Chapter XI: State Socialism (3)

In this doctrine of Professor Wagner we find the same general features we have already seen in the doctrine of Rodbertus. It is true he would not nationalize all industries whatsoever; he would only nationalize such industries as the State is really fit to manage successfully. He admits that uneconomic management can never contribute to the public good, and so far he accepts a very sound principle of limitation. But then he applies the principle with too great laxity. He has an excessive idea of the State's capacities. He thinks that every business now conducted by a joint-stock company could be just as well conducted by the Government, and ought therefore to be nationalized; but experience shows--railway experience, for example--that joint-stock management, when it is good, is better than Government management at its best. Then Professor Wagner thinks every industry which has a natural tendency to become in any case a practical monopoly would be better in the hands of the Government; but Government might interfere enough to restrain the mischiefs of monopoly--as it does in the case of railways in this country, for example--without incurring the liabilities of complete management. Professor Wagner would in these ways throw a great deal of work on Government which Government is not very fit to accomplish successfully, and he would like to throw everything on it, if he could overcome his scruples about its capabilities, because he thinks industrial nationalization would facilitate the realization of his particular views of the equitable distribution of wealth. It is true, again, that Wagner's theory of equitable distribution is not the theory of Rodbertus--he rejects the right of labour to the whole product; but his theory, if less definite, is not less unjustifiable. It is virtually the theory of equality of conditions which considers all inequalities of fortune wrong, because they are held to come either from chance, or--what is worse--from an unjust utilization of chance, and which, on that account, takes comparative poverty to constitute of itself a righteous claim for compensation as against comparative wealth. Now, a state of enforced equality of conditions would probably be found neither possible nor desirable, but it is in its very conception unjust. It may be well, as far as it can be done, to check refined methods of deceit, or cruel utilizations of an advantageous position, but it can never be right to deprive energy, talent, and character of the natural reward and incentive of their exertions. The world would soon be poor if it discouraged the skill of the skilful, as it would soon cease to be virtuous if it ostracized those who were pre-eminently honest or just. The idea of equality has been a great factor in human progress, but it requires no such outcome as this. Equality is but the respect we owe to human dignity, and that very respect for human dignity demands security for the fruits of industry to the successful, and security against the loss of the spirit of personal independence in the mass of the people. But while that is so, there is one broad requirement of that same fundamental respect for human dignity which must be admitted to be wholly just and reasonable--the requirement which we have seen to have been recognised by the English economists--that the citizens be, as far as possible, secured, if necessary by public compulsion and public money, in the elementary conditions of all humane living. The State might not be right if it gave the aged a comfortable superannuation allowance, or the unemployed agreeable work at good wages; but it is only doing its duty when, with the English law, it gives them enough to keep them, without taking away from the one the motives for making a voluntary provision against age, or from the other the spur to look out for work for themselves.

It will be said that this is a standard that is subject to a certain variability; that a house may be considered unfit for habitation now that our fathers would have been fain to occupy; that shoes seem an indispensable element of humane living now, though, as Adam Smith informs us, they were still only an optional decency in some parts of Scotland in his time. But differences of this nature lead to no practical difficulty, and the standard is fixity of measure itself when compared with the indefinite claims that may be made in the name of historical compensation, or wild theories of distributive justice, and it makes a wholesome appeal to recognised obligations of humanity instead of feeding a violent sense of unbounded hereditary wrong. At all events, it presents the true equality--equality of moral rights--over against the false equality of State socialism--equality of material conditions; and it is able to present a better face against that system, because it recognises a certain measure of material conditions among the original moral rights. For this reason the English theory of social politics is the best practical criterion for discriminating between socialistic legislation and wholesome social reforms. The State socialistic position cannot be advantageously attacked from the ground of Mr. Spencer and the adherents of _laissez-faire_, who merely say, Let misfortune and poverty alone; whether remediable or irremediable, they are not the State's affairs. The two theories nowhere come within range; but the English theory meets State socialism at every point, almost hand to hand, for it admits the State's competency to deal with poverty and misfortune, and to alter men's material conditions to the extent needed for the practical realization of their full moral rights.

III. _State Socialism and Social Reform._

On this English theory of social politics, the State, though not socialist, is very frankly social reformer, and those schools of opinion, which are usually thought to have been most averse to Government intervention, have been among the most earnest in pressing that _role_ upon the State. Cobden, I presume, may be taken as a fair representative of the Manchester school, and Cobden, with all his love of liberty, loved progress more, and thought the best Government was the Government that did most for social reform. When he visited Prussia in 1838, he was struck with admiration at the paternal but improving rule he found in operation there. "I very much suspect," he said, "that at present for the great mass of the people Prussia possesses the best Government in Europe. I would gladly give up my taste for talking politics, to secure such a state of things in England. Had our people such a simple and economical Government, so deeply imbued with justice to all, and aiming so constantly to elevate mentally and morally its population, how much better would it be for the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen!" So far from thinking, as the Manchester man of polemics is always made to think, that the State goes far enough when it secures to every man liberty to pursue his own interest his own way, as long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of his neighbours, the Manchester man of reality takes the State severely to task for neglecting to promote the mental and moral elevation of the people; the chief end of Government being to establish not liberty alone, but every other necessary security for rational progress. The theory of _laissez-faire_ would of course permit measures required for the public safety, but what Cobden calls for are measures of social amelioration. Provisions for the better protection of person and property, as they exist, against violence or fraud, make up but a small part of legitimate State duty, compared with provisions for their better development, for enlarging the powers of the national manhood, or the product of the national resources. The institution of property itself is a provision for progress, and could never have originated under the system of _laissez-faire_, which now makes it a main branch of State work to defend it. In the form of permanent and exclusive possession, it is undoubtedly a contravention of the equal freedom of all to the use of their common inheritance, committed for the purpose of securing their more productive use of it. It interferes with their access to the land, and with the equality of their opportunities, but then it enhances and concentrates the energies of the occupants, and it doubles the yield of the soil. It promotes two objects, which are quite as paramount concerns of the State as liberty itself--it improves the industrial manhood of the nation, and it increases the productivity of the natural resources; and institutions that conduce to such results are not really infractions of liberty, but rather complements of it, because they give people an ampler use of their own powers, and create, by means of the increase of production they work, more and better opportunities than those they take away.

Now the lines of legitimate intervention prescribed by the necessities of progress, and already followed in the original institution of property, will naturally, when extended through our complicated civilization, include a very considerable and varied field of social and industrial activity, and this has been all along recognised by the English economists and statesmen. While opposed to the State doing anything either moral or material for individuals, which individuals could do better, or with better results, for themselves, they agreed in requiring the State, first, to undertake any industrial work it had superior natural advantages for conducting successfully; and second, to protect the weaker classes effectively in the essentials of all rational and humane living--in what Adam Smith calls "an undeformed and unmutilated manhood"--not only against the ravages of violence or fear or insecurity, but against those of ignorance, disease, and want. Smith, we know, would even save them from cowardice by a system of military training, and from fanaticism by an established Church, because, he said, cowardice and fanaticism were as great deformities of manhood as ignorance or disease, and prevented a man from having command of himself and his own powers quite as effectually as violence or oppression. Laws which give every man better command and use of his own energies are in manifest harmony with liberty, and for the State to do such industrial work as it has special natural advantages for doing is conformable with the principle of free-trade itself, which has always prescribed to men and nations as the best rule for their prosperity, that they should concentrate their strength on the branches of industry they possess natural advantages for cultivating, and give up wasting their labour on less productive employment. Mr. Chamberlain is certainly wrong in thinking over-government an extinct danger under democratic institutions, a mere survival from times of oppression which haunts the people still, though they are their own masters, with foolish fears of over-governing themselves. In reality, the danger has much more probably increased, as John Stuart Mill believed, for if we cannot over-govern ourselves, we can very easily and cheerfully over-govern one another, and a majority may impose its brute will with even less scruple than a monarch; but however that may be, those who tremble most sincerely for the ark of liberty cannot see any undue contraction of the field of individual action in an extension of authority for either of the two purposes here specified, for the purpose of undertaking industrial work which private initiative cannot prosecute so advantageously, or of making more secure to the weaker citizens those primary conditions of normal humanity, which are really their natural right. The first of these purposes is quite consistent with the principles of men like W. von Humboldt, who contend that the best means of national prosperity is the cultivation to the utmost of the individual energy of the people, and who are opposed to Government interference because it represses or supplants that energy. They welcome everything that tends to economize and develop energy, to place things in the hands of those that can do them best, and generally to increase the productive capacity of the whole community. They believe that machinery, division of labour, factory systems, keenest conditions of competition, however they may at first seem to contract men's opportunities of employment, always end in multiplying them, and, because they increase or economize the productive powers of those actually employed, really expand the field of employment for all. Now Government management would of course have a like operation wherever Government management effected a like economy or increase in the productive powers of society, and would really expand the field of individual initiative which it appeared to contract; and those who believe most in individual energy and its power of seeking out for itself the most advantageous new outlets, will find least to complain of in an intervention of authority which releases men from work ill-suited to their powers to do, and sends them into work where their powers can be more fruitfully occupied.

The second purpose of legitimate intervention seems even less open to objection from that side. The State is asked to go in social reform only as far as it goes in judicial administration--it is asked to secure for every man as effectively as it can those essentials of all rational and humane living which are really every man's right, because without them he would be something less than man, his manhood would be wanting, maimed, mutilated, deformed, incapable of fulfilling the ends of its being. Those original requirements of humane existence are dues of the common nature we wear, which, we cannot see extinguished in others without an injury to our own self-respect, and the State is bound to provide adequate securities for one of them as much as for another. The same reason which justified the State at first in protecting person and property against violence, justified it yesterday in abolishing slavery, justifies it to-day in abolishing ignorance, and will justify it to-morrow in abolishing other degrading conditions of life. The public sense of human dignity may grow from age to age and be offended to-morrow by what it tolerates to-day, but the principle of sound intervention is all through the same--that the proposed measure is necessary to enable men to live the true life of a man and fulfil the proper ends of rational being. A thoughtful French writer defends State intervention for the purpose of social amelioration as being a mere duty of what he calls reparative justice. Popular misery and decadence, he would say, is always very largely the result of bad laws and other bad civil conditions, as we see it plainly to have been in the case of the Irish cottiers, the Scotch crofters, and the rural labourers of England, and when the community has really inflicted the injury, the community is bound in the merest justice to repair it. And the obligation would not be exhausted with the repeal of bad laws; it would require the positive restoration to the declining populations of the conditions of real prosperity from which they fell. But though this is a specific ground which may occasionally quicken the State's remedial action with something of the energy of remorse, it is no extension of its natural and legitimate sphere of intervention, and the State might properly take every measure necessary for the effectual restoration of a declining section of the population to conditions of real prosperity on the broad and simple principle already laid down, that the measure is necessary to put those people in a position to fulfil their vocation as human beings. Hopeless conditions of labour are as contrary to sound nature, and as fatal to any proper use of man's energies, as slavery itself, and their mere existence constitutes a sufficient cause for the State's intervention, apart from any special responsibility the State may bear for their historical origin. Even the measure of the required intervention is no way less, for if its purpose is to preserve some essential of full normal manhood, its only limit is that of being effectual to serve the purpose. The original natural obligation of the State needs no expansion then from historical responsibilities to cover any effectual form of remedial action against the social decadence of particular classes of the population, whether it be the constitution of a new right like the right to a fair rent, the adoption of administrative measures like the migration of redundant inhabitants, or the provision of wise facilities for the rest by the loan of public money.

It is plain, therefore, that we have here within the lines of accepted and even "orthodox" English theory a doctrine of social politics which gives the Government an ample and perfectly adequate place in the promotion of all necessary social reform; and if we are all socialists now, as is so often said, it is not because we have undergone any change of principles on social legislation, but only a public awakening to our social miseries. The Churches, for example, while they left Lord Shaftesbury to fight his battles for the helpless alone, have now shared in this social awakening, and show not only a general ardour to agitate social questions, but even some pains to understand them; but the Churches did not neglect Lord Shaftesbury fifty years ago, because they thought his Factory Bills proceeded from unsound views of the State's functions, but merely because their interest was not then sufficiently aroused in the temporal welfare of the poor, and with all their individual charities they responded little to the grievances of social classes. We are all socialists now, only in feeling as much interest in these grievances as the socialists are in the habit of doing, but we have not departed from our old lines of social policy, and there is no need we should, for they are broad enough to satisfy every claim of sound social reform.

It is only when these lines are transgressed that, strictly speaking, socialism begins; and though it is hopeless to think of confining the vulgar use of the word to its strict signification, it is at least essential to do so if we desire any clear or firm grasp of principle. The socialism of the present time extends the State's intervention from those industrial undertakings it is fitted to manage well to all industrial undertakings whatever, and from establishing securities for the full use of men's energies to attempting to equalize in some way the results of their use of them. It may be shortly described as aiming at the progressive nationalization of industries with a view to the progressive equalization of incomes. The common pleas for this policy are, first, the necessity of introducing a distribution of wealth more in accordance with personal merit by neutralizing the effects of chance, which at present throw some into opulence without any co-operation from their own labour, and press thousands into penury in spite of their most honest exertions; and second, the advantage society would reap from the mere economy of the resources at present wasted in unnecessary competition. Both pleas are, however delusive; it is neither good nor possible to suppress chance, and if competition involves some loss, it yields a much more abounding gain.

A sense of the blind play of chance in all things human lies indeed beneath all work of social relief. "Hodie mihi, cras tibi," wrote the good Regent Murray over his lintel to avert the grudge of envy, and the same feeling of the uncertainty of fortune quickens the thought of pity. Men reflect how much of their own comfort they owe to good circumstances rather than good deserts, and how much more bad circumstances have often to do with poverty than bad guiding. To change these bad conditions so far as to preserve for every man intact the essentials of common progressive manhood is a proper object of social work. But while mitigating the operation of chance to that extent is well, to try and suppress its operation altogether would be injurious, even if it were possible. For there is no pursuit under the sun in which chance has not its part as well as skill, and skill itself is often nothing but a quick grasp of happy chance. To discourage the alert from seizing good opportunities on the wing, by confiscating the results and distributing them among the languid and inactive, is the same thing as to discourage them by like means from exerting all their industry in any other way. It violates their individual right with no better effect than to cripple the national production. They are entitled to the best conditions for the successful use of their individual energies, and the best conditions for the use of individual energies are the true securities for national progress. The sound policy is not the greater equalization of opportunities, but their greater utilization. It may be right to make ships seaworthy and their masters competent navigators, but if one of them gets delayed in a calm or disabled by a storm, while another has caught a fair wind and is carried on to port, it would answer no good purpose to equalize their gains for the mere correction of the inequality in their opportunities. It would relax in both masters alike the supreme essentials of all successful labour--activity, vigilance, enterprise. State action with respect to the quips and arrows of fortune ought to go as far but no farther than State action with respect to the crimes and hostilities of men, or with respect to evil forces of nature like those of infectious diseases--it ought to content itself with effectually protecting the primary conditions of sound manhood against their outrages. It may do what it can, not merely to relieve the unfortunate in their extremity, but to prevent their coming to extremity, to arrest, if possible, their decline, to check or soften the trade fluctuations that often swamp them, and to facilitate their self-recovery; but, when it goes on to suppress or equalize the operation of fortune, it destroys the good with the evil, and even if it removed the tares, would find it had only spoiled the harvest of wheat. The present industrial system has its defects, but it certainly has one immense advantage which would be forfeited under socialism--it tends to elicit to their utmost the talents and energies alike of employers and employed. The languor of the "Government stroke" and the slow mechanism of a State department are unfavourable to an abundant production. The general slackening of industry, and the extinction of those innumerable sources of active initiative which at present are so busy pushing out new and fruitful developments, are too great a price to pay for the suppression of the evils of competition. To effect some economies in the use of capital, we damage or destroy the forces by which capital is produced, and really lose the pound to save the penny.

Even from the standing-point of a good distribution of wealth, if by a good distribution we mean, not an equal distribution of the produce, however small the individual share, but, what is surely much better, a high general level of comfort, though considerable inequalities may remain, then an abundant production is still the most indispensable thing, for it is the most certain of all means to that high general level of comfort. Even in those agricultural countries where this result is promoted by a land system favouring peasant properties, the result is largely due to the fact that occupying ownership is itself the best condition for high production; and if we compare the principal modern industrial nations, we shall find labour enjoying the best real remuneration in those where the rate of production is highest, where employers are most competent, machinery most perfected, and labour itself personally most efficient. And, on the other hand, while the general level of comfort rises under a policy that develops productivity even at the risk of widening inequality, the general level of comfort always sinks under the contrary policy which sacrifices productivity to socialistic ideas and claims.

We have practical experience of the working of socialism in various forms, and under the most opposite conditions of culture, and the experience is everywhere the same. Custom in Samoa, for example, gives a man a pretty strict right to go to his neighbour and requisition what he wants, or even to quarter himself in the house without payment, as long as he pleases. No one dares to refuse, for fear of losing credit and suffering reproach. Originating as a well-meant refuge for the distressed, the system has become still more a subterfuge for the lazy, and Dr. Turner sums up his account of it by saying, "This communistic system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a canker-worm at the roots of individual and national progress." The disheartening of the industrious has an even worse effect than the encouragement of the indolent; the more they make, the more subject they are to the imposition. The English agricultural labourers belong to a very different state of society from the savages of Samoa. They are of an energetic race, which if it does not positively love work, has probably as little aversion to it as any nation in the world, and seems often really to delight in the hardest exertion; but in England the effect of giving the poor a similar socialistic right was precisely the same as in Samoa. While we are supposed to have been advancing in socialism with our Factory Acts, we were really retreating from it in our Poor Law. The old English laws which for centuries first fixed labourers' wages, and then made up the deficiencies of the wages, if such occurred, out of the poor rates, were certainly socialistic, and the commission that inquired into their working sixty years ago reported that their worst effect had been to make the labourers such poor workers that they were hardly worth the wages they got. The men were by law unable to earn more if they worked more, or to lose anything if they worked less, and so their very working powers drooped and withered. As most modern socialists put their trust entirely in the old motive of self-interest, and propose to pay every man according to his work, their only resource against such a result would be a stern system of poor-law administration, like the English, and that would of course involve a departure from their favourite ideal of furnishing the dependent poor with as decent and comfortable a living as the independent poor gain for themselves by their work. The change from Samoa to rural England is probably not so great as the change from rural England to Brook Farm and the other experimental communities of the United States, companies of cultivated and earnest people, coming from one of the best civilized stocks, and settling under the favourable material conditions of a new country for the very purpose of working out a socialist ideal. Yet in these American communities, socialistic institutions led to precisely the same results as they did in England and in Samoa, a slackening of industry, and a deterioration of the general level of comfort. No doubt, as Horace Greeley said, who knew these communities well, and lived for a time in more than one of them, there came to them along with the lofty souls, who are willing to labour and endure, "scores of whom the world is quite worthy, the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, the good-for-nothing generally, who, finding themselves utterly out of place, and at a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be." But the proportion of difficult subjects would not be larger in Brook Farm or New Harmony than it is in the ordinary world outside, and in these communities they would be under the constant influence of leaders of the highest character and an almost religious enthusiasm. If the new and better economic motives, which romantic socialists like Mr. Bellamy always assure us are to carry us to such great things as soon as the suppression of the present pecuniary motive allows them to rise into operation--if the love of work for its own sake, the sense of public duty, the desire of public appreciation, could be expected to prevail anywhere to any purpose, it would be among the gifted and noble spirits who founded the community of Brook Farm. But the late W. H. Channing, who was a member of the community and looked back upon it with the tenderest feelings, explains its failure by saying: "The great evil, the radical, practical danger, seemed to be a willingness to do work half thorough, to rest in poor results, to be content amidst comparatively squalid conditions, and to form habits of indolence."[8]

The idleness of the idle was one of the chief standing troubles in all the socialistic experiments of the United States. Mr. Noyes gives us an account of forty-seven communistic experiments which had been made under modern socialist influences in the United States and had failed, while Mr. Nordhoff, on the other hand, furnishes a like account of seventy-two communities, established mainly under religious influences (fifty-eight of them belonging to the Shakers alone), which have been not merely social but economic successes, some of them for more than a hundred years; and one is struck with the degree in which the idler difficulty has contributed to the failure of the forty-seven, and in which the continual and comparatively successful conflict with that difficulty by means of their peculiar system of religious discipline has aided in the success of the other seventy-two. Mr. Noyes is himself founder of the Oneida community, and bases his descriptions of the rest on information supplied by men who were members of the communities he describes, or on the materials collected by Mr. Macdonald, a Scotch Owenite, who visited most of the American communities for the purpose of describing them. No causes of failure are more often mentioned by him than "too many idlers" and "bad management." Not that industry was relaxed all round. On the contrary, it seems to have been a peculiarity of the Owenite and Fourierist communities, that the industrious wrought much harder (and in most of them for much poorer fare) than labourers of ordinary life. Macdonald was surprised at the marvellous industry he saw as he watched them, and would say to himself: "If you fail, I will give it up, for never did I see men work so well and so brotherly with each other." But then a little way off he would come on people who "merely crawled about, probably sick (he charitably suggests), just looking on like myself at anything which fell in their way." A very common feeling among members of these communities seems to have been that they were far more troubled with idlers than the rest of the world, because their system itself presented special attractions to that unwelcome class. "Men came," says one of the Trumbull Phalanx, "with the idea that they could live in idleness at the expense of the purchasers of the estate, and their ideas were practically carried out, while others came with good heart for the work." The same testimony is given about the Sylvania Association. "Idle and greedy people," says the writer of this testimony, "find their way into such attempts, and soon show forth their character by burdening others with too much labour, and in times of scarcity supplying themselves with more than their allowance of various necessaries, instead of taking less." Idle and greedy people, no doubt, did get into these communities, but these idle and greedy people constitute, I fear, a very large proportion of mankind, and the point is that socialistic institutions unfortunately offer them encouragement and opportunity. The experience of American communism directly contradicts John Stuart Mill's opinion, that men are not more likely to evade their fair share of the work under a socialistic system than they are now. That difficulty in one form or another was their constant vexation. The members of Owen's community at Yellow Springs belonged in general to a superior class; but one of them, in stating the causes of the failure of that community, says: "The industrious, the skilful, and the strong saw the products of their labour enjoyed by the indolent, and the unskilled, and the improvident, and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the harvest field or the workshop. A lecturer upon Natural Science insisted upon talking only while others worked. Mechanics whose day's labour brought two dollars into the common stock insisted that they should in justice work only half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought only one." The same evil, according to R. D. Owen, contributed to the fall of New Harmony; "there was not disinterested industry," he says, "there was not mutual confidence." A lady who was a member of the Marlboro' Association in Ohio, a socialistic experiment that lasted four years and then failed, attributes the failure to "the complicated state of the business concerns, the amount of debt contracted, and the feeling that each would work with more energy, for a time at least, if thrown upon his own resources, with plenty of elbow-room, and nothing to distract his attention."

The magnitude of this difficulty only appears the greater when we turn from the forty-seven socialistic experiments which have failed to the seventy-two which have thriven. The Shakers and Rappists are undoubtedly very industrious people, who, by producing a good article, have won and kept for years a firm hold of the American market, and being, in consequence of their institution of celibacy, a community of adult workers exclusively, every man and every woman being a productive labourer, the wonder is they are not wealthier and more prosperous even than they are. Their economic prosperity is based, as economic prosperity always is and must be, on their general habits of industry, and the natural tendency of socialistic arrangements to relax these habits is in their case effectually, though not without difficulty, counteracted by their religious discipline. Idleness is a sin; next to disobedience to the elders, no other sin is more reprobated among them, because no other sin is at once so besetting and so dangerous there, and the conquest and suppression of idleness is a continual object of their vigilance, and of their ordinary devotional practice. Mr. Nordhoff publishes a few of their most popular hymns, and one is struck with the space the cultivation of personal industry seems to occupy in their thoughts. "Old Slug," as they delight to nickname the idler, is the "Old Adam" of the Shakers, and a public sentiment of hatred and contempt for the indolent man is sedulously fostered by them. As they not only work, but also live under one another's constant supervision, and within earshot of one another's criticism, they more than replace the eye of the master by the keener and more sleepless eye of moral and social police. And if all this discipline fails, they have the last resource of expulsion. They easily make the idler too uncomfortable to remain. "They have," says Mr. Nordhoff, "no difficulty in sloughing off persons who come with bad or low motives." They exercise, in short, the power of dismissal, the last sanction in ordinary use in the old state of society. Not that they make any virtue of strenuous labour. They work moderately, and avoid anything like fatigue or exhaustion. They frankly acknowledged to Mr. Nordhoff, once and again, that three hired men taken in from the ordinary world would do as much work as five or six of their members. Their wants are few and simple, and they are satisfied with the moderate exertion that suffices to supply them; but they will tolerate no shirking of that in any shape or form, and this alone saves them from disaster. The experiences of these successful Shaker and Rappist communities serve, therefore, to show, even better than the experiences of the unsuccessful Owenite and Fourierist communities, the gravity that the idleness difficulty would assume in a general socialistic _regime_, which possessed nothing in the nature of the power of dismissal, and in which we could not calculate either on the formation of an effective public opinion against idleness, or on its effective application if it were formed. The men who founded the unsuccessful communities were far superior to the Shakers in business ability and education, and they had more money to begin their experiments with, but where they failed the Shakers have succeeded through the indirect economic effects of their rigorous religious discipline. But the evidence is as plain in the one case as in the other as to the natural, and even powerful, effect of socialistic arrangements in relaxing the industry of many sorts and conditions of men.

The same sources of evidence prove with equal clearness the development under socialistic institutions of two other concurrent causes of decline. I have already quoted Mr. Channing's statement that the Brook Farm community showed a disposition to be content with comparatively squalid conditions of life. Mr. Nordhoff would probably not use the word squalid of anything he saw in the Shaker and Rappist communities he describes, except perhaps in certain instances of the state of the public streets; and in some points, such as the scrupulous cleanness of the interior of their houses, he would set them far above their neighbours--you could eat your dinner, he says, off their floors. Still the people he found everywhere content, if not exactly with squalid, certainly with poor and dull and rough conditions of life, much poorer, duller, and rougher than they might easily be. They enjoyed equality, security from harassing anxiety for the morrow, abundance even for their limited wants, independence from subjection to a master, but they were weak in the ordinary springs of progress. The spirit of material improvement was not much abroad among them. Give me the stationary state of society and contentment, you may exclaim; but then even this stationary state is only maintained in these sequestered communities by the constant play of peculiar religious influences which cannot be counted on everywhere, and it would soon change into a declining state in the great seething world outside if it were not effectively counter-worked by the most powerful incentives to progress. Now the same equalizing social arrangements which destroy one of the most essential of these incentives by guaranteeing men the results of industry without its exertion, enfeeble a second by predisposing them to rest content with the lower conditions of life to which they are reduced.

A third cause of decline to which the American experience shows socialistic institutions to be incident is a certain weakness in the management, produced sometimes by divided counsels, sometimes by the delay involved in getting the sanction of a Board to every little detail of business, and sometimes by a difficulty which we find also shattering similar experiments in France, that men were raised to the Committee by their gifts of persuasion rather than their gifts of administration. Well-meaning persons, with a great itch for managing things, and a great turn for bungling them, for whom there is, under the present order of society, a considerable safety-valve in philanthropy, contrive in a socialistic community to get appointed on the Council of Industry, and play sad havoc with the common good. While they preached and wasted, the really practical men who, with better power of talk, might have confounded them, could only sulk and grumble, and eventually lost heart in their work, and all interest and confidence in the concern. This had much to do, according to Mr. Meeker, an old Fourierist, with the ruin of the North American Phalanx, one of the most important of the transatlantic experiments, and it was the main cause apparently of the downfall of the community of Coxsackie--"They had many persons engaged in talking and law-making who did not work at any useful employment; the consequences were that after struggling on for between one and two years the experiment came to an end." A socialist State would probably have as many difficulties with this bustling but unsatisfactory class of persons as a socialist Phalanx, nor would the evils of divided counsels and departmental delays be a whit milder; and the extension of State management to branches of work for which it had not otherwise some sort of special natural qualification would have the same kind of ruinous operation.

In spirit and effect, therefore, as may be palpably seen from these actual experiments, the equalizing institutions of socialism stand quite apart from the very restricted use of State management and the remedial or invigorating legislation that a sound social policy prescribes. When England is accused of heading the nations in the race of State socialism, because England has nationalized the post and telegraph service, and passed a series of factory and agrarian Acts for the protection of the weaker classes of the people, the accusation is made without proper discrimination. It is not the frequency of the intervention, but its purpose and consequences that make it socialistic. If the post is better managed by the State than by private initiative, if the factory and agrarian laws merely reinstate weaker classes in the conditions essential for a normal human life, and neither seek nor produce that equalization of the differences of fortune or skill which is fatal to any high and progressive general level of comfort, then there is no State socialism in it at all. State management is not pushed beyond the limit of efficiency, nor popular rights beyond the positive claims of social justice. Let us go a little further into detail.

IV. _State Socialism and State Management._

What are the conditions of efficient State administration? The State possesses several natural characteristics which give it a decided advantage as an industrial manager, some for one branch of work, some for another. It has stability, it has permanency, and it has--what is perhaps its principal industrial superiority--unrivalled power of securing unity of administration, since it is the only agency that can use force for the purpose. On the other hand, it has one great natural defect, its want of a personal stake in the produce of the business it conducts, its want of that keen check on waste and that pushing incentive to exertion which private undertakings enjoy in the eye and energy of the master. This is the great taproot from which all the usual faults of Government management spring--its routine, red-tape spirit, its sluggishness in noting changes in the market, in adapting itself to changes in the public taste, and in introducing improved methods of production. Government servants may very generally be men of a higher stamp and training than the servants of a private company, but they are proverbial, on the one hand, for a certain lofty disdain of the humble but valuable virtue of parsimony, and, on the other, for an unprogressive, unenterprising, uninventive administration of business.

Now the branches of industry which the State is fitted to carry on are of course those in which its great fault happens to have small scope for play, and in which its great merit or merits have great scope for play; those, for example, which gain largely in efficiency or economy by a centralized administration, and suffer little harm comparatively from a routine one. That is the reason Governments always manage the postal service well. In post-office work the specific industrial superiority of Government carries its maximum of advantage, and its specific industrial defect does its minimum of injury. The carrying and delivery of letters from one part of the empire to another require, for efficiency, a single co-ordinated system, and, on the other hand, those operations themselves are of so unvariable and routine a character that little harm is done by their being carried on in a routine spirit; they involve so little capital expenditure--the entire capital of the department in England is only L80,000--that the opportunity for waste and corruption is slight; and being conducted much more largely under the public eye than the affairs of other departments of State, they are consequently subject to the constant and interested criticism of the people whose wants they are meant to satisfy. The same reason explains why Government dockyards and arms factories are always managed so unsatisfactorily. There is, on the one hand, no need in them for any higher unity of administration than is wanted in any ordinary single business establishment; but, on the other, progressiveness and adaptability are of the first moment, routine and obstruction to improvement being indeed among their worst dangers. Then the risk of prodigality and corruption is high, for their capital expenditure is great, and the check of public criticism very distant and ineffectual. So exceptional a business is the post, that the telegraphs, though managed by the same department, have never been managed with the same success. They were bought at first at a ransom, they have involved an increasing loss nearly ever since, and the public have to pay practically as much for their telegrams--perhaps more--than the public of the United States pay to their telegraph companies. Even in the postal department, Government administration shows the usual official slowness in adopting much-needed and even lucrative reforms. Of this, a good example occurred only the other day. It was not until a Boys' Messenger Company was already in the field and doing the work, that the Postmaster-General was brought to recognise, as he said, "the desirability of providing a more rapid means of transmitting single letters for short distances and under special circumstances than at present exists."

It ought of course to be acknowledged that State management in England is tried under the very worst possible conditions, inasmuch as it is tied to the fortunes and exigencies of political party. No business could be expected to thrive where the supreme control is placed in the hands of a good parliamentary debater, who knows nothing about the special work of the department he undertakes; where, even at that, this inexperienced hand is changed for another inexperienced hand every three or four years; where policy shifts without continuity, to dodge the popular breeze of to-day, or to catch the popular breeze of to-morrow; and where the actual incumbent of office, is always able to evade censure by throwing the responsibility on his predecessors, who are out of office. Well may a sagacious man like Mr. Samuel Laing, with large experience of administration both in the affairs of State and of private companies, exclaim: "I often think what the result would be if the railway companies managed their affairs on the same principles as the nation applies to its naval and military expenditure. Suppose the Brighton Board were turned out every three years, and a new Board came in with new views and a new policy, and new men at the head of the locomotive, traffic, and other spending departments, how long would it be before expenses went up and dividends down?" If State management is to succeed--if it is to have fair play--it must be entirely divorced from party fortunes, while subject, of course, to the criticism of Parliament, under some system like that adopted in Victoria for the management of the railways. In such circumstances the question of the advisability of Government assuming the management of any industry, is a question of balancing the probable gains from the greater unity of the administration against the probable losses from its greater inertia.

There are some exceptional branches of industry in which Government does better than private persons, because private persons have too little interest to do the work well, or even to do it at all, and there are others in which the State's very want of personal interest is its advantage instead of its drawback. Forestry is the best example of the first sort. One generation must plant, and another cut down, so that the present owner is often unwilling to incur the expense of a speculation of which he is unlikely to live to reap the fruits; but the natural permanence of the State leads it to do more justice to this important branch of production, and experience everywhere shows that State forests are more productive than private ones. In Prussia and Belgium they are nearly twice as productive. The average annual produce of all forests in Prussia (including State forests) is 0.36 thaler per Morgen, but the produce of State forests alone is 0.66 thaler per Morgen. In Belgium the produce of all forests is 19.33 francs per hectare, and of State forests 34.42 francs.[9] The erection of lighthouses is also a public service, which falls to the State because of individual inability; it cannot be undertaken in any way to make it remunerative to private adventurers.

The best example of an industrial work for which the State's want of personal interest is its advantage is the Mint. Nobody would trust the stamp of a private assayer as he trusts the stamp of the Government, because the private assayer could never succeed in placing his personal disinterestedness so absolutely above the suspicion of fraud. The policy of the official attestation of the quality of commodities is often disputed on the ground that it discourages improvement above the pass standard, but it is never doubted that if a brand is wanted, the brand to command most confidence is the brand of the Crown. Our own Government, out of the infinity of commodities offered for sale, attests none but six--butter, herrings, plate, gun barrels, chains, and anchors--articles in which the dangers of deterioration probably exceed the chances of improvement, and in the case of some of these six there is a strong feeling abroad that the State's intervention is doing more harm than good. Scotch herrings have suffered lately in the German markets, because they were worse cured than the Norwegian, and the herring brand was blamed for the unprogressiveness of the cure. This class of interventions, therefore, is neither numerous now, nor likely to become very numerous in the future.

A more important class of undertakings in which the State's industrial advantage lies in its superiority to the temptations of self-interest, is that of industries which naturally assume something of the character of a monopoly, and in which self-interest lacks both the check on its rapacity, and the spur to its activity supplied by effective competition. It is true of more things than railways that when combination is possible, competition is impossible, and the growth of syndicates, trusts and pooling arrangements at the present day has led to considerable agitation for State interference, especially in the case of commodities like salt and coal, which are necessaries of life. Our experience of these things is as yet limited, but so far as it has gone it seems to show that the public dangers dreaded from them are apt to be exaggerated. The combinations fear to raise the price to the public so high as to provoke competition, and in most cases in America have not raised it at all, drawing their advantage rather from the reduction in expense of management, and the saving of capital; and the State would not be likely to manage industries producing for the markets any better than, or even so well as, the more keenly interested board of private directors. But if the balance of evidence seems against public management in this class of monopolies, it stands, I think, decidedly in favour of public management in another and not unimportant class. The gas and water supply of towns is a monopoly, and though the point is not undisputed, it appears to answer better on the whole in public than in private hands, because the management has no interest to serve except the interest of the public. Experience has not been everywhere the same, but usually it has been that under municipal control the quality of the gas has been improved and the price reduced. But this is municipal management of course, not State management, and the difference is material, inasmuch as municipal management, in the case of gas and water supply, is the management of the production of things of general consumption under the direct control of the very people who consume them, so that it is constantly exposed to effective public criticism, perhaps as good a substitute as things admit of for the eye of the master. The natural defect of public management is so mitigated by this circumstance, that probably of all forms of public management, municipal management is the best, and when applied to branches of production that tend to become monopolies at any rate, it answers well. The question is entirely different with proposals that are sometimes made for converting into municipal monopolies branches of production--such, for example, as the bread supply of the community--which are carried on by individual management under effective competition. To do as well as joint-stock management uncontrolled by competition is one thing; to do as well as individual management subject to competition is another; and so long as public management replaces nothing but the former class of enterprises, which are in any case a sort of natural monopolies, it will never contract the vast field of individual enterprise to any very serious extent.