Chapter VIII: Part 8

At page 42, we are confidently told that [183] "labourers by receiving wages" cannot lessen "even temporarily" the "capital of the employer," while at page 44 it is admitted that in certain cases the capitalist "pays out capital in wages." One would think that the "paying out" of capital is hardly possible without at least a "temporary" diminution of the capital from which payment is made. But "Progress and Poverty" changes all that by a little verbal legerdemain:--

. . . "For where wages are paid before the object of the labour
is obtained, or is finished--as in agriculture, where
ploughing and sowing must precede by several months the
harvesting of the crop; as in the erection of buildings,
the construction of ships, railroads, canals, &c.--it is
clear that the owners of the capital paid in wages cannot
expect an immediate return, but, as the phrase is, must
"outlay it" or "lie out of it" for a time which sometimes
amounts to many years. And hence, if first principles are
not kept in mind, it is easy to jump to the conclusion
that wages are advanced by capital" (p. 44).

Those who have paid attention to the argument of former parts of this paper may not be able to understand how, if sound "first principles are kept in mind," any other conclusion can be reached, whether by jumping, or by any other mode of logical progression. But the first principle which our author "keeps in mind" possesses just that amount of ambiguity which enables him to play hocus-pocus with it. It is this; that "the creation of value does not depend upon the finishing of the product" (p. 44).

[184] There is no doubt that, under certain limitations, this proposition is correct. It is not true that "labour always adds to capital by its exertion before it takes from capital its wages" (p. 44), but it is true that it may, and often does, produce that effect.

To take one of the examples given, the construction of a ship. The shaping of the timbers undoubtedly gives them a value (for a shipbuilder) which they did not possess before. When they are put together to constitute the framework of the ship, there is a still further addition of value (for a shipbuilder); and when the outside planking is added, there is another addition (for a shipbuilder). Suppose everything else about the hull is finished, except the one little item of caulking the seams, there is no doubt that it has still more value for a shipbuilder. But for whom else has it any value, except perhaps for a fire-wood merchant? What price will any one who wants a ship--that is to say, something that will carry a cargo from one port to another--give for the unfinished vessel which would take water in at every seam and go down in half an hour, if she were launched? Suppose the shipbuilder's capital to fail before the vessel is caulked, and that he cannot find another shipbuilder who cares to buy and finish it, what sort of proportion does the value created by the labour, for which he has paid out of his capital, stand to that of his advances?

[185] Surely no one will give him one-tenth of the capital disbursed in wages, perhaps not so much even as the prime cost of the raw materials. Therefore, though the assertion that "the creation of value does not depend on the finishing of the product" may be strictly true under certain circumstances, it need not be and is not always true. And, if it is meant to imply or suggest that the creation of value in a manufactured article does not depend upon the finishing of that article, a more serious error could hardly be propounded.

Is there not a prodigious difference in the value of an uncaulked and in that of a finished ship; between the value of a house in which only the tiles of the roof are wanting and a finished house; between that of a clock which only lacks the escapement and a finished clock?

As ships, house, and clock, the unfinished articles have no value whatever--that is to say, no person who wanted to purchase one of these things, for immediate use, would give a farthing for either. The only value they can have, apart from that of the materials they contain, is that which they possess for some one who can finish them, or for some one who can make use of parts of them for the construction of other things. A man might buy an unfinished house for the sake of the bricks; or he might buy an incomplete clock to use the works for some other piece of machinery.

Thus, though every stage of the labour [186] bestowed on raw material, for the purpose of giving rise to a certain product, confers some additional value on that material in the estimation of those who are engaged in manufacturing that product, the ratio of that accumulated value, at any stage of the process, to the value of the finished product is extremely inconstant, and often small; while, to other persons, the value of the unfinished product may be nothing, or even a minus quantity. A house-timber merchant, for example, might consider that wood which had been worked into the ribs of a ship was spoiled--that is, had less value than it had as a log.

According to "Progress and Poverty," there was, really, no advance of capital while the great St. Gothard tunnel was cut. Suppose that, as the Swiss and the Italian halves of the tunnel approached to within half a kilometre, that half-kilometre had turned out to be composed of practically impenetrable rock--would anybody have given a centime for the unfinished tunnel? And if not, how comes it that "the creation of value does not depend on the finishing of the product"?

