce an equality of conditions. The details of the changes by which they propose to effect this result, or the grounds on which they seek to represent this result as possible, vary like the details of the systems of ingenious gamblers.

But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact--or, rather, of one protean fact--by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it a.s.sumes, as they s.h.i.+ft their positions, any number of different aspects. This is the fact that out of unequal men it is absolutely impossible to construct a society of equals.

Two ill.u.s.trations, taken from the history of socialistic thought, will show how socialists hide this fact from themselves, first by a fallacy of one kind, then by a fallacy of another kind; and how, wherever it is located, it is the essential factor in their argument.

In their endeavour to prove the possibility of an equalisation, absolute or approximate, of economic conditions, Karl Marx and the earlier socialists started with two main doctrines. The one was a moral doctrine; the other was an economic. The moral doctrine was that, as a matter of eternal justice, every man has a right to the whole of what is produced by him. The economic doctrine was that, as a matter of fact, the only producers of wealth are the ma.s.s of manual labourers, and that, with certain unimportant exceptions, the economic values produced by all labourers are equal. Hence he argued that all wealth ought to go to the labourers, and that all labourers were ent.i.tled to approximately equal shares of it. The later socialists aim at reaching the same conclusion, and they start with two doctrines, a moral and an economic, likewise. Having arrived, however, at a truer theory of production--having recognised that labour is not the sole producer, and that some men produce incalculably more than others--they have, in order to support their demand for an equality of possession, been obliged to supplement their repudiation of the economic theory of their predecessors, by repudiating their theory of eternal justice also, and introducing another of a wholly opposite character. While Karl Marx contended that, in justice, production and possession were inseparable, the later socialists contend that there is no connection between them, and that it is perfectly easy to convert to this moral view every human being who is likely to suffer by its adoption. Thus the difference between the earlier and the later socialists is as follows: The earlier socialists started with a theory of justice which is in harmony with common-sense and the general instincts of mankind; and this theory was pressed into the service of socialism only by being a.s.sociated with a false theory of production. The later socialists start with a truer theory of production; and they reconcile this with their own practical programme, only by a.s.sociating it with a false moral psychology. In each case a fallacy is the basis of the socialistic conclusion; and without a fallacy somewhere--a fallacy which is pushed about, like a mouse under a table-cloth--no socialistic conclusion even tends to develop itself from the premises.

And what is true of the main arguments of the later, as of the earlier socialists, is equally true of their subsidiary arguments also, from those which refer to the generalisations of the sociologists of the nineteenth century, and base themselves on the confusion between speculative truth and practical, down to those which are drawn from the absurd psychological supposition that all motives are interchangeable, and that those which actuate the artist, the anchorite, and the soldier can be made to replace by means of a vote or a sermon those which at present actuate the masters of industrial enterprise. On whatever argumentative point the socialists, as socialists, lay stress, there, under one form or another, their root-fallacy reappears. In short, their arguments are illusionary in proportion as they themselves value them.

And in this there is nothing wonderful. The more logically and ingeniously men reason from premises, of which the one most essential to their conclusions is radically false to fact, the more punctually on every critical occasion is this fallacy bound to rea.s.sert itself as the logical basis of that which they desire to prove.

The question, however, still remains to be answered of why a large body of men, like the educated apostles of socialism, who exhibit as a cla.s.s no typical inferiority of intellect, unite in accepting, as though drawn to it by some chemical affinity, one particular error which dispa.s.sionate common-sense disdains, and which the actual history of the whole human race refutes? In the case of some preachers of socialism the answer lies on the surface. Socialism is of all creeds that which it is easiest to present to the ignorant; and in these days, like ”patriotism”

in the days of Dr. Johnson, it is often ”the last refuge of a scoundrel,” or of a desperate and ambitious fool. But I here put such cases altogether aside. What I here have in view are men who are morally and intellectually honest, and many of whom, indeed, are intellectually above the average. How is the affinity for one common error, and the pa.s.sionate promulgation of it in forms, many of which are conflicting, to be accounted for in the case of men like these?

The answer to this is to be found, not in their intellect, but in their temperament. It is a well-known fact that men, otherwise of high capacity, are incapable of mastering any but the humblest branches of mathematics. With the men who become socialists the case is closely similar. Just as certain men are incapable of dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, so are the socialists men who, in virtue of their const.i.tutions or temperaments, are incapable of comprehending accurately the concrete facts of life, and are consequently as unable with any practical accuracy, to reason about them as a professor of mathematics would be to reason about the value of strawberries, if he knew only their weights or numbers, but had no expert judgment with regard to their condition or quality.

To ascertain how the socialistic temperament thus debilitates the faculties, it will be enough to note certain characteristics distinctive of those possessing it. Such persons are all distinguished, though naturally in various degrees, by an undue preponderance of the emotional over the critical faculties, whence there arises in them what, to borrow a phrase of President Roosevelt's, we may aptly call an _inflammation_ of the social sympathies. This makes such persons magnify into intolerable wrongs all sorts of pains and inconveniences which most men accept as part of the ”rough and tumble” of life; and it thus renders them abnormally impatient of the actual, and abnormally preoccupied with the ideal. The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention. Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that cla.s.s from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details. They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flus.h.i.+ng the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace. From a study of Turner's picture of ”Rain, Steam, and Speed,”

it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed. It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved. It is similarly impossible for men of the socialistic temperament to understand the general process of industry, or to judge how it can and how it can not be altered, from the purely spectacular impressions which its intricate parts produce on them.

