PREFACE↩

IT is a chastening thought that some parts of this book have had an ante-natal existence of approximately twenty-two years. When I began the final stage of reducing to writing an unwritten book, I had in mind the production of what should be, in size and otherwise, a companion volume to The Development of Economic Doctrine, which apparently has been found to serve a certain purpose in the education of the young economist. Despite my good intentions, however, it has refused to be compressed; and in the end it does not fall far short of attaining twice the modest dimensions originally planned. Possibly the socialists, being in the main dissentients, rebels, and prophets, are a more interesting lot than their orthodox and respectable cousins, the ‘economists.’

I make no apology for writing this book. It may not be the book which the general reader requires as an introduction to the development of socialist thought, but that at the present moment he does require a book on the subject is beyond all question. Kirkup's History of Socialism dates from 1892; and since then the literature on the subject has been astonishingly meagre, and—as it may appear to many—grossly disfigured by prejudice on one side or the other. It ought to be possible to write of Socialism without the underlying assumption that socialists alone are right and righteous; that they alone are the true crusaders against the powers of darkness. Equally, of course, it ought to be possible to write of Socialism without assuming that all socialists are fundamentally dishonest, and that Socialism attracts exclusively the world's incompetents and the world's failures. And of this second view, there are also some glaring examples.

Not that any one in these matters can be expected to write without bias: if such a miracle were possible, the result would probably not be worth reading. There is, however, an obvious duty resting on an expositor to try to understand a point of view, even when he disagrees with it. In the present case, my bias—some may say my ‘prejudice’—is doubtless sufficiently apparent. I shall be told that I am not sympathetic to Marx and the Marxian tradition. In a Preface an author, having rigorously eschewed the First Person Singular throughout eighteen chapters, may be allowed to talk somewhat more informally to his readers; and accordingly I am prepared to acknowledge that I do not like Marx, and that I do not like Lassalle; just as further back I do not like Rousseau. And though one may admit on high principle that one ought not to allow a small matter of likes and dislikes to influence judgment, those of us who are honest with ourselves will admit that in general it does for all that! It is difficult to imagine any normal person wishing to meet Marx for a third time. Further, if in the intimacy of a Preface I may continue to be indiscreet, Marx irritates me because in the last generation he has so successfully led so many of the ‘intellectuals’ up the garden path, where at great length they discuss What Marx Really Meant, and say things which would astonish you, as they would certainly have astonished Marx, could he have overheard them discoursing in the garden-house. It is greatly to his credit that Marx, so it is recorded, protested on one occasion that he was not a Marxian. Mr. E. H. Carr, who almost alone in the present generation writes of Marx with balance, comments on the attitude of the pseudo-Marxists in this matter, and their pathetic faith that ‘if but one plank can be saved from the discredited platform of Marxism, all will be well.’ It is an unedifying spectacle. No one would suggest that Marx was consciously dishonest, but a very great deal of intellectual disingenuousness has gone to the explaining (and the explaining-away) of Marx. Accordingly, all things considered, I do not like the company of Marx.

Spiritually, despite, or because of, their absurdities, I am much more at home with Saint-Simon and Fourier. While I would do much to avoid meeting Marx—for this Diotrephes of the socialist church would merely bark at me in his hot displeasure—I should greatly appreciate a long evening with Fourier in a quiet hostelry; and, if the bar were not too crowded, I believe I could prevail upon him to give his marvellous impersonation of a fox or of a robin or a giraffe, with copious comments on the qualities each of them symbolised. It was a performance which he gave only when his company was entirely congenial.

While I am thus prepared to acknowledge that I have my likes and dislikes among the team here assembled, and while this may have made me in some cases more sympathetic than elsewhere, I do not think that I have anywhere been ‘unfair.’ At least, within the space available, I have tried to allow my witnesses to say all that they have to say, and to say it in their own words. As a final contribution to ‘impartiality,’ I have, after searching my heart, confessed herewith that, should we all hereafter forgather in an Elysium, devised by Mr. Eric Linklater, it is only with Marx, Lassalle and Rousseau that I shall hope to avoid being on visiting terms. Having warned the reader of this, my possible bias, he may make the desired correction in the other sense.

The only practical reparation an author can make for writing a book twice the length he had intended is to indicate what parts the reader-in-a-hurry may skip. While, officially, I am bound to say that each chapter contributes something to a comprehension of all the others, in fact most of the chapters are reasonably self-contained, and any one may therefore read the portion in which he is interested. The reader who is exclusively concerned with the problems of Socialism to-day may be tempted to begin at Chapter 12 with Marx; but I would plead with him (unless he is very pressed) to go further back; we do not in this country know enough about the Fathers of Socialism (so-called), and on the human side they are much more interesting than the children they begat. I would therefore suggest that the hurried reader, after running through the Prologue which gives the framework, should begin at Chapter 5, with William Godwin. He might omit Chapter 11, unless, merely for the sake of sampling, he elects to read the sections on two of the English pre-Marxians (let us suggest Hall and Gray). In Chapter 12 he might, if he gnaws at the main joint, omit Lassalle and Rodbertus. In Chapter 13 he could restrict himself to Bakunin, and in Chapter 14 he might prove his insularity by leaving Bernstein aside. The concluding chapter, as it merely contains disconnected and irresponsible comments by the author, may also be neglected by those who seek a ‘shortened course.’

I am under great obligations to many librarians who have magnanimously allowed books to go out of their immediate care; perhaps I may be allowed to acknowledge in particular the help received from the Custodians of the Libraries of the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. To my son, John Gray, I am indebted for assistance in the tasks of proof-reading and of the preparation of the Index.

ALEXANDER GRAY.

Edinburgh,

September 1944.

THE SOCIALIST TRADITION. MOSES TO LENIN

PROLOGUE AND PLAN↩

THE purpose of the present volume is to present the outstanding figures in the development of socialist thought, with some estimate of the significance of their several contributions. It does not, it should be observed, aim at being a history of socialist thought: such a task, in its immensity, would probably engage more than the average lifetime of any moderately conscientious student. Nor indeed (though it may savour of heresy) is a history of socialism on a comprehensive scale a primary requirement for the ordinary man, confronted with the problems of to-day. Further, any temptation to be drawn into the history of the socialist movement has, so far as possible, been resisted. It is admittedly a cognate subject; but again, the effort, doubtless incumbent on all of us, to disentangle the confusion of ideas making up the environment in which we live, would not be materially aided by embarking on the vain attempt (for instance) to understand the cross-currents and interrelations among the socialist parties in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here we are primarily concerned with ‘ideas,’ as these ideas have been reflected in the minds of the men who have been most influential in shaping the socialist tradition. As a consequence of this method of approach it is inevitable that many connecting links should be omitted and even some considerable movements ignored. It is suggested, however, with some confidence, that if the ordinary man, who is the bulk of the population, can acquire a knowledge of what Godwin or Proudhon, or Marx or Lenin stood for, he may, without great immediate loss, leave to the academic expert the fascinating pursuit of conjectural sources and hidden influences.

One question barks for an answer on the threshold of our journey; but Prudence and Cowardice (a combination of potent masters) unite in suggesting that the question should meantime be avoided. What, it may at the outset reasonably be asked, are we to understand by socialism? The definitions of socialism that strew the expositions and the criticisms of socialism furnish a depressing prospect. Some are foolish; some are vacuous; some are contradictory; some, which appear commendable up to a point, leave gaping omissions. There is in short no agreement among the experts as to what socialism is supposed to mean, or what it is that constitutes the Wesen of a socialist system of thought. On the other hand, there is not the same disagreement as to who are the ‘great socialists,’ to fall back on the title of Mr. Muckle's little book¹—though, admittedly, there are not a few of Mr. Muckle's team who would be entirely excluded on any strict interpretation of most of the most-favoured definitions. For the purpose of our journey through time we shall accordingly guide ourselves, not so much by the application of a definition of socialism postulated in advance, as by accepting somewhat unquestioningly those whom the general consensus of opinion has agreed to designate as ‘the great socialists.’ When these have gone into the witness-box, and have severally testified to the faith that is in them, it may in a concluding chapter be possible to consider more knowledgeably what is the essence of socialism, and how one brand of socialism differs from another. For the present, therefore, without suggesting that it even remotely foreshadows a definition, we shall accept all who, urged by a passion for justice or equality, or by a sensitiveness to the evils of this present world, seek a better world, not by way of reform, but by way of subversion (using the word in its literal and neutral sense)—or, if it be preferred, by a fundamental change in the nature and structure of society.

It may be convenient if in this Prologue some indication is given of the prominent figures selected to illustrate the development of socialist thought. In the modern western world, our way of thinking derives largely, on the one hand, from the Jews, modified and supplemented later by Christianity, and on the other hand from Greece. These together provide in large measure the pit from which have been dug our thoughts on the relation of man to man, of man to society, of man to God. Inevitably many of the ideas which lie at the root of socialism were foreshadowed (and more than foreshadowed) in the Mosaic Law, in the indignation of the prophets, in the speculations of the Greek philosophers, and in the teaching of the early Church. The first two chapters accordingly seek to determine how far socialism may justifiably appeal to Greek philosophy; how far it may claim that it finds inspiration and support in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

The third chapter may also in a sense be regarded as concerned with background—with the inspirations leading to socialism, rather than with socialism itself. A curious and fascinating side-line in the literature of socialism is concerned with the portrayal of imaginary and ideal societies, where, without any of the pangs of birth (so familiar to Marx), the perfect world is represented, in the guise of fiction, as a going and highly successful concern. The greatest of all Utopias is, of course, the original Utopia itself, unless indeed Plato's Republic is regarded as a Utopia—which, strictly speaking, it is not. The third chapter is accordingly devoted to the Utopia of Thomas More (1478–1535); and since Utopias play so large a part in later socialist literature (down to Looking Backward and News from Nowhere), some attention is devoted to two of the other early Utopias, as represented by Campanella (1568–1639) and Fénelon (1651–1715).

In the fourth chapter we approach the questionings out of which modern socialism has sprung. Here we are concerned with the prelude to the French Revolution, where, of course, the greatest name is that of Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau was primarily a political writer, but he was tortured by a passion for equality, by a hatred of property (or of certain kinds of property) and by a vision of class warfare which made him one of the greatest influences in the origins of socialism. In this chapter there is also included some reference to two much smaller pre-revolutionary figures who were, however, great in their time, Mably (1709–1785) and Morelly (?-?). These also thirsted for equality, as did Babeuf (1764–1797), the martyr of the Secte des Egaux, who likewise is admitted to this chapter. Though he is hardly at home with these companions, there is also included here a slight account of Fichte (1762–1814), who represents the enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, and who became influential in the authoritarian tradition of Germany.

In the following chapter (5) we meet one of the enigmatic figures of English literature. William Godwin (1756–1836) appears here as the first, and perhaps the greatest and most consistent of the anarchists, and, as such, he opens a line of thought which has ever since been in part intermingled with, and in part opposed to, socialism. Godwin was an anarchist because he was so pre-eminently a man of reason and inhuman logic. An anarchist society is conceivable only if all concerned are the embodiment of reason and restraint. Not merely therefore should an anarchist be a man of reason; he should also combine with his own reason a wholly unreasonable belief that all others are equally reasonable. It is Godwin's distinction that, more successfully than any other, he came within sight of accomplishing this nice balancing feat.

The next stage brings us to the group of writers among whom (in the foolish metaphor) we must look for the father (or the fathers) of socialism. They represent what Marx later called in derision the ‘Utopian Socialists’; they have also, again with a touch of contempt, been classed as ‘associationists.’ They were Utopian because, in the main, this initial phase of socialism represented a naive belief (as it appeared to Marx) that a better world could be engineered by men of good will doing something, by action from above, in the form of an Act of Parliament, the promulgation of a Royal Decree, or the philanthropy of a well-disposed capitalist. They were associationists because (again, in the main) they looked for the realisation of socialism through the formation of groups or associations of people, living on socialist lines within this present tainted world, yet in the course of time gradually leavening the lump.

The representatives of this phase of socialism provide an odd assortment of interesting types, distinguished by a high degree of eccentricity, if not of something more, though in some cases with very doubtful claims to be regarded as socialists at all. Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a turbulent, tumultuous, restless, forward-looking mind, was in himself rather a prophet of big business, of the totalitarian State and of the virtue of leadership; but his followers, the Saint-Simonian school, gave his doctrine a slight modification which had far-reaching effects in making Saint-Simonism a profound socialist influence. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) is likewise a father of socialism in whom the old Adam of individualism dies hard; for he loved property, and he loved inequality and he loved most of the things that a socialist ought not to love. But he let his terrible imagination loose in criticising this poor civilisation of ours, and in his own unbalanced way he preached the gospel of co-operation as a way of escape. Saint-Simon and Fourier have high claims to be regarded as the most interesting and piquant figures in the history of socialism: it is a matter of regret that those who are unquestionably immeasurably more important should also be immeasurably duller.

The third of this group is Robert Owen (1771–1858), who, after being a successful man of business, devoted his fortune to the furtherance of experiments in the establishment of communistic settlements and to much communistic and miscellaneous propaganda. His life, after he ceased to make money as the model employer, may appear to the superficial eye as a series of frustrations; yet his influence is everywhere in the labour movement of the nineteenth century. Lastly there is Louis Blanc (1813–1882), who, though unquestionably an associationist in virtue of his plan of co-operative associations, yet in many ways belongs to a somewhat later era because of his frank acceptance of the existing State as the appropriate machine for bringing the new world into existence. To each of these representatives of the Utopian or associationist stage a chapter is devoted (Chapters 6–9).

Chapter 10 brings us to Proudhon (1809–1865), a writer who refuses to be classified and who, superficially viewed, appears as a mass of contradictions. He was indeed a lone fighter who railed against everyone and anyone whose views he did not at the moment share. As he rather prided himself on arguing on both sides of every question, a consistent body of doctrine can hardly be expected from Proudhon, who, in the admirable phrase of Emile Faguet, ‘ne comprenait pas tout à la fois, mais qui, successivement, comprenait admirablement chaque chose.’¹ But if Proudhon must be ‘placed’ for the purposes of this plan, he is best regarded as a continuator of the anarchist tradition, a kind of link between Godwin and Bakunin later, carrying on the same Holy War against all authority and against all authoritarian forms of socialism.

The next stage should bring us to the centre of things and to ‘scientific socialism.’ On the way to Marx, however, it is well for us in this country to recall a remarkable group of early English socialists—forgotten and rediscovered—who anticipated the Marxian way of thinking, and at times indeed Marxian phraseology, especially with regard to exploitation. So far as mere chronology goes, these writers (Hall: 1740–1820; Thompson: 1785–1833; Hodgskin: 1783–1869; Bray:?-?; Gray: 1799-?1850) are, at least in their fruitful period, more nearly contemporary with Saint-Simon and Fourier, but spiritually they are on the threshold of Marx. It has accordingly been thought advisable to ignore dates in this matter, and give some account of certain of the members of this remarkable English pre-Marxian group in Chapter 11, immediately before the discussion of Marx; and along with them has been included a brief reference to agrarian socialism in this country, as seen in Spence (1750–1814) and Ogilvie (1736–1819), who had at least this in common with Marxians everywhere, that they popularised the idea of ‘theft.’

Having considered these English forerunners, we are free to turn to the main exposition of scientific socialism. The essence of scientific socialism, as distinguished from Utopian socialism, is that it bases socialism on a philosophical view of history, usually, but not very happily, described as the ‘Materialist Conception of History.’ The urge forward in history comes, it is held, not from men's ideals, but from the conditions under which they earn their living. Men's ideals indeed are a result and not a cause; they represent a by-product of their material conditions. Moreover, the Materialist Conception of History finds its expression in an everlasting class-struggle, where exploiters defraud the exploited, and in which one struggle is resolved, merely to give place to another. In the future, however, with the expropriation of the expropriators, there will be inaugurated a condition of affairs, called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ leading ultimately to a classless society. Thus, in its classic form as presented by Marx (1818–1883), scientific socialism comprises at least a philosophy of history, embodying the class-struggle; a theory of exploitation, based on presumed economic reasoning, and a vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the enunciation of scientific socialism, Marx was united in indissoluble partnership with Engels (1820–1895), and they are considered together here. Although the Marx-Engels combination is almost sufficiently representative of scientific socialism, there are two others who ranked more highly two generations ago than they do to-day, and who even now ought not to be ignored. These are, firstly, Rodbertus (1805–1875), who thought like a philosopher and who lived aloof like a philosopher; and secondly, Lassalle (1825–1864), who, not without demagogic qualities, largely created the German working-class movement, and who exercised a greater immediate influence than Marx. Marx and Engels, with addenda on Lassalle and Rodbertus, are discussed in Chapter 12.

The post-Marxian development of socialism has been entirely conditioned by Marx. There has been nothing that cannot be interpreted, either as a reaction against Marx, a ‘revision’ of Marx, or a return to what is presumed to be the essential core, the pure gold, of Marx. These stages and schools may be briefly indicated. We have already noted the anarchism of Godwin and Proudhon. A large part of Marx's life, especially in connection with the First International, was devoted to the feud with the anarchists, and indeed the First International shipwrecked because of the incompatibility of the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism and the anarchism of Bakunin. Chapter 13 is devoted to some of the representatives of the anarchist tradition, Bakunin (1814–1876), Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Bertrand Russell.

Inside the professedly socialist party, the chief reaction against Marx is found in the Revisionist movement, of which the chief representative was Bernstein (1850–1932). Some such Revisionist movement was natural and probably inevitable. Marxism had comprised a considerable mass of prophecy, which somehow was not being too obviously fulfilled. The worker was not becoming more miserable; the middle class was not being squeezed out; to the unaided eye, which did not see by faith, the promised revolution was perhaps even rapidly advancing backwards. Even if Marx were right in his prophecies—it was whispered—was it not possible that he might have been mistaken in the time that would be required for their fulfilment? And if so...? What should be done meanwhile? The end-result of Revisionism was thus to eliminate the revolutionary aspect of Marxism and turn it into a gospel of Reform: evolutionary socialism took the place of revolutionary socialism. Substantially the same point of view, without however being due to a reaction against Marx, was represented by the Fabians in this country. Chapter 14 deals with the Fabians and their continental counterpart, the Revisionists.

The next significant movement is that of Syndicalism, and this provides the subject of Chapter 15. Syndicalism was pre-eminently a French and Italian manifestation. It is perhaps best viewed as a protest against Revisionism and the moderating influence of the Second International. Socialism, having become reformist, had also become respectable and middle-class; the fighting spirit had gone out of it; it was being infected by corroding, bourgeois influences. Inevitably also, being reformist, it had truckled to the State. Syndicalism is thus a call to return to the essence of Marx, which is to be found in the class struggle; it represents a determination to make socialism once again exclusively a working-class movement, looking for and finding the working classes in the trade unions. With this is combined a strong infusion of influences deriving from anarchist sources, making Syndicalism hostile not merely to the existing State but to any State. In short, Syndicalism seeks to revive the purity of Marxism, but in Marxism it sees primarily, if not exclusively, the class struggle, which it embodies in the vision of the General Strike.

Guild Socialism, which occupies Chapter 16, is best viewed as the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Syndicalism. While in no way falling behind the Syndicalists in violence of language, the Guild Socialists were somewhat less extreme, to this extent at least, that in their reconstruction of things a place was still left for some sort of a rump of a State to represent consumers. On the side of production, the world, was, however, to be refashioned on the basis of trade unions remodelled as Guilds.

Finally, in Chapter 17 we come to Lenin (1870–1924). Leninism has this in common with Syndicalism, that it professes to be a return to the purity of Marx; but again it is difficult to resist the impression that the Marx to whom we are invited to return is a somewhat one-sided Marx. Lenin, in fact, is almost exclusively interested in revolution. The aspect of Marx and Engels on which he concentrates is accordingly that which is concerned with the technique of revolution, and above all with the significance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. For Lenin, Marxism means the theory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and of the process whereby, after the establishment of this dictatorship, the State will begin to wither away.

In a concluding section (Chapter 18) some consideration is given to certain general questions relating to the nature of socialism and the position of socialism to-day and to-morrow.

Such is the programme, and such are the representatives, or schools, chosen to reveal the development of socialist thought. Mindful of the high injunction of St. Thomas Aquinas in these matters, it may be as well to ask whether there are any glaring defects or omissions in what is here offered to the public. Realising that round any great name are clustered whole galaxies of other writers both before and after, bearing in mind that seldom have two socialists, even of the same school, entirely agreed, it is clear that in any finite volume, whole cohorts of authors must be treated as though they had not been.

It may, however, be permissible to indicate three non-existent ‘infra-marginal’ chapters, the inclusion of which might have been in some ways advantageous in completing the picture. Firstly, there is much so-called ‘mediaeval socialism,’ which is humanly interesting if not economically very instructive. The early writers, Sudre and Thonissen,¹ who held ‘le socialisme’ and ‘le communisme’ in undisguised horror, thought it incumbent on them to give a somewhat lengthy account of the Anabaptists and of the debaucheries of Münster, as a horrible warning of the awful consequences that follow from any trafficking with the accursed thing. But indeed the history of the Anabaptists and the fantastic life of John of Leyden, while admirably providing ample material for a crowded historical film, are of doubtful significance in the history of socialism. No doubt, the mediaeval outlook on economic questions is of absorbing interest; and that not merely from the point of view of a history of socialism. Otherwise, however, most of ‘mediaeval socialism,’ on its more dramatic and picturesque side, is rather a psychological and pathological study in the aberrations that follow certain types of religious mania.

The second infra-marginal chapter might have been devoted to the task of disentangling and defining the many strands of nineteenth-century French socialism. France has been particularly prolific of writers whose names stand for a system of socialism somewhat different from those offered by rival and competing socialists, each with just a little of something the others haven't got. Leroux, Buchez, Pecqueur—and for that matter, Cabet—may be cited from the beginnings of socialism, merely to indicate the nature of the labyrinth. If this challenge has been declined, it is because the questions involved, though doubtless of considerable interest to the French student, are hardly of pressing importance to us in this country. We are not sensibly inconvenienced by an ignorance of Blanqui, even though a ‘Blanquist’ is a recurrent term of abuse in the writings of Lenin.

The third unwritten chapter comes nearer home. In the great literature of the Victorian era there are a number of writers who reveal something which, if not socialism, is a kind of socialist simmering. A later age has, by a kind of natural reaction, tended to find in the Victorian a figure inviting satire; yet it is well to be fair, even to the Victorians. They had their ideals. Now there is nothing greatly wrong with idealism, so long as high ideals are not advanced in extenuation of low practice. What has brought ‘idealism,’ in this sense, into disrepute, so that no one under the age of sixty so much as uses the word without blushing, is the gap not infrequently observed between profession and attainment, which somehow seems to import into idealism an element of what crude people call hypocrisy. The best Victorians aimed high; they took themselves seriously. They were extremely anxious to do that which is right; they were intent on putting an end to evil.¹ Perhaps, as their grandchildren tend to suggest, they may have been somewhat discriminating in the selection of the evils to which they were sensitive: no generation understands its immediate predecessors. For our purpose it is significant that the Victorian idealism produced a kind of literary socialism, or at least a revolt against the ugliness of industrialism, the selfishness of individualism, the general depravity of ‘Manchesterthum’—to borrow a libellous word from the Continent. Hence the socialism (or is it sometimes fascism?) of Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley and others. But indeed, though a chapter on the quasi-socialist utterances of some of the great literary Victorians ought to be of interest, it is doubtful whether it would be in place here. Apart from Morris (though Morris is not quite in this company) this ‘literary socialism’ exercised little or no influence on the general development of socialism, except in so far as it disposed public opinion to a readier acceptance of more virile forms of socialism—or, in the case of Carlyle, may have helped to sow the seeds of fascism.

On their claims, therefore, the three infra-marginal chapters are better left as infra-marginal. But there is a more compelling reason. It may be that poets sing because they must, and pipe but as the linnets sing; but other books are written in the hope that some one will read them, or selected portions of them. Apart from novels, where there is apparently no upper limit, it is to-day distressingly true that no quality so inexorably condemns a book to be classified among the unreadable and the unread as does excessive length. Probably, without John of Leyden and Pecqueur and Ruskin, this volume has already approached that undefined amplitude beyond which even an author's most tactful daughter-in-law will obdurately refuse to have dealings with it

CHAPTER I. THE GREEK TRADITION↩

AT what point a history of socialism should begin is a question which might give occasion to high argument. There are some who hold that we merely becloud our judgment if we allow ourselves to speak of socialism before the middle of the eighteenth century, or perhaps even somewhat later. On this view socialism is essentially a manifestation of the proletarian spirit; or, if socialism is not necessarily proletarian in character and origin, it at least postulates a society which tends to be comprehensive in its membership. Accordingly, it is suggested that a society which assumes for its efficient working the existence of a slave population, denied all rights, may at times speak a language suggestive of socialism, but it can know nothing of socialism as that word has been understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The existence of a serf or slave population may in certain respects add a complication to life; but in other directions it quite obviously enormously simplifies the social and political problems of existence, as these are presented to that section of the population who are not slaves. On this view, a history of socialism should probably begin among these first ripples and disturbances which presaged the deluge of the French Revolution.

As against this view, which looks on socialism as something which cannot be dissociated from the social and political conditions of the last century and a half, there are some who carry their excavations for the roots of socialism not merely to ancient Greece, but to ancient China and to the early days of the children of Israel, and who accord a place in the socialist temple to Moses, in virtue of certain provisions in the Mosaic Law; and to Isaiah, in virtue of his poetic sensitiveness to the wrongs of this world.

If we are strict, it is probably to the former of these views that we should incline. We shall see presently how futile to our present-day mind is the justice and the equality of a State which attains these elevated aims by building on the slavery and oppression of the overwhelming majority of the population. Yet it does not follow that the history of socialism can exclude all that happened before the eighteenth century. Lycurgus and the polity of Sparta may in fact have little to teach us. The community of life which Minos introduced into Crete may have no point of contact with our modern needs. Plato, to ascend to higher names, may have dreamed a dream which would be but a nightmare to-day, if any attempt were made to realise it. Yet throughout the ages, somewhat surprisingly, the limitations imposed by the assumptions of Sparta and Athens have been overlooked. Plato and Lycurgus, to mention no others, have been permanent influences in moulding communist theory. This is particularly true of Plato, though at times (as in Mably) Lycurgus runs him hard. It would be an unpardonable exaggeration to say that all communism and egalitarianism derive from Plato; but on the more visionary and Utopian side, he is everywhere. Like the fabled tree of the nursery, his evergreen branches have given support and shelter to all manner of strange birds, great and small:

Tous les oiseaux du monde vont y faire leurs nids.

Even if the ‘socialism’ of antiquity has, in its own right, no claim to be considered as an integral element in a history of socialism, its representatives demand attention as inspirers of socialism in others in much later centuries.

This subsequent appeal to Greece, as the presumed holder of the original title-deeds of socialism, has been made on two grounds. On the one hand, Greece, in its highly variegated political life, is presumed to have given examples of the actual functioning of the communistic way of life. Here, of course, it is pre-eminently Sparta that has fascinated later ages; though Crete also enters into the picture—and to a much lesser extent, Lipara. On the other hand, Greece has supplied the theory and the vision of Communism. On this side, needless to say, it is Plato, in The Republic and The Laws, who in himself very largely constitutes the legacy of Greece. Before approaching Plato, the begetter of much socialism which he would have disowned, it may be advisable to glance, even if hastily, at Greek communism in practice.

According to tradition, Sparta was the handiwork of Lycurgus; but what may any one profitably or usefully say regarding this obscure personality, of whom even Plutarch says that there is nothing concerning him that is not the subject of dispute? This original lawgiver, on whose persuasive powers the socialist laws of Sparta rested, is indeed a shadowy figure—a kind of cross between Moses and King Arthur. If we accept Plutarch's account, Lycurgus was oppressed by the glaring contrast between riches and poverty, the vast number of poor and landless on the one hand, and, on the other, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals—almost a Marxian vision. And so—although surely external circumstances must have reinforced his arguments—he persuaded the Spartans to agree to a new distribution of lands on a basis of equality, and by other measures he weaned them from the love of silver and gold, and led them to adopt that harsh simplicity of life which the very name of Sparta has come to connote. Plutarch's description is of interest because, waiving the question of its historical accuracy, it gives a very adequate definition of the ideal communistic state, as ideally imagined by countless later generations. In general, he says,

he trained his fellow-citizens to have neither the wish nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves always integral parts of the whole community, clustering together about their leader, almost beside themselves with enthusiasm and noble ambition, and to belong wholly to their country.¹

Thus Plutarch, of the influence of a man who is after all but the shadow of a shade, and who, it may be, was more or less imagined in order that his influence might explain what was.

Whether or not Lycurgus succeeded in abolishing ‘all the mass of pride, envy, crime and luxury’ which flowed from the previous state of inequality—indeed, whether or not Lycurgus ever existed—Sparta, with her remarkable system of government and institutions, certainly did exist, and these are in a way something of a portent. The symmetry of her constitution, her clear consciousness of the end for which, in Sparta at least, the State existed, the rigorous discipline imposed on the individual with a view to the realisation of these ends, have, taken together, provoked the eulogies of many simple-minded enthusiasts. The beauty and the stability of Sparta became, to take but one example, something of an obsession with the ineffective Mably. On the other hand, Sir Frederick Pollock has suggested—and one's heart warms to him—that the Spartans were the most odious impostors in the whole history of antiquity. In any event, the Spartan State was probably unique in some respects in the record of political institutions. It is difficult to recall any other State in which the individual was so completely subordinated to the general ends of the community—and such subordination is, of course, of the very essence of socialism in its general sense, as distinguished from that species of socialism generally referred to as communism. From the day of his birth, when he might be not merely subordinated but suppressed for the good of the State, the young Spartan continued to be disposed of in one way or another until death opened up for him a way of escape. The common education, which began at the age of seven, was wholly designed to make good soldiers, to teach men to suffer uncomplainingly the extremes of heat and of cold, of hunger and of pain, and in each was implanted the conviction that he belonged not to himself, but to the State.

With this must be taken another fact no less significant, common indeed to all Greek civilisation, although perhaps specially important in Sparta. When we speak of Sparta, we are not concerned with a homogeneous population. The problem is complicated, as always, by one form of the slave question. The Spartan State could continue to exist only so long as the Helots were kept under. Thus the Spartans had to consider not merely their enemies beyond their frontier: they also lived as a governing class amid enemies, vastly more numerous, always sullen, constantly menacing. This is the ultimate explanation of the socialistic aspect of the Spartan State. Pöhlmann has a pregnant saying, written long before 1914, and therefore free from any suggestion that it springs from the misfortunes of the last two generations, to the effect that ‘state socialism is the inevitable correlate of the war-like type of society.’¹ Mr. Hawtrey, in our own day, has explained how Collectivism ‘emerges as the logical outcome of militarism when pushed to the extreme limit.’² A State that is at war, or that is perpetually organised for war, dare not tolerate individual liberties which may be in conflict with the general interest; and if the crisis becomes acute, so that the very existence of the State is in danger, there always has been, and there always will be, a tendency to sacrifice the individual; and this means one or other of two things, either despotism or State socialism.

This then explains much in Sparta. She was perpetually organised for war; inevitably she was organised to subordinate the individual in the interests of military efficiency. This also, it is probable, discloses the significance of the common meals, so striking a feature of the civil life both of Sparta and of Crete. It has been suggested that these common meals, so familiar in More and Campanella, may here be viewed as the last remnants of an older and more primitive agricultural communism. Clearly, this is largely a matter of speculation; but the argument is that if, far back at the beginning of things, there was a time when men worked together on land held in common, they would naturally eat in common also. Diodorus of Sicily, speaking of Lipara (in Book V), says that the people there ‘enjoyed their estates in common and fed together in societies,’ as if the two were bound together as cause and effect. But indeed no such speculative explanation is necessary. The common meals were merely another consequence of the fact that Sparta was wholly and exclusively organised as a military State, which, even in peacetime and at home, maintained as a symbol and as a discipline the habits of a campaigning army in taking meals together under arms.

In summary, what does the communism of Sparta amount to? There is not, it must be confessed, much to support the moral which it has usually been asked to supply. Despite the original equal division of the soil, differences in material conditions were not excluded; and contact with the larger world in time undermined the more characteristic Spartan virtues, if indeed they were virtues. For the modern communist in search of ensamples there are, on wider grounds, grave stumbling blocks. In the first place, the Spartan State was not so much a State as a military machine. Its sole interest was in training men to suffer and endure, and it pursued this by methods which stand unique in their revolting barbarity. They may have attained equality and community in education, but not much is thereby gained if education is directed to an unholy end. And secondly, to revert to a point which cannot be over-emphasised, if only because the worshippers of Sparta have so frequently forgotten it, there is the horrible obverse of Spartan communism presented by the hunted and harried Helot. It is not merely that communism in Sparta was a communism in use, others having produced. It was a communism of an idle and boastful people, whose government and whose existence demanded an army of Helots, who suffered at their hands a ruthless tyranny without parallel in history. It has too often been forgotten that the Helots also were men. Mably, in his intoxicated enthusiasm for Lycurgus and all his works, does not seem to have thought of this aspect of the question. It would be a fitting Nemesis, if in some reincarnation he were sent to live—as a Helot—in his so greatly adored Sparta.

The case of Crete is not so dissimilar from that of Sparta, despite the efforts of Polybius to show that they had little or nothing in common. The part of Lycurgus is here played by Minos, ‘le plus sage et le meilleur de tous les rois’—if we are to believe the undiscriminating Fénelon. The tradition indeed is that Lycurgus learned his statecraft in visiting and studying Crete. Here also there was the same determination that the young ‘should grow up accustomed to arms and toils, so as to scorn heat, cold, marches over rugged and steep roads, and blows received in gymnasiums or regular battles.’ ¹ Here also was the institution of the common dining-table; but again the communism, such as it was, was a communism bought at a price; it was the communism of an idle aristocracy, attained at the expense of the many, resting on the ‘exploitation of man by man,’ to use nineteenth century phraseology. Probably neither the fact nor the phrase would have impressed the Cretans; nevertheless this consideration, in one form or another, ought to have been sufficiently in the minds of later generations from Fénelon onwards, to have acted as a damper on any yearning to follow too unquestioningly in the footsteps of Minos. It is interesting to recall that in 1793, when Hérault de Séchelles was called upon to produce ‘by Monday’ a draft constitution, his first and instinctive step was to call upon all the available librarians to get for him ‘sur-le-champ’ a copy of the Laws of Minos.² It is a striking example of the abiding influence of the legacy of Greece. Whether in consequence of the insidious influence of the Laws of Minos or by reason of the mysterious workings of original sin, the ancient Cretans seem to have enjoyed a particularly low reputation among their fellows. The Apostle Paul has most successfully made it a matter of universal knowledge that they were accounted liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. Polybius, in less picturesque language, has said that they were ‘the only people in the world in whose eyes no gain is disgraceful’¹—an odd characteristic in those who are usually cited as having made an obeisance to a communistic way of life.

A third example of the practice of communism, that which for a time existed at Lipara, is in itself vastly less important, but it is of interest inasmuch as the account which has been handed down is more explicit as to the motives prompting to a life in common. The chief source of information on this point is to be found in the fifth book of Diodorus of Sicily, which competent authorities consider may be accepted as substantially correct. He tells us how, somewhere in the sixth century B.C., a number of colonists, under the leadership of Pentathlus, left Cnidus and Rhodes and ultimately settled in the island of Lipara, where they ‘received a kindly reception,’ and ‘were prevailed upon to make common cause with the inhabitants of Lipara in forming a single community there.’ The actual description given by Diodorus of what happened is of some importance in disclosing the springs of primitive communism:

At a later time, because they were being harassed by the Tyrrheni, who were carrying on piracy on the sea, they fitted out a fleet, and divided themselves into two bodies, one of which took over the cultivation of the islands which they had made the common property of the community, whereas the other was to fight the pirates; their possessions also they made common property, and living according to the public mess system, they passed their lives in this communistic fashion for some time. At a later time they apportioned among themselves the island of Lipara, where their city also lay, but cultivated the other islands in common. And in the final stage they divided all the islands among themselves for a period of twenty years, and then they cast lots for them again at every expiration of this period.²

The words of Diodorus are particularly interesting, both as explaining the reason for, and the extent of, this communistic experiment. It is clear that communism was not something that the colonists brought with them in their blood, an inheritance from their past life. It was only at a later time, when circumstances compelled them to prepare a fleet for their defence, that the step to communism was taken; and in the course of time this was again departed from. In the first place, the main island was divided into private property; later, all the islands were divided, subject to a redistribution every twenty years. But the important point is that the impulse to communism came from the necessity of constant military readiness against an external enemy. Nowhere is perpetual preparedness so necessary as against an enemy who comes from over the sea, and the explanation of the system of communism in Lipara is very briefly that the inhabitants, in face of this ever-present danger, were driven to a systematic division of the work of the community among the whole population. Some manned the fleet; some tilled the ground. It is merely a further exemplification of the influence of war conditions in moulding the structure of society in a ‘socialistic’ direction.

It is, however, time to turn from these tentative approximations towards communistic practice, in order to consider very briefly certain theories propounded elsewhere in these matters. Here it is, of course, primarily Plato—indeed, almost exclusively Plato—who demands attention. In approaching Plato and the place which he occupies in the development of socialism and as an inspiration of socialism, we are confronted with a very obvious difficulty. There is an immensity of Plato, as there is an immensity of Shakespeare and of Adam Smith, and to seek to detach a fragment of this immensity is probably a course that would be frowned upon by austere scholars. In short, the communism advocated by Plato, such as it was and limited as it may have been, is but a part of his general theory regarding the State, and doubtless it should be discussed in connection with the main body of his political theories. A chapter on the ‘Politics’ of Plato has, however, its proper resting-place in a book with a somewhat different title-page from that which this volume bears. Here, though it may be a difficult and not wholly satisfactory course, we must endeavour to walk gingerly through the Platonic forest, choosing the path which will best disclose his views on the topics which are relevant to our purpose.

But at least the framework may be indicated. The liberalism of Pericles had aimed at the many-sided development of the Athenian citizen. With progressive democratisation, there had emerged an unrestrained individualism. The sophists, on the theoretical side, had represented a disintegrating influence, teaching, among other things, that justice was the interest of the stronger, that it was merely that which was ordained by law, that each man was the measure of all things. All this tended to the subjectivism of philosophical anarchism. Nor were things any better on the side of the practical administration of affairs. As Plato (or Socrates) saw things, the State suffered from two main defects. In the first place, it suffered from disruptive tendencies. There was strife; there was envy; there was division. And secondly, it suffered from the democratic assumption (pushed to its absurd extreme in election by lot) that all men were equal, and that anyone could do anything as well as anyone else.

Such were the maladies from which Plato's world suffered, and his suggested remedies corresponded to the diagnosis. To cure disruption, unity must be implanted at the centre of things; the State (or that part of it which matters) must become One, with all causes of dissension removed. To cure the cult of incompetence, inherent in Democracy, it must be made abundantly clear that government is a matter for the expert; and indeed, not merely in the field of government, but everywhere, people must stick to their job, and not interfere with others. The world and all its affairs must be run by experts. It is primarily with the first of these points—the lack of union and the cure for disunion—that we are here concerned.

Plato's own statement of the overriding importance of the general principle of unity is almost as important as the machinery for its realisation. A short extract from the fifth book of The Republic may be given. Socrates is speaking, Glaucon supplying the responses.

Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?

There cannot.

And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and pains—where all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions of joy and sorrow?

No doubt.

Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is disorganised—when you have one half of the world triumphing and the other plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the citizens?

Certainly.

Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of the terms ‘mine’ and ‘not mine,” ‘his’ and ‘not his.’

Exactly so.

And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ in the same way to the same thing?

Quite true...

... and I agree with you that in the best-ordered State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you describe.

Then when any of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?

Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.¹

Such is the programme in its general terms: we must eliminate (in places where it matters) the distinction between ‘meum’ and ‘tuum.’ The first person singular in all its forms—I, me, my and mine—must be excoriated. Property therefore must go; for it is the obvious embodiment of ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’; but no less logically, though more courageously, the home and the family must also go, for in the family are the springs of all individualism. There must be community of possessions and community of wives. No one must know his offspring, just as no one must know his father or his mother. A generation will beget a generation.

This, however, is rather a summary statement, in general terms, of the vision to which Plato tends. To appreciate the motives of Platonic communism and the limitations by which it is hedged, we must go back and assist in the construction of the city, observing at what point and with what objects the condition of communism is imposed. The State, as Socrates unfolds it, springs from the needs of mankind: in the language of a later age, it is based on division of labour. ‘The barest notion of a State must include four or five men’¹; and in its first stages there is a husbandman, a builder, a weaver and a shoemaker. It sounds like an echo of that other fragment of oriental wisdom that the chief thing for life is water and bread and clothing and a house to cover shame. But obviously, beyond this primitive embryo of four essential workers, the State must expand, and it does so with the suggestion of a possible stopping-place where all the natural and simple needs of mankind are satisfied. If we pass beyond this ‘healthy State,’ the addition to the population and the list of occupations will be represented by luxury trades. Also in such a world of clutching States, countries which ‘exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth’² will each covet a slice of their neighbour's land, and wars will become inevitable. Thus, faced with the necessity of defence, we encounter the guardians.

In the Platonic State, the guardians, who are later sub-divided into ‘guardians in the fullest sense’ (the rulers) and ‘auxiliaries’ (the soldiers) occupy a place of very considerable importance. Inevitably, for the discharge of their duties a peculiar combination of qualities is required. The guardian must unite in himself philosophy and spirit, and swiftness and strength: he is to be spirited towards those without and gentle towards those within, and he must be educated and trained with those objects in view. Education indeed is one of the chief instruments for fashioning the right guardian, and accordingly The Republic resolves itself, over long stretches, into a treatise on education. Yet education alone, even if it is shaped on the somewhat peculiar lines laid down by Plato, is not sufficient to produce the perfect guardian. There remains a danger. May not the guardians, being stronger than the citizens, become a menace? May they not become savage tyrants instead of friends and allies? May not the watch-dog worry the sheep instead of the wolf? The solution of this difficulty is found in the institution of communism. That the guardians may not be thus corrupted they must be a class apart, consecrated to high and noble ends; they must be in the world but not of it; they must not be as other men, entangled in secular affairs. Hence not only their education, but their habitations and their whole environment should be such as will not impair their virtue as guardians, nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens. It is so important that Plato should not be misrepresented on this fundamental issue, that the actual words used in instituting communism should be quoted.

Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotted and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand.¹

This is indeed a strange communism! The guardians, using the phrase in the wider sense to include the auxiliaries, are, in a phrase beloved of the Physiocrats, a classe stipendiée. They are supported by the third estate, and although it is said that they are to receive a fixed rate of pay, it is clear in fact that all they get is sufficient to provide for the common table. Indeed it is perhaps inaccurate to describe this as a system of communism at all; for of possessions, singly or collectively, they have none. It is made clear at the beginning of the next book that ‘they are only fed, and not paid in addition to their food, like other men.’² In short, they are boarded out, and no pocket-money is allowed. This, if it be a type of communism, is a communism of poverty and of asceticism, of abnegation and renunciation. It represents an economic disability, not a privilege—a badge of poverty, imposed as a condition of efficiency. The motive is thus poles asunder from that which inspires communism in any of its modern forms from Thomas More downwards. Others have preached communism, tormented by the frightful inequality of the rich and the poor; they have been haunted by the enormity that, as Rousseau puts it, a handful of people are stuffed with superfluities, while the famished multitude lacks what is necessary. Here then Plato stands completely apart from the main stream of communistic thought; and in its way it is somewhat curious, for the other aspect of the question was not absent from his mind. He realised, in a frequently quoted sentence, the danger that the city might be not one but two, a city of the rich and a city of the poor. Yet in his advocacy of communism, there is no hint of this; communism is instituted solely in order that those to whom it applies may escape the entanglements of this world.

The second point of interest that arises is concerned with the extent to which the system of communism is to be applied throughout the Platonic State. A straightforward perusal of the passage from the close of the third book cited above would certainly leave with any reader, not given to over-ingenious sophistication, the impression that the system of communism is limited to the relatively small class of the guardians and the auxiliaries, and that it is not intended to be applied to the much more numerous third estate, whom for convenience we may call the husbandmen. Certain it is that in The Republic, when once Plato has mentioned the husbandmen, they fade from the picture with an astonishing celerity and completeness: it is the education and the way of life of the two higher ranks that alone have power to engage his attention. Consequently it has been generally assumed that communism is advocated only for the soldiers and officials, and that the workers are left to an unregenerated family life, and to the burden and care of wife and children. This view, however, has not been universally accepted. Thus Mr. Beer, in his Social Struggles in Antiquity, observed:

A superficial reading of the Republic gives the impression—which is, in fact, shared by many writers—that Plato recommends communism solely for these upper sections, and leaves the remaining class of the people in the old conditions. This interpretation, however, is wholly erroneous. From the quotations we have given above it is quite clear that Plato advocated communism for all Hellenes. Otherwise, there would be no point in the entire social criticism which he levels, in both his works, against the economic, political and moral conditions of his country.¹

Aristotle is, of course, one of the more eminent of those superficial readers of The Republic, and he promptly seized on the point that ‘the main body of the State consists not in the guardians but in the mass of other citizens, about whom nothing is determined.’² He complained that Plato had not made it clear whether the system of communism was to extend to husbandmen as well as to guardians. If yes, how would the classes differ? If no, there would in fact be two States within the State. Among our modern authorities on Plato, Sir Ernest Barker, rivalling Aristotle in his superficiality, roundly states that ‘neither the communism in respect of goods, nor that in respect of wives, which are both advocated by Plato, touch the third or economic class. How indeed could a system which means the abnegation of desire touch the class which represents the element of desire?’ ³

The argument that Plato did not in his statement overlook the position of the husbandmen will be found heavily advanced in the course of Pöhlmann's two ponderous volumes.¹ Briefly, it is, in the first place, urged that the fact that Plato makes minute provision for the way of life of the husbandmen in The Laws, which is concerned with the second-best State, clearly proves that he cannot have intended to exclude them from the advantages of the best State. The second-best State cannot in fact be more enlightened than the best State. Secondly, and perhaps more cogently, it is contended that the omission of details as to the precise manner of the application of the fundamental principles to the whole population was deliberate, was indeed forced upon Plato by the scheme of his work, and that he foresaw Aristotle's arguments and met them in advance. In the fourth book, Socrates declines to go into a great many matters of detail on the ground that all these things are, comparatively speaking, ‘trifles,’ and that they will settle themselves, or at least be easily settled if the main thing, the education and the training of the governing class, is secured: ‘If our citizens are well educated and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit.’ Then a little later he enumerates another host of questions, and asks impatiently: ‘But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars?’ and the echoing Adeimantus dutifully replies: ‘I think that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves.’² Thus the argument is that Plato was concerned with one thing and with one thing only, the training of the guardians and the rulers: it would be for them later to make provision for the regulations governing the population as a whole, by the issue of the appropriate Statutory Rules and Orders within the general framework. Meanwhile, like a discreet junior Government clerk, Plato refrained from expressing any opinion which might later embarrass his Ministers.

When two such eminent authorities as Aristotle and the late Professor of Ancient History in the University of Erlangen are ranged in opposite camps, it behoves the ordinary man to walk warily. Yet if Plato himself be allowed to speak—bearing in mind the legal assumption that words be taken to mean what apparently they do mean—the position as to the extent of this communism should be clear beyond any shadow of a peradventure. The institution is expressly said to be ‘the regulations appointed by us for our guardians’; the guardians are to receive a fixed rate of pay from the citizens, which is clearly a system of life that cannot be universalised; most conclusive of all, if they depart from communism in any respect, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians. Moreover, if the motive of Platonic communism is borne in mind, it will be clear that there would be no justification for extending it to the husbandmen. It is possible to provide that one class shall not be too much spotted by contact with the world; but the whole population cannot be so treated. Indeed, apart from the exercise of academic ingenuity, it might have been thought that Plato had been at pains to make it abundantly clear that his communism was designed as the essential distinguishing mark of the two upper classes, marking them off from the third.

To complete the picture of Platonic communism, as presented in The Republic, a slight further reference should perhaps be made to the community of wives and children which is dealt with in Book V. It is not necessary here to consider the machinery of marriage, the system of lots, together with the ‘considerable dose of falsehood and deceit’ introduced with the highest eugenical ends, and all the rest of what may be called the administrative arrangements. Nor need we concern ourselves unduly with the regulations designed to obliterate in the mother all knowledge as to which of the next generation is in fact the fruit of her body, and the means by which what the mathematicians would call a ‘one-one relationship’ is to be expunged. But it is of some interest to note the object and intention of community of wives (and of husbands) in confirmation of what has already been said. Again the motive may be said to be twofold, blending together. In the first place, there is the (quite mistaken) idea that there will be greater unity if each regards the whole of the next generation as his children, and shares this fatherly feeling with all those of his own. Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity; and what greater unity is possible than that prevailing among men of whom it can be said that ‘every one whom they meet will be regarded by them either as a brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or daughter, or as the child or parent of those who are thus connected with him?’¹ This is on the point of becoming complicated, but the meaning is clear. There is much justice in the observation of Aristotle that, in a world where every one has a thousand sons, shared with a correspondingly large number of fathers, ‘the result will be that all parents will be equally neglectful of all the children.’² Proudhon, thinking in terms of universal brotherhood, made the same point more epigrammatically. And mingled with this attainment of unity—or perhaps but another phase of this—is the promotion of greater efficiency: ‘Both the community of property and the community of families, as I am saying, tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the city in pieces by differing about “mine” and “not mine.”’ The very poverty of their communism will make them efficient: ‘As they have nothing but their persons which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or relations are the occasion.’ The guardians will be efficient as guardians, just because they will have the carefree existence of those who have no cares, who have rid themselves of the meannesses of life: ‘all the pains and pangs which men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries for their household... the many evils of so many kinds which people suffer in this way are mean enough and obvious enough, and,’ says the Greek philosopher, ‘not worth speaking of.’ ¹

Enough has perhaps been said to indicate the nature of the communism of The Republic and to show how unfitted it is to respond to many of the appeals directed to it by subsequent ages. In summary, it is a communism of monastic asceticism and renunciation, a communism of withdrawal from the world and the cares of the world. Despite the efforts of the ingenious, it is further a communism confined to a small part of the community. Again Aristotle's comment is amply justified: ‘The necessary consequence is that there will be two States in one and those States mutually hostile.’ ² But indeed this understates the difficulty. The communism established in The Republic is a communism of dependence: ‘their pay was to be their food, which they were to receive from the other citizens, and they were to have no private expenses.’ ³ An age which has been, and is being increasingly, taught the importance of economic power will have little difficulty in deciding which of the two mutually hostile States, in Aristotle's language, will enter the contest with most advantages.

For our present purpose, it may be sufficient to glance at The Laws, for, significant as this Dialogue may be in throwing light on Plato's views on many political questions, it may be doubted whether it adds anything of substance, so far as general principles are concerned. The Laws, as is well known, was written in Plato's old age, and it has been assumed to betray to a certain extent the disillusionment that frequently comes with the years. For, odd as it may appear, there is a tradition that Plato had believed that the vision of The Republic was realisable, and that he had sought, ineffectively, to bring it down to earth. In current jargon, while The Republic is revolutionary, The Laws is reformist. Acknowledging that the ideal State of The Republic was something beyond the reach of frail men, he has now descended to outline the constitution of what is admittedly the second-best State. We are back again in the chill atmosphere of unrelieved monogamy. The constitution and the mode of life which, in some respects, are outlined in astonishing detail, are primarily directed towards preventing the emergence of unhealthy inequality, by limiting the ratio of the possessions of the richest to those of the poorest. What, however, is of interest—and perhaps this alone concerns us—is that the old faith still burns bright, although the architect has been constrained to compromise with the second-best. In a passage, somewhat tinged with the pathos of vanished dreams, Plato says:

The first and highest form of the State and of the government and of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that ‘Friends have all things in common.’ Whether there is anywhere now, or will ever be, this communion of women and children and property, in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost—whether all this is possible or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a State which will be truer or better or more exalted in virtue.¹

To complete the picture of Plato's communism, if only by way of contrast, Aristotle should be allowed to testify on the subject. His views on the community of wives and property, expressed at some length, may be found in the second book of The Politics. Aristotle, as is his manner, speaks with the horse-sense which has distinguished men of horse-sense throughout all the ages; in consequence, perhaps, his views may tend to be somewhat familiar, not to say hackneyed and trite, representing, as they do, what plain blunt men have always said. His fundamental criticism is perhaps political rather than economic. It is that Plato misconceives the kind of unity of which a State is capable. A State consists of a number of individuals who are necessarily different in kind. The State possesses an essential plurality; if it becomes a unit in the sense envisaged by Plato, it will cease to be a State at all.²

On the question which more immediately concerns us, that of community of property, Aristotle in one place roundly says that ‘Life appears wholly impossible on such principles.’ Here there is perhaps somewhat too much of the unreasoning instinct of the man of common sense. The arguments on which Aristotle bases this conclusion rest, broadly, on an appeal to common experience. ‘The more numerous the joint owners of anything, the less it is cared for.’ On the principle that what is everybody's business is nobody's business, men neglect their common possessions, relying on ‘the idea that someone else is looking after it.’ Nor, as he argues, is there any virtue in the argument that common ownership eliminates contention. On the contrary, nothing is so difficult as for people to live together and enjoy any worldly goods in common: witness what happens when people travel together and keep a common purse. It is precisely when people try to share that they start to quarrel. Further, Aristotle opens a casement on an unending vista of age-long disputes on the question of stimulus, in conflict with the allurements of sloth: those who think that they consume less and work more (and that, though Aristotle does not say so, is the bulk of humanity) will complain of those who enjoy more and work less. Aristotle, it will be observed, tries to take men as he finds them.¹

Turning from criticism of communism to what is at least a modified defence of property, Aristotle suggests (and it is a profound observation, capable of many applications) that the evil complained of may spring not from the want of community of property, but from defects of human nature. His argument, in general terms, is that property corresponds to something in human nature: ‘there is an unspeakable advantage in the sense of private property.’ And again, ‘the love each individual bears to himself is not purposeless.’ While defending property, because it satisfied a ‘natural’ instinct—if we may use a much abused eighteenth-century word—Aristotle is not, however, an obfuscated defender of things as they are. He prefers the existing system, but it should be ‘embellished by the moral tone of those who live under it, and by a code of wise laws.’ In a rather vague way, he suggests that private ownership should be combined with common use, at least among friends, and cites approvingly the practice in Lacedaemon where, without overmuch ceremony, citizens made use of each other's slaves and horses. As a matter of law, tenure of property should be private, but in practice it should be common; and the task of the legislator should be to produce in the citizen a disposition to adopt this course. It has been a familiar solution from time to time in the world's history: in effect, it accepts private property, but seeks to correct its possible abuses by developing a sense of public responsibility, at times indeed of trusteeship, in the owners of property.²

From Aristotle, supplying the cold douche of individualist criticism, it is time to turn to the reverse side, the ideas of Plato as seen in burlesque parody. For this we are indebted to Aristophanes, who, in the Ecclesiazusae has given us a most excellent skit on women's rights and communistic theories. The Ecclesiazusae is, as a matter of mere chronology, slightly older than The Republic, but conscientious students have elaborated so many similarities in phraseology, so many passages in the Ecclesiazusae which acquire their full meaning only in the light of something in Plato, that it is difficult to believe that the two works are not connected. Mr. Bickley Rogers, than whom it is impossible to appeal to a higher authority, had no doubt on the point. In modern phraseology, Aristophanes had doubtless in some way a pre-view of The Republic.

In the Ecclesiazusae, Praxagora, the heroine, wife of Blepyros, who is very much a music-hall figure of a husband, engineers a coup d'état which places the control of the State in the hands of the women. The motive of the revolution is that men are wayward and changeable, whereas women are conservative, doing everything as of old, not perpetually in a hurry and trying new plans. Yet despite this, Praxagora's first step is to enact a universal state of communism in possessions, in which there will be no marriage, but where all women and men will be common and free.

In a burlesque one does not look for honest criticism: indeed a parody is almost necessarily a libel and a misrepresentation. The communism of Praxagora is therefore in its essence very different from the communism of Plato. Plato's communism is founded on asceticism run mad; even the curious communism of wives rests on a crucifixion of the flesh. Praxagora's communism is a communism of enjoyment, which expresses itself in the promise of magnificent banquets and in the unseemly brawling of rival hags over the abduction of a desirable young man. Yet, waiving the Aristophanic skulduddery, it is curious that the communism of Praxagora is much more akin to the spirit of modern communism. If one may take seriously what was not meant to be taken seriously, her revolution was designed as a protest against the monstrous inequalities of life, the crying shame of the poverty of the poor, placed cheek-by-jowl with the offensive luxury of the rich. Praxagora thus announces her programme to her downtrodden husband:

The rule which I dare to enact and declare,
Is that all shall be equal and equally share
All wealth and enjoyments, nor longer endure
That one should be rich, and another be poor,
That one should have acres, far-stretching and wide,
And another not even enough to provide
Himself with a grave: that this at his call
Should have hundreds of servants, and that none at all.
All this I intend to correct and amend:
Now all of all blessings shall freely partake,
One life and one system for all men I make.¹

The further conversation between Praxagora and her husband runs on familiar, yet diverting, lines. All property is to be brought to the stores; there will be one fund out of which ‘We (the women) will feed and maintain you.’ But suppose, says Blepyros, on this question of surrender of goods:

  Suppose
He choose to retain it, and nobody knows; Rank perjury doubtless; but what if it be? 'Twas by that he acquired it at first.

P.           I agree.
But now 'twill be useless; he'll need it no more.

B.  How mean you?

P.       All pressure from want will be o'er.
Now each will have all that a man can desire, Cakes, barley-loaves, chestnuts, abundant attire, Wine, garlands and fish: then why should he wish The wealth he has gotten by fraud to retain?

‘But who will attend to the work of the farm?’ is another question asked by the anxious Blepyros. The answer is that

All labour and toil to the slaves you will leave;
Your business 'twill be, when the shadows of eve
Ten feet on the face of the dial are cast,
To scurry away to your evening repast.

There will be no more law-suits, no more theft—for why should any one steal what is partly his own? Blepyros imagines that he has cornered his wife when he asks how, in the new world, it will be possible to fine anyone who has committed a common assault, ‘when elated with wine’; but Praxagora is ready with her answer, which is not so different from that offered for our acceptance in these latter days:

     Why, his victuals and drink
Will be stopped by command for a while; and I guess That he will not again in a hurry transgress, When he pays with his stomach.

It is all vastly entertaining, and there can be little doubt that the house rocked with laughter; yet it is not wholly without its elements of pathos, in that a play well over two thousand years old should be in places so horribly topical. The rest of the play is concerned with the scheme of communism in operation. We see the prudent citizen waiting to see what the others will do in the matter of giving up property, hatching

     some crafty shrewd device
To keep my goods, and yet secure a part In all these public banquets like the rest.

We have the very irksome consequences of State interference in the amatory affairs of the population; and at the end the Chorus urges all and sundry to the munificent public banquet, but (believing in the virtue of private enterprise) adds a wise hint to take a plate and an omelet with them if, notwithstanding the overwhelming menu, they wish to be sure of something to eat.

     Those who seek in the inquisitive Greek spirit for foreshadowings of every trend of modern thought have little difficulty in finding prototypes of that other subversive tendency which runs through extreme individualism to something approaching anarchism. A liberal in all ages is one who upholds the rights of the individual against the claims of the State and of authority; and an anarchist is merely a liberal who has gone off the deep end, losing all sense of proportion. The various types of communism so far considered, both practical and theoretical, have all been what we should now call national. Even Plato's Republic was, as has been noticed, organised in its most essential features because, things being what they are, it would inevitably go to war with other States and other States would inevitably go to war with it. Anarchism which denies the authority of the State within its frontiers, necessarily denies the authority of all States, and is thus impelled to a vague internationalism, or the far-off dream of a somewhat nebulous world-state. The tendency towards extreme individualism, anarchism and cosmopolitanism may be found in Zeno and the Stoic school generally.

But not there alone. There is a long line of individualism in Greece, and Pericles is its greatest ornament. Indeed Socrates and Plato exist very largely to protest against the liberalism of Pericles, run to degenerate forms. The Cynics, who have points of contact with the Stoics, were also individualists, at times repulsive individualists, with whom the State counted for little. Moreover, the Greeks did not escape that ubiquitous nostalgia after a primitive state of nature which, Hobbes notwithstanding, has usually been regarded as a blissful, though more populated, Garden of Eden. It is almost impossible to yearn after a vanished state of nature without resenting the shackles which now cause us to stumble. Consequently, the devotees of a state of nature tend to hunger after a freedom, ample and unrestrained.

The professed teaching of Zeno was not indeed marked by that ‘churlishness’ and that anti-social tendency which traditionally are associated with the Cynics. It is possible, with care, to select extracts which would present the founder of Stoicism as apparently highly conscious of a man's duties to his fellows. The ‘wise man,’ that ideal figure of the Stoics, ‘will take part in politics, if nothing hinders him’: he will not live in solitude, ‘for he is naturally made for society and action.’ Thus Diogenes Laertius, reporting on the school¹; though it may be suggested that the somewhat conditional statement of a duty to participate in politics rather implies a fear that something in fact may very well hinder the wise man from so behaving. And it need hardly be said that the whole tendency of Stoic doctrine was in the direction of a self-sufficient aloofness. The end, according to Zeno, is ‘life in agreement with Nature’; and the natural life, moreover, is the life according to reason.¹ But throughout the ages, those who have sought to live according to reason have naturally lived according to their own reason; and those who have sought to live in agreement with Nature have been impelled to act on their own interpretation of what is natural. The compulsion of circumstances fades away, and each becomes a law to himself, listening to the voice of his own reason. In Zeno's Republic, of which Diogenes Laertius has preserved for us some of the high-lights, we are in a world where there is no marriage, no temples, no law courts, no places of education, no currency, no compulsion.² This removal of landmarks, placing faith in the guidance of reason, is pure Godwin; and though apparently reached by a different path, it is almost the whole of Godwin.

The injunction to take part in politics, ‘if nothing hinders,’ becomes indeed rather nugatory, if it is realised that something always does hinder. This hindering something is the nature of States as we know them. One Stoic teacher expressly held (and probably all others would have agreed) that a statesman must either displease the gods or displease the people. Along various lines, then, the Stoic is led to reject the State, and the sum total of States known to men. Here we reach the true significance of the Stoics for our purpose, the point on which they introduced something peculiarly their own in the bubbling cauldron of Greek political speculation. Turning away from the pettinesses and the cares in which the State was enmeshed, they claimed to be citizens of the world. For if reason is the distinguishing mark of man, and if all men are endowed with reason, then all men are, or should be, members of one community which has reason for its common law. Thus we have the vision of a world State—nebulous, it may be, with not a little anarchism at its roots—but representing a significant progress beyond the stage when the world was thought of in terms of Greeks and a vast but inferior horde of barbarians outside. In particular, the contrast with Plato is sufficiently marked; for Plato never quite got above the idea that the foreigner represented a dangerous and insidious element which should be kept remote in order to avoid corruption and contamination. In Zeno, then, we have the foreshadowings of anarchism and cosmopolitanism.

     One other phase of socialist literature may, without undue straining, be said to have its precursors in Greek literature. Where precisely the literature of Utopia fades into the literature of Baron Munchausen would be an interesting question for discussion elsewhere. As it loses its didactic purpose, as it ceases in intention to contrast the actual and the ideal, a Utopia tends to transform itself into a Wundermärchen, a mere fairy tale. Probably, viewed impartially, the Greek stories of far-off happy countries are nearer the fairy-tale end of this ladder. Most of them are not so much known, as known about by fragments and references in other writers; but this, of course, does not prevent these rather shadowy Utopias from making a brave show in German Encyclopædias of Classical Knowledge. Two which are more available will be found embedded in that rich mass of mixed feeding which constitutes the works of Diodorus Siculus. There is, firstly, in the second book,¹ the strange tale of Iambulus, who in some islands conveniently remote discovered a remarkable race, four cubits high, living to the age of 150 years. Having reached this assigned limit, they put an end to their own existence by lying down on a plant endowed with the peculiar quality that whoever lies down upon it imperceptibly and gently falls asleep and dies. These happy islanders live in complete communism, knowing nothing of marriage, but living on that high plane which mankind occupied ere one to one was cursedly confined. Mothers who are suckling their babies hand them round periodically, until they have quite muddled themselves as to which is which. It seems a less satisfactory and less efficient way than that devised by Plato. As a consequence of this confusion of children, ‘since there is no rivalry among them, they never experience civil disorders and they never cease placing the highest value upon internal harmony.’ It is the familiar story of simple men whose peace is rooted in their simplicity; though it must be added that Nature (after the manner of Utopias) is kind to them and supplies their needs liberally and ungrudgingly. Presumably of no political or social significance, but interesting in illustration of what may be encountered on the other side of the boundary between Utopia and the Wundermärchen is one peculiarity of these excellent people. Nature gave them a tongue cleft for some distance, and by artifice they have divided it further back to the base. They are therefore double-tongued, though in no invidious sense. This oddity, however, enables them to carry on two conversations at the same time: an attainment of dubious value to anyone but a ventriloquist. They have also certain remarkable beasts, of which the most interesting is a roundish animal, which has a mouth and an eye at each end of two diagonal yellow stripes intersecting at right angles. The four mouths unite in a common gullet. Underneath, it is amply supplied with feet enabling it to move in any direction. Mr. Facing-both-ways would have been filled with envy. In the fifth book of Diodorus² there is the less wonderful account of the island of Panchaea, a priest-ridden country, where communism is violated only to the extent of a house and garden: ‘all the products and the revenue are taken over by the priests, who portion out with justice to each man his share; and to the priests, alone is given twofold.’

Not much importance perhaps need be attached to such slight Greek fragments descriptive of communistic, happy and simple peoples. But they serve to show the wealth and variety of Greek speculation in these matters, and in some ways they are rather suggestive of ‘Utopia made easy,’ as disclosed later in parts of Fénelon's Télémaque.

CHAPTER II. THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS↩

(a) THE OLD TESTAMENT

IF it is from Greece and Rome that Western Europe in large measure derives its ideas with regard to literature, art, philosophy, politics and much more, it is from the Jews and from Christianity that we derive our religion and our morality. Nor is it necessary to differentiate between these two sources: Christianity is the completion of Judaism. Christ professedly came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it¹; and in a passage which subsequently played a great part in the controversies with which we are concerned—the incident of the young man who had great possessions—he specifically pointed back to the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of all good behaviour and indeed as the key to eternal life.² On one side, and that doubtless the most important, the roots of our thoughts on that most difficult problem of how men should live together and behave towards each other are deeply intertwined with the Mosaic Law.

It is therefore not surprising that gallant attempts should have been made to represent Moses in the guise of a primitive socialist law-giver, and to find in the Gospels the seeds of later socialist thought. On all these matters a layman may but speak as a layman, timorously and tentatively; and assuredly no one who could avoid it would willingly allow himself to become entangled in the entangling entanglements of the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Yet even a layman may perhaps, with reasonable safety, note certain points. In the first place, the Mosaic Code, however it may be viewed, is clearly a monument apart in the history of the world's legislation. Waiving the details which may frequently appear to the modern eye to be concerned with trumpery details, the underlying spirit (which alone matters) is clear and obvious, and, having regard to what the Jews thought of themselves, is readily explicable. The Jews in a very strict sense regarded themselves as the children of one God. This relationship necessarily implied brotherhood; and to a large extent the purpose of the Mosaic Law was to maintain the Jewish people as one family. All should be linked together by a sense of common brotherhood.³ It was not, however, the brotherhood of children, living under the same roof and still eating out of the common pot; it was rather the brotherhood of grown men who have left the old home, each living his own life, yet remembering and acknowledging the claim each has on the other by reason of the past they have shared together. Even with this slight reservation, it may, however, be doubted whether such a prevailing sense of brotherhood could have existed, apart from the unifying conviction that they were a holy people unto the Lord, chosen to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth. Among other things, their profound consciousness of spiritual superiority tended to unite them, and make them as brothers.

Yet this ‘brotherhood,’ which it was the final purpose of the Mosaic Code to produce, in no way leads to anything suggestive of the desirability of communism, or of the reprehensibility of private possessions or of private enterprise. On the contrary, the sacredness of private property is an underlying assumption throughout. Probably the Ten Commandments have enjoyed in human history a somewhat unmerited pre-eminence; they represent in the main the negative side of well-doing which consists in avoiding evil-doing. Yet if we take such a commandment as the eighth (on the Anglo-Saxon enumeration), it is obvious (with all respect to Proudhon, who gave a pleasingly revised translation) that stealing necessarily implies the existence of property that may be stolen. ‘Respect the property of others’ is not merely the plain sense of the commandment: it is a precept which in a multitude of forms and in a multitude of applications is perpetually recurring in the books of the law. Still remaining within the confines of the Ten Commandments, it is significant that this respect for the property of others is carried so far, that the mere casting of covetous eyes on our neighbour's ass is ranked with the fundamental sins.

When we turn to the confused mass of detailed regulations, the outstanding feature is found in the manifold provision made for the prevention and relief of poverty, for the humane treatment of debtors, for the continuance to each of his property, and, where necessary, for the periodic restitution of property. In a very real sense each man was made his brother's keeper; on each rested the responsibility of seeing that his brother did not suffer want. It may be a trivial matter and of little immediate application to most of us, but it is worth while turning up the 22nd chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy and reading the first four verses, which impose on every one the obligation of taking in, caring for, housing and feeding his neighbour's errant ox, ass or sheep, should it happen in its wanderings to come his way. The spirit of this far transcends mere Scotland Yard regulations. The relief of the poor is put upon each as a duty: ‘Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.’¹ So also the law with regard to debtors and the taking of pledges was hedged round with restrictions and conditions designed to secure the humane treatment of those in distress: ‘No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man's life to pledge.’ ¹ That a worker's distress should not be made the occasion of separating him from his tools indicates the highest economic wisdom. Jesus, the son of Sirach, puts the same point, even more tersely: ‘He that taketh away his neighbour's living slayeth him.’² More odd is the stipulation that if a neighbour's raiment be pledged, it should be returned before sundown ³—lest the poor wretch should shiver in the night. Perhaps it is not wholly irrelevant to note that the Mosaic Law throughout also shows a most unusual concern for the humane treatment of animals.

In addition, there was what has come to be known comprehensively as ‘The Law of the Corner’—a provision which is surely unique in the world's legislation. It derives its title from the injunction: ‘When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field... thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger’; but it had different interpretations as applied to corn, vineyards and olive trees, and it regulated the disposal of the gleanings, the fallen grapes and something which is delightfully called ‘that-which-is-left-through-forgetfulness.’ It is a curious device to make provision for the poor by inciting all and sundry to be somewhat carefully careless in the ordinary affairs of life, the wastage (if it may be so called) being used as a nucleus for poor relief. ⁴

It remains merely to point to two institutions whose obvious intention was to prevent the poor from sinking, and to restore every one to his own. The first was the ‘release,’ a cancellation of debts at the end of every seventh year,⁵ to which, of course, there are classical analogies, though doubtless not, as here, conceived as part of a longterm plan. In addition there is the consecration of the fiftieth year as a year of Jubile, the distinctive feature of which, for our purpose, was that ‘in the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession.’¹ What was the relationship, if any, between the year of release and the year of Jubile, whether they were ever effectively enforced, whether (in view of the apparent redundancy of one or other of these provisions) they represent the aspirations of different periods of Jewish history are questions which are easily asked.

Enough has been said to indicate the extent of the ‘socialism’ sometimes attributed to the Mosaic dispensation. The Jewish State was, rather oddly, one in which provision for the poor was more or less the fundamental act of association: it was a State founded on a Poor Law. And the poor were to be succoured by a universal prevalence of benevolence, of ‘charity,’ in the good sense which that word bore before it suffered devaluation. In other respects, however, it is rather a world of rampant individualism, where regard for the property and rights of others is inculcated in a thousand ways.

Needless to say, Israel did not live up to its high professions. It is the recurring theme of most of, if not all, the prophets, who also, by the ingenuous, have been roped into the socialist fold. The prophets were indeed valorous champions of the poor—of whom there ought to have been none, had the Mosaic Law been observed. They were stern in their condemnation of the tyrannous iniquity of the rich in grinding the faces of the poor, and in invoking the judgment pf God on those that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no place. But again the prophets were indignant rather than constructive, or at least they were not constructive with regard to the management of the affairs of this world. With unequalled eloquence they denounced unrighteousness and wickedness, luxury and the abuse of wealth. They called men to repentance. The regeneration they sought was, however, a spiritual regeneration. Beyond this they did not go; nor would they have regarded it as within their province to do so. When, as in Isaiah, there is an idealised vision of the future, it has been suggested ² that it is more in line with the anarchist dream of a world where all men are good and do good without earthly or political constraint.

(b) THE ESSENES

The ancient Jewish world does, however, present one example of an apparently successful communistic way of life, extending over a considerable period of time. The Essenes have been described as the great enigma of Hebrew history and, doubtless because of the fascination of the enigmatic, a considerable literature has gathered round them. Seldom have scholars built so much on so little. The ordinary reader will find all he needs to know, and in a sense all there is to be known, in certain pages in Josephus and in Philo. Porphyry, who sometimes figures as a leading authority, is content to reproduce all that Josephus says, with that innocent and honest tendency to plagiarism which former and less sophisticated ages took as a matter of course.¹ Pliny likewise has a few words about the Essenes, as befits a man whose net nothing escapes.²

The Essenes, while unmistakably Jews and in the Jewish tradition, nevertheless represent a curious infusion of asceticism which, following a not uncommon sequence, tends towards communism. How the Essenes came to be, what influences went to their making—for that matter, how they ceased to be—are questions to which the experts can give the enquirer no assured answer. In fact, no one quite knows what the word ‘Essenes’ may mean: the interpretations offered are many and varied. Rather oddly, there is no mention of a founder. In the matter of their more peculiar characteristics, some speak of Pythagorean influences; some, groping further east, invoke Buddhist doctrine; one of their ritual observances embodies an obvious reminiscence of sun-worship. They regarded the soul as entangled in the prison-house of the body, and their aim was to obtain release from the bonds of the flesh. Holiness, if not dependent upon, was at least thought to be materially stimulated by under-nutrition.

The accounts given by Philo and Josephus, if combined, give a fairly complete picture of a communism which in certain respects has unique features. In numbers the Essenes were never anything but a feeble folk, some four thousand in all at any time, and they lived for the most part in the villages of the western shores of the Dead Sea. The most puzzling and unusual feature in their system of religious communism is, however, that they did not withdraw from the rest of the world. They continued to engage in ordinary secular occupations, working on the land or at their trade, like those around them. They had their houses scattered about among the other houses in the villages where they lived. Nor, although the Essenes were preponderatingly to be found in the area indicated, were they in any way restricted either in their place of habitation, or—generally speaking—in their occupation. Some Essenes lived in Jerusalem; some distinguished themselves as leaders in the war against Rome.

But, inside these rather vague frontiers, the Essenes professed to practise complete communism. On being admitted after a rigorous novitiate extending over three years, they surrendered all their possessions to the community. ‘In no other community,’ says Philo, ‘can we find the custom of sharing roof, life and board more firmly established in actual practice.’ Further, ‘all the wages which they earn in the day's work they do not keep as their private property, but throw them into the common stock and allow the benefit thus accruing to be shared by those who wish to use it.’ Consequently, and it is now Josephus who speaks, ‘their community of goods is truly admirable; you will not find one among them distinguished by greater opulence than another.’

Communism demands the elimination of the individual home, and this again demands the extinction of the individual wife. This may be achieved either by community of wives (as in many Utopias and in certain extreme and heretical sects), or it may be achieved by pretending that women do not exist. As was natural in an ascetic sect, the second course was that adopted by the Essenes, though with some hesitations. They ‘despised’ marriage; but they did not on principle condemn it or, apparently, forbid it. They merely desired to avoid what Mr. Thomas Taylor, in translating Porphyry, called the ‘lasciviousness of women.’ It is almost a Proudhonian intuition. Josephus somewhat unnecessarily adds that the Essenes were ‘persuaded that none of the sex keeps her plighted troth to one man.’ The community or sect (or whatever it may be called) had thus perforce to be perpetually recruited from outside. On the one hand they received the children of other people, and from a tender age moulded them after their own fashion; on the other hand (the phrase is Pliny's) they received those driven to them through vitae paenitentia, the weariness of life. Pliny's brief reference adds nothing to our knowledge; it is chiefly interesting because it is written (or so it may seem to some) in a strain slightly suggestive of satirical scepticism. He describes them as a gens sola et in toto orbe praeter ceteras mira—a unique tribe, remarkable beyond all others in the world; and he goes on to add that this ‘gens’ lives sine ulla femina... socia palmarum—with never a woman, and with palm trees for company. Thus through thousands of ages, a race, in which no one is born, lives on for ever. It is difficult to resist the impression that here at least Pliny did not believe all he was told.

The metaphysical and religious beliefs of the Essenes do not concern us here, important as they may be elsewhere. Assuming that the accounts given by Philo and Plutarch are fairly reliable in their main outlines—and the best authorities agree that they may be so accepted—the Essenes are of great significance in revealing something like a state of communism, enduring for a considerable period of time, with the added peculiarity that they intermingled curiously with the rest of the population. In themselves they were a special corps of the ultra-pious, more strict even than the strictest of the other Jews in their observance of the Sabbath. They were a moral élite, and they so regarded themselves; and it is fairly clear that in their make-up they had not a little of that spiritual pride and exclusiveness for which the Pharisees (probably unjustly) have become proverbial. In the stream of influences that go to make up the world's history, the Essenes may, without too much imagination, be assigned a somewhat focal place. It is probable that John the Baptist had affiliations, if not with the main body of the Essenes, then at any rate with some of the other less known and somewhat similar sects, which had Essenian characteristics.¹ Also, as we shall see presently, it is extremely probable that Luke's account of the communism in the primitive Church at Jerusalem, if not in fact true of Jerusalem, was a reasonably correct account of the communism of the Essenes; and it is abundantly clear that this passage, based on and infused with memories of the Essenes, was the inspiration of that line of thought in early Christianity which tended towards communism.

(c) THE NEW TESTAMENT

Thomas More represents his Utopians, who were naturally favourable to the community of goods, as eagerly embracing Christianity, ‘since they perceived that Christ and his followers lived by that rule.’ How far there is an element of socialism in the teaching of the Gospels and in the account of Christian beginnings in the Acts of the Apostles is a question that has given rise to prolonged controversy. At the one extreme are Sudre and Thonissen, devout men, writing at a time when socialism and communism were looked upon as the authentic mark of the Beast; and to them the spirit and the letter of the New Testament alike give no support to anything so tainted. At the other extreme (to take widely different examples) there are such writers as Cabet and Mr. Beer to whom primitive Christianity means nothing if it does not mean socialism. The question is probably very largely irrelevant in itself; in any case it is not quite so simple as either of these schools would maintain. It has been seen that the Mosaic Law, while prescribing alms and charity, contained nothing that was communistic or hostile to property. Nor is there in the Old Testament anything that is characteristically ascetic. Asceticism, as Adler suggests (probably rightly), filtered in from the East; and the results of the ascetic infusion may be seen in the Essenes. As the same writer acutely observes, asceticism may lead to one of two consequences. It may lead to the renunciation of wealth and comfort, and to the glorification of poverty as in itself a holy state, a sign of virtue. Along this line we have the begging friars and all those who hope to attain blessedness in another world by suffering hunger and self-castigation in this. But the impulse to asceticism may also be satisfied by stopping short at the renunciation of private property, each for himself. This line will lead to the formation of some sort of communistic body, composed of men who have severally renounced the world and who each individually possesses nothing; but the community to which they belong need be in no wise destitute.

In approaching the teaching of the New Testament in these matters, the first point to note is that, whatever may have happened later under various influences, there is no suggestion of asceticism in the earliest enunciation of Christianity. The Son of Man came eating and drinking: contrasting him with John the Baptist, who probably reflected Essene influences, his enemies even derided him as a man gluttonous and a winebibber. In the Gospels themselves it would be difficult to find any passages suggesting that life ought to be a vale of woe, and that we should go out of our way to make ourselves and others unhappy. It is probably equally true to say that so far as the words of Christ are concerned, comparing the different gospels where there is a suggestion of discrepancy, there is nothing anywhere to suggest any condemnation of private property or the structure of society which goes with private property. In large measure he represented the Mosaic Law—which professedly he came to fulfil—carried forward. He taught charity; he emphasised alms-giving as a way to divine favour; he condemned covetousness. Even the acknowledgment that riches may prove a stumbling-block on the way to the Kingdom of God is uttered as a warning rather than as a condemnation. The crucial passage on the subject is the account given of the young man who had great possessions—later the text of the discourse by Clement of Alexandria which probably decided the attitude of the Church on the matter. In view of the large place which this narrative occupies in later discussions of social problems, it may not be unprofitable to examine it with some minuteness.¹ Three points are of special significance. Firstly, in answer to the rich young man's question as to what he must do to inherit eternal life, Christ's original answer is a brief enumeration of the Ten Commandments. The enquirer is in fact referred back to the traditional Mosaic Law, which, as we have seen, involved respect for the property of others. ‘Do not steal: defraud not,’ as Mark puts it. Secondly, the further and stricter counsel is given only because the young man, protesting that he has kept the commandments from his youth up, insistently presses for something more. It is then that Christ counsels him to sell whatever he has and give to the poor; but if we follow St. Matthew, this instruction is prefaced by the significant words, ‘If thou wilt be perfect.’ In short there is here the familiar distinction between a precept binding on all, and a counsel of perfection imparted to some and valid in certain circumstances. The third point arises from the account given by St. Mark, in the comment of Christ after the young man had gone away ‘grieved,’ where there is what at first sight appears a curious repetition. ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God,’ are Christ's first words to his disciples; and when they were astonished, the difficulties of the rich are restated more guardedly with a slight verbal modification, which, however, profoundly affects the meaning of the phrase. The restatement takes this form: ‘how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God.’ This, it will be observed, no longer applies merely to the rich, but to all, rich or poor, who put their confidence in the things of this world.

The truth is, or so at least it would seem to some, that there is somehow an element of inappropriateness in microscopically examining the words of Christ in order to find therein an answer to a question in which he was not greatly interested. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness’: this, if one were compelled to choose one text for the purpose, probably best expresses the kernel of Christ's teaching. But it implies, above all in its context, that in the searching light of this exhortation, all other problems fade into insignificance. The true position has been admirably expressed by a writer quoted by Thonissen:

L'Évangile ne contient pas un mot qu'on puisse tourner contre la propriété; il ne s'élève pas une fois contre les prétendues injustices de l'ordre social; il ne représente pas les riches comme des oppresseurs ni les pauvres comme des opprimés; il se place au-dessus de ces distinctions sans les attaquer, en conseillant aux uns la résignation, aux autres le sacrifice, à tous l'abnégation d'eux-mêmes, la charité et l'amour.¹

Il se place au-dessus de ces distinctions sans les attaquer: it is probably as just an estimate as it is possible to arrive at in the matter. Even though the lecture containing this phrase dates from 1848, and derives from a forgotten Jew who precariously survives in a quotation in the pages of Thonissen, the words are worthy of perpetuation.

At the same time it is idle to deny, and it is only fair to recognise, that there were mingled with the origins of Christianity certain communistic aspirations, deriving probably from the Essenes, later colouring the day-dreams of the Christian Fathers in their unguarded moments, and erupting periodically as ‘heresies’ in the first centuries. Among the gospel-writers it is Luke who represents this ‘left wing.’ It is extraordinarily interesting, as well as extremely instructive as an example of the art of editing, to compare the version of the Sermon on the Mount given by Matthew with the much more summarised version in the gospel of St. Luke.²

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ says St. Matthew; ‘blessed be ye poor,’ says St. Luke in a conciser phrase.¹ ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ says St. Matthew; ‘blessed are ye that hunger now,’ says St. Luke. The abbreviating blue pencil converts a spiritual hunger into the pangs of bodily need. If one cared to be fanciful, one might note that Luke slips in (what is not in Matthew) a blessing ‘when men shall separate you from their company’—as though Marx and the class war were already pestering to be born. But without being fanciful, it is significant that in Luke the so-called beatitudes are followed by curses and objurgations—against the rich for being rich: ‘Woe unto you that are rich!... Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.’ This, one feels somehow, is Luke, rather than Christ. It is, on the economic plane and in terms of the physical belly, a denunciation of the full because they are full; a blessing on the empty because they are empty.²

It is also to Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, that we owe that idyllic account of the early days of the Church at Jerusalem, to which appeal has so frequently been made in the subsequent unending discussion regarding riches and poverty. The passage in the fourth chapter of the Acts is among the most familiar in Scripture:

Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.³

It is a fairly typical picture of the golden age; yet to draw from this highly idealised and conventional description of a communism in use the inference that a system of communism prevailed among the early Christians is shown to be erroneous by Luke's own narrative in the passage immediately following. For in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, which is a pendent to this account of primitive communism, it is clear beyond all question that Ananias, having a house, was free to sell or not to sell as he chose; having sold it, he was free to bring the money or retain it for his own use. He was not free to pretend that what he brought was the whole price obtained for the house, when in fact it was not. It is fairly clear that what prevailed at Jerusalem was not in any sense a system of communism: it was rather—as was perhaps natural among the members of a new and enthusiastic movement—a condition of unrestrained and voluntary sharing, in which all, in the spirit of the Mosaic dispensation, willingly and gladly helped their neighbours in need. That there was in fact no communism among the early Christian Churches is amply proved by the epistles of St. Paul. Mixed up with much theological doctrine and other things, St. Paul's letters also have, in innumerable passages, the character of begging letters, of appeals for charity. Doubtless they are written in a more impeccable English than most appeals for contributions, but appeals for contributions they nevertheless are—on behalf of distressed Churches. Moreover, it is assumed that what may be ultimately given will be given by individuals and will be, in modern jargon, a ‘free-will offering’: ‘Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.’¹

Probably the truth of the matter is that the account of the communistic way of life in the Church at Jerusalem was, for Luke, something of a Sorelian myth. His gospel reveals him as the leveller among the apostles; the passage in the fourth chapter of the Acts, after the manner of myths, served as a rallying cry to all the later egalitarian sects. The account he wrote was, of course, not contemporary with the events described. Looking back through a haze of years, Luke saw at Jerusalem, in the abounding liberality and generosity of the first Christians, something that seemed a reflection of the myth that had been his inspiration; and accordingly he described his ideal golden age, even though within a few lines he was compelled to deny it.

(d) THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

When we turn to the early Christian Fathers and to their attitude to the problems of wealth, private property and community of goods, it is necessary to trim our course somewhat gingerly round the fringe of an engulfing whirlpool. In a discussion in which the Fathers in their totality may be allotted only one section in a chapter, they cannot expect to be represented by more than a mere random sample. On the general question this much may, however, be said. For at least a hundred years, and perhaps much longer, it has been found an entertaining pastime to bring together explosive dicta from the Fathers, showing their kinship with left-wing revolutionaries. Nor is it a difficult, or even an unamusing task, apart from the fact that the Fathers were in many cases so unconscionably voluminous. Round about 1850, Thonissen obviously found much enjoyment in tearing to shreds a forgotten M. Pelletan, who had compiled such a revolutionary anthology from the Fathers. In our own day, a confiding and unquestioning reader of Mr. Beer would very easily, as indeed he is meant to do, carry away the impression that the term ‘Christian Father’ merely represents the extreme left of left-wing socialism. On the other hand, Dr. George O'Brien,¹ with much sobriety and conscientious scholarship, has shown that the early teachers in the Church were consistently opposed to what we should now call ‘communistic doctrine.’ If an alien and an intruder in these fields of scholarship may venture to utter a two-fold word of warning, it would be, firstly, that when any apparently communistic expression of opinion is cited from one of the Fathers, enquiry should be made as to the context, not merely with a view to verifying whether a few words may not have disappeared from the beginning or end of the quotation, but also to ascertain how the quotation is related to the general argument, assuming that there is one; and secondly, such an isolated quotation should be checked against what the Father in question may have said elsewhere on the same subject. This can usually be done without undue labour by looking up the Index under ‘Wealth,’ ‘Property,’ ‘Riches’ or ‘Possessions.’ If this course be adopted, the judgment of the dispassionate will almost certainly be with M. Thonissen and Dr. O'Brien, rather than with the forgotten Pelletan and Mr. Beer.

Dr. O'Brien very properly indicates certain considerations which ought to be borne in mind in any attempt to assess the true meaning of certain of the apparently more extreme utterances of the Fathers; for indubitably certain isolated expressions may appear to modern ears to bear a revolutionary significance, even if these may be belied by adjacent pronouncements. Three of the points which tend to a frequent misunderstanding of isolated passages may be indicated. There is firstly the altogether extraordinary importance attached to alms-giving in the Old and the New Testaments, and this is quite naturally carried forward to the Christian Fathers. In an age which is increasingly putting its hope of salvation in an indefinite extension of Social Insurance, it is perhaps difficult for us to realise just how fundamental a virtue alms-giving was assumed to be. That almsgiving was the pathway to salvation; that the rich man should open his hand liberally, and regard his wealth as a trust to be used for others; that the rich, in a picturesque phrase, were the dispensers of the treasure of the poor—these were all commonplace propositions in the early days of Christianity. But it is obvious that universal giving is not far removed from universal sharing; and it is accordingly not surprising that at times some of the Fathers, not having temperamentally the timorous caution of a civil servant skilled in balanced drafting, should say something that probably appears to mean more than was intended.

A second influence which at times led the Christian Fathers to express a non-communist thought in communist phraseology may be found in the peculiar horror with which the Scriptures regarded the discontented man. Covetousness, no less than murder or adultery, strikes at the framework of society. The greedy, avaricious man who seeks gain is a fool, with a wrong sense of values. He loves this present world, and thus, like Demas, he fails in the supreme test. That we should be contented with what we have is a pervading thought throughout the New Testament. It is one of the boasts of the somewhat boastful Paul: ‘I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.’ It is therefore only in the tradition of the prophets and the New Testament that the Fathers should denounce those who make the acquisition of gain the chief end of life; still more those who acquire gain by wrongful and tyrannical means. But again denunciation of the love of wealth may at times appear to imply denunciation of wealth itself; for the impassioned preacher it is a fine line of division that must be observed. It is significant and illustrative to note with what comparative unanimity the Pauline dictum that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ has passed into popular currency in the abridged and quite non-Pauline form that it is money itself that constitutes this root.

The third and most serious cause of misunderstanding of certain of the sayings of the Fathers is more subtle, and indirectly comes from classical sources in the conception of natural law, and the distinction between natural law and positive law. Let us cast aside refinements which vary from the Stoics to the Physiocrats (and beyond). Broadly, natural law reflects the mind and intention of the Creator when he set this globe spinning like a fretful midge and peopled it with men made in his own image. And in this happy state, this Eden, had it but endured, all men would have been equal; there would have been no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’; there would have been communism. Under natural law, God gave all things to all men, to be enjoyed in common; and such would be the position, could we but get back to things as they were ‘when they left the hands of the Creator’—in a phrase beloved of Mably in the eighteenth century.

Much, however, has happened since then. We are no longer concerned with man in his innocence, but with fallen man whose heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And for fallen man something more than natural law is required; he needs, for his restraint, positive law, civil law, civil administration and institutions, all of which would have been unnecessary had he remained in a state of innocence. Thus, under positive law, much may be added to natural law—in a sense modifying it to meet the frailty of man. Property may have to be recognised, a coercive State created and much more. Moreover, what is ordained under positive law is not in itself evil, or worthy of condemnation. These things may indirectly spring from man's sin, but they are devised as a remedy against further sin.¹ It will be seen, therefore, in what sense the Fathers, without condemning property, could yet hold that property is occasioned by, and is the result of, man's evil-doing. When they appear to condemn property, it is frequently the result of an unduly elliptical method of expression. At somewhat greater length they might have said that the recognition of property is a necessary provision in positive law, and that positive law has been rendered necessary because of the hardness of man's heart, which, unfortunately, must be accepted as a permanent hypothesis of the sinful world in which we now live. The Fathers had periodically a nostalgic longing for the world as it might have been under ‘natural law’; and in such a mood they describe how happy we would be if we could share all things, or live according to Luke's picture (true or imagined) of the early Church at Jerusalem. But in general, it is but a dream dependent on a hypothetical and unrealisable ‘if,’ rather than a concrete proposal calling for ‘active consideration.’

(e) CERTAIN CHRISTIAN FATHERS

Readers who have accepted the foregoing section without demur may perhaps, without great loss, skip the present section. For it is essentially in the nature of an expanded footnote, not perhaps free from a certain amount of repetition. Having stated in general terms the position of the Christian Fathers, it may be as well to give somewhat more concrete form to what has been said, by reference to some of the more frequently quoted passages, where the Fathers are assumed to reveal a communistic tinge. A mere handful of Fathers must suffice; but among these, for reasons which will be apparent presently, Clement of Alexandria must be included. The others must of necessity be a somewhat random selection, cited somewhat summarily to confirm and exemplify the general conclusions of the last section. As, however, they are in substantial agreement, no apology is needed for curtailing the procession of Fathers, or (apart from Clement of Alexandria) reducing to a minimum the time each is allowed to testify.

Clement of Alexandria is here the chief witness, and indeed he occupies a place of peculiar importance in this long controversy. In the main his attitude is the traditional attitude of the early Church; he holds that riches are a snare and a danger; that we must be on our guard against the love of riches; that they are to be used rightly, and that ultimately riches are a gift of God to be devoted, with a sense of responsibility, to promoting the good of others. In a rather quaint metaphor, he says that ‘wealth seems to me to be like a serpent, which will twist round the hand and bite; unless one knows how to lay hold of it without danger by the point of the tail’; and he goes on to say of riches that one must, ‘despising them, use them skilfully, so as to crush the creature by the charm of the word.’ ¹ Moreover, in a phrase which, though sometimes it is taken to mean more than it does, merely emphasises the misery of the miser and the blessedness of unrestrained liberality, he argues that ‘it is not he who has and keeps, but he who gives away that is rich; and it is giving away, not possession, which renders a man happy.’² Again, in a rather metaphysical argument, which is essentially the same as that underlying Wycliffe's Dominion of Grace, he reasons—as Ruskin might have done—that ‘good things are the property only of good men; and Christians are good.... Accordingly, good things are possessed by Christians alone.’ ³ Stated in this form, there is involved an obvious logical fallacy; in any case, the point is not developed. It is doubtful, however, whether St. Clement is here saying more than that good men alone know how to make a good use of good things, or even know which things are good.⁴

The importance of St. Clement, however, rests on the fact that he wrote a short treatise wholly devoted to the central issue in the question with which we are here concerned. This sometimes bears the title The Rich Man's Salvation, which is certainly more concise than the literal translation, Who is the Rich Man that is being Saved? The editor and translator of the Rich Man's Salvation in the Loeb series, writing from an English University, opines that it is too long to have been delivered as a sermon on any single occasion: but what do they know of sermons, who only England know? If it were indeed a sermon, then, if one may adapt the title of a frequently donated prize-volume to the young of two generations ago, it certainly deserves to be included among ‘The Fifteen Decisive Sermons of the World.’ For in some respects it is not too much to say that St. Clement's sermon represents one of the decisive landmarks of the world's history.

For the great miracle of Christianity, however the inexplicable be explained, lies in its ascent to power, authority and influence. It originated among the Jews, a race of outcasts, whose pride it nevertheless was to keep themselves to themselves, as becomes a chosen people; its first sponsors were for the most part men of mean origin, craftsmen and fishermen; the gospel, as it was formulated, was a gospel for the poor and downtrodden, counting as naught the powers and principalities of this world. How a movement with such unpromising beginnings came to conquer the Roman world and become the official religion of Europe, wielding a power above kings and emperors, remains something of a riddle, even after the ecclesiastical historians have said their last word. Christianity might very well have remained the faith of an obscure and languishing sect among the poorer Jews—at the most, something like the Essenes, or the Therapeuts, or the Hemerobaptists. The first great obstacle to be overcome lay in its Jewish limitations: the gospel must be extended to the Gentiles. The record of this great controversy runs through certain of the Pauline epistles.

The situation confronting St. Clement was somewhat different. He was stationed in one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient world. In the second century, Christianity, increasing in influence, was making an ever stronger appeal to those who were by no means poor and downtrodden, who could not with any show of reason be called weary and heavy-laden. Clement was in touch with the wealthy and the prosperous: in modern phraseology, he had a west-end congregation. But there was no use blinking the fact that the writers of the gospels (and Luke in particular) had not written at all encouragingly regarding the rich man's prospects of salvation. Above all, there was that incident of the rich young man and the comments attached to it. ‘Who then can be saved?’ the apostles had asked, and it was a question that might well continue to haunt the rich men of Alexandria. Nor had the poorer Christians taken kindly to their richer brethren. Clement implies that they had been behaving with ‘insolent rudeness’ to the rich. His mission, conscious or unconscious, was to make Christianity comprehensive: it should be not merely the religion of the poor, but the religion of all. It is unnecessary to emphasise the importance, for the future of Christianity and of Europe, of Clement's pronouncement which made it clear beyond all doubt that Christianity knew no frontiers determined by station or rank in life.

St. Clement's sermon is so illuminating as a considered statement of the attitude of the early Church towards worldly wealth, that a few points in the argument may be noted. The professed purpose of the discourse is to free the rich from their ‘unfounded despair,’ and to prove to them that they must not regard themselves as irrevocably damned in advance. The text is, inevitably, the story of the rich young man—in this case as given in the Gospel of St. Mark (x. 17–31)—and the problem is to rob of its sting the injunction to ‘sell whatever thou hast.’ The answer of St. Clement is that the words must not be taken literally. ‘It is no great or enviable thing,’ he says, ‘to be simply without riches.’ Nor has the injunction in this sense anything new in it: groping into Greek history, he cites various instances where men have renounced their wealth for one purpose or another. He will not admit that those who ‘lie along the roads in abject poverty’ are, for this reason alone, assured of God's blessedness. The real essence of the injunction is that we should

banish from the soul its opinions about riches, its attachment to them, its excessive desire, its morbid excitement over them, its anxious cares, the thorns of our earthly existence which choke the seed of the true life.¹

The fact that it is not the ‘visible act’ of parting with goods that matters is again shown by the fact that renunciation of wealth may in fact bring a man no nearer to God. A man who has unburdened himself of his property may be more anxiously minded than before, more occupied with the desire and longing for wealth than when he had it. The command laid upon us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked could not be obeyed, ‘if each of us were already in want of all these things.’ Consequently, advancing from this ‘alms argument’ which cuts little ice to-day (for no one would now admit that the continuance of poverty is necessary in order that alms-giving may flourish), he restates what is, despite deviation, probably the central doctrine of the early Church in these matters:

Wealth too is an instrument of the same kind. You can use it rightly; it ministers to righteousness. But if one use it wrongly, it is found to be a minister of wrong. For its nature is to minister, not to rule.²

What matters is not wealth, but the use of wealth. We must extirpate, not possessions which in themselves are neutral, but the passions of the soul which prevent the good use of wealth. Possessions are outward things, and salvation does not depend on outward things. So in the end we come back to liberality on an unbounded scale, with wealth as a trust to be administered with a sense of responsibility. The final statement does indeed speak of a ‘common stock’; but it is clear that individual responsibility remains. Christ, he says, ‘declares that all possessions are by nature unrighteous, when a man possesses them for personal advantage, as being entirely his own, and does not bring them into the common stock for those in need.’ ³

Let us now call St. Ambrose. One of the most frequently quoted passages in this controversy is that in the seventh chapter of the first book on The Duties of the Clergy, where St. Ambrose is concerned with justice and goodwill. The words usually cited are these:

... Nature has poured forth all things for all men for common use. God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.¹

This occurs in a passage where St. Ambrose is stating and considering the views of certain ‘philosophers’; and it might be suggested that there is a faint pervading aroma of oratio obliqua about the whole argument: it is not clear where St. Ambrose's statement of the views of the philosophers ends, and where his own added comment begins. But, waiving this, the essential point to note in the foregoing extract is that it rests on the distinction between the state of nature and the conditions that supervened later. This is obvious from the fact that the conclusions which St. Ambrose draws from his argument are in no wise revolutionary. Far from suggesting that we should restore the situation as it was when ‘nature produced a common right to all,’ his recommendations are what we should now call tepidly and mildly reformist:

Thus, in accordance with the will of God and the union of nature, we ought to be of mutual help one to the other, and to vie with each other in doing duties, to lay all our advantages as it were before all, and (to use the words of Scripture) to bring help one to the other from a feeling of devotion or of duty, by giving money, or by doing something, at any rate in some way or other.²

This may be criticised on the ground that the guidance it gives to anxious souls (‘doing something, at any rate in some way or other’!) is somewhat nebulous: it certainly cannot be suggested that it is subversive of society.

It may be interesting to apply to St. Ambrose the other test indicated above. What does he say elsewhere, apart from the passages most frequently cited to demonstrate his communistic leanings? Riches, he says, are to be contemned: the love of riches is to be despised; they are unnecessary to salvation. But at the same time, ‘riches themselves are not blamable,’³ if one knows how to direct one's property. All of which is in danger of being trite and commonplace; but at least it reveals that the crucial test is not wealth and possessions, but the use made of wealth and possessions.⁴

Tertullian, in virtue of one passage, is frequently invoked in these questions. In the thirty-ninth chapter of his Apology, in describing for the instruction of unbelievers how the Christian community did in fact live, he remarks that ‘all things are common amongst us, except our wives.’ Waiving the reservation, it is, however, clear that Tertullian's words are not to be taken literally. He was a writer who greatly (and rightly) enjoyed his own rhetoric. Every sentence was fashioned and balanced with an eye to the maximum effect attainable. The whole Apology is an example of how a case should be presented to a jury. The significant point here, however, is that immediately preceding the phrase so frequently quoted, Tertullian gives a much more sober account of a way of life which is anything but communistic, but which again represents the prevalence of open-handed liberality among people who recognised private property:

Even the kind of treasury which we have is not filled up with sums paid under a sense of obligation, as if they were the price of religion; but each one places there a small contribution on a certain day of the month, or when he wishes, providing only he is both willing and able—for the offerings are not compulsory but voluntary.

Thus, he adds, ‘we never hesitate to communicate our substance to another.’¹

Lactantius is another of the early Christian writers frequently cited to prove the essentially communistic features of primitive Christianity—but surely, only by those who are content to accept the stray phrase offered to them, without looking behind and around. For Lactantius indeed condemns what he is summoned to bless. He admits that Plato ‘approached nearer to the truth’ (i.e. than some others who were more remote from the truth); but in the same sentence he adds that ‘no one fell into worse errors, especially because in his books respecting the State, he wished all things to be common to all.’ The utmost that Lactantius concedes is that ‘this is endurable concerning property, though it is unjust’; and the reason annexed is of the essence of the Manchester School: ‘For it ought not to be an injury to any one, if he possesses more than another through his own industry.’ But still he admits that ‘this is capable of being endured in some way’—an attitude of admirable tepidity, which, needless to say, changes to something else when he contemplates the Platonic community of wives.²

Perhaps more significant is a passage in the fifth chapter of the fifth book of the Divine Institutes, which is devoted to Justice. Here, Lactantius, with that odd confusion of sacred and profane history which is so charming and disarming a feature of some of the more scholarly of the early Christians, gives a glowing and approving account of the reign of Justice under Saturnus, before it was banished by Jupiter; and he quotes Vergil, how ‘it was not even allowed to mark out or divide the plain with a boundary: men sought all things in common’; and the reason was that

God had given the earth in common to all, that they might pass their life in common, not that mad and raging avarice might claim all things for itself, and that that which was produced for all might not be wanting to any.

But forthwith he explains that

this saying of the poet ought so to be taken, not as suggesting the idea, that individuals at that time had no private property, but it must be regarded as a poetical figure; that we may understand that men were so liberal, that they did not shut up the fruits of the earth produced for them, nor did they in solitude brood over the things stored up, but admitted the poor to share the fruits of their labour.¹

For Lactantius, this golden age is a dream gone for ever; and even the dream did not represent a world of communism, but a world of unbounded liberality, such as had been the ideal of the Mosaic Law, and of all the early Christian teachers without exception.

St. Basil is an interesting witness on these questions, if only because in certain of his homilies (especially 6 and 7) he is unrestrained in his denunciation of the foolish and self-indulgent rich. They keep horses with pedigrees, and ‘scarlet cloths make the horses as gay as bridegrooms.’ They maintain cooks, confectioners, butlers, huntsmen, sculptors, painters, devisers and creators of pleasures of every kind. They have herds of camels, troops of horses, droves of oxen, flocks of sheep, herds of swine. They paint their walls with flowers and let their fellow-creatures go bare; they have baths in town and baths in the country. And, needless to say, matters are worse when a man has a wealth-loving wife—a common misfortune: ‘With all their behests they do not leave their husbands breathing-time. No fortune is vast enough to satisfy a woman's wants—no, not if it were to flow like a river!’ In short, ‘when will the man have time to care for his soul, who has to serve a woman's fancies.’ Isaiah, towards the end of his third chapter, had obviously a glimpse of the truth.²

Such is the indictment: the rich man harnesses his horses with splendour, and despises his brother if he is ill-dressed; he lets his wheat rot, and will not feed the hungry. Yet the conclusion to be drawn is anything but communistic. ‘Come then,’ he says; ‘dispose of thy wealth in various directions. Be generous and liberal in thy expenditure on the poor.... Do not wait for a famine before thou openest thy barns.’ And when Basil is not delivering homilies with an effective popular appeal, but is merely writing soberly to a fellow-bishop, his position is made even more explicit:

The good man, however, neither turns his heart to wealth when he has it, nor seeks after it if he has it not. He treats what is given him not for his selfish enjoyment, but for wise administration.¹

It is the orthodox view of the early Church. It is not wealth, but the abuse of wealth that is sinful; the rich man should spend with a sense of his responsibilities.

Many passages might be cited from St. John Chrysostom, a particularly voluminous Father, but one must suffice in a chapter where there is barely room for samples of samples. The quotation selected is from the Second Homily to the People of Antioch, where the theme is that it is not riches that are forbidden, but pride; that sin lies not in external possessions, but in the covetous mind. Wealth is not forbidden if wisely used. St. John Chrysostom may himself explain the position in his own words:

For as I observed, wine is not a bad thing, but drunkenness is so. A covetous man is one thing, and a rich man is another thing. The covetous man is not rich; he is in want of many things, and while he needs many things, he can never be rich. The covetous man is a keeper, not a master of wealth; a slave, not a lord.²

The conclusion is that ‘the rich man is not one who is in possession of much, but one who gives much.’ Wealth is to be wisely used; it is to be a servant, not a master.

Many other Fathers might be summoned, but even if great names have been omitted, enough has been said to clarify the point at issue. And indeed further citation might prove but vain repetition—if indeed that stage has not already been reached. For there is, fundamentally, a singular uniformity in the official and orthodox views of the early Church, even if these views are not always expressed with punctilious prudence. ‘Communism’ receives no support; it is indeed at times explicitly condemned; but the spokesmen of the Church were very much alive to the dangers inherent in the possible abuse of wealth. Possessions in a sense were indifferent in themselves—neither good nor evil. The essential issue depended on how they were used and how they were regarded. The real evil lay not in wealth, but in being attached to wealth. It was not riches that damned a man; but pride and a covetous heart.

While this may be accepted as the ‘official’ attitude of the early Church, the view taken by responsible Fathers in their responsible utterances, there is perhaps something to be said on the other side. Unquestionably—and it merely shows unreasoning partisanship to deny it—there was a communistic tradition in early Christianity. How far this derived ultimately from the Essenes is largely a matter of speculation. What, however, is not a matter of speculation is the enormous influence and the abiding appeal of Luke's idealised account of the communism of the early Church at Jerusalem. Doubtless, the moment it is read carefully, the inner contradictions reveal that it is but an old man's confused dream of something he has persuaded himself ought to have happened. Yet for centuries one is almost tempted to say that these few verses in the Acts of the Apostles are quoted as frequently as any other passage in the New Testament. Obviously they served as a ‘myth,’ giving expression, if not to the aspirations of all men, at least to the aspirations of many men in a certain emotional condition. And beyond question the legend of the communism of the Church at Jerusalem served to give continuity to the communist tradition. The manifestations of this tradition are, however, to be found in what without disrespect may be called the underworld, in obscure communistic sects which appeared from time to time, earning the censure of the Church. Probably one such sect was that of the Nicolaitanes, which has the signal honour of a fleeting mention in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, with an expression of the undiluted hatred of the author. In the second century there was the sect founded by Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes, a precocious lad who died (it is said) at the age of 17 and who, rightly or wrongly, is credited with the authorship of a book which no adolescent should have written. The curious will find as much as they require regarding Carpocrates in the second chapter of the third book of the Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria. Carpocrates (or it may have been the precocious Epiphanes) seems to have been moved by a singularly simple logic. The justice of God, it was argued, consists in all things being common, and in all being equal. And just as God makes the sun to shine on all alike, so he made all women for the equal use and enjoyment of all men. Clement was unconvinced and did not approve. It is odd, or perhaps not so odd, to note thus early the apparently inevitable connection between complete communism and promiscuity. The reason is not to be found in the simple faith in God's bounty that appears to have inspired the precocious Epiphanes. There is a much more compelling reason clearly realised by Plato, Campanella, Fourier and many others. It is that women are incorrigible individualists and make men selfish—or if not selfish for themselves, selfish for their wives and children. For the true communist, the home, postulating the supreme devotion of one individual to another, is the nursery of all selfish and anti-social instincts. And even St. Paul dimly sensed this truth.¹

(f) ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

In the concluding section of a chapter dealing with various aspects of the Christian tradition in regard to the questions with which we are here interested, it may be convenient to add a note on the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who, in unusual measure, is a link between far distant centuries. But indeed the significance of St. Thomas lies not so much in the fact that he restates and completes the essential elements of the Christian tradition; it is rather that he combines the Christian and the Greek traditions, aiming at a synthesis of the two great streams of influence in human history. Here, in the nature of things, we are concerned only with a small fragment of the teaching of St. Thomas; and in some ways, as he would himself have thought, the least important. The influence of Christianity had profoundly modified the accepted views on many aspects of human life, so that not a few of the assumptions of Plato and Cicero were no longer axiomatic. Even if slowly, labour was ceasing to be a thing of contempt; even if haltingly, it was being recognised, as in the Jewish tradition, that all men were the children of one God, though doubtless God expressed his will by assigning them to different stations in life. Yet on one point, if for very different reasons, St. Thomas was at one with the leading representatives of Greek thought. Neither Plato nor Aristotle were really interested in economic questions, for the excellent reason that these questions did not really interest them. In their eyes, a taint of lowness and vulgarity adhered to buying and selling, and to ‘mankind in the ordinary business of life.’ Ethics mattered; and politics mattered. The economic problem, when it appeared in mangled fragments, was a subsidiary by-product of more worthy studies. Nor, could it have been presented to him, would St. Thomas have been greatly interested in the ‘economic problem’ as such; for the still more excellent reason that it did not matter. Only one thing mattered; and that was Salvation, Beatitudo, living the Christian life, walking humbly with God now, in order to attain eternal life hereafter. This was the one end; and all other things were weighed as means to the attainment of this end. If, as we have been told in these latter days, economics is concerned with the application of scarce means to alternative ends, St. Thomas's comment would have been simple and emphatic: There never are and there never can be alternative ends. ‘Seek ye first—and indeed seek ye exclusively—the Kingdom of God.’

It is doubtless dangerous to give way to unprovoked generalisations, above all on insufficient knowledge; yet it may be suggested that perhaps no age has been so completely penetrated with the spirit and the assumptions of Christianity as that of which St. Thomas was the chief ornament. It was an age of moderation and restraint, which not merely accepted the view, but endeavoured to act on the view, that this transient world is but the porch to life everlasting; that we are indeed but pilgrims, and that in our pilgrimage we should do the right thing by our fellow-wayfarers. The assumptions on which the Middle Ages acted were largely that each should labour unquestioningly at the task assigned to him by Providence; that no one should take advantage of his neighbour in anything, that greed and avarice are incompatible with a balanced view of the relationship between this world and the next. God, it was held, may give riches; but riches cannot give God. This may appear, and perhaps is, a somewhat rose-coloured view of the Middle Ages. Possibly the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were as prolific of crime (and other things) as earlier and later ages; but it is sometimes wise to judge a people by its motives.

In this place we may confine ourselves to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on one point, and one point exclusively. His views on justice in exchange, on the just price and on usury are doubtless not irrelevant, but they are slightly off our path. The central point for our purpose may be subsumed under the heading of the problem of Property—or putting it in larger and more correct terms: ‘What should be the attitude of a man seeking the Kingdom of God towards the things of this world? also what, in respect of these things, should be his attitude to his fellow-men?’ It is generally said, and on the whole rightly said, that St. Thomas represents in his doctrine, a synthesis of Aristotle and of Christian doctrine, and some have even suggested that he is largely concerned (as in his references to slavery) to carry forward as much as possible of Aristotle. It may be so: but to anyone who reapproaches St. Thomas immediately after a surfeit of the early Christian Fathers, the really arresting point is the close kinship between the Fathers and the Angelic Doctor. St. Thomas indeed is largely the completion, the perfection and the clarification of the early Christian tradition.

The question of the lawfulness of property St. Thomas establishes in two stages. In the first place, he proves that the possession of external goods corresponds to the nature of man. True, all things are under the power of God: the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. But so far as ‘use’ is concerned, man has a natural power over external things, since, guided by reason and will, he can use them as though they were fashioned expressly for him. The less perfect exists for the more perfect. Thus the Philosopher proves that ‘possessio rerum exteriorum est homini naturalis.’¹

This, it may be said, does not take us very far. It establishes a right in man, made in the image of God, to have ‘dominion,’ in the phraseology of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. The really knotty problem remains: may the individual justifiably have individual property? The answer given by St. Thomas is very obviously in line with Aristotle; not so obviously, but nevertheless perhaps more essentially so, it is in line with the Christian Fathers. He is aware of, and indeed quotes in the ‘Objections’ the apparently communistic utterances of St. Paul and St. Ambrose, which have had such a long run up to, and including, the works of Mr. Beer. But St. Thomas is undeterred. Two rights, he answers, must be distinguished in this matter. There is the power to acquire and administer (‘potestas procurandi et dispensandi’); there is the power to use. Now, so far as concerns acquisition and administration, St. Thomas largely follows Aristotle, arguing that private ownership is not merely permissible, but necessary to human life. The grounds advanced are familiar, not to say hackneyed. There is, firstly, the greater care bestowed on individual possessions, compared to that devoted to what belongs to everybody, and therefore nobody; each of us, laborem fugiens—such is the nature of the beast—leaves the heavy end of the stick to others. Secondly, things proceed in a more orderly manner, if each has his allotted task and what belongs thereto, as contrasted with the chaos of every one doing, and looking after, everything. And thirdly, a point emphasised by Aristotle in regard to the disputes which spring from the common purse, relations will be more harmonious if each is content with his own possessions. These arguments for private property are, it will be observed, based purely on grounds of expediency and on the imperfection of men. It is not so easy for unregenerate man, laborem fugiens, to live in excessive intimacy with his fellows. We need, in all senses, a room of our own. Thus private property is ‘necessarium ad humanam vitam,’—not on general principles, but in order to avoid the greater evils which would otherwise result.

While private ownership is thus consecrated on the side of administration, it is otherwise so far as concerns ‘use.’ On this side it is not permissible to regard possessions as purely private property for personal enjoyment. The Latin somehow sounds more peremptory than most translations: ‘Quantum ad hoc non debet homo habere res exteriores ut proprias, sed ut communes.’ In form this is substantially Aristotle's counter-proposal to Plato's communism, viz. that the advantages of both systems could be combined by adding to private possessions the mollifying influence of community in use. Yet it is only necessary to read the relevant passage in Aristotle in conjunction with that in St. Thomas Aquinas to realise that in practice the two are poles asunder. In Aristotle the proposal gives effect to the proverb, ‘Friends’ goods, common goods’; we are, as becomes gentlemen, not to be too particular when our friends make use of what is ours. He cites with approval, as we have already seen, the custom in Lacedaemon where the citizens use each others' slaves, and where the employment of dogs and horses is not too strictly accounted for, when it comes to a hunting expedition. This, with respect to Aristotle, is but to scratch the surface of a deep problem; for this merely represents the camaraderie among members of a governing caste, corresponding to the etiquette of an officers' mess, where one does not wait to be pressed to take another cigarette, where the bottle is for use and not for ostentation, and where the return of Penguins is hardly expected. It is otherwise with St. Thomas Aquinas. There is here no question of free-and-easy sharing with ‘friends’ and equals. ‘Common use’ implies that wealth is to be shared easily with those in need; and after the manner of St. Thomas he falls back on the counsel of St. Paul to the rich, that they be ‘ready to distribute, willing to communicate.’¹

We are back, it will be observed, at the great question of almsgiving; and it should be noted that in an age innocent of employers' contributions, and of schemes of social improvement and betterment financed by a progressive income tax, the principle of community in use, of making wealth serviceable to the community at large, could only be effected on the initiative of the possessor of wealth, through the voluntary exercise of alms-giving. In St. Thomas Aquinas, as in the great body of the Christian Fathers, private property is defended, but for its justification it is necessary that almsgiving prevail. Moreover, seeing that the things of this world exist for the use of mankind, there can be no valid right to property, unless the owner by alms-giving makes his wealth available for the purpose for which it was created. It is fairly commonly reported that one of the Christian Fathers said roundly that the rich man is a thief. What in fact he did say was that the rich man, if he does not give alms, is a thief. The point illustrates admirably a cardinal element in the views of the Christian Fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas alike. The possessor of wealth is the administrator merely; it may be that in his administration he is responsible solely to his own judgment; but he holds it only on condition that he uses it for the good of mankind, which involves the giving of alms. It is not merely, as the semi-sacred writer said, that alms maketh an atonement for sin. It is necessary to the proper use of wealth; ultimately, the giving of alms alone can justify the existence of property.

The doctrine that wealth exists for the use of those who need it, finds its crucial test in St. Thomas's consideration of the question whether, in extremest need, ‘theft’ is permissible. He has already explained that the recognition of property is not contrary to natural law, but is something which human reason has added to natural law. But clearly, what flows from human enactment cannot derogate from natural or divine law. Now it is the nature of divine providence that all lower things are designed to meet the necessities of men. No provision regarding private property can therefore be allowed to prevent these lower goods from relieving the necessities of men. In short, what one has in superfluity is, in natural law, due to be applied to the sustenance of the poor. In the extreme case, therefore (where, e.g. death threatens, or help cannot otherwise be got), it is permissible, openly or secretly, to take what is necessary from the possessions of others. Nor has such an action anything in common with theft or robbery.¹

This, above all if detached from its framework, may sound like the voice of an instigator of anarchy. But, indeed, St. Thomas is cautious and moderate; so far is he from being revolutionary, that there are some who would have us believe that his was the great influence that turned the Church against the socialists and the communists! That alms should be given out of superfluities to those in need is the governing principle which admits of no denial. But as in the case of other general principles, it is easier to enunciate it at large than to apply it to particular cases. It is the need of another that is to be pitted against my superfluities; and (in these days at least) there is a marked disinclination to admit that we possess in superfluity.

The attempt to give the general principle somewhat more concrete form gives interest to St. Thomas's discussion of the question how far one should give alms out of one's necessities. The answer is that, as every text-book knows, the word ‘necessaries’ may have two meanings. He who merely has that which is necessary, in the sense that he has only enough to keep himself alive—one in the enjoyment of a sort of Ricardian wage—is clearly exempt from the obligation of giving alms, just as for similar reasons he was supposed, in the classical Political Economy, to be able to elude the incidence of taxation. But, on the other hand, ‘necessaries’ may refer to that provision without which it will be impossible to live appropriately as one's station demands (‘secundum conditionem et statum propriae personae et aliarum personarum quarum cura ei incumbit’). Admittedly it is impossible to determine where this line falls. To give alms impinging on this necessary provision is a good work: but it is counsel, not precept (‘non cadit sub praecepto, sed sub consilio’). But what is not permissible is that anyone should give so much that with what is left he is unable to lead his life in accordance with his station and the obligations resting on him. And St. Thomas adds, in what is a cardinal thought in the Middle Ages: ‘Nullus enim inconvenienter vivere debet.’ ¹

The matter is thus in the end left to the individual conscience, and indeed perhaps it cannot be otherwise. Alms-giving, it should be repeated, derived its extraordinary importance in the early Christian and mediaeval periods, from the fact that it was the only method of making provision for social needs; and as it was in its nature voluntary, it was necessary to stimulate the flow of alms by keeping men's consciences tender. But it is obvious that St. Thomas's theory leaves loop-holes. He belonged to an age which believed that men were assigned by Providence to different stations in life and, as has been seen, that it was their first duty to live in accordance with the requirements of that station. He was therefore no egalitarian. He outlined a theory of division of labour by divine decree, according to which one is more drawn to one task than another. But it is of the essence of the doctrine of the ‘calling,’ that if men are assigned different tasks, then their needs must also be different. Different things are expected of different people, and each must live convenienter. If in addition one ropes in dependents (as St. Thomas does), it is obvious that the question whether one has more than is ‘necessary,’ is a very difficult one, to which very varying answers, according to temperament, may be given. Imagine, in modern phraseology, a middle-class father, ‘with a position to keep up’ (which is a free translation of convenienter vivere); give him six utterly unattractive and completely feckless daughters, and ask him to determine the point at which he has more than is necessary. If we agree to give him £3000, doubtless the wolf will not be exactly at the door; his answer will be that neither are his six prospective sons-in-law. Nor is it much good telling us to take no thought of to-morrow. Perhaps because of our lack of mediaeval faith, the future nowadays is precisely the one thing we find it impossible to forget. This may seem a trivial example with which to confront Thomist philosophy: concrete examples perhaps always are trivial. The criticism which St. Thomas can hardly wholly escape on this question is that he advances propositions which are somewhat radical in principle; whereas his suggestions as to their application tend to the consecration of things as they are, and to the arbitrament of the flexible and elastic conscience of the individual.

So far as the main issue is concerned, however, the significance of St. Thomas Aquinas for our purpose is clear. He represents a continuation of the tradition of the Christian Fathers. Property is defended; but in theory, property is reduced to a right of administration. Wealth is a trust held for the public good, and therefore there can be no arbitrary jus utendi et abutendi. The owner is responsible, if only to his own conscience, for the use he makes of his substance. Alms-giving out of superfluity (as in Godwin who, oddly, has much in common with St. Thomas) is not a meritorious act, being merely the discharge of an obvious debt. St. Thomas, however, is much more cloudy than Godwin as to what constitutes superfluity. Lastly, the existence of property is justified only on the assumption of adequate alms-giving. The central dogma that the owner of property is merely the administrator has certain obvious links with some characteristic features of the Feudal System, which also refused to recognise absolute property, but merely usufruct on certain conditions.

CHAPTER III. UTOPIA AND THE UTOPIAS↩

(a) MORE'S UTOPIA

SIR THOMAS MORE'S Utopia is one of the great books of all time. Reviving the tradition of Plato, it has itself established a tradition for subsequent generations. Yet, when all is said, the book remains and is likely to remain, an enigma, which each reader may interpret as he will. There is certainly no ambiguity about the views expressed in the course of this imaginative fairy-tale by the various participants in the dialogue, above all by that redoubtable traveller, Raphael Hythloday, on whom falls the burden of criticism of this very imperfect world and of the description of a better. But it is a nice matter of speculation to enquire how far what is unquestionably the dominant note of Utopia is a reflection of what was in the mind of More when he wrote the work. Clearly a man who writes a play or a dialogue cannot be assumed to hold all the views expressed by all his puppets. In the present case there are three dramatis personae, More himself, Peter Giles, town clerk of Antwerp, and the reporter regarding the blessed island of Utopia, who is also the critic of conditions in England and indeed in Europe generally. Everything of substance is in fact said by Raphael; the other two are, in the main, but a nodding audience. It is, however, perhaps of significance that among the few words More attributes to himself is an orthodox defence of property as against the praise of communism, and the final observation of all on the last page is a caveat that he cannot ‘perfectly agree’ to everything that has been related.¹ Is Utopia primarily a satire, not intended to be taken too seriously, or is it merely a literary exercise in which a not very convincing flight of fancy provides a series of pegs on which to hang comments on things at large? Or do the devastatingly critical comments of Raphael in fact reflect the mind of More who, confronted with the rather difficult task of living with his contemporaries, chose the path of prudence in giving currency to all this cargo of high explosives in the form of an imaginary dialogue, adding in effect that the editor was not responsible for any of the views expressed by his characters? For, on any interpretation, Utopia is a curious book to have come from Sir Thomas More. It was written in 1515–1516, when he was round about thirty-seven years of age. He was already rising in the service of the State, and was to become Lord Chancellor before tragedy overtook him. To put it no higher, it is unusual for civil servants or Ministers of the State, in the active practice of their profession, to demonstrate, even through the mouth of an imagined Raphael Hythloday, the iniquitous shortcomings of all known States and of most social institutions. One other point may have some bearing on this question. Utopia ought to have been one of the great English classics; in fact, it was written in Latin and printed abroad in 1516. An English translation did not appear until as late as 1551, when translations in German, Italian and French were already available. If More undeniably launched on the world a consignment of highly inflammable and revolutionary doctrine, in intention at least he did not address it to Everyman, but only to those who ‘had the Latin.’

The devising and the writing of Utopias is a curious weakness of mankind. Were it not that the writer of that Utopia, from which all others derive generically their name, was one of the noblest and most courageous of men, one might be tempted to look upon Utopias as the cowards' flight from reality. Doubtless it may be thought that a pleasant tale (assuming that it is pleasant) may reach a wider circle of readers, on the questionable analogy of the efficacy of parables in speaking to the simple: ‘Without a parable spake he not unto them.’ We are assured that truth embodied in a tale may enter in at lowly doors. Something may also be allowed to considerations of prudence, as perhaps in the case of More himself, living in the reign of Henry VIII; it may be possible, with greater safety, to present with a coating of fiction what would merely occasion trouble if offered neat. But the weakness of all Utopias is necessarily that they dodge the real difficulty of how to transform this present world into something better. The writers of Utopias take you to a distant island in a magic sea, or to another planet, or to the far future, whence, looking backward, these evil times may be dimly descried, or they even take you into the bowels of the earth. In any event, the reader is called to witness a smoothly working society, which in most cases has worked smoothly for an indefinite period. But the important point for us lies, in the practical administrative difficulties of the transition. A Utopia is a kind of Heaven. Easy enough doubtless to live there, once you are there; the whole difficulty is in getting there.

Another point with regard to Utopias is perhaps less surprising than it may appear at the first blush. Viewing them as a group, we have here writers, in many cases of the highest eminence, who set out to describe the ideal State, and to reveal its functioning through ideal institutions; and in all cases we are assured that never was there such a happy population. Yet in fact no Utopia has ever been described in which any sane man would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape. In spite of all the creature comforts, in spite of (and partly because of) the reduction in the hours of work, there is not one in which life would not be weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. And the reason is not far to seek; it is that in all Utopias life has reached a static stage. Nothing ever happens; no one ever disagrees with any one; the government, whatever its form may be, is always so wisely guided that there may be room for gratitude but never for criticism. ‘Life is Colour, and Warmth and Light, and a striving evermore for these.’ In all Utopias perfection has, by definition, been attained, and there is nothing left to Strive for.

Etwas fürchten und hoffen und sorgen
Muss der Mensch für den kommenden Morgen.

But there are no such stimulants to vitality in any known Utopia. The result is that life in any of them would be as devastatingly boring as life in the conventional heaven, where, since the revolt of the angels, nothing has happened to stir the blood or quicken the pulse. Somewhat naively, Raphael says of Utopia that ‘he that knows one of their towns knows them all.’ It is an understatement. He that knows one inhabitant of any Utopia knows all the inhabitants; and one is almost tempted to add that he that knows one Utopia knows all Utopias. Nothing happens, nothing can happen in any of them.¹

Yet though the actual description of life in the ideal state—the social gadgets—may appear trivial and puerile, or at best faintly amusing, the ideas inspiring the dream may be of intense interest. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the original Utopia itself. If Utopia survives as a living force, it is not because of its description of the garden city of Amaurot, so pleasantly situated on the river Anider, or because of its account of its rather too rational inhabitants, but because of its comments on the social evils of the times in which it was written, and of its astonishing relevance to much subsequent controversy.

Utopia falls into two ‘Books,’ the first of which is in the main concerned with the evil conditions prevailing in England round about 1516, though in fact its censures extend to all the princes and potentates of Western Europe. The second ‘Book’ is devoted, in contrast, to the happy island of Utopia which, through the wise dispensations of a former King Utopus, has escaped the evils from which we suffer. Sitting on a green bank in a garden of Antwerp, More and Peter Giles listen to the tales of Raphael Hythloday, the travelling philosopher. They would fain have a man of his knowledge and experience serve humanity by entering the service of a Prince; but Raphael realises that he would be of no use to the princes of this world, who are ‘generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms, right or wrong, than on governing well those they possess.’¹ Raphael, a Portuguese by birth, is extraordinarily well-informed regarding the conditions in England. It was an age of poverty, of homelessness, of robbery and theft due in part to the enclosures, whereby ‘your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men, and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.’² Consequently, honest men were reduced to drifting along the dusty highway in the great company of vagabonds who, by way of theft and robbery, ended on the hangman's gallows. The other great nursery of potential thieves was to be found in the unnecessary retainers of useless nobles, for these, when they lose their occupations, must also take to begging and stealing. As this provides one of the Leitmotifs of Utopia, let Raphael Hythloday himself speak:

There is a great number of noblemen among you, that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labour, on the labour of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick.... Besides this, they carry about with them a great number of idle fellows, who never learned any art by which they may gain their living; and these, as soon as either their lord dies, or they themselves fall sick, are turned out of doors.... Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do?³

This leads to a discussion of the effects of the undue severity of the law, as evidenced in the indiscriminate hanging of all thieves; indeed, at one place Raphael's argument is rather directed against all capital punishment, as being an infringement of divine law.⁴ Universal bad government, ambitious princes neglectful of their subjects, the abuses of the idle rich, vagabondage, robbery, indiscriminate hanging, neglect of the teaching of Christ—such, briefly, are the distinguishing marks of the world in general and of England in particular, over against which Raphael Hythloday sets the vision of Utopia, of which, after an interval devoted to dinner, his auditors being seated once more on the same green bank, he gives a detailed account in Book II.

Life in Utopia may perhaps be dealt with in this place without overmuch detail and with a large brush, except where the peculiarities of the inhabitants raise points of principle. It is of course a communistic island, where private property has ceased to exist. In morals they appear to have been enlightened followers of Bentham, believing in pleasure, ‘using only this caution, that a lesser pleasure might not stand in the way of a greater, and that no pleasure ought to be pursued that should draw a great deal of pain after it.’ ⁵ They seem to have been familiar with the felicific calculus. In matters of religion, ‘their priests are men of eminent piety, and therefore they are but few.’⁶ It is a country where there are few laws, and no lawyers—‘a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters, and to wrest the laws.’¹ Other engaging features are that ‘they love their ease,’ and, rather oddly, ‘they take great pleasure in fools.’ ²

Life in Utopia is subject to strict discipline: everything is made to a pattern. The cities are numbered; they are at appropriate distances from each other; the number of families in each city and the size of families are regulated. They have their magistrates—Syphogrants and Tranibors, if such details interest. They have a Prince and a Council; but as in all authoritarian states, it is not for the ordinary citizen to meddle unduly with state affairs; ‘It is death for anyone to meet and consult concerning the state, unless it be either in their ordinary council, or in the assembly of the whole body of the people.’³ That Utopia entails such a vigorous repression of talk in the tavern has perhaps been insufficiently observed. Every one masters two trades, agriculture and one other. All wear the same clothes, except in so far as is necessary to distinguish the sexes, and the married from the unmarried. Moreover, fashions never change. The day is strictly divided up between its various occupations, and the hour-glass is the tyrant of every man's life. All must work, except a few who are exempted because of their aptitude for study, and if these do not make the necessary progress, this exemption is withdrawn. This austerity of life follows them into their leisure, which must be devoted to ‘some proper exercise.’ The hours of work are, however, only six, three hours before and three hours after dinner. There is a significant passage, the forerunner of much in later literature, arguing that long hours result from the army of idlers which society carries, and that if all did their share, the burden of work could be spread thin, and a few hours' work would suffice. So far from six hours being too little, it is rather too much, for you have but to consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle:

First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind; and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle; then consider the great company of idle priests, and of those that are called religious men; add to these all rich men, chiefly those that have estates in land, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, together with their families, made up of idle persons that are kept more for show than use; add to these, all those strong and lusty beggars, that go about pretending some disease, in excuse for their begging; and upon the whole account you will find that the number of those by whose labours mankind is supplied, is much less than you perhaps imagined.⁴

In addition, very few of those who are employed are really engaged on useful work: ‘for we who measure all things by money, give rise to many trades that are both vain and superfluous, and serve only to support riot and luxury.’ It is an idea which later was dear to the heart of Fourier who, with infinite gusto, docketed and classified all the parasitic classes of mankind. And beyond this, there is a point of frequent recurrence in all Utopias, namely, that simplicity of life has its reward. There is less work to be done, when people eschew the luxurious life and shun changes of fashion. ‘And thus, since they are all employed in some useful labour, and since they content themselves with fewer things, it falls out that there is a great abundance of all things among them.’ ¹ In all this More (or Raphael Hythloday) sets a fashion; by a combination of universal labour, the simple life and more effective machinery, there is almost no limit to the shrinkage of the working hours which subsequent writers have suggested as possible.

Within Utopia life is organised on a communal basis, provisions being brought to the four markets in each town, and thence taken freely, firstly for the use of the hospitals, secondly for the public halls, and thirdly by whomsoever will. But in fact they all eat in the public halls, for without good cause no one would willingly eat at home, ‘since it is both ridiculous and foolish for any one to give themselves the trouble to make ready an ill dinner at home,’ ² when he might fare so much better eating in public. In an ominous phrase elsewhere, we are told that in Utopia ‘all men live in full view.’ In that happy island everything may be had in abundance except privacy. Dinner and supper are prefaced by a short ‘lecture of morality,’ which serves as a text for uplifting conversation³; in Utopia this may be an additional reason for shunning the cold domestic joint.

Trade is conducted on rather unusual principles, and with rather unusual results. Seeing that the island abounds in all things, and that little or nothing is needed from abroad, foreign trade is in essence a giving away of superfluities after a two years' supply has been assured. This export is in part a free gift; otherwise they get in return vast quantities of gold and silver. Here indeed is the mercantilist ideal of a country stuffed with bullion. This, however, is combined with a complete contempt for the precious metals and for all other baubles: ‘the folly of man has enhanced the value of gold and silver, because of their scarcity.’ ⁴ Accordingly, that the hearts of the Utopians may not be beguiled into worshipping the so-called precious metals, the gold is transformed into vessels of dishonour. It is out of gold that chamber-pots and close-stools are fashioned; so also fetters of gold are made for the slaves, to whom an ear-ring of gold may be attached as a special badge of infamy.

There is thus much gold in the country, even if it is to be found in unexpected places. It is used to hire mercenaries in the event of a war, and this need is also supplied by a certain traffic in the condemned criminals of other countries who are acquired as slaves. In this fantasy which is called Utopia, we here touch on two points which may offend modern susceptibilities. Firstly, the Utopians do not wage war wholly on approved principles. In this matter they cannot escape the charge of being somewhat imperialistic. If their population exceeds the optimum, they send out colonies to the neighbouring continent, ‘taking the inhabitants into their society, if they are willing to live with them.’ Otherwise they drive them out of the bounds which they have marked for themselves:

For they account it a very just cause of war, for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil, of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated; since every man has by the law of Nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.¹

This is the pure doctrine of Lebensraum, naked and unashamed, and it is interesting to see the Law of Nature invoked here, and invoked in a logical sense, as applying to the rights of all the inhabitants of the world to all the land of the world, and not merely, for example, to the right which the French people may be supposed to have to the land of France. Wars may of course arise otherwise through loyalty to their friends. When it comes to the waging of war, while the Utopians fight bravely in the last resort, they prefer to hire mercenaries from other nations and to gain victory by dexterity rather than by bloodshed. In practice this means that they stir up fifth columnist activity, and incite enemy subjects to kill their prince.

The second point that may offend is that we are still, apparently, in a world of slavery. Quite apart from the demands of war, the comforts of Utopia demand a slave population whose function it is to render the ‘uneasy services’; they also do the work of the slaughterhouse, an occupation which the fastidious Utopians find nauseating. In short, they do everything that is unpleasant, a consideration which ought in itself to make the work of the others more agreeable. Unlike the Utopians who get off with a six-hour day, the slaves ‘are kept at perpetual labour and are always chained.’² The slaves are a motley crowd; firstly, there are their own condemned criminals, and secondly, ‘which is more common,’ condemned criminals of other countries, whom merchants may pick up at bargain prices, or even get for nothing. These are supplemented by the voluntary poor of other countries, who presumably feel that slavery in Utopia is better than freedom elsewhere. These, as indeed they deserve, are better treated than the other classes of slaves. The rebellious slave is treated like a wild beast, and in the last resort is put to death. The implied advocacy of slavery as a punishment represents a protest against the harshness of excessive hanging; while, on economic grounds, a slave who can be made to do useful work is more of an asset to the community than a hanged criminal. But there is inevitably a flaw in any Utopia that needs slaves for its uneasy services.

Much of this, it may be said, represents but the trimmings of the fairy-tale; and any one who cares may say that this or that is impracticable, or absurd or undesirable. Let it be remembered that More was one of those unfortunate people whose humour is tinged with seriousness, and whose most earnest utterance is illumined by a jest playing in the back of the mind. They are an unhappy race who are sure to be misunderstood: far happier they who announce when they are jesting, or, better still, who refrain from such a dangerous pastime. More was a master of irony, and we are not meant to take literally all that he wrote; if we could but see his eyes as he wrote (or thought) some of the more startling passages, it might help those of us who are specially stupid to a better understanding of what he meant. But there is little irony in what are for us the essential passages, where Raphael Hythloday, with a sombre eloquence, advances a passionate demand for justice, and laments the iniquities, the fruits of selfishness, that spring from man's lust for wealth and power; and argues, in consequence, for the necessity of communism. In order to appreciate the perennial influence of More, it is sufficient to read Hythloday in his more exalted moments, and to note the strange modernity of his utterances. A few extracts—unfortunately too brief—will here be more effective than much exposition. The first relates to the evils of private property, and is a more restrained statement, occurring at the end of Book I, where, in contrast to the evil conditions in England, Hythloday first glances at Utopia:

Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own, that so long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even those are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely miserable.... When, I say, I balance all these things in my thoughts, I grow more favourable to Plato... for so wise a man could not but foresee that the setting all upon a level was the only way to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so long as there is property; for when every man draws to himself all that he can compass, by one title or another, it must needs follow, that how plentiful soever a nation may be, yet a few dividing the wealth of it among themselves, the rest fall into indigence.... From whence I am persuaded, that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed: for as long as that is maintained, the greatest and the far best part of mankind will be still oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties.¹

Towards the end of the second book, a note of passion enters Hythloday's restatement of the same point. Utopia, he says, is the only commonwealth that truly deserves that name; and he continues:

In all other places it is visible, that while people talk of a commonwealth, every man only seeks his own wealth; but there, where no man has any property, all men zealously pursue the good of the public: and indeed, it is no wonder to see men act so differently; for in other commonwealths, every man knows that unless he provides for himself, how flourishing soever the commonwealth may be, he must die of hunger: so that he sees the necessity of preferring his own concerns to the public; but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?¹

And on the disputed question of Justice, there is this eloquent denunciation:

I would gladly hear any man compare the justice that is among them with that of all other nations; among whom, may I perish, if I see anything that looks either like justice or equity: for what justice is there in this, that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or at best is employed in things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendour, upon what is so ill acquired; and a mean man, a carter, a smith or a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labours so necessary, that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood, and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs.²

Lastly there is this most revolutionary conclusion drawn from the condition of the world at large:

Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please.³

It is such passages as these (all of them, be it noted for what it is worth, spoken by Hythloday) that have made Utopia a living book for four hundred years. And if any one cares to cast a forward-looking glance to Marxian revolutionary socialism, he will be able to find in More (or in More's creature, Hythloday) quite a number of significant pointers. They may be worth enumerating. Quite apart from the main thesis of the evils springing from private property, Utopia lays emphasis on (i) the evils of the unproductive classes; (ii) our extravagance and wrongful use of wealth; (iii) the evils of money, and in particular the baneful influence of gold; (iv) the exploitation of the poor by the rich; and lastly and most surprisingly (v) the conception of the State as a class organisation, a ‘conspiracy of the rich.’ Somewhat apart from these—in some ways it is more in the anarchist tradition—is the plea for reduction of hours of work by cutting out unnecessary idlers and unnecessary luxuries.’ Assuredly, whatever may be thought of More, Raphael Hythloday had in him the makings of a very promising revolutionary Marxian socialist.

(b) CAMPANELLA: THE CITY OF THE SUN

Campanella's City of the Sun is not infrequently regarded as a kind of pendent to Utopia; it at least presents an ideal State which is of interest by reason of its similarities and its contrasts. Campanella (1568–1639) was a much tortured, much imprisoned Dominican monk, and The City of the Sun is a literary by-product of his imprisonment. It is in stretches a somewhat tedious, not to say boring, production, and more even than most Utopias it is pervaded by a chilling atmosphere of unreality. It is difficult to take seriously a chief ruler called Hoh, assisted by three subsidiary princes named Pon, Sin, and Mor—names admirably devised to fill in the odd corners of a crossword puzzle. Even when these are translated into Metaphysic, Power, Wisdom and Love, they remain somewhat inhuman. It is gratifying to know that in whatever Hoh inclines to, Pon, Sin and Mor are sure to agree. It is a characteristic of all totalitarian States. Nor do we readily acknowledge Magistrates who are called Chastity, Fortitude, Gratitude, Sobriety and so on, through all the known and reputed virtues. There is a somewhat too lengthy description of the city itself, and of its walls. These walls have inscribed on them all knowledge and all science, and thus are the young educated. It is not a wholly absurd idea, for without doubt much wall-space is running to waste in all our cities. A complete course of mathematics displayed on the Underground stations might not be without its effects, though perhaps awkward for those making the journey in the wrong direction.

Here also is a Commonwealth that has risen beyond private property, and has carried community of possessions to the debatable point of community of wives. It is possible to indicate with brevity the few points of significance in Campanella. In the first place, Campanella emphasises, with a clarity and a precision that have seldom been surpassed, the conflict between the individualistic and the social instincts, and he realises that these individualistic instincts are not mere selfishness, but are rooted in the family:

They say that all private property is acquired and improved for the reason that each one of us by himself has his own home and wife and children. From this self-love springs. For when we raise a son to riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become either ready to grasp at the property of the state, if in any case fear should be removed from the power which belongs to riches and rank; or avaricious, crafty and hypocritical, if any one is of slender purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken away self-love, there remains only love for the state.¹

This is a passage of extraordinary importance, and represents a line of thought which extends from Plato to Fourier and beyond. Stripped of unessentials, it means that it is the family that is the stumbling block to the creation of the communistic and the socialist State. Inside this larger community within which all men are to be equals and brothers in a sloppy sense, there is already this other group in which men are brothers in a very peculiar and definite sense: and as Plato and Campanella clearly saw, devotion to the family detracts from that complete devotion and surrender to the State and the public interest which is postulated as desirable.

With this there is also in Campanella an early emphasis on Eugenics, and a realisation that children are produced for and belong to the State, and are not primarily the concern of the parents: ‘Indeed, they laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breed of horses and dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings.’ ² More in detail, he argues thus:

Moreover, the race is managed for the good of the commonwealth and not of private individuals, and the magistrates must be obeyed. They deny what we hold—viz., that it is natural to man to recognize his offspring and to educate them, and to use his wife and house and children as his own. For they say that children are bred for the preservation of the species and not for individual pleasure, as St. Thomas also asserts.³

The State, therefore, in the person of the mysterious Mor (Love) is responsible for the education of children, since ‘individuals for the most part bring forth children wrongly and educate them wrongly.’⁴

The other point of significance in Campanella relates to his attitude to work. In More's Utopia, doubtless every one worked; but there were still slaves for the uneasy services. Campanella abolishes slavery, and emphasises the dignity of all work. In contrast with our foolish ideas of nobility, ‘they consider him the more noble and renowned who has dedicated himself to the study of the most arts and knows how to practise them wisely,’ and they laugh at us in that we consider our workmen ignoble.⁵ ‘All work they call discipline’; no one thinks it lowering to wait at table or to work in the kitchen. Thus even More's ‘uneasy services’ are honourable. The working hours which had been six a day in Utopia have contracted to four, and the rest of the time is spent in ‘learning joyously’ and in many other diversions. The only prohibition seems to be against games which are played while sitting; on this test, billiards would seem to be permissible, whereas chess is expressly forbidden. Such are the solarians, ‘rich because they want nothing, poor because they possess nothing; and consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.’¹

(c) FÉNELON

Among the other writers of early modern Utopias, perhaps a glance should be directed towards Fénelon, who on the strength of certain passages in Les Aventures de Télémaque has been claimed as a sympathiser with the communist way of life. Though much admired by the appropriate authorities, Télémaque is to our modern eyes a rather odd book. It is a pedagogic romance, written for the instruction of the young Duke of Burgundy; and Fénelon, aiming at two birds with one book, seeks to combine instruction in classical mythology with such moral and political lessons as an Archbishop might properly impart to a pupil of importance. An eminent authority in French literature has declared that to savour the charm of Télémaque it must be read ‘dans l'innocence de la première jeunesse’: presumably the Duke satisfied this condition. There are indeed two Utopias embedded in this morass, the first dealing with La Bétique, at the end of Book VII, the second being concerned with the town of Salente, which is referred to in Books X and XVII. Neither need delay us long.

The happy country of La Bétique is one of those cases in which Utopia is made easy by the special favour of heaven, manifested in an idyllic situation and a climate such as never was on land or sea. The sky is perpetually sweet and serene; the winters are mild, and the heat of the summer is tempered with refreshing zephyrs. Indeed, the whole year is a happy marriage of spring and autumn. Consequently, the soil yields a double harvest every year. The trees by the wayside are perpetually green; the mountains are almost clothed with cattle. It will be conceded that people living under these conditions start off with a certain initial advantage.

Despite all this wealth bursting and sprouting around them, the natives of La Bétique have clung to the simple life. Though they are supplied with gold and silver, these are devoted to the manufacture of ploughs—a more honourable use than in Utopia. The beatific climate enables them to do without houses, just as, apart from certain traditional conventions, it might enable them to dispense with clothes. As a matter of fact, it almost does. They think that we pin ourselves down unduly if we make a house which will outlive us. In this happy state, they live without dividing the soil, holding all goods in common, moving on with their tents when they have exhausted the fruits and the pasturage around them. Their peace consists in cutting off vain riches and deceitful pleasures. They neither drink, nor wage war, and the list of their virtues is endless. Among all the inhabitants of La Bétique there is neither pride nor haughtiness, nor bad faith nor desire to extend their domination.

All this may have fired the imagination of the Duke of Burgundy in the innocence of his first youth: to our more sophisticated age it sounds rather thin stuff and little better than vacant chaff well meant for grain. A Utopia which rests on a climate which will make possible the scrapping of houses and clothes is not likely to be realised in Surrey's green and pleasant land, still less in the not-quite-so-green but more invigorating land that makes up the Moor of Rannoch. And though it would be unreasonable to ask that the Archbishop should have read the works of Malthus, the Malthusian question of the stability of such a society should have occurred to him. What in fact Fénelon describes in La Bétique is the Garden of Eden, in an enlarged and improved edition; and thither, if only because of the Cherubim with the flaming swords, we may not return.

The town of Salente (Books X and XVII) has been mentioned, but, strictly speaking, the relevant passages give us not so much a description of a Utopia, as instructions for the restoration of a state to a condition of health and well-being. It is, of course, Fénelon, speaking through Mentor, who gives the advice and issues the instructions; and while, in the language of taxation, the impact is on Télémaque and Idoménée (whose city it is), the incidence of the advice is designed to be on the young Duke of Burgundy. Foreign merchandise, tending to luxury, is forbidden; ornaments of gold and silver are banished. A noble and frugal simplicity is restored, and this applies to the delights of the table as to other things. Idoménée (who, after all, is king) is allowed a little vin du pays— ‘mais en fort petite quantité.’ Indeed Fénelon, perhaps with his eye on the young Duke, is habitually rather prejudiced in the matter of wine, of which a more inspired and impartial writer has said that it turneth every thought into jollity and mirth, so that a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt. Effeminate music, superfluous merchants, top-heavy furniture, are all sacrificed to austerity. In consequence, the Salentins, who had complained of their poverty, begin to have the sensation of well-being. ‘Deceptive riches had impoverished them, and they became effectively rich in proportion as they had the courage to do without them.’ That a feeling of well-being may be attained by restricting the scope of our desires is an old economico-moral lesson which remains ever fresh.

All this would not justify Fénelon's inclusion here; but more importance attaches to certain features, illustrative of Utopian muddle-headedness, confronting us when we turn to the repercussions of these changes on the country around Salente. Here we have an agrarian philosophy, reaching forward to the Physiocrats. The soil has been neglected, and therefore all the superfluous inhabitants of Salente are to be moved back to the land, reinforced by citizens drawn from neighbouring states—to do the hard work, seeing that the banished clerk from the capital would probably not be the most efficient agriculturalist. If they are well treated in the matter of taxes, and encouraged to marry, all will be well. And in support of this, Fénelon argues in a passage which seems to have strayed from a physiocratic treatise:

The earth is never ungrateful; it always nourishes with its fruits those who cultivate it carefully; and it refuses its gifts only to those who fear to devote their efforts to it. The more children the workers have, the wealthier they are... for the children, from their earliest years begin to help them.

There follows a moving picture of rustic felicity, in which not even the shepherd's flute is forgotten. Never, on any stage, was rural life so attractive. And apparently there is no limit to this: ‘Nature alone would draw from her fertile bosom all that would be required for an infinite number of moderate and hardworking men.’ Could anything be more extravagant? Could there be an easier path to Utopia?

Yet within two pages, Utopia (including, inferentially, the shepherd's flute) is shattered. For Idoménée, pestered by unconscious Malthusian qualms and doubtings, asks whether, if they are thus placed in peace and abundance, they may not be corrupted by délices, and turn against their king. To which Mentor, giving evidence of a remarkably short memory, replies that though they will have abundance, they will have only what is necessary; this abundance, moreover, will be diminished by the facility of marriages and by the multiplication of families. Each family, being itself numerous and having little land, will have to cultivate it by ‘un travail sans relâche.’ In an illuminating phrase, he adds: ‘Ils auront du pain, à la vérité, et assez largement; mais ils n'auront que du pain, et des fruits de leur propre terre, gagnés à la sueur de leur visage.’

On all this confused thought Malthus would have thrown himself with glee, inviting the good Archbishop to continue the story of his Salentins for a further trifling period of fifty years. Yet if there is little of positive substance in Fénelon—on this side—he is of interest as showing the natural end of those who make their Utopias too easy. If in your assumptions you are allowed to invoke a miraculous climate and thus increase without limit the bounty of nature; if you may postulate that men, on high moral grounds, are prepared to cut down their enjoyments to unremitting labour and sufficient bread, Utopia should not be so difficult to establish in the imagination. In essence the lesson which Fénelon would seek to convey (and it should never be forgotten that the dish is seasoned for a future King of France) is that luxury is an evil thing, that simplicity is much to be desired, that a prosperous agriculture is essential for a healthy State, and that a large population, living on the land and not in the cities, should be the aim of national policy. Teaching that the plough should be held in honour, he is, on this side of his genius, a Physiocrat born out of due season.

It would be unprofitable, though not uninteresting, to follow further the primrose path leading to a large choice of assorted Utopias. From the time of More to the present day, the years are strewn with them, and not unnaturally most of these are tinged with ideas borrowed from one or other of the schools of socialism. Morris's News from Nowhere is wholly charming as a work of literature; Bellamy's Looking Backward presents a rather vulgar and unattractive world of state socialism run mad. In Cabet's Voyage en Icarie, in its time so influential, the propaganda almost drowns the tale. Hertzka's Freiland is another monument of propaganda for a specific purpose, which (judging by sales) made an appeal somewhat incomprehensible to-day. Lord Lytton, who tried everything, had perforce to write a Utopia; and Mr. H. G. Wells is also of the company.

While stoutly refusing to extend this chapter further, one general point may be noted. Utopias tend to become not so much a criticism of our system of government and our social institutions, as a criticism of human nature. Men are so selfish as to prefer their own wives and children to the wives and children of other people; they are foolish and greedy and covetous, and given to unworthy enjoyments; they forget that

It's no in makin muckle, mair,
To make us truly blest.

Consequently the deviser of Utopias, when he is at it, presents not merely the perfect State, but, more or less, the perfect man. In one sense, this is almost ‘cheating,’ just because it simplifies matters so enormously for the architects of Utopia. On the other hand, this inferential criticism of human nature may perhaps point to the crux of the whole problem. We have an imperfect world, among other reasons, because we are very imperfect men and very imperfect women. We can have no earthly paradise until we are fit to five in an earthly paradise. Moral and political regeneration are not two problems, but one.

CHAPTER IV. ROUSSEAU AND SOME OTHERS↩

(a) ROUSSEAU

FORTUNATELY, we are here concerned with only one side of Rousseau—assuming, indeed, that it is possible to detach for consideration one aspect of his legacy. Rousseau was primarily a writer on politics, concerned, after the manner of Hobbes and of Locke, in explaining the origins of government by reference to a mythical Social Contract, the terms of which may of course be varied, according to the deductions it is desired to draw from it. He was also a writer, and a writer of influence, on education, though he would doubtless have been a rash parent who sent his daughter to any Ladies' College conducted by Rousseau. He was a prophet of sentiment and sensibility. For that matter, he had views on music. Doubtless even in the most versatile there is a unity linking divergent activities. In the present case, the significance of Rousseau in the development of socialist thought is to be found in the combined and pervasive influence of all his writings on succeeding generations. Yet, within the space here available, it may be permissible, if scarcely defensible, to look on the Contrat Social as belonging rather to the history of political thought; and, accordingly, in searching for his contribution to socialist thought, we shall confine ourselves to those writings which are more exclusively occupied with the perpetual themes of socialist discussion. Briefly, this comes down to a consideration of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, an essay which was not awarded the prize for a dissertation on this subject by the Academy of Dijon.

But before proceeding to the Discourse on Inequality, it may be permissible to glance at the earlier essay to which the Academy of Dijon did award its prize, thereby suddenly making Rousseau a celebrity. The subject prescribed for this essay was: ‘Whether the restoration (rétablissement) of the Sciences and the Arts had contributed to the purification of manners?’ There is a traditional tale that when Rousseau indicated his intention of competing for the prize, he was warned by a wise acquaintance that if he wished to have any chance of success, he would have to answer the question in the negative, since all the other candidates would be found ranged on the other side. The authenticity of the story may be assessed by Rousseau experts. It is probably entirely apocryphal; but any examiner of experience will acknowledge, in his cups if not at other times, that if of fifty competing essays, forty-nine say the same thing with varying degrees of lucidity, and the fiftieth says something wholly different, this last cunning candidate has an initial advantage out of all proportion to his deserts, if only because of the difficulty the examiner has in arranging the other forty-nine in ascending order of demerit. In any case, whether because he conscientiously so believed, or because he was instigated by Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Rousseau elected to denounce the baneful influence of the Sciences and of the Arts. As the outlook disclosed is fundamentally the same as in the more effective, but unsuccessful, later essay, it is as well to read the two together.

Later Rousseau affected to regard his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts as mediocre. In substance it is; but there is a certain bravado about this violent and monstrously one-sided attack on civilisation and all its works, which doubtless made it an arresting production on its first appearance, and which obviously carried the Academicians of Dijon off their feet. There is a considerable kinship with the later Discourse, and here already it is obvious that the theme closest to Rousseau's heart is that of inequality and the loss of freedom. The Sciences, Literature, and the Arts, we are told, stifle in men the sentiment of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, and make them love their bondage.¹ The Sciences and the Arts owe their origin to our vices, and we should be in less doubt as to their advantages if they sprung from our virtues. In explanation he argues that astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence, of ambition; geometry, of avarice (a dark saying, unless he refers to the ‘mensuration’ of our possessions); physical science, of a vain curiosity ²; and all are the offspring of human pride. Here we touch the fundamentals of theology, for is there not high authority for the view that Pride is not only the fundamental sin, but the only sin, of which all other sins are merely allotropic modifications? Moreover, this defect in the origin of the Sciences and the Arts is reflected in their aims and objects. What would be the good of jurisprudence without the injustice of man? Where would history be, if there were no tyrants, wars or conspiracies? In an illuminating question which goes to the root of Rousseau's thought or prejudices in these matters, he asks: ‘Who would wish to pass his life in sterile contemplation, if each of us, thinking only of the duties of man and the needs of nature, had time only for the fatherland, for the unfortunate and for his friends?’³ The Sciences, born in idleness, in turn nourish idleness and the vices that spring therefrom. Rousseau, it will be observed, was not the man to allow a regard for truth to deprive him of his paradox.

But, worst of all and most specifically suggestive of the later Discourse, all these things lead to inequality. With the development of the Sciences and the Arts, tribute is no longer paid to virtue but to ability:

We no longer ask of a man if he has integrity, but if he has talents; nor of a book if it is useful, but if it is well-written. Rewards are showered on intellect, and virtue remains without honour. There are thousands of prizes for les beaux discours, none for les belles actions.¹

So far as there is an ideal here, it is that of a primitive life, so fully occupied with the claims of the fatherland, the unfortunate, and one's friends, that there is no leisure left over in which to become vicious; for an advance beyond this point means the development of opportunities for manifesting superiority based on intellect in place of an imaginary condition of equality in which virtue alone is held in honour.

In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, dating from 1754, Rousseau gives a philosophy of history, resting on a condensed account of the development of the human race, and the whole essay is saturated with that passionate hatred of inequality which may not unfairly be regarded as the dominant feature of his character. It is almost unnecessary to say that for Rousseau's history there is not the faintest shadow of a particle of evidence. Nor does Rousseau claim that there is; he is indeed engagingly ingenuous on this point. ‘Here,’ he says, addressing Man at large—‘here is your history as I have thought it was to be read, not in the books of your fellows, who are liars, but as it is to be found in Nature, which never lies.’ ² Such a procedure without doubt greatly simplifies the writing of history. In fact, Rousseau is merely imagining what it is convenient to imagine; and, viewed in the cold light of reason, his account of the life of primitive man at times borders on the grotesque and ludicrous.

The Discourse falls into two parts, of which the first is devoted to the fairy-tale of Rousseau's primitive man, and the second to the departure, with increasing acceleration, from that happy state. As Rousseau sees him, primitive man takes his fill beneath an oak; he quenches his thirst at the nearest stream, and he finds his bed at the foot of the tree which has given him sustenance; and thus are all his needs satisfied. In this condition, having regard to the rigours of the seasons (for it cannot always be pleasant to sleep, nude, beneath a sheltering oak); having regard likewise to the needs of defence or escape in the matter of beasts of prey, man is, and must be, robust and strong; so also is his progeny. He must use his body, his arms and his legs for everything. When he learns to use an axe, a ladder, a sling, a horse, the convenience is bought at the price of a diminution of strength or agility. Nor does he fear wild animals at this stage; he is a match for them, and if need be, he can climb a tree.³

Apart from such dangers of the jungle, there are other ineluctable enemies—natural infirmities, infancy and old age. Infancy, of course, is not an infirmity peculiar to man; but on the whole, our remote ancestors scored over other animals by reason of the greater capacity which the female of our species has in carrying about her young. In the matter of old age, Rousseau draws a most rosy and optimistic picture of how things used to be. In old age, the need of victuals diminished with the power of getting them—a singularly beneficent arrangement on the part of Providence; and thus in the absence of gout and rheumatism (unknown to la vie sauvage) old people get snuffed out without anyone perceiving that they have ceased to exist, and almost without their noticing it themselves—‘ils s'éteignent enfin, sans qu'on s'aperçoive qu'ils cessent d'être, et presque sans s'en apercevoir eux-mêmes.’¹ One would naturally expect that their extinction would be more obvious to the survivors than to the deceased.

As for our other maladies—the rough-and-tumble of a panel practitioner's life—Rousseau indicts society for its sins, and argues that most of our misfortunes are our own work, and that practically all could have been avoided, if we had adhered to the ‘simple, uniforme et solitaire’ manner of life prescribed by Nature. As will be seen presently, it is the word solitaire that is here the most significant. The history of human diseases is best obtained by tracing the development of civil society. In Rousseau's primitive paradise, no surgeon other than Time is needed to cure a fractured limb; no treatment is necessary other than leur vie ordinaire; and all this is accomplished without the patient being tormented with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or wasted with fastings. If primitive man has nothing to hope but from Nature, he has on the other hand nothing to fear but his own illness. So much for the advantages of medical benefit.²

Rousseau's dissertation on the origin of language hardly concerns us, except in so far as the conditions of his problem throw light on his conception of the life of the natural and primitive man. For the surprising view emerges, as indicated in the word solitaire already emphasised, that Rousseau's primitive men hardly ever met. It is Rousseau's first difficulty in the matter of the origin of language: How could a language arise, or be regarded as necessary among men who had no communication with each other, nor any occasion to have such communication? For in that early phase of human society, any encounter was fortuitous and ephemeral.³ It is indeed fundamental to the development of Rousseau's ultimate thesis, that Nature has taken no trouble to bring men together on the basis of their mutual needs: ‘sociability’ is not a quality prepared by that mysterious eighteenth-century divinity called Nature. In this primitive condition man had no need of man, and Rousseau intends to emphasise that we must, for our salvation, return to this state of affairs. But though primitive man thus wandered about, for ever solitary except for casual and transient encounters, he was not miserable; for what kind of unhappiness could properly be attributed to a ‘free being, whose heart is at peace, and whose body is in health’?¹

It follows that in this strange world where individuals can, at most, salute each other in passing, where no moral relationships or acknowledged duties unite them, it is impossible to speak of men as being either good or bad. In this lonely and solitary world, no question of virtue or vice can arise. Somewhat oddly, however, and on rather insufficient grounds, Rousseau allows primitive man to have ‘Pity,’ which is the source of all social virtues. It is this ‘Pity’ that in a state of nature takes the place of laws, of morals and of virtue.²

Clearly also this elimination of the primitive man's fellows delivers him from many of our present-day shortcomings. Having no relationship with others, he knows nothing of vanity, or esteem or contempt for others. Even the sexual instincts, in these happy days, occasioned no jealousy. Rousseau distinguishes between that love which consists in the satisfaction of a physical need, and that love which, if it is permissible to paraphrase, results from the frills which civilisation has added. It is in this type of love alone that jealousy may arise. The primitive man knows only the first kind of love: ‘toute femme est bonne pour lui,’ and again, ‘le besoin satisfait, tout le désir est éteint.’³

Thus for primitive man the happy generations passed—an endless wandering in the forests, ‘without industry, without speech, without domicile, without war as without union, without any need of his fellows, or any desire to injure them.’ If any discoveries were made, ‘the art perished with the inventor’ in a world where there was no education or progress, and where each succeeding generation set out from the same starting-point.⁴

Rousseau's description of the blessedness of primitive man has been summarised in some detail, because, fantastic as it may be, it is of the essence of his view of things, and it colours his later account of the fall of man from this high estate. At this point, however, it is sufficient to draw attention again to the most astonishing feature in this most astonishing reconstruction of history. The foundation and reason for primitive man's happiness lies in the fact that he had no need of his fellows, in fact had no dealings with his fellows, whom, indeed, to all intents and purposes he never met. Man was never so happy because man was never so much alone.

The second part of the Discourse is devoted to tracing the growth of inequality in place of these primitive egalitarian conditions. It opens with a purple passage which has been so often quoted that its further quotation is almost inevitable:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say: ‘This belongs to me,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would have been spared the human race by him who, snatching out the stakes or filling in the ditch, should have cried to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and that the earth belongs to none.’¹

This first unrecorded enclosure was the beginning of property; but in fact it was a culminating point rather than a point of departure. Already, ways and means had been found to take such precautions as were necessary for safety. There had been discoveries and inventions; fire had been brought to earth; the bow and the arrow, as well as hooks and snares for catching animals, had been contrived. All this gave man a sense of superiority over other animals, and implanted in his heart ‘the first movement of pride.’² Thus, in the triumphant and unseemly gloating of the hunter over his victim, we find the far-off roots of human inequality.

With this also came the distant foreshadowings of co-operation. There were occasions—admittedly rare—when l'intérêt commun justified primitive man in counting on the assistance of his fellows. How these ultra-individualistic nomads came to conceive of such a thing as the ‘common interest’ is, however, not explained. In such a case they united ‘by some sort of free association which was binding on none, and which lasted only so long as the transitory need which had occasioned it.’ Clearly, however, we have reached a stage when man is not quite so solitary as he once was: the bloom is off the peach. For such occasional acts of mutual assistance as these, no more highly developed language than that of crows or monkeys would be necessary.³

In this imaginative history of the human race, the great turning-point, with ramifications in many directions, came when man ceased to sleep ‘under the first tree,’ and made some semi-permanent shelter or hut, with branches and mud as their basic constituents. For here you have the beginning of the home. Rousseau's primitive man had been extraordinarily successful in shaking off the casual women whom he encountered. But now, enclosed in the same hut, are man and woman, parents and children. Doubtless with this transition, as Rousseau acknowledges, there came the sweetest sentiments known to man, conjugal and paternal love; but he is able to compile an alarming series of items to be entered on the debit side. Women became sedentary, clinging to the hut, and thus there resulted a division of labour. Also men and women alike became softer, losing something of their ferocity—although in the previous paragraphs Rousseau's primitive man had been depicted as anything but ferocious. Among men living in adjacent huts, language perforce had to arise. More significant is the fact that mere propinquity gave rise to the habit of making comparisons in the matter of merit and beauty. Jealousy awakens with love, and in the highly-coloured language which Rousseau loved: ‘Discord triumphs, and the sweetest of passions receives sacrifices of human blood.’¹

It is an odd picture which Rousseau here draws of the rise of ‘distinctions’ among men, imposed by their environment. Brought together to live in adjacent cabins, what is there for these attractive primitives to do in the evenings, unless they sing and dance together under a great tree? Now it is a familiar fact that we do not all sing equally well or equally badly, and the same is demonstrably true in the matter of dancing. But, given the circumstances, the man who sings best, who dances best, is most ‘considered.’ ‘Why did she fall for the leader of the band?’ is the question put by a later generation, confronted by the same phenomenon. Es ist, apparently, eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt sie immer neu. In these distinctions, embodied in the judgment of spectators and critics of primitive ball-room behaviour, Rousseau finds the first step towards inequality and towards vice at the same time. One other departure from primitive perfection is significant. From this last idea of ‘consideration’ paid to any one excelling in any respect, arose the first ideas of civility on the one hand, and on the other the sense of outrage should the measure of respect supposed to be due happen to be withheld. In a world where a man's a man for a' that, and where all are equal, there can clearly be no room for civility.

Despite these first shadows, this was the stage at which Rousseau would have had the human race remain, and he sums up in language of unmistakable clarity his astonishing philosophy of human nature:

So long as they confined themselves to works which one alone could do, and to arts which did not need the assistance of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good and happy...; but from the moment when one man had need of the assistance of another, from the moment when it was perceived that it was useful for one man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and vast forests were changed into smiling fields which it was necessary to water with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and increase with the harvests.²

This indeed is the fundamental idea in this extraordinary Discourse. Men may be equal and happy, so long as they never meet, so long as no one needs the assistance of another; but from the moment when they cease to be solitaire, from the moment when they begin to live together, help each other, do things together, inequality enters, and from Rousseau's point of view the rest of history is a hastening descent. Waiving his earlier and later history as entirely fictitious, there, is of course, one sense in which Rousseau is merely expressing a platitude in a somewhat allegorical form. On all this question, there is in fact of course no such thing as equality among men, for so it has been ordained by God. Neither in stature, nor in weight, nor in chest expansion, neither in the colour of the eyes or of the hair, neither in strength, intellectual capacity or moral sensibility, are men equal. It is perhaps possible to speak of the equality of men, if there is no possibility of comparison; if, as in Rousseau's primitive conditions, human beings are never brought together except for fortuitous acts of silent copulation—if, in short, the doctrine of equality is never brought to the test. But the whole doctrine of equality in the literal sense breaks down the moment you bring men together and inevitably are forced to compare them, not merely in their capabilities for singing and dancing, as in Rousseau's rather puerile example, but up and down the whole range of human equipment. It is indeed only necessary to view two human beings together in order to realise that in certain respects A is ‘superior’ to B, and in others B is ‘superior’ to A; but probably in no respect are they equal. In this sense Rousseau is possibly right in suggesting that the postulated equality of men who are never brought into comparison disappears at once when they live in adjacent huts. It is, however, to be hoped that Rousseau was trying to express more than this dowdy platitude. Also, of course, the admitted inequality of man does not really affect that deeper question as to whether the differences in human endowment furnish grounds for existing differences in rights and rewards.

In the remainder of the Discourse, Rousseau warms to the task of denunciation as he traces the growth of inequality. It may not, however, be necessary to follow in detail the development of the argument. The prime impulse towards the furtherance of inequality is found by Rousseau in the arts of metallurgy and agriculture: in more concrete language it is iron and corn that have been the curse of humanity, creating groups of workers dependent on each other.¹ Agriculture likewise led to the partition of land, and consequently to laws to protect the possessor and define his rights. Following Grotius, Rousseau recalls that when Ceres was given the title of ‘Lawgiver,’ it was to indicate that the partition of land brought with it the necessity of a new kind of law, the law of property, as distinguished from natural law.²

With industry (typified by iron) and agriculture thus brought on the scene, the stage is set for the development of inequality. Diversity of talent and of capacity bring their natural consequences in diversity of condition. Vice is not far off. It becomes necessary that men should appear to have certain qualities, even when these are absent. ‘To be’ and ‘to appear’ have become entirely different matters. Hypocrisy and deceit have arrived. Man is no longer free and independent, since he is dependent on his fellows for the satisfaction of a multitude of needs: ‘Rich, he has need of their services; poor, he has need of their assistance; and even mediocrity does not enable him to do without them.’ ¹ Add to these ‘devouring ambition,’ and the picture begins to resemble the vision of Marx:

In a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, and on the other conflict of interests, and always the concealed desire to make a profit at the expense of others: all these evils are the first effect of property and the inseparable accompaniment of rising inequality.²

The final pages of Rousseau's essay are perhaps best viewed as examples of lurid writing rather than of lucid thinking. He defines three main stages in the descent. The first is the establishment of law and the right of property; the second is the institution of the magistrature; the third is the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power. In somewhat different language, these stages consecrate the distinction between rich and poor, between strong and weak, and between master and slave. Moreover, Rousseau's pessimism is without frontier and without boundary. In surveying the inevitability of human descent, he observes that ‘the vices which render social institutions necessary are just those which render inevitable the abuse of these institutions.’ What, in short, is the good of anything?

It is a far journey from the innocent picture of men dancing and singing on the grass, beside the primitive mud-covered huts. It was then, when admiration was paid to one and withheld from another, that inequality was born. Into this other Eden, another Serpent entered. The final picture, when the curse has had time to work itself out, is one of unrelieved gloom. Rousseau gives as bitter a picture of modern civilisation as may be found anywhere,³ and ends with the impassioned declaration that ‘it is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however it may be defined, that a child should command an old man, that an imbecile should conduct a wise man, and that a handful of people should be stuffed with superfluities, while the famished multitude lack what is necessary.’ ¹

Perhaps Rousseau has sufficiently testified to the faith, or the lack of faith, that is in him, so far as this is manifested in the two Discourses. Fundamentally it is a curiously churlish philosophy that is here propounded. Men are represented as happy so long as they live in complete isolation, having no need of each other, and no occasion to meet each other; all evil springs from bringing them together and allowing them to co-operate. Nor indeed is it even a consistent philosophy. Doubtless, Rousseau is careful to explain that his savage in his solitary state has neither virtue nor vices; but he is assuredly a noble beast, endowed with Pity, the mother of all the virtues. Yet as soon as they are brought into contact with each other, it is of the essence of Rousseau's explanation of the decline of man, that forthwith these noble savages seek to take advantage of each other.

Coming more closely to Rousseau's place in the socialist tradition, there are perhaps three points which may be isolated and underlined for their relationship to what has gone before and to what is yet to come. Firstly, property is specifically regarded as the source of all evil, with doubtless a certain emphasis on the case of land. Community in all things is implied—land again receiving special emphasis—though perhaps it should be made clear that by ‘community’ is rather meant non-appropriation. Secondly, Law for Rousseau is essentially a device whereby those in possession protect themselves against the ‘have-nots’; it is in short one of the instruments for the establishment and the maintenance of inequality. In other words, Law (and with it, the State) is an instrument of the governing class. Thirdly, in the contrast between rich and poor, the strong and the weak, masters and slaves, Rousseau preaches, and his words lend themselves to, a vitriolic class-war. But when all is said, it is perhaps truer of Rousseau than of most, that his influence can be traced less to any particular dogma or doctrine which he enunciated than to a pervasive atmosphere which emanated from Rousseau as a whole.

(b) MABLY

‘Who now reads Cowley?’ Probably fewer to-day than when the enquiry was first addressed to the world; but even so, possibly a hundred for every one who reads Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785). Mably is one of the most striking examples of swift and irretrievable descent from a position of the highest reputation and influence to a position in which he is less than the dust that strews the paths of the generations of book-worms. A writer who, within a few years of his death, enjoys the spectacle of four entirely distinct editions of his collected works (ranging from 12 to 26 volumes according to the format) has no occasion to complain of neglect. Mably, in short, was read and quoted by every one in his own day, and immediately thereafter; almost a hundred years later, M. Janet was able to testify that, in the frequency of his appearance in the book-stalls along the Quais, he reigned supreme, with the Abbé Raynal as the only possible runner-up. The answer to those who are so hardy as to ask why the world at large does not now read Mably, is that they themselves should try. Without entering into a dangerous controversy, it may be suggested that he is the extreme example of the evil consequences of an undiluted classical education. He was never able to lay the ghost of Plato, and he wrote Platonic dialogues, as they might have been written by Plato, had Plato not been Plato. He worshipped Sparta and all its institutions, real or imagined; Lycurgus was his constant obsession. It has been suggested that he was acutely sensitive to the social evils, to the inequalities and injustices of his day, when the floods of revolution were gathering to sweep over France. In fact, however, the impression left on a reader of these days is that he sees everything through a haze of classical reading. His heart may have been touched by the wrongs of his time, but he thought and wrote in terms of Lacedaemon. A certain awareness of this paralysing defect seems at times to have knocked dumbly at the portals of his consciousness. In one of his dialogues, one of the speakers (who is more or less Mably) expresses a fear of what his friends may say of him: ‘La tête a tourné à ce pauvre homme; c'est dommage... il s'est gaté l'esprit à lire l'histoire des Grecs et des Romains qu'il aimait.’ ¹ His friends would have been abundantly right; but they obviously failed to say it effectively.

Mably was destined for the Church, but although throughout his life and subsequently, he has been consistently designated as ‘Abbé,’ he soon faded away from ecclesiastical activities. He trembled for a time on the fringe of political employment, but this he also abandoned and gave himself up to a life of writing. His works are deplorably numerous and extensive, ranging over the whole field of history, politics, legislation, morals and much more, although always, in his rather pedantic and pedagogic manner, he was chiefly concerned with making man good. For the purpose of ascertaining the relationship which links Plato and More at the one end and Babeuf at the other, a small selection from this numerous brood of publications is sufficient. There is the rather cumbrously entitled Doutes proposées aux philosophes économistes sur l'ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, which Mably wrote in order to demolish the views on property and other things expressed by Mercier de la Rivière, one of the Physiocrats—not in itself a difficult task. Des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen is not quite a dialogue, though it professes to report conversations with Lord Stanhope. De la Legislation, ou Principes des Loix is a triangular conversation between an English peer (who figures merely as ‘Milord’) who, although easily converted, is supposed to represent ‘common-sense’ views, a Swede who brings vision, and the narrator, who is either markedly silent, or modestly refrains from reporting his own contributions to the discussion. Lastly, for our purpose there is the Entretiens de Phocion, professedly a translation of a classical manuscript discovered in a monastery—a fiction as innocuous as the Entretiens themselves. It should scarcely be necessary to repeat the warning already hinted at in the case of Sir Thomas More. The Doutes are unmistakably straightforward Mably; but in some of the other more important works (e.g. De la Législation) he is professedly reporting the discussions of fictitious characters, and in such cases he clearly cannot be held responsible for all the views expressed. Probably in the work cited, Mably would approve in general of the views of the Swede, and he would not always have approved of the views of ‘Milord’; but in the nature of things it would have been open to him to disclaim both.

If truth be told, there is not much in Mably that may not be found better expressed elsewhere; he is of interest, partly because of his place in the development of things, and partly because of the strange pessimism which persuaded him that the world was suffering from a disease, or a multiplicity of diseases, for which there could be no effective remedy. Relying on natural law, he believed in the equality of men; looking around him (in the intervals of reading the classics) he was satisfied that private property was the root-cause of all human misfortunes; and (especially after reading the trite moral maxims of antiquity) he was of the opinion that there is much to be said for a simple life. Such, in brief, is the theoretical basis of Mably.

For Mably, the equality of man is part of the design of Nature: ‘Nature says to us in a hundred different ways: You are all my children, and I love you all equally... the whole earth is the patrimony of each of you; you were equal when you left my hands.’¹ Nature has given us the same needs to be a continual reminder of our equality. It made men parfaitement égaux, without rights one over the other, and consequently perfectly free. Nature created neither kings nor magistrates, neither subjects nor slaves, neither rich nor poor. When Nature had finished her work in the creation of man, there was nowhere any principle of inequality.² In a frequently recurring phrase Nature destined man to be equal. In one place he opens a wider door, and in words which sound rather like an anticipation of Proudhon, he tells us that this sentiment of equality is nothing other than the sentiment of our dignity.¹ In amplification, and a dangerous amplification, Mably emphasises the uniformity of Nature. Men are the same everywhere; he will have nothing to do with the geographical school that holds that men are affected by such trivialities as latitude, temperature and rainfall—as if it were the duty of a legislator, before settling to his task, to consult a thermometer in place of the human heart.² If it is urged that men are in fact unequal in endowments, Mably again gives a somewhat Proudhonian reply; it is education, brutalising some and developing the faculties of others, that persuades us to believe (wrongly) that Providence has established differences among men. At birth all men are substantially alike. The variegated history of any family, where presumably the members have the same heredity, and to a large extent have the same environment and education in essential matters, should provide sufficient comment on this aspect of the argument that humanity is but a tub of undifferentiated and indistinguishable peas.

On the question of the origin of property in the bosom of that primitive society which was so happy as to be propertyless, Mably offers suggestions which are peculiar, and which, if he had paused to reflect, go far towards the torpedoing of all his theorisings on these subjects. For in the Doutes where he is writing in his own person and cannot therefore disclaim responsibility, he suggests that property had its origin in the indolence of certain drones, frelons, who sought to live at the expense of others, and in whom it had not been possible to inculcate a love of work—à qui on n'avoit pas l'art de faire aimer le travail.³ This same explanation is advanced at greater length by the Swedish philosopher in De la Législation. Indolent men, less active than the others, served society with less assiduity and zeal. Their indifference grew because it was not repressed. These idlers were a burden on their fellow-citizens, who complained of their conduct, and presently the Republic was agitated by dissensions. Presumably, society then fell back on the Pauline injunction that if any would not work, neither should he eat. Should this theory of the dronishness of men prove unacceptable, the Swedish philosopher, like an obliging salesman, is quite prepared to offer an alternative solution of the problem of the origin of property. It is that certain of the magistrates retained more than their share in the distribution of the fruits of the earth, or showed an unjust preference towards their friends and relations.⁴ On this curious (and, perhaps, in part plausible) theorising, two comments are inescapable. Firstly, the indolence that ruined primitive communism would probably once again ruin communism, if re-established; there would still be drones willing to live at the expense of others, laborem fugientes in the language of St. Thomas Aquinas. And secondly, it reveals an extraordinary confusion of thought and of argument to proclaim that communism is the only condition in which men may live virtuously and happily, and in the same breath explain that communism was abandoned because the ordinary citizen failed to play fairly by his fellows, or alternatively because the leaders of society were dishonest and given to nepotism. The Abbé, in spite of himself, is being forced back to acknowledge the reality of original sin.

That property is the source of ‘tous les malheurs’ and of ‘tous les maux’ hardly calls for particularisation, inasmuch as the argument is on familiar lines.¹ The moment property is established, inequality becomes inevitable, with the result that there are henceforward opposed interests, all the vices of wealth and all the vices of poverty, brutalisation of men's minds, corruption of civil manners, and much more.² Carrying the argument a stage further, the existence of property leads to war.³ It is property that has introduced l'oisiveté and la fainéantise,⁴ those pet aversions of Saint-Simon later; although oddly enough, as has been seen, it was this penchant to l'oisiveté that led to the establishment of property. In language closely resembling that used by Babeuf, the thought constantly recurs that what one has in excess is obtained at the cost of others suffering deficiency. More important from the point of view of the theory of property, it is contended that property finds no support in the laws of nature; its sanction is to be found solely in convention; and what convention has made, convention may unmake.

If it be argued, as for example ‘Milord’ (representing commonsense) does in fact argue in De la Législation, that a ‘stimulus’ is needed, and that, in short, ‘on ne travaille pas pour les autres avec la même ardeur que pour soi,’⁵ Mably, disguised on this occasion as the Swedish philosopher, has two answers. Firstly, even if less were produced, it would be better so. There are more important things than opulence. Adam Smith said as much, having his mind directed to the issue of national defence. For Mably (or the Swede) the thing that is more important than Abundance is Virtue. It is more advantageous for the human race to have quelques vertus than beaucoup de fruits.⁶ It sounds like the echo of an unimpeachable copybook Latin tag. Moreover, to those who seek and attain unto simplicity, everything else is added. Adam Smith's ‘defence,’ for instance, comes in as a by-product of a life spent in spare leanness. With a curious innocence of mind he holds that such a society is safe from its enemies. If you have any doubt on the subject, he refers you to Plato and Socrates for reassurance; for is it not written that a poor army, if composed of happy citizens, is invincible, and will always be victorious over an army three times as numerous, which has the handicap of representing a rich State? ¹ In the twentieth century the assurance even of Plato brings us no comfort on this point.

The second answer suggested by Mably on this question of stimulus—and he is abundantly right—is that avarice is not the only motive capable of moving the human heart. Unfortunately, he pins his faith to a motive which for his purpose would be but a broken reed. There are such things, he says, as ‘distinctions’; and if society had in time devised an adequate system of distinctions, the whole evolution of property could have been nipped in the bud. This ‘amour de la gloire et de la considération’ obviously played a considerable part in Mably's ideas relating to the ordering of the universe. Milord's objection that a man works hardest when working for himself is met with the retort that he is in very deed, véritablement, working for himself, if the horizon is dotted with prospects of ‘glory’ and ‘distinctions.’ In a rather absurd phrase, what will a man not do to ‘goûter le plaisir qui accompagne la considération’?²

The idea that the world may find its driving force in a Birthday Honours List (giving the King, if necessary 365 official birthdays in the year) occurs with pathetic frequency in the more Utopian forms of socialist literature, although perhaps few are so badly bitten with the notion as is Mably. Fourier doubtless is more extreme, but he is always in a class by himself. It is a foolish doctrine anywhere, but nowhere more foolish than in Mably. For in his scheme of things, he makes use of ‘distinctions’ to induce every one to work, so that, had matters been arranged properly, society need never have been driven to the recognition of property. But obviously, if any were wise or depraved enough to say that they preferred indolence to a ribbon (and there would be many such) they would have to be allowed to continue to lead idle lives, sponging on their neighbours; perhaps some who had at last attained the ribbon might burst into a blaze of fainéantise in order that they might without distraction savour the pleasure which accompanies consideration. Mably's world, in short, is one in which it is expected that work will be done by all, without intermission, in the hope of a distinction to come, or in gratitude for a distinction already received.

But indeed the idea that the normal motives of life can be replaced by the desire of the scholar to be created, let us say, a Companion of the Midnight Lamp, or by the ambition of the worker to become a Member (Fourth Class) of the Most Assiduous Order of the Indefatigable Beaver, is a delusion revealing a strange misreading of human psychology in these matters. A distinction is a distinction, only if it distinguishes; and no commodity so precipitously loses all value, so rapidly comes to be shunned, as a distinction somewhat too generously shared with others. There is, moreover, a further point on which the Utopian resort to ‘distinctions’ and ‘honours’ as a substitute for more sordid incentives lamentably fails. Mably, since he at the moment is giving evidence, does not say how or by whom his distinctions are to be conferred: he is always vague when the point at issue calls for something more precise than a lugubrious shaking of the head. But it is assumed, and always is assumed, that there will be a universal and unquestioning belief that the fountain of honour has sprayed its refreshing waters on all the most deserving and on none but the most deserving. This naively innocent faith does not exist in the world we know, nor is it likely to exist in any earthly paradise that man may imagine. In the absence of such a faith, the shower of distinctions which Mably thinks ought to have saved the world from its selfishness might have precisely the contrary effect. An Honours List, while it is designedly an official commendation of those contained therein, is also inferentially, if not an official censure, at least a display of official frigid neutrality, of postponed approval with regard to those excluded. As Tertullian says, ‘choice implies rejection.’ It skilfully attains two ends simultaneously; it gives, or is supposed to give, pleasure to those included, if only by enabling them to contemplate the mortification of the less fortunate: no less emphatically it annoys, or may annoy, those who are excluded, and this annoyance is caused not by their exclusion, which might be borne with fortitude if not indifference, but by their having to witness the inclusion of others whom they deem less worthy. A general or a civil servant, kept waiting unduly in the queue for the Bath, may find his youthful ardour replaced by the sourness of hope deferred, and zeal may flag. Mably wants to confer honours on the shepherds whose flocks are most prolific (doubtless, the Order of the Fecund Ewe), the hunter who is best able to bear fatigue and the rigours of the seasons, and many more, including ‘la femme la plus ocupée de ses devoirs domestiques.’ Here indeed would be a nice apple of discord to toss lightly into the ranks of the W.R.I. and a copious cause of heart-burning among the excluded marginal women. This may appear a trivial, almost a puerile question, almost unworthy of mention; yet the search for non-material stimuli in the form of what Mably calls ‘considération’, is so recurrent, that it deserves somewhere to be looked at rather more closely.

Having thus laid bare the evils of the past and the present, Mably might be expected to hold out some hope for the future. He is, however, almost unique in his pessimism: never was a diagnostician so gloomy in his prognosis. It is a recurrent note in his lamentations that our accumulated vices have made any return to a state of happiness impossible. In preaching equality, he makes it clear at the outset that in his view no human power could now restore it without causing greater disorders than those sought to be avoided; and a few pages later he adds that the evil to-day is too deeply rooted to allow any hope of a cure.¹ The barriers between us and the true order of nature are insurmountable.² How gladly would one return to the equality established by Lycurgus and sought after by Plato, but in this world of ours this equality can be but a chimera.³ Moreover, the world is foolish and there is no use in trying. We have reached such a stage of corruption that ‘l'extrême sagesse doit paroître l'extrême folie, et l'est en effet.’⁴ The Swedish philosopher, who without injustice may in general be taken as the mouthpiece of Mably, declares that if he were to attempt to re-establish equality, he would most infallibly be taken for a fool.⁵ The Apostle Paul was not so sensitive.

This is indeed the voice of Timorous, who, having had his vision, such as it was, of the Celestial City, turns back in his pilgrimage, because of the lions in the way, not caring to know whether they were sleeping or waking, or perhaps even chained. From Mably, in short, we may look for no solution, for our evils are ‘sans remède.’ The utmost he can suggest lies in the adoption of a few ‘palliatives,’ in order perhaps to soften and somewhat diminish our misfortunes. The laws should be fashioned so as to discourage avarice and ambition, the two primary vices which property and inequality engender. The substance of his suggestions is somewhat archaic, as is indeed everything in Mably. The State must set the example. It must have few requirements: expenditure and taxation must be kept down to the minimum.⁶ As a slight contribution in this direction (and for other reasons) magistrates should be unpaid. The citizens should be induced to be content with a mediocre fortune, and to achieve this end riches should be rendered inutiles.⁷ Most of all he recommends sumptuary laws, of wide range and universal application. Luxury must be abandoned, and in this thirst for primitive simplicity, the Arts also should go: ‘je demande à quoi peut nous être bonne une académie de peinture?’ ⁸ The law of inheritance and bequest should be modified to prevent accumulation of wealth: a single daughter would be forcibly given two adopted brothers, in order to prevent her from being corrupted by an excess of wealth. Commerce should as far as possible be forbidden: it is undertaken for reasons of cupidity, and against the interests of good government. A merchant is a dangerous person, in that he has no fatherland. Here, mixed up with physiocratic views, is a reminiscence of the mediaeval doctrine that a merchant can hardly be pleasing to God. But indeed Hosea had already said it: ‘He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress.’ Such, more or less, are the stale pills which Mably offers to the patient whom he has already pronounced too far gone for recovery.

On his own meagre merits, Mably might be left undisturbed in the complete oblivion that has overtaken him; but such a test is not the only proper criterion in an attempt, however sketchy, to trace the development of ideas and of thought. In his own lifetime and during the succeeding generation, he was an influence of the first magnitude in stressing the idea of absolute equality—although, indeed, his communism is largely based on the more or less uniform capacity of the human stomach, as man ‘leaves the hands of Nature,’ to borrow one of his favourite expressions. To take one instance of his influence (if it be not an absurd conjunction of names), there can be little doubt that he is the connecting link between Plato and Babeuf. His very great contemporary fame is slightly incomprehensible, even admitting that in many ways—as, for example, in his rapt admiration of the noble savage—he is of his time. But though a passable writer, discoursing with reasonable competence and adequate book-learning on a vast range of subjects,¹ no one would now call him a good writer. He is an uninteresting pedestrian who in time covers the ground several times. Moreover, when we turn to the substance of Mably, it is difficult to resist the impression that, if not a sham (and no one ought to allege this), his socialism was an artificial, academic product, quite out of touch with the needs of his own, and still more of the next, generation. It is exclusively a product of Plato and Lycurgus. His dream is of a primitive community which has succeeded in banishing luxury and the arts, or has never had them; which takes its magistrates direct from the plough, and which looks to its poverty and its temperance as the most potent munitions of war against any possible external enemy. Nor does Mably even have the redeeming feature of feeling at one with the people; in his heart he feels something approaching contempt for his fellows. In short, Mably is, all the time, looking in the wrong direction—backward and not forward; and it is rather odd that his own generation should apparently have had no instinctive feeling of this disabling characteristic.

(c) MORELLY

It is now universally accepted that Le Code de la Nature, ou Le Véritable Esprit de ses Loix de tout tems négligé ou méconnu, which appeared anonymously in 1755, in the same year as Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was the work of Morelly; but Morelly remains, nevertheless, the most elusive of figures. For long the work was attributed to Diderot, and indeed so generally attributed that Le Code in fact appears in certain collected editions of Diderot's works. Such an attribution is, however, an insult to the memory of the great. It is for the expert in French literature to assess the evidence which has fathered this work on Morelly. To the outsider, the chief reason seems to be that Le Code contains in the early pages, and throughout, somewhat fulsome praise of a bad allegorical political poem, La Basiliade, published two years earlier; and as it seems to be agreed that no one but the author of La Basiliade could possibly praise La Basiliade, it follows that the author of Le Code was the author of La Basiliade, who was Morelly. Doubtless, this is not the only piece of evidence bearing on this point. Unfortunately this conclusion does not take us much further. Certain other very minor works swim into the picture, and there have been suggestions that there are two Morellys, a father and a son, sharing the honours between them. Perhaps in all this we should remember that fine flower of classical criticism, crystallised in the saying that ‘the Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.’ The only fact that clearly emerges is that nothing is known of Morelly. ‘Morelly,’ in short, is little more than a convenient abbreviation for ‘the author of Le Code de la Nature.’

But whether Le Code was written by Morelly, or by his father, or his son, or by another man of the same name, the book itself remains a work of capital importance as an influence in the second half of the eighteenth century, and beyond. The Code is as nearly destitute of intrinsic merits as it is possible for any book to be, though it has its interests. Apart from those spiritually akin to Babeuf, the critics have been uniformly harsh in their attitude toward Morelly. Raynal, on its appearance, described it as possessing ‘ni suite, ni méthode, ni vues’; another contemporary critic found ‘ni principes, ni raison, ni lumières dans son livre.’¹ Much later, from an impartial distance, Janet pronounced Morelly's socialism as ‘un socialisme sans lumières et sans culture,’ and Morelly himself as ‘un esprit vulgaire et de bas étage.’²

These criticisms are substantially justified. Morelly annoys—and in many ways. He is complacent, self-satisfied, and shallow; he dabbles in psychology and theology, indulging in doubtful disputations beyond his stunted depth; he is uniformly rather dreary. Moreover, putting aside as irrelevant (if one may rise to such heights of magnanimity) all these many occasions of irritation, Morelly has the further disability that he has not much to say that is in any way peculiar to himself. He believes that man is fundamentally good, and not depraved; he holds that the wickedness of man is occasioned by the society in which he lives and the corrupting institutions which surround him; and that ultimately all these evils spring from the existence of property; and he further seeks to persuade his readers that a better society, indeed a perfect society, would result from the abolition of property. All this is moderately common late eighteenth-century, left-wing doctrine, presented with no distinction. Where Morelly differs from anyone else is that he endeavours to codify the Code of Nature, and prints a ‘Model of Legislation conforming to the intentions of Nature.’ Natural law is spread all over the eighteenth century, but for obvious prudential reasons, it is usually left vaguely in the air, without a too precise definition of its contents. It is the merit, or at least the peculiarity, of Morelly, that he rushed in where Quesnay and many others had feared to tread, and laid down in a terrifying document the fundamental laws of a society that would seek to conform to the intentions of Nature.

We may pass over the compliments which at the outset the author of Le Code pays to the author of La Basiliade, a work which is supposed to clothe with poetic grace the truths about to be demonstrated in prose. Having discharged this pleasant duty, Morelly turns to the first point of his programme, the perverse and erroneous views of the political and moral philosophers. Morality ought to be as simple and as evident in its first axioms as mathematics, but it has become disfigured and clouded with prejudices. The fundamental error of the moralists is that they have assumed as their foundation the proposition that man is born vicious and evil (vicieux et méchant). It is, it will be observed, the repudiation of the Fall of Man and of the doctrine of Original Sin, which is so large a part of socialist teaching for the next three generations. It has not, he says, occurred to anyone (although in the fullness of time it will most emphatically occur to Fourier) that the problem is ‘to find a situation in which it is almost impossible for man to be depraved or wicked.’ ¹

The view of the philosopher is that even before Man is born, he carries within himself the baneful seeds of his depravity, urging him to seek his own good at the expense of all his kind.² This is self-interest (amour propre), and Morelly's attack on the philosophers is largely a white-washing of this self-love, and a demonstration that self-love ought to lead to sociability. For this self-love, transformed by the moralists into an hundred-headed hydra, is something entirely innocent ‘in the order of Nature.’ It is nothing more than a constant desire to preserve one's existence by means which are both easy and innocent, and which Providence has placed within the reach of all. But when human institutions have surrounded these innocent means with insurmountable difficulties and much more, need it cause surprise that this self-love is transmuted into a multitude of vices?¹ It is, however, from this ‘triste Morale’ of the philosophers, and not from Nature, that this ill-omened leaven derives.

The Supreme Wisdom, to which Morelly has at all times free access, intended, however, something entirely different. Its purpose was to make the human species an Intelligent Whole, which should arrange itself by a mechanism as simple as marvellous—indeed by a species of ‘moral attraction,’ another pointer in the direction of Fourier.² For out of self-love there springs, or ought to spring, a ‘benevolent affection’ for all that alleviates or helps our weakness. The desire to be happy may be fundamental, but self-love achieves nothing without assistance, and this impels us to the happy necessity of being benevolent. Crystallised in a sentence: ‘Tu veux être heureux; sois bienfaisant.’³ Benevolence is the path by which self-love realises itself.

Had we but followed the intentions of the Supreme Wisdom, the situation should have been an entirely happy one. Using in a contrary sense a metaphor to which Malthus was later to give an unenviable notoriety, Morelly assures us that

the world is a table sufficiently furnished for all the guests, whose provisions belong in their entirety, sometimes to all because all are hungry, sometimes to some only because the others are satisfied: thus no one is absolutely the master, nor has the right to claim to be so.⁴

Nature has ingeniously contrived a number of devices whereby men are impelled, though perhaps not very effectively, towards unanimity and general concord. It has given us a sense of equality of conditions and of rights and of the necessity of labouring in common by showing us our ‘parity’ in feeling and in needs. By temporary variations in our needs, so that all are not equally affected at the same time (we are not all hungry together), it has warned us that we should sometimes renounce our rights for the advantage of others. By endowing men differently in strength, in industry and in ability, it has pointed the way to different employments. The pain and effort of satisfying our needs when acting alone, impress on our minds the necessity of looking for the assistance of others, and inspire us with an affection for all that helps us. Thus Morelly, revealing the inner workings of the divine plan, shows how the stage was set to urge man on to a comprehensive benevolence; and these urgings the politicians and the moralists should have seconded, instead of playing the part of ‘maladroit mechanicians,’ breaking the springs and thereby involving the dissolution of humanity. Morelly is rather proud of his view of society as an automatic machine, and it recurs.

The methods by which primitive legislators should have kept man in the straight path are not obscure. There is but one vice in the world, namely Avarice.¹ All other vices, how different soever they may present themselves to the human eye, ultimately resolve themselves into a desire to possess, le désir d'avoir; and it therefore follows, with a devastatingly simple logic, that where there is no property, there can likewise be none of the pernicious consequences flowing from property. But our legislators, those pretended sages whom our imbecility admires, have broken the bonds of sociability in recognising property.² The law should have regulated, not property, but the use of property. Even now (apparently) if property is abolished, all will be well. If we are but delivered of this tyrant, as he tells us in a phrase of delicious and superfluous emphasis, it will be ‘impossible de toute impossibilité’ that man should be guilty of crime, that he should be either a thief, an assassin, or a conqueror.³ The legislators, however, missed the golden opportunity of basing society on the true intentions of Nature which, as will be seen presently, can be summarised in a few simple propositions. So far as concerns the application of these principles in practice to such matters as the direction of each to his appropriate employment and the assignment to each of the means of subsistence—all the tasks of the Ministry of Labour and of the Ministry of Food—this need cause no anxiety. Morelly belongs to that long and pathetic line that believes that the business of this world and the administration of government are matters which any child could compass in his less intelligent moments. All these questions, he says, merely amount to a simple matter of enumeration of things and of persons, a simple operation of calculation and combination and, consequently, ‘susceptible d'un très-bel ordre.’ Too often have socialist dreams of a Utopia been vitiated by the innocent faith that all business is ‘merely a matter of accounting.’

One other point in Morelly's general theory is perhaps worth mentioning, as it serves to link him with anarchist thought of a later date. He will have nothing to do with the suggestion that men are by nature indolent, or in any way averse from labour. If men appear to be lazy, or to be addicted to an untimely folding of the hands together, this also is the result of prejudices, springing from the institutions by which we have been corrupted. We have fixed a permanent condition of repose on some whom we call prosperous, leaving to others the heat and burden of the day. In these circumstances, where idleness is the privilege of the fortunate, it is natural that the others should acquire an aversion, indeed a dégaut, for work imposed upon them. That men are not naturally idle, may, however, be inferred from the zeal with which the rich seek ‘le tumulte fatiguant des plaisirs pour se délivrer d'une oisiveté importune.’ It is a wholly fallacious argument which in the fullness of time is called upon to bear a heavy burden.¹

The peculiarity of Morelly, however, lies in the fact that in the fourth part of the Code he is so temerarious as to give a model of legislation which conforms with the intentions of Nature.² It is a curious document. Quite obviously the intentions of Nature are not what they are usually assumed to be; moreover, Nature, which ought to confine herself to generalities, condescends to questions of detail which ought to be beneath her dignity. There are three fundamental and sacred laws, which are guaranteed by Morelly to cut the roots from the vices and evils of any society. These laws are buttressed by laws on specific subjects—distributive laws, agrarian laws, sumptuary laws, laws relating to the form of government, conjugal laws, penal laws and so on. These are not certified as fundamental and sacred; and on certain matters they contain very detailed provisions, sometimes of a rather arbitrary nature. What Morelly does is to present, professedly as a code of laws—though no lawyer would recognise it as such—the picture of a communistic society which owes not a little to More's Utopia. The three fundamental and sacred laws are somewhat general in their character. The first prescribes that there shall be no private property, apart from the things of which a man is making actual use, whether for his needs, his pleasures or his daily work—a definition which already opens a whole corridor of serious doors. The second, in a rather curious phrase, requires that every citizen is to be an ‘homme public,’ maintained and employed at the expense of the public. The third imposes on every citizen the obligation to contribute to the public good according to his strength, his talents and his age.³

The Morellian commonwealth is in part an orthodox Utopia; in part it has original features. However viewed, it would be a thoroughly unpleasant place of residence. The structure rests on families, tribes, cities and, if need be, provinces; and there is a system of government by rotation which may represent an obeisance to the principle of equality, but which would certainly sacrifice the remnants of efficiency. As in Utopia, goods are accumulated in, and distributed from, public magazines. In the event of a shortage of ‘provisions d'agrément,’ there may be a suspension or restriction of supplies. Essential goods are, however, dealt with on a different basis: ‘on prendra garde, avec soin, que ces accidens n'arrivent pas à l'egard de choses universellement nécessaires.’ ⁴ That ought to be quite enough to put a stop to a bad harvest. Every citizen works in agriculture from the age of 20 to 25, which again brings an echo from Utopia. Boys and girls are sorted out at the age of five, and entrusted to a curious rota of fathers and mothers, who do duty consecutively for periods of five days. It does not seem a very effective system of education; fortunately, education seems to end at the age of ten. At that age the children pass to the workshops: indeed, those who are bright may have acquired before then the rudiments of their destined trade. They are married off at the earliest possible moment, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen; and all marriages take place together at the beginning of the year. Religious, metaphysical and philosophical doctrine is prescribed, and no departure tolerated. Children are not to have their minds ‘imbued’ with any ‘fable, conte, ou fictions ridicules.’¹ The animosity of Utopians towards Red Riding Hood is deep-seated and ineradicable. There is an astonishing wealth of detailed provisions regarding divorce: Utopia apparently does not guarantee connubial felicity. One provision is so surprising that it deserves to be expiscated; the children (both sexes) remain with the father in the event of a divorce, and the woman whom he has last married will alone be regarded as their mother; none of those who have preceded her may take the title with regard to the children of the husband. This may be in conformity with the intentions of Nature, but one would like to know the sources of Morelly's information.

Lastly, these laws partake in part of the nature of the laws of the Persians and the Medes. The section dealing with government (foolish enough in itself) is, like the fundamental laws, to be reputed sacred and inviolable: ‘they cannot be changed or abrogated by anyone soever.’² Morelly shows a ghoulish enjoyment in the prospect of punishing his offenders, though it is odd that in a world where it was to have been ‘impossible de toute impossibilité’ for man to err, there should still be a place for penal laws. He is not the first of whom it may be said that the latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. These laws for the restraint of criminals are, however, ‘aussi douces qu'efficaces.’ Morelly's ideas of a ‘douce’ punishment are somewhat peculiar. There are two grades of offenders, those who have merited separation from society for a time, and those who have deserved to ‘die civilly’—in other words to be separated perpetually from their fellows. In the least agreeable and most barren part of the country, Morelly contemplates the creation of a gloomy prison and a cemetery in close proximity. The prison with the heavy gratings is not, indeed, for those who would tamper with the laws. It is reserved for minor offenders, doing time—adulterers, those who speak disrespectfully of the Senators, and such small fry. Those who have deserved to die civilly, the would-be tamperers with the law, are accommodated in the cemetery, in spacious caverns with heavy iron bars, until they are not merely civilly dead, but dead in very deed. Thereafter the cavern becomes their tomb. It is an arrangement which is at least ultimately economical in the matter of transport; and again one can but wonder at the intentions of Nature.

Doubtless few will dissent from the verdict of M. Janet that this is indeed ‘un esprit vulgaire, et de bas étage,’ and that his is a socialism without light and without culture. This, however, does not prevent him from having given light, albeit a murky light, to others. Morelly and Mably indeed go hand in hand for many years, the inspiration of the egalitarian side of the French Revolution, culminating in the mysterious conspiracy of Babeuf. Babeuf was right when he said that the author of Le Code was the leader of his conspiracy: that he happened to call him Diderot is irrelevant. What chiefly astonishes and offends us to-day is perhaps not so much Morelly's shallow pilferings from all ages and his total lack of comprehension and profundity in face of the problems with which he professes to grapple, as his effrontery in fathering on Nature the details of a constitution and a system of law of which (apart from hints from Plato and More) no one but he could be the begetter. History, unfortunately, demands a place even for foolish people, and Morelly cannot be ignored here, partly because of his relation to Babeuf; partly (though one says it with regret) because in certain respects he holds out a hand to Fourier.

(d) BABEUF

At the portals of what purports to be a history of thought, Babeuf—Gracchus Babeuf or François Noël Babeuf, according as one prefers his familiar adopted name or his forgotten baptismal name—should perhaps knock in vain; for there are those who have suggested that Babeuf was innocent of thought. Yet he has a place in history, and in some ways is a portent. Babeuf represents a combination of Mably and Morelly, transferred to the field of action. The pessimistic shrug of the shoulders with which Mably had acknowledged the futility of doing anything is replaced by a demoniacal subterranean energy, aiming at the destruction of all things. On the theoretical side, the doctrine is unalloyed Mably-Morelly, apart from such minor modifications and variations of emphasis as inevitably emerge when an accepted point of view is restated in the light of another environment. Babeuf had not enjoyed the ample surroundings which had enabled Mably to discourse frigidly of equality in classical dialogues. On the contrary, poverty had lurked incessantly by his doorway. It would probably be true to say that Babeuf was not without envy in his heart, envy of those who had been more kindly treated in the lottery of life. His appeal for a higher way of life is accordingly addressed to the lower instincts and passions of mankind. Babeuf is thus of interest as showing the logical continuation, downhill, of Mably and Morelly, when their gospel is accepted by one who is not beset by academic jitters, as was Mably. He is also of interest because, in the rage for destruction which finally consumed him and his sect, the Babouvists are a connecting link with nihilism and later destructive anarchism.

The stormy life and the tempestuous death of Babeuf are part of the history of the French Revolution. The barest bones, designed to ‘place’ him, must suffice here. Born in 1764, he was already a provincial journalist, practising in Amiens on Le Correspondent Picard, before the Revolution sucked him into the Parisian vortex. He became a figure on the extreme left-wing, assumed the name of Caius Gracchus, and was ever afterwards known as Gracchus Babeuf. Also, without any authority apart from his own mere volition, he called himself the ‘Tribune of the People,’ and in the course of time published under this title a paper which periodically went underground. After the fall of Robespierre and under the reaction of 1795 (la réaction thermidorienne), Babeuf developed an extraordinary subterranean activity, which culminated in the notorious ‘Conspiration.’ The object of the conspiracy, engineered by the ‘Secte des Egaux’ was to overthrow the existing government and to establish complete and ‘real’ equality. The whole story of the conspiracy has about it a flavour of fantastic melodrama, and in view of its wide ramifications and extensive publicity, the existing government was rather obtuse not to have become alive to the danger sooner than it did. It may be that we of our generation have little experience of conspiracies of this nature; yet, even allowing for our disability in this respect, it is difficult to resist the impression that the conspirators were melodramatically acting the part of plotters, and were greatly enjoying the experience. In time they established a ‘directoire secret de salut public.’ There is a curious document enacting that ‘the people is in insurrection against tyranny,’ preceded by four pages of clauses, each beginning with ‘considérant que...’ for all the world as though they were the I.L.O. in full session.¹ It is not thus, one imagines, that conspiracies are usually run. At the last moment, the plot was betrayed by a traitor to the cause, Georges Grisel. The leaders were arrested, and a somewhat wearisome and protracted trial ensued. In the end, Babeuf and his chief supporter Darthe were condemned to death. Across the distance of years, it is rather surprising that in so far-reaching a conspiracy, justice was supposed to be satisfied with a mere two capital sentences. The final scene has an element of ghoulishness which happily is almost unique. True to the inspiration of the name ‘Gracchus’ and the old Roman Stoic virtues which it suggested, Babeuf and Darthe endeavoured to fall on each other's swords after being condemned. Such a method of suicide obviously calls for a certain technique of its own, nor is suicide the kind of thing in which the necessary dexterity can be acquired by practice. The conspirators merely succeeded in grievously wounding each other, so that they bled profusely until their execution next day (24th February, 1797): it was what Buonarotti rightly calls ‘une exécution sanglante.’

Even in the most summary account of Babeuf, this fellow-conspirator, Buonarotti, has an indefeasible right to be mentioned, for in a sense he supplies the epilogue. It is not clear why he escaped the fate of Babeuf, for, assuming guilt, he seems to have been as guilty as any. In his own words the Tribunal merely said to him and some others: ‘Allez traîner une vie malheureuse loin de la patrie dans des climats brûlans et meurtriers,’¹ which may be accepted as an ornate paraphrase of a sentence of banishment. But before the end Buonarotti had given the martyrs a solemn pledge that he would one day write the full story of the conspiracy, and justify their memories. He kept his word, although not until after the lapse of some thirty years of vagabondage. His Conspiration pour l'Egalité, dite de Babeuf (1828), with as many ‘pièces justicatives’ as time had spared, was until quite recent years the real source of our knowledge regarding Babeuf. Moreover, though it may not be a great book, it is a book of some interest as carrying still further the Mably-Morelly tradition.

A consideration of Babeuf raises a question of great historical interest, which in its time has been much discussed. How far was the French Revolution a movement inspired by socialist ideas in the ordinary acceptation of the phrase? The fullest answer in one sense has been given by M. Janet.² The lectures which lie at the base of M. Janet's book were delivered in 1872. Doubtless the acid test of what should be regarded as socialism in 1872 is not what would be accepted as appropriate to-day; doubtless also M. Janet was sufficiently near the generation of Sudre, Thonissen, and Reybaud, to have an instinctive feeling that socialism was of the devil. Yet, with these reservations, the conclusions of M. Janet are probably substantially correct. For Janet, socialism covers generally any doctrine which undermines the principle of private property; just as conversely (if it is conversely) the strongest weapon against socialism is private property. Now according to Janet, ‘nowhere, at no time, and in no country, has the right of private property been more firmly claimed and more firmly guaranteed than by the Revolution.’ ³ For the detailed argument the reader must consult Janet himself; in the brevity which is here imposed, it is sufficient to recall that the right of property was indeed viewed as one of the fundamental rights of man. In the Constitution of the French Republic decreed in the year 1793, it is expressly stated (Article 2) that the natural and imprescriptible rights of man are: ‘l'égalité, la liberté, la sureté, la propriété’; and Article 16 defines the right of property as ‘celui qui appartient à tout citoyen, de jouir et de disposer à son gré de ses biens, de ses revenus, du fruit de son travail et de son industrie.’¹ Much of Babeuf's revolutionary activity was directed to getting back to the Constitution of 1793, as a stepping-stone, but he never disguised the fact that its consecration of property was, in his eyes, a grave blot. Buonarotti quotes with approval the superior version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted by Robespierre, where property is defined as ‘le droit qu'a chaque citoyen de jouir et de disposer à son gré de la portion de bien qui lui est garantie par la loi.’ Those who attacked property were, according to Janet, a dissident minority, standing apart from the main stream of thought and action, which, while it doubtless interfered with property in various ways, never dreamed of questioning the fundamental right of property. Here then lies the significance of Babeuf; he was a protest against the Revolution stopping halfway in its task; in a world that spoke of Equality, he clamoured for ‘real’ equality, which (he held) could not be attained so long as property existed.

Even a brief summary of Babeuf runs the risk of being a tedious repetition, on a different plane, of a point of view encountered elsewhere. Yet though the substance does not differ materially from what may be found in those who inspired him, the flavour in Babeuf is different; and enough must be said to catch, if it be possible, something of this peculiar flavour. Apart from what he wrote for Le Tribun du Peuple, Babeuf was a very valiant correspondent. M. Maurice Dommanget has brought together in a volume of Pages Choisies as much as—indeed probably a great deal more than—anyone is likely to desire in the matter of Babeuf's writings. For that matter a very lengthy letter of July 28, 1795, together with No. 35 of Le Tribun du Peuple, are sufficient to give the clotted cream of Babeuf's views on things in general.²

The starting-point is inevitably the familiar contention that Nature has made all men equal in rights and needs. If there are inequalities, the law of society should act so as to redress the balance and maintain the equality designed by Nature; but in fact it has acted in precisely the opposite direction.³ Babeuf is perhaps peculiar in the emphasis he lays on the fact that human prejudices have unjustly favoured certain occupations. Some are given ‘une valeur d'opinion.’⁴ It is a point on which he is almost inclined to nag, so that one almost suspects that the prosperity of some of his fellow-villagers had become an offence to him. In fact, all honest men are equal. Every one ‘qui a des vertus’ honours his calling, and all should therefore enjoy ‘une égale aisance.’¹ There is perhaps more originality—and up to a point more commendable originality—in his views on education. Babeuf has that pathetic faith in education, which is to be found only in those who have been denied it, and who have struggled to make good a self-confessed deficiency. It colours all his frequently expressed anxieties with regard to the future of his children. Yet to Babeuf, with his eyes intent on equality, the system of education is full of dangers. For inequality has one of its roots in the different education of rich and poor. In a phrase which has an arresting quality seldom found in Babeuf, he asserts that education has become ‘a species of property.’ Education, like other property, should therefore be something that all should share alike. There is a touch of the wild language later characteristic of the Secte des Egaux in Babeuf's exclamation that there should either be no education at all, or all should be able to have it equally. Consistently through life, he was an advocate of ‘all or nothing.’²

Where there is inequality, there must be injustice; if one has superfluity, another must lack. For Babeuf, like his immediate predecessors, is extraordinarily well informed as to the intentions of Nature, and is able to define these intentions with the utmost precision. Nature, which is described as ‘économe de ses dons,’ produces only just approximately what is useful for all the beings it creates³; apparently, Nature takes a census, and quite apart from what may be done meanwhile by the beings it creates, it sends sufficient rations and no more, like a somewhat stingy Minister of Food. It follows that if one enjoys superfluity, drawn from this nicely calculated store, somewhere else there must be someone suffering a corresponding deficiency: ‘ce qui manque au grand nombre existe dans le trop, dans le superflu du petit nombre.’⁴ By a natural transition (even though Proudhon has not yet spoken the word) this becomes a species of theft. The deficit, where there is a deficit, springs from what others have stolen—‘stolen legitimately, if you like, with the help of laws made by brigands.’ ⁵ There is here sufficient groundwork for an extreme statement of the class warfare, and Babeuf expresses it in various picturesque phrases. There is perpetual war between the starvers and the starved, les affameurs et lés affamés; a war between rich and poor; a war between those who have nothing and those who have all.⁶ Moreover, the doctrine of the class war is driven home by a liberal and oratorical appeal to the envy and the discontent of the unfortunate. Why should some have la bonne table, and others le pain noir? ⁷ How can you expect me, Babeuf, to ‘temporiser,’ to ‘politiquer,’ when I have not eaten for 48 hours; when, on rising in the morning, I do not know whether it is my old breeches, my shirt, my shabby coat, or my frayed bed-cover that I shall have to sell? ¹

In the eyes of Babeuf, as of Fourier later, everything is wrong; and in the extremely significant letter of July 28, 1795 (or should we say, of the 10th thermidor of the Year III?), addressed to Charles Germain, he comes nearer than elsewhere to a systematic indictment of the world in which we live.² Commerce exists, he says, for the purpose of pumping the sweat and blood of more or less everybody, in order to form lakes of gold for the benefit of the few; it is a Fourieresque thought, down even to the confused picture which it evokes. The idea of exploitation is hinted at on lines familiar to a later generation. There is a conspiracy (complot) of the part against the whole: the procedure, in a rather cumbrous and lumbering phrase, is to contrive to set in motion a multitude of arms without allowing those who in fact move these arms to receive their destined fruit. Wealth flows to criminal speculators, who are aided and abetted by merchants, their co-voleurs—a pleasant word. The most essential workers get least: this, in a significant phrase, is ‘la loi barbare dictée par les capitaux.’ It is a world of uncertainty: we can never be sure that we or our offspring are secure against the danger of destitution. It is a thought which obsesses Babeuf, ever yearning for his children. He has already reached the characteristic note of the later ‘Conspiration,’ in avowing that the only course is to destroy everything. Had I but the magic fairy ring, he exclaims, ‘je ferais la poussière du passé,’ and simultaneously evoke from the earth the much-dreamed-of Société des Egaux. Here, as with the anarchists of the deed, what is desired is the annihilation of all things, trusting that out of the dust of destruction a fair city may arise. And buoyed by such a hope, how blithely would Babeuf bide the stour.

Putting it otherwise, the revolution, however nobly it may have been originally designed, has turned out a misfire, above all since 1793. So long as everything that is worthless has not been overthrown, we have not yet ‘assez revolutionné pour le peuple.’ So far as the people are concerned, there has been no revolution. The revolution must be continued until it becomes the revolution of the people. Indeed, the whole thing must be done over again: la révolution est à réfaire.³ And in this, what is primarily necessary is a work of destruction.⁴

Before we glance at certain of the documents relating to the conspiracy, Buonarotti, in his capacity of literary and revolutionary executor, should perhaps be allowed to supplement Babeuf. Apart from the pièces justificatives which throw a flood of light on dark places, the chief interest of Buonarotti lies in the fact that a substantial part of the first volume is devoted to a systematic outline of the Babouvist heaven. Babeuf had been anything but systematic, and Buonarotti's re-editing of the ultimate aims of the conspirators, thirty years after the event, is a better statement than Babeuf could himself have produced. What, however, most impresses in reading Buonarotti is our nearness to Mably and Morelly. In this world of ‘égalité sans mensonge,’ the right to property is replaced by a right to an existence as happy as that enjoyed by anyone else ¹; although, obviously, a state that seeks to equalise so elusive a thing as happiness has some nice psychological problems in its path. It is a world of abundance to all, with, however, this caveat, that what cannot be ‘communicated’ to all, must be severely cut down. In effect, unless everyone is to have everything, no one is to have anything.² It is a world of simplicity, cutting out the arts and turning its back on foreign trade and the luxuries and dangers it brings with it³; a world where every citizen is a soldier, and where youth will be encamped on the frontier, but which nevertheless finds its most sure shield of defence in its simplicity and integrity ⁴; a world where there are few laws, for laws are not required where there is equality. What laws, indeed, beyond the simplest, are needed among a people who are ‘without property, and without the vices and crimes which it engenders, without commerce, without money, without taxes, without finances, without civil processes, and without poverty’?⁵ It is a world where education is to be ‘national, common and equal,’ since political equality springs from equality in education.⁶ Unfortunately, and it represents the debit side of much socialist Utopian speculation, it is also to be a world in which the individual will have no life of his own: ‘La patrie s'empare de l'individu naissant pour ne le quitter qu'à la mort.’⁷ In a world which has shed so many things that laws have become virtually unnecessary, it is odd that the State should continue as an octopus, against whose encirclements the grave alone provides a secure asylum.⁸

Even a short account of Babeuf calls imperatively for some reference to the numerous proclamations and what-nots in which his conspiracy was shrouded. Never surely was a conspiracy so amply ‘documented’: the plotters shed their ink as freely as they urged their followers to shed their blood; and the result is a curious collection of manifestos, draft decrees, and instructions which may be found among Buonarotti's pièces justificatives. They are of interest in showing the path a successful Babouvism would have followed. The most notorious is the Manifeste des Egaux, said to be the work of Sylvain Maréchal. This is a fire-eating and loud-mouthed production: the unkind might even call it rant. A few sentences will suffice:

Eh bien! We claim henceforward to live and die equals, as we have been born equals. We demand real equality, or Death; that is what we must have.

And we will have this real equality, no matter at what price. Woe to those whom we meet, coming between it and us! Woe to whomsoever offers resistance to so determined a desire.

The French Revolution is only the fore-runner of another revolution, still greater, still more solemn, and which will be the last....

We must have this equality, not merely transcribed in the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen: we must have it in our midst, under the roof of our houses. We consent to everything for its sake, to make table rase, so that we may cleave to it alone. Perish, if need be, all the arts, provided there remains to us real equality!¹

The various projects and fragments of projects, the body of decrees drawn up by the ‘insurrectionary committee’ in preparation for ‘the day,’ furnish an interesting introduction into the technique of revolution, though perhaps the ultimate lesson lies in the revelation of what should be avoided. The curious ‘Acte d'Insurrection,’ which purports to enact a state of insurrection, provides in Article 12 that all opposition will be overcome on the spot, and that those who oppose will be exterminated. More humanely (Articles 13 and 14) it provides for a free distribution of victuals to the people, and conscripts the bakers to bake bread incessantly. Article 17 provides for the goods of the enemies being distributed among the defenders of, the Fatherland.² Another projected decree enacts that poor citizens who are at the moment badly housed, will not return to their ordinary dwellings: the houses and the furniture of the former rich will be made available for their use.³

There is something refreshingly humorous in a conspiracy, of which the primary purpose is the abolition of property, drafting in advance an enactment legalising loot. After a lapse of thirty years the point had obviously begun to worry Buonarotti. It would be wrong, he says, to consider the promise of a large distribution of goods as contrary to the spirit of communism which was aimed at: Le grand point était de réussir. This surely is the disarming simplicity of old age.¹

There is further a fragment of an economic decree which seems to foreshadow something in the nature of national workshops, and is of some mild interest in tracing the affiliations of Louis Blanc.² Of more general significance, however, is a project of a police decree dealing with ‘étrangers,’ which, to avoid the implications of the words ‘stranger’ and ‘foreigner,’ should perhaps be translated as ‘outsiders.’ Those who do nothing for the Fatherland, that is, those not engaged in certain specified useful occupations (and in fact not all these), are classed as ‘outsiders,’ to whom the Republic accords ‘hospitality,’—which sounds quite honorific. In fact, their ultimate destination is one or other of the small islands off the French coast, converted into places of correction. These islands, moreover, are to be ‘rendered inacessible.’ ³ The hospitality accorded by the unborn Republic is, in short, the hospitality of the concentration camp. There may have been many reasons for the failure of the ‘Conspiration, dite de Babeuf.’ A perusal of Buonarotti leaves little doubt that one reason among others was that they all talked too much, and spent too much time elaborating draft edicts to come into force on the blessed day of revolution.

Enough—perhaps too much—of Babeuf for the narrow confines of this book. Weighed dispassionately, he may have had few gifts, apart from a certain inflammatory biliousness in his pen. In ordinary times he would have been one of the world's very small men, going to and coming from his appointed task, somewhere in Picardy. Do not let us condemn him in that he called himself Caius Gracchus; it was in accordance with the custom of the time. Less pardonable was his assumption of the title of ‘Tribune of the People’; for to such an office or dignity no man may nominate himself. Let it be remembered that he was dreadfully in earnest. Nor let us be too censorious over his censorious rebukings of the actors at Amiens, at whose hands he was condemned ‘à voir des Marquis et d'autres gens de cette espèce.’ ‘Moi republicain, moi homme libre, moi ami de l'égalité’ could hardly be expected to sit in the pit unprotestingly under such an outrage.⁴ He was a sans-culotte, and took himself seriously. Moreover, taking himself seriously, he was at times rather inclined to think well of himself, though this may have been but the workings of the inferiority complex. One feels most kindly towards Babeuf when reading his intimate letters, through which there glows such a love of wife and children as would have won the approval of Robert Burns in his more official moments. His letters written from prison in the last days almost achieve real pathos, and might have succeeded in doing so had he been able to prune somewhat the sproutings of his egotism. But even on the night before his execution, a man should not comfort his wife by foretelling the satisfaction she will feel when men say of her husband: ‘Il fut parfaitement vertueux.’ ¹

Nevertheless, when all has been said in demonstration of the inherent insignificance and commonplaceness of Babeuf, he remains vastly more interesting than many who have been more generously endowed. He represents one end of a tradition, if traditions ever do end without being immediately reborn. It is instructive, even if it be not edifying, to witness the platonic dialogues of Mably debouching in the rather fatuous decrees of La République des Egaux, conceived but never born. Babeuf is also of interest because his wild rage of destruction, his willingness to smash the universe if frustrated, is, in its intensity, something new, and for anything similar we have to await the Russian nihilists. The significance of Babeuf then is that he represents the nodal point at which the academic egalitarianism of Mably becomes transformed into the ungovernable destructiveness of left-wing anarchism.

There is another respect in which Babeuf, if certainly not unique, is at least an example of a moderately rare phenomenon. He speaks somewhere rather slightingly of Rousseau as a dreamer, the suggestion being that Rousseau was a dealer in words who did nothing. It is true that revolutionary writers have not always been revolutionaries, nor even conspirators. Even Marx beyond the age of thirty may perhaps be described as a dreamer in this sense, sowing revolutionary seed, but to the ordinary eye a mere bourgeois, living on the fringes of debt and of Hampstead. Lenin is perhaps the great example of the theoretical revolutionary carrying his theories into practice. It is a far cry from the Russian Revolution to the Conspiration des Egaux; but, to put it no higher, Babeuf would have liked to resemble Lenin.

(e) FICHTE

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) has incontestable claims to admission to a history of socialism, though there may be some doubts as to the precise chapter to which he should be shepherded. In some respects he has kinship with later German developments, in so far as German thought has always shown a marked tendency in favour of a strong State and a strict authoritarian régime. On the other hand, he is essentially of the eighteenth century, and perhaps therefore he may be included here among writers who on the whole represent late eighteenth-century impulses. Fichte may not unfairly be described as a Utopian, in the sense that the book with which we are here concerned (Der geschlossne Handelsstaat) is calculated to elicit the snorts of the practically minded; he is a philosopher; being of the eighteenth century, he moves within the framework of the idea of a Social Contract—not indeed of one contract, but of a whole plethora of contracts, which are held together and guaranteed by the State. Even of the exiguous contents of the Geschlossne Handelsstaat there is much that may here be left aside. What concerns us is his view of the functions of the State; of the relation of the State to its members, and of the members of the State to each other. The purpose of the State, in rounded language, is said to be to give to each what is his; to confirm each in his possession, and thereafter to protect him therein.¹ It is the State alone which has power to turn an indeterminate crowd into a ‘closed whole’; through it alone a right to property can be established. The distribution of functions (if one may borrow a later phrase) rests on a contract of all with all, and the underlying assumption on which the contract is based is that all should have approximately an equal share of the pleasures and amenities of life: they must alle ungefähr gleich angenehm leben können.²

Who, it may be asked, are the parties to this contract or contracts? We have, it may be, come to swallow the idea of a Social Contract, as presented by Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, without too much protest against the absurdity of the whole business—perhaps because most of us encounter these contracts at an early and unquestioning stage of our initiation into political wisdom. Elsewhere, fictitious and notional contracts reek of artificiality, and tend to provoke expressions of impatient incredulity—nowhere more so than in the case of Fichte. His contract is in the first place between the Produzenten and the Künstler, the producers of the original materials and the artificers—and ultimately as there are all manner of artificers, the number of contracts is proportionately multiplied. The substance of the contract, in very simplified language, is that each shall do his job, and stick to his job, and not interfere with the other man's job, and inevitably, of course, that each shall ebenso angenehm leben können as the others. To these presently come the merchants, the Kaufleute, with further proliferation of contracts, and obviously it is also essential that the Kaufmann should ebenso angenehm leben könne as the original producer and the artificer. The basis of all these imaginary contracts is that all should be able to enjoy an equally agreeable life.¹

It is time to introduce the State into this orgy of contracts; for in one sense the function of the State is to assure the observance of all the contracts which have thus been made.² The fact that the argument is phrased with reference to contracts which were never made and never could have been made is immaterial: what clearly emerges is a State with devastatingly extensive powers. In the first place, it must determine the number of those to be admitted to each calling, and must never allow any excess over the number deemed necessary. And in this task it must see to the provision of essentials before allowing for luxuries. There must be enough for all, before there are superfluities for some.³ The State must have an absolute power to refuse anyone the right to exercise a calling. Also there must be proof of capacity; every candidate must satisfy the Kunstverständige, the knowers-of-the-job. The number of merchants is likewise fixed, and they are under an obligation to buy or sell on demand, like the Bank of England in the matter of gold under the Act of 1925.⁴ The whole of production is to be carefully planned on the basis of requirements; and control of the machine is facilitated by the fact that merchants are guaranteed their customers and their sources of supply. There are to be bestimmte Verkäufer and bestimmte Abkäufer—registered customers, in the language of a war-tried generation.⁵

The State must also fix prices which indeed are to be unalterable for all time. Into Fichte's theory of value it is unnecessary to enter. It is not a promising avenue to take as the measure of the relative value of things, the time we can live on them respectively.⁶ His theory of value is mixed up with his theory of money, which, even on points of detail, is suggestive of Knapp, without the inconvenience of Knapp's barbarous language.¹ The State must have its own money, which must be no one else's money, and as the State can do what it likes in these matters, prices may be fixed without any variableness or shadow of turning.²

One last point may be noted in this regimented world. As is indicated by the title of his essay, Der Geschlossne Handelsstaat, Fichte aims at creating a self-contained world. No one is to be allowed to engage in foreign trade. If there must be foreign trade (and the possibility is not wholly excluded), then it should be regarded—like the making of war, of treaties and alliances—as something to be done by the State alone. Any arrangement whereby the citizen of one State is allowed to have direct dealings with the citizens of another State must in fact view them both as citizens of one State.³ The thought is not very gracefully expressed, but the implication is clear. Economic intercourse can take place only between citizens of the same state, and indeed it implies common citizenship. The frontiers within which intercourse may take place should therefore be adjusted accordingly. It is, from a different angle, akin to the physiocratic idea, that the merchant is a danger because he belongs to two countries. If goods are required from abroad—and in fact the need of imports can be cut down to the vanishing point—then the State and the State alone should do it on the basis of barter: rather pathetically, Fichte contemplates such arrangements (when necessary) as enduring to eternity, zu ewige Zeiten⁴

Fichte does not usually figure with any prominence in histories of socialism—and perhaps rightly so. The network of contracts on which he bases his view of society may be ignored as eighteenth-century convention, quite becoming in a son of the eighteenth century; much (with all respect to a great philosophical name) may be regarded as somewhat foolishly impracticable; he may be criticised for his vagueness (if such a word may be applied to a complete silence) on the important question of the machinery through which the State will discharge its high tasks. But on two points at least, he is extremely instructive for our purposes and reveals insight denied even to some of our own day.

In the first place, Fichte's idea is that of a State of unlimited competence whose primary purpose is to guarantee to all the requirements of a reasonable life. But he does not delude himself, as some of our own generation do, into the belief that a State can provide for everyone on these lines, and yet leave everyone free to do as he likes. The price of a guaranteed security lies in a sacrifice of freedom. In Fichte's vision, the citizen, if he does not become the slave of the State, at least lives subject to the constant direction and redirection of a National Service Officer. It is by Gesetz und Zwang alone—by law and compulsion—that the State may discharge its obligations.¹ In the concluding paragraphs, Fichte realises that the opposition to his visionary proposals will come from those who incessantly call aloud for freedom, free trade, freedom from supervision by the police, freedom from order and morality. To these people, he adds contemptuously, anything aiming at regularity and a firmly established uniform march of events, appears as an infringement of their natural freedom.² To authoritarians of all classes, liberalism has always been the arch-enemy. Socialism of the type outlined by Fichte is, on his own analysis, incompatible with freedom.

The other point of interest in Fichte is in the central conception of the ‘closed State,’ the enactment that none shall engage in foreign trade. This may be, and perhaps is, foolish, especially with some of Fichte's refinements; but at least it may be urged that it is at worst a foolish answer to a real difficulty, and this is always more stimulative to the advance of truth than a failure to realise that a difficulty exists, Foreign trade is for Fichte an upsetting element in the national balance sheet: it represents the roots of instability. A State cannot guarantee the undisturbed continuance of a foreign market; if, with its encouragement, its citizens embark in enterprises which may suddenly come to an end, how can it then, in the day of adversity, discharge its primary duty towards its citizens? The question of foreign trade has long been a stumbling-block in socialist speculation. For the present day, Fichte's difficulty may be put more pointedly. We are told, by an increasing multiplicity of voices, that ‘outside planning there can be no salvation. But, in effect, says Fichte, forerunner of planners,³ no one may plan who does not have under his control all the elements that enter into the plan. In this sense, foreign trade is most emphatically not subject to control. If our national plan assumes the export of so much coal to Poland and Italy, or the export of so much salted cod to South America, and so on indefinitely, and if these countries should’ suddenly decide otherwise, what then becomes of the plan? In substance, Fichte's contention was that only a self-contained unit can ‘plan’; and in this sense he was abundantly right.

CHAPTER V. WILLIAM GODWIN↩

IN the case of William Godwin (1756–1836), though indeed this is true of not a few of those we encounter in these pages, it requires resolution to keep biographical details within the prescribed minimum. For Godwin, to express it with restraint, was an unusual man—as also were Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen; and the eccentric and bizarre always have a psychological fascination for the great unenterprising bulk of humanity, whose humdrum visages conceal no hidden weakness or waywardness. Godwin appears here as the first logical and consistent exponent of anarchism. Nevertheless he was cradled in the strictest orthodox piety, and was for a stretch of years a parson and a preacher in a dissenting sect, until evil communications and his own natural bent turned him into a rebel in matters political and religious alike. His great work, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (to give it for once its full title), appearing in 1793, had an astounding success. There is a traditional tale that Pitt declined to suppress Political Justice, on the wholly unconvincing ground that a book published at three guineas could not possibly do much harm—forgetting that the thirsty multitude may buy even a three-guinea book by combining their contributions. For a number of years following his great success, Godwin was one of the most outstanding personalities and one of the most influential writers of his time. Unfortunately, having shot his bolt at the age of 37, he had the misfortune to continue alive until he was 80. It is the tragedy of Godwin's life to trace his descent through evil days, until he was utterly forgotten—‘that which was Godwin’—a miserable literary hack and a rather disreputable bookseller, steering for bankruptcy and sponging on those who could be induced to lend to him. Yet, despite the rather shady, shabby and shoddy tale of his later years, Godwin occupies a central position in the intellectual life of his times. He was not merely the Father of Anarchism, he was the husband of Mary Wollstonecroft, the first and fiercest exponent of women's rights; he was the father-in-law of Shelley; he was, by reaction, the spiritual progenitor of Malthus. The first edition of the Essay on Population, indeed, declares on its title-page that it contains ‘remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin.’

Two characteristics of the man, or perhaps two aspects of the same characteristic, should be borne in mind as explaining much in Godwin's exposition. In the first place, never was there anyone who was more entirely the embodiment of intellect and reason. There is in his life no evidence of warmth or passion, and throughout he was incapable of understanding any deviation from reason in others. It was on reason that he based his friendships, and to those who are interested in such matters nothing could be more illuminating than the story of his marriages and his projected marriages. The Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecroft, in which he has been unsympathetically accused of ‘stripping the dead body of his wife,’ provides perhaps the extreme example of this detachment from ordinary human sensibilities.

Secondly, it follows from this peculiarly intellectual bias that he was utterly destitute of common sense. When he turned to business and the affairs of this life, he could not but fail. The extreme views professed, the paradoxical propositions propounded are in all cases the perfectly logical conclusions to be drawn from the axioms and assumptions from which he sets out. But, visualising human beings merely as the vehicle of reason, he forgets the necessity and the virtue of compromising where frail men are concerned. Life in fact is not run by logic; and the man who in all things is logical—as Godwin was—who leaves no place for the forces of unreason, ends by being a fool.

For our present purpose it is sufficient to confine our attention to the Enquiry concerning Political Justice, of which the first edition, in two stupendous volumes, appeared in 1793. In the second edition (1798), Godwin on a number of points is less extreme, or, perhaps, more guarded. In this life, however, whatever the moralists say, we never can live down our first editions; and as it was by the first edition that Godwin became known and exercised his influence, the later, slightly modified version may at present be disregarded except for minor points of comparison.

Turning to the written word, we find on the threshold, and throughout as an all-pervading influence, two ideas, one of which is a gross exaggeration of any truth it may contain, and the other is almost certainly entirely erroneous. These two Idées Mères are, indeed, but the reflection of Godwin's own personality and, to a certain extent, at least, the first is common form in a good many of the writers with whom we are concerned about this time. These two dominant ideas relate, firstly, to the old problem of innate ideas, and, secondly, to the place of reason in the individual's life.

On the first point, it is of the essence of Godwin's position that we bring into this world no innate principles: ‘we are neither virtuous nor vicious as we come into existence.¹ Men are wholly and exclusively fashioned by their environment and by the influences to which they are exposed. The reason why ‘superficial observers’ are led to believe in innate ideas (and, inferentially, in natural differences among men) is that they do not realise how soon the ‘seeds of error’ may be sown, and consequently they mistake for ‘innate’ what is in fact due to the world which operates on us from the moment of our birth. In a dreadful picture, Godwin shows how by the end of the first week—indeed probably on the first day—most of us have already probably been corrupted by the world, as represented by our parents. He is referring to the infant's inarticulate cry for assistance:

In this neutral and innocent circumstance, combined with the folly and imbecility of parents and nurses, we are presented with the first occasion of vice. Assistance is necessary, conducive to the existence, the health and the mental sanity of the infant. Empire in the infant over those who protect him is unnecessary. If we do not withhold our assistance precisely at the moment when it ceases to be requisite, if our compliance or our refusal be not in every case irrevocable, if we grant anything to impatience, importunity or obstinacy, from that moment we become parties in the intellectual murder of our offspring.¹

It is an appalling and disturbing thought that the incompetent and distracted parent, not knowing when to say ‘No’ to a muling child that will not cease to mule, has already sown the seeds of vice in the next generation, and is indeed, in part, the (intellectual) murderer of his offspring. Thus early, in the first days, do the shades of the prison-house besmirch our first innocence.

The conclusion from this line of argument—and it is to be found in Owen, Bertrand Russell and elsewhere, is that there is no such thing as guilt or crime, and indeed no such thing as moral responsibility. If we are what we are by virtue of our environment, we are entirely justified in transferring to our environment the responsibility for our shortcomings. Our parents may quite properly be blamed (though they, poor things, could not help themselves), or the schools in which we are miseducated, or society which has frustrated us. Here in one sense is the depth of pessimism, in that we are all caught in the web of circumstance; but, on the other hand, there is a great hope. In proportion as environment can be improved, so will mankind rise. If the incidents which influence us could be ‘divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world.’²

The other governing idea in Godwin is to be found in a pathetic belief that men are reasonable beings capable of being persuaded, that truth when revealed will be recognised as truth, and that men will act accordingly. There are no half-shades in Godwin's world: Truth opposes error, and right opposes wrong; and in each case an intellectual proof will not merely demonstrate which is which, but will carry conviction, expressing itself in action. In short, men cannot possibly act unreasonably, and reason can always demonstrate what is right. As with Socrates, it is an intellectual problem: ‘All vice is nothing more than error and mistake reduced into practice, and adopted as the principle of our conduct.’¹ As this touching faith in the demonstrability of truth (and right behaviour) and its power to prevail is in some ways the foundation-stone in Godwin, two detached sentences may be cited as samples of many other similar expressions on this point:

Truth may be presented... in such irresistible evidence... as ultimately to conquer the most obstinate prepossessions.... It is the property of truth to spread,²

Show me in the clearest and most unambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonable in itself or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infallibly pursue that mode, as long as the views you suggested to me continue present to my mind.³

There is here little realisation of the fact that this is a complex world in which truth is a precious ore seldom mined in a pure state, and in which the problem of action is too frequently not the simple choice between right and wrong, but a choice between a number of courses of varying degrees of objectionability.

Such is the general framework within which Godwin majestically unfolds his speculations. Man is neither good nor bad, except in so far as circumstances and environment have moulded him. He is, moreover, a reasonable being who, if he could be brought to listen to the voice of reason, would inevitably do right, since the problems of life are intellectual problems.. A further enormous simplification is made by Godwin. The environment which influences man is made up of many elements: the geographical and climatic had, for instance, been emphasised by Montesquieu. But Godwin in effect thrust these aside. Man is a creature of reason, and the environment which effectively shapes him is the intellectual environment. In his own words, ‘it inevitably follows that physical causes, though of some consequence in the history of man, sink into nothing, when compared with the great and inexpressible operations of reflection.’

These successive simplifications of the problem, with the glorification of the place and power of reason, lead to what is in some ways the central Godwinian conception, that of the ‘perfectibility of man.’ If man is a function of his environment, then an approach to the perfect environment will bring with it an approach to the perfect man. The doctrine has been frequently misunderstood or misrepresented, and at times Godwin's statements, being expressed with his own peculiar extravagance, have naturally stimulated the scoffers. But in his more guarded moments, he did not so much imply that man would attain perfection (whatever that may be), as that there could and should be continual progress in the direction of perfection: and thus expressed, the doctrine is not in itself inherently absurd.

Godwin's problem, in its widest statement, is how, in the light of these principles, man may be regenerated. The weapons of regeneration are in fact three; but two of them are merely mentioned in order to be put aside, leaving the third as the theme of his two spacious volumes. Yet his brief comments on Literature and Education, the first two engines for advancing mankind, are of great interest, if not in clarifying the problem of the ascent of man, then at least in revealing the essential Godwin. With regard to Literature, he argues that there are innumerable opinions prevailing on any subject; ‘yet of all these opinions only one can be true’—a characteristically Godwinian, statement. It is the function of Literature to extirpate existing prejudices and mistakes. Truth, he says, is infallibly struck out by the collision of mind with mind. All this is rather naive in its assumption that Literature can never disseminate error, and that all argument ends in clarification and never in obfuscation. Equally naive is his contention that ‘if in any science we discover one solitary truth, it cannot be overthrown’ Literature, however, is of no use for Godwin's purposes. ‘The multitude’—he is writing in 1793—‘cannot partake of its illuminations.’¹

Education, an ‘engine of unlimited power,’ is also put aside for the present as ineffective, for a rather disconcerting reason: ‘Where must the preceptor himself have been educated, who shall thus elevate his pupils above all the errors of mankind?’² In other words, the right education demands the right teacher, who can himself be ‘right,’ only if he himself has had the right education. How indeed shall mankind escape from this, the most perfect of all vicious circles?

There remains as the third instrument of regeneration what Godwin calls ‘Political Justice,’ a vague phrase unless supplied with an interpretation. It is defined at the outset as ‘the adoption of any principle of morality or truth into the practice of a community.’³ Political Justice, as so defined, is given a pre-eminent position, because it is universal in its operation. Other influences are intermittent, but the machinery of society (and in effect Political Justice merely means the right kind of political machinery) influences a man all his life. Moreover, in the second edition, Godwin argues that Political Justice must come first, before any attempt is made to improve man in any particular point. To aim at reform in a rotten society is futile; but if the right society can be achieved, individual reforms will come unsought:

May it not be found, that the attempt to alter the morals of mankind singly and in detail is an erroneous and futile undertaking; and that it will then only be effectually and decisively performed, when, by regenerating their political institutions, we shall change their motives and produce a revolution in the influences that act upon them?⁴

And indeed, looking around, Godwin has no difficulty in proving on familiar lines that the shortcomings of man are due to the defective institutions of society, and their inevitable consequences. Thus robbery and fraud spring from the very nature of the society in which we live: ‘If every man could with perfect facility obtain the necessaries of life... temptation would lose its power,’ and in such a society ‘guilt could hardly be known but by report.’¹ Prevailing poverty has, however, repercussions in many directions:

The poor man will be induced to regard the state of society as a state of war, an unjust combination, not for protecting every man in his rights and securing to him the means of existence, but for engrossing all its advantages to a few favoured individuals, and reserving for the portion of the rest want, dependence and misery.²

Here is the class war, and in these circumstances the privileges of the rich operate as a ‘bitter aggravation’ of the calamity of the poor. The rich also become insolent, and develop ‘a temper overbearing, dictatorial and tyrannical.’ The rich, moreover, are ‘directly or indirectly the legislators of the State; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system.’ These evils are confirmed by the law, for ‘legislation is in almost every country grossly the favourer of the rich against the poor,’ and further ‘the administration of law is not less iniquitous than the spirit in which it is framed.’ Is it any wonder that the poor are ‘stung with the furies of envy, resentment and despair’?³ Such, so far as possible in his own words, is Godwin's analysis of the baneful effect of our present society on its members. It does not perhaps differ greatly from what may be found in many other quarters, being largely a blend of the class war and the class State. If there is perhaps a distinguishing note, it may be that Godwin lays more emphasis on the insolence of the rich.

As against this mountain of injustice, what does justice require of us? The answer is of an astonishing simplicity when stated in general terms, though doubtless not so easy of interpretation and practice as Godwin assumed. ‘If justice have any meaning,’ he observes, ‘it is just that I should contribute everything in my power to the benefit of the whole.’⁴ There is, as is well known, another maxim in these matters which has enjoyed a considerable circulation, to the effect that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. Godwin glances at this rival principle somewhat disparagingly, remarking that ‘this maxim, though possessing considerable merit as a popular principle, is not modelled with the strictness of philosophical accuracy.’ It overlooks the fact that my various neighbours and I may have very different values for society.

Here we come to the essential core of Godwin. This principle of justice, defined as imposing on each the duty of contributing everything in his power to the benefit of the whole, combined with the infallibility of human reason in guiding our actions, explains all the Godwinian paradoxes which so offended his own and later ages. All the rest of Godwin is merely an unfolding, in their various applications, of these two principles, urged ruthlessly to their frigidly logical ultimate conclusions.

As a preliminary to accompanying Godwin on his tour of destruction, it may be as well to be clear on a fundamental point. Godwin, living in an age much attached to the rights of man, is emphatic that there never can be rights, but duties only. A ‘right’ in its very essence implies a discretion to do or not to do; a right may or may not be exercised; it involves an option. But it is of the essence of Godwin's philosophy that the principle of justice should guide our every action, and that our reason will interpret to us what justice is. That we must do, and no other. To do anything else is injustice, and there can be no right to do injustice. We never do have an option. Every shilling that we possess has already ‘received its destination from the dictates of justice.’¹ Justice commands us in everything, leaving nowhere the minutest crevice for choice or discretion.

Not a talent do we possess, not a moment of time, not a shilling of property, for which we are not responsible at the tribunal of the public, which we are not obliged to pay into the general bank of common advantage. Of every one of these there is an employment which is best, and that best justice obliges us to select.²

There we have Duty, a very stern daughter of the voice of God. I can only have a discretion, i.e. rights, in matters of total indifference, as for example, whether I shall sit on the right or left side of the fire, whether I shall dine on beef to-day or to-morrow. Even this field within which we may choose is much smaller than might be imagined, since before an option can be allowed,

it must be proved that my choice on one side or the other can in no possible way contribute to the benefit or injury of myself or of any other person in the world.³

The very essence of rights consists in their ‘absolute nugatoriness and inutility.’ It will be conceded that life on these high moral altitudes would be somewhat exhausting: we are invited to live on a plane where even the boarding of a passing tram is only permissible after a long period of stubborn questioning.

In the light of Godwinian justice, what should be our attitude to our friends, and to our kith and kin? Godwin resuscitates for us the fatuous fable of Fénelon and the housemaid. They are trapped in a blazing Palace, on the point of sizzling in the flames. Only one can be saved. Which shall it be? Obviously, the Archbishop every time. Everyone who has stuck in the middle of Télémaque will admit that Fénelon is vastly more important to humanity than a whole registry of housemaids, and that even in time of war. But if the housemaid had been my wife or mother—awful thought, if I had myself been the housemaid? The answer remains the same: Fénelon still has it, because justice tells me that the life of Fénelon ought to be saved at the expense of my wife, my mother or even myself. ‘What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?’¹

Let us advance from friendship to gratitude. In the case cited, should not gratitude to my mother (assuming she were involved) have urged me to drag her out and leave the Archbishop behind? By no means: ‘gratitude is no part either of justice or virtue.’² As always, we must have justice, pure unadulterated justice. Gratitude means preferring some one on grounds other than his superior usefulness or worth, when justice would have dictated another course. Anyone who does from motives of gratitude what he would not otherwise have done is therefore acting unjustly. As Godwin expresses it elsewhere tersely and in a somewhat abbreviated form: ‘Gratitude is a vice and not a virtue.’³

Sliding down the slippery slope, we come, on a very different plane from Machiavelli, to the Machiavellian problem of the obligation to observe engagements. Clearly on Godwinian principles there can be no virtue in keeping promises merely because they are promises. We must always and everywhere do justice; that is to say, we must do what at the moment we are satisfied most conduces to the general good. In deciding what is justice, a past promise is an irrelevant consideration; but Godwin had better express it in his own language:

‘I have promised to do something just and right.’ This certainly I ought to perform. Why? Not because I promised, but because justice prescribes it. ‘I have promised to bestow a sum of money upon some good and respectable purpose. In the interval between the promise and my fulfilling it, a greater and nobler purpose offers itself, and calls with an imperious voice for my co-operation.’ Which ought I to prefer? That which best deserves my preference. A promise can make no alteration in the case. I ought to be guided by the intrinsic merits of the objects, and not by any external and foreign consideration. No engagements of mine can change their intrinsic claims.¹

The case against the binding nature of promises may be stated in two forms. Firstly, the man who intimates that when the time comes to decide in any matter, he will be guided by considerations other than those which at that future date will be present to his mind, is acting viciously.² Because he has committed one error, that is no reason why he should be guilty of a second. In the language of a later anarchist, grappling with the same problem: ‘Because I was a fool yesterday, is that any reason why I should be a fool to-day?’ A variant of this is emphasised in the second edition. We are (it is optimistically assumed) always learning. To bind ourselves now as to how we shall act in the future is to preclude ourselves from the use of the knowledge we may have gained in the interval.³ Such (doubtless with other considerations) are the grounds for the sweeping assertion that promises are, absolutely considered, an evil.⁴ In a delicious phrase, dealing with the political side of the question, Godwin reveals the depths of turpitude which may be plumbed by those who teach that promises should be kept: ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘to imagine a principle of more injurious tendency, than that which shall teach me to disarm my future wisdom by my past folly.’⁵

If the taint of vice adheres to the giving and keeping of promises, what shall we make of marriage, which is supposed to rest on promises from which death alone normally offers release and an avenue of escape? Rather oddly, Godwin launches his frontal attack on marriage primarily because it demands co-operation. It is the true anarchist who proclaims that ‘everything that is usually understood by the term co-operation, is in some degree an evil.’⁶ To be dependent on the convenience of others is anathema to Godwin, and indeed it is probably true that the necessity of fitting in with others as part of a machine may very well conflict with the awful dictates of justice which, as we have seen, lay down for me how the last minute of my time must be spent. Godwin's argument may appear trivial, yet two short illustrations are revealing:

Why should we have common meals? Am I obliged to be hungry at the same time that you are? Ought I to come at a certain hour, from the museum where I am working, the recess where I meditate, or the observatory where I remark the phenomena of nature, to a certain hall appropriated to the office of eating; instead of eating, as reason bids me, at the time and place most suited to my avocations?⁷

It is still worse when a man is also obliged to consult the convenience of others. If I be expected to eat or work in conjunction with my neighbour, it must either be at a time convenient to me, or to him, or to neither of us. We cannot be reduced to a clock-work uniformity.¹

How to escape co-operation in an industrial world based on division of labour is, admittedly, something of a problem. It is perhaps somewhat aside from our path, but it is extremely illuminating to note Godwin's speculative hints as to the way of escape. May there not be such an improvement of machinery that the most extensive operations may yet some day be within the reach of one man, so that any one will be able to do anything (and apparently everything), as and when he chooses, without being dependent on others? In a homely illustration he visualises a plough being turned into a field to perform its office without the need of superintendence. There are hints of concerts given by a one-man orchestra in order to relieve the musicians from ‘the miserable state of mechanism’ which has already become a ‘topic of mortification and ridicule.’ It cannot, however, be said that Godwin squarely confronts the difficulties in the way.²

It is interesting on this point to note the very different grounds on which Rousseau and Godwin alike object to co-operation. Rousseau in effect holds that whenever two people come together, one will take advantage of the other. Godwin's objection to having breakfast with Mrs. Godwin is based on the probability that the workings of their respective digestive organs may not synchronise. On these lines, and on his first principles, it is easy to see why Godwin condemns marriage. Perhaps the argument may be grouped under three main headings. Firstly, marriage rests on promises which should never be given; we should never bind our freedom of action. Secondly, marriage involves co-operation, and co-operation must mean some degree of dependence of one on the other, which must again entail some disobedience to the dictates of one's own conscience in the matter of justice. Thirdly (and more cryptically), ‘all attachments to individuals, except in proportion to their merits, are plainly unjust.’³ We should, he adds, be the friends of man rather than of particular men: presumably, though there is a prejudice to the contrary, we should be the friends of woman rather than of particular women. Expressed in this summary form, Godwin's argument against marriage may seem a relatively tepid affair. In fact he reserves his most glowing eloquence for his denunciation of marriage as a system of fraud and as the most odious of all monopolies.⁴

So far we have disposed of friendship; we have seen that gratitude is a vice; that promises are an evil, and that marriage is a fraud. It remains to abolish the State, Law and Property.

When we turn to the question of government, two general conclusions follow from the Godwinian assumptions. The first is that all government is an evil: we are perpetually reminded that while society may be a blessing, government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, springing from our weaknesses.¹ Government should therefore be restricted to a minimum, and we should moreover aim at reducing the scope of government still further:

Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished.²

Further the individual can never shed his moral responsibility by sheltering behind the State. He remains subject to his own conscience; the voice of conscience is addressed to him directly, and not mediately through the State:

No man can transfer to another the keeping of the conscience and his judging of his duties.... No consent of ours can divest us of our moral capacity.³

Putting this last point in somewhat different words, there is in Godwin's scheme of things no place for obedience; nor can there be, if on every occasion our own conscience, for each of us, is a sufficient and imperious commander, not to be disobeyed. The dictates of justice exhaust the field; when we have lived up to the fundamental Godwinian principle, ‘what province is there left to the disposal of obedience?’¹ Indeed, expressed in the extreme form which Godwin always loved: ‘The first lesson of virtue is, “Obey no man.”’² The compliance we yield to a government is, or should be, of the same nature as the compliance we yield to a wild beast, which may force us to go whither we would not.³ In short, obedience, when we disapprove, rests solely on force majeure.

The second general conclusion to be inferred from Godwinian assumptions is that, in so far as government is necessary, it is a purely intellectual problem to determine what the form of government should be. For the somewhat dubious reason that truth is single and uniform, ‘there must in the nature of things be one best form of government, which all intellects, sufficiently roused from the slumber of savage ignorance, will be irresistibly incited to approve.’⁴ Also, as becomes more explicit in the second edition, this best form of government will be suitable to all peoples: ‘If one form of government makes one nation happy, why should it not equally contribute to the felicity of another?’⁵

Thus armed, it is an easy task to turn to the various accepted types of government, and show how utterly absurd each and all of them are. Godwin follows the traditional classification of types of government into Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy—the rule of one, of a few, of many—which by long descent derives from Aristotle. It makes the problem somewhat too facile. Governments, at least in the modern world, are not so neatly classifiable; and even in Godwin's time, the monarchies of Western Europe could hardly be regarded as conforming to the irresponsible and absolute rule of one. It is unnecessary to delay unduly over his exposure of the absurdities of monarchy or aristocracy. Bearing in mind that he is dealing with a copybook king and a copybook aristocracy, made to conform to an unreal definition, he declaims the obvious—though, be it added, with oratory and effect.

For in the imagined world in which Godwin visualises a notional Prince, that Prince is inevitably badly educated. Truth is a stranger to his ears-; he never learns fortitude.⁶ By his very position, every King is by unavoidable necessity the enemy of the human race.⁷ The picture is as black, or blacker, when we turn to survey the corruption of courts, and observe how the contamination extends downwards to the subjects of the King. To one of Godwin's appalling honesty and disconcerting love of the literal truth, the fundamental defect of monarchy is that it is founded on imposture.¹ Kings possess no intrinsic superiority over their subjects; and the pretence that things are other than they are spreads falsehood through the whole of society. Nor is the situation any better if we turn to an elective monarchy,² a limited monarchy,³ or a president with regal powers.⁴ A limited monarchy merely brings new absurdities. The doctrine that the King can do no wrong inevitably annoys Godwin. It is not true; and to the extent to which it is supposed to embody a constitutional principle, it reduces the ‘miserable wretch’ to being no more than a ‘vacant and colourless mirror.’ Remembering also the first lesson of virtue (which is ‘Obey no man’), it will be realised how absurd, or rather how ‘fraught with degradation and meanness’ is the very name of subject. Can an honest man honestly acknowledge a superior—being ‘subject,’ as he is, only to the laws of justice? But indeed it is almost enough to fall back on the celebrated dictum of Montesquieu (whom he misunderstands and mistranslates) to the effect that ‘we must not expect under a monarchy to find the people virtuous.’⁵

Aristocracy, as a form of government, need not delay us, though to a certain extent it delayed Godwin.⁶ Again he rather labours the obvious. The whole idea of heredity is absurd, an insult upon reason and justice. At considerable length he dilates in his own language on the fairly obvious truth that the peer and the mechanic are examples of the same biped. Again there is the curse of the opulent, and therefore enervating, education. Like monarchy, aristocracy is founded on falsehood; if anything, it operates more harshly than monarchy. It accentuates inequalities, as it accentuates the pursuit of wealth.

Even at the first encounter, it is probable that most readers will find a certain air of unreality about Godwin's denunciations of monarchy and aristocracy: anyone who knows anything about anything must feel that he is not getting to grips with his subject, and that he is tilting, for instance, not so much at monarchy as at his idea of what monarchy, on a theoretical definition, ought to be. But if his rhetoric does not illumine his subject, at least it throws light on Godwin himself; for his criticisms reveal a naive, impractical, intensely earnest and honest man, whose honesty is rooted in a horrible literalness. He has not learned to appreciate the conventions or the virtue of compromise; he has not learned that there are many things that are not worth troubling about, and that, if any one cares to say so, life is full of conventional lies which, even at the Day of Judgment, will, we trust, matter not at all. Honourable members need not necessarily be honourable, and a Serene Highness has, presumably, occasional lapses from the Heights of Serenity; we do not always meet with gladness those whom we say we are glad to meet. But to Godwin such trifles represented the poison of falsehood choking the integrity of the nation. The House of Lords makes his indignation almost incoherent; he never realises how humorous an institution the Peerage really is.

The optimistic may hope that democracy will present a more pleasing prospect. And in a sense it does. Doubtless there are dangers; for as the unwise outnumber the wise, democracy may be at the mercy of ignorance and folly. Yet despite this and other obvious perils, democracy is admitted to be ‘greatly preferable’ to other systems; and by speaking and acting the truth—though this is difficult on Godwinian standards—the dangers of democracy may be avoided. But any satisfaction that this conclusion may afford vanishes when we reflect on how National Assemblies in fact behave and conduct their affairs.

Firstly, they produce a fictitious unanimity. But let Godwin himself speak:

In reality all matters that are brought before such an assembly are decided by a majority of votes, and the minority, after having exposed with all the power of eloquence and force of reasoning of which they are capable the injustice and folly of the measures adopted, are obliged in a certain sense to assist in carrying them into execution. Nothing can more directly contribute to the depravation of the human understanding and character. It inevitably renders mankind timid, dissembling and corrupt.¹

Secondly, national councils (i.e. representative bodies) bring about an unnatural uniformity of opinion. Men tie themselves to a party; every one considers ‘the effects which the opinions he avows will produce on his own success.’²

Thirdly, there is the absurdity of terminating a discussion by a vote. Not merely does the speaker aim at a transitory effect rather than a permanent conviction, but there is the ludicrous spectacle of men ‘weighing particles and adjusting commas.’ And finally there is ‘that intolerable insult upon all reason and justice, the deciding upon truth by the casting up of numbers.’¹

It will be observed that we have here come to the essence of anarchism. The objection to democracy is that, being still a form of government, it is still a tyranny, in which the minority is bound against its will by the decision of the majority and compelled to do what it would not. Godwin, it will be noticed, very subtly insinuates that the measures imposed by the majority are characterised by ‘injustice and folly’: the minority in fact is right.

Democracy, indeed, only becomes tolerable if the National Assembly (the machinery of democracy) meets at very rare intervals and on special occasions only: ‘In a country in which universal truth was already established there would be little need of a representative assembly.’² Either they should be elected only for extraordinary emergencies, or they should sit periodically, as for example, for one day in the year. Our purpose should be to ‘annihilate the quackery of Government.’³

From this orgy of destruction, what positive suggestions emerge? Briefly, after enunciating certain impeccable principles of benevolence towards other nations, it is argued, firstly, that there is unnecessary complication of government, and secondly, that small territories, as units, are preferable. The only two legitimate purposes for which a government may exist are, on the usual laissez faire lines, (i) the suppression of injustice against individuals, and (ii) defence against external invasion. But the former of these merely calls for an area large enough to provide for the institution of a jury to deal with offences and questions regarding property.⁴ In fact, on the basis of small areas, comparable to a parish, the world could govern itself without knowing it was doing so. Controversies would not arise between parishes; and so far as the criminal is concerned, he would be kept in check ‘by the general inspection that is exercised by the members of a limited circle over the conduct of each other,’⁵ somewhat after the manner of the Sick Visitors in the older Friendly Societies. If for any reason, at long intervals, an Assembly should be required, it will ultimately be sufficient to ‘invite’ the various parishes to cooperate for the common advantage.⁶ ‘Invitation’ takes the place of command, and in the internal administration the same pleasant distinction holds good. When the whole species shall have become ‘reasonable and virtuous,’ the task of the jury will take a new form: ‘It will then be sufficient for them to invite the offenders to forsake their errors.’¹ In a world of men full of Godwinian reason, what more could possibly be required? Thus government is reduced to a National Assembly which (if possible) never meets, a suggestion of a Parish Council, though in fact the ‘general inspection’ of the inhabitants does the trick, and juries who invite offenders to forsake their wicked ways. As, however, the whole argument tends to prove that there will be no offenders, the juries will perpetually wallow in a spate of white gloves. In all essentials government has been abolished.

Having abolished government and the State, it may seem somewhat otiose to make a special holocaust of the Law; yet there are reasons for holding a separate inquest on the Law, and demonstrating its monstrosities. In the first place, Law is not really urgently required, ‘if a society be contented with the rules of justice.’² But apart from this, the whole conception of Law is open to numerous objections, of which three in particular may be specified, as revealing the Godwinian point of view.

Firstly, Law is endless, as it is incomprehensible. ‘Edict is heaped upon edict, and volume upon volume.’ In this welter, no action of any man is ever the same as any other: he would imply that no two murders (e.g.) are the same murder. But along comes the Law with its Procrustean bed and applies the same test to all. Hence it becomes necessary either to wrest the Law, or perpetually make new ones. Hence also arises the uncertainty of the Law: no one can foretell what the result of any action will be. It has become ‘a labyrinth without end,’ and ‘a mass of contradictions that cannot be extricated.’³

Secondly, a consideration even more offensive to Godwin, Law pretends to foretell the future. It partakes of the nature of prophecy and of promises. It takes upon itself to say what men will do, and what will happen, forgetting that in the interval we may acquire additional knowledge; it tends to produce stagnation and permanence in place of unceasing perfectibility.⁴

Thirdly, and most fundamentally—a pervasive influence through all that Godwin wrote—is the fact that Law is restraint on people in whom the beginning of virtue is that they should obey no one.

In the light of these considerations, ‘we cannot hesitate to conclude universally that law is an institution of the most pernicious tendency’; and it follows also that ‘a lawyer can scarcely fail to be a dishonest man.’ ‘This,’ adds Godwin magnanimously, ‘is less a subject for censure than for regret.’ Not only so, but in the ‘perhaps altogether impossible’ contingency of a perfectly honest lawyer being discovered, he would probably be a more pernicious member of society than the dishonest lawyer.⁵

Apart from these considerations, there are more profound reasons, stretching back to Greek philosophy, for questioning the expedience of Law. Right is something that transcends Law: Law cannot make anything right that was not right before:

Men cannot do more than declare and interpret law; nor can there be an authority so paramount, as to have the prerogative of making that to be law, which abstract and immutable justice had not made to be law previously to that interposition.¹

There is here something of the Physiocratic doctrine of the priority of Loi Naturelle; going further back, there are memories of Cicero, groping for a right superior to, and antecedent to, human law. Without in any way speaking disrespectfully of Natural Law, its obvious weakness as a guide to everyday life is that it is so singularly silent on the Isle of Wight bee disease, the muzzling of dogs, and the precise day in October on which the close time for trout should begin.

What is to take the place of Law? Again we are in a world of echoes from the past. The answer is that the true principle is to be found in ‘reason exercising an uncontrolled jurisdiction upon the circumstances of the case.’² There ought to be men among us ‘whose wisdom is equal to the wisdom of the Law,’ and we should therefore leave the decision to the wisdom of unfettered men, doing what seems right at the moment. It is the view to which Plato tends in one of his dialogues.³

Of crimes, little need be said. There is no such thing as Free Will; as has already been noted, we are entirely the results of our environment: ‘my propensities are the fruit of the impressions that have been made upon me.’⁴ In one of those extravagant phrases beloved of Godwin, ‘the assassin cannot help the murder he commits any more than the dagger.’⁵ It follows that all ideas of guilt, of crime, of desert, of accountableness are out of place. No pot in the potter's hand was ever more helpless than Man, as Godwin sees him, held in the clutch of circumstance. We are villains by necessity and fools by heavenly compulsion. ‘It is through the Lord that I fell away,’ as an earlier shirker of moral responsibility expressed it, with a greater semblance of piety than would have been proper to the later Godwin. Moreover, we must remember that no two crimes were ever alike. Who can fathom the hidden impulses of the criminal, or measure the temptations by which he may have been beset? Robert Burns, in more enduring words, has said something to the same effect. On these matters, Godwin rather naively suggests that the criminal is probably better informed than the judge.¹ The logical conclusion of the Doctrine of Necessity in this extreme form is the abolition of the criminal law altogether. Godwin, as always—though indeed it is characteristic of most anarchist writers—has infinite faith in the power of Reason. As with Socrates, sin is ignorance. Demonstrate to the supposed criminal what is right, and he cannot help doing it: ‘if they made him understand with how much reluctance they had been induced to employ the force of the society against him, if they presented truth to his mind with calmness, perspicuity and benevolence... his reformation would be almost infallible.’²

We reach the last stage in this long process of annihilation, when we come to property—though indeed the essential Godwinian doctrine with regard to property is already contained in the doctrine that under the dictates of justice, all that we have has already had its final destination determined, so that we may not enjoy the free disposal of so much as a penny, or of a moment of time. On this view, surveying that marginal penny in my pocket, to whom does it in fact belong? Obviously, to him to whom its possession is most beneficial:

To whom does any article of property, suppose a loaf of bread, justly belong? To him who most wants it, or to whom the possession of it will be most beneficial. Here are six men famished with hunger, and the loaf is, absolutely considered, capable of satisfying the cravings of them all. Who is it that has a reasonable claim to benefit by the qualities with which this loaf is endowed? They are all brothers perhaps, and the law of primogeniture bestows it exclusively on the eldest. But does justice confirm this award? The laws of different countries dispose of property in a thousand different ways; but there can be but one way which is most conformable to reason.³

It follows also that when we give, we merely do what we ought to do, and can claim no merit for our action; in fact we are merely handing property to its rightful owner, or at least to some one with a greater claim to it than we possess. In all this matter we have deluded ourselves or been deluded, and have been taught ‘to treat the practice of justice, not as a debt, which it ought to be considered, but as an affair of spontaneous generosity and bounty.’

The consequence of this has been that the rich, when they bestowed the most slender pittance of their enormous wealth in acts of charity, as they were called, took merit to themselves for what they gave, instead of considering themselves as delinquents for what they withheld.¹

Into the evils that result from the existence of property, the sense of dependence, the truckling spirit, the pride and the crimes which its presence or absence engenders, it is unnecessary to enter. Though rich in Godwinian phrases, the discussion adds little to the picture, as it adds little to what others have said.

Such for our purposes are the main points in Godwin. He is, it will be observed, the complete anarchist, and when, with his scythe of reason and justice, he has finished mowing in the field of human hypocrisy, singularly little is left standing. Also, of course, though he is a universal destroyer, the work of destruction is inspired by the highest of motives. Godwin was an impossibly good man, of impossibly high ideals; and he is in himself almost sufficient confirmation of the old saying that the anarchist is a man who is too good for this world. And it fits in with the picture, though at first sight it is somewhat astonishing, to note how singularly ‘unrevolutionary’ Godwin is. There is to be no rebellion, no revolution as ordinarily understood, no violence, no tyrannicide. In the matter of martyrdom, Godwin expresses the view that he would rather convince men by his arguments, than seduce them by his example. No doubt so would most martyrs; but the Godwinian elimination of emotion and of passion is noteworthy. Moreover, who knows what opportunities of usefulness might offer themselves in future, should life be prolonged?² There may have to be a certain amount of passive resistance; but otherwise Godwin shows infinite faith in the power of talk. ‘Show people the truth,’ is the beginning and end of Godwin's strategy. ‘The phalanx of reason is invulnerable,’³ but an appeal to force may have a dubious issue. What is required is an ‘universal illumination.’ If that can be achieved, ‘not a sword will need to be drawn, not a finger to be lifted up.’⁴ A much later generation dreamed of a revolution à bras croisés; Godwin's revolution was to be, if anything, more easily accomplished.

Or again, take that vexed question of the right or duty of tyrannicide, so much discussed throughout the ages. Godwin deals with the matter on the level of a cold intellectual logical syllogism: ‘either the nation, whose tyrant you would destroy, is ripe for the assertion and maintenance of its liberty, or it is not.’ In the former case, the tyrant should be deposed, ‘with every appearance of publicity’; in the latter case, it will do no good and may do much harm to remove, or attempt to remove, the tyrant, before in fact conditions are ready for his removal.¹ Everywhere, it is not martyrdom and tyrannicide and all that sort of thing that we require, but ‘illumination.’ Given light and still more light, given truth and still more demonstrations of the truth, and all problems solve themselves.

Even in the matter of property, Godwin is perhaps less revolutionary than appears at first sight. This is above all true if reference be made to the second edition, where Godwin, on certain points, assumes a garment of greater restraint. But even in the first edition it should be remembered that Godwin mingles his thoughts of the present with fantasies of the future, when men will labour but for half a day, and will nevertheless live abundantly, because they live simply. In such a world of superlative abundance and abnegation, the God-winian principles in property will clearly be less difficult to apply. Moreover, it is fairly clear that Godwinian justice does not entitle anyone to walk off with my property, merely because he considers his needs greater than mine. It is for me to decide: it is on my conscience and judgment, and not on his, that the decision hinges. Admittedly, once my judgment has done its work and my conscience has spoken, I have no option. In a sense, Godwin does not deny property: all he does is to restrict infinitely the use the owner may make of his property. There is a rather ridiculous illustration which compresses Godwin's attitude into a grotesque sentence. If a man wants my table, I have apparently a choice of three answers. I may tell him to make one for himself (a course which would probably commend itself to most); if I happen to be more skilful in making tables, I may offer to make one for him; lastly, if his need is urgent and he says he must have the table now, I may invite him to sit down and compare (and discuss) the urgency of our respective needs, and thereafter let justice decide. It is assumed that I shall listen to the voice of justice without bias.²

It has been indicated that Godwin imperceptibly fades from his criticism into his Utopia. Putting it another way, he realises that before he can have his particular brave new world, men will have to be changed. In this same question of property, he is confronted with the objection that his vision is impracticable because of what, in a most charming phrase, he calls the ‘allurements of sloth.’ His answer is that before these things can be, we must first reach ‘a state of great intellectual improvement’; ‘the general mind must be highly cultivated.’³ Without this preliminary exaltation, any attempt to realise his vision ‘will be productive only of confusion,’—presumably the allurements of sloth will continue to allure. So also the objection that such a system as he outlines would lack permanence he counters by emphasising his presupposition that these changes will have been ‘produced by the serious and deliberate conviction of the community at large.’¹ He postulates in effect the universal acceptance of the Godwinian idea of justice, and on this assumption the change will exhibit permanence, if men are permanently changed. In this world of reason, all passion spent, men will ‘derive infinitely more pleasure from simplicity, frugality and truth, than from luxury, empire and fame’²; and will realise that ‘the tendency of a cultivated and virtuous mind is to render us indifferent to the gratifications of sense.’³

In this chapter, Godwin has intentionally been accorded a somewhat fuller treatment than that to which he may be thought to be entitled on a strict assessment of his importance in the socialist tradition. If an apologia be required, it would be that Godwin sums up, as no one else does, the sum and substance of anarchism, and thus embodies in himself a whole tradition—a tradition, moreover, which has tended to be neglected by a generation which has laid (we hope) an undue emphasis on Marx. Godwin may be foolish; but he is always logically foolish. He may, as most of us, do, make mistaken assumptions; but once these assumptions are granted, the torrent of his oratory flows on with admirable consistency to conclusions which, doubtless, may be rejected as contrary to every-day common sense, but which can never be condemned as fallacious within the framework of the general principles which have been postulated. In Godwin we find that the essence of anarchism lies in the supreme importance attached to the individual. Nothing must fetter him. His judgment—and by that we mean his judgment at any moment—is always right for him; and in the interest of the untrammelled liberty of the individual, we are called upon to abolish everything—the State, the law, the binding nature of all engagements. There is no contract which cannot be broken at will; no promise should impede his freedom to judge and act. Since co-operation links him with others, and may therefore impose restraint upon him, all co-operation is evil. Godwin, however, differs from later anarchistic egotists in this respect that while with him the individual is unfettered, this freedom is not given him for selfish ends. Godwin's individual may be free from all external restraint, but he is fettered, horribly fettered, to the task and duty of promoting the general good, so that in the end he becomes the slave of his conscience, which never in fact leaves him any choice of action, even in the most trifling affairs of life. But it is his conscience, his judgment that commands.

NOTE.

It is difficult for us to-day, a century and a half after the event, to appreciate the horror with which, on its appearance, Godwin's Political Justice was viewed by the respectable classes. But it is sometimes possible in unexpected ways to catch a whiff of the old righteous indignation. The 1793 edition, with its stately type and its gracious margin, offers ample opportunity for a running comment, if the reader is inclined to unburden his mind. In the copy in the Library of Edinburgh University, the original owner, whoever he may have been, has taken full advantage of the opportunity of addressing remonstrances to Mr. Godwin. It was the custom of the age. In places the abuse and the refutation flow on from page to page, and add materially to the enjoyment of perusal. It is only possible to give a few of the shorter and snappier of these pointed arrows:

Here you show your cloven hoof, Mr. Godwin (p. 30).

O you cold-hearted blackguard, this is what you have been working (? to) for so long, is it? (p. 425).

Well done, Mr. Godwin, that's worthy of yourself, you rascal! (p. 430).

Ah, you dog, you dare openly find fault with our nobility, you vile atheist and democrat! (p. 473).

O, you devil incarnate! (p. 515).

That's right, you devil, out with it at last! (p. 797).

But it's the dictate of the Bible, you wretch! (p. 849).

Godwin is also at times a ‘consummate blackguard,’ an ‘unprincipled cunning rascal,’ and an ‘insufferable fool.’ After all these years, it is but right that all this spluttering rage should be allowed to work its way to the daylight.

CHAPTER VI. SAINT-SIMON AND THE SAINT-SIMONIANS↩

(a) SAINT-SIMON

COUNT HENRI-CLAUDE DE ROUVROY DE SAINT-SIMON¹ is one of the great eccentrics of history, though indeed it may be that his eccentricity has been accentuated in the growth of legend and tradition. He was a man who deliberately, with something of the purposefulness of Faust, set himself to drain the cup of life to the dregs and to taste all experience. In consequence, having been all things and having touched all extremes, he emerges as a somewhat confusing bundle of contradictions and incoherences, with nevertheless one central purpose dominating all his life. Born in 1760, into one of the most ancient families of France, claiming descent from Charlemagne, Saint-Simon never ceased to be the grand seigneur, conscious of the great things expected of him; although to describe him as the last gentleman and the first socialist, as has been done, is perhaps to use a phrase too devastating in its implications. ‘Rise, M. le Comte, you have great things to do to-day’: such, according to the legend, was the formula with which his valet was instructed to call him, when still a boy, to each new morning. It is at least true to the spirit of Saint-Simon, for ever panting after great things, and true to his love of doing things in the large spectacular manner. When but a lad he fought, and fought well, in the American War of Independence, returning with military rank disproportionate to his years. America left a permanent impression upon him. On the one hand, despite his creditable record, it turned him very decisively against the profession of arms. In his own words, he realised that his profession was not that of a soldier. It would be unjust to say that America made him a pacifist; it certainly made him a man of peace. Further, America revealed itself to him as very visibly the representative of a new era, a country which had shed, or had never acquired, the trappings of feudalism, a country where all men worked and none were idle.

His colourful life can be but glanced at. Back in Europe, taking Mexico on the way (with projects for a Panama Canal), he abandoned the army and travelled to Spain and Holland. His consciousness of his mission grew upon him: ‘Je devais beaucoup observer,’² as he said later with much simplicity. The French Revolution found him renouncing his title, and becoming Citoyen Bonhomme; it also enabled him to speculate in Church lands and thereby acquire a considerable fortune—not for low ends as he was careful to explain, but as a means to the execution of great projects. The revolution also consigned him for about a year to prison, where Charlemagne, his great ancestor, appeared to him in a vision, and spoke comfortably to him.

At an age when, as he over-modestly says, his brain had lost its malleability, Saint-Simon took to serious study, but in the grand manner he required the most eminent savants to wait upon him. True to his declared intention to lead ‘la vie la plus originale et la plus active possible’¹ he studied much more than his studies. Also he married; according to the legend, he entered on matrimony, stipulating for a three years' contract. A wife at the end of the banqueting table obviously laid a better foundation for an intensive study of mankind than could be hoped for from any arrangements resting on more transitory birds of passage. The story of the three years’ contract may be a myth; but Saint-Simon, in his fragment of autobiography, says unashamedly: ‘J'ai usé du mariage comme d'un moyen pour étudier les savans, chose qui me paraissait nécessaire pour l'éxecution de mon enterprise’²—a statement which is at least not inconsistent with the grotesque tradition. In any case, marriage as a device for studying society was not a success. Saint-Simon complained that his guests ate more than they talked, or at least more than their talk was worth; and he draws a pathetic picture of himself sitting silently in a corner, listening to twaddle and falling asleep. The Saint-Simonian home may have been a ‘social centre’; but one year was enough, and at the end of this period divorce put an end to this phase of his education. Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon; and went to call on Madame de Stael.

His visit to Madame de Stael is the peg on which more foolish legends have been hung. What is certain is that in the following year (1802), having reached the moderately mature age of 42, he published his first work, the Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries. Having put pen to paper, Saint-Simon, with an increasing consciousness of a mission and with that passionate vehemence which never deserted him, continued to write and to write incessantly, pouring out the most extraordinary series of pamphlets, catechisms, projects, plans of later books, plans of books that were never written—a disordered, turbulent flood of words. Gone were the spacious years of worldly splendour. His marriage had proved a somewhat too expensive finishing course. He sank into poverty, living and starving in a garret, earning a pittance as a clerk, supported in part by a former retainer. In his despair he attempted suicide, with but indifferent success. His last years were somewhat less uneasy. An unsuccessful prosecution for sedition at the age of 59 earned him a certain measure of publicity, which always has its uses. Before his death he attracted a certain number of disciples among whom for a time were Thierry and Comte. He died among friends, and his last words (or so nearly his last words as to make no difference) were a summary of his life: ‘Souvenez-vous que pour faire quelque chose de grand, il faut être passionné.’ The epilogue is strangely in tune with the prologue. As a boy, fifty years earlier, he had each day eagerly sprung from his bed, because great things were waiting to be done, and to be done that day. He died, impressing on his disciples that, in order to achieve great things, passion is that which is needful. Despite his chaotic and incoherent life, there is a strange unity about Saint-Simon. He was dominated by a passion for the achievement of great things.

Saint-Simon's writings are a confused jungle, partly because as a grand seigneur he somewhat despised the literary arts; and also in part because for him time was always urgent. He was always writing to catch the post: next week would be too late. He acknowledges his shortcomings with considerable naiveté and some condescension: ‘I write because I have new things to say; I will present my ideas as they have been forged by my spirit. I will leave to professional writers the care of giving them polish. I write like a gentleman, like a descendant of the Counts of Vermandois, like an inheritor of the pen of the Duc de Saint-Simon’¹ Thus are the ‘ecrivains de profession’ put in their proper and subordinate places. But it is chiefly the urgency of things that explains Saint-Simon's turbulent disorder. There is no time for literary grace: he is compelled to give his ideas ‘dans leur état de nudité native.’² He would have approved the spirit of Lord Keynes' advice to the economist of a later generation that he should cultivate a ‘willingness to spill his ideas, to flick them at the world,’ and the implied injunction ‘to pluck the day, and fling pamphlets into the wind.’ Never was a writer so assiduous as was Saint-Simon in flicking his ideas at the world, so free (in the words of an earlier enthusiast) from ‘le soin vulgaire d'effacer ses contradictions.’³

What were these so new things that Saint-Simon had to say? What, it may be asked, was all the hurry about? In one sense, the Saint-Simonian problem, if not the Saint-Simonian solution, can be put in a few words. He wrote, be it remembered, in the back-wash of the French Revolution, and in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. The world was confronting a new era; the eighteenth century, an age of criticism and destruction, had gone; it was to be the task of the new century to construct and rebuild. The feudal world had passed, giving way to an Industrial Age. Also the world, in this era of transition, when the old was dead and the new not yet born, had lost its guides. The teeming multitudes of Europe were as sheep without a shepherd—and sheep need a shepherd. The temporal power had gone; the spiritual power was no longer respected. Where in the new age—an industrial age with all the implications of an industrial age—are we to find a new temporal power and, even more important, a new spiritual power? This is the question that obsessed Saint-Simon; and for the salvation of the world an answer had to be found forthwith. Herein lies the strange unity of Saint-Simon. He may have given a different answer every time he flicked a pamphlet in the face of the world; but it was always the same question he was trying to answer.

Perhaps at the risk of some disproportion it may be permissible to look at his first book in somewhat greater detail than will be possible elsewhere. In its chaotic confusion, its grotesqueness of suggestion if taken literally, in its appeal to divine vision and illumination, this first publication, purporting to be letters from an inhabitant of Geneva, is pure Saint-Simon; not only so, it may with a little imagination be viewed as the whole of Saint-Simon, indicating in embryo the various directions along which subsequent pamphlets were to gush. The first letter, expounding the proposal, extends to a little over a page; there is a ‘reply from a friend,’ purporting to ask for more details, but in fact blowing off Saint-Simonian steam; then there are two more letters (which are not letters) in expansion of the project. Take as characteristic the opening of the first letter:

I am no longer young; I have observed and reflected with much activity during the whole of my life, and your happiness has always been the object of my labours: I have conceived a project which, it appears to me, might be useful to you, and I am going to present it to you.

Open a subscription before the tomb of Newton: subscribe all of you, indiscriminately, for the sum you wish.¹

This, it will be agreed, is a somewhat brusque debut for a man of letters, entering into his kingdom at the age of forty-two. The proposal, in what he would have called its ‘crude nudity,’ is that by a system of universal subscriptions and universal election, there should be set apart three mathematicians, three physicists, three physiologists, three writers, three painters and three musicians. The men so elected are to accept no position or employment; they are to be free to make what use they will of their powers, and being thus consecrated and honoured, they will be able to render to humanity the greatest services of which they are capable.

Here, in the Council of Newton, there is, despite its fantastic appearance, a plea that spiritual leadership should be entrusted to the savants. These men are the torches, the flambeaux of humanity, and, as we are assured by another authority, it is of the essence of torches that they should be altruistic:

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves.

Nevertheless humanity does not reward its torches as it should. His battle-cry at this stage is, ‘Down with the Alexanders; long live the Archimedes!’—‘Plus d'honneur pour les Alexandre: vivent les Archimède!’¹ Much of the pamphlet is taken up with appeals to the intellectuals, to the landowners and to the people at large, giving reasons why they should each accept the scheme. The savants are most obviously and directly interested in the success of the subscription. The appeal to the proprietors is based on the fact that they have already lost the battle and that it is in their interest to adopt this measure in order to avoid greater evils. In his appeal to the people at large, Saint-Simon is (as perhaps always) the slightly condescending and benevolent aristocrat. Somewhat patronisingly, he suggests that they should show a becoming gratitude for what has been, or may be, done for them. They should remember that though the proprietors are inferior in numbers, yet they are superior in lumières (a word very dear to Saint-Simon), and that, for the general good, authority should be distributed according to lumières. Or take this, as the basis of an appeal to the man in the street to support the torches with his subscriptions:

On Sundays, eloquence has charms for you; you find pleasure in reading a book well-written, in looking at beautiful pictures or lovely statues, or in listening to music capable of fixing your attention. In order to speak or write in a manner that may entertain you, to make a picture or statue which gives you great pleasure, one must work hard. Is it not just, my friends, that you should reward the artists who fill the intervals of your occupations with pleasures most fitted to develop your intelligence.... Subscribe all of you, my friends....²

All this is rather condescending and even foolish, especially as, apparently, all the contributions are going as a free gift to the twenty-one chosen torches. The idea of popular election in this matter is doubtless somewhat disturbing, but Saint-Simon explains to his proletarian friends what he proposes to do, and counsels them to follow the same procedure: he will ask all his mathematical friends who are the three greatest living mathematicians, and he will be guided by their advice. It is at least an innocent mind that looks forward to a time when the conversation in the taverns of Wapping will range round the comparative merits of Einstein and Max Born as torches. There then, embedded in much that is curious, is Saint-Simon's first suggestion in this problem that so obsesses him. In his own words: ‘the spiritual power in the hands of the savants; the temporal power in the hands of the proprietors; the power of nominating those called to fulfil the functions of leaders in the hands of everyone.’¹

But beyond this, Saint-Simon branches out in this same pamphlet into other matters that bulk largely in the ample brood of sequels. In a vision in which God speaks to him, it is ordained that the Pope, the Cardinals, the Bishops and the priests will henceforth cease to speak in his name; and the reason is that God will always withdraw from the Ministers of his altars ‘the power to speak in my name as soon as they shall have ceased to be more learned (savants) than the flock whom they would lead, and shall have allowed themselves to be dominated by the temporal power.’ Accordingly, and it is God who is speaking in the vision, the religion of Newton is ordained: ‘The Council of Newton will represent me on earth.’ Speaking in large capitals, the Almighty declares that ‘Women shall be allowed to subscribe: they may be elected.’² Detailed instructions are given as to the building of temples and mausolea, and one such instruction gives clear evidence of its divine origin. It is that none of the libraries attached to the temples of Newton shall ever contain more than five hundred volumes.³

The other side of Saint-Simon, that leading to socialism, is also present in embryo in these Geneva letters. Further on (and again large type underlines its significance) God declares that ‘All men shall work’; and in his own comment, on waking up, Saint-Simon says:

The obligation is imposed on each one to give constantly to his personal forces a direction that is useful to humanity; the arms of the poor will continue to nourish the rich, but the rich receives the commandment to make his brain work, and if his brain is not fit to work, he will certainly be obliged to make his arms work; for Newton will assuredly not leave on this planet, one of the nearest to the sun, workers who are wilfully useless in the workshop.¹

The Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva have been surveyed in some detail, because they conveniently present a summary of the lines along which Saint-Simon wrote and speculated for the rest of his life. How far this nonsensical dream of a temple of Newton and of the popular election of ‘torches’ was seriously meant; how far the divine vision was merely a literary exercise, how far the bulk of the pamphlet is blague with a substratum of serious intention, would provide interesting questions for leisurely discussion. The important point is that here we have Saint-Simon groping to establish leadership in a world that does not recognise its leaders; we see him seeking to establish some form of intellectual aristocracy; we have his criticisms of all established religions on the ground that their priests are, by their ignorance in essential matters, no longer qualified to be leaders; and we already have his emphasis on the obligation resting on all to work for the common good, and an expression of that rage which filled him increasingly with the years, whenever he thought of the idlers—les fainéants, les oisifs.

The earlier disciples of Saint-Simon tended to represent him as having passed through a scientific, a political, a moral and a religious phase. This is a rather dangerous over-simplification; for though doubtless his main interest moved in something like the direction indicated, and though, despite much oscillation, his thoughts tended to crystallise on certain points, yet Saint-Simon was not the man to allow his ‘phases’ to be neatly partitioned and docketed. His ultimate aim throughout life was singularly unchanging; it was to reorganise, and indeed (remembering his passion for great things) it was nothing less than to reorganise all knowledge and all science, and all the applications of knowledge and science. The only object worthy of pursuit was to labour for the reorganisation of the system of morale, of the religious and of the political system²; elsewhere he speaks of the urgent and immediate task as being that of finding a solid foundation on which to reconstruct the scientific, the religious arid political edifice. ¹ In his earlier stages, fresh from his academic coaches, it is naturally the reorganisation of scientific knowledge that is his consuming interest; only later did the social and political problem assert its insistence.

Saint-Simon was not a scientist; his recurrent speculations on the possibility of the beaver, as the most intelligent animal, ultimately replacing man is enough to classify him among the attractive amateurs. In any case what he has to say with regard to scientific method falls outside our immediate province. It has, however, an application to the matters with which we are concerned. He is never tired of repeating, with considerable variety of phraseology, that the eighteenth century had been critical, destructive, revolutionary; it was the task of the nineteenth century to be organisatrice, it was time to ‘changer de route’; the discoveries now due to be made could only be achieved by abandoning the a posteriori for the a priori method.² Looking back to the fifteenth century, Saint-Simon also emphasised the continual decline of the theological principle compared with the physicist principle. A modern of the moderns, indeed a man to whom the future alone was of interest, Saint-Simon even in 1813 could say (somewhat prematurely perhaps) that whereas the test of education used to be whether a man ‘possessed’ the Greek and Latin authors, now the question was: ‘Is he strong in the Mathematics?’³ In this general reorganisation and affiliation of all sciences at which Saint-Simon aims, it is essential that all sciences should become positive sciences. The ultimate end then is to give to the ‘science of man’ a positive character, basing it on observation, and treating it by the methods employed in the physical sciences. For is not man, in a phrase to which he recurs, ‘un petit univers’? Moreover this science of man, thus viewed, is to become the chief object of public education.⁴

All this, of course, is more or less Comte, who for a time was proud to sign himself ‘Élève de Henri Saint-Simon.’ The implications of this view are, however, far-reaching, with remote repercussions on Saint-Simon's doctrines regarding politics and government generally. For when politics becomes a positive science, those whose business it is to resolve political problems, if they know their physiology, will look on their difficulties—it comes with rather a shock—as being merely questions in hygiene.⁵ Putting it in more general terms, in the new scheme of things, the questions raised will be eminently ‘positives et jugeables,’ and the decisions given will be the result of scientific demonstrations. Thus as an engineer is supposed to be able to give the answer to a question submitted to him, so will the expert politician, if qualified in his job and trained in the positive ‘science of society’ (the phrase is notable), be able to give the right answer; and infer-entially, all expert politicians, being positive scientists, will give the same answer, which will be capable of scientific demonstration.¹

Thus along one line we are led to government by the expert, without as yet knowing who the expert is. Indeed in a sense we are led to the elimination of government in the traditional and political sense of the word. Reaching forward in anticipation to the Catéchisme Politique des Industriels we find this line of argument leading to a favourite doctrine of Saint-Simon, that society is destined to pass from the régime gouvernemental to the régime administratif.’² This replacement of government by ‘administration’ may at first appear, and indeed it is, a somewhat delusive idea; yet it ought not to be unfamiliar to the present generation. It is surprising to note how frequently arguments are advanced that this or that subject should be ‘taken out of politics.’ Looked at rigorously, it is a somewhat pathetic admission that democracy or parliamentary government is not wholly fitted for its entire task. A generation ago it was a common argument throughout the world that the tariff should be ‘taken out of politics’; in our own day an attempt was made to make the G.P.O. something not quite like an ordinary government office; in its early days the Unemployment Assistance Board (while it was still the U.A.B.) was in intention designed to be something apart from the Minister of Labour, and indeed from anyone else. The whole brood of half-way houses, the Central Electricity Board, the B.B.C., the London Passenger Transport Board, etc., are all attempts to take things ‘out of politics.’ Saint-Simon would have said that they represent the transition from government to administration; they have reached a stage where they are better run administratively, like any other business enterprise, even if in some ways they acknowledge a social responsibility. Saint-Simon is here the prophet of a certain type of Neo-Capitalism, freed from parliamentary criticism because parliamentary criticism is incompetent, yet working primarily for the common good.