I think it may be not too much to say that, of all the political delusions which are current in this queer world, the very stupidest are those which assume that labour and capital are necessarily antagonistic; that all capital is produced by labour and therefore, by natural right, is the property of [187] the labourer; that the possessor of capital is a robber who preys on the workman and appropriates to himself that which he has had no share in producing.

On the contrary, capital and labour are, necessarily, close allies; capital is never a product of human labour alone; it exists apart from human labour; it is the necessary antecedent of labour; and it furnishes the materials on which labour is employed. The only indispensable form of capital--vital capital--cannot be produced by human labour. All that man can do is to favour its formation by the real producers. There is no intrinsic relation between the amount of labour bestowed on an article and its value in exchange. The claim of labour to the total result of operations which are rendered possible only by capital is simply an a priori iniquity.

[188]

V.

SOCIAL DISEASES AND WORSE REMEDIES

LETTERS TO THE "TIMES" ON MR. BOOTH'S SCHEME.
WITH A PREFACE AND INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

[1891]

PREFACE

The letters which are here collected together were published in the "Times" in the course of the months of December, 1890, and January, 1891.

The circumstances which led me to write the first letter are sufficiently set forth in its opening sentences; and the materials on which I based my criticisms of Mr. Booth's scheme, in this and in the second letter, were wholly derived from Mr. Booth's book. I had some reason to know, however, that when anybody allows his sense of duty so far to prevail over his sense of the blessedness of peace as to write a letter to the "Times," on any subject of public interest, his reflections, before he has done with the business, will be very like [189] those of Johnny Gilpin, "who little thought, when he set out, of running such a rig." Such undoubtedly are mine when I contemplate these twelve documents, and call to mind the distinct addition to the revenue of the Post Office which must have accrued from the mass of letters and pamphlets which have been delivered at my door; to say nothing of the unexpected light upon my character, motives, and doctrines, which has been thrown by some of the "Times'" correspondents, and by no end of comments elsewhere.

If self-knowledge is the highest aim of man, I ought by this time to have little to learn. And yet, if I am awake, some of my teachers--unable, perhaps, to control the divine fire of the poetic imagination which is so closely akin to, if not a part of, the mythopoeic faculty--have surely dreamed dreams. So far as my humbler and essentially prosaic faculties of observation and comparison go, plain facts are against them. But, as I may be mistaken, I have thought it well to prefix to the letters (by way of "Prolegomena") an essay which appeared in the "Nineteenth Century" for January, 1888, in which the principles that, to my mind, lie at the bottom of the "social question" are stated. So far as Individualism and Regimental Socialism are concerned, this paper simply emphasizes and expands the opinions expressed in an address to the members of the Midland Institute, delivered seventeen years earlier, [190] and still more fully developed in several essays published in the "Nineteenth Century" in 1889, which I hope, before long, to republish.*

* See Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 290 to end; and this volume,
p. 147.

The fundamental proposition which runs through the writings, which thus extend over twenty years, is, that the common a priori doctrines and methods of reasoning about political and social questions are essentially vicious; and that argumentation on this basis leads, with equal logical force, to two contradictory and extremely mischievous systems, the one that of Anarchaic Individualism, the other that of despotic or Regimental Socialism. Whether I am right or wrong, I am at least consistent in opposing both to the best of my ability. Mr. Booth's system appears to me, and, as I have shown, is regarded by Socialists themselves, to be mere autocratic Socialism, masked by its theological exterior. That the "fantastic" religious skin will wear away, and the Socialistic reality it covers will show its real nature, is the expressed hope of one candid Socialist, and may be fairly conceived to be the unexpressed belief of the despotic leader of the new Trades Union, who has shown his zeal, if not his discretion, in championing Mr. Booth's projects. [See Letter VIII.]

Yet another word to commentators upon my letters. There are some who rather chuckle, and [191] some who sneer, at what they seem to consider the dexterity of an "old controversial hand," exhibited by the contrast which I have drawn between the methods of conversion depicted in the New Testament and those pursued by fanatics of the Salvationist type, whether they be such as are now exploited by Mr. Booth, or such as those who, from the time of the Anabaptists, to go no further back, have worked upon similar lines.

Whether such observations were intended to be flattering or sarcastic, I must respectfully decline to accept the compliment, or to apply the sarcasm to myself. I object to obliquity of procedure and ambiguity of speech in all shapes. And I confess that I find it difficult to understand the state of mind which leads any one to suppose, that deep respect for single-minded devotion to high aims is incompatible with the unhesitating conviction that those aims include the propagation of doctrines which are devoid of foundation--perhaps even mischievous.