But the ingrained inability of such men to understand that which they would revolutionise does not reveal itself in their errors of theory only. It reveals itself still more strikingly in their own relations to life. If we allow for exceptional cases, such as that of Robert Owen, who was in his earlier days a competent man of business, we shall find that the theorists who desire to socialise wealth are generically deficient in the higher energies that produce it. Though they doubtless could, like most men who are not cripples or idiots, make a living by some form of manual labour, they have none of them done anything to enlarge the powers of industry, or even to sustain them at their present pitch of efficiency. They have never made two blades of gra.s.s grow where one blade grew before. They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals. They have never organised the systems or improved the s.h.i.+ps and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving. If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody. They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large. They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them.

At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two cla.s.ses, _those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it_. Here we have the conclusion of the whole matter. These two cla.s.ses are contrasted, not because in mere intellect one is inferior to the other, but because when they are dealing with the industrial affairs of life these affairs appeal to them in two contrasted ways. One of these cla.s.ses takes men and nature as they are.

With the utmost minuteness it masters the secrets of the latter, with the utmost minuteness it directs the actions of the former; and in seeking wealth for itself it brings about those conditions which alone can make added wealth a practical possibility for all. The other cla.s.s, occupied not with what is but what ought to be, fails to understand what can be, because it does not understand what is. The men of whom this cla.s.s is composed--the men whose temperamental deficiency now finds its fullest expression in socialism, as it did formerly in theories of ultra-democratic individualism, are like amateur architects, and amateur sanitary engineers, who, thinking in pictures, and having no knowledge of structure, condemn existing houses and existing systems of drainage, and would replace them with palaces which no builder could build, with arches which would collapse from the weight of their own materials, and magnificent cloacae the waters in which would have to run uphill.

The theory, then, of socialism, let it take what form it will--the theory which represents as practicable by one device or another the social equalisation of economically unequal men--is a theory which, in minds which are intellectually honest, can develop itself only in proportion as these minds are incapable of grasping in their connected completeness the actual facts of life; and that such is the case has been ill.u.s.trated in the preceding chapters by a systematic a.n.a.lysis of all the crucial arguments on which socialists have rested their case from the earliest day of socialistic thought to the latest.

The reader, however, must observe the manner in which this statement is qualified. In speaking of the arguments of the socialists, I speak of those that are crucial only--that is to say, of those arguments used by socialistic thinkers in support of their programme in so far as that programme is peculiar. It is necessary to note this because, as a matter of fact, with such of their arguments as are proper to socialism only, the philosophers of socialism and their disciples frequently a.s.sociate others which are not peculiar to the socialistic scheme at all, but which nevertheless mult.i.tudes of men who call themselves socialists regard as being at once the most important and practicable parts of it; and these I have in consequence reserved for separate treatment. They are three in number, and are as follows:

The first relates to the remuneration of the ordinary manual labourer, and deals with the question of what his just remuneration is. According to Marx this question is easily settled. Of every thousand labourers a.s.sociated in any given industry, each produces, with few and unimportant exceptions, a thousandth part of the whole exchangeable product; and his just remuneration is a thousandth part of the value of it. The intellectual socialists of to-day, while repudiating as we have seen the doctrine that the labourer's claim to remuneration is limited to the values produced by him, and contending that he has a further right to the product of the ability of others, constantly declare that, even according to the moral standard of Marx, he is usually defrauded at present of a large part of his due; or that, in most if not all industries, his wages represent but a part of the full value produced by him. Whether this is so or not is a question not of theory but of fact, and one which can only be answered by discovering some intelligible basis on which the values produced by labour in a general way may be estimated, as distinct from those produced by effort of other kinds.

With this question I shall deal in the following chapter.

The second relates to those forms of individual income which are covered by the word interest, when used in a comprehensive sense. It being admitted by the later socialists, in opposition to the earlier, that the directive ability of the few is, in the modern world, a productive agency no less truly than labour is, many of these socialists are now anxious to concede that the man of ability is ent.i.tled to such values, no matter how large, as are due to the active exercise of his own exceptional powers; but they contend that, as soon as his personal activity ceases, his claim to any influx of further wealth should therewith cease also. Let him spend his acc.u.mulations, they say, on his own gratifications as he will; but neither he nor his descendants can be suffered in moral justice to hold or apply them in such a manner that they will renew themselves, and yield an income to recipients who do nothing to make them fructify. To numbers of people who repudiate most of the socialistic programme, this doctrine as to interest appeals as at once just and practicable. If the state could appropriate all incomes due to interest, as distinct from those which represent the product of active ability, an enormous fund would, they think, be available for general distribution, and the ideals of socialism, in so far as they are practicable or desirable, might thus be realised by other than socialistic means. This argument, likewise, will have its own chapter--or rather two chapters--allotted to it.

The third of these arguments or proposals which, though not in themselves socialistic, are popularly a.s.sociated with socialism, relates to equality of opportunity. To this also I will devote a separate chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] While these pages were being corrected for the press, a number of utterances have been made by English clerics--Episcopalian and Nonconformist--precisely similar in purpose and spirit to those of the author here quoted.

CHAPTER XII

THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS