THE LIBRARY OF THE NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924002669319 A MISSING SCIENCE LONDON : PRINTED BY SFOTTIS'.VOODB AND CO., NRW-STUBBT SQCABE AND PAKT,IA3IENT STREET SOCIAL EQUALITY A SHORT STUDY m a MISSING SCIENCE BT W. H. MALLOCK AtlTHOB OF 'IS LIPE WORTH LIVING?' LONDON mCIIARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET f ttWisIjcrs in ©rbiiiars tu ftt Pajtstg i\t (^mm 1882 CONTENTS. I. The Aim of Modern Democract ... 1 II. The Pehtcipues oe Modern Democracy . . 26 in. The Esbudo-Science op Modern Democracy 48 IV. The Missing Substitute 85 V. The Science of Human Character . .100 "VI. Human Character and the Desire for In- EaUALITY .... ... 138 Vn. The Human Character and the Desire for Weaith 160 Vlll. Inequality and Material Pkoorbss. . . 182 IX. Inequality and the Maintenance of Civilisation. 215 X. Inequality and Social Pkosress . . . 250 SOCIAL EQUALITY. CHAPTEK I. THE AIM OP MODERN DEMOCRACY. Let us suppose ourselves in the High Street of an Enghsh country town, watching the scene that on any afternoon it might present to us. Before one of the principal shops a large barouche is waiting, and the head of the esta- bUshment stands at the carriage door, and takes the ' esteemed orders ' of some magnate of the neiglibourhood. Meanwhile, along the pavement, move various well-known figures — a spectacled soUcitor in his black frock-coat ; knots of labourers, their jackets soiled with earth ; a grocer's wife, with a boa and cork- screw curls ; at the same time a farmer has rattled by in his dog-cart, followed slowly by B I THE AIM OP MODERN DEMOCRACT. the country rector's phaeton. The central group in the drama is the large barouche with its occupant. AU the passers-by turn to it for at least a moment, and acknowledge either by their looks or salutations the importance of the principle that is embodied in it. The solicitor squints at it ; the farmer touches his hat to it ; the rector waves his hand to it. Nor is this all : for between these minor characters there are looks or salutations also ; and they are each charged with a meaning either of respect or of condescension. The whole fotms a scene with which we are aU famihar ; every object and every incident can be imagined without an effort ; and few scenes, to many people, could seem more prosaic and common-place. Let us now introduce into it two further characters — an Enghsh Eadical and a Conti- nental Democrat ; and let us see the way in which it would strike them. Far from regard- ing it with acquiescent apathy, they would both declare that to their eyes it was full of injus- tice and abuses, and that all its details sug- THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 3 gested the need for change. And we will first hsten to the Eadical. He would find httle difficulty in telhng us what his change would begin with. He would fix on the barouche, and the county magnate sitting in it ; and his aim, he would say, was to make that sort of thing impossible. The park, the country house, and the game-preserve — above all, the terri- torial influence, and the constant deference paid to it — these are the evils which the aver- age Eadical would fix upon ; and he would say they formed an incubus that at present stifled society. Let the squire or the peer be impoverished, his footmen discharged, his house shut up, his barouche used as a hen- coop, his estate sold in allotments, and his park laid out in building-plots — with the changes implied in this the Eadical would be nearly satisfied. Next let us hsten to his companion — the more extreme and logical Democrat ; and we shall find that such a change would by no means satisfy him. It was a right beginning, he would say, but a beginning only. Having done with the park B 2 4 THE AIM OF MODBEN DEMOCKACY. and the country house, he would turn with even more severity to the large shop and its owner ; and just as the Eadical would abolish the aristocratic type of existence, so he would abohsh that of the middle-class capitahst. Landlord and rich shopkeeper, each, he would say, were robbers, Hving on the labour of the people. The present status of each must be equally done away with ; and the suburban villa is to be respected no more than the mansion. The Democrat, in a word, would overturn everything ; from aU persons of pro- perty he would abstract some of their posses - sions ; and what he left them, he would leave them on new conditions. It is indeed hard to imagine any existing arrangement of a house- hold, any existing style of furniture, any ex- isting habits, manners, modes of thought, or amusements, which would be left possible by such a change as he desiderates. Certainly all that hitherto has been connected with high breeding, or with personal culture, would at once be out of the question. The type of character that is born of leisure and study, of THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 5 freedom from common cares, of wide com- merce with men, of the possession of works of art, and of memories of many lands — for this the democrat would be able to find no place. He might promise us a substitute, of what kind it is doubtful ; but it would at any rate be very difierent from what he had taken away from us. So under his regime would be everything. We should almost feel that we were hving in a difierent planet. It is to some such change as this — a change not merely in forms of government, or in particular lines of pohcy, but in the distribu- tion of property, the relations between class and class, and the daily conditions of the private lives of each of us — that many men think the modern world is hurrying ; and there seems to loom before them some vast social catastrophe of a kind new to history. Nor is it possible to say that their views are without foundation. We are hving at a moment of fierce pohtical passions, and of social passions thinly disguised by pohtics, which on the surface connect themselves with 6 THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCEACT. many distinct questions, and do in their origin really depend on several. But let us study them where we will, in whatever country and whatever rank of life, and it is sufficiently plain that there is one idea behind all of them. It is an idea which, though it connects itself with national and constitutional movements, does this by the way only ; and it rather hides than expresses itself in the local disputes it animates. Its main concern is with a question which, though far more complex in fact, yet appears to be far more simple ; and which, partly in virtue of this appearance, appeals to the emotions with far greater directness. That question is the existing structure of society ; or, to speak with more precision, its chief structural feature. I refer to its inequalities ; partly to those of nominal rank and authority, but principally to those of private Hfe and circumstance. Above are the few who, without manual labour, command, at will, the manual labour of the many. Below are the many whose labour is thus commanded, and who never themselves taste any of the THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 7 choicer fruits of it. The consequence is that though in the scale of classes there may at no special point be any distinct break, yet life at one extreme and life at the other are practi- cally two wholly different things. Such is the arrangement with which we are aU at present familiar. , It is common to every civilised country, and is implied more or less in the daily hfe of all of us. It is precisely on this arrangement that modern thought is fixing itself; and for the first time in history it is being offered to our practical judgment as an arrangement that can, and consequently must, be altered. Before our own epoch, the professed party of progress aimed only at equahty in poHtical rights ; not at equality in the conditions of private hfe. The latter had no doubt been dreamed about by a few visionary philosophers ; but so little was it contemplated by the common sense of men, that, amidst the wildest excesses of the first French Revolution, ' landed and other property ' was declared ' to be for ever sacred.' That Ee volution attacked the power, but not the riches, of the aris- 8 THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. tocracy; and it aimed at protecting, not at abolishing, poverty. Since then, however, the professed party of progress has put a new end before it ; and though it still attacks power as it used to do, it does so with a further motive. Its real end now is social, not political, equaUty ; and by social equaHty it means a very distinct thing — an equality in material circumstances. Accordingly, just as formerly it connected progress with the destruction of privilege, so now it connects it with the re-distribution of property. This conception, amongst the special party I speak of, is every day becom- ing clearer ; and, in the opinion of many observers, the party is itself increasing. Its members are certainly very widely spread ; and though in different places their guise or disguise is different, we can stUl trace their teachings in nearly every civiHsed country. Sometimes this may be more, and sometimes less, qualified ; nor is its drift always equally obvious. But when we consider how indus- triously it is being propagated, how strong are the passions it appeals to, and how far it has THE AIM OF MODEKISr DEMOCRACY. 9 already roused them, we cannot but recognise that, our existing civilisation is, for bad or good, confronted by a very formidable enemy ; and that there is much to justify alike the hopes and the apprehensions which are at present dividing every nation in Europe, and which, unless we are much misinformed, are not unknown in America. This fact, though already familiar to so many people, may, when thus bluntly stated, possibly startle others. It will do so less if they see it in its true proportions. It is by no means meant that the hopes and apprehen- sions spoken of are as yet universally of a very violent kind. In many cases they are so shght as to be hardly feehngs at aU, but shadows of feehngs that really exist elsewhere : and again in others, where they certainly are violent, we can afford to smile at and to pass them by as fantastic. In other words, the existing struc- ture of society, though it is threatened, is not yet tottering ; and there is still ample time to avert or to prepare for the catastrophe. Thus grave as the situation is, we may view it with- 10 THE AIM OF MODBKIf DEMOCRACY, out excitement. It will suggest anticipations to us, which we shall not let it inspire. It will rouse our anxiety, but it will not disturb our judgment. We shall see that some social con- vulsion is not in the least impossible ; we shall see, on the contrary, that many things tend to produce it ; but we shall see^also that as yet it is not inevitable, and we shall yield equally little to panic and to a sense of security. K we are wise, what we shall do is this. Eecog- nising what, if a struggle reaUy happened, would, as matters now stand, be its one aim and object, we shall set ourselves betimes, in a true scientific spirit, to inquire carefully how far this object is attainable, or what would be the results of any great attempt to attain it — and this for a double reason. Could any positive conclusions on these points be arrived at, and forced on the world's atten- tion as verified truths of science, they would certainly leave their impress on the present course of aifairs, and it is quite possible that they might profoundly change it. In any case they would put us in the only right position. THE AIM OF MODEBN DEMOCRACY. 11 either to understand the movement of the present, or to provide for and face the future. Strange, however, as the fact may seem, the inquiry I speak of has never yet been at- tempted. The world is fast dividing itself into two hostile parties, the one denying and the other asserting certain social propositions. The propositions are distinct ; the assertions and the denials are vehement ; but if we ask for their scientific basis, both sides will be equally unable to answer us. Nothing wiU be forthcoming in the shape of connected reason- ing that would be for a moment recognised by any scientific thinker. I do not say that there might not be scattered arguments, each pos- sessing separately a true scientific character : such, indeed, may be found in the pages of many writers. But no writer as yet has ever dealt with them systematically. They are of little force, because they have not been enough insisted on ; and of little significance, because they have not been followed up or connected. Thus though opinions on the subject are growing daily more marked and positive, they 12 THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. are opinions only, they are not scientific knowledge ; nor can one set of them definitely dispel the other. They are thus both useless in any practical controversy. Each may sat- isfy the man who is not inclined to doubt it ; but it cannot compel the reluctant assent of any one to whose passions or interests it would be likely to prove hostile. The result is this, that men are as much in the dark in our day with regard to social problems as they were before Hume's day with regard to economic problems ; and for a precisely similar reason. The science as yet is missing by which alone they can be elucidated. It is as completely non-existent at the close of the nineteenth century, as political economy was at the beginning of the eighteenth. The Conservatives illustrate this fact far more clearly than the Democrats, though they are not in reality such complete examples of it. When they criticise, for instance, any scheme that seems to, tamper with property — and such essentially are the special schemes they contend against — they have practically THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 13 but one way of condemning it ; they call it a scheme of theft : and if they can justify this description of it, they seem to think that the last word has been said. And once no doubt they would have been perfectly right in think- ing so. Once theft was a word weighted with common odium ; and it discredited any pro- ject on which it could be fixed effectually. But this is precisely the point at which the great change has occurred. The Conserva- tives, as we have seen already, are now faced by a theory which places theft in a wholly different light ; arid if we give the word its ordinary and immemorial meaning, it, accord- ing to this theory, is not a sin, but a necessity. In other words, it is now maintained deliber- ately that the key to aU social progress is some re-distribiition of property, and some violation of rights that have been hitherto held sacred. Thus to call the democrats a set of thieves and confiscators, is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to repudiate ; and their opponents, if they think in this way to discredit them, are begging the very point 14 THE AIM OF MODEBIf DEMOCRACY. which it is their first business to prove. They must prove that property is a thing which should be respected, before they can secure a verdict against those who do not respect it. The whole situation is really contained in that. Property in our day is theoretically in a new position. It is the defendant now, not the plaintiff as formerly, and the jury consists of the minimis who have least obvious cause to be tender with it. This, no doubt, may seem a strange state of affairs, but the sooner we see it in its true hght the better. We must reahse once for all that the old conservative arguments are by this time wholly obsolete. The old traditions that were once thought sacred, the moral principles that were once thought absolute — we have to defend them, not to appeal to them ; or rather we have to see how far they are defensible. Thus it would be idle to show, in the event of any great con- fiscation, how unjustly the few would suffer. The only reply would be, ' So much the worse for the few ! ' If property is to be defended at all, it must be defended on wider grounds, and THE AIM OF MODERJf DBMOCEACT. 15 in a very much deeper way. It must be shown that an attack on it would not injure the few only, but that it would equally bring ruin on the many ; and this can be done only by an accurate and scientific demonstration of either or both of two distinct positions. One is, that however desirable it might be to equahse property, it would be impossible to do so for more than a single moment ; that the equahty of such a moment would be one of want, horror, and consternation, not of prosperity; and that the old inequalities would again arise out of it, only changed in having their harsher features exaggerated. The other is that, even supposing that permanent equahty were not thus unattain- able, but that it could be really established as a stable social condition, its estabhshment would be not to the interest of even the poorest classes: in other words, that the in- equahty now surrounding us is not an acciden- tal defect which we must minimise as far as possible ; but that it is, on the contrary, an efficient cause of civilisation — that it is the 16 THE AIM OF MODEEN DEMOCRACy. cause of plenty, but not the cause of want ; and that want would be increased, not cured, by its aboHtion. Such are the positions which the Con- servative party must prove, or at least one or other of them. Nothing less will be of the least avail. Should we find on examina- tion that we are unable to do this; should we find that property is capable of being equalised permanently, ahd that the majority would profit by its equahsation, then such of us as belong to the higher ranks of Hfe must conclude that, as a class, our days are already numbered. If we are philanthropists, we shall hail the coming change ; and if we are philosophers, we shall at least submit to it. Should our examination, on the other hand, lead us to an opposite conclusion, should we find that the above positions embody scientific truths, and that they can further be rigidly shown to do so — shown to do so by a syste- matic appeal to facts — we shall then have placed property in a new state of security ; its enemies will be reduced to the ranks of THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 17 either quacks or criminals ; the present fer- ment of opinion will subside gradually, and the friends of progress, though they will not rehnquish their efforts, wUl turn them in another direction. To produce, however, either of these results is possible in one way only — the way which I have just now indicated. The matter must be made the subject of its own special science ; and that science yet has to be created. I propose in the present volume to point out its limits, and the exact order of facts of which it will take cognisance. I propose, further, to review the most important of these last, and to state in outhne the .chief general conclusions which, by strict scientific reasoning, we shall be forced to arrive at from them. Here, however, I must anticipate three sets of objections. In the first place, it may be argued on behalf of the democratic 'party that such a science as that I have spoken of, so far from being unattempted, has been already long in C 18 THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCKACY. existence, and claims as its students a whole school of Continental speculators. Such men may be pointed to as Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Karl Marx ; and not only may it be said that they have made great scientific discoveries, but discoveries which have had a momentous practical influence. Indeed it may be said that I have just been admitting this. In the second place, it may be argued on behalf of the conservative party that the doc- trines of the above thinkers are answered and refuted by those of the orthodox economists, or the more recent speculations of sociolo- gists, such as Mr. Herbert Spencer; that the supposed missing science is merely pohtical economy, or sociology under another name, and that thus the field of discussion is already fuUy occupied. In the third place, supposing both these objections dismissed, there remains another, which may presently seem more forcible. It may be admitted that the truths which I propose to deal with scientifically have with- THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCEACY. 19 out doubt never been so dealt with ; but tliis, it may be argued, is for a very excellent reason. It may be argued that we know them suffi- ciently by the light of our common sense ; that we aU appeal to them as self-evident in our daily conduct and conversation, and that to set them forth with a show of scientific exac- titude would be nothing more than an empty intellectual ceremony. AU these objections I shall meet in their proper order. With regard to the doctri- naires of Continental democracy, in spite of the influence and seeming coherence of their systems, I shall show that in reahty they are not men of science at all ; that if here and there they have hit on a right conclusion, this has happened only by accident ; that they have had no glimpse of the true inductive method ; that they have merely reasoned from certain assumed first principles ; and that their main teachings have as little relation to fact as had the physical speculations of Thales, or the dreams of the medisBval alchemists. "With regard to pohtical economy, I shall c 2 20 THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. show that though it touches the science in question, it barely overlaps the borders of it ; and I shall show a similar, though not quite the same, thing with regard to sociology, and other alhed studies. Finally, I shall show that though certain of the facts I shall dwell upon are without doubt common-place, this by no means renders a further study of them superfluous. I shall remind the reader how the essence of scientific knowledge consists less in the discovery of facts that are alto- gether strange to us, than in the analysis and arrangement of facts that are at least par- tially familiar ; and I shall hope to convince him that, at least in the present case, com- mon sense is a less advance upon ignorance than scientific knowledge is upon common sense. The last two of these three positions will be explained in detail presently. But the first lies on the threshold of the whole inquiry, and must be dealt with thoroughly before we can proceed further. I have said that the modern social problem THE AIM OF MODEKN DEMOCRACY. 21 has never yet been studied scientifically ; but I have not said that it has not been studied at aU. On the contrary, although there is no true science of it, there is a voluminous body of doctrines which aspires to pass for such, and which has probably had a more marked effect upon action than has ever been had by any other speculations. These doctrines are sufficiently unmistakable ; and the first point I dwelt upon was their existence and their immense influence. They are those of the avowed leaders of the modern democratic movement ; and these men stand alone in two points. They are not alone only in at- tacking our social inequaUties ; but they are alone in even claiming to have studied them scientifically, or pronounced any reasoned opi- nion with regard to their origin, their justice, or their stabihty.^ Thus the present struggle, ^ Sociologists, as I shall show presently, utterly faU to see at ■what point the question ought to be grasped ; and the orthodox economists, as I shall show presently also, assume the point at issue and make hardly any eifort to discuss it. What the democratic doctrinaires contend is, not that the conclusions of the economists do not follow from their premisses, but that 22 THE AIM OP MODEKN DEMOCBACT. in SO far as it is other than physical, has, up to the present moment, been altogether one- sided. All that bears any semblance of organ- ised thought or system has belonged to the attacking party ; and, force excepted, it has been met by nothing but an obsolete dog- matism that cannot even explain itself. This would be true in the history of human action, even if it were not true, as it is, in the history of human thought. In other words, there might be a scientific hterature of con- servatism as voluminous as that of democracy, but it would not affect the argument. For it is a hterature, if it exists at all, of which the these premisses postulate a certain condition of society, which, though it imdoubtedly does exist at present, yet demands and is capable of alteration. Whilst the present condition lasts, they not only admit but insist that the theories of the econo- mists are rigidly sound and true. Their argument is that that condition can be altered, and a society produced in which they shall be true no longer. Thus, though in the event of any practical struggle the present race of economists might be personally in opposition to the Democrats, this would be for other reasons than those which their own science supplies them with. The theoretic tenets by which the two parties are dis- tinguished not only do not militate, but they do not even meet. What the economists assert the Democrats do not deny ; what the Democrats assert the economists have never adequately considered. THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 23 world knows nothing. It has had no effect on pubHc opinion. No class or party has ever mastered or been moved by its teachings ; and in the world of action, knowledge is non- existent that does not exert some practical influence. If we turn, on the other hand, to the speculative doctrines of democracy, we shall detect their operation in nearly every popular movement that has marked the pre- sent century. The Democrats, in rebelling against the estabhshed order of things, have always encouraged and justified themselves by an appeal to certain doctrines which they take to be scientific truths. The Conservatives, in repressing these rebelhons, have neither wanted theoretic encouragement nor cared about theoretic justification. They have had their convictions certainly, no less than their adversaries ; and these, to say the least of them, have been equally firm and honest; but they have rested on a different basis. They have been inherited, not acquired. They have been regarded as things so sacred and self-evident that it would be as idle to prove 24 THE AIM OF MODERN DBMOCEACY. their trutli as it would be wicked to question it ; and thus those who have not only ques- tioned but denied it have been treated less as mistaken men, than as lunatics or as dangerous criminals. They have been repressed or ne- glected, but they have never yet been refuted. It is largely to this treatment that their grow- ing power is due. From their being the only party that has professed scientifically to defend itself, a superstition has gone abroad that they are the only party capable of scientific defence ; and so widely is this superstition spreading itself, that many secretly yield to it who re- gard it with the utmost horror. Not only does it strengthen the Democrats, but it troubles the Conservatives ; and many of the latter entertain a dark misgiving that it represents, after all, the actual truth of things. This must be a famihar fact to every one who has watched modern opinion in the higher ranks of society. The remark, for instance, may often be heard now-a-days that it is only natural for the poorer classes to be Demo- crats ; and the reason given is that ' they THE AIM OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 25 have everything to gain by a change.' Per- haps more frequent still are the even plainer sayings, that ' Things by this time have passed beyond our control;' and that '■there is no- thing left for us but to wait till the crash comes.' The significance of this helpless, despondency is unmistakable. It is a piece of evidence of the strongest possible kind that, so far as science and accurate reason go,, conservatism possesses as yet neither defence nor explanation of itself. I therefore venture to say, though I shall prove the fact more fully afterwards that, with regard to the question of progress in the democratic sense of the word, the only doctrines extant which even pretend to system, or which have ever had any intellectual in- fluence, are the doctrines of the Democrats, themselves. The first step, therefore, towards estabhshing a true social science must be the complete exposure of those doctrines which at present usurp the place of it. 26 THE PEmCIPLBS OP MODEEN DEMOCKACY. CHAPTER n. THE PEINCIPLES OP MODEEN DEMOCBACT. I PEOPOSE, then, to examine briefly the gene- ral theory of modern democracy, and the methods by which it has been arrived at. But here, very hkely, a certain difficulty may suggest itself. The Democrats and their theories, it may be said with perfect justice, differ amongst themselves in many important ways. Proudhon, for instance, differed from Louis Blanc ; LassaUe differed from Schulze Dehtzsch ; and Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamber- lain would differ from all four, or may very likely seem to have next to nothing in com- mon with them. The reader, therefore, may be incHned to argue that, though it is well enough for general purposes to regard the Democrats as a single class, yet we can by no means do this for the purposes of accurate THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 27 criticism. Such, however, is not really the case. The differences spoken of, important as they may be practically, are differences not as to principles, but mainly as to the application of principles. The principles themselves are in all cases the same ; and it is with these alone that we are here concerned to deal. If we can show these to be false, we may leave the disputes based on them to take care of themselves. Let us consider, then, what these principles are — ^principles which unite Mr. Chamberlain with Proudhon, and Mr. Bright with Louise Michel. They are very simple, and can be very easily stated. The first and foremost of them is contained in the abstract proposition, that the perfection of society involves social equality. Let us be careful to see what the words exactly mean. They do not mean that equality is the same thing as perfection— for equahty in itself might be merely equality in destitution : but they do mean that inequahty is essentially an evil and an imperfection. The Democrat postulates, no less than the Oonser- 28 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY, vative, the conservation and even the increase of existing material luxuries. But, these being granted, his distinctive contention is that the chief evil of life is the unequal distribution of them ; and that progress consists of such changes as tend to make it equal. This doc- trine resolves itself into the following train of reasoning. Happiness is proportionate to dis- tributable means of enjoyment ; of these means there is only a certain quantity, which has to- be distributed amongst a certain number of people ; and consequently when one class has more than an equal share, somewhere else there is a corresponding deficit. The luxury of one. man means the privation of another ; the high rank of one man means the degradation of another. Thus, happiness being proportionate to riches and social status, social inequalityy in its very nature, implies unhappiness some- where. It is, in a word, identical with social wrong. Accordingly, the end of progress being the diffusion of human happiness, progress is es- sentially a constant approach towards equality. Such is the great first principle of all THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 29 modern Democrats, from the extremest to the most moderate sections of them. How far it is held that equahty can ever be absolute, is a minor matter altogether. One section main- tains that we can reach it ; another section thinks that we can only aipproximate to it ; but they all mamtain ahke that it is the ideal condition to work towards, and that the more near we get to it, the more advanced is our civilisation. That is the principle, and it is in every case the same. Proudhon differed from Louis Blanc only as to' the best means of applying it. Mr. Bright differs from Proudhon only as to the degree to which he thinks its application possible, or in the consistency with Tvhich he wishes to apply it. Should the reader be inchned to doubt this, let him think for a moment on the methods of Enghsh Eadicals whenever they seek directly to gain the adherence of the people. They come forward as the champions of social justice, and their avowed mission is to reform abuses. This being so, their first and principal task is to- place these abuses in the most odious light 30 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. possible, and to rouse, as much as possible, the people's passion against them. Now, how do they do this ? Always in one way. They re- present whatever abuse may be at the time in. question, not as a direct wrong done to their hearers personally, but rather as an insult to general social justice. Let us take, for in- stance, the case of perpetual pensions or else a grant to some member of the royal family. No Eadical orator, denouncing these at a meeting, pretends that the sums in question, if divided amongst the nation, would yield to his own audience so much as a farthing a head annually ; or that any one is appre- ciably injured by the apphcation of them which he denounces. His argumentative tactics are of a very different kind. His understood end is, of course, the good of his hearers ; but he does not suggest to them this end directly. He does not try to make them discontented with their own poverty, but to make them indignant with other people's riches ; and the virtual question that he always first addresses to them is not, Why THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 31 should you have so little ? but, Why should! others have so much ? This fact appears eveu more plainly in the Eadical method of attack- ing the landed aristocracy. Nearly always the first point dwelt on with regard to this class is not the evil that its existence does the community, but the exceptional position that it itself occupies. It is decried because it i& enviable rather than because it is injurious. A quaint example of this is to be found in the following argument, which is exceedingly popular with contemporary Eadical writers. The owners, it is said,, of four-fifths of the soit of England could be gathered together in a single assembly room, and be addressed easily by the voice of a single speaker.^ Now this- may be no doubt true, but for what reason is it dwelt upon ? The mere fact that an aristo- cracy could stand in a single room need in ' Mr. Arthur Arnold dwells much on this fact in his- volume on Free Land. It forms also the one subject of tw* recent volumes, which are specially addressed to the people, entitled Our Old NohUity; and the present wi-iter, not long since, saw it placarded as a startling truth in the shop windows- of nearly all the Eadical pamphlet-sellers at Leeds. 32 THE PRINCIPLES OF MODEEN DEMOCRACY. itself be fraught with no more evil to the com- munity, than the fact that a monarch could sit in a single chair, or than the fact — equally true— that the inhabitants of the whole world could stand on the Isle of Wight. Its sole significance from the Eadical point of view depends on the striking way in which it exhi- bits a social inequahty. It is designed to inform the masses, not how near they are to misery, but how far they are from splendour ; and its immediate tendency is to excite the wish in them not to raise themselves, but to humble others. Now the Eadicals, according to their own principles, are perfectly right when they argue in this way. If social equa- lity really be the chief condition of happiness, it may most legitimately be put forward as the immediate end to be struggled for. Nor would there be any force in the objection that this was merely an appeal to envy ; for if, as I say, the doctrine of equahty be true, we must consider envy to be as sound a guide in pohtics as reverence by religious men is considered to be in religion. Just as one is THE PUmClPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 33 jealousy for the honour of God, so the other is jealousy for the general welfare of man. I have merely reminded the reader how the English Eadicals argue, not to show that they are inconsistent with their own principles, but that their fundamental principle is identical with that of all other Democrats. There, every member of the professed party of pro- gress meets the rest in unanimity. The Ger- man sociahst in his prison, the Parisian com- munist in his exile, the English Kadical Minister by his trout-stream or in his conservatory, each bases his opinions on the same fundamental principle, that the perfection of society in- volves social equality, and that the more near we get to it, the more advanced is our civilisation. This principle, however, though the key to the common creed of democracy, is by no means the only principle agreed to by all Democrats ; nor for practical purposes is it even the most important. Its importance depends entirely on another principle imphed in it, which though from the outset we have D 34 THE PBINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. presumed without stating it, it is now requisite to put in distinct form. It is this : Not only is inequality an imperfection in theory, but it is an imperfection remediable to such an ex- tent in practice that the more marked forms of it, at aU events, can be entirely done away with. The Democrats do not merely maintain, like curious social analysts, that the wealth of the few is a precipitate from the proper compe- tence of the many ; but they assert also, as vigorous men of action, it is a kind of hoard which has been mechanically got together, and which could readily and with advantage be put back again in the quarters from which it was taken. Were this not the case, they would be nothing but a set of sentimentalists bewail- ing the injustice of hfe, just as other men might bewail the shortness of it. They might sigh, but they would not agitate ; nor would a practical man find any point to discuss with them. Unless they maintained that social equahty can be, to discuss whether it ought to be would be a mere discussion in the clouds ; or, more properly speaking, there THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERlir DEMOCRACY. 