Chapter IV: Part 4

The introduction is excellent and has for its text Sir James Mackintosh’s great saying--great in his non-evolutionary age though very common-place today--“Constitutions are not made, but grow.” He then declares “the central idea of Plato’s model republic” to be “the correspondence between the parts of a society and the faculties of the human mind.”

Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury, comes next with his celebrated “Leviathan.” Hobbes sought to establish a still more definite parallelism; not, however between a society and the mind, but between a society and the human body. Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was the Commonwealth and he “carries this comparison so far as to actually give a drawing of the Leviathan--a vast human-shaped figure, whose body and limbs are made up of multitudes of men.”

Spencer criticizes these analogies of Plato and Hobbes in detail, but finds the chief error of both writers to consist in the assumption by both “that the organization of a society is comparable, not simply to the organization of a living body in general, but to the organization of a human body in particular. There is no warrant whatever for assuming this. It is in no way implied by the evidence; and is simply one of those fancies which we commonly find mixed up with the truths of early speculation.” But, insists Spencer: “The untenableness of the particular parallelisms above instanced, is no ground for denying an essential parallelism; since early ideas are usually but vague adumbrations of the truth.”

Lacking the great generalizations of biology, it was, as we have said, “impossible to trace out the real relations of special organizations to organizations of another order.” Therefore he proposes “to show what are the analogies which modern science discloses.”

Spencer then discovers four points in which an individual organism and a society agree, and four in which they differ. The points of agreement are:

(1.) “That commencing as small aggregations, they insensibly augment in mass; some of them eventually reaching ten thousand times what they originally were.”

(2.) “That while at first so simple in structure as to be considered structureless, they assume in the course of their growth a continually increasing complexity of structure.”

(3.) “That though in their early, undeveloped states, there exists in them scarcely any mutual dependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire a mutual dependence; which becomes at last so great, that the activity and life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the rest.”

(4.) “That the life of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged than the lives of any of its component units; who are severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body politic composed of them survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, in completeness of structure, and in functional activity.”

The four points of difference are:

(1.) “That societies have no specific external forms.”

(2.) “That though the living tissue whereof an individual organism consists, forms a continuous mass, the living elements of a society do not form a continuous mass; but are more or less widely dispersed over some portion of the earth’s surface.”

(3.) “That while the ultimate living elements of an individual organism are mostly fixed in their relative positions, those of the social organism are capable of moving from place to place.”

(4.) “The last and perhaps the most important distinction is, that while in the body of an animal only a special tissue is endowed with feeling, in a society all the members are endowed with feeling.”

It is worthy of note that, while Spencer finds the parallelisms to increase in significance the more they are examined, the differences tend to break down when they are worked out in detail.

The advantage which Spencer had over Plato and Hobbes is very clearly seen in the first and fourth parallelisms, neither of which could have been made until twenty-one years before, when in 1839, Theodore Schwann developed his great theory that the body is an organized society of interconnected cells. “The importance of this theory,” says Professor Thatcher, “can hardly be estimated. It gave an entirely new view to animal and vegetable life.” At any rate, it served Spencer greatly in this essay.

The next ten pages are devoted to organic development from the protozoa, the lowest tiny animal forms, to crustacea--crabs etc.,--which are materially higher in the animal scale. This development is marked by increasing mutual dependence of parts and a growing division of labor. It is compared to the development of society from primitive Bushmen to the early Anglo-Saxons, during which corresponding phenomena are traced.

He escapes Haeckel’s blunder at least to the extent of calling the two divisions of labor by their proper names. Among animals it is the “physiological” division of labor; in society, the “economical” division of labor. Whether he would have been able to still perceive that distinction in dealing with those ant and bee communities where Haeckel got lost, there is nothing to show.

Spencer’s middle-class predilections come out strongly, and a very pretty physiological justification is provided for that wholly admirable section of the community.

The first step in the development of an embryo is its division into two main layers of cells--the mucous layer and the serous layer. The mucous layer, that fine inside skin of the body so to speak, absorbs nutriment. But that nutriment must be transferred to the serous layer which builds up the nerves and muscles. Presently there arises between these two a third--the vascular layer. Out of this third layer the chief blood vessels are developed and these vessels serve to transport the nutriment from the inner or mucous layer, which gathers it, to the outer or serous layer, which uses it for the whole organization’s upbuilding.

“Well,” says Spencer, “may we not trace a parallel step in social progress? Between the governing and the governed, there at first exists no intermediate class; and even in some societies that have reached considerable size, there are scarcely any but the nobles and their kindred on the one hand, and their serfs on the other; the social structure being such that transfer of commodities takes place directly from slaves to their masters. But in societies of a higher type, there grows up, between these two primitive classes, another--the trading or middle class. Equally at first as now, we may see that, speaking generally, this middle class is the analogue of the middle layer in the embryo.”

It is a pity to disturb this serene complacency, by pointing out that the real transporters of commodities are not the members of the middle class who, as a rule, do little and live well, but that section of the working class which mans freight trains, drives teams and shoves trucks. As for that “higher” class of cells which receives these commodities and consumes them while usefully engaged in building up the nervous and muscular system; such comparison could only apply to society’s brain workers, and it contains no justification for the useless parasitic type represented by such charming persons as Harry Thaw and Reggie Vanderbilt.

Another very interesting point is Spencer’s physiological vindication of profit. The limbs, glands, or other members of an animal are developed by exercise. But in order “that any organ in a living being may grow by exercise, there needs to be a due supply of blood.” All action implies waste; blood brings the materials for repair; and before there can be growth, the quantity of blood supplied must be more than is requisite for repair.

“In a society it is the same. If to some district which elaborates for the community particular commodities--say the woolens of Yorkshire--there comes an augmented demand; and if in fulfillment of this demand, a certain expenditure and wear and tear of the manufacturing organization are incurred; and if, in payment for the extra quantity of woolens sent away there comes back only such quantity of commodities as replaces the expenditure, and makes good the waste of life and machinery; there can clearly be no growth. That there may be growth, the commodities obtained in return must be more than sufficient for these ends; and just in proportion as the surplus is great will the growth be rapid. Whence it is manifest that what in commercial affairs we call profit, answers to the excess of nutrition over waste in a living body.”

This is “physiological” political economy with a vengeance and shows to what straits bourgeois apologists are reduced to find a justification of that exploitation of labor which is the only source of profit. In concluding this point Spencer seems to satirize his own position and at the same time gives something that looks very much like a socialist explanation of panics. He says: “And if in the body politic some part has been stimulated into great productivity, and afterwards can not get paid for all its produce, certain of its members become bankrupt, and it decreases in size.”

The truth of the whole matter is that Spencer is wholly at sea the moment he touches political economy, and in place of some elementary knowledge on that subject, we have the obsolete theories of the Manchester School proclaimed in the name of physiology.

Then follows a series of very ingenious comparisons. Following Liebig, he compares coins to blood corpuscles calling the later blood-discs to enhance the analogy and concludes: “throughout extensive divisions of the lower animals, the blood contains no corpuscles; and in societies of low civilization, there is no money.”

Then the development of blood vessels in lower animals is compared to the development of roads in primitive societies; their greater perfection in higher animals comparing with the railroads which more effectively convey food stuffs to the centers of population. Amid much that is fantastic and tedious, he says: “And in railways we also see, for the first time in the social organism, a system of double channels conveying currents in opposite directions as do the arteries and veins of a well-developed animal.”

“We come at length,” says Spencer, “to the nervous system.” This is by far the most interesting item in Spencer’s catalogue, because it is here that the evolutionary philosopher and the Manchester School politician come into open contradiction.

“We have now to compare the appliances by which a society as a whole, is regulated, with those by which the movements of an individual creature are regulated.”

Beginning with the nervous systems of lower animals he discovers their inferiority to lie in the absence of a controlling center. The lower Annulosa is composed of a series of ring-like segments. Each ring has its own nerve ganglia linked by connecting nerves, but “very incompletely dependent on any general controlling power. Hence it results that when the body is cut in two, the hinder part continues to move forward under the propulsion of its numerous legs; and that when the chain of ganglia has been divided without severing the body, the hind limbs may be seen trying to propel the body in one direction, while the fore limbs are trying to propel it in another.”

As we move up in the animal world the nervous system culminates in a centralized brain, and similarly as society becomes more complex, government appears.

And now the great apostle of the non-interference of government with the life of society is driven into the glaring contradiction of contending that the highest animal organization is that in which the brain, which he compares to government in society, interferes and controls most effectively.

“Strange as the assertion will be thought,” he says, “our Houses of Parliament discharge, in the social economy, functions which are in sundry respects comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal.” Strange indeed! Especially to Mr. Spencer’s disciples.

Then Mr. Spencer discovers that the kind of brain activity displayed by the highest animals best compares with that form of government called “representative.”

He says: “It is the nature of those great and latest-developed ganglia which distinguish the higher animals, to interpret and combine the multiplied and varied impressions conveyed to them from all parts of the system, and to regulate the actions in such a way as duly to regard them all; so it is in the nature of those great and latest-developed legislative bodies which distinguish the most advanced societies, to interpret and combine the wishes of all classes and localities and to make laws in harmony with the general wants.”

It would seem from this that, a society whose government represents only the interests of a handful of the community while the great majority are uncared for, is suffering from social paralysis.

Before we pass to the next chapter where we shall examine the position presented in “The Man Versus The State” we will observe one break in Spencer’s analogy which he fails to notice.

When the brain of an animal is wrecked the animal dies; it has no choice. But when the brain of a society fails to represent the interests of the mass of the people who compose that society, or when the social brain runs amuck and invites disaster, society may take its choice, it may elect to die or--it may get a new brain.

IX.

SPENCER’S INDIVIDUALISM.

Individualism is dead.

As a theory, it has gone with Stahl’s “Phlogiston,” Cuvier’s “Cataclysms,” and Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” to the museum of history. The revolution in philosophy, which covers the nineteenth century and reaches back into the closing decades of the eighteenth, has met and overthrown it at every point. Today it lingers in the world of thought a reminiscence of a prior stage of social development, as the imperfect remnant of the “third eyelid” remains in our bodies a surviving rudiment, a legacy that links us with our extinct ancestors of the silurian age.

The greatest name ever thrown into the scales for Individualism and against Socialism is that of Herbert Spencer. He has the reputation of having been the greatest Individualist of all times.

Many people, including Socialists, who are not familiar with the works of Spencer wonder how it comes to pass that the great evolutionary philosopher could defend a theory so obsolete and anti-evolutionary as Individualism. With this problem solved, Individualism is practically disposed of--at least, its greatest prop is gone.

All careful students of the works of the “Synthetic” philosopher, eventually recognize the dual personality of Mr. Spencer; the “Dr. Jekyll” of evolution, and the “Mr. Hyde” of Individualism.

The last chapter dealt mainly with the former; this chapter will treat chiefly of the latter.

Mr. Spencer’s chief utterances against what he conceived to be Socialism and in favor of Individualism are to be found in a volume of four essays entitled, “The Man Versus the State.” In this book Mr. Spencer complains bitterly of the rapid extension of government interference in the England of his day. He declares these “Acts of Parliament” to be a greater and greater restriction of the individual rights of the citizen.

Here are a few of the Acts which Spencer denounced: An Act directing the Board of Trade to record the draught of sea-going vessels leaving port, and another to fix the number of life-boats and the life-saving appliances such vessels should carry. An Act making illegal a mine with a single shaft: The inspection of white lead works to compel the owners to provide overalls, respirators, baths, acidulated drinks, etc., for the workmen: Providing for the inspection of gas works: Making compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires in London; Taxing the locality for local drainage; That bake-houses should have a periodical lime washing, and a cleaning with soap and hot water at least once in six months; To secure decent lodgings for persons picking fruit and vegetables for public consumption; To provide free compulsory education and public schools; The Public Libraries Act; All the Factory Acts limiting child labor or enforcing the protection of dangerous machinery; The Preservation of Seabirds Act; The establishment of state telegraphy; Proposals to feed children; Government endowment of scientific research; etc.

All these measures, and many others of similar nature, excited the indignation of the greatest prophet of Individualism because, forsooth, they modified somebody’s right to do as he pleased about something. Luckily for England, Mr. Spencer and a handful of his individualist disciples stood alone, while the electorate carried these laws through their highest tribunals.

One can imagine the “joy of living” in an individualist arcadia fashioned after Mr. Spencer’s own heart. A working man would be able to take up the occupation of a sailor. He could embark on the rotten old tub of some greedy shipowner, insured for many times its value, loaded to the gunwales and sure to sink when it got out of sight of land to where the water was a little rougher than plate glass. Of course he would be living under a system of “voluntary co-operation” and “freedom of contract” and if he didn’t wish to go to sea he could stay at home and--starve. There would be very little work in port unloading ships, as so many of them would never return to be unloaded. When the insurance money was paid the shipowner could give a banquet and hold forth on the individual right of the sailor to get drowned in the interests of commerce without the government meddling about life boats and other expensive and nonsensical appliances.

If he preferred to work on “terra firma” he might get a job in a mine with only one shaft which in case of firedamp would be converted into a furnace. Then as there would be no way to get out, no socialistically inclined person would be able to dispute his individual right to stay in. If he preferred the white lead industry he might “get in” there, and there being no respirators, baths, or acidulated drinks he could be a physical wreck in a year and a corpse in two. Or he might try the gasworks and, there being no inspectors, there would be nothing to interfere with his individual right to be asphyxiated in an oven or roasted in a retort.

As wages would be small, unions not being individualist institutions, he might get a cheap room in the top of an hotel without fire escapes, in a town with no fire engines. He could live cheaply on bread from bakehouses that never knew lime washings and had not seen hot water or soap for over six months, and eat fruit and vegetables handled by people who were not troubled with decent, let alone sanitary, lodgings.

He would have the liberty to stay at manual labor as there would be no public schools or libraries to assist him to qualify for any profession such as, for instance, journalism. This would, no doubt, be a blessing in disguise, for if he became a writer, instead of following the brilliant example of Mr. Spencer, he might misuse his powers to the detriment of the race by advocating the limitation, or even the abolition, of child labor. If he married he might be at liberty to sew on his own buttons, his wife having left her fingers among the cogs of uncovered machinery.

Such would be the social heaven, operated on the principles of the “Manchester” school of politics, which mark the high-water of Individualism, and of which Herbert Spencer was the chief apostle.

Compare this attitude of mind with that of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, over whom Spencer had the advantage of the lapse of a period of seventy years. In 1815 Owen convened a large number of cotton manufacturers at Glasgow, Scotland, to consider the state of the cotton trade which was then in great distress. To that conference he presented two proposals; one to help the masters, the other to benefit the workers. The first was that they should petition parliament for the repeal of the tariff on raw cotton; the second that they should request parliament to shorten the working hours, and otherwise improve the conditions of workers in the mills. The first proposal carried unanimously, but the one on which Owen’s heart was set, was not even seconded.

Knowing as he did the terrible condition of the English working class of that period, the callous brutality of these rapacious masters roused him to irony and defiance. He delivered an address to the conference which he had printed and spread broadcast in every corner of the country.

This is how the lion turned on the jackals:

“True indeed it is that the main pillar and prop of the political greatness and prosperity of our country is manufacture, which, as now carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of the cotton trade that children, at an age before they have acquired strength or mental instruction, have been forced into the cotton mills--those receptacles, in too many instances, for living, human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society. It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pothouse or ginshop, it is only since the introduction of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and fearful strides throughout the community.

“Shall we then go unblushingly, and ask the legislators of our country to pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? If such be your determination, I, for one, will not join in the application--no, I will, with all the faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery of the poor negroes in the West Indies, for deeply as I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say: Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life.”

Compare these noble utterances of the great-souled utopian Socialist with the sneers at the most unfortunate element of the working class which disfigure the pages of “The Man Versus the State” and let the Individualist take whatever satisfaction he can get from the contrast.

But Spencer’s reactionary views did not stop with opposition to every attempt to alleviate the condition of the wealth producers of his day.

As an individualist, he would tolerate no “government interference” with the rights of individuals who wished to shoot sea-birds which they could not get, but which usually flew out to sea, and died floating, with a broken wing. Why should these lofty minded people be interfered with? Were they not the prototypes of our own Roosevelt, who is always ready to manifest his love of nature by killing everything in sight?

What a pity these individualists were not allowed to have the British telegraph system managed by a gang of financial pirates like the owners of the “Western Union” and the “Postal” of this country.

State repression of knowledge having proved such a bad thing in the middle ages, state encouragement of learning must of course, needs be equally bad in the nineteenth century. “Government endowment of research,” indeed! Not for the individualist champion. And yet England holds the world’s honors in biology, because of Darwin, whose opportunity came through the government exploration of “The Beagle,” and Huxley, who began his brilliant career with the government expedition of the “Rattlesnake.” As England led the world in the middle of the century so France had held first place during its first quarter, and that because the French government sent out scientific expeditions to the tropics, which, on their return loaded down the shelves of the “Jardin des Plantes” with specimens which made possible those greatest of her thinkers, Lamarck, Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire.

When the feeding of school children is thrown as a charge against Socialism, we are proud to plead guilty. It is our glory that the only cities in the world that have no starving children behind school benches are those cities such as Lille, Ivry, Montlucon, etc., with a Socialist majority in the town councils, which removed the disgrace.

Such then were the arguments of this flag bearer of Individualism, who has supplied the opponents of Socialism with objections these thirty years. His individualist philosophy is now so thoroughly discredited as to call for no answer were it not for the fact pointed out by Huxley, that erroneous ideas do not die just simply because they have been killed.

It is not necessary to wheel into position the heavy artillery of Marx to overthrow this house of cards. Spencer is a sufficient reply to Spencer.

Here is the great contradiction. Spencer, the great biologist, says the brain is to the animal what the Government is to a society. (1) The more effectively and completely the brain controls the members composing the animal body, the higher its place in the organic scale. (2) The less effectively and completely the Government controls the members of the body politic the better will be the society.

Sociological literature has failed to produce any individualist champion able to reconcile this astonishing contradiction. And so there it stands plainly before the eyes of Mr. Spencer’s readers.

“Suppose,” says Professor Huxley, “that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell were left free to follow its own “interest” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would come of the body physiological? The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”--and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.”

This is the rock upon which Spencerian Individualism struck and went to pieces, independently of those great forces, which I shall point out, that made for its disintegration.

These two contradictory positions are the upper and nether millstones between which the individualistic philosophy of Anarchism is ground to powder. Socialists are not stupid enough to argue that because society can get along without a king therefore an orchestra should have “no head.” We are also able to distinguish between “the state” which Socialism will abolish, and the “administration of industry” which it will establish.

Every step forward in modern thought has emphasized the importance of that factor called “environment.” The evolution philosophy is an environment philosophy. Lamarck, the greatest pioneer of modern science, makes a change of environment the prime necessity of organic development. Darwin makes environment the selective factor in “Natural Selection” and in this he is supported by every living biologist of note. Karl Marx paralleled these great advances by discovering that every political philosophy takes its origin in some particular economic environment. This is true of Socialism and Individualism alike.

And so if we wish to understand the historic significance of Individualism we must go back to the period of its birth and examine the social processes of production of that day. This takes us back to the early years of the 19th century.

In the closing half of the 18th century, laborers individually owned the small and crude tools by which they made their living. In this stage of social development the laborer owning the tools he used, appropriated the result. There was here no contradiction and whatever notion of justice is supposed to inhere in the “individual ownership of the means of production” derives its whole force from the economic status of the worker of this period. If that status had remained unchanged, Socialism would never have been heard of. But in the process of evolution the truth and justice of the 18th century became a lie and a social wrong in the 19th.

This transformation was wrought by the development of machinery. It was impossible for every individual worker to own a large machine, and so some men became toolless wage laborers employed by the owners of machinery. This is the beginning of the present labor problem and here arises the struggle in the world of ideas between the philosophy of Individualism and that of Socialism.

Let us examine the vital change which had taken place even before we reach the middle of the last century. Now, one man uses the tools, but another owns them and appropriates the result. And this is the economic foundation of the class war between the exploited wage worker and the exploiting capitalist.

But the individualist theories proper to the 18th century, and its mode of wealth production, passed over into the 19th where their economic justification had ceased. As the fortunate individual owners of machinery found themselves growing rich at a great rate apart from their own individual efforts, they became enthusiastic supporters of “Individualism” and eventually founded the “Manchester” school of politics, which had Herbert Spencer as its chief mouth-piece and Henry George as a somewhat belated trumpeter.

In this heyday of Individualism the “rate of profit” was at its highest, one Lancashire cotton spinner boasting of one thousand per cent. But the social hell in which the English working class of this period lived is without parallel in modern times. Its system of child labor, as recorded in the government blue books as well as already shown by Owen, was indescribably horrible, but the manufacturers were opposed to “government interference” and the individualist philosophy and its bogey of “paternalism” was their craven plea.

With the grouping of the workers in factories production became socialized, and now came this contradiction, production was social while ownership and appropriation were individual. The Socialists of that period rightly maintained that society should either go back in production to the individual form so as to be in harmony with the existing individual form of ownership and appropriation, or it should adopt social ownership and social appropriation to harmonize with the already existing social production.

But the wheel of history never revolves backward, and the latter solution is destined ultimately to prevail. Social evolution has already carried us far in that direction. With the organization of capital individual ownership disappeared and class ownership has taken its place. The struggle of the 20th century is not a struggle between individuals, it is a struggle between classes, and so Individualism has lost its meaning--it is defunct.

With the disappearance of the economic foundation of Individualism, and the overthrow of the philosophic superstructure erected thereon, all its watchwords have lost their power to charm. Free trade, free labor, free contract, free competition; all these are the lingering and belated echoes of a day that is gone.

“Free trade” was the protest of the rising capitalist class against the trammels placed upon its commerce by the feudal regime. Now it appears in a new role; it is the cry of the small capitalist against those “predatory trusts” which discovered that competition is not the life but the death of trade, and are using protection to destroy their weaker fellow-robbers.

“Free labor” was the demand of the capitalist that the serf should be released from the soil in the country so that he might be available for exploitation in the factory, in the city. In England an attempt has been made to give this defunct phrase a new lease of life by the “Free Labor Association” an organization which had this in common with our “Citizen’s Alliance” that it sought to encourage the dear good workingman to keep out of the “tyrannical” labor unions.

“Freedom of contract” or, as it is sometimes called “Voluntary Co-operation” never existed in capitalist society and has never been anything but a grim joke or a plain lie. Where is the freedom or voluntaryism of the worker who must work for what he can get or starve like a dog in the street?

The effects of “free Competition” in England in the early days of capitalism, where it was most free, were such that none but a fiend would wish them recalled. The “might have been” halo with which present day individualists seek to surround this principle, is a midsummer night’s dream that never had any existence in the world of reality and can never be realized, except in the phantasmogoria of their own ideological imaginations.

Individualism in all its forms has become an anachronism. The deified ego of Max Stirner, which imagines itself sitting enthroned on the pinnacle of the universe, directing the motions of the planet Jupiter by crooking its little finger, is an ideological phantasm, which has no connection with the solid earth. The flowery exhortations of Emerson, to live a noble life in ignoble surroundings, is an invitation to attempt what is, for the mass, impossible. Any philosophy which proposes to save the individual without transforming his social environment stands condemned by modern science.

If, with a society more highly organized than any known to history, we still have anarchy in the production and distribution of our wealth, the remedy is, not less social organization, but more. If with all our dental science toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer dentists, but more dentistry. The need of to-day is not less society, but more social organization. There is no hope in going back to the small production of sixty years ago as Hearst and Bryan desire. Increasing the number of bandits in any society is not the concern of their victims. The golden age of labor is not in the past but in the future. The labor problem cannot be solved by going back to the scramble of the hog-pen or the methods of the jungle. There is no succour in flying at each other’s throats in the name of business.

Freedom cannot live in a society rent by class wars. Her conquests are only possible with a humanity united to subdue the cosmic world by which it is interprenetrated and surrounded.

Happily for us, society evolves independently of anybody’s opinion. Our opinions follow blindly and gropingly in the rear. The opinions of individualists do not manufacture social laws, according to certain ethical requirements; they interpret and explain those laws which they discover in operation. The fundamental question is not, “is Individualism better than Socialism?” but “Is society moving in the direction of the one or the other?”

To answer this question it is only necessary to compare the world of to-day with that of ten or even five years ago. America moves steadily toward Socialism, while Europe advances in great leaps. Every civilized country tells the same story, and the recent development of Finland and Austria astonished the world.

Society moves forward, as irresistibly as the ocean tides, and it moves in a direction predicted by those greatest thinkers of this or any age--the men who linked their lives with the blood and the tears and the struggles of half a century in the greatest cause that ever throbbed in the brain of man--the cause of Socialism.

X.

CIVILIZATION--WARD AND DIETZGEN

One of the darkest curses that has fallen on the working class is its being shut out of the wondrous world of modern thought. The great gates of the Temple of Science are clanged in its face, and its mind is fed on the theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In the school, the press, and especially the pulpit, ideas are gravely presented as serious truths, which are known by all university men to be thoroughly exploded lies.

A twentieth century newspaper will brazenly devote a whole page to presenting, with pictorial illustrations, alleged recently discovered proofs of the truth of that Genesis legend which has done such loyal service to the ruling class by stultifying the brains of its victims. These hypocritical displays are never publicly contradicted, although every man with the least smattering of scientific knowledge, including the editors, knows how utterly false they are. These worthies indulge in a sly grin and lower one eyelid, for it is generally understood among them that the great donkey--the working class--will only consent to carry everybody’s burdens in addition to its own, just so long as it is kept in childish ignorance of everything it ought to know.

And this is not all. Now that a great body of workingmen are discarding these ancient lies, and groping for those great truths that contain the germs of their redemption, the official savants, true servants of the ruling class, twist and warp their own science in order to make it contradict every working class idea.

This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse--it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. It is an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one’s best friend because of the groundless calumnies of an interested enemy.

This terribly mistaken antagonism to science has unfortunately found its way, in some measure, into the Socialist movement, though happily, increasing acquaintance with Socialism’s classic literature is breaking it down. In this connection the following passage from the pen of Isador Ladoff is very pertinent:

“Rationalistic modern Socialism is based, not exclusively on certain economic theories and maxims, as some narrow-minded ‘Socialists pure and simple’ think and would fain make us believe, but on the broad foundation of modern science and thought. The economic theories peculiar to modern Socialism are derived from the application of the results of the achievements of modern knowledge and philosophy to the field of social economics. The trouble with the ‘Socialists pure and simple’ is in the extreme limitation of their mental horizon. They happen to know, or rather imagine they have mastered Marxian economics, while modern science and philosophy remains to them a sealed letter. That is why they get irritated whenever and wherever they meet in the socialistic press an article containing something else than the everlasting parrot-like repetitions of pseudo-socialistic commonplaces and shibboleths. Every attempt to present to the attention of the readers of socialistic publications, glimpses of the radiant world of science and philosophy, leading up to socialistic ideas and ideals in all their world-redeeming significance, appears to the simpleminded and superstitious simon-pure Socialists as an attack on somebody or something, as a heresy and heterodoxy of some kind. To such people the religion of science is the religion of ignorance and vice versa, ignorance is their religion and science.”

The use of science and philosophy by the ruling class as a pretence for the appropriation of the lion’s share of the wealth produced by labor does not prove that workingmen should abandon philosophy as useless to their cause. On the contrary, as Dietzgen says: “Philosophy is a subject which closely concerns the working class,” and he adds: “This, of course, does by no means imply that every workingman should try to become acquainted with philosophy and study the relation between the idea and matter. From the fact that we all eat bread does not follow that we must all understand milling and baking. But just as we need millers and bakers, so does the working class stand in need of keen scholars who can follow up the tortuous ways of the false priests and lay bare the inanity of their tricks.”

It is quite clear that working men, instead of underestimating the value of mental training, should remember what a terrible weapon it has proved in the hands of their enemies. It is precisely because the workers have lacked this weapon, that in spite of their overwhelming numbers and physical strength, they have always been outwitted. “The emancipation of the working classes,” concludes Dietzgen, “requires that they should lay hold on the science of the century.”

Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall now examine, warns us against the erroneous supposition “formerly quite prevalent,” that “science consists in the discovery of facts.” He maintains that “there is not a single science of which this is true, and a much more nearly correct definition would be that science consists in reasoning about facts.”

We may recall here that learned body which sneered at Darwin as “a mere theorizer” and conferred its honors upon an unknown man who had collected some facts about butterflies but had carefully avoided “reasoning about them.” Of course the value of this reasoning is that it leads to the discovery of those laws or generalizations which reveal the relation of the facts to each other, and thus enables us to appreciate their real significance.

Therefore we might venture to push the matter a little further and define science as the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity and invariability of physical phenomena, astronomy would be impossible. The discovery of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology. Dalton’s theory of atoms and Lavoisier’s permanence of matter emancipated chemistry from the superstitions of alchemy.

Ward is therefore on solid ground when he maintains that “the indispensable foundation of all economic and social science” consists in the fact that “all human activities and all social phenomena are rigidly subject to natural law.” It is just the difficulty of discerning uniform laws amidst the highly complex phenomena of society that delays the proper development of sociology, although, as we have seen, this difficulty is materially augmented by the class interests at stake.

Again, just as biology was hindered in its growth by the doctrine of special creations and, still earlier, Copernican astronomy was checked by the geocentric theory, so now the progress of sociology is restrained by the doctrine of divine providence. Believers in divine providence are well represented by the Hindoo who in his lesson on English composition spoke of his father as having “died according to the caprice of God which passeth all understanding.”

It is precisely because “caprice” can not be understood and cannot therefore, be made the basis of prevision, that it can not be admitted into the domain of science. Science, as Starcke well said, is founded on “faith in the universality of causation.” If the activities of men and the policies of nations are not ruled by cause and effect a science of society is impossible.

And yet, contends Ward, it was the very adoption of this “altogether sound abstract principle” that “led to the greatest and most fundamental of all economic errors, an error which has found its way into the heart of modern scientific philosophy, widely influencing public opinion, and offering a stubborn resistance to all efforts to dislodge it.”

And now we come to the keynote of Ward’s whole system and at the same time to the point where he completely breaks with the biological sociologists. The error, which Ward attributes to them all, the refutation of which is the main object of his work, is described as follows:

“This error consists in practically ignoring the existence of a rational faculty in man, which, while it does not render his actions any less subject to natural laws, so enormously complicates them that they can no longer be brought within the simple formulas that suffice in the calculus of mere animal motives. This element creeps stealthily in between the child and the adult, and all unnoticed puts the best laid schemes of economists and philosophers altogether aglee. A great psychic factor has been left out of the account, the intellectual or rational factor, and this factor is so stupendous that there is no room for astonishment in contemplating the magnitude of the error which its omission has caused.”

This is the foundation stone of Ward’s sociology. With great care he elaborates the vital difference between the economy of nature with its blind forces, and the economy of society with its mental arrangement of means to ends. He marshals that well-known array of facts which prove the tremendous waste continually going on in the natural world.

According to M. Quatrefages, two successive generations of a single plant-louse would cover eight acres. A large chestnut tree in June contains as much as a ton of pollen. Considering the size of pollen-grain the number on such a tree would be next to inconceivable. Burst a puff-ball and there arises from it a cloud that fills the air for some distance around. This cloud consists of an almost infinite number of exceedingly minute spores, each of which should it by the rarest chance fall upon a favorable spot, is capable of reproducing the fungus to which it belongs.

And yet in spite of all this enormous reproductivity the population of these species remains practically stationary. Ward objects very strongly to this insane waste of nature being set up as a model for human society, and he is entitled to the sympathy of Socialists who have always protested against the planless anarchy of capitalist production, which however, bad as it is, can hardly be considered a circumstance compared with the random waste of nature.

“The waste of being,” says Asa Gray, “is enormous, far beyond the common apprehension. Seeds, eggs, and other germs, are designed to be plants and animals, but not one of a thousand or a million achieves its destiny.” And Gray quotes with approval from an article in the Westminster Review: “When we find that the sowing is a scattering at random, and that for one being provided for and living, ten thousand perish unprovided for, we must allow that the existing order would be considered the worst disorder in any human sphere of action.”

Ward, of course, takes the same view: “No one will object to having nature’s methods fully explained and exposed, and thoroughly taught as a great truth of science. It is only when it is held up as a model to be followed by man and all are forbidden to ‘meddle’ with its operations that it becomes necessary to protest. I shall endeavor still further to show that it is wholly at variance with anything that a rational being would ever conceive of, and that if a being supposed to be rational were to adopt it he would be looked upon as insane.”

“Such,” says Ward, “is nature’s economy. How different the economy of a rational being! He prepares the ground, clearing it of its vegetable competitors, then he carefully plants the seeds at the proper intervals so that they shall not crowd one another, and after they have sprouted he keeps off their enemies whether vegetable or animal, supplies water if needed, even supplies the lack of chemical constituents of the soil, if he knows what they are, and thus secures, as nearly as possible, the vigorous growth and fruition of every seed planted. This is the economy of mind.”

And now Ward presents a truth that is very familiar to all Socialists--that the difference between an animal living in a state of nature and man living in human society, is that man is a tool using animal. This use and development of tools is due to that application of reason called the inventive faculty, which no other animal possesses. “The beaver indeed, builds dams by felling trees, but its tools are its teeth, and no further advantage is taken than that which results from the way the muscles are attached to its jaws. The warfare of animals is waged literally with tooth and nail, with horn and hoof, with claw and spur, with tusk and trunk, with fang and sting--always with organic, never with mechanical weapons.”

And because man can invent tools and improve them he has an immense advantage over other animals. It is this advantage which the biological sociologists have overlooked. But this advantage makes an incalculable difference. The fundamental difference is, that “the environment transforms the animal, while man transforms the environment.”

What, then, is civilization? It is human development beyond the animal stage. What it its chief factor? It is psychic--the application of “mind” to the problems of life.

Now we see still further how Ward is irresistibly driven, by the logic of his position, to Socialist conclusions. He sees that another striking difference between irrational nature and rational society is that nature is competitive, while society is increasingly co-operative. And this co-operation is due to the greater development of that psychic factor, which is the chief instrument of civilization and leads men to avoid waste.

Turning now to “Pure Sociology,” we are told that the subject-matter of sociology is “human achievement.” When we ask, in what does this achievement consist, we are informed that: “Achievement does not consist in wealth. Wealth is fleeting and ephemeral. Achievement is permanent and eternal.”

Again the sum total of the things which constitute achievement may be summed up in the one word “inventions.”

Achievement with Ward is another name for civilization. Page after page is given to an enumeration of its particulars,--music, painting, poetry, exploration, industry and many other things which we have not space even to mention. The one thing that is vital here is that “achievement,” while it does not include perishable wealth, nor yet the actual, perishable machinery by which the wealth has been produced, does nevertheless undoubtedly include that something described by Socialists as the “process of production.”

This is of prime importance because now when we turn to Ward’s “Applied Sociology,” we find that not only achievement, but “improvement” is the theme of that branch of the science.

And now listen to this great American sociologist, who has so far outstripped all his contemporaries as to be practically without a rival, this thinker whose monumental works have gained him an international reputation; listen and compare what follows with the hocus-pocus that usually comes from the official chairs:

“The purpose of applied sociology is to harmonize achievement with improvement. If all this achievement which constitutes civilization has really been wrought without producing any improvement in the condition of the human race, it is time that the reason for this was investigated. Applied sociology includes among its main purposes the investigation of this question. The difficulty lies in the fact that achievement is not socialized. The problem, therefore, is that of the socialization of achievement.

“We are told that no scheme for the equalization of men can succeed; that at first it was physical strength that determined the inequalities; that this at length gave way to the power of cunning, and that still later it became intelligence in general that determined the place of individuals in society. This last, it is maintained is now, in the long run, in the most civilized races and the most enlightened communities, the true reason why some occupy lower and others higher positions in the natural strata of society. This, it is said, is the natural state and is as it should be. It is moreover affirmed that being natural there is no possibility of altering it.

“Of course all this falls to the ground on the least analysis. For example, starting from the standpoint of achievement, it would naturally be held that there would be great injustice in robbing those who by their superior wisdom had achieved the great results upon which civilization rests and distributing the natural rewards among inferior persons who had achieved nothing. All would assent to this. And yet this is in fact practically what has been done. The whole history of the world shows that those who have achieved have received no reward. The rewards for their achievement have fallen to persons who have achieved nothing. They have simply for the most part profited by some accident of position in a complex, badly organized society, whereby they have been permitted to claim and appropriate the fruits of the achievements of others. But no one would insist that these fruits should all go to those who had made them possible. The fruits of achievement are incalculable in amount and endure forever. Their authors are few in number and soon pass away. They would be the last to claim an undue share. They work for all mankind and for all time, and all they ask is that all mankind shall forever benefit by their work.”

And so Ward’s conclusion is that the greatness of the present consists in that mass of achievements called civilization, among which are those inventions which have so wonderfully increased the capacity of social labor in its production of wealth. And the hope of the future lies in the socialization of those achievements so as to make their rich fruits the common heritage of all mankind. There are no Socialists who will quarrel with these conclusions.