The most degrading feature of the narrower forms of Christianity (of which that professed by Mr. Booth is a notable example) is their insistence that the noblest virtues, if displayed by those who reject their pitiable formulae, are, as their pet phrase goes, "splendid sins." But there is, perhaps, one step lower; and that is that men, who profess freedom of thought, should fail to see and [192] appreciate that large soul of goodness which often animates even the fanatical adherents of such tenets. I am sorry for any man who can read the epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians without yielding a large meed of admiration to the fervent humanity of Paul of Tarsus; who can study the lives of Francis of Assisi, or of Catherine of Siena, without wishing that, for the furtherance of his own ideals, he might be even as they; or who can contemplate unmoved the steadfast veracity and true heroism which loom through the fogs of mystical utterance in George Fox. In all these great men and women there lay the root of the matter; a burning desire to amend the condition of their fellow-men, and to put aside all other things for that end. If, in spite of all the dogmatic helps or hindrances in which they were entangled, these people are not to be held in high honour, who are?

I have never expressed a doubt--for I have none--that, when Mr. Booth left the Methodist connection, and started that organisation of the Salvation Army upon which, comparatively recently, such ambitious schemes of social reform have been grafted, he may have deserved some share of such honour. I do not say that, so far as his personal desires and intentions go, he may not still deserve it. But the correlate of despotic authority is unlimited responsibility. If Mr. Booth is to take [193] credit for any good that the Army system has effected, he must be prepared to bear blame for its inherent evils. As it seems to me, that has happened to him which sooner or later happens to all despots: he has become the slave of his own creation--the prosperity and glory of the soul-saving machine have become the end, instead of a means, of soul-saving; and to maintain these at the proper pitch, the "General" is led to do things which the Mr. Booth of twenty years ago would probably have scorned.

And those who desire, as I most emphatically desire, to be just to Mr. Booth, however badly they may think of the working of the organization he has founded, will bear in mind that some astute backers of his probably care little enough for Salvationist religion; and, perhaps, are not very keen about many of Mr. Booth's projects. I have referred to the rubbing of the hands of the Socialists over Mr. Booth's success;* but, unless I err greatly, there are politicians of a certain school to whom it affords still greater satisfaction. Consider what electioneering agents the captains of the Salvation Army, scattered through all our towns, and directed from a political "bureau" in London, would make! Think how political adversaries could be harassed by our local attorney--"tribune of the people," I mean; and how a troublesome man, on the other side, could be "hunted [194] down" upon any convenient charge, whether true or false, brought by our Vigilance-familiar!**

* See Letter VIII.
** See Letter II.

I entirely acquit Mr. Booth of any complicity in far-reaching schemes of this kind; but I did not write idly when, in my first letter, I gave no vague warning of what might grow out of the organised force, drilled in the habit of unhesitating obedience, which he has created.

[195]

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETY.

[1888].

The vast and varied procession of events, which we call Nature, affords a sublime spectacle and an inexhaustible wealth of attractive problems to the speculative observer. If we confine our attention to that aspect which engages the attention of the intellect, nature appears a beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation of a faultless logical process, from certain premises in the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more human, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed to influence our judgment, and we permit ourselves to criticise our great mother as we criticise one another; then our verdict, at least so far as sentient nature is concerned, can hardly be so favourable.

In sober truth, to those who have made a study of the phenomena of life as they exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, [196] the optimistic dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds, will seem little better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only another instance to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a priori speculators who, having created God in their own image, find no difficulty in assuming that the Almighty must have been actuated by the same motives as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any other course been practicable, He would no more have made infinite suffering a necessary ingredient of His handiwork than a respectable philosopher would have done the like.

But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured thesis of physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated by principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true that sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances directed towards the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and it may be proper to say that these are evidences of benevolence. But if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence?

If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human workmanship, we should call skill, is [197] visible in those parts of the organization of a deer to which it owes its ability to escape from beasts of prey, there is at least equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of the wolf which enables him to track, and sooner or later to bring down, the deer. Viewed under the dry light of science, deer and wolf are alike admirable; and, if both were non-sentient automata, there would be nothing to qualify our admiration of the action of the one on the other. But the fact that the deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts suffering, engages our moral sympathies. We should call men like the deer innocent and good, men such as the wolf malignant and bad; we should call those who defended the deer and aided him to escape brave and compassionate, and those who helped the wolf in his bloody work base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer these judgments to nature outside the world of man at all, we must do so impartially. In that case, the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and the wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will neutralize one another: and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.

This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous facts in every part of the sentient world; yet, inasmuch as it not only jars upon prevalent prejudices, but arouses the natural dislike to that which is painful, much ingenuity has been exercised in devising an escape from it.

From the theological side, we are told that [198] this is a state of probation, and that the seeming injustices and immoralities of nature will be compensated by and by. But how this compensation is to be effected, in the case of the great majority of sentient things, is not clear. I apprehend that no one is seriously prepared to maintain that the ghosts of all the myriads of generations of herbivorous animals which lived during the millions of years of the earth's duration, before the appearance of man, and which have all that time been tormented and devoured by carnivores, are to be compensated by a perennial existence in clover; while the ghosts of carnivores are to go to some kennel where there is neither a pan of water nor a bone with any meat on it. Besides, from the point of view of morality, the last stage of things would be worse than the first. For the carnivores, however brutal and sanguinary, have only done that which, if there is any evidence of contrivance in the world, they were expressly constructed to do. Moreover, carnivores and herbivores alike have been subject to all the miseries incidental to old age, disease, and over-multiplication, and both might well put in a claim for "compensation" on this score.

On the evolutionist side, on the other hand, we are told to take comfort from the reflection that the terrible struggle for existence tends to final good, and that the suffering of the ancestor is paid for by the increased perfection of the progeny. There would be something in this argument if, in [199] Chinese fashion, the present generation could pay its debts to its ancestors; otherwise it is not clear what compensation the Eohippus gets for his sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby. And, again, it is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward. Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive metamorphosis. If what the physical philosophers tell us, that our globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down, is true; then the time must come when evolution will mean adaptation to an universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low and simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and the Protococcus of the red snow. If our globe is proceeding from a condition in which it was too hot to support any but the lowest living thing to a condition in which it will be too cold to permit of the existence of any others, the course of life upon its surface must describe a trajectory like that of a ball fired from a mortar; and the sinking half of that course is as much a part of the general process of evolution as the rising.

From the point of view of the moralist the [200] animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight--whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor. And since the great game is going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear--

. . . sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.
Voci alte e floche, e suon di man con elle

--it seems to follow that, if the world is governed by benevolence, it must be a different sort of benevolence from that of John Howard.

But the old Babylonians wisely symbolized Nature by their great goddess Istar, who combined the attributes of Aphrodite with those of Ares. Her terrible aspect is not to be ignored or covered up with shams; but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. Error which is not pleasant is surely the worst form of wrong.

[201] This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every twenty-four--a supposition which many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant--the burden of life would have been immensely increased without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these.

There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which renders the hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is dictated by malevolence quite untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all appearances unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than such as are afforded by natural [202] beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.

The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Ormuzd has not had his way in this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism. If we desire to represent the course of nature in terms of human thought, and assume that it was intended to be that which it is, we must say that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral; that it is a materialized logical process, accompanied by pleasures and pains, the incidence of which, in the majority of cases, has not the slightest reference to moral desert. That the rain falls alike upon the just and the unjust, and that those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were no worse than their neighbours, seem to be Oriental modes of expressing the same conclusion.

In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is therefore a part of nature. But it is convenient to distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays the part of immediate cause, as some thing apart; and, therefore, society, like art, [203] is usefully to be considered as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from nature in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the ethical man--the member of society or citizen--necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical man--the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom--tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.*

In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer. However imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the origin of the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very low type. They strove with their enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyaena, whose lives were spent in the same way; [204] and they were no more to be praised or blamed on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots.

* [The reader will observe that this is the argument of the
Romanes Lecture, in brief.--1894.]

As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence. The human species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.

The history of civilization--that is, of society--on the other hand, is the record of the attempts which the human race has made to escape from this position. The first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war, whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step, created society. But, in establishing peace, they obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence. Between the members of that society, at any rate, it was not to be pursued a outrance. And of all the successive shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited.

[205] The primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever took his fancy, and killed whomsoever opposed him, if he could. On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others; he seeks the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and means with him; and he founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man, governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality.

But the effort of ethical man to work towards a moral end by no means abolished, perhaps has hardly modified, the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course. One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause, of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without limit, which man shares with all living things. It is notable that "increase and multiply" is a commandment traditionally much older than the ten; and that it is, perhaps, the only one which has been spontaneously and ex animo obeyed by [206] the great majority of the human race. But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence--the war of each against all--the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

It is conceivable that, at some period in the history of the fabled Atlantis, the production of food should have been exactly sufficient to meet the wants of the population, that the makers of the commodities of the artificer should have amounted to just the number supportable by the surplus food of the agriculturists. And, as there is no harm in adding another monstrous supposition to the foregoing, let it be imagined that every man, woman, and child was perfectly virtuous, and aimed at the good of all as the highest personal good. In that happy land, the natural man would have been finally put down by the ethical man. There would have been no competition, but the industry of each would have been serviceable to all; nobody being vain and nobody avaricious, there would have been no rivalries; the struggle for existence would have been abolished, and the millennium would have finally set in. But it is obvious that this state of things could have been permanent only with a stationary population. Add ten fresh mouths; and as, by the supposition, there was only exactly enough before, somebody must go on short rations. The [207] Atlantis society might have been a heaven upon earth, the whole nation might have consisted of just men, needing no repentance, and yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar, non-moral Nature, would have riven the ethical fabric. I was once talking with a very eminent physician* about the vis medicatrix naturae. "Stuff!" said he; "nine times out of ten nature does not want to cure the man: she wants to put him in his coffin." And Istar-Nature appears to have equally little sympathy with the ends of society. "Stuff! she wants nothing but a fair field and free play for her darling the strongest."

* The late Sir W. Gull

Our Atlantis may be an impossible figment, but the antagonistic tendencies which the fable adumbrates have existed in every society which was ever established, and, to all appearance, must strive for the victory in all that will be. Historians point to the greed and ambition of rulers, to the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations, and thereby point their story with a moral. No doubt immoral motives of all sorts have figured largely among the minor causes of these events. But beneath all this [208] superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited multiplication. In the swarms of colonies thrown out by Phoenicia and by old Greece; in the ver sacrum of the Latin races; in the floods of Gauls and of Teutons which burst over the frontiers of the old civilization of Europe; in the swaying to and fro of the vast Mongolian hordes in late times, the population problem comes to the front in a very visible shape. Nor is it less plainly manifest in the everlasting agrarian questions of ancient Rome than in the Arreoi societies of the Polynesian Islands.

In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in which we live, the practice of infanticide was, or is, a regular and legal custom; famine, pestilence, and war were and are normal factors in the struggle for existence, and they have served, in a gross and brutal fashion, to mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause.

But, in the more advanced civilizations, the progress of private and public morality has steadily tended to remove all these checks. We declare infanticide murder, and punish it as such; we decree, not quite so successfully, that no one shall die of hunger; we regard death from preventible causes of other kinds as a sort of constructive murder, and eliminate pestilence to the best of our ability; we declaim against the curse [209] of war, and the wickedness of the military spirit, and we are never weary of dilating on the blessedness of peace and the innocent beneficence of Industry. In their moments of expansion, even statesmen and men of business go thus far. The finer spirits look to an ideal civitas Dei; a state when, every man having reached the point of absolute self-negation, and having nothing but moral perfection to strive after, peace will truly reign, not merely among nations, but among men, and the struggle for existence will be at an end.

Whether human nature is competent, under any circumstances, to reach, or even seriously advance towards, this ideal condition, is a question which need not be discussed. It will be admitted that mankind has not yet reached this stage by a very long way, and my business is with the present. And that which I wish to point out is that, so long as the natural man increases and multiplies without restraint, so long will peace and industry not only permit, but they will necessitate, a struggle for existence as sharp as any that ever went on under the regime of war. If Istar is to reign on the one hand, she will demand her human sacrifices on the other.

Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and industry have had their way among us with less interruption and under more favourable conditions than in any other country on the face of the earth. The wealth of Croesus was nothing to [210] that which we have accumulated, and our prosperity has filled the world with envy. But Nemesis did not forget Croesus: has she forgotten us?

I think not. There are now 36,000,000 of people in our islands, and every year considerably more than 300,000 are added to our numbers.* That is to say, about every hundred seconds, or so, a new claimant to a share in the common stock or maintenance presents him or herself among us. At the present time, the produce of the soil does not suffice to feed half its population. The other moiety has to be supplied with food which must be bought from the people of food-producing countries. That is to say, we have to offer them the things which they want in exchange for the things we want. And the things they want and which we can produce better than they can are mainly manufactures--industrial products.

* These numbers are only approximately accurate. In 1881, our
population amounted to 35,241,482, exceeding the number in 1871
by 3,396,103. The average annual increase in the decennial.
1871--1881 is therefore 339,610. The number of minutes in a
calendar year is 525,600.

The insolent reproach of the first Napoleon had a very solid foundation. We not only are, but, under penalty of starvation, we are bound to be, a nation of shopkeepers. But other nations also lie under the same necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal in the same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to get the most and [211] the best in exchange for their produce. If our goods are inferior to those of our competitors, there is no ground, compatible with the sanity of the buyers, which can be alleged, why they should not prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take place on a large and general scale, five or six millions of us would soon have nothing to eat. We know what the cotton famine was; and we can therefore form some notion of what a dearth of customers would be.

Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than the position in which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete, degree we have attained the condition of peace which is the main object of social organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be assumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself innocent and praiseworthy--namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves, we are in reality engaged in an internecine struggle for existence with our presumably no less peaceful and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do not ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible with the general good; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon that fine old Scottish family motto, "Thou shalt starve ere I want." Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is likely to [212] be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole;* this state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.

The practical and pressing question for us, just now, seems to me to be how to gain time. "Time brings counsel," as the Teutonic proverb has it; and wiser folk among our posterity may see their way out of that which at present looks like an impasse.

It would be folly to entertain any ill-feeling towards those neighbours and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but, if somebody is to be starved, the modern world has no Oracle of Delphi to which the nations can appeal for an [213] indication of the victim. It is open to us to try our fortune; and, if we avoid impending fate, there will be a certain ground for believing that we are the right people to escape. Securus judicat orbis.

* [It is hard to say whether the increase of the unemployed
poor, or that of the unemployed rich, is the greater social
evil. -- 1894]

To this end, it is well to look into the necessary condition of our salvation by works. They are two, one plain to all the world and hardly needing insistence; the other seemingly not so plain, since too often it has been theoretically and practically left out of sight. The obvious condition is that our produce shall be better than that of others. There is only one reason why our goods should be preferred to those of our rivals--our customers must find them better at the price. That means that we must use more knowledge, skill, and industry in producing them, without a proportionate increase in the cost of production; and, as the price of labour constitutes a large element in that cost, the rate of wages must be restricted within certain limits. It is perfectly true that cheap production and cheap labour are by no means synonymous; but it is also true that wages cannot increase beyond a certain proportion without destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as part and parcel of cheapness, a moderate price of labour, is essential to our success as competitors in the markets of the world.

The second condition is really quite as plainly indispensable as the first, if one thinks seriously [214] about the matter. It is social stability. Society is stable, when the wants of its members obtain as much satisfaction as, life being what it is, common sense and experience show may be reasonably expected. Mankind, in general, care very little for forms of government or ideal considerations of any sort; and nothing really stirs the great multitude to break with custom and incur the manifest perils of revolt except the belief that misery in this world, or damnation in the next, or both, are threatened by the continuance of the state of things in which they have been brought up. But when they do attain that conviction, society becomes as unstable as a package of dynamite, and a very small matter will produce the explosion which sends it back to the chaos of savagery.

It needs no argument to prove that when the price of labour sinks below a certain point, the worker infallibly falls into that condition which the French emphatically call la misere--a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the [215] pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest, in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave.

That a certain proportion of the members of every great aggregation of mankind should constantly tend to establish and populate such a Slough of Despond as this is inevitable, so long as some people are by nature idle and vicious, while others are disabled by sickness or accident, or thrown upon the world by the death of their bread-winners. So long as that proportion is restricted within tolerable limits, it can be dealt with; and, so far as it arises only from such causes, its existence may and must be patiently borne. But, when the organization of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify it; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh experiment. The animal man, finding that the ethical man has landed him in such a slough, resumes his ancient sovereignty, and preaches anarchy; which is, substantially, a proposal to reduce the social cosmos to chaos, and begin the brute struggle for existence once again.

Any one who is acquainted with the state of [216] the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that, amidst a large and increasing body of that population, la misere reigns supreme. I have no pretensions to the character of a philanthropist, and I have a special horror of all sorts of sentimental rhetoric; I am merely trying to deal with facts, to some extent within my own knowledge, and further evidenced by abundant testimony, as a naturalist; and I take it to be a mere plain truth that, throughout industrial Europe, there is not a single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described; and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable to be precipitated into it by any lack of demand for their produce. And, with every addition to the population, the multitude already sunk in the pit and the number of the host sliding towards it continually increase.

Argumentation can hardly be needful to make it clear that no society in which the elements of decomposition are thus swiftly and surely accumulating can hope to win in the race of industries.

Intelligence, knowledge, and skill are undoubtedly conditions of success; but of what avail are they likely to be unless they are backed up by honesty, energy, goodwill, and all the physical and moral faculties that go to the making of manhood, and unless they are stimulated by hope of such [217] reward as men may fairly look to? And what dweller in the slough of want, dwarfed in body and soul, demoralized, hopeless, can reasonably be expected to possess these qualities?

Any full and permanent development of the productive powers of an industrial population, then, must be compatible with and, indeed, based upon a social organization which will secure a fair amount of physical and moral welfare to that population; which will make for good and not for evil. Natural science and religious enthusiasm rarely go hand in hand, but on this matter their concord is complete; and the least sympathetic of naturalists can but admire the insight and the devotion of such social reformers as the late Lord Shaftesbury, whose recently published "Life and Letters" gives a vivid picture of the condition of the working classes fifty years ago, and of the pit which our industry, ignoring these plain truths, was then digging under its own feet.

There is, perhaps, no more hopeful sign of progress among us, in the last half-century, than the steadily increasing devotion which has been and is directed to measures for promoting physical and moral welfare among the poorer classes. Sanitary reformers, like most other reformers whom I have had the advantage of knowing, seem to need a good dose of fanaticism, as a sort of moral coca, to keep them up to the mark, and, doubtless, they have made many mistakes; but that the [218] endeavour to improve the condition under our industrial population live, to amend the drainage of densely peopled streets, to provide baths, washhouses, and gymnasia, to facilitate habits of thrift, to furnish some provision for instruction and amusement in public libraries and the like, is not only desirable from a philanthropic point of view, but an essential condition of safe industrial development, appears to me to be indisputable. It is by such means alone, so far as I can see, that we can hope to check the constant gravitation of industrial society towards la misere, until the general progress of intelligence and morality leads men to grapple with the sources of that tendency. If it is said that the carrying out of such arrangements as those indicated must enhance the cost of production, and thus handicap the producer in the race of competition, I venture, in the first place, to doubt the fact; but if it be so, it results that industrial society has to face a dilemma, either alternative of which threatens destruction.

On the one hand, a population the labour of which is sufficiently remunerated may be physically and morally healthy and socially stable, but may fail in industrial competition by reason of the dearness of its produce. On the other hand, a population the labour of which is insufficiently remunerated must become physically and morally unhealthy, and socially unstable; and though it [219] may succeed for a while in industrial competition, by reason of the cheapness of its produce, it must in the end fall, through hideous misery and degradation, to utter ruin.

Well, if these are the only possible alternatives, let us for ourselves and our children choose the former, and, if need be, starve like men. But I do not believe that the stable society made up of healthy, vigorous, instructed, and self-ruling people would ever incur serious risk of that fate. They are not likely to be troubled with many competitors of the same character, just yet; and they may be safely trusted to find ways of holding their own.

Assuming that the physical and moral well-being and the stable social order, which are the indispensable conditions of permanent industrial development, are secured, there remains for consideration the means of attaining that knowledge and skill without which, even then, the battle of competition cannot be successfully fought. Let us consider how we stand. A vast system of elementary education has now been in operation among us for sixteen years, and has reached all but a very small fraction of the population. I do not think that there is any room for doubt that, on the whole, it has worked well, and that its indirect no less than its direct benefits have been immense. But, as might be expected, it exhibits the defects of all our educational systems--fashioned [220] as they were to meet the wants of a bygone condition of society. There is a widespread and, I think, well-justified complaint that it has too much to do with books and too little to do with things. I am as little disposed as any one can well be to narrow early education and to make the primary school a mere annexe of the shop. And it is not so much in the interests of industry, as in that of breadth of culture, that I echo the common complaint against the bookish and theoretical character of our primary instruction.