35 would be no discussion at all. The most bigoted aristocrat would not be an aristocrat in Utopia ; indeed, if the imagination were to be the only thing that guided him, he would advocate equality no less than the wildest socialist. He would raise aU his citizens to the highest possible level. Perhaps, too, he would give them aU wings and wishing-caps ; or, better stiU, he might make them angels instead of men. We are not concerned, however, with any such dreams as these ; we are concerned only with realities, actual or potential. Tak- ing the earth and its inhabitants as they have been hitherto, or as they may possibly come to be, is social equality an end we can practically work towards, so as ever for a permanence to be appreciably more near to it ; and if more near to it, to be any better off than we are ? The Democrats declare that it is. Here at last Ave touch upon solid ground. We have no abstract question as to what ought to be ; we have a direct proposition as to what is, and as to what will be. We have a proposition which can be proved to be either false or true, D 2 36 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN DBMOCEACY. or, at all events, shown to have some founda- tion or none. Now of one thing with regard to it we may at once be certain. It is not a generalisation from any order of events, either happening now, or that ever have happened formerly ; for the Democrats themselves admit that the equality they wish to produce has never yet coexisted with the civilisation they wish to preserve. It must, therefore, be a de- duction from a certain further generalisation, and what this is, it is not hard to discover. The Democrats, in declaring the change in question to be possible, tell us also the kind of means by which we are to accompKsh it. These are familiar to all of us ; and it will be enough to name a few of them — nationaHsation of the land, a graduated income-tax, abolition of rank, a normal day of labour, compulsory State education, and, above aU, universal suf- frage, which wUl enable the people to pass what laws they please. In other words, the means for producing equality are a series of changes in existing social institutions. Now what is implied in this? There is evidently THE ' PRINCIPLES OF MODEKN DEMOCRACY. 37 implied in it the following general doctrine, that by changing the institutions of a society, we are able to change its structure ; and this again resolves itself into the more general doc- trine stiU, that the structure of society depends on its institutions. That is to say, if we put it a little more fully: The broad distinction between rich and poor, privileged and un- privileged, rulers and ruled, producers and non-producers, which has characterised every civilisation that has hitherto existed in the world, depends for its maintenance on those law-s and forms of government, which in any given case are, no doubt, its immediate sanction. Here we have the exact generalisation we were looking for. The former proposition as to the possibUity of producing equahty is nothing more or less than a deduction from this. The reasoning run's thus : Laws and forms of government represent some dehberate human purpose ; this purpose hitherto has been that of the few only, and it has been directed by them only to securing their own advantage. It is therefore argued that the many, if they 38 THE PKWCIPLBS OF MODEEN DEMOCBACT. will but combine, can reverse this state of things, and give effect to their own purpose instead — that is to say, the advantage of the many. They can establish new forms of government, and make new laws ; and just as the old institutions produced inequahty, so wiU the new ones produce equahty. Put more briefly, this amounts to the following syllogism : The structure of society depends on its institutions ; we can change its institu- tions ; therefore we can change its structure. Accordingly, that the structure of society depends on its institutions, we may call the major premiss of the modern democratic syllogism ; and with its truth or falsehood, the conclusion stands or falls. We have thus pushed the matter a step farther back ; but we have not even yet come to anything that can be compared immedi- ately with facts. For this premiss itself, no more than the conclusion drawn from it, is a generahsation from what is or ever has been. It is confessedly a statement as to a sequence of cause and effect of which the world of THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 39 fact has as yet offered no example. Using the word structure m the sense we are now giving it, the structure of all civihsed societies has hitherto been the same. It has been essentially that which exists in Europe now. There has always at one extreme been wealth and honour, and at the other obscurity and comparative ind.igence. In some cases the inequahty may have caricatured itself, as in the case of the Asiatic despotisms ; in others it may have disguised itself, as in the case of the Itahan or Greek repubhcs. But it has always been present wlierever civilisation has been present ; and though it may have changed its form, as it did during the great French Eevolution, yet not even then did it change more than that. It simply re- appeared as another species of feudahsm, which Louis Blanc said ' was even worse than the old.' In a word, many as have been the changes made in the institutions of various countries, none of these changes have changed the social structure.^ Accordingly, whether or * When we speak of institutions in this connection, and of the possibility of a change in the democratic sense being made 40 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN DBMOCEACT. no the latter really does dejjend on the former, it has never shown its dependence in any- overt fact of history. It will, of course, be said that the changes made hitherto in insti- tutions have not been of the right kind ; but this only illustrates what I say more strongly. It at once shows us that, however the demo- cratic premiss has been arrived at, it has not been arrived at from a study of anything that has actually happened, nor has it ever even been verified by a single comparison with it. It is plain, however, that, in its character of a scientific doctrine, it must have been arrived at from a study of facts somehow — indirectly, if not directly ; and since it is not a generahsation from such in them, we do not mean a change that will alter their minor details, but we mean a change that will invert their general tendency ; and any reforms that fail to touch this are, from our present point of view, not changes at all. They are, on the contrary, conservative, not progressive ; and instead of tending to abolish inequalities, they tend rather to prevent the masses from resenting them. The action, for instance, of trades unions is regarded by extreme Democrats as treacherous to the popular cause ; and though higher wages have been secured, by their means, to the workmen, the result of this, it is said, is only to make them content with their chains. THE PKINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCKACY. 41 facts itself, it must be a deduction from some other doctrine, that either is, or is supposed to be. What doctrine, then, is this ? and . what order of facts does it refer to ? Here, again, is a problem which it is not very hard to answer. I have observed already that the equality of modern democracy is essentially a material equahty — an equal sharing in the fruits of ex- isting material civilisation, or, in other words, of the world's existing wealth. It is plaia, therefore, that the democratic premiss is es- sentially some proposition about wealth. It is a proposition, in fact, about the cause of the distribution of it, and it declares this to be laws and forms of government. Now, one thing is plain. Whether or no laws and forms of government are the cause of the distri- bution of wealth, they are certainly not the cause of the production of it. The democratic premiss, therefore, is virtually a statement that the cause of the production of wealth is distinct from, and independent of, the cause of the distribution of it. This necessarily 42 THE PRINCIPLES OF MODEKN DEMOCKACY. presupposes some doctrine already arrived at, as to what the cause of production is ; and that doctrine must be the generahsation from which the democratic premiss is deduced. Now that doctrine we arrive at in two ways ; not only from the logical necessities of the case, but from the exphcit and formal statements of the democratic thinkers themselves. It is the doctrine so often proclaimed, and so little understood or examined, that the cause of aU wealth is labour. Thus the Gotha Programme of the German Labour Party — an acknow- ledged epitome of the most serious democratic thought on the Continent — begins with the following sentence : — ' Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture ; and as productive labour generally is only possible through society, hence the aggregate product of labour belongs to all the membera of society, each member having a right to an equal share, in accordance with his reasonable wants, and each sharing equally the universal duty of work.' And pre- cisely the same principles, though stated in a less formal way, are at the root also of our THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 43 modern English Eadicalism. Mr. Bright, for instance, in addressing an audience of working men, introduced, amidst loud cheers, the fol- lowing significant sentences: — '■Just now,' he said, ' as I was on viy way to this place to speak to you, I watched in the street a magnificent car- riage pass me; and in that carriage were two splendidly -dressed ladies. Who made that car- riage"? — You did. Who made those splendid dresses f* — You did. Have your wives any such carriages to drive in"? Do your wives ever wear clothes of that kind f I watched that carriage farther, and I saw where it stopped. It stopped before a stately house, with an imposing portico. Who built that house? — You did. Do you and your wives live in any such houses as that ? ' Further, that this doctrine should be the foundation of the democratic theory is not merely a matter of history ; but it is, as I say, a matter of logical necessity also. The theory impHes the doctrine, and could support itself on no other ; as we shall see readily if we reflect what the theory is. The theory is that we can re-distribute the existing wealth of 44 THE PEINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCEACY. the world, and yet not diminish the amount of it ; or, in plainer language, that if we can take from the wealthy the excessive wealth which they now consume annually, and divide it amongst the poor, there will still annually be the same wealth produced. Now, this plainly can be true on one supposition only, that the wealthy classes, as such, are connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators of it ; and that in its actual production they have no part what- ever : otherwise, to ehminate them would be to diminish production. The vahdity, therefore, of the whole demo- cratic theory depends on the scientific value of this doctrine of wealth and labour. Now here we have a doctrine at last which brings us face to face with facts. We have a pro- position as to what is and has been — ^what happens every day, and can every day be seen to happen ; not a deduction from this, as to what can happen, but has never happened yet. Wealth is being produced every day about us. The cause of its production is every day in THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 45 operation ; and the doctrine that its cause is labour is a statement, true or false, about a process taking place at this moment in the nearest mill or workshop ; and which, in the nearest miU or workshop, could be either disproved or verified. This, then, is the point at which the demo- cratic theory must be tested ; and here we shall begin, and indeed end, our examination of it. If labour really be the ultimate cause of wealth, then wealth can be distributed as the Democrats declare it can. Its distribution depends on laws and forms of government. The structure of society depends on its institu- tions : we can change the institutions, and we can, therefore, change the structure. In a word, the democratic theory is true, and the progress of democracy is irresistible. On the' side of the Conservatives there is no more to be said, except pitifully to ask for a short reprieve. On the other hand, if we find that the cause of wealth is something difierent from what the above doctrine states it to be, then aU these 46 THE PEINCIPLBS OF MODEEK DEMOCRACY. deductions fall utterly to the ground, and room will be left for a completely different set. This is the result to which I hope to conduct the reader. I propose, by appeahng to the actual facts of life, to show that labour is not the ultimate cause of wealth, and that, apart from other causes, it would be utterly power- less to produce it ; consequently, that the distribution of wealth which the democratic programme demands is a scientific impossibility, and that no laws could accomphsh it ; that the structure of society does not depend on its institutions, but that, on the contrary, the institutions depend on the structure ; and that if material equahty is ever to be secured at all, it will be secured only by the destruction of civihsation, not by any distribution of the finer existing fruits of it. In other words, I shaU. show that the principles of modern de- mocracy or radicalisni, being deduced, as they are, from an absolutely false generahsation, tend inevitably, in proportion as they are acted on, to increase the very evils which it is their avowed object to remedy ; and that by fixing THB PRINCIPLES OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. 47 the imagination of the masses on an impossible kind of progress, it is really directing them backwards towards a second barbarism, the horrors and privations of which are now hardly- conceivable. 48 CHAPTEE in. THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF MODERN DEMOCRACY. To repeat again, then, what we arrived at in the last chapter, the entire theory of modern democracy, with all the hopes it encourages, and with all the measures it advocates, depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labour. Let us now inquire accurately what the democratic theorists mean by it. And, first, it will be well to point out thatj however false what they really mean may be, there are certain falsehoods which their lan- guage seems to imply, but which they them- selves would be the first people to repudiate, and with which it would be idle and unfair to tax them. Having thus disposed of what they do not mean, we shall be freer to deal with what they do. MODERN DEMOCRACY. 49 For this purpose, let us turn once more to those sentences of Mr. Bright's, which were just now quoted. There, in a plain and highly popular way, labour is stated to be the cause of wealth ; and certain forms of wealth are particularly specified, which, being intended to prove the statement, must at all events show its meaning. These are fine clothes, a fine carriage, and a fine house ; and the relation of labour to these three produc- tions is a type, for the Democrat, of its relation to wiealth generally. What, then, did Mr. Bright mean to tell his workmen as to the relation of labour to a silk dress ? He did not mean to tell them that it produced the silk- worms ; nor, in the case of the carriage, that it produced the wood or the leather ; nor, in the case of the house, that it produced the stone or the marble. He did not mean to say, therefore, that it is the only cause of wealth ; but simply that it is the only human cause. Of other causes there may be any number, such as soil, chmajte, geographical position, and the distribution of coal and minerals ; and E 50 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF the amount and quality of production may depend on these as much as it does on labour. The democratic doctrine, then, contains no denial of this : the Democrat, on the con- trary, is quite ready to admit it. But he is content to leave the question in the hands of skilled economists ;, for it is not a question that touches his own argument. He urges no claim on behalf of inanimate nature ; he is not a delegate from particular soUs or climates, demanding for them a share in human wealth ; therefore it is nothing to him how far they have helped to produce it. His only claim is on behalf of human beings ; it is amongst them a:lone that human wealth can be divided ; he does not ask, therefore, whether man has more to do with its production than nature ; but whether one class of men has more to do with it than another class, or whether certain classes have anything to do with it at all. His whole attention is confined to this. Thus his doc- trine of wealth and labour is to be taken with an important reservation. As to the part played by nature, it contains no statement MODEBN DEMOCRACY. 51 -whatever. It does not mean that labour is the only cause of wealth : it means simply that it is the only human cause. And now let us turn again to one of Mr. Bright's illustrations — the fine house, perhaps, will serve our purpose best — and let us ■examine the train of reflections that were plainly in Mr. Bright's mind with regard to it. ■' See,' he said mentally, ' the pillared portico ; ■see the stonework and the brickwork of the tall, imposing faqade ; look at each of these features, ■and let me ask, who made it? The answer is ■evident: stonecutters, bricklayers, masons. By ■a little inquiry we could find the names and ad- ■dr esses of all of them. Enter ; and let us mark .the coved ceiling in the drawing-room, with all its fretwork and gilding. That was not made by the idle ■ lady sitting under it. She does not .even know what material it is made of. It was ■made by dexterous workmen, who themselves, per- haps, live ih garrets. Again, that marble chim- ney-piece ivhich is carved so beautifully — was it made by the young guardsman who is now lean- ing against it ? It is as much as hi' can do, B 2 52 THE PSEUDO-SCIE>X'E OF if he can cut a picji out of an orange. No ; it was made by a stone-carver, who has never since seen his own handy-work. Yet again, that parquet floor — was it made by the young dandies who to-night are going to dance upon it f No ; it was made by carpenters, who in their own rooms have barely a strip of carpet. Consider, then,' Mr. Bright would say, ' here is a typical abode of luocury ; and yet of the only people who at present get any pleasure from it, not one has so much as a notion of the processes by which it was constructed. Plainly, then, those people have had no share in producing it. In so far as men have produced it, it is the product of labouring men — of their knowledge, their skill, and their muscular strength ; and it is the pro- duct of these only. This is evident on the face of things, and requires no further proof.' Mr. Bright's meaning thus far it is easy enough to follow ; but here there arises in it a very marked ambiguity. The above reflections are simple, and at least partially true ; but what conclusion does he draw from them.? The answer to this is two-fold. He — or we may MODERN DEMOCRACY. 53 ■drop our allusion to him, and we may say the Democrats generally, draw two conclusions. They draw one as pohtical agitators, the other as serious thinkers ; and between these two we must make a sharp distinction. As agita- tors, they argue in this way : — ' The luxurious house being the product of labour only, it might have existed just as well if its present mal- appropriators had never been in existence. The only difference in that case would be, that it would be enjoyed, and enjoyed justly, by the p>eople whose labour made it. And as with the house, so with all the other luxuries that are now monopolised by the non-labouring classes ; if we extinguished those classes, their luxuries would be inherited by the labourers. There would be ■the same fine carriages, only with workmen's wives driving in them ; the same fine dresses, only with workmen's wives wearing them. Every bricklayer at night would come home to his own drawing-room ; and the London of the future would be a series of Belgrave Squares' Now this is the wild doctrine which, in the heat of political agitation, the Democrats undoubtedly 54 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF do allow themselves to teach their ignorant hearers ; but they do so at such times only. So far from being part of their reasoned sys- tem, it is in reahty not compatible with it ; and it is not a doctrine that they ever main- tain seriously. Their dupes and their enemies,, however, so widely suppose it to be such, that it will be well, in passing, to briefly point out its falsehood. Continuing, then, to use the house as our type of wealth and luxury, let us ask why it is a type of luxury at aU ? It clearly is not so because it consists of certain materials, and because on these materials have been spent certain skill and labour. The same materials, the same skill and labour, might have gone just as well to constructing a domed hovel without window or chimney, and supporting on its roof a colossal marble tea-pot. But this, monstrosity would never be called a luxury ;. nor would Mr. Bright taunt his working-men because their dwelhngs were not hke it. The fine house, then, is a type of luxurj-, not from the fact of its having been produced by so MODERN DEMOCRACY. 55 much labour, but from the fact of this labour having been used in a certain way. We have supposed, for instance, that it has an imposing fa9ade. That fa9ade is composed of certain materials, which have been put together by the labour of masons and bricklayers. But 'the labour of these men is not the cause of it as a fa9ade ; it is the cause of it only as a brick structure of some sort. As a faqade, its immediate cause is the architect. So, too, with all the rest of the house, in so far as, it is luxurious, the architect is the cause of its luxury. It is due to him that the rooms are arranged conveniently, that they are properly warmed, properly lighted, properly propor- tioned — in a word, that they are luxurious rooms, not unhealthy dungeons. "We must, how- ever, go a step farther yet. When we speak of the rooms being thus proper and convenient, we mean that they are proper and convenient for some special purpose ; and this purpose is to gratify the tastes and to fulfil the wants of the class of people who are to inhabit them — that is to say, the tastes and wants of the wealthy. 56 THE PSBUDO-SCIENCE OF Thus if the wealthy classes never gave balls or dinner parties, there would be in our house no great reception-rooms. If they were not pleased with fine ceilings, fine gilding, and harmoniously coloured walls, there would be in our house none of these things either. But it is precisely these forms of magnificence that Mr. Bright, and thinkers of his order, always, when addressing the masses, take for types of wealth in general. If, therefore, they really mean what they seem to mean — if they reaUy mean by wealth the existing luxuries and the existing splendours of the wealthy, then labour, so far, from being by itself the cause of it, actually gives it none of its essential character- istics. Wealth, in this sense, is like a bronze statue, whose sole beauty is due to the mould it is cast in. The mould consists of the tastes and the habits of the wealthy ; labour dees nothing but melt and pour in the metal. Thus of wealth in this sense, the true cause must be the wealthy ; since if it did not exist for them, it would not exist at aU ; whilst from the labourer's point of view, it can be MODERN DEMOCEACY. 57 nothing but Dead Sea fruit, which would turn into dust the moment he laid hands on it. To hold it up to him, therefore, as a prize, which, as a labourer, he has any right to, or which, as a labourer, he could ever possibly possess, is simply to delude him for some ulterior pur- pose. So crude a fallacy can deceive no serious thinker ; and I mention it here not so much to combat it, as to show the reader that it does not need to be combated. What the Democrats really maintain, and what alone it is worth while to examine seriously, is something very different from this. Not only do they fully recognise that but for the wealthy classes, wealth, as we have just used the word, would be never produced by labour ; but they add, further, that it ought never to be produced at all ; and it is a chief point in their argument that, were the wealthy classes extinguished, this production would cease. There would be no more palaces, no more grandiose staircases, no more suites of reception-rooms ; nor would there even be any humble imitations of these : 58 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF of wealth in such forms there would certainly be an end. Of something else, however, there would not be an end : and that is, of wealth in another form. The form would change, but the amount would remain the same. Wealth would undergo, metamorphosis, but it would not undergo extinction. Thus, in- stead of one house, with twenty useless rooms in it, and each one of them five times too large for comfort, there would be a number of smaller houses, arranged upon diiferent principles, but in their OAvn way equally perfect. The labour that had once ministered to the pride of a single family, would here minister to the healthy pleasure of many: what had made one gallery splendid, would make fifty homes beautiful. And the same change would occur with regard to food, clotlies, carpets, furniture, and all other productions, whether useful or ornamental. There would be no objects individually of fantastic or wasteful value, as is so often the case now. There Avould be no liqueurs worth fifteen shillings a bottle, no carpets worth three MODERN DEMOCEACY. 59 guineas a yard, and no writing-tables worth five thousand pounds. But the skill and labour which is now so wrongly concentrated upon things like these would, without being in the least diminished, be applied in a juster way. Instead of producing a few invidious or enervating luxuries, it would produce many harmless and healthy ones, which to any sound taste would be even more pleasing than the former. Thus the wealth of the community, though minted as it were into smaller coins, would be still as great in the aggregate, or perhaps greater even than it ever was. This is the conclusion really drawn by the Democrats from their doctrine of wealth and labour ; and it is by the hght of this that we must judge what that doctrine means. Now, on the very surface of it, it means plainly thus much — that the amount of skill and the amount of labour expended annually in any given community, are independent of the uses they are put to ; and, though these last may vary, the former remain constant. This 60 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OP proposition, however, can be put in a simpler form. It implies that men who do not labour are an unnatural and artificial class ; and that a man naturally, whether his powers be large or small, wiU, unless hindered, de- velop and use them to the utmost. In other words, the doctrine of wealth and labour is really a statement with regard to human nature. It declares that man is naturally a labouring animal ; that a human community is naturally a labouring community ; and that out of so many men, unless there be some special hindrance, there wUl come naturally so much labour. That is to say, we may count on a man to labour, just as surely as we may count on a man to eat ; and, although this tendency in him may be capable of some further explanation, it is capable of none that can affect the social speculator. For him it is an ultimate fact ; and as such he buUds upon it. Here at least we find the thing we are looking for. Step by step we have examined the democratic theory ; we have traced care- MODERN DEMOCKACY. 61 fully backwards the logical pedigree of its doctrines ; and we now arrive at the one from which they all spring. The conception of man as a naturally labouring animal, and of his tendency to labour as an ultimate social fact, is the logical foundation of every scheme or system that now emanates from the professed party of progress. The entire doctrine of equahty, the entire democratic theory, stands or falls with the correctness of it. The inquiry, therefore, narrows itself to the single question : Is the above conception true or false? What is its relation to the actual facts of life ? Perhaps few democratic theorists, plainly as this conception is in their minds, and plainly as we have seen that all their argu- ments rest upon it, have ever stated it to themselves in the form of a definite proposi- tion. One is almost forced to suppose this, because there is one fact which it is hard else to explain. It is hard to explain how else any set of men could ever have admitted, to say nothing of having reasoned from, a 62 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF fallacy so monstrous as this conception in- volves. The Democrats, however, are not alone in their ignorance. Other speculators upon kindred subjects have touched the same fallacy ; and, though they have not reasoned from it, they have not seen or exposed it. To me few facts in the history of modern science are so starthng as this singular over- sight. Here is a fallacy of the most impor- tant kind imaginable, standing, as it were, in the middle of our busiest modern thinkers ; but it stands there qtdetiy, like a hider at hide-and-seek, whilst the seekers brush against its clothes, and yet never suspect its neighbourhood. The more I consider this, the more strange does it seem to me. If ever there was a fallacy which could not remain hidden, which, by its direct contradiction of the best-known truths of science, was certainly calculated to provoke its own detection, such a fallacy one might well have thought was this one. There is more yet to add. In a different form, and applied to different ques- tions, it has not only been detected, but MODERN DEMOCRACY. 63 denounced and exposed already. Indeed, modern psychology is little else but one long and crushing refutation of it. It has been driven, however, from one field of thought, only to disguise itself and re-appear in another. The lie which was yesterday sent naked out of doors by the psychologist, is to-day, in a new dress, the first truth of the social specu- lator. That this way of putting the case is not in the least exaggerated I shall now pro- ceed to show. Let us take, then, the doctrine we have been just now considering, and look at it in its psychological aspect. Man, it declares, is naturally a labouring animal ; unless he is actually hindered, he will work according to his capacities, and whatever use we put his labour to, the labour will be still forthcoming ; just as a river would still pour down its water independently of the kind of mills we built on it. In other words, the amount of labour done by a man is not caused by, and is independent of, his circumstances. But the circumstances of a man's life are an exact equivalent for his 64 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF motives. This doctrine, therefore, psychologi- cally is neither more nor less than a statement that labour is a kind of action which is pro- duced without motive. Motive may direct its application, but it does not cause its existence. The cause of that is to be sought elsewhere. It inheres in the human constitution just as thirst and hunger do ; and as little as these, has it any external origin. In a word, as has been said already, it is action uncaused by motive. Now, were this doctrine propounded in any psychological treatise, its monstrous character would be seen in a single moment. But when it is connected with various concrete issues, when it is treated not as a psychological doctrine, but merely as an economic or a social one, then its fallacy seems to at once conceal itself. For this fact there must, of course, be some explanation. I conceive it to be as follows. The democratic theory, in the mind of every Democrat, is founded originally not upon thoughts, but images ; and thought is invoked afterwards, merely to analyse what MODEBN DEMOCRACY. 65 is already contained in these. ' Now the first image that every Democrat starts with, consists of two contrasted figures — the man who labours, and the man who does not labour ; and these he takes as types of the whole of hunian society. Hence there at once occurs to him the extremely obvious reflection that since plainly nobody can live without labour of some sort, the man who does not labour is supported by the man who does ; and further, that if the latter were to cease to support the former, the former immediately would begin to support himself In the above simple image, and in these simple reflections on it, is to be traced the origin of the democratic doctrine of labour. Now, so far as they go, these reflections are 'true enough ; but the point to be noticed is, that they go only a Httle way. The Democrat's error lies in his faUing to understand this. Consequently he expands them beyond their proper Hmits, and transmutes them in so doing into a grotesque and preposterous falsehood. Let us consider for a moment how much we can really draw F 66 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF from them. In themselves they amount to this, that if no one else does any work for a man, he is certain, if he Hves at aU, to do some work for himself; and for the plain reason that he cannot hve otherwise. Hence the Democrat at once jumps to the generalisation that man naturally, and unless artificial conditions hinder him, wUl always exert his faculties as a paid artisan does now. He will go on producing, no matter what, but something. This is what the Democrat means when he says that labour is the cause of wealth, and when he conceives of man as naturally a labouring animal. But the original observation warrants no such conclusions. It shows us, no doubt, that man naturally wiU always do labour of some sort ; but the amount of this labour is the very least conceivable. It is nothing more than will suffice for his own bare subsistence. That much we can always count upon his doing. But why ? Because there are certain wants that we can always count upon his feel- ing. The only labour in short that we can say he will do naturally, is the exact counterpart MODEKN DEMOCRACY. 67 of the wants of whicli lie cannot possibly divest himself Whatever labour he may do beyond this, he does only in virtue of certain variable circumstances ; and until we know them, we can say nothing about the labour. It will appear, however, from hence, that in a very Hmited sense labour may be spoken of as being practically natural to man, and his tendency to it accepted as an ultimate fact in his constitution. But it will appear further that if we are to use the word thus, labour emphatically is not the cause of wealth ; it is the cause, on the contrary, of nothing but a bare subsistence. If the Democrats in that sense hke to use that formula, they may find it convenient as a kind of mental shorthand ; and if their hearers are duly warned that it is such, there is no reason why it should convey a wrong idea. In our present purpose, how- ever, it would only prove confusing, and we must completely free ourselves from such ambiguous phraseology. It wiU be well for us to remember that, however certainly we can always count on a man for the minimum of F 2 68 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OP labour spoken of, yet even this really depends on external circumstances, and couldnotbe pro- duced unless these were present to motive it. Let us suppose, for instance, a hungry man in a prison, where there was no food to be ac- quired by any means, and where he knew there was none. In that case we should have the internal want, but we should certainly have no labour ; and for this reason, that there would be no motive to labour. A motive is the product of two things, and the internal want is but one of them. The other is the external means by which it is thought this want can be satisfied ; and if this last ele- ment is absent, labour is unproducible. If our starving prisoner thinks that there is in his cell somewhere food hidden behind some loose stones or brick work, he will tear his hands to pieces in trying to dislodge the masonry. But if the structure of his walls show such a hope to be impossible, he wiU not, except in madness, raise so much as a finger against a surface of ponderous granite. Labour under such circumstances, so far from being natural MODERN DEMOCRACY. 69 to him, will be both impossible and unthink- able. Motive will be absent, and the man will be a helpless log. The tendency in man then to do a certain minimum of labour, which is practically, no doubt, an ultimate fact in his character, is, strictly speaking, not an ultimate fact at all ; and to speak of it as if it were so, is merely a short way of saying not that this labour does not depend upon circumstances, but that the circumstances that produce it exist practically everywhere. In other words, man will always labour to feed himself, because in every spot he inhabits he can procure food by labouring. And now let us gather up all the foregoing arguments and apply them finally to the great doctrine we are considering — the modern de- mocratic doctrine — that the cause of wealth is labour. The result is this — that that doctrine which is so perpetually appealed to both in pohtics and speculation, which is paraded before the world as a new social evangel, as the first tidings of hope that have ever reached the multitudes, and which is stirring the minds 70 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCK OF of men with divided hope and horror, is, when analysed accurately and resolved into its com- ponent propositions, a doctrine utterly at vari- ance with every teaching of science, and the more evidently monstrous the more thoroughly it is understood. It is one of two things : it is either a direct contradiction of the actual facts of life, or else it is a statement that has no relation whatever to them. It is either a falsehood, or it is nonsense. If labour be spoken of with the understanding just alluded to, that man labours naturally only in so far as he has always some motives present to him, then the doctrine is not nonsense but it is a falsehood. For labour so quahfied, as we have seen already, produces not wealth, but it pro- duces the very antithesis of wealth, that is, only a bare subsistence. If, however, labour be spoken of, as it undoubtedly is spoken of by the Democrats, with the above understanding completely put aside and forgotten — if it be spoken of as in itself an original and constant cause, and if, as such, it be said to produce anything, then the doctrine is simply so much MODERN DBMOCEACY. 71 nonsense. It is a contradiction of the very first truth of psychology — of a truth admitted by thinkers of every school, by necessitarians and by behevers in freewill equally — the truth, namely, that action is the creature of motive ; and that even if the will be as free as it has been ever said to be, it can simply choose between motives, but never supply their place. Here formally my destructive criticism ■ends, but it is not quite ended practically. We have gone to the root of the whole demo- cratic theory ; we have found that to consist of a single scientific falsehood ; and to each of my arguments in succession the reader may no ■doubt have assented. But the falsehood in question, when put in its proper hght, is at •once seen to be so crude and palpable that in many minds there is sure to arise a doubt whether, after all, it can have really been -taught by anybody ; whether the theory of modern democracy can be really based upon it, and whether all this while we have not been tilting at a windmill. Until this doubt 72 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OP has been dispelled completely it is impossible to consider that the democratic position has been disposed of. I shall, therefore, ask the reader to consider the following fact. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his ' Study of Socio- logy,' ^ touches the very question we have been just discussing, namely, the origin of what the Democrat means by wealth ; and of this he takes a very excellent example, the ' Walter Press,' by which the ' Times ' is printed. And I say such a printing-press is a very excellent example, because it is a machine for producing not an aristocratic luxury, but one of the prime necessaries of the ideal democratic life — a newspaper. Mr. Spencer, then, bids us consider the origin of the 'Walter Press.' Most men, he thinks, would have probably no notion of it ; he therefore goes on to instruct us. ' In the first place,' he says, ' this automatic printing machine is lineally descended from other automatic printing machines . . . each pre-supposim/ others that went before. . . And then, on tracing the more remote antecedents, we ' The Sfiidy of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, pp. 126-130. MODERN DEMOCRACY. 7S find an ancestry of hand-printing presses which, through generations, had been successively im- proved.' This, however, says Mr, Spencer, is but a small part of the matter. He points out how the ' Walter Press ' not only imphes an ancestry of former presses, but how it imphes the existence of the machinery used in making it, and how this again has a further ancestry of its own. Again, he reminds us that the ' Walter Press ' would have been useless until there had been invented a paper-machine which would turn out paper in almost endless lengths. ' Thus,' he says, ' there is the genesis of the paper-machine involved •' and he finally adds to all this, the abvmdance of iron in England, which has been the chie/ cause of the development of our machine-making gene- rally. Here, however, he pauses to tell us that we have not finished our inquiry even yet. To produce the ' Walter Press ' there have been moral causes at work too. ' Without that readi- ness^ he says, ' to sacrifice present ease to future benefit, which is implied by enterprise, there would never have arisen the machine in question. . . 74 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OP Without mechanical engineers, who fulfilled their ■contracts tolerably well by executing worh accu- rately, neither this machine, nor the machines that made it, could have been produced; and without artisans having considerable conscien- tiousness, no master could insure accurate work. . . . So that there are implied in this mechanical ■achievement not only our slowly generated indus- trial state, with its innumerable products and processes, but also the slowly-moulded moral and intellectual natures of masters and workmen. Has,' Mr. Spencer proceeds, ' nothing now been forgotten ? Yes, we have left out a whole division of all-important social phenomena — those which we group as progress of knowledge. . . . Without a considerably-developed geometry . . . without a developed physics . . . and in the absence of a developed chemistry . . . such a machine could not have come into existence. Surely,' he exclaims, ' we have now got to the end of the history. Not quite: there yet remains an essential factor. No one goes on year after year spending thousands of pounds and much time, and persevering through disappointment and anxiety, without a MODERN DEMOCRACY. 75 Strong motive. The " Walter Press " was not a mere tour de force. Why, then, was it pro- duced'? To meet an enormous demand with great promptness — -to print with one machine 16,000 copies per hour.' Mr. Spencer amplifies this statement a little ; and then he informs us that his explanation is at last complete. He has put all the causes before us as of a typical piece of wealth. Now I shall ask the reader to consider this account attentively, and for the following reason. It is given us by a man who, of all living men, is perhaps most representative of modern scientific thought. There are few branches of science which he has not studied ; there are few opinions with which he is not famihar ; in especial he has analysed human nature and society : and this is his account of the most prominent of sociological facts — the production of material wealth. What, then, does the reader see in it ? Perhaps the first thing that will strike him is its extreme ^ amplitude and complexity, as contrasted with the crude formula that the cause of wealth is 76 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OP labour. But such a contrast is altogether superficial. Has the reader not detected something more than that ? I will show it to him. In that elaborate account of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, despite all the knowledge and all the keenness shown in it, there is imphed tacitly the very same fallacy which I have shown to be the root of the democratic theory. In each of the causes that Mr. Spencer enunciates there is implied the existence not only of human labour, but human labour of the most various kinds. But all this labour Mr. Spencer takes for granted ; and, though he teUs us carefully how in each case it has been directed, it never once occurs to him to ask how it was generated. In other words, in this special connection, he conceives of labour as action that is independent of mo- tive. He does not distinctly say this, he does not distinctly think it ; but the conception is evidently at the back of his mind, and its dim presence is traceable in his whole handhng of the subject. The reader may ask, however. How can this be? Does not Mr. Spencer MODERN DEMOCRACY. 77 specially mention motive ? Indeed, is it not the very thing that he leads up to and ends with ? To this I answer that so far as the word goes, Mr. Spencer no doubt does not only mention motive, but he parades it ; but the promi- nence he gives to the word merely shows how completely he has missed the thing. Let us see how this is. In the first place, then, out of aU the countless actions which he shows have been involved in producing the ' Walter Press,' there are one man's actions, and one man's alone, which he thinks it necessary to refer to motive at aU; and those are the actions of the inventor of the machine himself. The actions of all the inventors that had preceded him, of all the miners, the ironfounders, the chemists, the engineers, and so forth, are taken as matters of course that require no explanation. This omission, how- ever, is a comparatively minor matter. It is a hint rather than a proof of the real error in question. The proof of that is, not that Mr. Spencer does not dwell upon motive enough, but that what he speaks of as motive 78 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF is not really motive at all. Let us consider this point carefully. The invention and com- pletion, says Mr. Spencer, of the ' Walter Press,' involved much persevering labour on the part of a certain man — the inventor, and this man laboured in this way only in virtue of his being influenced by a certain motive to do so. Now, what does Mr. Spencer say that that motive was ? It was the wish, he says, to print ' The Times ' at the rate of 16,000 copies an hour ; or, as he puts it afterwards, the wish to supply the pubhc demand for such copies. Mr. Spencer, however, here is confusing two things. He is confusing the motive of an action with the purpose of it. The purpose of an action is its objective end, the motive of it is its subjective end. The one is the cause of a man's acting in a par- ticular way, the other is the cause of a man's acting at all ; and though these two causes may occasionally coincide, yet essentially they are always distinct, and generally they are completely different. Thus in producing the ' Walter Press,' the wish to supply the public MODERN DEMOCRACY. 79" demand spoken of did no doubt constitute the inventor's purpose ; but it did not consti- tute bis motive. His motive was not in this wish, but in the reason of his having this wish. Now, that reason, it is just conceivable,, may have been a wholly unselfish desire on his part that whoever wanted 'The Times'' should be able to procure a copy of it, and his motive and his purpose accidentally would in that case coincide. But none the less for that reason would his motive have been distinct from his purpose ; nor could it pos- sibly be expressed in terms of it. The only way to express it would be in terms of his own character — that is to say, the intense and loving solicitude with which the general public had inspired him. We shall not, how- ever, I think, be doing the inventor an injustice if we refuse to credit him with a state of feeling so singular, and if we attri- bute to him as his motive, instead, the desire to make money ; if we say that whilst his purpose was to give something to the pubUc, his motive was to get something out of it. 80 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF Anyhow, whether his motive was this, or whatever it was, it was something which Mr. Spencer does not even so much as hint at: it was an internal tendency to action de- veloped in him by external circumstances ; and it was an exact resultant of these last and of his own character. Nor does this hold good of the inventor only. It holds good equally of all those countless others, without whose labours, as Mr. Spencer says, the ' Walter Press ' would have been impossible. Without motive not one of those could have moved a muscle : they might as well have been inmates of the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. And motive in each case — in the case of every coUier who handles his pickaxe, of every stoker who fires his engine, of every chemist who lifts his crucible — has been the exact resultant of the man's character and of liis circumstances, of the wants he is capable of feeling, and of the means he finds open to him of satis- fying them. Here, then, we have the one final cause, not merely of human labour, but even of human movement ; and yet of this MODERN DE.MOCEACY. 81 cause Mr. Spencer says nothing. Though he may know it as a psychologist, yet he has utterly forgotten it as a sociologist. In this latter character it has never even come into his considerations. What is to be said then ? The very thing I have said already — that that same democratic fallacy which, when once exposed, it seemed difficult to attribute to any intelhgent being, still more to conceive of as the basis of an accepted system, is actually to be found in the reasonings of the very man who, of all others, would be the first, if he detected its presence, to reahse and to de- nounce its enormity. Since, then, the reader sees with his own eyes that such a thinker as Mr. Spencer can be guUty of it, he will find it less hard to bring the truth home to himself that Mr. Bright may be guilty of it also ; and that for one man hke Mr. Bright who may have the vigour to teach it, there may be eager milhons ready to receive and reason from it. Finally, to clench the foregoing arguments, and to make the practical import of them G 82 THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF more vivid still, there remains to be added one thing. In place of the fundamental fallacy of the pseudo-science of the Democrat, we must put the fundamental truth that in a true social science will correspond to it. The pseudo-science starts with the conception of man as an animal, containing in himself a natural tendency to labour. The true science does just the opposite. It starts with the con- ception of man as an animal, containing in himself no tendencies whatsoever, and ex- hibiting them only when acted on by external circumstances. Abstracted from these cir- cumstances, it regards him as hardly animate. It might, perhaps, allow that he would have as much life as a vegetable; he would be conscious of this life also : but so far as power to perform a single action goes, he would be practically dead. He could neither raise an arm, turn his head, nor move a step backwards or forwards. He would be motionless, for he would have no motive. If ever we would arrive at a true scientific knowledge of the human cause of wealth and the progress of MODERN DEMOCRACY. 8S material civilisation, we must start with the conception of man as thus abstracted from his circumstances. We must strip him of every attribute by which we know him as a working creature. "We must regard him as on a par with a cabbage or a blade of asparagus, and as incapable as these of making the least exertion. Even this hardly symbohses suffi- ciently his utter and absolute deadness. Let us conjure up to ourselves the face and the figure of Napoleon ; let us think of the ener- gies .that, wherever he went, he manifested ; and let us ask why these energies never left him ? It was because, wherever he went, he was surrounded by external circumstances. Abstract him from these, and the same breath- ing body becomes as helpless and inactive as. a dead cod's head in a gutter, or a wax doll in a toy-shop. Take, however, this hfeless lump, and place it once more in its own circle of circumstance. In a moment, in the twinkhng of an eye, a host of motives is generated ; the dead thing is ahve again. It is ' in form and motion, how express and admirable! in action, 6 2 84 MODERN DEMOCRACY. how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a God 1 ' Since, then, apart from circumstances man can have no motive, and since apart from motive he has practically no faculties, since he is as incapable of labour as a doll or a dead fish, labour in itself is no more the cause of wealth than Shakespeare's' pen was the cause of his writing ' Hamlet.' The cause is in the motives, of which labour is the outward index. Moreover, motive itself being the resultant of two things — a man's internal character and his external circumstances — the cause of wealth is finally to be sought for in these ; nor will the conditions of its produc- tion ever be understood until in some way or other it is systematically connected with both of them. It is that connection which I say has never yet been perceived ; and it is that connection which the missing science wUJ show us. 85 CHAPTER IV. THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. We have now done with fallacies ; we are beginning our search for truth ; and the first of these truths we have arrived at and laid down already — ^namely, that all labour ia caused by and must be referred to motive, and that motive is the resultant of a man's character and his circumstances. This pro- position is, of course, little more than a truism. The Democrats deny it only by an unintentional implication ; and when once it is plainly stated, they would admit it as much as anybody. It, then, so far as it goes, we start with as proved and settled. Before, however, we can make any positive use of it, we must put it in a fuUer and far more accu- rate form. We must not be content with saying that motive is the cause of labour ; we 86 THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. must add that this causal relationship is of a kind so intimate, that each special manifesta- tion of labour has its special corresponding motive, and that every difference in the one has its corresponding difference in the other ; so that wherever there are various manifesta- tions of labour there must also, to produce them, be a corresponding variety of motives. When, however, the proposition is put into this form, it at once ceases to be a truism ; and for this reason. It may have any one out of several distinct meanings ; and though all wiU admit that one of these meanings must be true, it is impossible offhand to decide which. Whatever decision is made, we shall need proof to guide us in it. First, then, let us see what these alternative meanings are. The cause of their existence is in the com- posite nature of motive, and we can under- stand them only by carefully considering that. We have said already that motive is the resultant of circumstances and character ; but it is requisite now to make our language exacter. We must reflect now that when we THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 87 speak of a man's character we mean not one but two sets of qualities. We not only in- clude in it goodness and badness, selfishness and unselfishness, kindness and cruelty ; but we include in it also wisdom and folly, quick- ness and stupidity, and perhaps even such things as physical endurance and dexterity. In other words, a man's character divides into his desires on the one hand and his capacities on the other ; and between these two we must draw a marked distinction. We must, ac- cordingly, in our revised analysis of motive, say that it is the resultant not of two but of three things — of a man's circumstances, of a man's desires, and of a man's capacities.^ Let us take, for example, a chemist, who, at a high salary, superintends some process in ^ Though I have already touched on the following fact in passing, it will not be amiss to notice it once more here. The above statement, with regard to action as the result of circum- stances, contains no contradiction of the doctrine of free-wiU. The reader, therefore, who for theological or other reasons, is pledged to that doctrine, need regard it with no suspicion. "Whether the will be free or no, motive is equally a sine qud non of action. Free-wiU only operates in the choice of motives offered to it. It is like a player at whist, doing its best with the hand dealt it. It cannot change its cards ; still less can it play without them. 88 THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. a factory ; and let us analyse his motive for doing this exact work. In the first place it is evident that to do it he must have the special capacity for doing it, else he would do not it but some other work. In the second place, the greater his capacity the less hkely would he be to do mere routine work for its own sake ; he must do it, therefore, because he desires to earn his salary. In the third place, it is evident that were this salary not forth- coming, the mere desire to earn it would have no practical effect upon him ; therefore the external circumstances under which, as a fact, he does earn it, are absolutely necessary to make the desire operative, and the operation of the desire is necessary to make him exert his capacities. Let us now suppose that in the same factory our chemist has a brother who is nothing higher than a cinder-sifter, and let us analyse this brother's motive for doing his work also. Just the same facts con- front us. To do his work he must evi- dently have some capacity for doing it ; he THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 89 could not do it if he had no arms, or were a lunatic. It is evident, also, that he does not do it for its own sake — that is to say, from a sentimental love of cinder-sifting ; he does it, therefore, because he desires to earn his wages, and this desire is only operative through the circumstances that enable him to get them. From either of these men take any one of these three things — the capacity, the desire for money, or the circumstances under which money can be gained, and his motive disappears and his labour becomes impossible : whilst if, keeping all of them, we simply change the first, we shall have a motive stiU ; but it will be a difierent one, and it will produce some difierent laboiir. We have not, however, put the whole of the case yet. The labour of the chemist and the labour of the cinder-sifter are different kinds of labour as it is. Therefore, as it is, there must somewhere be a corresponding difference in their motives. The question is, where does this difference lie? — ^in their capacities, in their desires, or in their circumstances? or so THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. does it lie more or less in aU of these ? Does it lie in the fact that one is cleverer than the other, that one is more ambitious than the other, or that one is better paid than the other ? Or does it lie in the fact that he is aU of these things at once ? This, then, is the point that we now have to elucidate. When we say that wherever there are various manifestations of labour, there must to produce them be a corresponding vari- ety of motives, we must explain exactly in mo- tive what elements we are declaring variable. Let us go back to our chemist and our cinder-sifter, whose labours may stand as types of the varieties of labour generally. They have been born of the same parents, they have been brought up together, and their lives in early childhood must have been at least approximately similar. The present difference in their functions has been only developed gradually. What has been the cause of it ? Let us go through the various suppositions that are possible. It is possible, then, that the chemist and the cinder-sifter may THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 91 have begun life both with equal capacities, and have seen equally that by developing them they would increase the money value of their labour ; but the cinder-sifter may have been so idle, that the trouble of self-development has more than counterbalanced his .desire for higher wages ; he is therefore fitted only for the simplest form of labour, and has to rest content with what wages he can get for it. i3econdly, it is possible that both brothers may have been equally industrious, and equally resolved to make their labour valuable ; but they may not both of them have had equal •capacities ; and though each has done his best yet the overt results are different. Both tried to be chemists, but only one has succeeded. Thus the difference of motive, corresponding to the difference in their labours, would in the first case be a difference in their desires, in the second a difference in their capacities ; and in both a difference in external circum- stances ; for in both cases we have presumed this fact, that the rate of payment differs with the kind of labour. Finally we may suppose 92 THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. a tKird case ; we may suppose that the rate of payment is constant. The cinder-sifter is paid as much as the chemist ; the chemist is paid no more than the cinder-sifter. Both, however, let us remember, are paid something ; for with- out that neither would labour at all. In this case, then, exiternal circumstances are still as much as ever an element in both motives ; but they cease any longer to be an element in their difference. The difference lies wholly in the two men's characters. The chemist is a chemist simply because he likes chemistry, and has had the perseverance and talent to become a proficient in the science. The cinder- sifter is a cinder-sifter for no other reason than that he prefers or is fitted for no higher em- ployment, and he therefore accepts the simplest that the occasion offers him. Now, if we regard our pair of brothers as individuals, not as types, the difference in their labour might be accounted for on any one of these three suppositions. It is evident that it might be on either of the two first ; it is also possible that it might be upon the third. A THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 93 pair of brothers, that is, may quite possibly " have existed, of whom one, though he gained not an extra shilling by his exertions, may, from instinctive love of science, have laboriously made himself a chemist, and have been willing -to give his skilled labour to a manufacturer for wages no higher than those of the unskilled •cinder-sifter. But we are not now dealing with exceptional cases, and if this last case be •exceptional it has nothing to do with us. The pair of brothers for us have been types, not individuals. They have represented the general rule, and emphatically not any exception to it. The question, therefore, if we regard them thus as typical, is not what might be the analysis of their respective motives, but what, as a matter of fact, is; and this is a question that can be answered in one way only — not by imagin- ing what is possible, but by observing what is actual ; by a wide observation of men's lives as they are and have been. Having now shown, therefore, the alterna- tive ways in which, as the cause of various labour, motive conceivably mi^Ai vary, let us go 94 THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. on to inquire in which of these, we must say- that actually, as a general rule, it does. I shall state our conclusion first, we will consider its proofs afterwards. When it is said, then, that whenever there are various manifestations of labour, there must be also a corresponding variety of motives, what it is meant to say with regard to motive is this : In the first place there is a variety always in the capacities of the men motived, and in the second place there then is a variety usually in their desires also. These two propositions, however, it is hardly worth insisting on ; they are involved in any view of the case, and will be denied by nobody. The proposition to be proved and defended refers to the third element, that of ex- ternal circumstances, and upon it, and it alone, does the real discussion hinge. This proposi- tion is, that unless in the case of each different labour, the external circumstances of the labourers were different also, the two other dif- ferences would be practically non-existent ', the difference in their desires would be inoperative, that in their capacities would be undeveloped. THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 9& In other words, various as are men's desires- and capacities naturally, yet if there were no corresponding variety in the external good things that can be gained by men — if talent and ambition commanded no larger share of these than a minimum which rewarded the lowest idleness and stupidity, all men practi- cally would be equally idle and stupid, and their natural differences might as well have been non-existent. A Columbus in that case would do no more than a common cabin-boy, and if we cared to glance again at the pair of brothers we were speaking of, we might find both of them cinder-sifters, but we should not find either of them a chemist. The world, in fact, would be a Hving graveyard of mute inglorious Miltons, and of Oromwells who had done nothing for their country. Let me put this in a way more formally logical. We speak of a man being born with great natural capacities ; but before these capacities can have any effect upon the work he does, the man himself must take the trouble to develop them. Now, to do this is never an 96 THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. easy task, and it is open to the man to per- form it thoroughly, partially, or not at all. A man's natural capacities are .therefore the limit, not of how little he wiU be able to do, but of how much. They merely prevent him exceeding a certain limit ; they do not in the least prevent his falhng short of it. Within limits, then, his capacities practically are just so much as he has himself chosen to make them. Now, upon what does his choice in this matter depend ? It depends on his desire to gain some external advantages ; and this desire, in its turn, depends for its force to move him on the fact that these advantages could be gained by his self-development, and gained more or less completely in proportion to its completeness ; whilst without this self-de- velopment they could not be gained at aU. Our set of propositions will accordingly stand as follows : Men's capacities are practically unequal, simply because they develop their own potential inequalities ; they only develop their potential inequalities because they desire to place themselves in unequal external cir- THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 97. cumstances ; and this desire has this efiect on them only because the condition of society is such that the unequal circumstances are attainable. Thus, in the various motives that corre- spond to various labours, all the three ele- ments which compose a motive are variable. That the two first are so, however, is a fact, as we have seen already, which in itself no one doubts ; we may therefore presume, without restating it. All we want to insist on is that part of the proposition, which at present we cannot presume — about which people at pre- sent do doubt, and which still has to be proved to them ; and having now seen what that part is, we may state the doctrine which I propose to prove, in this form. Those personal in- equaUties, which are admitted on all hands to be involved in the difference between the motives of different labours, are themselves creatures of unequal external circumstances, and for practical purposes would have no existence without them. Inequality, there^ fore, in external circumstances, or social in- H 98 THE MISSIIfG SUBSTITUTE. equality, which is simply the same thing, is the ultimate cause, not indeed of the lowest fomi of labour, for we shall liave that in any case, but of every form of it which rises above the lowest. In stating this proposition I do not con- ceive for a moment that it contains anything itself that will commend it to our accept- ance. UnUke certain others, it does not need only to be stated for our common sense at once to perceive the truth of it. It is no more in harmony with any apparent fitness of things than the proposition that milk boils at a higher temperature than water, or that bismuth melts at a lower temperature than lead. On the contrary, if it provoke any im- mediate judgment at aU, it is far more likely to be thought false than true ; for there are, as a fact, a number of counter-arguments, which at a hasty glance are certain to seem fatal to it. Its truth can be estabhshed only by an appeal to external facts, and by comparing it with them, not with our own reflections. Hastily, by fits and starts, without any system, or per- THE MISSING SUBSTITUTE. 99 ception that there can be a system, such a comparison has often been made already ; but no one has ever itiade it as a special and separate study, or has ever distinguished clearly the order of facts involved in it. This is the reason why, as I have said already, there are endless opinions on the matter, but abso- lutely no knowledge ; why on the side of the Democrats there is nothing but a false science, and on the side of the Conservatives no science at all. By a true method of inquiry all this might be changed ; and it is this method which I venture to trust I may now be the means of initiating. H 2 100 THE SCIEIfCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. CHAPTER V. THE SCIENCE OP HUMAN CHARACTER. We are here at last on the threshold of the missing science ; and we need not now look far to distinguish its scope and subject-matter. The general proposition we are invoking its aid to estabhsh asserts a permanent relationship to exist between two things — human character and social inequahty. Now this inequality, whatever its first origin (that is a question we shall touch upon by-and-by), in its present development not only acts upon human cha- racter, but is itself produced by this very thing it acts upon, just as a fire may be fed by the hands which it keeps from freezing. Our proposition therefore primarily is a proposition about human character ; and if we state it (which we do) as a general and a permanent truth, and declare that we can prove it by THE SCIENCE OF HUJLAN CHARACTEE. 101 strict scientific methods, we must mean that human character can be made the subject of a science. We must mean that, ia spite of all its countless varieties, it yet presents to us certain phenomena so uniform, that it "will be possible to state them as laws of human nature, and to reason from them afterwards as fixed and established principles. This in fact is pre- cisely what I do mean. The missing science is a science of human character. This statement, however, will never explain itself. To convey to the reader a true concep- tion of my meaning, we require a far fuller and far more minute description of it, and that for two reasons. Compared with the sciences that are now recognised as existing, the science I speak of is closely alhed to several ; and yet at the same time it is wholly distinct from any. It is hke a bull's-eye in a target, which has marks of ball all round it ; which by one or two balls has been even grazed perhaps ; but which never by any- chance has been hit full. We have there- fore, with regard to it, to prove two oppo- 102 THE SCIENCE OP HUMAN CHAEACTEK. site things, first that it can exist, and secondly that it does not exist — first that its possibility- is not a dream, secondly that its existence is not yet a reality. Such being the case, our best way of approaching it will be by reference to those writers who have already come most near to it. These are Buckle and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Let us turn first to the former. The science Buckle sought to establish he called the Science of History, and it was to have for its aim, as he himself expressed it, the discovery of' the 'principles which govern the character and the destiny of nations.' That such a science is at least conceivably possible, must, he argued, be plain to everyone who assents to the following propositions : — ' That when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the result of some antecedents ; and that therefore if we are acquainted with the whole of the antecedents and with all the laws of their movements, we could with unerring cer- tainty predict the whole of their immediate THE SCIENCE OP HUMAN CHARACTER. 103 results' If we believe thus much, he said, we must see that the science is a possible thing conceivably ; and if we will only realise what materials there are ready for us, we shall see also that it is a possible thing practically. The materials in question he discusses at great length, and they are many in kind and number ; but there is one class upon which he dwells especially, and which alone, he says, gives the others their scientific significance. This is the class of material supphed to us by statistics. Statistics, he points out, afford a new kind of evidence ; and they have put us in possession of a new order of facts. They show us something, he says, which we might else have dreamt about, but could never have hoped to prove — the sameness of human con- duct when under the same circumstances ; and they thus at once supply us with one general truth to begin upon. He illustrates this in a number of curious ways, which reveal the sameness spoken of, in even the smallest matters. Thus there is a starthng regularity every year in the number of letters 104 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHABACTEE. posted without, any direction. Marriages and murders recur in the same way ; so does the proportion between male and female births. But the fact he dwells on as most striking of all, and which he regards as explaining and proving his point most clearly, is this same regularity when found in the case of suicide. ' Among public and registered crimes,' he writes, ' there is none which seems so completely depen- dent on the individual as suicide. . . . It may therefore very naturally he thought impracticable to refer it to general principles, or to detect any- thing like regularity in an offence which is so eccentric, so solitary, so impossible to control by legislation, and which the most vigilant police can do nothing to diminish. . . . These being the peculiarities of this singular crime, it is surely an astonishing fact that all the evidence we possess respecting it points to one great con- clusion. . . . that suicide is merely the product of the general condition of society. . . . In a given state of society, a given number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law ; and the special question as to who THE SCIENCE OF HtMAN CHARACTER. 105 shall commit the crime, depends, of course, upon special laws ; which, however, in their larger action, must obey the larger social law to which they are all subordinate.' Buckle tliien formally applies this statement not to crimes only, but to all human actions. By a similar train of evidence he declares we can prove all of them to be simply ' part,' as he puts it,. ' of one vast scheme of universal order ' ; and to be ' deter- mined, not by the temper and wishes of indi- viduals, but by large general facts over which individuals can exercise no authority.' Such was the first great inference, and such was the method of observation, on which Buckle sought to base the study of the science of history. Now, the chief point to notice is the nature of this method, and the scientific principle which he expressly declares to be involved in it. The principle is that no fact or event of any kind can be understood by studying a single instance of its occurrence. ' Everything,' he writes, ' that we at present know has been ascertained by studying phenomena, from which all casual 106 THE SCIENCE OF HUilAN CHARACTER. disturbances having been removed, the law re- mains a conspicuous residue. And this can only be done by observations so numerous as to eliminate the disturbances, or else by experiments 30 delicate as to isolate the phenomena. One of these conditions is essential to all inductive ■science.' But it is plain, he says, that when a man performs any action — for instance, when he marries — we can neither isolate his feehng.s nor make the required number of observations on them. Hence, says jBuckle, the true cause of a marriage is never to be sought for in the * temper and wishes ' of the bridegroom, for these are things we cannot treat scientifically ; but it is to be sought for instead in certain * large general facts ' which we can. Such is the outhne of the argument in Buckle's opening chapters, and not only is it full of just and ingenious reasoning, but it is a luminous exposition of the only true method to be followed in the inquiry spoken of. We encounter, however, one singular omission, and that is in the materials to which he says this method is to be apphed. Let us return to the passage in which he THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 107 speaks of suicide. Seemingly, he says, there is no act ever performed by man which is ' so completely dependent on the individual ' who performs it. But that is only seeming ; what it is really dependant on is ' the general con- dition of society : ' consequently the facts in the case, which the man of science must study, are not facts in the lives of individual suicides, but the number of such men in recurring periods, and the relation of this number to the general conditions in question. Let us attend, however, to the following obvious considerations. It may be quite true — indeed we may say it certainly is true — that between the particular act and the general social conditions there does exist the strict relation which he says there does. But if this be so, why is it ? The relation exists in virtue of a chain of events or facts, the last link in which is the private character of the individual. Buckle himself lays it down as the very foundation of his science, that ' when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive.' Indeed, in the special case of suicide he elaborately 108 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTBK. expands the statement. He points out at length what a complex internal process on the part of the agent is involved in the com- mission of the act, what a nice balancing of motive, what a conflict of thought and passion. This being the case, were the agent's character different, it stands to reason that his act would be different also. Even if we were to go no further, he must be a sentient human being ; no social conditions could cause the suicide of a wooden High- lander in a snuff-shop. It is quite plain, however, that we can go much farther than this. Given a bold man instead of a timid one, a sanguine man instead of a phlegmatic one, and we might see resulting from the very same social conditions, not suicide, but a fresh start in hfe. Action, then, is so in- separable from the character. of the agent — and Buckle himself would be the first to admit this — that the latter may be looked on simply as the reverse side of the former. When, therefore, it is maintained that every human action is really the effect of general THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 109 social circumstances, we must not say only tliat the circumstances are the cause of the action, but that they are the cause also of the character of which that action is the resultant ; and when it is said that the regu- larity of action is simply a reflex of the regularity of circumstances, we must mean that there is a constant and uniform rela- tionship between circumstances and the de- velopment of character. But this is pos- sible only on one obvious supposition, that there is a uniformity in the development of human character itself ; and that however it varies, it varies according to law, just as surely as the circumstances which are the cause of its variation. Let us take, for instance, the case of a vast mob of enthusiasts, inspired like one man, with a single purpose, such as taking the BastUle, we wiU say, or destroying the Hyde Park railings. Now it is plain that no member of either of the mobs in question could completely explain his part in it, by any personal confessions of his own. Events 110 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHABACTER. and circumstances are involved in each case, which may be traced out by the historian, but which are invisible and unknown to the actors. But there are two points to remem- ber. A mob collects and acts, Buckle tells us, owing to certain remote causes outside the lives of its members, and in obedience to some general law. We may freely admit that. But in the first place, be the law never so general, and the causes never so re- mote, the law exists, and the effect follows the causes, only in virtue of each mobsman being a man of certain character. In a mob of twenty thousand men there are twenty thou- sand characters, twenty thousand sets of motives working ; and the conduct of the mob is the exact resultant of these. We are accustomed, it is true, to ignore this fact in language. We speak of a mob as though it were reaUy a single animal. We say that it got excited, that it was appeased, or that it did this or that. But we speak thus for the sake of convenience only. What we mean is, that twenty thousand men got excited at the same moment and by the same thing, or that THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. Ill they were appeased at the same moment^ or by the same thing, or that they did this or that in concert. Now here comes, the grand point to remember. No two men in this crowd have had exactly the same histories, or have exactly the same cha- racters ; and the character therefore is dif- ferent of each of our twenty thousand mobs- men. In spite, however, of all these differ- ences, we have, on the occasion we speak of^ complete unanimity of action. To what theu can this be due ? It must be due to the fact that our supposed twenty thousand characters- have, in spite of their differences, certain points- of agreement ; and it is only through these that their common action is possible. Let us- consider the point further. Of all these thou- sands of men, each has his own separate temperament, his own separate interests. The passions that direct him as a mobsman may be quite dormant in private Hfe ; and any twa of the number under ordinary circumstances might seem contrasted rather than similar characters ; they might .indeed be so. But when they all act together for some common 112 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTER. purpose, all these countless differences, for a given hour or two, have disappeared ; they have cancelled out, as it were, and left nothing but the points of agreement, and the mob virtually has become a single organism, whose strength and weakness is as some multiple of its parts. Here then are the exact conditions re- quired for scientific observation. The field in this special case, no doubt, is very hmited ; for one special mob, however numerous it may be, represents but a small section of the human race at large. None the less it affords us a clear and complete example of how certain facts of character are susceptible of scientific observation. It exhibits to us the action not of any character in particular, but of the character that is common to thousands of men generally, and that alone connects their actions with some common social cause. And thus the •conditions that Buckle demands are fulfilled : *■ all casual disturbances have been eliminated,' and ' the law remains a conspicuous residue ' ; or at least the facts remain out of which a law might be formulated. THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTEE. 113 r This is the point, however, that Buckle has. failed to notice. He was so busy in ex- posing a falsehood, that he entirely overlooked the truth which ought to have replaced it. His contention, as we have seen, was tlxat when dealing with biographical details, such as a man's conscious emotions on any given occa- sion, we can neither ' isolate the phenomena ' nor ' eliminate the casual disturbances ' ; and we therefore cannot rise to any scientific generali- sation. And this is of course true : there can be no science of any single character. But if there is one thing that Buckle's argument proves, and that his whole position requires, it is that though there can be no science of any character in particular, there can be a science of the human character in general. I now pass from Buckle to Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose arguments still more directly point to the same conclusion, and who yet fails equally to draw that conclusion himsfelf. In the volume I have already quoted from. The Study of Sociology, just as Buckle contended there could be a science of' history, so Mr, I 114 THE SCIENCE OP HUMAN" CHARACTER. Spencer contends that there can be a science of society ; and the result of its study will be, he says, to show us ' what ts desirable, what is practicable, what is Utopian,' with regard to social progress. The following extracts will serve to explain his meaning. ' That the pro- perties of the units,' he writes, ' determine the properties of the whole they make up, evidently holds of societies, as of other things .... Ig- noring for a\ moment the special traits of races and individuals, observe the traits common to members of the species at large-; and consider how these must affect their relations when associated. They have all need for food. . . . To all of them exertion is a physiological exercise. . . . They are all of them liable to bodily injury. . . . and to continual pains of positive and negative kinds,' and so on. It is plain then, he argues (I proceed with his own words), ' that from these individual qualities must result certain qualities in an assemblage of individuals . . . and these assemblages will differ in their charac- ters in proportion as the component individuals of the one differ from, those of the other.' Now THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTEK 115 all this, says Mr. Spencer, ' is almost a truism,' and he lays it down as something we may at once start with accepting. Such being the case, he continues, ' it cannot be denied that in every community there is a group of phenomena growing naturally out of the phenomena pre- sented by its members — a set of properties in the aggregate determined by the sets of properties in the units ; and thus the relation of the two sets forms the subject matter of a science.'^ Now hence it might seem that we were about at once to be led up to the very science I am myself speaking of. It might , seem that Mr. Spencer had covered the ground already. And when we consider a few of the illustra- tions by which he supports the above position, we shall hardly be able to doubt that such is indeed the case. ' If he writes, ' in crossing a street, a man sees a carriage coming upon him, you may safely assert that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand he will get out of the way. If, being pressed to catch a train, he knows that by one route it is a mile to 1 Study of Sociology, pp. 51, 53. I 2 116 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTER. the station, and by another two miles, you may conclude with considerable confidence that he will take the one-mile route.' ^ Further, he reminds us how it is implied in all repressive legisla- tion, ' that the desire to avoid punishment will so act on the average man as to produce an average foreseen result' Similarly, he con- tinues, it must be held ' that on the average of men the desire to get the greatest return for labour, the desire to rise into a higher rank of life, the desire to gain applause, and so forth, will each of them produce an average result also.' And he finally concludes by saying, ' that to hold all this is to hold that there can he pre- vision of social phenomena, and therefore social science.' Surely one might think nothing could be more clear than this. The science described thus must not only, like Buckle's, point to a science of character, but it can be nothing more or less than the science of character itself. Such would be naturally our con- clusion from the extracts above quoted ; but ' Study of Sociology, p. 38. THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 117 if we foUow Mr. Spencer further we shall see that it would be a wholly wrong one. The science of character he does indeed touch upon ; but he does this as though he hardly knew what he was doing. Though he touches it he does not grasp it ; though he sees it he does not recognise it. Never wholly out of contact with it,. he is yet always shding off it as though it were an incHned surface. Not once does he fasten on it, as the real centre of the question ; and he practically misses it quite as much as Buckle did. Let us see how this is. He begins his proof that some science of action is possible by citing certain cases in which action is plainly uniform ; and the generaUsations with regard to these which he gives as specimens, one at first conceives he is offering us as frag- ments of that science itself Of such an im- pression, however, he very quickly disabuses us. The generahsations of that science, when once he really brings us to them, are found to deal with facts of a wholly different order. Of these too he gives us certain specimens 118 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTEB. in advance, and they at once show thus much clearly to us. ' To make more definite,' he writes, ' the conception of a social science, let me set down a few of the truths indicated. . . . Their aim is simply to convey a clear idea of the nature of sociological truths. Take first,' then, says Mr. Spencer, ' the general fact, that along with social aggregation there always goes some kind of organisation. . . . The evolution of a governmental structure, having some strength and permanence, is the condition under which alone any considerable growth of a society can take place.' This is his first specimen. Let us now pass to his second. ' Along with the evolution of societies in size, there goes evolution of their co-ordinating centres; which having become permanent, presently become more or less complex.' Here, again, is his third. '■Men rise into a state of social, aggregation, only on condition that they relapse into relations of inequality in respect of power, and are made to co-operate as a whole only by the agency of a structure enforcing obedience.' ^ ' /Study of Sociaiogy, p. 60. THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 119 Such then is the class of generalisations to which the social science, as conceived by Mr. Spencer, is to lead us ; and they show us at once that, whatever that science may be, it is not the science of character. They do, how- ever, something far more than this. They show tis, though they do not show Mr. Spencer, that very science of character which he does not recognise, standing hke a ghost by the side of the science which he does, and displaying its diiference all the more clearly by its nearness. Let me put my meaning more plainly. These generalisations we have just quoted of Mr. Spencer's, all deal with the actions, not of units, but of aggregates. So hkewise does his whole social science. It is a set of inductions as to the actions of men in masses, and it deals with these actions solely as related to each other, or else to the con- ditions supplied by external nature. Now the very first truth that Mr. Spencer in this connection insists upon, is that the action of men in masses depends for its uniformity on the character of the individuals that compose 120 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAKACTEE. such masses. Between these two factors, he says, there is a constant and a necessary- relation. This relation, however, he treats in a very singular way. He treats it as a fact to be recognised, not as a fact to be explained ; and having shown that it exists, as he does with great force and clearness, he feels free to draw his conclusions from it, without examin- ing it further. In the following passage he tells us as much, quite plainly. ' Thus recog- nising,' he writes, ' these relations between the phenomena of individual human nature and the phenomena of incorporated human nature, we cannot fail to see that the phenomena of incorporated human nature form the subject- matter of a science.' ^ There is the whole case. What he wants to make us reahse is, not the nature of the relation between these two orders of phenomena, but merely the result of it in producing regularity in the second of them. His whole scientific attention confines itself to these last. From incorporated human nature he never reasons back to individual ' Study of Sociology, p. 59. THE SCIE^X■E OF IIUMAX CHARACTER. 121 human nature ; nor connects his generalis- ations as to the one with corresponding generalisations as to the other. Thus, having told us that ' 111671 rise into a state of social aggregation only on condition that they lapse into relations of inequality in respect of power,' he adds that ' this is a primary common trait in social aggregates, derived from a common trait in their units' ^ But this is all he says. How it is derived, why it is derived, what that common trait in the units is, he does not even dream of inquiring. And yet if the trait in the aggregates be capable of scientific statement, that in the units must be equally capable also. For every generalisation we can make about a mass there must be some corresponding gener- alisation we can make about a man. This, how- ever, Mr. Spencer altogether overlooks. There is another instance which wiU make the case yet clearer. One of the chief present obstacles, he says, to a conception of the social science, is the pre-existence of what he calls ' The Great-Man- Theory,' or the theory according to ' Study of Sodology, p. 60. 122 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. which ' the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.' ^ This, he says, is the theory of the benighted childhood of all of us ; but the moment science examines it, ' it breaks down completely ; ' ' and he goes on to tell us exactly why it breaks down. ' If it be a fact,' he writes, ' that the great man may modify his nation in its structure and its actions, it is also a fact that there must have been those antecedent modifications constituting national progress before he could be evolved. Before he can re-make his society, his society must make him. So that all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief cause in the generations he descended from. If there is to be anything like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.' Verbally, Mr. Spencer's sentence ends there ; but virtually it contains this further concluding clause: — 'It must be sought in the aggregate of conditions, and not in the ' Study of Sociology, p. 30. THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 123 biograpKical details of the great man's life.'^ These last, he has declared a few moments before, are fit for nothing but to tickle an appetite ' not very remotely allied to that of a village gossip.' Now here we have Buckle's exact error repeated. Because of the events of which a great man is the proximate initiator his biography can supply us with no complete explanation, therefore, Mr. Spencer argues, it can supply us with no necessary part of such. This must be sought solely in that ' aggregate of conditions ' he refers to. Surely here is, an astounding mode of reasoning. These two sets of causes seem to him to be mutually exclusive ; he utterly fails ^ Study of Sociology, p. 35. It may be worth the reader's while, as a philosophical curiosity, to examine the passage in Mr. Spencer's volume from which this extract has been made. He will find, if he reads the whole of it, that Mr. Spencer is confusedly combatting two popular ideas at once. He is main- taining that it is idle to study the biographies of great men ; Jirstly, because they do not really cause the great events they seem to cause — they are mere puppets in the hands of other causes behind them ; and secondly, because the events they seem to cause are in reahty not very great after all. It is in- teresting to note the absurdities in which he involves himself when stating this last reason ; and also its complete inconsis- tency with the first. 124 THE SCIENCE OP HUMAN CHAEACTEK. to see that they are in reality complementary. He asks us, as an instance, to consider the case of Csesar. ' Ccesar,' he writes, ' could never have made his conquests without disciplined troops, inheriting their prestige and tactics and organisation from the Romans who went before them.' But he says nothing of the equally obvious fact that the troops would never have made conquests either, unless they had had a Csesar to comma.nd them. "Whatever aggre- gates of conditions Caesar's conquests were caused by, these aggregates of conditions were obhged to operate through Caasar. True, Mr. Spencer will say, but the fact is unimportant, for it was these very conditions that produced Ctesar himself. Now let Mx. Spencer pause, and reflect for a moment on what he means by that. The conditions in question, he means, are distinct from Caesar. Caesar, before he was bom, no doubt, was in them ; he was in their womb, as it were. He was being shaped and fashioned without any consciousness of his own. But as soon as he saw light he became a separate THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTEE. 125 being. What, then, had the aggregate of con- ditions done for him thus far? They had simply sent him into the world a baby, with immense capacities indeed, but capacities un- developed, and which under certain circum- stances might have never been developed at all. What developed them so as to make him the Caesar of history ? Mr. Spencer will again say, the aggregate of conditions surrounding him. But does Mr. Spencer not see that we have now two factors in the case — the one the aggregate of conditions, and the other the conscious Caesar himself ; and that these acted on Caesar in the way they did, only through those motives of which his personal life is the record .P And does he not see that if the events of which Caesar was the ' proximate initiator ' were thus really the result of forces which Caesar did no more than transmit, he could have transmitted these last only be- cause these motives we speak of had been developed and had operated according to certain laws ? Finally, does not Mr. Spencer see that though we can never discover these. 126 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAKACTEE. laws by observing their manifestation in Caesar's character only, yet none the less do these laws exist, and that by studying other characters which have played similar parts to Caesar's, they are at least conceivably ascer- tainable, and susceptible of scientific state- ment ? Surely one might have thought that, with Mr. Spencer's own arguments for guides, this conclusion would be obvious to even the meanest capacity. But what does Mr. Spencer say ? He says that we should discover no such laws whatever, even should ' we read ourselves blind,' as lie puts it, ' over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Frederick the Greedy, and Napoleon the Treacherous.' Let us for a moment hold him to his own examples. It is true that being unversed in the language of philosophic history, I am not certain who Frederick the Greedy and Napo- leon the Treacherous are ; we wUl suppose, how- ever, that the latter is the late French Emperor. Now let Mr. Spencer compare the late French Emperor with Cfesar, and merely note in these two hves the part played by ambition — hoAV.it THE SCIENCE OF HUMATiT CHARACTER. 127 was developed, and the class of actions caused by it. Even these two lives will suggest, if they do not prove, to him, that ambition is produced under certain uniform conditions, and affects action in a certain uniform way ; whilst if he extends his observations from these two lives to those recorded in the other biographies which he ridicules, he will find the foregoing suggestion transformed into a scien- tific certainty. He will in fact be brought back to a truth that he has himself already insisted on, namely, that ' The desire to rise into a higher rank of life has an average effect upon the average man:' only now this truth will have taken an accurate form for him. He will know how the desire is caused, and what the effects are ; and instead of merely seeing that there is plainly some uniformity in them, he will be able to recognise what this unifor- mity is. In other words, he will be able to change his first • statement, which is ' not re- motely allied to that of a village gossip,' into an accurate statement becoming a scientific philosopher. Let him do this and a new light 128 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. will dawn on him. He will see that bio- graphical details, however seemingly trifling, depend for their value on the way in which we look at them ; and that he has hitherto thought them fit but for village gossips, only because he has looked at them in the village gossip's way. Thus far, however, this has altogether escaped him. He - has studied social pheno- mena as though they were an intricate train of clock-work. He has observed the first wheel and he has observed the last ; and he has dis- covered that the movements of these two are connected ; but he has left out of sight the whole intervening machinery, to whose regular action he admits that the connection which he studies must be due : that is to say, he omits the Science of Character. The mere fact, how- ever, that Mr. Spencer omits it is not my point here. All I want to make evident is that, although he omits it, yet his entire system is one long proof of its possibility, and that its scope is defined by the outhnes of the gap which its absence causes. If there be such a THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHABACTER. 129 tKing as a social science, if there be sucli a thing as a science of history, there must be such a thing as a science of biography also — or a ■science, in other words, of the character of the human unit. Buckle shows this ; Mr. ■Spencer shows this ; and though they both of them show it altogether unintentionally, it is for immediate practical purposes the most valuable thing they do show. I shall now follow Mr. Spencer's example, .and illustrate the science by a few specimens 'Of its generalisations. To the first of these Mr. Spencer himself shall help us. 'i/",' he has said, ' in crossing a street, a man sees a ■carriage coming upon him, you may safely ■assert that in nine hundred and ninety-nine ^ases out of a thousand, he will get out of the way.' Now there at once we have a certain general statement, either applied to or derived from a number of biographical details. It is not, however, as it stands a generaUsation of the science of character ; but it is merely a step towards, or else a deduction from, one ; and taken by itself it is wholly without signifi- K 130 TIIK SCIKNCE OP HUMAN CHAEACTEE. cance. The real generalisation it depends upon is something very different. It is that every man so strongly desires to preserve his life, that when it is threatened by circum- stances, he will always act to preserve it. There is a genuine truth belonging to the science of character. It is very simple, and it is all the better for its simplicity. Let us consider its nature carefully. First, then, its subject-matter is not the action of aggregates ; its subject-matter is the action of the single unit. It can instantly be connected with a corresponding truth in the aggregate ; but it is an explanation of that connection ; it is not in itself a statement of it. In itself it is a statement about the unit. Next let us consider its degree of certainty and universality. In the form we have just given it, it has been made to apply to every man. Every man, it was said, desires to preserve his life. That, however, can only be roughly true. Some men commit suicide, some court deatli in battle, and some suffer it for their friends ; nor can we be certain in the case of any individual that he will not some THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 131 day do one of these things himself. Our pro- position as it stands, therefore, is not true uni- versally ; and the moment we apply it, we are at once aware that it expresses not a certainty but only a very strong probability. If we would make it certain, we must put it in a different form. We must not say that, whenever a man's life is threatened, the desire to live will always make him act to preserve it ; but we must say instead that whenever a man does act to preserve it, the cause of his action is "always the desire to live. Now I will ask the reader to consider this point well, for it is not peculiar to the truth we are now touching on, but it is an essential characteristic of all the truths of the science. Those truths are all of them propositions, like this one, with regard to action as related to motive in the individual ; and they all, hke this one, can be put into two forms. They can either begin with the motive, and thence proceed to the action ; or they can begin with the action, and thence go back to the motive. That, however, in itself is not the important K 2 132 THE SCIECCE OP HtitAS CHJIRACTEE. poiiiL The imjKfftaiit point is that, in the famer f:asR, we have amply statements of prohaWitieg — inanetiines strong, often ex- tw a mdj weak ; and that, in the second case, we have statements of virtual certainties. In other words, the slndy of the science of duracter will not oiable ns, except as a pnriiabffi^, to saj that any given man pos- sesses a givoi motive ; or, supposing him to poBsess it now, that he will continae to possess it for the fntme. It cannot show us this of even the motive of selfpreservation. There- &re it cannot show us, except as a proba- faifity, how any spedal man will, as a fact, act in the fhture. !£, however, on the other hand, any specaal action be given us, it <;an show ns, as a certaintj^^ that it was produced by a spedal motive ; and conversely that, if the special motive is wanting, the speaal action is sure to be wantii^ also. This holds good throughout the whole sdenceof character. The" importance of this feet will appear presently. Let us pass first to another ex- ample of it, which I shall take from what THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 133 many will tliink a very iinlikely place — the works of a well-known novelist. ' Emotion,' says George Eliot, "is obstinately irrational: it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy, lives are a set-off against twelve miser- able lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction.' Now, of all the countless readers who have thought these words true, not one perhaps has recognised them as a hard scientific generahsation. Yet such they are ; and, if they be true at all, the truth they embody belongs to a science of character as much as the formula3 of a chemist belong to the science of chemistry, and would be as much in place in a scientific educational handbook. Let the reader reflect and see if this be not so. George Eliot asserts a fact with respect to human emotion. That is evident : but with respect to the human emo- tion of whom ? Not the emotion of John, or Jack, or Mary — of any particular persons, or of any particular group of persons — but the emotion of men generally. Her assertion 134 THE SCIENCE QF HUMAN CHARACTER. either refers to that, or else it refers tb nothing. It is, therefore, a scientific gene- ralisation. Let lis take another example ; it shall be from La Bruyere : ' Love may lead to ■ ambition, but ambition will never return to love.' That may be true, or it may not be true ; but if it be true, in other words, if it be ,not nonsense, it is a scientific gerier£|,lisation also, and it belongs also to the same science of character. Let us take yet another : this one shall be from Shakespeare : — Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong} The samie criticism plainly applies to that. It is a general scientific truth, or it is not a truth at all.^ Now, about these statements there is this point to consider. All three, we have said, are statements of general truths ; ' It may be perhaps worth while to notice that this law of jealousy is paifly referable to some other more general law felative to the influence of fear and desire upon belief. ^ The reader may compare with the above remarks the following words of Buckle-: ' The most accurate investigators of the human mind hitherto have been the poets, particularly Homer and Shakespeare.' THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHARACTER. 135 "but general in wliat way ? The subject of •eacli is affection in one form or another ; and in each it is implied, no doubt, that affection is a common feehng. That is to say, each states by imphcation that, given a man at hazard, he will probably be susceptible of the kind of affection spoken of. But, at least in the case of the love that leads to ambition, this probabiHty is only of a very faint kind ; nor even in the two other cases does it nearly approach a certainty. George Eliot does not .say that everybody feels emotion ; La Bruyere •does not say that everybody falls in love ; .Shakespeare does not say that everybody is made jealous. The generahty of the state- ments does not lie there. As general state- ments they mean nothing more than this : that, given the emotion, given the love, and given the jealousy, emotion, love, and jealousy will act in certain uniform ways. And now I must cite finally one example more. It is already not strange to us. All productive labour that rises above the lowest is always motived by the desire for social 136 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAKACTEK. inequality. This is the . proposition to which I have been slowly re-conducting the reader ;. and I have used the others solely to throw light upon this. Now I have made no attempt as yet to prove this proposition true : it still confronts us utterly unsupported. My sole aim hitherto^ has been, before proving it to be a truth, to explain the kind of truth that I propose to prove it to be. Firstly, it is a truth belonging to an inductive science, and it embodies, as such, not opinions as to particulars, but knowledge as to a permanent principle; and, secondly, whilst this knowledge cannot be apphed to the pre- sent, so strictly as to enable us to predict a man's future actions, it will enable us, suppose a given action predicted, to state as a certainty that a certain cause must produce it. Given the action, it will enable us to reason back to the motive ; and given the absence of the motive, to deny the possibility of the action. In other words, it will afford us no certainty that a hundred years hence there will be any skilled labour at all in the world ; but it will THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN CHAEACTEE. 137 afford us a certainty that if there be any- skilled labour, the desire for social inequality will have been the motive that produced it, and that social inequalities will be existing to make the desire operative. 138 HUMAN CHARACTER AND CHAPTEK VI. HUMAN CHARACTER AND THE DESIRE FOR INEQUALITY. Having thus shown what it is I propose to prove, let us now address ourselves to the proof of it. First, however, let me make it clear to the reader what the proof must con- sist of, for which he will have to look. The proposition to be proved is not like a proposi- tion of EucHd. It cannot be neatly deduced in a brief syllogism from any foregone first principles. We cannot prove it in harbara, or celarent, or bocardo.- The proposition is an induction — a generalisation from an im- mense number of facts ; and it can be proved only by so referring to these, that the reader shall recognise at once the reahty and the force of them. Now in different inductive sciences, this reference has to be made in different ways. In some, the facts are altogether new to the THE DESIKE FOE INEQUALITY. 139 public. They are made known for the first time by some man of science ; and they have to be accepted at first solely on the evidence of his word. Such, for instance, are many of the facts brought forward by Mr. Darwin. But in other cases the facts, in a loose and general way, are for the most part quite familiar ; and then the task of proof consists principally in reminding the reader of things he knows already, in leading him to coiisider them accurately, and to classify them ; and thus, not so much adding to his existing stock of knowledge, as forcing him to put it into shape. This is the form of proof we shall have to look for now. My first step, then, will be to anticipate certain objections, which are sure at starting to bewilder the reader's mind, and to indis- pose it for a calm view of the question. It is sure to be said that the proposition before us attributes all civihsation to the meanest of human vices ; and that it is a piece of cynicism almost too crude to be criticised. Does the desire for inequality give the painter 140 HUMAN CHAKACTEK AND his eye for colour? Does it give the. chemist or the astronomer his diligence and his interest in discovery ? Has man no finer tastes ? Has he no nobler aspirations ? And is theexercise of skiU in itself not a pleasure and a motive to him ? Then again, has he no kindly feel- ings ? And in civilisation, has no part been played by philanthropy ? AH this will be said, and more to the same effect, which the reader may supply as his feehngs or thoughts dictate to him. Now in all this is implied a profound truth. It is a truth that may be expressed in many general forms, one of the most significant being that of the weU-worn text, ' Man does not live by bread alone ; ' and if any cynic denies it, he must be silly as well as cynical. It is, however, not to the point here ; it forms no objection to the proposition now to be examined by us. It. is, on the contrary, quite compatible with it, as we shall see at once if we examine the matter accurately. First then let us consider this. The pro- position in its scope is strictly limited. It THE DESIRE FOR INEQUALITY. 141 does not say that all human activity is motived by the desire for inequality : it says so only of all productive labour, except the lowest. Of other forms of activity it says absolutely nothing. It does not, for instance, say that a man eats because he desires inequahty, or that he goes to the play because he desires inequahty. That, however, is so evident, that it hardly requires to be noted ; and it does not answer what is in the objector's mind. The objector is thinking, not of ac- tions like these, which affect nobody but the agent. He is thinking of actions that affect society at large, and which either raise or lower the quahty of a civilisation ; and amongst these he is perfectly right to recog- nise many with, other motives than the desire for inequality. He commits, however, two mistakes with regard to them. He mistakes the nature of their importance ; and he exag- gerates their number. The latter, indeed, he probably thinks indefinite. Let me correct him in that point first. Of all actions which affect society generally, 142 HUMAX CHAKACTEK AJSD there are four classes only, independent of the desire for inequahty. These are artistic crea- tion, scientific discovery, corporal works of mercy, and the propagation of rehgion.^ This list is exhaustive. Now of these four classes of actions, the last evidently has nothing to do with productive labour at all ; for our present purpose, therefore, we may at once set it aside. Next, with regard to corporal works of mercy, their aim is the distribution of the products of labour, not production itself; it is the decrease of want, not the increase of wealth ; and for our present purpose we may set them aside also. All we need deal with are the two first — artistic creation and scientific discovery. Between these and productive labour there is, no doubt, a real connection. The point is, of what kind ? Let us begin with artistic creation. A ' To this list might be added the activity of the statesman, or the politician ; but hitherto this has been so evidently asso- ciated -with a desu-e for inequality in rank, that it has not seemed right to include it. If there are any cases of which this cannot be said, they may be classed together with actions motived by the philanthropic impulse. THE DESIRE FOR Ilf EQUALITY. 14S picture, or a statue, or, we may add, a work of literature, is in itself an actual piece of wealth ; and it is a piece of wealth producible without a desire for ineqiiality. Any of these things may be produced for the mere pleasure of producing them ; and when they are so produced, then I fully admit we have a genuine exception to the proposition I am seeking to estabhsh. It is, however, the one single exception, and its importance is far less than it seems to be. In the first place works of art, in any case, form but a very small part of the results of productive labour : and, in the second place, though the artistic impulse is at times the only motive for their produc- tion, and is always concerned in it, yet this, as a fact, is by no means what happens gene- rally. Generally there goes along with the ai-tistic impulse a desire for inequality, if not in money, yet in fame — very often in both — and beyond a doubt the finest art in the world has been that produced under this added stunulus. The Greek tragedians wrote for applause, and pubhc prizes ; Shakespeare 144 HUMAN CHABACTER AND wrote in order to gain a living ; Scott wrote in order to build Abbotsford ; Eubens and Turner painted both for fame and fortune. Thus, if we consider artistic creation on the whole, though it affords theoretically a genuine exception to my proposition, yet it is morally rather a confirmation of it. Of scientific discovery we must speak in a different way. The motive here is generally of a far purer kind. Indeed, of all classes of labour, with the exception of the labour of the missionary, that involved in this is appa- rently the least self-interested. A watcher of the skies, WJien some new planet swims into his ken may be well supposed to find in that moment a reward sufficient to account for his pains in arriving at it ; and most sciences would yield us similar illustrations. There is another fact that throws yet more Ught on the matter. Men of science, as a rule, neither seek nor make fortunes. Neither the flowers of fashion nor the fruits of rank are offered to them. They neither shine, nor aspire to shine, in the THE DESIRE FOK INEQUALITY. 145 arena of social life ; indeed, a savant, to many people, seems but another word for a recluse. Plain living ami high thinking has been, as a rule, their real as well as their nominal motto ; and tlie career and the position that is most common amongst them seems a conchisive proof as to the motive of their special activity. It is the love of truth for its own sake ; it is not the desire for inequahty. Now, granting all this to the fuU, what will be its bearing on our view of produc- tive labour? Productive labour, for many of its extraordinary advances, depends, as we aU know, upon pure scientific discovery. Let us give that fact its fuU weight and signifi- cance ; but, having done so, let us proceed to observe this. Pure scientific discovery in itself is not productive labour. It is, on the contrary, wholly unconnected with it ; it is not even in the region where such labour operates. The truths arrived at by it, as ap- prehended by the mere seekers for truth, are Hke powerful spirits, secluded in a distant L 146 HUMAN CHAKACTEE AND star ; and so far as they affect manufactures or manufacturing processes, they might just as well have never been discovered at all. Before they can be applied to these practical purposes, they have to be mastered by a new class of men altogether, who value them not ■for themselves, but solely for the uses they can be put to. Before, then, the truths of science can be connected with productive labour, they must pass out of the hands of those who originally discovered theru ; and they must be made over to men who, what- ever may be their motives in acquiring them, have some motive evidently beyond the scientific impulse. Indeed, this might really be shown by a much briefer argument. In so far as a man of science pursues scientific truth for its own sake, he does not pursue it for the sake of applying it to manufactures ; and in so far as he does not apply it to manufactures, he is himself unconnected with the operations of productive labour. Accordingly, though we may grant the utmost that could be urged by any objector THE DESIEE FOR INEQUALITY. 147 — though we may grant that scientific dis- covery is one of the chief agents in progress, and that it is yet not motived by any desire for inequahty, its case is no disproof of my proposition about productive labour. Indeed, if we may proceed to one or two farther reflections, it will be found to be morally a confirmation of it, equally with the case of art. What I mean is this. In spite of the modest hfe characteristic of the scientific student, in spite of the absence in it of struggle for place or wealth — or perhaps more properly I might say because of this absence — ^we can clearly detect marks in it, as on a white sheet of paper, of a tendency in proportion as exceptional power is felt not only to use this power, but to claim a position corresponding to it. In the first place, then, it can hardly be doubted that every scientific discoverer when on the traces of a great truth, feels not only anxious that this truth should be dis- covered, but that he, out of aU others, should be the person who discovered it. This anxiety, however, would be not worth mentioning if L 2 148 HUMAN CHAEACTER AM) its object were merely an inward sense of achievement ; but it can be seen to be more than that, by a very simple observation. Let a man of science who has made some great discovery have this discovery claimed for an inferior and later rival, and his indignation will afford a singular revelation to us. He will feel, and he will feel very rightly, that he has been defrauded of an honour that was due to him ; and though he may not have thought of it until he discovers it to be withheld, the value he has unconsciously put on it will be revealed to us by his anger at its loss. We see the same thing, too, under a slightly different aspect, in the love that men of science form for their own opinions ; in the marked acerbity with which they often repel attacks on them ; and still more in the praise they command from every one when frankly, and with a good grace, they acknowledge them- selves in error. If a man, in the pursuit of any particular truth, was really motived by nothing but the desire that this truth should be discovered, he would care as little whether THE DESIEE FOE IlfEQUALITY. 149 he were himself thought to have discovered it, as whether he or the link-man were thought to have discovered the hansom that he was anxiously waiting for to take him home from a party ; and he would be as httle disinclined to withdraw from and acknowledge an error, as he would be to withdraw from a house if he had by chance entered the wrong one. It will thus be seen that, even with the scientific impulse, a desire for inequality of some sort can hardly fail to associate itself. But we must not end here. The same thing, though in a more modified way, may be said of the religious and the philanthropic im- pulse also. Often, it cannot be doubted, and in more cases than we shall ever be able to number, both these impulses do their work singly, and singly produce fives of continued labour and sacrifice. But such is the constitu- tion of the human character that the desire for inequality is not far ofi" even here. The most devoted labourers in the cause of refigion have many of them notoriously yielded to it, and all 150 HUMAN CHAEACTER AND have, been liable to its influence. Once let piety have given a man power, and it is the highest praise we can award him to say that he has not used it to raise himself. Whilst as to philanthropy, we can all of us bear witness, that the warning is not superfluous against doing good that we may be admired for it. I have advanced, I believe, nothing in the above remarks that, when looked at candidly, will be for a moment denied by any one ; and they can hardly have failed, in some degree, to remove the objections that they are aimed against. I conceive, however, that their work will have been very far from complete ; and that in the minds of those who are behevers in human goodness, there will stiU remain a misgiving. It may be said that, instead of limiting the cynical proposition with which I started, I have, on the contrary, done httle else but extend it. I have not only attributed all productive labour to a motive no higher than the commonest kind of covetousness, but I have left no form of useful action whatever free from the same, or at least a similar taint. THE DESIEE FOR I^^EQUALITY. 151 In a word, I have passed a censure on human nature generally, which, however I may explain it away, common sense is insulted by. This impression, then, it yet remains for me to remove. It should not be hard to do so. . Let the reader reflect again on aU that has just been said ; let him note every state- ment that most jars his feelings ; and let him see really what they all come to. Of no form of action at aU except productive labour is the desire for inequality said to be the only, or even the chief, motive. In all the others it is simply said to be an auxiliary one. Now, the point that I am anxious to bring forward is this. When an action is the product of several combined motives, though its moral character is sometimes determined by the lowest of them, this by no means is so always ; and in the cases we are now speaking of the very reverse, as a rule, holds good. Let us begin with that of religion, which seems the most doubtful of them. If we take men of the highest degree of sanctity, who have aimed at reaching that, and whose influence is due to 152 HUMAN CHARACTER AND their having reached it, in such men, doubt- less, a desire for worldly inequahty would be a desire that, if yielded to, would ruin their whole character. But if we take men on a less exalted level, our judgment of them in this matter wiU have to be wholly different. Of them we shall have to say that the desire in question, though in some cases it may turn them into designing and even criminal hypo- crites, may not only leave them, in others, useful and excellent men, bvit may actually be instrumental in making them such. Men of this class are good or bad, sincere or hypo- critical, not according to whether or no this desire is possessed by them, but according to whether it is subservient to their higher desires, or whether their higher desires are subservient to it. A priest or a clergyman may be a good, even a holy, man with the sincerest zeal for the souls that have been committed to him, and he may yet have a strong ambition to become a bishop or a cardinal. Indeed, such an ambition may afford the clearest proof of his goodness, if he THE DESIRE FOR INEQUALITY. 15S refuses to approach the object of it, except through the path of duty ; and if the pleasure he anticipates from the sense of personal power would vanish unless that power was to be used for sacred purposes. StUl, however, I admit fully that in the rehgious Hfe this type of character is not the highest, and that with the highest type the desire for inequality is incompatible. But this holds good of the religious hfe only ; or in a very shght degree, perhaps, of the philan- thropic also. To the life of art and science it has no apphcation at all. A man's power of artistic creation, a man's hunger for scien- tific truth, though it may exist and operate without the desire for inequality, need yet necessarily be in no way diminished by the presence of it. If the inequahty desired be simply a material one ; if it be one simply of titular rank or riches — in other words, if it be extraneous to the means employed to arrive at it — then, accidentally, its effect may be deleterious. But if it be an inequality, mainly of fajne and honour ; if it consists in the 154 HUMAK CHAEACTEE AKD man's being recognised for what he really is, and since he is greater than other men, being acknowledged by other men to be so, then the desire for inequahty need be a slur neither on the artist nor the philosopher ; nor in asserting its presence do we, in the smallest degree, derogate from the power and spontaneity of the artistic or scientific impulses. Eather, indeed, do we the contrary. "We attribute to these impulses a sign of strength, not of weak- ness. If we take a wide survey of men of the highest genius, and if we set apart certain exceptional cases, we may lay it down as a broad general rule that the desire for in- equality in fame, even if it does not initiate artistic creation, or the pursuit of philosophic truth, is yet developed pari passu with them. There can be the desire for inequality in fame without the power of achieving it ; there can be the power of achieving it also, without the desire of doing so ; but in the latter case, almost as surely as in the former, there will be no power exercised. To this, as I have said already, there are, no doubt, exceptions ; but THE DESIRE FOR INEQUALITY. 155 that genius without ambition is not naturally self-developing, can be proved clearly by three orders of cases : first, by those in which it has lain dormant, until ambition has been excited by some external stimulus ; secondly, by those in which the love of pleasure has checked it ; and thirdly, by those (such was the case of Chatterton) in which non-recognition has nipped it. The exceptions to this, I beheve myself, to be not numerous ; but if any one thinks otherwise I am not concerned to dispute the point. I am here insisting simply on the broad general truth that, not only as a rule, in men of the highest genius, is the artistic or scientific impulse allied with a desire for inequality of some sort, but that this alliance need have nothing mean or degrading in it. Nor is that all. I would have the reader reahse more than that. I would have him reahse that so far from being necessarily degrading, it is, on the contrary, normally right and healthy. It is the just ex- pectation of aU great artists and philosophers that they shall receive that honour which only 156 HUMAN CHAEACTER AND ignorance can refuse, and which only envy- can grudge them ; and if the desire for this due inequahty is in such men ever mean and ridiculous, it is not because they possess it, but because they pretend that they do not. If all this be taken into consideration, the objections -which I set out with anticipating will lose at once the greater part of their force. Even yet, however, I do not conceive that the objector will have been completely silenced. He -will say, perhaps, that I have shpped away from the original question altogether ; that I have been talking latterly but of inequahty in personal fame ; and that this is a thing whoUy different from what is usually meant by social inequahty. If he says this, I shall admit him to be entirely right ; but I shall ask him to again attend to a fact I have already noticed, namely, that artistic creation is but a small part, and scientific discovery no part, of what is usually meant by productive labour. And from this I shall now proceed to a very important consideration. The inequahty, we say, desired by the artist THE DESIRE FOB IKEQUALITY. 157 and the man of science, is an inequality in fame ; that desired by the productive labourer is an inequaJity in riches. Now apart from the intrinsic difference apparent in these two, there is this accidental difference also— that the former, as it were, is of the same sub- stance with the work that leads to it ; the latter is quite distinct. The fame of a scientific discoverer is essentially bound up with his discoveries ; but a cotton-spinner's London house is not by any means bound up with his cotton-spinning. The reason of this is obvious. The desired results of the cotton- spinner's labour are in themselves of no interest beyond their homely use ; and what- ever ability may have gone to produce them, they bear in themselves no distinguishable record of it ; they are not given away, so they excite no feehngs of gratitude ; and they thus throw no personal lustre on the character of their manufacturer. They exhibit him to the world neither as a great man, nor as a bene- volent man. And of all other manufactured articles the same holds good, though not 158 HUMAN CHAEACTEE AND always in exactly the same degree. Thus a fine cabinet, a china vase, or a piece of tapestry, suggests certain qualities in its producer, which a piece of cotton does not. These, however, are not by any means great enough' to make their recognition a very dazzhng prize ; and it will be found further that in exact proportion as a manufactured article is useful and of wide consumption, less and less is its producer, in a personal sense, suggested by it. Hence the motive necessary to cause him to produce, becomes more and more entirely dissociated from the product. From these facts we may rise to the following general principle : The kind of inequality by which any labour is motived varies according to the kind of benefit which that labour confers upon society ; and it varies thus. The more wide and more popular is the benefit, the more material is the kind of inequality aimed at ; and the higher and less material is the kind of inequahty aimed at, the less wide and less popular is the benefit. THE DESIRE FOR INEQUALITY. 159 Thus the higher motive produces discoveries, but it does not produce inventions ; it may- lead to the understanding of economic laws, but it will never lead to the establishment of any special trade or manufacture ; it may produce a great architect, but it will never produce a builder. The man who longs for truth unravels the laws of electricity, but it is the man who longs for a fortune who lights Charing-Cross Station with it. And now we may have done with this aspect of the question. Our main propo- sition by this time has been reduced to its true proportions ; it has been stripped of all those fancied implications which might have raised distrust in the sensitive ; and it stands before us in such a condition that the question of its truth may be entertained dispassionately. 160 THE HUMAN CHARACTER AND CHAPTEE Vn. THE HUMAN CHARACTER AND THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. First, then, I shall suggest to the reader an exceedingly simple question. Wealth exists in the world, and it has been produced by men somehow. Why have men produced it ? The answer seems obvious — men have pro- duced it because men have wished to possess it : and that, in some sense or other, certainly must be true. But in giving that answer, what would most people mean by it ? Would they mean that all men have wished to possess wealth — that it is a natural wish in fact, and may be taken for granted in every one ? Or would they mean that it is an exceptional wish, not natural at aU, and only acquired under' certain special circumstances ? To most people it will seem absurd to ask. Of course they will THE DESIEE FOR WEALTH. 161 say, all men wish for wealth, though unfortu- nately only a few can get it. Such, as we know, is the loose view current about the matter. I shall therefore ask the reader to consider the following imaginary case. Let him imagine a race of unwarlike savages, living on an enchanted island, where loaves and roast mutton grew upon all the trees, and where the chmate was so dehghtful that there was need neither for roof nor cloth- ing. Here one might think would be the ideal cradle of wealth. Those necessaries which in couhtries at present civihsed the labourer has to expend aU his powers in secur- ing, the people here possess without any labour at all. They start, as it were, with their wages a free gift to them. Their entire time is their own ; if they labour at aU, it will not be to sustain life, but to embeUish it ; and whatever the results of any man's labour may be, there is no reason why he should not enjoy the whole of them. Ex hypothesi no one can be in want ; ex hypothesi also, anybody might be in luxury. Would not such conditions fulfil M 162 THE HUMAN CHAKACTEE AND the very dream of the Democrat ? Would not wealth, there, exist and be divided as it ought to be ? One might think so at first ; but what would be the case really ? Supposing our islanders to be men like all other men, under such conditions wealth would be utterly unproducible. Conditions very similar ac- tually do exist ; and under these it actually is unproducible. As to this, we can speak with the utmost confidence. What is the reason of it ? The reason is plain. We have said that our islanders are savages ; that is, they possess, to start with, none of the wants and therefore none of the motives that are caused by the sight or by the enjoyment of manufactured products of civilisation. They are motived by those wants only which are inseparable from all animal Ufe — the want to eat, and the want to reproduce their species. Thus though they can satisfy both these with next to no labour, and though they are free in con- sequence to employ a life-long leisure as it pleases them there is one way in which they THE DESIRE FOR -WEALTH. 163 are never pleased to employ it, and that is in the production of luxuries. Productive labour is impossible to them. They are no more capable of it than they would be if they had neither hands nor muscles. Their island is rich, we wiU suppose, in coal and in aU metals, but they sink no shafts, build no furnaces, smelt no iron. And why ? They know nothing of what the use of coal and iron could do for them. They have never seen wealth, therefore they are unable to desire wealth ; in the absence of desire there is no motive ; and in the absence of motive there is no action, just as surely as in the absence of fire not a child's work will be done by the most gigantic steam-engine. A man who is always sure of sufficient to eat, who has no need either for shelter or clothing, who has neither seen nor heard of wealth, nor dreamed of the attractions it might hold out to him ; such a man will be incapable of doing anything either to enrich or raise himself ; and so will a nation of such men. Let us suppose, however, that a stranger M 2 164 THE HUMAIf CHABACTER ASD arrives at our island — a man with the tastes and habits of civihsation ; and that he contrives to possess himself, by some means or other, of all the loaves and of aU the legs of mutton. Let us suppose, further, that he •withdraws them for a single day, that he makes the people feel the pangs of hunger, and that he declares he wiU starve them unless they obey his orders. In a single day energy is created. The thing that was not, is. Now, we have arms, and hands, and intelligence, endowed on a sudden with power and activity, and ready at once to be informed and guided by the intelligence of him who can give or withhold food. Now the nerveless, indolent, vacant savages become strong, industrious men, and thought begins to stir in them. A sleeping civilisation is being called forth into life. Our islanders have been transfigured, and made different beings, by this one agency — the agency of want, with the prospect of having their want satisfied. Now here we have something that, though in its literal sense a fairy-tale, is yet symboli- THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. 165 cally an accurate piece of history. It is true there are no islands where the trees bear loaves and roast mutton; but there are islands in which there grows the sago-pahn, and where a man by an hour's labour could secure food for a twelvemonth. There are other places in which, for other reasons, the means of sub- sistence are obtained even more easily. But in none of these places, except under foreign pressure, do the natives produce wealth. - It is not, however, only amongst tropical or sub-tropical savages that we can find parallels to our imaginary islanders. We can find them in Europe, in the very middle of civUisation. Not to go farther afield, we can find one in the Irish peasantry. The Irish have to labour it is true ; but why ? Because without labour they would perish with cold and hunger. The labour they do, however, is only just sufficient to raise them to that level on which without labour our islanders are placed naturally. It is the lowest level compatible with animal comfort. The Irish rise to that, and they develop some skill in the process ; but in spite 166 THE HUMAJr CHARACTER AJTD of their skill, beyond that level they cannot riae. Necessity may be the mother of inven- tion ; but it is the mother only of the inven- tion of necessaries. With the attainment of the necessaries, their skill and their invention ceases. They can invent no more, because they want no more. They have no desire for a clean cottage with four or five rooms in it ; they prefer a smoky hut. They have no desire for a house to put the pig in ; they had far sooner that it kept the family company. Not only have they no desire for such improve- ment ; they resent it if it is thrust upon them. Give them a clean cottage, they will instantly make it dirty. Put the pig in the pig-house, they will instantly have it back in the kitchen. What they want is not riches ; it is simply a leisurely poverty. I have said this of the Irish, but it is not true only of them. They are simply a familiar type of the average of mankind in general wherever wealth is not directly before them, either in itself or in the means that lead to it. The average of man- kind, all the world over, are, in that case, THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. 167 exactly in the condition of our islanders. Wealth not being before them, they are unable to desire it. I know this is a hard saying. Popularly it is supposed that the desire for wealth is of aU desires the commonest and most natural ; and any assertion that contradicts this, is sure to be met at first with a smile of increduhty. It is necessary, therefore, that we examine the matter carefully. First let me observe, then, that the popular supposition spoken of, like most popular suppositions, contains a certain truth in it : and that is exactly the reason why it is so misleading. "We will begin by considering what this truth is. We need not go far to discover many recognised expressions of it. One of them, however, will be quite sufficient — the homely, pro- verbial saying, that money will do anything. Now in this saying there is nothing to find fault with. It is a loose way of stating what in a general way is true. It means that, except under certain special circumstances, money or its equivalent will, if the amount be 168 THE HCMA>' CHABACTEB ASD large enough, always secure from any man certain immediate services. But to say this is not in itself to say that the desire for wealth is naturally common to all men. The latter proposition is simply an inference from the first, and it is an inference of the falsest and most illogical kind. What the first proposi- tion really says is, not that the desire for wealth is common to aU men naturally ; but that under one given condition it will always naturally develop itself; and that given con- dition is the sight of wealth. It is the very condition I have just now been insisting on. Let us take an illustration not from money, but from something strictly analogous to it. There are certain savages who have hved for ages ignorant of alcohohc hquors, but who once having tasted whisky will do anything in order to earn some more of it. Now amongst such men it might be said with per- fect truth, not indeed that money, but that whisky will do anything. That does not mean, however, that they all desire whisky na- turally : it means only that they desire it, THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. 169 when once they have been made to taste it. And the same is the case with wealth, as civihsed nations use the word ; only here the desire is more hard to develop, and it varies in its intensity with the conditions of its- development. I have already cited the cases of the Irish peasantry.' *Let us now turn to England and to the heart of our manufactiiring districts. There we shall find colhers who, when times are good, earn more from week to week than many beneficed clergymen ; and amongst factory hands we shaU find families whose earnings are larger stiU.^ Now what, as a fact, do these people do with their money ? Some save, and invest it in various ways — very often, I am informed, in house property. But those are a small minority. As for the rest, however, the singular thing about them is, not that they do not save their money, but ' I was told, for instance, by one of the largest cotton- spinners in the kingdom, that amongst his employfe were many families the united wages of each of which amounted to 30(K. a year. I learnt from the same soui-ce many facts as to how such incomes were spent. 170 THE HUMAK CHAEACTER AND the manner in which they spend it. Not only do they spend it on nothing that can be of any permanent comfort to them, but they spend it on things that, in proportion to the price paid, can yield them at the moment the smallest amount of pleasure. Thus they will spend on grapes more than they do on house-rent ; they will buy a piano without knowing a note of, music ; they will give beef-steak to their bull- dogs ; and they have been known to smoke pipes with four bowls to them, so as to con- sume in a given time as much tobacco as possible.-^ And yet all this while they will be living in squalid cottages, with hardly a per- manent comfort, and with not one refinement they can value in them. Now though these men very likely, if taken to some rich man's house, might look with a vague envy at his rooms, his pictures, and his furniture, it is plain that they really have no desire for such things ; for if they had, they might themselves have something similar. Again ; though if any ' Pipes of this Mild were some years ago made at New- castle. I do not know if the manufacture is continued. , THE DESIEE FOE WEALTH. 171 one of them were offered a thousand pounds, it is needless to say that he would take the money with avidity, it is plain that, it not being offered him, he has no distinct desire for it. If he had, in five years he might save it. Here, then, we have three classes of men — peasants, colHers, and factory hands, all living Tvith wealth on every side of them ; and yet the first class plainly does not desire it at all ; and the two latter desire it so httle that what they do receive of it, they virtually throw away from them. But what, then, of those fierce class hatreds, of which we hear so much and see so many signs ? These are all, it may be said, based on desire for wealth ; and the whole of the present volume, I may be reminded, points to them. To this objection must be given a two-fold answer. Firstly, I am not now contending that the desire for wealth is not widely producible ; but merely that it cannot exist without certain conditions to pro- duce it. Secondly, I must point to a fact we have not yet touched upon, that the desire for 172 THE HUMAN CHAEACTEE AOT) wealtli is a very ambiguous thing, and is by no means always exactly what it seems to be. A sickly mother, we wiU say, with a half- starved family, sees a series of drags, pUed with luncheon-baskets, passing her cottage door, on their way to Ascot races. Now the class hatred spoken of, it is admitted on all sides, is always fiercest when want is confront- ing luxury. The mother, therefore, we may weU suppose, is moved to bitterness, by the sight of the wealth before her, and wishes — wishes what ? Not that she herself were driv- ing a four-in-hand, or gossiping with the fine ladies she has just seen, or making love with the fine gentlemen ; nor do visions of cham- pagne, or lobster-salad, or ortolans stufied with truffles, make her mouth water. She knows nothing of these things ; they do not enter her imagination ; whilst as for the ser- vants, the ladies' dresses, the horses, and the glancing harness — all that, iu its details, is but so. much sound and fury to her ; it signifies nothing. It affects her only as forming, in the aggregate, a vague symbol of profusion. THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. 173 •while she herseK is destitute : and profusion to her means little but a sufficiency of food and clothing. In other words, wealth at the moment she most desires it means a way out of privation, not a way into luxury. And such is the case with women of her class generally. Once reheve their necessities, and give them a modest competence, and the desire of wealth wUl be found to subside instantly. It will become as imperceptible as it is in the Irish peasant, or as unreal as it is in the collier or the factory hand. Since then, even in an age like ours, when wealth of some kind is never far from anyone, and is flashing its attractions on aU eyes openly, there are still large classes who have no true desire for it, and to whom it means no more than a certainty or a surfeit of what is necessary, it will be surely easy for the reader to realise this — that in those earher states of society from which progress started, men must have been wholly unable to produce that which, even now, such numbers of them are, in their hearts, indifferent to. In other 174 THE HUMAlf CHARACTEK AKD words, our imaginary islanders form an accurate type, so far as wealth is concerned, not only of what men were before wealth was produced, but of what they would be again, if all wealth were destroyed. Accordingly, if we would understand the cause of civihsed pro- duction, we must begin by referring to that primary state of society, and consider the steps which have led from that to our own. What, then, let us ask, was the origin of wealth in the first place ? If no one could produce it until he had first seen it produced, who can have been the first producer ? The answer is to be found in a fact that I have hitherto purposely omitted, namely, that man was a warhke animal before he was an industrial one. The first inequalities were military inequahties ; and the first beginnings of wealth were probably plundered necessaries. As to this matter it is impossible to speak in detail ; for every civihsation that has had a beginning in history, has owed its beginning to a civilisation that went before it ; but detail here is of very little importance. It is THE DESIRE FOE WEALTH. ITS' enough for us that at the earhest historical period, wealth was being produced aheady,. and produced under certain conditions ; and that whenever a barbarous' nation has since become civihsed, the same conditions, or their equivalents, have invariably repeated them- selves. The ancient civilisations, it is' true^ were all of them based on slavery ; and our modern civihsations are all of them based on wages ; but in the following point both systems are identical. They are both based on labour which is not only motived by the want of food, for all labour is motived by that primarily, but they are based on labour which is motived by the want of food in such a way, and under such conditions, that it does more than satisfy the wants by which it is motived. This is true, without exception, of every society that has hitherto risen from barbarism ; and it is borne witness to by every monument of its , progress, from the walls of Babylon to the newest street in Chicago. In. other words, whenever wealth has been pro- duced, an essential factor in its production* 176 THE HUxMAIf CHARACTER AND has been the labour of men who, for its own sake, have had no wish to produce it. The Egyptian bricklayers cared nothing about the pyramids. In their eyes they were merely bye-products incidental to their securing the flesh-pots. The point for us to inquire, then, is, how has such labour been produced ? And Tve can answer that at once by referring to our imagined islanders. The added power has been produced in every case by an opera- tion precisely similar to that performed by the stranger — by the creation, in the first place, of an artificial want of food, and by then supplying the want on certain given conditions. But who is the stranger ? What force does he symbohse ? What is his counterpart in the actual history of civihsation ? He symbol- ises three things — one in the ancient world, one in the modern, and a third in both. In the ancient world he symbohses the power of conquest ; in the modern world he symbohses the power of society ; in both he symbohses the power and the desires of a minority. Wherever in any society the production of THE DESIRE FOR WEALTH. 177 wealth has begun, there has always been present either overt physical force, which has made some men slaves, or certain social arrangements which have made some men free labourers ; and there has always been a minority which has either possessed the force, or which, owing to circumstances, has profited by the social arrangements. Let us now sum up this evidence, and see what it all comes to. The result is startling, but none the less is it incontrovertible. It amounts to this — that every civilisation that has ever existed in the world has been begun against the will of the majority of the human beings concerned in it ; and when modern Democrats look back at the past, and declare that the history of it is one long history of oppression, they are simply bearing witness to the truth of this fact. They are admitting that civilisation in every case has been begun by a minority — and a minority whose motive was solely its own advancement. Now, although it may involve a certain emotional inconsistency, most Democrats will N 178 THE HUMAN CHARACTER AND probably recognise this. So far as the past is concerned, and so far as the beginnings of civihsation are concerned, they will allow to a dominant minority the useful part just claimed for it. But in the course of progress they will say that all this has changed; and that the key to the present situation is to be found, not in man's rise from savagery to the begin- nings of civilisation, but in his rise from the beginnings of civihsation to its latest and most advanced development. They wiU. say, or more properly, they will imply, that during that process his entire character has changed ; that the desires at first implanted in him with difficulty, have now taken root; and that, having so long been schooled to produce wealth for others, he is now in a condition to desire and to produce it for himself. The ascendancy of a minority, under whatever shape, is no longer needful for him. To this I answer as follows. Between the average man as he was, at the beginning of civihsation, and the average man as he is. THE DESIEE FOB WEALTH. 179 amongst civilised nations now, there is no doubt a profound difference, not only in ■circumstances, but in character. But the difference in this last is not what, in the democratic argument, it is supposed to be. The character inherently is altogether the same. Its difference depends solely on the difference in the circumstances that develop it. Just as one form of inequahty caused produc- tion to begin, so other forms of inequality have caused production to continue ; and if production in these days is greater than it was under the Pharaohs, that is no sign that it depends less upon inequalities; but it is a result of inequahties being more elaborately organised. This can only be proved, however, or indeed stated fuUy, by a direct reference to the history of industrial progress, and a care- ful consideration, not of its facts in detail, but ■of the different classes into which those facts divide themselves, and the sameness of the principles that underlie their differences. Now N2 180 THE HUMAN CHARACTER AND the classes of facts in question are evidently two in number. The one consists of enter- prises, discoveries, and inventions ; the other of the social conditions under which these have been made or utilised. Thus if we compare modern Europe with ancient Egypt, we may say that the former differed from the latter,, partly in the possession of steam-power, partly in the possession of free labour; and the classes of questions we shall have to deal with may be well typified by the following : What were the operations of character involved in the introduction of steam-power ? And how, with regard to labour, does the operation of character differ in a Birmingham workman and in a slave of Sesostris ? Between these two subjects of inquiry, this distinction, as I say, is evident ; and yet, so far as I am aware, no democratic theorist has ever yet been at the trouble to distinguish them ; nor have they even been classified under any accepted names. I propose, therefore, for convenience' sake, to call the former Impersonal Progress, and the latter Personal Progress, seeing that THE DESIKE FOR WEALTH. 181 the special mark of the former consists in things done, and that of the latter in the con- dition of persons doing things ; and I shall proceed in the following chapters to examine the two separately. 182 IlfEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGEESS. CHAPTER Vm. INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGEESS. Comparing, then, civilisation as it is now, with its earliest, its rudest, or its most partial developments — comparing civilisation under Queen Victoria with civilisation under Sesostris^ or Belshazzar, or Charlemagne, or WiUiam the Conqueror, let us note some of the chief impersonal facts in the present, which are supposed to make it, materially, so great an advance on the past. And let us be carefiil to take facts only which are of the widest popu- lar import, and which the extremest Democrat regards as triumphs of progress, no less than do his most conservative adversaries. The principal of these it is easy to lay our hands upon. They are gunpowder, cheap printing, steam-power appHed in three ways — to land travelling, to sea travelUng, and to the direct IKEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PEOGRESS. 183 f operations of industry, illumination by gas, electric telegraphs, and the network of com- merce which now connects all countries. This list is of course not exhaustive, but it is enough to show the reader the order of facts referred to, and also their essential connection with the ideals of modern democracy. For instance, nothing has done more to distribute power than gunpowder ; nothing has done more to distribute knowledge than printing ; nothing has done more to multiply comforts than steam-power ; and whatever sense has been developed of the sohdarity of mankind generally, is due to the extension of commerce and the increased facihty of locomotion. In addition to which, all that speculative science which has been so largely instrumental in making these facts possible, owes itself as much to them as they owe to it. Now by what means, let us ask, have these facts been accomphshed? They have been accompUshed by human means somehow ; that, of course, they have. What we want to know is by what means, and how ? And in 184 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PEOGRESP. asking this question, we are not asking for all the means, but we are asking only for the most distinctive means ; just as if I want to know how a message has been brought me I shall be satisfied if I know that a groom has brought it on horseback, or that a commis- sionaire has brought it in a hansom ; and I shall not care to inquire who bred or shod the horse, or who bmlt the hansom, or what induced either groom or commissionaire to embrace their respective callings, K, then, we consider any one of the facts in question, its existence will be at once associated with the name of some particular man, or the names of several such. Thus the name of Columbus wUl be associated with the discovery of America, that of Friar Bacon with the dis- covery of gunpowder, those of Watt, Stephen- son, and others with the discovery and intro- duction of steam-power : and the popular im- pression we shall find to be, that these great events have been caused by the men whose names are associated with them. In other words, we shall find the popular impression to INEQUALITY AKD MATERIAL PROGRESS. 185 he that the impersonal progress of industrial civihsation has been due to the genius of •certain gifted individuals. I propose first to shqw that thus far the popular impression is right. Having done that, I shall proceed to the further inquiry, as to what were the motives by wliich these individuals have been actu3.ted. It may perhaps be asked by some, if the impression I speak of be the popular one, what need is there that I should waste time in insisting on it ? An answer wUl be found by referring to certain passages which I have already quoted from Mr. Herbert Spencer. It will be recollected that he, in the strongest manner possible, has declared this impression to be an altogether erroneous one. It is fatal, he says, to any true understanding of progress, and scientific thought is steadily undermining it. It is this impression which, when put in a distinct form, he has denounced so unspar- ingly as ' the great-man theory ' ; and his treat- ment of which I have already had occasion to criticise. If Mr. Spencer's view of the matter. 186 INEQUALITY AM) MATEEIAL PEOGEESS. however, was peculiar to himself, it would notl be worth while to refer this second time to it- But it is by no means peculiar to him, or to those taught by him. Mr. Spencer no doubt may have given his own expression to it, and woven it into his own system ; but it was. itself a scientific or a quasi-scientific com- monplace when Mr. Spencer was in his perambulator. Macaulay, for instance, treats it in this way. He lays it before his readers as something that was already a platitude to the initiated, even if it still were a paradox to- the vulgar ; and in so doing he anticipates not only Mr. Spencer's sense, but almost one of Mr. Spencer's sentences. Mr. Spencer says, as we have seen already, ' Before the great man can re-make his society, his society must make- him.' Macaulay says, ' It is the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age. Great minds do indeed re-act on the society that has- made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received. . . . The inequalities of intellect,' he continues, ' like- the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PEOGEESS. 187 SO small a proportion to the 7nass, that in cal- culating its great revolutions, it may safely he neglected. The sun illuminates the hills while it is yet below the horizon ; and truth is discovered by the higher minds a little before it is mani- fest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light which, without their assistance, must in a short time be visible to those who lie far beneath them.' ^ Such, then, is the view of the matter which modern science tells us is to supersede the vulgar view. In the study of progress indi- vidual great minds may, as Macaulay says, ' safely be neglected," or as Mr. Spencer says, we should learn nothing of value, even if we ' read ourselves blind over their biographies.' They do, it appears, but hasten, by a httle, the discovery of the truth, which ' without their assistance ' society would have found out for itself. In a former chapter I have dwelt iipon this astounding doctrine, to show by it how modern thinkers have overlooked an ^ Essay on Dryden. 188 INEQUALITY AND MATERUL PEOGKESS. entire science. I am recurring to it now, for a somewhat different reason, to show how in itself it is utterly at variance with facts. When saints go astray, they are generally the worst of sinners. When men of science be- come inaccurate, there is no confusion Hke theirs. Keeping, then, in our minds those facts of progress we are deahng with — the growth of commerce, the introduction of steam-power, and so on, together, by implication, with the knowledge required for their accomplishment, let us ask which of them society could have accomplished by itself? Could it have dis- covered America? Could it have invented the art of printing ? Could it have discovered the law of gravitation, or the distance of the earth from the sun ? Or lastly, could it have written Mr. Spencer's ^System of Philosophy'? Could it have done any one of these things ? or has it done' any one of these things? K any one thinks it could, I can hardly dis- cuss that point with him ; but I can at all events ask him to see if it has. Men who INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 189 pride themselves on pursuing the liistorical method, will surely do well to consult the facts of history. Let us take, then, the discovery of America. That event, as we all know, was in one sense an accident. It was the result of an attempt to discover a new route to the Indies. Now suppose the opinion of every man and woman in Europe had been asked on the matter, while Columbus was planning his ex- pedition : what numerical proportion of them would have had any opinion at all? How many would have comprehended what such a route meant ? How many of those who did, would have thought such a route possible? And how many of those who thought it possible would have been wilhng to risk anything in an attempt to see whether it were practicable ? Any one who has studied the state of society, of knowledge, and of opinion at that time, will have little difficulty in arriving at a general answer ; and the biography of Columbus himself will give them still more detailed information. So far from the dis- 190 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PE06RESS. coveries of Columbus having been in any- way the work of European society generally, the vast majority of that society was, until they had taken place, in the profoundest ignorance as to the very fact of their being contemplated ; and of the small minority who knew of their being contemplated, most were indifferent, and many hostile to the idea of them. No doubt it may be said, by Mr. Spencer and by others, that Columbus was not born with the idea of his discovery ready-made in him. Its development may be traced to his setthng in Lisbon, where his brother was already a maker of naval charts, and where he married the daughter of an Italian naval adventurer ; and here it may be said that he received into himself the knowledge and ^the spirit of the discoverers that had gone before him. But in the first place these discoverers were in themselves picked men — amongst mankind at large an infinitesimal minority; and in the second place, even of these, to those whom Columbus knew, his behefs and his projects were either a stumbhng-block or a INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 191 levelation. Here, then, is a plain and in- controvertible fact. "Whatever past, or what- ever contemporary circumstances may have gone to produce Columbus, when he was produced he was the single individual centre from which Hght and power emanated for a certain great achievement. He was essen- tially not a part of his age, but beyond his age : he was its schoolmaster, not its pupil : and on August 3, 1492, the cause of one of the greatest events in history was not, as Mr. Spencer would have it, diffused over Europe generally, but, confined to the limits of one narrow quarter-deck, was watching the bar of Saltes slowly fade from his vision, and was for a time departing out of Europe alto- gether. Again, let us take another example from those I have already mentioned. Let us take Mr. Spencer's ' System of Philosophy : ' and let us apply his criticisms of the great-man theory to that. It will appear from them, that if Mr. Spencer really holds by them, he can- not consider himself to be, in any important 192 INEQUALITY AXD MATERIAL PROGRESS, sense, the author of his own volumes. He is the origin, of course, of the mere manual labour involved in them ; but for the rest he has been little more than a shorthand writer, taking notes of Avhat society has dictated to him ; and he is as little himself a philosopher in the vulgar sense of the word, as a newspaper reporter is himself the whole House of Com- mons. The idea in Mr. Spencer's mind is sufficiently obvious; I have no wish to carica- ture it ; and there is in it also a truth which I am directly about to recognise. Mr. Spen- cer's error hes in putting a third of the truth for the whole ; and, because men previously had neglected that one-third, now reveng- ing himself by denying the other two. In the first place, then, no man in these days any longer imagines that a man, however great, is independent of the times he lives in. Un- less a vast amount of knowledge had been already accumulated, Mr. Spencer himself could never have speculated as he has done. Thus society, in a certain sense^ we may admit, has certainly made him. But having admitted . INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 193 this, there arise two distinct questions : first, in what sense is it that society has made him ? and secondly, in considering the cause of his philosophy, can he as an individual, and distinct from society, be left out of count ? Now, in reading Mr. Spencer'§ works, if there is one thing that strikes one more immediately than another, it is the supreme contempt'displayed by him everywhere for the opinions of society generally. He can hardly touch upon any question without bringing forward some instance of the ludicrous mis- behefs that at present prevail regarding it ; nor does he find his misbelievers amongst the unlettered classes only, but amongst men who, however faulty may be their theories, are, so far as fame and genius go, amongst the most remarkable of his contemporaries. Now, I am not for a moment saying that in most cases Mr. Spencer may not be right, and those whom he criticises wrong. AH I want to insist on is this. If of the society, of which Mr. Spencer is himself a part, and which, accord- ing to his own theory, has made him, an over- O 194 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGEESS. whelming majority, does not only not believe his philosophy, but is stOl wedded to the fallacies that are most opposed to it, it is plain that whatever Mr. Spencer represents, he can- not represent that society as a whole. If he represents anything outside himself, and this he no doubt does, he represents only a certain select part of it. He represents, that is, a minority which is struggling with a refractory majority. In other words, if he refuse to be thought influential as being a great man him- self, he is influential as representing a certain knot of great men. Secondly, to this knot of great men what are his own relations ? He has imbibed from them a certain view of things in general, and he has made himself master of an enormous amount of facts, which these men, in the first instance, collected. But after that, what has he done with them ? He has certainly done something, or he conceives himself to have done something. He has not left matters in the exact state in which he found them. On the contrary, if we may take the opinion of a INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 195 number of intelligent people, he has done something of very great importance ; and it can hardly be doubted that himself he shares this view. , Here, then, is Mr. Spencer, who is influential not only as representing the thoughts of a minority, but as having added an important something to these thoughts himself. What, therefore, are we to say about him ? In proportion as he is influential, is he not a great man ? And is he not, as such, himself the cause of his influence? Perha"ps he would say, were the question thus put to him, that he was merely a tool in the hands of circumstances, and that if he had not played his part someone else would have played it for him. But what would this mean ? It might mean two things. It might mean that anybody would have been equal to the task Mr. Spencer has himself performed — which is plainly untrue ; and that anybody would have performed it had it happened to come in his way — ^which. is plainly untrue also ; or it might mean that had Mr. Spencer not existed, there would have been another man equally 02 196 IJTEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PEOGRESS. great instead of him — which, so far as the great-man theory goes, is simply to put one great man for another, and does not alter the case. It is just as plain, therefore, in Mr. Spencer's case, as it was in that of Columbus, that he is the cause of the achievement Avith which his name is associated ; and the same will hold good of all other great men what- ever. Let me dwell, however, a httle longer on what we here mean by cause. Let me repeat once again that I know as well as Mr. Spencer knows, and acknowledge as fiiUy as he acknowledges, that the things accomplished by any great man, could not have been accom- plished by him independently of his circum- stances. But it is equally true, and it is a far more important truth, that his circumstances could not have accompHshed them indepen- dently of him. Columbus could never have crossed the Atlantic if he had had no sailors with him ; but it is simply a piece of idle pedan- try to name the sailors amongst the causes of his crossing it. Sailors are essential to all voy- INEQUALITY AND MATEKIAL PEOGEESS. 197 ages. Columbus was essential to this voyage. Again, in Mr. Spencer's case, all the materials of his philosophy may have been ready to his hand. He may have had to do very little original work in putting them together. But still that work had to be done by someone ; and the man who did it has been as much and as truly the cause of it, as a match is of a conflagration. Suppose, for instance, that Mr. Spencer's hbrary caught fire, and that the manuscript was destroyed of some new volume of his philosophy. If he wished to ascertain what was the cause of the catastrophe, he would not inquire as to the nature of the paper he had written upon, and say that his book had been burnt because paper was highly in- flammable ; but as soon as he discovered that there had been a match on his writing-desk which had been ignited by accidental friction, he would then be satisfied that he had found the true cause. He would care to go no farther. He would not ask who sold the match, who made the match, or who was the person who first invented matches. He would 198 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. rest content with the fact that a match was in itself a thing possessing certain qualities, and that it would ignite under certain circum- stances. Now, the composition of a match, and the circumstances under which it will ignite, are so famihar to Mr. Spencer that he would not need to inquire into them. But was this not so — were matches very rare natural products, which were found in certain places nobody yet knew how, and went off nobody yet knew why, all his inquiries, as a scientific student, would centre on the genesis of the match, and the circumstances of its ignition. And with great men the case is exactly similar. If Mr. Spencer, then, hkes to degrade them, here is , a simile at once trivial and accurate to his hand. He may call them the lucifer matches of the world : only, in that case, I tell him that the conflagrations these matches cause, depend for their occurrence on what the heads of the matches are made of, and the kind of surfaces they go off upon. That is to say, they depend on the lives and the characters of the great men themselves. INEQUALITY AND MATEEIAL PROGRESS. 199 and must be studied in these great men's biograpHes — in their biographies, not singly, but taken one with another, and examined by the comparative method. If this examination sho\7s us no points of resemblance between them, then we can no more explain the events the great men have initiated, we can no more connect them with other events and circum- stances, than we could connect a fire with the common order of nature, if any stick of wood, with something black at the end of it, no matter what, could become a lucifer match. And in one way, let me remark, this is the exact state of the case. It is as yet unexplained, with regard to any individual birth, why the child born is a male or female ; it is equally un- explained, indeed it seems even more inex- plicable, why one child is born a potential genius, and its brother a potential dunce. Though, however, we can, neither by bio- graphical nor other studies, arrive at any general law with regard to the production of potential genius, we can arrive at a most distinct general law with regard to its develop- 200 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. ment into actual genius ; and the biography of every great man — every great man, at least, who has helped forward material pro- gress — exhibits the following special fact in support of it. Every great man who has either opened a new line of commerce, enriched the world with a new invention, or enslaved for man's use some new force of nature, has always been actuated, not solely but largely, by the desire for social inequality of some sort. Let us turn once again to Columbus ; his case is to the point especially. I have admitted ah-eady that there is a certain class of achievements which are in themselves of such a nature that they bring, as it were, their own inequahty with them, and that the hope of this in some cases has nerved men to achieve them, without any hope added to it of social inequality properly so called. Now, if any achievement belongs to , this class, one might certainly have thought that such would be the discovery of a new world. But let us consider the facts of history, the facts of human nature. Columbus, the one INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 201 man of his age who could conceive this splendid project, the one man with patience, with hope, with courage to carry it into execution — did he find the splendour, or the use of it, sufficient motives in themselves to induce him to under- take it? His biography shall answer for him. He had, as everyone knows, many difficulties to battle against — apathy, ignorance, supersti- tion, increduhty — bfefore he could gain assist- ance to so much as begin his venture ; but to all these he added another of his own making, and that was the immense personal reward he demanded for himself should the venture prove successful. He demanded that he should be at once ennobled with the title of Admiral of the Seas, and that this office and title should be hereditary in his family, that he should have one-tenth of all the merchandise brought back from the countries he should discover, and a right to an eighth part of the expenses and consequent profits of each trading transaction that should hereafter take place with them. It wiU thus be seen that, beyond the ambi- tion of the discoverer, there was the distinct .202 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGBE.SS. ambition in him of a man who desired to raise his family : and the importance, as a motive, of this ambition may be gauged by the fact that, till the prospect of gratifying it was held out to him, he refused to move a step towards the accomphshment of his great enterprise.^ Now in Columbus we have a perfect type of the action of human nature in promoting impersonal progress, or if in any way he fails to be wholly typical, it is not because the de- sire for inequahty was so prominent among his motives, but because it was accompanied by so many motives besides. If we study the history of any enterprise or invention, the purpose of which has been either the manu- facture of wealth or the exchange of it, we shall find in the hves of aU the great men concerned in it, desires equivalent to those of ' It is, of course, not meant that all discoveries, such as those of Columbus, have been motived by the desire for social inequality. The recent polar expeditions, for instance, have been motived mainly by scientific curiosity. The discovery of •Columbus is cited here as an event simply in the material progress of the world ; and it is specially valuable as showing • that not even the accidental glory attached to it obviated the necessity of some more material motive. INEQUALITY AND MATEEIAL PROGRESS. 203 Columbus for his share in the commerce of the Indies, and for the proud position he asked for his own family. We shall find a distinct desire for social inequahty of some sort ; it may be one of money only, it may be one of rank only, or it may be one of both ; and the more exclusively useful is the purpose of the enter- prise or the invention, the more exclusively shall we find this desire for inequahty to be the motive of it. It may, no doubt, be said that a number of the most important inven- tions owe their origin, in one sense, to events that have been little else but accidents. That of glass, for instance, is said to have been acci- dental altogether, and the steam-engine first became self-acting through a httle boy's idle- ness.^ But these cases, and the numerous ^ Newcomen's steam-engine, it is well known, used origin- ally to be regulated by a boy, wbo had to open and shut an injection-cock at each stroke of the piston. But at last a boy named Humphrey Potter contrived a catch attached to the beam of the engine, by which the injection-cock was opened automatically. We may note that the boy called this catch a ' scoggan,' by which he meant an apparatus that enabled him to idle — to ' scog ' in the North of England meaning to skulk, or shirk work. Thus even this boy was motived by the desire 204 INEQUALITY AND MATEEIAL PROGEESS. others like them, do not make against what I am now saying. Such happy accidents, such triumphs of a chance ingenuity, add nothing in themselves to the general wealth of the world. Whether the discovery be a new substance or a new mechanical contrivance, it has in the ; first place to be perfected, and in the second place to be multiplied and introduced to the public. Until it has undergone this double process, so far as progress is concerned, it is unborn, it is non-existent. Progress depends not on inventions and discoveries only, but on the extent to which these are apphed to the world in general. It is in the perfecting, the pro- ducing, the multiplying the things discovered or invented — ^be they glass, or printed matter, or gas-lighting, or railways, or whatever we like to name — it is in this, so far as the world is concerned, that material progress lies : and the labours of the men we are concerned with have been labours in this field. Let the reader consider for a moment three of leisure, a thing that can only exist where there are social Inequalities. INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 205 of the above-named cases, namely, those of printed matter, gas-hghting, and railways. Amongst the earlier printers there was, no doubt, prevalent much of the ambition of the scholar, and much of the instinct of the artist ; and to us this may seem more conspicuous in them than the desire for inequality in money. But not only shall we find that in them even this last desire existed, but we shall find also that it increased in their successors in exact proportion as printing became cheaper, and books were multiphed. The history of gas-Hghting is altogether analogous. That an inflammable gas is evolved from coal during the process of its destructive distillation was first discovered by a clergyman in 1739. The fact was pubhshed in ' The Transactions of the Royal Society,' and it soon engaged the attention of other weU-known experimentahsts. But more than half a century had elapsed after its first discovery before any one thought of making any practical apphcation of it ; and even after it had been first apphed practically, twenty years elapsed before that 206 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGEESS. practical application was completed and intro- duced to the public. During that period it had been applied only to one house in Corn- wall, one factory near Birmingham, and on one occasion to one London theatre. Nothing- more had been done, and this was the reason. The fact in question and the invention based upon it had been not yet seized upon by men who were able to make money by them. In 1813 they were so seized upon. The matter passed into the hands of a regular commercial company, and almost instantly there were gas- lamps all over Europe. The history of the railway engine and the extension of the railway system, both point to conclusions in the same direction, which are almost too obvious to require our dwelhng upon them. The railway engine was perfected by the patient and com- peting labours of a number of men, who had all the same motive, and that motive was the desire to make money. The more carefully we study the details of the question the more pro- foundly will this fact be impressed upon us ; whilst if we turn from the construction of the INEQUALITY AXD ilATEKIAL PROGRESS. 20T railway engine to the extension of the railway system, the names of Brassey, of Brunei, and of Stephenson, will carry their own instruction to us. Evidence of this kind might be multipHed indefinitely ; but any reader of ordinary infor- mation wiU be able to supply it for himself. He need only turn to facts which he knows already on one side, dnd reversing them, examine the other. That discoverers, in- ventors, manufacturers, merchants, all of them aim at wealth, and the most successful attain it, is a truth as trite as that the sun rose yesterday ; but its full scientific signifi- cance has. never yet been recognised. The attainment of wealth by such men when suc- cessful has been regarded rather as a usual accident of their case, than an essential factor in it ; and thus the Democrat can argue plausibly that it is an accident, a chance result, which in the future it wiU be possible to obviate. But this view of the matter is wholly unscientific, and the real principle in- volved in it is lost sight of altogether — the 208 INEQUALITY A^^) -AIATERIAL PIIOGBESS. principle that while the attainment of wealth is the general result of the success, the desire of wealth is the invariable motive of the en- deavour. The proposition as to the result, and the proposition as to the motive, although so closely connected, are wholly distinct things. The first, if separated from the second, is not a scientific generalisation at all. It is simply a statement as to what has hap- pened hitherto, but need not happen always. To say that wealth is the general result of industrial success, is to refer to nothing but existing social conditions ; which, for aU that the statement tells us, may be altered to any extent. But to say that the desire of wealth is the invariable motive of it, is to refer to human nature itself, and to lay down a permanent and a universal law. All, then, that I need ask the reader to do, is to look at the reverse side of what he knows quite well already. The discoverers, the in- ventors, the merchants, the manufacturers, whose lives have marked epochs in the history of material progress, have not only made INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 209 ■wealth but they have been made by it. If wealth had not been attainable, the genius of such men would have been whoUy undeveloped. It would have been practically non-existent. It would have been an acorn, not an oak. What the earth is to the acorn, the desire of inequahty is to such men's genius. In pro- portion as inequahty has been possible, that genius has developed itself; in proportion as inequahty has been impossible, that genius has been unapparent. So intimately indeed is it connected with the special desire in question, that its practical effect on the material pro- gress of the world could be almost expressed in terms of that desire itself — ^its definiteness, its strength, and the nearness or remoteness of the object of it. Every observation that it is possible to make in the matter confirms and illustrates this great general law. Our materials for observation we find both in the past and present, in different countries and different stages of civiHsation ; and we find always and everywhere the same law acting. But we must not content ourselves with P 210 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PBOGKESS. appealing solely to the width and the solidity of this inductive basis. Some may feel them- selves still able to argue that the desire for inequahty, whatever may have "been its function hitherto, is capable, under new con- ditions, of being replaced by some other desire, which as a motive will produce the same results. Now if this contention be worth anything, its worth depends on its relation to observed facts, and the motive it refers to must be some motive in particular. What can be this motive ? The answer to the question is obvious, as only one has ever been proposed, and only one is in the smallest degree plausible. The motive that it is said by some is to supersede the desire for inequahty, is the desire for the welfare of the human race at large. It is general benevolence, as opposed to private selfishness. Let us therefore ask on what scientific foundation the opinion rests, that this new motive will really do the work of the old one? To ask the question is in itself to refute the opinion. Actions motived by benevolence have been sufficiently marked INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 211 in history to show us clearly enough their constant limits and purpose. This purpose has never been the creation of new forms of wealth ; it has been simply the alleviation of the existing pains of poverty. Benevolence reheves those in want or sickness, it provides, instruction and even amusement for those who would be else without them. It builds hos- pitals, schools, and almshouses, and it gives playgrounds to the people : but there its work ends. There is nothing inventive in it. It may prompt men to give a cup of cold water to the thirsty ; but it will not lead them to manufacture a new liqueur. It may prompt them now to give a poor man some tobacco ; but supposing tobacco unknown to Europe, it. would not lead them to introduce it from America. Is it conceivable that benevolence, before the days of railways, could have made anyone burn to send his fellows traveUing from London to York at the rate of a mile a minute?' Or had the most ardent philanthropist, before the days of telegraphs, been considering the lot of a happy family in the country, would P2 212 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PEOGRESS. the wish, ever have occurred to him that he could add to its happiness by placing it in communication with every city in Europe? The answer is plainly, no ; and our certainty in the matter comes from our wide experience of what benevolence has accomplished hitherto. That experience is all we have to go upon ; and any belief in the matter not supported by that, is nothing better than an idle piece of ■dreaming. Experience teaches us that as a motive to action, benevolence is excited by one class of things only — ^privation, pain, or any marked want of pleasures already enjoyed by others ; but except for the purpose of attack- ing such evUs, it is powerless to produce either practical thought or labour. It may perhaps flutter the wings of fancy, and suggest Utopias where man has conquered nature entirely ; but it never awakens that creative imagina- tion which shall grasp a scheme of conquest in any of its practical details ; still less can it rouse that strong and dogged resolve which alone can push such schemes to any successfal issue. INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. 213 As regards, then, the impersonal progress of the world, we may consider this much to be estabhshed-p-firstly, that such progress is so far caused by certain gifted individuals, that with- out their intervention it would be impossible ; and secondly, that their intervention would be impossible unless motived by the desire for social inequahty ; to which we must add that this desire is inoperative, except in a society in which social inequahty is attainable. It foUows, therefore, that all those triumphs of progress on which the modern Democrat lays so much stress — our oecumenical commerce, our railways, our telegraphs, our ne^vspapers, our multiphed products of all kinds, would have been utterly unproducible except in a society constructed on the principle of in- equality. It wiU appear further, from the various examples that have been cited, that whatever changes such progress may have brought with it, it has brought no change in this respect to the human character ; but that, on the contrary, the desire for inequahty is, not only as a motive, as necessary now as 214 INEQUALITY AND MATERIAL PROGRESS. •ever, but that its action is, if anything, even greater and more apparent. Perhaps, however, the Democrats will urge that the impersonal progress of civilisation has advanced far enough already. They may say, in fact, as LassaUe distinctly did say, that it can be never suffered to come altogether to a standstill, and that personal progress is the sole progress of the future ; and while grant- ing that social inequahty has been requisite to bring the world's annual output of wealth to its present state, they may say that it is not requisite now for maintaining it in the state to which it has been brought. The business started through inequaJity can be carried on through equality. That position we wUl now proceed to examine. Having seen that we could not have advanced without inequahty, let us see if, without it, we should not directly retro- grade. 215 CHAPTEE IX. INEQUALITY AND THE MAINTENANCE OP CIVILISATION. It is hardly necessary to repeat that the entire civilisation we are speaking of, especially those features of it which the Democrat most values, depends altogether on the division of labour. This we may accept as an axiom. Certainly, no Democrat can doubt it. Without division of labour not a single train could run, not a single newspaper could be printed. If articles of value could be produced without it at all, they would be the rare luxuries of the rich, not the necessaries and the comforts of the poor. More hands are concerned in producing a yard of printed cotton than in producing a yard of tapestry ; in producing a yard of drugget than a yard of Wilton carpet ; in producing a pewter mug in a pot-house than 216 INEQUALITY AND THE a gold goblet by Cellini. Indeed, the more popular, the more essentially democratic is the product, the more is division of labour involved in its production. Division of labour is the very foundation-stone of the ideal democratic commonwealth. Without it popu- lar thought could not difiiise itself, and popular intercourse would languish, except between near locahties. As a consequence of this, not only would the people lose the power of combination, but they would lose also then- joint wish to combine. Local ignorance, local prejudice, and above aU local interest, would again divide what is now only partly united ; and as our modern Democrats not only know, but acknowledge, in proportion as peoples are pitted against each other, they become of necessity subject to some mihtary despotism or aristocracy. We thus see that, putting aside altogether any question of further impersonal progress, every thought, every aspiration of modern democracy, rests, and must rest, upon a per- petual division of labour. The question we MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 217 have now to consider is, how is that division to be perpetuated. As to one point, we are perfectly clear' already. Division of labour, alike in its origin and its maintenance, must have been always- the result of a certain set of motives, supphed by external circumstances, and apphed to the human character. And this brings ■ me back to a remark which I made in my opening chapter, namely, that pohtical economy barely overlaps the borders of the inquiry now before us. Division of labour, indeed, as approached from one side, is the main subject with which the pohtical economist deals ; but as to the causes of it in the human character, the httle he does say only serves to show us how much he has left unsaid. ' This division of labour^ writes Adam Smith,' for example, '■from which so many advantages are derived, is not origi- nally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has 218 INEQUALITY AND THE in view no such extensive utility ; the propensity to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given . ... it ■belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no ■other race of animals' Smith iEustrates this in a few brief paragraphs ; he then dismisses the subject altogether, apparently wholly un- ■conscious of its extent and importance ; nor do any of his successors seem to have been more ■clear-sighted, or to have added anything worth mentioning to his crude and meagre observa- tions. The singular part, however, is not that the propensity Smith mentions is an insufficient •explanation of the beginnings of the division of labour, but that the beginning of that divi- sion should be aU that he attempted to ex- plain. One might have thought that having asked himself how it began, he would have been led naturally to ask himself how it was developed, and finally how it is stiU main- MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 219 tained. ' It gives occasion,' he observes, ' to general opulence,' but this opulence, he ex- pressly states, has no direct connection with the propensity to truck, barter, or exchange. How, then, has the general opulence been produced ? It has not been produced auto- matically, or by accident. Some new motive, or as Smith would say, some new propensity, must have been concerned in it. What can this be ? Smith observes, it is true, and with great justice, that division of labour is the cause of the diversity of men's talents. It enables one savage to perfect himself as a hunter, another to perfect himself as a tanner, and another to perfect himself as a maker of bows and arrows ; but the only occupation and the only talents he names are those neces- sary for procuring the bare means of exist- ence. What, when these means are supphed in sufficient abundance, has caused labour stiU to continue, and still further to dif- ferentiate itself — that he never inquires. Had this last question ever occurred to him, he would have found that it fixed his attention 220 INEQUALITY AND -THE on a wholly new order of facts. He would have seen that the division of labour proper to savagery, and the division of labour proper to civilisation, were marked off from each other by two points of difference. In the first place the former, as we have just noticed, aims only at producing the bare means of existence; but the latter begins exactly where the former ends, and aims at raising on a sufficiency of the means of existence a superstructure of wealth and luxury. In the second place, and this is more important still, the former involves only variety, or co-ordination of labours ; the lat- ter involves inequaUty, or subordination also. To maintain savages in a state of stationary competence, labours need only be various : to produce or maintain civihsation, they need not only be various, but unequal. Thus in providing a savage village with food, the hunter and the maker of bows and arrows, though they play different, yet play equal parts. Man for man, one does as much as the other. But in constructing a railroad, a navvy and an engineer, man for man, play parts that MAINTENANCE OP CIVILISATION. 221 are wholly unequal. The labour of the latter affects the whole undertaking; that of the former, perhaps only a millionth part. We may say, therefore, that so far as labour is concerned, civihsation and savagery differ from each other in this way : that whereas both are equally based upon the simple divi- sion of it, the former, as distinct from the latter, is based on the division being graduated. Thus presuming the division of it in any case, we may say that the special and distinctive cause of civilisation is not the division but the graduation of labour. It is the graduation of labour that is the cause of the railway and the newspaper. It is the graduation of labour that enables any fellow-feeling to spring up between peoples, or makes even the dream of democratic solidarity possible. And on it every hope and prospect of the modern Demo- crat depend. Our present inquiry, therefore, resolves itself into this : — To what cause in human nature is this graduation of labour due .P What, when some men are shepherds, or carters, or dock-labourers, is the cause of 222 INEQUALITY AKD THE other men being skilled mechanics, or elec- tricians, or engineers, or chemists? Why, when on their labours some men expend so little thought, do others expend so much? The cause, I have said over and over again already, is the desire for social inequahty. Thus far, however, I have only stated this answer. I am now about to substantiate it. For this purpose there are abundant materials lying on every side of us, which by the com- monest observation we might, any one of us, seize upon. It happens, however, that we can be spared even this trouble ; for they have been already collected by others, and are arranged ready to our hands ; and that in the very quarter where, from what I have just been saying, we might least expect to find them. I allude to the writings of the great political economists. Political economists, as I have already said, hardly so much as ask the question we are now considering ; and even when they have asked it, they have shown no conception of its importance, and MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 228^ only a very imperfect conception of its nature. The reason of this, however, is, not that it is so remote from the subject of their own inquiries, but that it is so very near to it. They do not see it indistinctly for the former reason, but they overlook it for the latter. All the while, as it were, it is lying under their feet. It is beneath their ken ; it is be- yond it. One of the principal questions with which the poHtical economist deals, is why different labourers are paid at different rates ; and he explains the fact by reference to the existing conditions of society. But he fails- to see that what he regards as a result is in reality the universal cause also. He gives us elaborate reasons why wages are paid in pro- portion to skill ; but it never occurs to him that the graduation of skill, as a universal rule, is developed in proportion to wages. To prove^ however, that such is really the case, we have but to repeat a process which I dwelt upon in the preceding chapter ; we have simply to invert the facts which the pohtical economist supplies us with, and refer them not super- ■224 INEQUALITY ATO THE ficially to society as he does, but fundamen- tally to human nature ; and we shall thus find them to be but so many particular examples of a law, which in a confused way he must no doubt presume, but which he has never adequately recognised, or made any attempt to formulate. The following passages wiU explain my meaning. ' We do not,' says Adam Smith, * reckon our soldiers the most inditstrious set of j>eople among us, yet when soldiers have been employed in some particular sort of work, and liberally paid by the piece, their officers have frequently been obliged to stipulate that they should not be allowed to earn above a certain sum every day, according to the rate at which they were paid. Till this stipulation was made . . . the desire of greater gain frequently prompted them to overwork themselves, and to hurt their health by excessive labour.' Again, in touching on the question of slave labour, ■* it appears,' Smith says, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 225 the work performed by slaves ; ' and Professor Thorold Rogers, in a note to this passage, gives the following fact in explanation of Smith's remark : ' It is, of course, plain that, as the slave has no motive to economise his labour — to do the greatest possible work with the least possible exertion, slave labour is always costly.' Here again is another passage from Smith, and another note by Professor Thorold Eogers : ' This great increase,' says the former, ' of the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances : first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman ; secondly, to the saving of the time which is usually lost in passing from one species of work to another ; and lastly, to the inventions of a great number of machines, which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.' To which Professor Thorold Eogers adds : ' Smith has omitted to notice another important consequence of the process referred to in the text. The divi- sion of labour makes it possible that the different Q 226 INEQUALITY AND THE agents in the joint product should be remunerated at different rates ; whereas, if the process were begun and completed by the one man, the com- monest or easiest labour bestowed by him would have to be paid at the rate of the highest and hardest' Now, all these passages deal with this one fact, that the amount and quahty of labour done by a man are related in some way or other to the amount of reward offered him. But only in the first case is the least attempt made to state exphcitly what this relation is. In the case of the soldiers paid by piece-work, Smith puts, no doubt, the matter in the right way. He represents the inequaUty in the re- ward as the cause of the inequahty in the work ; but the slight and cursory stress which he lays upon the doctrine shows how httle he realised either its importance or its universaHty ; whilst, when we come to the other two pas- sages — Smith's text and Professor Thorold Rogers' comments on it — this doctrine ia any distinct form is lost sight of altogether. Slaves, we are told, will always exert themselves but MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. ii27 little, because they have no motive to exert themselves much. Professor Thorold Rogers says this is a plain fact. But why is it plain ? It is not plain as a fact of observation certainly, because most of us have never seen any slaves, and know very httle about them. It can be plain only, if it is plain at all, as being a de- duction from a known universal law, that all labour, whether that of slaves or other men, is proportionate to the magnitude of the mo- tive, or that unequal reward is the cause of unequal labour. Again, when it is mentioned as a matter of great importance ' that the dif- ferent agents in the given product should he remunerated at different rates,' it is, of course, understood that in this way we save money, and the fact that we do so is presumed to be as plain to us as the preceding one. But again we ask why is it plain ? Only because, ■or in so far as it is plain to us, that we can produce the lower kinds of labour by a low rate of wages, and that we can produce the higher kinds of labour only by a high rate. That is to say, Ave have another tacit reference Q2 228 INEQUALITY AND THE to the law just mentioned of unequal rewards, and another tacit assumption of its universahty. We might go through the works of all the economists who have ever written, and in almost every illustration taken by them from any branch of industry we should find the same thing. We should find the same uni- versal law either illustrated or tacitly refer- red to. It is true we should find further that the reference was only tacit, and the illustra- tions only semi-conscious. On no one occa- sion should we find the law distinctly stated,. dragged forth from the dim regions of impU- cation, and showing itself in intellectual day- light. And this is the reason why the modem democratic theorists, though fhey acknow- ledge the doctrines of the economists to be true in the present state of society, conceive we can change society so that they shall be true no longer. In other words, as I have twice observed already, they refer these doctrines to society, and not to human nature. For this error the economists are themselves ta blame. Their science, as they present it to us. MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 229 is a science upside down. Its roots, its first principles, are in tlie air. They have never been planted in their proper and solid soil — the uniform, the unalterable, the ascertainable facts of the common human character. Had they been so some hundred years ago, much of the democratic speculation of the present century would have been weU-nigh impossible, and the world might have been spared in con- sequence many vain expectations, many bitter disappointments, much bloodshed in the past, and not a little danger for the future. Men may easily be persuaded that a revolution can " metamorphose society ; it wiU be harder to persuade them that it can create a new human nature ; and this last is the only' revolution that could fundamentally alter the existing state of things. But though the economists, as I say, have failed to show this themselves, the facts they have collected afford an overwhelming proof of it. They have examined carefully every branch ■of industry on which our existing civilisation •depends, and in every branch they have 230 IXEQUALITY AND THE encountered the same phenomenon, namely, that unequal reward goes with unequal labour, and that when the rewards are equal the labours are equal also. The ascent from these multi- tudinous particulars to the universal law, when once it has occurred to us to make it, is the work of a moment. Since where there is no inequahty in the reward labour never rises above its sim- plest or its most necessary forms, and where there is inequality in the reward it does rise above them, it follows that inequality in the re- ward is the cause of this rise in labour. That is to say, the human character is so constituted that without the desire of this inequahty as a motive, the higher forms of skiU, or even of application*, are wholly unproducible. It is not that men would not choose to produce them, but that they could not produce them. Just as a woman is the proper cause of a man's falling in love, so the inequahty spoken of is the proper cause of a man's developing skill in labour ; and to say that any other cause but this could make him develop it, would be about as true as to say that, in the absence of MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 231 a woman, lie would be made to fall in love by the table-cloth.. There are many truths which until they have been formally stated all the world may by implication reason from, and yet con- sciously be so little aware of their nature, that even the gravest thinkers at times may by im- phcation utterly ignore them. Once, how- ever, let the formal statement be made, and the whole case changes. The truths in question, hke the angel sent to Balaam, suddenly stand before us, barring our intellectual path, and whether we will or no they compel us to take heed of them. Then one or other of two things happens. We either at once recognise and assent to them unbidden ; or else an assent is wrung from us by our being made to face the alternatives. A truth of this kind is the one we are at present dealing with. Now that it has been distinctly stated, let the reader ask himself if it is possible to contradict it. If he can contradict it, he can do so for one reason only — only because he has some other proposition which he can put in place of 232 INEQUALITY AND THE it. If the desire for social inequality be not, as has been said, the cause of the graduation of labour, something else must be ; and that something else must be some, other human motive. What can that motive be then? There are only two which can be even plausibly mentioned. One is benevolence, or a feeling which prompts a man to do his best for the community ; the other is the pleasure which a man feels for his own sake in doing the best of which he feels himself to be capable. Let us consider if it be for a moment possible to ascribe the graduation of labour to either of these motives. As to benevolence, in connection with in- ventors and discoverers, we have dwelt upon that already ; and we have seen that, by itself, even with those men, it is utterly power- less as a motive. Much more then shall we find it to be so in the present case. If it is unable to rouse even genius into activity, so as to nerve a single man to increase the wealth of millions, it is hardly hkely that it will have a greater eflfect upon skiU, and produce equal MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 233 labour for the sake of infinitely smaller results. If it were not the cause of Columbus's dis- covering a new continent, it will hardly be the cause of a clerk's learning book-keeping by double entry. Indeed, the very conception that a man, in the world either of commerce or production, should attempt to develop his faculties from a sense of universal benevolence, would have been too fantastic to be even worth considering, if modern positivism had not actually suggested it. If any one thinks other- wise, let him put his opinion to a homely practical test. Let him go where he will, through the whole civihsed world — to London, to Birmingham, to Paris, or to New York, and in any grade of any branch of business, let him do what he can, amongst all the skilled em- ployes, to discover one who performs his work out of benevolence. Where will he find such a, man? Does he suppose that an engine- driver on the Great Northern Eailway is con- sumed with a desire that Cockneys should ;see Edinburgh ? Or that the captain of a Ounard steamer is an apostle of international 234 INEQUALITY AND THE commerce? Or that telegraph clerks need have any feehng but apathy with regard to the benefits arising from a quick transmission of messages ? Or supposing that he actually here and there did meet a man who professed and even felt some of these grand and promising sentiments, would he find that such men gave their services gratis, or at any rate took no more from them than they could earn as agri- cultural labourers ? There we may find a test at once simple and conclusive ; and it will apply equally to the other supposition also^ that the graduation of labour is due to a natural tendency in a man to do the best he can with his talents, for his own personal satis- faction. For if either this tendency or else benevolence were the cause of the gradua- tion of labour, and not the desire for in- equality in reward, then skilled labour would be as cheap as unskilled. An experienced ship's captain, for instance, could be had for a common seaman's wages ; which, it need hardly be said, is certainly not the case. It is true now as ever, indeed it is even more MAmTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 235, true, that labour must be rewarded in propor- tion to its excellence ; or there will else be no' excellence to reward. It is not only that on no other condition will the labourer develop his faculties ; but on no other condition will he use them when already developed. Nor can any one urge that this present state of affairs is due to our social £|,rrangements, and not to human nature. For if human nature were ever really capable of being motived to skilled production by anything but the desire for inequality, no social arrangements could tend so strongly as ours do to bring that capacity to the surface. It is the notorious wish and endeavour of all modern employers to secure skilled labour at as cheap a rate as possible. If, therefore, skilled labour can be 'really motived by benevolence, or by any other motive except the desire for inequality, the labourers of to-day have every facility iafforded them for making the fact apparent. They have only to do willingly the very thing which their employers would make them do ; and which they with a vigour that increases 236 INEQUALITY AND THE every day declare they will never dream of doing. Perhaps, however, it will be said in reply to this, that though skilled labourers at present doubtless get all they can, and if they can get much refuse to work for httle, yet this covetousness on their part has no essen- tial connection with their skUl ; but that our social arrangements, though they do not indeed cause its existence, are none the less the occa- sion of its exercise. They give to skilled labour, it may be said, an opportunity for the time being to dictate its own terms, much as a lodging-house keeper does during the height of her seaside season ; and just as the lodging- house keeper will be reasonable when she is unable to be extortionate, so will skilled labour be when our social arrangements are altered. It seems not impossible that this answer might be given ; but if any one thinks that it really meets the case, he may reflect for a moment on the following obvious fact which, obvious as it is, is very often forgotten. When we speak of skm in production, be it of whatever kind — MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 237 that of tlie artisan, of the engineer, of the man of science, or the business manager — we have not to deal with a thing tliat if once called into existence is once for all put at the world's disposal. On the contrary, all of it that is at this moment in operation, in another forty years will have gone and have perished' utterly ; and within that period all of it, from the very beginning, will have had to be re- created in a new race of beings. Man's civiHsation is nothing but a castle of sand, for ever dissolving, and for ever being heaped up again ; and were the latter process suspended for but one half-century, the whole of the vast fabric would have sunk to a shapeless ruin. Where and what are the men at the present moment, who in the next generation will be dispelling the darkness with electricity, scattering truths or falsehoods to all the winds from the printing-press, and conquering dis- tance by the railway or the ocean-steamer ? Some of them are in theii- cradles, some at the infant school. Some of them cannot speak ; few of them yet can spell ; none of them 238 INEQUALITY AND THE practically know more about steam than Adam did ; or as much of geography and navigation as Ulysses. By patient effort they have to learn everything. The task is not easy for any of them ; for some of them it is arduous in the extreme. None of them can accomplish it except by their own will — by their own will forcing its way through difficulties. By what motive, then, is this will to be roused and forti- fied ? A bare subsistence can be gained by the simplest form of labour; and millions never attempt to fit themselves for any other. Why should a minority thus elect voluntarily to fulfil functions of this exceptional character .? No external power can possibly make them do so ; for until they themselves have chosen to show their talent, no one else can tell that they have any talent to show. It rests with themselves to develop it, or to let it he fallow. If, therefore, skilled labour can dictate its own terms now, and if it refuse to exert itself except for unequal wages, it must, as long as civiHsation continues, always be equally master of the situation ; and until the human charac- MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 239 ter shall have been altogether revolutionised, it will always continue to use its advantage similarly. The foregoing observations will have shown the reader thus much — that the inequality in reward which at present always accompanies the graduation of labour, is in no way the accidental result of existing social arrange- ments, but is the necessary result of the con- stitution of the human character. Even yet, however, the argument is not closed ; it may still be open to the objector, while he admits the above truth, to urge that in the future the human character may change. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, does say precisely this ; and the theory, in loose terms, is parroted on every side of us. What shall we reply to it? As regards Mr. Spencer the dispute can be settled easily ; for unless he has much misre- presented his own meaning, the change in the human character which he speaks of, he re- gards as a thing which it may take ages to ac- . complish ; indeed, the period he requires for it is apparently quite beyond calculation. With 240 INEQUALITY AND THE him, therefore, for practical purposes, there can be no discussion. In incalculable tiine, incalculable things may happen. . But if any thinker ventures to be more definite, and, clearly stating the change which is at this moment in qiiestion, maintains that it will occur within any time that is appreciable — if he maintains that in twenty-five years, or in fifty, or even in a hundred, or a hundred and fifty, the desire for inequahty wiU have not only ceased to be operative, but that some other motive will be doing its work instead of it, then at once we shall know what to say to him. We shall ask him, if he can, to show us any sign whatever either in the present or the past, or in the present as compared with the past, which may lead us to think that such a change is even possible. In the present, as we have seen, there is no such sign apparent ; on the contrary, the desire for inequahty is, as a motive, more powerful now than ever; and whatever change there is, is in just the other direction. Perhaps, however, in the eyes of the sanguine Democrat, this in itself MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 241 may seem one of the very signs we ask for. He may argue that the desire for inequality, if it were less in the past than it is in the present, may in the future be l6ss than it was in the past. Plainly, he will say, it is not constant but variable ; and who shall fix the limits of its variation? But the ghmmer of hope afibrded by this argument fades instantly when we come to inspect it closely. The desire for inequahty, there is not the smallest doubt, has at various times varied very widely in its importance ; but it has varied only as related to other motives ; it has not varied as related to productive labour. Other motives, at times, may have very nearly echpsed it, but when this has been the case we shall always find infallibly that productive labour has been nearly echpsed also ; and conversely, whenever productive labour has risen into importance and has echpsed other occupations, in exact proportion we shall find that other motives have become echpsed by the desire for in- equahty. This has apparently been true in every age of the world ; and, unhkely as it E 242 INEQUALITY AND THE might at first sight seem, in the ages of slavery as well as in those of free labour. The history especially of slave labour in Eome wUl throw on the question a long and continuous hght. We shall there be able to trace the exact phenomenon I have been speaking of. We shall see how, in proportion as a taste for luxury was developed, and slaves began to be looked to as agents in skilled production, the unequal rewards to which it was possible for a slave to aspire became steadily greater and more numerous. Let us turn, in short, where we will, the same fact will present itself. The desire for inequality, and efficiency in skilled production, always rise and always fall together ; and if the Democrat insists on appeahng from the present to the past, history will only repeat to him, with still greater emphasis, what his own observations might suffice by itself to teach him. It will show him that, so far as we are guided in our hopes and opinions, by any method of observation known either to science or to common sense, we have absolutely no ground either for MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 243 thinking or hoping that the human character within any calculable period will, in this respect, either change or even tend to change. The desire for inequality itself may, no doubt, dwindle some day ; but if it do so, production will dwindle also, and our material civilisation will wholly, or in part, vanish from us. That event is even more than possible. We may lose some day both the desire and the civilisa- tion ; but we shall never keep the latter in any state of society which does not excite, and which does not gratify the former. Our examination, however, of the causes by which civihsation is maintained, is not yet complete. We have thus far dealt only with the highest grades of labour ; it still remains for us to deal with the lowest, on which all the rest are based, and without which they ♦would be wholly powerless to exert themselves. Now the motive, as I have said already, that produces the lowest grade of labour is not the desire for inequality, it is the desire for a subsistence; and such labour, as I have said already also, has no natural tendency to B 2 244 INEQUALITY AND THE subserve civilisation at all. When savages have produced enough to satisfy their neces- sary wants, they are as wholly incapable of producing anything further, as if, after that point, their entire bodies were paralysed. They are raised out of this state of helpless- ness, and the rudiments of a faculty for civi- lised labour are added to them only by some such process as that symbohsed in our parable of the stranger and the islanders. A minority, in some way or other, must apply force to the majority ; it must virtually possess itself of the food-supply of the latter ; and in this way cause the labour which is motived by the want of food to do more than satisfy the wants by which it is motived. Historically, this application of force began with conquest and the institution of slavery ; and as its ope- ration there must be plain to even the least careful observer, I will ask the reader again to direct his attention to that. We have hitherto considered the existence of social inequality simply as supplying a motive to men who desired to rise. If, how- MAINTENANOE OF CIVILISATION. 245 ever, we look at the case of slavery, we shall see that it acts upon labour in another way also. It not only supphes motives, but it conditions motives. A common slave received no more food in his servitude than he would naturally have secured for himself in his freedom. He was roused into industry by no new object of desire ; but merely by the fact that what he had desired always, was now so placed that he had to take a new road to get to it. And the changed position in which he thus found himself, was essentially a position brought about by force. He not only himself had no wish to be put in it, but he could not have put himself in it, even if he had wished to do so. He could not possibly, by any endeavours of his own, have so applied to himself his own desire for food that it should cause him to do three times the work naturally required to satisfy it. The added power which, in his servitude, this motive had over him, was a power derived from a source wholly external to himself — not from a desire for any inequality on his own part, but from the pressure put on 246 INEQUALITY AND THE him by an inequality already achieved by others. Now in the case of an unskilled slave, during the early stages of progress, this fact is obvious. All civilisations, as I remarked in a former chapter, have begun against the wiU of the majority of the human beings concerned in them. Social inequality, at first, has been always inequahty in force, or, if we hke to put it bluntly, it has been neither more nor less than oppression. But when we pass from the ancient world to the modern, from the age of the slave to the age of the free labourer, it is not perhaps obvious, as regards this special question, what has happened during the transition. How, in the manner in which the .motive to labour acts upon him, does the un- skilled free labourer differ from the unskilled slave ? In many of his circumstances he, of course, differs profoundly. He cannot be sold ; he can move from place to place ; he can choose his own work, and his own mas- ter ; above all, he can save, and as long as his savings last him, no hving being can compel MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. 247 him to labour at all. But whenever, and in so far a,s unskilled labour is being done by him, he is essentially in the same position as the slave : the labour he is doing is motived in such a way that it does more than satisfy the wants by which it is motived. That is, whenever he produces anything, he is obliged to produce more than personally he has any wish to produce — or more, in other words, than he would be able to produce without some external force acting on him. Here then, in our latest civilisation, we encounter the same fact which we have just noted in the earliest. We find that the lower forms of labour can be made productive only by the apphcation of force in some way to the labourer. It appears, therefore, that in the gradual abohtion of slavery, what has really happened has been this. The force that once resided in one dominant class has gradually passed from that into the structure of society generally. The unskilled labourer has ceased to be at the mercy of a master ; but the force that the master once applied to him capri- 248 ' INEQUALITY AND THE ciously, is now applied to him instead by his whole social environment, and that not capri- ciously, but with the regularity of a' natural law. We thus see that the greatest of all changes that has ever taken place in the con- ditions of production, has not connoted the very smallest change in the constitution of the human character. To produce the! same amount of labour, the same motives and the same force must be applied now as ever ; and the only change or improvement that has ever taken place, has not been in the things applied, but merely in the method of the application. The maintenance of civihsation, then, de- pends upon two processes, the constant deve- lopment of the higher forms of labour, and the constant intensification of the lower ; and in each case equally the cause that operates is inequahty. In the first, it operates by pro- ducing a desire for itself in the labourer ; in the secoild it operates by exerting a certain pressure upon him. In the one case it at- tracts, in the other case it propels. But in both cases, in one way, what it does is the MAINTENANCE OF CIVILISATION. " 249 same. In both cases it endows the labourer with powers which, in its absence, would be wholly wanting in him. In its absence there could be no continued industry, just as in its absence there could be no developed skill. If we would ever scientifically grasp the great social problem, we must never lose sight of this fundamental truth. Man's power of producing more than a hvehhood depends upon causes that are without him, and not within him ; and these causes consist essen- tially, and they always have consisted since the earliest dawn of history, in some arrange- ment, more or less eJBfective, of marked social inequalities. 250 CHAPTER X. INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGEESS. "We have now considered the world's material civilisation under each of its three aspects, its rise, its progress, and its maintenance ; and in each case we have found the cause of it to be either the desire for, or else the pressure of, inequality. In the absence of this cause, civilisation has been also absent ; with the decline of it, civilisation has dechned. With regard then to the future, the deduction is in- evitable. Any social changes that tend to abohsh inequalities, will tend also to destroy or to diminish our civilisation. This statement, however, must be taken with certain Hmitations, or it may else be easily distorted by a perverse or a slovenly thinker. Although where there are no in- equalities, there will be no civilised produc- INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. 251 tion, and where there are mequahties there will be civihsed production, it is by no means meant that production always increases in exact proportion to the magnitude of the in- equahties, or that it need always be diminished in exact proportion to the-diminution of them. Thus under the old regime in France, as the inequaUties became greater, it is notorious that production became less ; and conversely, in the same country, as the inequalities have become less, the production has become greater. To any one, however, who has un- derstood the foregoing arguments, this will seem only natural. Inequality influences pro- duction not by existing only, but by existing as an object of desire on the one hand, and as a means of pressure on the other. Its power over the skilled labourer depends on the chances he has of achieving it ; its power over the unskilled labourer depends on the way in which it can apply pressure to him. Now in the first case, if inequahty be too hard to achieve, its influence, as an object of desire, wiU be almost as little as if it did not exist at , 252 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGRESS. all ; and in the second case, if its pressure be too severe, it may cripple labour in the very act of causing it. Its efficiency, therefore, as the cause of civilised production, will increase with its magnitude only within certain hmits. Further, these limits will themselves vary con- siderably in different cases. They wUl be different in England from what they are in Ireland ; they will be different in China from what they are in the United States. They wiU difier according to the temperament, the political history, and the occupations, of each separate people. But these differences will be altogether accidental. Precisely the same principle will be found to underlie all of them. Inequality, as it increases, will in every case increase production, until by its magnitude it begins to cause despair or indifference rather than hope in the skUled labourer ; and misery and weakness instead of resolve in the un- skilled. As soon as it increases beyond this point production will diminish ; as soon as it decreases towards this point again, produc- tion again will increase. This latter process, INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGKESS. 253 however, is no movement towards the aboli- tion of inequality ; it tends, on the contrary, to set it on its broadest basis, and not to lessen, but merely to distribute the effects of it. It affords, therefore, no exception to the. general law we have arrived at : that any social changes that tend to abolish inequalities will tend also to destroy or to diminish our civilisation. Now this, very likely, in the present con- dition of thought, will at first strike most of us as a somewhat disheartening conclusion. To the Democrat, of course, if he ever be brought to assent to it, it must be the death- blow of all hi? hopes ; but when it is bluntly and nakedly put before us, it may dishearten many who are very far from being Democrats. For with regard to the poorer classes, what it means is obvious. It means that until the world again relapses into barbarism their own distance from the rich can never be ap- preciably diminished ; and, further, that in such a relapse they would not rise towards riches, but the rich would sink towards poverty, and they themselves would sink towards pri- 254 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. vation. If, however, instead of yielding to our first impressions, we examine scientifically the real facts of the situation, the most ardent philanthropist need find little cause in it for disappointment. Material civilisation is a desirable thing for one reason only. It is desirable only because, and in so far as, it increases human happiness. If riches were supposed to make men miser- able, no Democrat would ever wish to distri- bute them. He wishes to distribute them only because he believes they make men happy; and he wishes to distribute them equally be- cause he believes that happiness is, in a general way, proportionate to them. Now it is on this last behef that our whole view of the question depends. If it really seems to us a dishearten- ing reflection that we shall have ' the poor always with tis,' it can only be because we believe tliis — that the poor man, as such, must be always unhappier than the rich man, and that his life will be pitiable in exact proportion to his poverty. I said, it will be recollected, that this belief was the first article in the creed IiraQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGKESS. 255 of modern democracy, and that creed, I said further, was accepted by many people as a misgiving who would repudiate it indignantly as an affirmation. But if this be true, as I believe it is, of the democratic creed in general, it is yet more true of this particular portion of it. It has often been remarked that, in the history of modern sentiment, one of the most prominent features is the wide development of pity, and by pity is meant generally a recog- nition of the physical and moral misery in the world, together with a ^sh that such misery might be alleviated. Now miseiry of both kinds is no doubt greater amongst the poor than amongst the rich ; and modern thought, fixing itself on that fact, has in a very singular way arrived at two conclusions — firstly, that poverty is the cause of the bulk of human misery ; and secondly, that the bulk of human misery can only be alleviated by some general equalisation of existing material inequalities. Thus in the present condition of things that feeling or wish which is commonly called pity or benevo- lence is not really a single wish, but a double 256 INEQUALITT AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. one. To the wish that misery might be alleviated there is added a seicond wish as to the special means for its alleviation, namely, the wish for social equahty ; and these two so instantly coar lesce that in the popular mind it is very diffi- cult to distinguish them. Whether this be the effect of the avowed democratic ' movement, or whether it be the cause of it, is beside our present purpose to inquire. It is enough for ' us here to recognise that, by some means or other, the benevolent sentiment, as it now exists in the world, certainly has aUied itself with the wish for social equality, not only amongst those who think social equahty at- tainable, but even amongst many who alto- gether despair of its attainment. If, however, we except the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labour, there has never been a fallacy with regard to social subjects so great as that which the above alhance is based upon ; nor until the world in general has learnt utterly to discard it wiU any sound con- ception of the social problem be possible. What is requisite in this case for a right under- INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGBESS. 257 .standing of the truth is nothing more than was requisite in the question of wealth and labour. It is simply to apply the inductive method ac- curately, to blot out for the time every picturp of the imagination, to silence for the time every whisper of sympathy, and to observe the facts of life, on which the points at issue turn, as they actually are and have been. Those facts are of a perfectly unmistakable order ; they are the facts of human happiness as affected by material circumstances, and we have all prac- tically such unlimited means for observing them that the, task before us will be to, arrange rather than to collect our evidenfce. What, then, does this evidence teach us ? In the first place, it teaches us that amongst the very richest of men numbers have lived and died full of disappointment and bitterness, and that amongst 'the poor numbers have lived and died contented. This fact, though so wholly lost sight of in the social speculations that have marked the present century, is yet in itself so notorious and so nearly self-evident that it would be almost an impertinence to S 258 INEQUALITY AITO SOCIAL PEOGEESS. support it by special instances ; and not less evident than the fact itself is the general in- ference that inevitably foUows from it. It foUows from it that however, in many cases, happiness may be increased by an increase of riches, it does not necessarily bear any propor- tion to them, and that if the poor as a rule are less happy than the rich, this is not due to their not possessing luxuries, but to some other cause of a wholly distinct nature. Should this seem a hard saying to any one, he may easily test the truth of it by an appeal to his own experience ; and if he be a rich man, and accustomed to luxurious hving, he will be able to do this only the more readily. Such a man, as soon as he begins to reflect at aU, will see how, within limits, luxury is wholly relative. That is, he wiU see how the very same material circumstances which he would think miserable on one occasion, he wiU think luxurious on another. He travels, we wUl say, from Paris to Nice in a sleeping-car, and he looks on himself as in the very lap of luxury, because he hes on a spring mattress, INEQUALITY AISTD SOCIAL PEOGEESS. 259' and because he has a whole compartment to himself. Suppose, however, at his journey's end he were offered a bedroom at his hotel which was the exact facsimile of that compart- ment, and instead of a place of luxury he would think it a stifling den. Or let him take, if he is a sportsman, his own life as a deer- stalker, and compare it with his hfe as a man of fashion in London. Whereas in London, probably, he will hardly venture out in a shower, and will take a hansom sooner than walk a furlong, in Scotland he will think nothing of either fatigue or weather. He will exert his muscles more, he will face greater hardship than the commonest day-labourer; and the man who in Piccadilly would barely put his foot in a puddle will He by the hour on the damp ground in Inverness-shire. And yet if he compare his two modes of hfe to- gether — his Hfe as a deer-stalker and his Hfe in the world of London — he will see that, in his own opinion and that of the world in general, the former is as much a Hfe of luxury as the latter, and is even more distinctive of the S2 260 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. richest and most luxurious classes. If, then, the rich man, who is accustomed to the softest living, can thus find the hardest Hving to be actually at times a luxury, he will scarcely be able to doubt that the hardest living to the poor man need not in itself be any cause of misery.'^ What makes it difiicult for the rich at first to realise this is that they naturally look at the matter through the distorting medium of the imagination. They look on the poor, in fact, as rich people ruined, and conceive of them as missing comforts that they have never ' It may be also noticed that, in all ages, many have held the opinion that not only does poverty not necessarily make men unhappy, but that it is in itself, and apart from accidental evils, more calculated to make them happy than riches are. Ofortunati nimium, sua «e hona norint, Agricolae ! expresses a view by no means confined to Virgil. It is a pro- verbial saying in our own day, that when a rich man complains of unhappiness, the best advice to give him is to live on sixpence « day, and earn it ; and curiously enough the very Democrats and Radicals, whose chief occupation is to hold the rich up to envy, are perpetually sneering at them, as though they were objects of pity. The above opinion is no doubt as false, in a general way, as its opposite. I only note its existence to show how loose and inaccurate is current thought with regard to the whole question involved in it. INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PBOGEESS. 261 even heard of. The poor, too, on their side, do an exactly similar thing. They look on the rich through the medium of the imagination also, and just as the rich attribute to them a whoUy imaginary misery, so they attribute to the rich a wholly imaginary happiness. In this, however, as in so many other cases, it is the chief function of scientific thought to cor- rect the behefs which the imagination thus distorts for us ; and if we only surrender our- selves here to its clear and impartial guidance, we shall see the foregoing conclusion to be altogether indisputable. Happiness and the possession of riches, unhappiness and the want of riches, are not in any way necessarily cor- relative. The bulk, therefore, of human un- happiness has nothing whatever to do with the existence of social inequalities, nor is there the least reason to despair of the world's future merely because these inequahties can never be done away with. What shall we say, then, when wretched cases reach us, of destitution, and hunger, and squalor, and pain from cold ? What shall we 262 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGKESS. say of the foul, unhealthy houses — of the crowded courts and alleys in which millions of our poor are lodged ? What we shall say is obvious. We shall say that these evils are caused by want, not that they are caused by inequality. We shall say that misery is miserable, not that inequality is miserable. The sufferings of the poor are not caused by their having httle as compared with the rich ; but by their having httle as compared with the simplest demands of human nature. It is in no way a sad thing that one man should be dining off turtle and ortolans, and another man off a plate of beans and bacon. What is a sad thing is that one man should be dining off turtle and ortolans, and another man have next to no dinner at all. So, too, it is in no way a sad thing that one man should live in a palace, and another man in a small cottage. What is a sad thing is, that while one man lives in a healthy house, so many other men live in unhealthy ones. Once let the poorest of the population be sufficiently clothed and fed, and so lodged as to be free from filth and INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGBESS. 263 fever, and it will be perfectly possible then that the poor, taken generally, may in point of happiness be as well off as the rich. What, however, if this be the case, be- comes of the main fact dwelt on in this volume, namely, the influence on human action of the desire for social inequality? If the unequal distribution of wealth has so httle to do with the unequal distribution of happiness, how can the desire for an unequal share of wealth be the one great motive that produces and maintains civilisation? To answer this, we need only appeal again to facts of human character that are within the knowledge of all of us. First, however, let the reader observe this. It has not been said that riches and poverty have no connection with happiness and unhappiness ; it has been said only that they have no necessary connection. Under certain conditions they are connected ; • and under certain conditions they are not connected." We have now to inquire what these conditions are. We may, to begin, then, say as a general 264 INEQUALITY AKD SOCIAL PROGKESS. rule that riches are essential to happiness in exact proportion as we are accustomed to them ; and that poverty is necessarily a cause of unhappiness, not because it cannot supply us with luxuries, but only when, and in so far as, it deprives us of them. It thus follows that the richer a man is, he is, not happier than the poorer men below him, but for the same amount of happiness more dependent on riches. Hence, though he may have no desire to become more rich than he is, he will have a very strong desire not to become more poor. He will desire to maintain his inequahty, though he will not desire to increase it. The desire for inequahty, then, can take two forms. It can take the form, not only of a desire to rise, but the form also of a desire to remain stationary. It may therefore be a constant cause of labour, even in cases where no dis- content is implied in it ; and a large propor- tion of its power is of this latter kind. When it takes, on the other hand, the form of a desire to rise, then no doubt the matter is somewhat different. The man who desires to INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS., 265. rise must, from that very fact; be discontented to some degree with his existing circumstances ;, but when a man's discontent is such that he can see his way to removing the cause of it,, and when it thus becomes the motive of hope- ful action, it is a source of happiness, not a source of misery to him. Now if we examine the conditions under which the desire to rise develops itself, we shall find that the discon- tent involved in it is essentially, of this pleasur- able kind. The human character, it will be found, is so constituted that a man's desire for things he does not possess is not in proportion to their desirableness, but in proportion to the ease with which they seem attainable. Thus most country gentlemen would be pleased at being made peers, but their way to the honour must be more or less plain to them before the want of it gives them the least uneasiness. And in aU classes of society a similar thing holds good. Putting out of the question cases of actual want, man is naturally contented with whatever conditions he is accustomed to untn some better conditions are put before 266 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGRESS. jhim, not only by his imagination as being better, but by his reason as being within his reach. It will be found further that when his imagination and his reason act in their normal 'waj, these better conditions are rarely very far in advance of his own. They are a step in advance, but a step only ; and though he may know that each step he takes he will see .another beyond that, yet what, at any given time, his happiness reaUy depends upon, is merely the one he is actually engaged in taking. Thus a man who starts in life with the wish to die a prime minister, at first depends for his happiness on being returned to Parha- ment. The desire to rise, in fact, when it is more than an idle wish is naturally hmited to -what is near at hand ; and is strong in pro- portion to the prospects of its being satisfied. Thus the more operative it is in maintaining and advancing civiHsatiou, the more does it become an element not of unhappiness, but of happiness ; nor does its presence in a poor man prove that poverty is necessarily miser- INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGEESS. 267 able, any more than its presence in a rich man proves that riches are. Here again, however, another perplexity- may present itself. It may be asked, if the human character be such as it has just been said to be, and if such be the natural action of the desire for inequality, how are we to account for the rise and spread amongst the masses, not only of a desire, but even of a passion for equality ? The answer to this question, though complex, is not difficult ; and the full materials for it are in our hands already. We have seen, t,hen, that equality, in the modern sense of the word, is not equahty. in the abstract, but an equality in material wealth. We have seen further that of the actual enjoyments the wealthy get from wealth the poorer classes have no conception whatsoever. Wealth to them is an object of desire only, as a supposed key to some state of unknown happiness, and a supposed means of escape out of every known unhappiness. Thus equahty, as presented by the modern Demo- crats to the people, means a condition of 268 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGEESS. things under which they will all enter some new state of existence indefinitely happier than their present one. But it does not mean that only. It means a condition of things also which is not only thus desirable, but which, by a certain course of action, is rapidly and certainly attainable. Now everyone would Hke to be indefinitely happier than he is : and though the idea of indefinite happiness afiects us but little usually, that is due to the fact that where it is indefinite it is usually remote also. When, however, it is presented to us as being near at the same time that it is in- definite, then its indefiniteness does but make it the more exciting : and this being the case, it is little matter for wonder that the idea of equality, as presented to us by the modern Democrats, should be, amongst the masses who do not detect its falsehood, the most exciting idea that could be ofiered to the human ima- gination. For this reason it constitutes the most formidable danger that has ever threatened society ; and for this reason no healthy pro- INEQUALITY AJTO SOCIAL PROGRESS. 269 gress will be possible until it has been exposed in its true light, and altogether discarded. Now its power, and therefore its danger, it will be seen from what has just been said, depends upon two distinct falsehoods ; one a falsehood of the imagination, which represents ■wealth to the poor as a condition of extraor- dinary happiness ; the other the falsehood of an intellectual theory which represents it as a possibility to make this condition general. It will be seen further that, apart from this intel- lectual theory, the false picture drawn by the imagination would in itself have practically no disturbing influence. A desire for the un- attainable is nothing but a harmless senti- ment, untU a false intellectual theory repre- sents the thing desired as attainable. It is, therefore, with the theory of equality, rather than with the conception of happiness ap- pealed to by it, that I have occupied myself in this volume ; and the point, with regard to it, that I have tried to demonstrate, has been at once simple and single. I have tried to demonstrate that equality, as the goal of pro- 270 KirEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. gress, is not practicable or impracticable, true or false, according to the completeness or in- completeness of the meaning we attach to it ; but that it is not a condition to which we should make any efforts to approximate ; and that, so far from being in any way a goal of progress, it is, on the contrary, the goal of re- trogression instead. Conversely, I have tried to demonstrate further, that inequahty, so far from being an accidental evil of civilisation, is the efficient cause of its development and of its present maintenance ; that the distance of the poor from the rich is not the cause to the former of their poverty, as distinct from riches, but of their civilised competence as distinct from barbarism ; and that if ever any changes that have reaUy advanced civilisation have had the appearance of a movement to- wards equality, this appearance has either been deceptive altogether, or has been else due to a coincidence, not to any real identity j the movement in question having been not towards equahty, but towards a more efficient arrangement of inequalities. INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PEOGRESS. 271 It is to the exhibition of this one great truth that I have confined myself. I have not discussed the various forms that inequality may assume ; and I have purposely avoided the question of the position and the function of a class wholly unconnected with production, such as a landed aristocracy ; because, though the existence of such a class may, under cer^ tain circumstances, supply an extraordinary stimulus to mercantile and manufacturing enterprise, yet it is plainly not essential, as the case of America shows us, to material civilisa- tion of a very advanced kind. Its effects are moral, rather than directly industrial ; and, as such, they demand separate treatment. I have, however, observed already, that the chief feature in the position, of a landed aris- tocracy which the modern agitator has suc- ceeded in rendering odious to the people is, not its unproductiveness, but its inequahty. And as to inequality, it is perfectly certain that the masses see practically no difference whatever between the commercial or manu- facturing plutocrat, and the peer or the ^72 INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. country gentleman ; or if they do see any dif- Tence, it is rather in favour of the latter. Thus, although the arguments I have dwelt upon in this brief volume have not touched on the question of the uses of a landed aris- tocracy, they will show that' the chief feature of it which Eadicals and Democrats are able to exploiter as an evil, is a feature they them- selves would be still obhged to retain, and in a form, if anything, even more marked and offensive. But these observations are -beside my pre- sent mark. The main importance of a recog- nition of the doctrine of inequality, is not the added security that it would give the rich, but the added hopes of progress it would hold out to the poor. Conservatism, no doubt, during the present century, has shown itself at time^ as an obstructive as well as a conserving power ; but for this the party of progress has chiefly itself to thank. If its schemes for wide redress of evils and grievances amongst the poor have been opposed or neglected, as they have been, this has been partly due, no doubt, INBQUALITT AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. 273 to prejudice ; partly, no doubt, to a mistaken class-selfishness ; but chiefly to the fact that these schemes themselves have been based on a theory wholly at variance with the facts of human nature, and which the common sense of mankind, when undisturbed by passion, has instinctively recognised as at once chimerical and ruinous. In other words, the theory of social equality, by identifying the hopes of the poor, with the attainment of a Utopia on the one hand, and the destruction of all society on the other, has been more influential than any other cause, not only in perpetuating, but even in. increasing the evils consequent on the modern developments of civihsation. It has made the prosperous poor discontented with circumstances which would naturally make them happy ; and it has shut out the suffering poor from their best hopes of progress by teaching them to mask their demand for what would really benefit them in a demand for something that would be the ruin of them- selves and everybody. It has placed them in an utterly false position. Instead of making T 274 INEQUALITY AM) SOCIAL PEOGKESS. civilisation the friend of the poor, it has duped the poor into making themselves the enemies of civilisation. It is never wise to yield to hope too easily ; but were the modern theory of equality once abandoned and discredited, there are abun- dant grounds, I believe, for a sober assurance that the cause of the poor and suffering would receive almost instantly an incalculable acces- sion of strength. The wealth, the culture, the wisdom, the philanthropy, which are now forced unwillingly to regard that cause with suspicion, if not to oppose it, would in an instant be arrayed upon its side ; and the sui- cidal movement, which at present passes for progress, would begin to be in reahty what it now is only in name. LONDON : PRrSTED BY gPOTTISWOODB AMD 00., KEW-STREKT SQUAKB AND PAHUAMENT SXBE&T HM i46.M'i-™""'""««v'-«--7 Social equallty:a short study In a missl 3 1924 002 669 319