Before leaving Saint-Simon's general views on science and knowledge, reference should be made to one further point which colours his outlook in various respects. It relates to his attitude to history and the writing of history. In his eyes, history is a science, and he complains that we have so far no histories written in such a way as to provide the means of inferring what will happen from what has happened.¹ This, with more excuse, was the view of Machiavelli. It is nevertheless a pestilential heresy, and hardly requires refutation. Just because men are unwise and curiously planned, it is never possible to foretell their behaviour, either individually or in the mass. It might, however, be argued that the Machiavellian view of history as the Prophet's Pocket-Guide to the Future ought to be true on Saint-Simonian principles. If, politics having become a positive science, the political expert can always show, with scientific demonstration attached, what is the only possible right answer in every case, this happy result must rest on the fact that human beings are no longer incalculable, but are as amenable to law as the elements hydrogen and nitrogen, assuming that these are still elements. In this case there would be no absurdity in assuming that history provided an unerring basis of prediction. It could then be said of History, as of Wisdom, that she knoweth things of old, and conjectureth aright what is to come. Saint-Simon is logical; his error lies in pressing too far the claims of the science of society to be a ‘positive science.’

There is another historical heresy to which Saint-Simon succumbs. To discover an analogy between the life of the individual and the life of the race is a snare which has beguiled many. That the individual is born, is a child, in process of time—having passed through the seven ages of man—becomes toothless and decrepit, are obvious truths, quite apart from what Shakespeare may have said on the subject. That the human race should pass through corresponding stages is a hypothesis which seems to have fascinated not a few. Saint-Simon swallowed the view whole-heartedly, and pressed the analogies further than most. In the earliest of all our days, to eat is our sole joy and occupation; so with the earliest stages of civilisation of which we have knowledge. Grown somewhat older, the child plays with bricks: the Egyptians erected pyramids. Arrived at puberty, we cultivate the fine arts; at a certain stage we all write poetry, and give way, even if furtively, to music and painting. The Greeks represent this efflorescence of youth. Later we desire to employ our forces, and look upon others as rivals; and the Romans were conquering warriors.² It is, of course, all nonsense; but it is of some importance in studying Saint-Simon, because he had succeeded in persuading himself that humanity, when he wrote, was at an age corresponding to forty in the individual. As a further consequence the race was at the height of its powers, and also it possessed the maximum capacity for ‘jouissances morales de tous les genres.’¹

So far, we have been concerned with Saint-Simon's views on the methods and place of science, and the possibility of a positive science of society as the basis of the great reorganisation of all things which he viewed as his mission. It is time to go back and consider the progressive dissolution of society, as from the fifteenth century, which has made this great task of reconstruction imperative. For this state of affairs, Saint-Simon in diversified language assigns three reasons, which are doubtless interlocked. Firstly, from somewhere about the Reformation, Europe had lost her unity; secondly, the nobility, the temporal power, had lost its usefulness and significance; and thirdly, the same could be said of the clergy, the spiritual power. The old age, in fact, had passed away, leaving no leaders, no guides, no landmarks.

On the first of these points, Saint-Simon has much to say of Luther, who, in his writings, turns up in strange places. We shall presently confront Luther in greater detail as he appears in Le Nouveau Christianisme. For the present, it is sufficient to note that Saint-Simon invariably regards Luther as a disruptive force, as indeed he obviously was. Harmony prevailed from the ninth to the fifteenth century; the spiritual and the temporal powers were in happy equilibrium. Luther dissolved the European Federation; and in particular he broke the bonds which hitherto had linked England to the Continent, making the island insular and launching it on a path of its own.² On the second point, little need be said; from somewhere about the reign of Louis XI, an understanding between the Crown and Industry had deprived the nobility of their significance. They ceased to have any positive importance in the State. Louis XIV reduced them à lui passer sa chemise et à le servir à table.³And indeed what leadership can be expected of a Peerage whose primary purpose is to pass the Prince his purple pyjamas?

It is on the third point, the decay of the influence of the spiritual power, that Saint-Simon is most expansive, not to say reiterative, and most illuminating. In a sense the point had been put with sufficient clarity in the vision incorporated in the Letters from Geneva; briefly, whatever may have been the position in the past, the clergy were now no better—by which, of course, was meant that they had no more lumières—than the laity. They were, therefore, as God had declared in the Vision, no longer fitted to be his representatives—blind mouths, that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheep-hook, as Milton exclaimed in a gorgeous galaxy of mixed metaphor; and—Saint-Simon would have added—lamentably ignorant of the Theory of the Steam Engine.

The authority of the clergy, of any clergy—their power to lead—thus depends on knowledge; and Saint-Simon leaves no doubt as to the kind of knowledge that is requisite. In the golden age before the fifteenth century, when their authority was greatest, the clergy were leaders in the cultivation of the soil and in irrigation; they applied themselves to mathematics and the physical sciences; they established hospitals and were leaders in education. Roger Bacon was a monk: everybody who was anybody in the way of increasing lumières was a monk or a priest. In short, they engaged in ‘useful works.’ And they had their reward in influence and in authority and in other ways. Since then they have declined from their high estate, and the reason is that they no longer ‘laboured in a direction useful to the progress of science.’¹ For the clergy to be useful it must be respected, and that it may be respected it must be not merely ‘savant,’ it must be ‘le corps le plus savant.’² Failing in this respect, its power will pass into the hands of the physicists who surpass them in knowledge. Indeed in any age, leadership in science should be not merely the essential mark of the clergy; it should be the quality that defines them: ‘le clergé doit être le corps scientifique.’³ If anything more emphatic is required, this may serve: ‘Le pouvoir sacerdotal et la capacité scientifique sont identiques dans leur essence.’⁴ The moment the clergy forfeit this qualification, they fall into disesteem, and are in the end replaced by ‘la reunion des hommes les plus savants.’ As against this statement of the Saint-Simonian ideal of what the clergy should be, they have in fact gradually sunk since the fifteenth century until to-day they have become ‘partie de la classe la moins eclairée.’⁵ Saint-Simon did not quote, though he might have done so, the dictum of the prophet to the effect that the priest's lips should keep knowledge.⁶

What, it may be asked, is the nature of this religion for which the Fellows of the Royal Society will act as Chief Priests? Going deeper, who is the God whom they will serve? Clearly, at any age, according to Saint-Simon, religion is merely the sum-total of scientific knowledge, presented, if that be possible, in a sacred form, as revealing the works of God. Moreover, the progress of science has consisted in substituting one cause for many causes, and so far as the enlightened were concerned, this transition had now been completed.¹ There was one universal law, the Law of Gravity. It is curious to observe how the Law of Gravity fascinated the speculators of the time. Fourier, also, put the Law of Gravity in the centre of things, and endeavoured to be a second Newton, extending his law from the material to the spiritual world. For Saint-Simon the acceptance of one law, the Law of Gravity, was to be the foundation of all future philosophy. A new religion, shortly to appear, would also be based on the conception of the universality of one law. His own views, expressed more than once, were not wholly free from a certain suggestion of intellectual dishonesty: there should for a time be two distinct doctrines—Physicism for the instructed classes, and Deism for the ignorant.² It is, however, interesting to note how close to the heart of the future religion the Law of Gravity is placed. He does not exactly say that the Law of Gravity is God; but he comes very near to it. The idea of gravitation, playing the rôle of a general absolute idea, is to replace the idea of God; it is the immutable law by which God governs the universe. The binding link in the conceptions of the learned will in future be, not the idea of ‘God,’ but the idea of gravitation, considered as the Law of God.³ Thus does the Law of Gravity just fall short of replacing God and the Ten Commandments.

For Saint-Simon, the urge to a new orientation of science, a new philosophy, a new religion could not be kept apart from the other aspect of the great problem of the age. Factory and foundry, forge and loom proclaimed that this was a new age, an industrial age in which France was assuming the similitude of a workshop, in which all men were jostling together, partners at the same bench. The industrial age, into which humanity had been projected, had two characteristics at least; firstly, there must be perfect equality, though this, in the Saint-Simonian world, is interpreted as equality of opportunity; and secondly, all privileges, in particular all privileges of birth, must be abolished. Perhaps there should be added (for it was never absent from Saint-Simon's mind) the further consideration that the world was now no place for idlers. This new world had, however, the wrong kind of government: there was a maladjustment between the government and the world it was supposed to govern. Surely it was an offence to see the ‘nation travaillante dirigée, et, qui pis est, gouvernée par la nation fainéante et incapable.’¹ In more general terms France presented the extraordinary spectacle of a country which was essentially industrial, and of which the government was nevertheless essentially feudal.²

This question obsessed Saint-Simon throughout his life, and in a plethora of pamphlets and catechisms he outlined a multitude of varying solutions, in very varying degrees of detail. He rung the changes on the industriels, the artistes, and the savants, now advancing, now degrading one or other of the possible claimants. It would be an interesting, though probably an unprofitable task, to plot through time the variations in the Saint-Simonian solution. Perhaps the most elaborate, certainly the most detailed, of his many solutions is that contained in the Organisateur, where the curious will find outlined a somewhat fearsome constitution, resting on three chambers, a chambre d'invention, a chambre d'examen, and a chambre d'exécution. The chambre d'invention is to comprise 200 engineers, 50 poets ‘or other inventors in literature,’ 25 painters, 15 sculptors or architects, and 10 musicians. Here indeed is Technocracy, and in a world panting for exploitation this solid phalanx of engineers will be able to circumvent the efforts of this medley collection of poets, musicians and others. Doubtless it will be easier to get 200 qualified engineers than 50 certificated poets. The chambre d'examen is less motley: it will be constituted by 100 biologists, 100 physicists and 100 mathematicians. The chambre d'exécution is to be drawn from all the branches of industry. After the lapse of more than a century, constitution-mongering on these lines can bring but a wan and faded smile to the lips of the reader.³

One interesting interlude in this long story of reshuffling the industriels and the savants is represented by what may be called his parliamentary phase. Round about the time of the fall of Napoleon, Saint-Simon became for a brief period an enthusiastic admirer of the British Parliamentary system, and a zealous advocate of its propagation throughout Europe.⁴ In each country the old organisation is to be replaced by a Parliamentary government, recognising the supremacy of a general parliament placed above them. In its complete development there will be an international House of Lords, and indeed what he calls ‘le roi du parlement européen,’—a post so ticklish to fill that Saint-Simon showed uncommon sense in postponing detailed discussion to a later work. Not the least interesting aspect of this curious phase in Saint-Simon's pilgrimage is the zeal with which he pleads for a union of England and France, in order to avoid on both sides greater evils to come; it will not merely be a nucleus of the European parliament; this first step will inevitably impel other countries to link up with them.

This sudden enthusiasm for the machinery of Parliamentary government is, however, but a passing phase, induced by the urgency of political occurrences. It has been said above that Saint-Simon shuffles and re-shuffles his industriels, his savants and his artistes in varying combinations. While this is true, it is not wholly true, or at least is not the whole truth. Increasingly, as he grew older, Saint-Simon laid greater emphasis on one of the possible candidates for authority in the new age. In an industrial age, the important class was clearly les industriels; and it was therefore the industriels who should be in control. Over long stretches, the writings of Saint-Simon resolve themselves into a most extravagant hymn of praise in honour of les industriels, the men who do things and get things done. No organ of the opposition ever clamoured more insistently for a ‘business government.’ Open Saint-Simon's later works anywhere, and the chances are that you will be within a few pages of some reinforcement of this, his dearest theme. The intelligent reader may wish to know who is an industriel; for, left in the vague, he is as much clouded in ambiguity as his frequent companion in the pages of Saint-Simon, le savant. In the first question and answer of the Catéchisme Politique des Industriels Saint-Simon gave a lengthy and comprehensive definition which must here suffer abridgement. An industrial, we are told, is one who labours to produce, or place within the reach of the members of society, one or several means of satisfying their needs or their physical tastes. Thus a farmer who sows corn or raises stock is an industriel A wheelwright, a farrier, a locksmith are all industriels; a manufacturer of shoes, of hats, of cloth is an industriel. A merchant, a carter, a sailor on a merchant vessel are all industriels. Industrials fall into three great classes: agriculturalists, manufacturers and merchants. Thus Saint-Simon, almost trembling on the brink of an attempted definition of productive labour.¹

For Saint-Simon's views on the ineffable merits and the supreme importance of the industrial class, and its consequent sole competence to govern, reference may be made to three publications, ignoring many illuminating comments elsewhere. In his Vues sur la Propriété et la Législation (1818), the motto already sounds the appropriate note: ‘tout par l'industrie; tout pour elle.’ In the Preface the reader is told among other things that ‘the industrial class is the sole useful class’; and further that all laws and administrative measures must be judged by one test only, namely whether they are useful or harmful to industry.¹ In the course of the argument he claims that industry ‘s'est emparée de tout’—it has laid its hands on everything.² It has taken over even war; and with a singularly modern note, he points out that in modern warfare (1818), the armies have been reduced to a subordinate position. They merely apply the products of industry; and, apart from complete incapacity on the part of the generals, the army which is best looked after by industry will win. In summing up at the end of these Vues, he expresses himself thus, with much more to the same effect:

The only class in society whose ambition and political courage we should like to see increased, the only one in which this ambition could be useful and in which this courage is necessary, is, in general, the class of the industrials; for their particular interests are in perfect harmony with the common interest, by the mere force of circumstances. It is because we realise this truth that we have zealously embraced the cause of the industrials, looking upon them as the true centre and hearth-stone of civilisation.³

A considerable extrinsic interest attaches to the Parabole de Saint-Simon⁴ (1819), which, it was suggested, instigated a murder, and which certainly led to a prosecution, happily unsuccessful. It also had as sequelæ a series of letters to the jury, providing them with gratuitous instruction in Saint-Simonian principles. In its form it is one of the most peculiar and fantastic of Saint-Simon's writings. It is but a diminutive opusculum, extending to a mere five pages in Hubbard's edition. ‘We suppose,’ he begins with characteristic abruptness—‘we suppose that France suddenly loses her fifty leading physicists, her fifty leading chemists, her fifty leading physiologists, her fifty leading mathematicians, her fifty leading...’ After a time he pauses for a semi-colon and a breath, and resumes a new paragraph: ‘her fifty leading mechanics, her fifty leading engineers civil and military, her fifty leading...’ In due course there is another semi-colon, and the next paragraph opens with ‘the fifty leading bankers...’ The eye of the reader skims down the lines and over the page, on which every fifth or sixth word is ‘cinquante,’ until finally he finds refuge in the peaceful haven of a full stop. There they are, the three thousand leading ‘savans, artistes et artisans de France.’ The result of their loss? These men are the most useful to their country; France would become a body without a soul in the moment of their disappearance. It would require at least a generation to repair the disaster.

Let us pass, says Saint-Simon, to another supposition—and the heart of the reader sinks within him, Now, however, he assumes the loss of a few individuals, or of large battalions in place of the niggling instalments of fifties, so that the tale of destruction is compressed. Suppose that instead of losing all these leaders in the arts and the sciences, France were to lose Mr the Brother of the King, the duc de Berry, and a few odd specified Duchesses; all the officers of the Crown and Ministers of State, all Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops and such like; all judges and the ten thousand wealthiest proprietors among those ‘who live nobly’—thirty thousand in all.

Such a thinning of the ranks of Who's Who would certainly grieve the French people, ‘parce qu'ils sont bons.’ The loss would, however, be a purely sentimental one; there would result no evil to the State. There are quite a number of Frenchmen capable of discharging the functions of the brother of the King; there are no lack of soldiers as good as our field-marshals. There are barristers quite willing to take the place of our judges, curés ready to step into the shoes of the bishops. To this odd Parabole Saint-Simon adds a few comments, marked by a certain bitterness to which he is ordinarily a stranger. These thirty thousand men are not merely neutral; they are positively injurious to the progress of the sciences and the arts, which is alone what matters. They are injurious in perpetuating an outworn way of looking at things; they are injurious in depriving the true leaders of society of their rightful place; they are injurious in using their means in the wrong way and in diverting the resources of the nation into wrong channels. The present state of society is the world upside down—le monde renversé. The final words are almost like an echo of the concluding paragraph of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. Everywhere, says Saint-Simon, the incompetent are put in charge of the competent; the most immoral are called to fashion the citizens in virtue; the great criminals are appointed to punish the shortcomings of the petty delinquents. Saint-Simon was seldom so inflammatory: it was unfortunate that one of the thirty thousand, whom he had specified by name, the duc de Berry, should have been assassinated within three months of the appearance of the Parabole.

The third of the writings of Saint-Simon to which it is proposed to refer on this question of the world upside down, as evidenced in the lack of respect paid to the industrial class, is the Catéchisme Politique des Industriels. A catechism is, on the whole, an unsatisfactory vehicle for propaganda, partly because of a certain infantile atmosphere which almost inevitably pervades the discussion, and partly because the Questioner and the Instructor always seem to be in undesired collusion. Certainly Saint-Simon's questioner invariably asks the right question, and indeed from time to time provides most useful summaries of what he has been told. The purpose of the Catechism is to prove the superiority of the industrial class over all others; to show why they have hitherto failed to attain the position due to their merits; to sow in their hearts the seeds of discontent, and to show the means whereby they may gain their rightful rank and influence. It is a discussion overflowing with history and comparative politics. After defining what is an industrial in terms already summarised, the Catechism proceeds:

Q. What rank should the industrials occupy in society?

A. The industrial class should occupy the first rank, because it is the most important of all; because it can do without the others, and none of the others can do without it; because it exists by its own forces, by its personal labours. The other classes ought to Work for it, because they are its creatures, and because it maintains their existence; in a word, everything being done by industry, everything should be done for it. (Tout se faisant par l'industrie, tout doit se faire pour elle.)

Q. What rank do the industrials occupy in society?

A. The industrial class, in the present social organisation, is constituted the last of all. The social order still accords more consideration to secondary works and even to idleness than to the most important labours and those of the most urgent usefulness.¹

A little later, though still in the early stages of the Catechism, we are given a summary statement of the reasons which make the industrial class fitted to govern:

The reason is simple: the political inclination of the vast majority of society is to be governed as cheaply as possible; to be governed as little as possible; to be governed by the most capable men, and in a manner which will completely assure public tranquillity. Now the only means of satisfying, in these various respects, the desires of the majority, consists in entrusting to the most important industrials the task of directing the public fortune; for the most important industrials are most interested in the maintenance of tranquility; they are most interested in economy in public expenditure; they are most interested in restricting arbitrary power; lastly, of all members of society, it is they who have given proof of the greatest capacity in positive administration, the success which they have achieved in their various enterprises having given evidence of their capacity in this respect.²

That the industrials alone are interested in economy, that they alone have given proof of capacity, that they least of all desire to meddle for the sake of meddling—these reasons for the supremacy of the industrial class are the constant theme of Saint-Simon's reiterations; but above all, merely because this is an industrial age, it is a chose monstrueuse that the direction of affairs should be elsewhere than in the hands of the industrials.³ The industrials have hitherto been denied their rightful place, because they have not been conscious of the superiority of their class. They have shown excessive prudence and insufficient firmness: they have, in other words, been too busy with their own affairs. Also they have themselves desired to rise, to become barons, or to marry their daughters into the aristocracy—anxious, in a fine phrase, to associate themselves with the débris de la féodalité. But now the industrialists must ally themselves with the Monarchy against the nobility. There must be formed the parti industriel; the Industrial Monarchy will be established, with the King proud of being the ‘first industrialist.’¹

In this future industrial state, two questions arise which are of considerable significance, alike in the later Saint-Simon and in the Saint-Simonian school after his death. The first relates to the end and functions of government; the second to the place of property in the scheme of things. A few words on each may complete this side of the picture.

It is one of the complaints of Saint-Simon that the purpose of the association of citizens, making up the nation, has never been adequately defined.² In the simile of two caravans, which at one time enjoyed a certain celebrity, he contrasted the position of one in which the instruction to the conductors was, ‘Take us to the place where it will be best for us to go,’ and the other in which the conductors were told, ‘You know the way to Mecca; take us there.’³ In the first, the conductors are everything; the caravan counts for nothing. In the second, the conductors are mere guides, discharging subordinate and controllable functions. In the same way, although clearly the analogy must not be examined too curiously, it is not enough to say that government should be in the interests of the governed and for their well-being. Such a statement is too vague and requires content. As made more precise by Saint-Simon, the sole and permanent object of the social organisation is to apply, for the satisfaction of the needs of man, all the knowledge acquired in the sciences and the fine arts, and in the arts and crafts, and to propagate, increase and perfect this body of knowledge as far as possible.⁴ Here is a utilitarian government in the strictest sense; and in his later years this conception of the State came more easily to Saint-Simon, because he entertained the agreeable belief that the last shot had been fired at Waterloo, and that henceforward there would be but the rivalries of peace. In practice, however, throughout his many schemes of government, it is curious to note how consistently Saint-Simon conceived the task of government as being primarily that of preparing a projet de travaux, a plan of public works, partly to provide employment, but more fundamentally because this represents the task of civilisation and of the industrial age.⁵ Later this was to become the ‘exploitation of the globe by association.’ In that fantastic outline of a super-European Parliament, to which reference has already been made, the primary function of this new creature was to carry out enterprises of general usefulness for the society of Europe, linking the Danube and the Rhine, the Rhine and the Baltic, peopling the globe with the European race and breaking the world in for the use of Europe. In short, however he might define it, for Saint-Simon the primary function of government was the preparation of projects of public works—preferably of a grandiose character.

The general question of the legitimacy of property and the limits of its use was destined to become a crucial point in the transition from Saint-Simon to the Saint-Simonians. Saint-Simon's position, to say the least, is hesitant and ambiguous and invited criticism. Probably it was an issue on which the descendant of Charlemagne had difficulty in coming to terms with the ancestor of a long line of socialists. Nowhere does he suggest any definitive restriction on property or on the use of property. The legislature, he says in one place, must assure the free exercise of property.¹ In his Vues sur la Propriété et la Législation, while he does not suggest changes in property rights, he gets as far as suggesting the possibility and the legitimacy of such changes. He remarks (and in Saint-Simon it is somewhat surprising) that the law which constitutes the form of government is less important, and less influential on the happiness of nations, than the law defining the exercise of property. Property is the real foundation of the social edifice. The right of property must therefore be founded in such a manner as to be most favourable to the increase of wealth.² From the fact that this law is fundamental, it must not, however, be assumed that it cannot be modified. As the point subsequently becomes of primary importance in the Saint-Simonian tradition, the crucial sentence of the Master may be quoted:

It is therefore evident that in every country, the fundamental law is that which establishes property and the provisions necessary to secure that it is respected; but from the fact that this law is fundamental, it does not follow that it cannot be modified. What is necessary is a law which establishes the right of property—not a law which establishes it in such and such a manner. It is on the conservation of the right of property that the existence of society depends; but not on the conservation of the law which originally consecrated that right.³

Further, the individual right of property can be founded only on the general utility which springs from the exercise of this right, and this utility may vary from time to time.

This amounts to saying that the institution of property must justify itself on public grounds; but such a conclusion has all the vagueness which characterised the caravan travelling to an unknown destination. When he ought to say something more precise, Saint-Simon is as uncommunicative as a Parliamentary Under Secretary left stranded by his chief. In one place he says that the moralist ought to urge public opinion to punish the idle proprietor by depriving him of all ‘consideration.’¹ Elsewhere, approaching the question from the positive rather than the negative side, he says that property ought to be so constituted as to stimulate the proprietor to make it as productive as possible.² Towards this laudable end, Saint-Simon contributed as best he might by invariably holding up the idler to contempt; at the thought of les oisifs and les fainéants, he gives way to ungovernable rage. A rentier who does nothing is a burden on society, even if he be an alms-giver.³ ‘Rentiers,’ he exclaims, ‘classe encore plus sotte et plus méprisable, qui cherche dans la vie des jouissances obtenues sans travail.’⁴ For Saint-Simon the first law of morality and the first law of religion was that ‘Man must work.’⁵ The teaching of Saint-Simon on property may then, not unjustly, be summarised as implying that property was not, at least for the present, to be disturbed; but that, secondly, under the pressure of public opinion, the owner of wealth must be made to feel that he has responsibilities and that he must not, in any case, shelter behind his wealth in order to enjoy a life of ease. Whether this is a logical or satisfactory position need not be debated; it is not, however, substantially different from the views of St. Thomas Aquinas, on the one hand, or of Charles Kingsley, representing the Christian socialists, on the other.

In the foregoing pages, all reference to Saint-Simon's last work, Nouveau Christianisme, has been rigorously and intentionally avoided. The early commentators and biographers, such as they were, seem to be agreed (perhaps not with complete justification) that this dialogue stands apart from the rest of his writings, and that it is here that he comes nearest to that socialism of which he is one of the many reputed fathers. In a sense, Nouveau Christianisme is a fragment, designed to be completed in two further dialogues; but even had he lived, Saint-Simon having been Saint-Simon, there is no guarantee that they would have been written.

Though in fact Saint-Simon continues to embroider the old themes in this, his last work, and though, in many respects, he continues to repeat what he has already repeated, there is undeniably an indefinable quality about Nouveau Christianisme which explains the position of honour frequently assigned to it. In the socialist tradition it has been the most influential of his writings. It is the least marred by Saint-Simonian eccentricities. Though in form a dialogue between a Conservateur and a Novateur, the Conservateur agreeably fades away, so that the reader forgets his presence. Here also Saint-Simon, in his zeal for humanity, seems somewhat to have shed the patronising airs which elsewhere cling to the grand seigneur.

Throughout his life Saint-Simon had preached the need for a new religion. In the Travail sur la Gravitation Universelle, he had already said that the Christian religion, after rendering great services, had fulfilled its missions and completed its usefulness.¹ Is it possible to restate the essence of Christianity, in accordance with the needs of the new industrial age? Such, briefly, is the theme of Saint-Simon's last testament. In approaching this question, probably as a concession to the Conservateur, Saint-Simon (who may be identified with the Novateur) admits that what God personally has said cannot be perfected or restated; but this must be distinguished from what the clergy said in his name. This constitutes a science capable of improvement like any other science.² If the human element (what the clergy have said) is abstracted, there remains but one principle representing the divine element in Christianity. It is the injunction that men should behave to each other as brothers. This and this alone is the essence of Christianity, and Saint-Simon deduces from it, in more lengthy phraseology which recurs like a Leitmotiv, the essential doctrine of the New Christianity. It is that men

should organise their society in the manner most advantageous to the largest number; they should propose, as the end to be aimed at in all their works and in all their actions, to ameliorate as promptly and as completely as possible the moral and physical existence of the most numerous class.³

La class la plus nombreuse—this swarming multitude! Hitherto, they have been crowded at the back of the stage; from time to time they have been heard ‘off.’ Is this the first time they have been thrust into the spotlight, and their condition and well-being made the primary, indeed the sole, end of every political and social institution, and of all political and social activity? For this also, be it observed, should be the end of religion—of all religion and of any religion⁴: ‘Religion should direct society towards the great aim of the most rapid amelioration of the lot of the poorest class.’

Such is the sum and substance of Nouveau Christianisme; but in the remainder, which is largely a criticism of Roman Catholicism and of Protestantism, there is much that throws light on Saint-Simon. The Catholic religion, he argues, is but a Christian heresy. The clergy (his old theme) should be capable of directing their flocks in works designed to increase their bien-être: they obviously are not. They should preach the possibility of ‘amelioration’—that blessed word: they simply do not have the necessary ‘connaissances.’ The ecclesiastical estates are badly administered; and much more.¹

He is more interesting in his criticisms of Protestantism, above all as embodied in Luther. Luther made quite a number of mistakes. Saint-Simon gives a lengthy speech which Luther ought to have addressed to the Pope, initiating him into the cream of Saint-Simonian ideas. Luther should have said that the theory of Christianity had been sufficiently perfected: it was now time to turn to application. True Christianity should make men happy not merely in Heaven, but here on this earth. He should also have told the Pope—though it would have been something of an anachronism if he had—that Christianity no longer recognised the right of one man to command another, and that Royalty was an institution designed to prevent the rich and the powerful from oppressing the poor. He should also have urged on a very astonished Pope the importance of a large plan of public works, making it clear that the only way of gaining eternal life was by labouring to increase the well-being of the human race.²

A further criticism of Luther is also of interest in revealing Saint-Simon. It is that Luther reduced religion to preaching. In doing so, il a prosaïqué, he reduced to prose the body of Christian sentiments.³ The poet ought to support the preacher; the musician, the painter, the sculptor should surround him: but all this side of life Luther banished from the temple. And lastly, in this incomplete summary, Luther erred in regarding Christianity as perfect in its origin, and as having deteriorated ever since. He urged his followers to study Christianity as expounded in the books written when it was founded, above all in the Bible; just as well might a chemist or a mathematician claim that their sciences would be best studied in the earliest known works on the subject. As a consequence of this odd error on the part of Luther, there are even now Bible Societies, distributing millions of copies of the Bible among the public!⁴

Doubtless from the point of view of theology and religion, Nouveau Christianisme cannot be regarded as a weighty contribution. It may be doubted whether what it preaches is a religion at all. It is a gospel of material betterment, of increased power over nature directed to the increase of human happiness, and of happiness here and now, and not merely in some shadowy future existence. Perhaps its significance does not even lie in its proclamation of universal brotherhood—doubtless a noble sentiment, but apt to be swamped in foam and froth. If all the world is my brother, Proudhon remarked later, then I have no brother. But that the whole machinery of society and of the State exists in order to care for la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre—there was an idea worth launching on the world.¹

It is now possible to assess the legacy of Saint-Simon when he died in 1825, and to consider his position in the socialist succession. He began, as has been seen, very largely as a critic of scientific method, looking forward to the development of a positive science of society. In this respect he is a forerunner of Comte. He was concerned with the creation of a spiritual power and of a new religion fitted to the needs of the new industrial age. In emphasising the characteristics of this new age, he was led to extol the virtues of the industrial classes, and became the prophet of big business, even if of big business with a sense of social responsibility. In all this, there is little of socialism as ordinarily understood; and it may be forcibly suggested that Saint-Simon's claims to be one of the fathers of socialism rest on very slender evidence of paternity. Even on a generous interpretation of the essentials of socialism, the distinctly socialistic elements in Saint-Simon are minimal. He saw that in this new world there must be perfect equality, in the sense of equality of opportunity; or, putting it from another angle, that all privileges must be abolished. Also he saw that in this new world there would be no room for the idler, though he never faced up to the question of how the congenital idler can be made to work. In his last book, he asserted the claims of the masses—the most numerous and the poorest class—to be the particular care of the State; and whatever other functions government might have, he was never in doubt that it had to provide work and education. On property, that thorniest of questions in socialist theory, he spoke with an uncertain voice: it was to be respected, but the owner had to be educated, or compelled by public opinion, to use his wealth for the public good. Beyond these few points, it is difficult to squeeze another drop even of the most diluted socialism out of Saint-Simon.

How then does it happen that he is invariably classed among the founders of socialism? The answer probably is that in some ways he began to live after his death. The Saint-Simonians, whose history represents one of the most fantastic tales of human freakishness, took over part of his theories, and by certain apparently slight but far-reaching modifications in his doctrine, linked Saint-Simon to the main line of socialist development. But the Saint-Simonian school is sufficiently apart from Saint-Simon to merit the compliment of a separate sub-section.¹

(b) THE SAINT-SIMONIANS

Let no one flatter himself that he is dead, merely because he has been buried. Scarcely had the curtain fallen on the tempestuous life of Saint-Simon, when it was rung up again on what may, without harshness, be called the fantastic farce of the Saint-Simonian Church. Saint-Simon had had but little influence and but few faithful followers in his lifetime. Thierry and Comte, sufficiently distinguished disciples for anyone, had moved elsewhere. There is a significant admission in the introduction to the Doctrine de Saint-Simon, to the effect that Saint-Simon had left ‘un très-petit nombre d'élèves,’ and that his doctrine had been studied scientifically by ‘très-peu de personnes.’ The true heir to Saint-Simon, the follower nearest to him in the last few years and at his death, was Olinde Rodrigues; and with filial piety he sought to bring together a company of disciples to carry on the master's work. The history of the Saint-Simonian movement becomes forthwith a whirl of lectures, conferences, newspapers, with a surprisingly large influx of recruits. Rodrigues was soon displaced in the leadership by Enfantin and Bazard. It was probably Bazard who supplied the brains and the ideas, while Enfantin gave the movement its bizarre elements. With the increase of disciples there emerged a sacred college of apostles. By this time there was professedly a Saint-Simonian religion and a Saint-Simonian Church, with six departmental churches throughout France. With true missionary zeal the Church carried its gospel abroad. The curious burrower in libraries may find pamphlets revealing that the chief of the Saint-Simonian religion in England in 1833 was a certain Fontana, and that the preacher of the movement was called Prati. The names hardly suggest that the new religion had had time to attract the indigenous elements.²

The roots of the Saint-Simonian religion may not unnaturally be found in Saint-Simon. One of the best known passages in Saint-Simon is that in which he chides the imagination of the poets for placing the age of gold in the cradle of the human race—in the Garden of Eden, in the symbolism of the Old Testament: ‘The age of gold of the human race is not behind us; it lies ahead of us; it consists in the perfection of the social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive there one day; it is for us to mark the path.’¹ This amounts to a repudiation of the doctrine of the fall of man and of all its implications. We have always been rising; we are rising now; we shall continue to rise. This is the Law of Progress. Infuse with this the spirit of The New Christianity, and it may be deduced that the true religion consists in working for the betterment of men here and now. Science is holy, and industry is holy; for these are the instruments of human betterment.² This, in so far as it is a religion, is a secular religion in which the emphasis is laid on work and service in the interests of the general welfare of humanity.

One other point follows from the repudiation of the doctrine of the Fall. If man has not fallen, there is no angry God to be appeased; and there is accordingly no particular reason why we should not find happiness, perhaps even pleasure, in life. The problem of the dualism of spirit and flesh had been much in Saint-Simon's mind; in his followers, in the Saint-Simonian religion, this line of development led to one of their most famous catchwords. They believed in ‘the rehabilitation of the flesh’; the flesh should be no longer mortified and crucified, but should have its claims recognised. And indeed why should we labour for the happiness of mankind, if mankind are not prepared to be happy?

It was, however, over the question of women that the Saint-Simonian Church, like so many other gallant adventures, finally came to grief. Apart from the statement in the Letters from Geneva, that women were to be allowed to contribute to the support of the Council of Newton, Saint-Simon had been extraordinarily discreet on the question of women, at least in his writings. Moreover, if one wishes to be pedantically precise, it may be recalled that this particular statement was made by the Deity and not by Saint-Simon. His followers, however, showed less discretion; and presently the question of women became the chief bone of contention in the infant Church. They proclaimed, as one of their leading principles, the ‘emancipation of woman.’ Now there may be much to be said for the ‘rehabilitation of the flesh’; there doubtless always has been, and always will be, much to be said for the ‘emancipation of woman.’ But, given the infinite possibility of human misunderstanding, they are principles which, if only for prudential reasons, ought not to be brought into too close contiguity, especially by an Enfantin.

It is difficult at this distance of time to decide whether Enfantin was a complete charlatan or a sincere but temporarily unbalanced religious enthusiast. It was perhaps permissible to glorify Saint-Simon; after all, he was not merely dead, but he was the presumed founder of the presumed religion. Even so, it seems to be going rather far to assign him ‘un rang plus élevé que le fils de Dieu,¹ or to summarise history tersely in the statement that ‘Moïse a promis aux hommes la fraternité universelle; Jésus-Christ l'a préparée; Saint-Simon la réalise.’²

But Enfantin, being still alive, was in a different case; yet he encouraged in his followers an extravagance of language which far exceeds the bounds of the ludicrous. Fortunately, he retained just enough sense to assure them that he was not God. His influence over his disciples was unlimited and somewhat uncanny. He dressed them in absurd garments of varying shades of blue to denote different grades in the hierarchy, and devised a wonderful symbolic waistcoat, which no one could put on or off without the assistance of one of his fellows, thereby impressing the useful lesson of our mutual dependence on each other. The same lesson had been taught in The Wealth of Nations on less picturesque lines. He led his followers into monastic retreat, where, to the disgust of their abandoned wives, they vied with each other in the length of beard they could produce during their period of celibacy. In short, the Saint-Simonian Church under Enfantin became a pantomime, one of the gratuitous entertainments of Paris, almost the song of the drunkards.

In addition to proclaiming the emancipation of women, Enfantin also discovered that the social unit in future was to be, not man, or woman, but man plus woman—a discovery with curious theological repercussions. Whether his teaching on woman and marriage was or was not immoral, is neither here nor there. What is important is that it was generally assumed to be so; and Bazard, the most intelligent of the Saint-Simonians, shared this view. His withdrawal from the Church on this issue led to the great schism. It also led to his ceremonial chair being vacated; for Bazard and Enfantin, as the leaders, had hitherto enjoyed no ordinary chairs. The chair continued to be left vacant; for if Enfantin was Le Père, clearly the other chair should be reserved for La Mère—but where was she? If we are to pursue our emancipation of women to a logical conclusion, it is clear that God must manifest himself in a female as well as in a male form. Indeed, if one is not careful—and the Saint-Simonians were not—the next question that comes up for discussion is that of the sex of God, who obviously ought not to show any partiality in these matters by being one or the other. The vacant chair thus remained as the symbol of the female Messiah who would one day come, and without whose help Enfantin felt his efficiency impaired. In the end Enfantin was prosecuted, along with certain of his followers, partly for teaching immoral doctrine and partly for convening illegal meetings. The trial was a supremely successful show, and even to-day it is possible to read a few pages at a time (here and there) of the volume in which the Saint-Simonians embalmed, for the instruction of posterity, a verbatim report of the proceedings. Enfantin and two others were condemned to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 100 francs. The movement never really recovered from this blow. Meanwhile, the bulk of his followers, having satisfied themselves in some way that the female Messiah was to be found on the banks of the Nile, proceeded to Egypt in order to summon her to fill the vacant chair. They did not find her; but they stayed on to help in the construction of dams. Not the least amazing feature of this fantastic story is that, after the Saint-Simonian Church as an organisation had faded out, almost without exception the leading Saint-Simonians, including Enfantin himself, moved into what Marshall would have called ‘the ordinary business of life.’ There they succeeded in showing that their youthful eccentricities in no way debarred them from distinguishing themselves in this competitive world. Indeed most of them were amazingly, almost disgustingly, successful. Above all in banking, in engineering and in railway administration, France in the next generation owed an enormous debt to the scattered remnants of the Saint-Simonian Church.

That a successful banker or railway magnate may in his youth have sought for the female Messiah on the banks of the Nile is a startling thought, doubtless calculated to provoke edifying commentaries on the unsearchableness of Man. This curious tale has, however, been glanced at with a different object in view. Saint-Simon and his enormous influence can be understood only if we appreciate the nature of the Saint-Simonian school, which just fell short of transforming their neglected master into a god, and which, though mixing much tinsel, if not dross, with their efforts, nevertheless succeeded in making Saint-Simon one of the great influences of the nineteenth century.

For us the essential point to disentangle is the process whereby the Saint-Simonians transformed the rather tepid, hesitant and attenuated socialism of their Master into a socialism which in places is as aggressive as that of Marx or Proudhon. Let no one seek to master Saint-Simonian literature. The Saint-Simonians were a numerous company of men, and of young men at that, who talked and preached incessantly, and who seem to have printed all that they said. Anyone who allows himself to be sucked into this whirlpool will never emerge again. Fortunately, the essentials of the Saint-Simonian school and of its modification of Saint-Simon can be obtained conveniently in the so-called Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition, Première Année (1829). This dates from the period of expansion of the Saint-Simonian school when life, as in the days of the early Fabians, was a long vista of uninterrupted conferences, across which the female Messiah had not yet cast her baleful shadow.

In the first place, the Doctrine is somewhat more specific than Saint-Simon had been with regard to the direction in which humanity is marching; or if this statement may seem to do injustice to Saint-Simon, a man ever looking to the future, we may say that his followers sought to give precision and currency to Saint-Simon's ideas by the reiterated use of certain catchwords—the secret of all successful propaganda. The past had represented the ‘exploitation of man by man,’ as in war and otherwise; this is to be replaced by the harmonious action of man on nature. Humanity is gravitating to ‘universal association.’ This universal association, moreover, is to be given a ‘pacific direction.’ The love of the works of peace has already succeeded ‘the ardour of combat.’¹ Under the influence of Christianity, the activity of mankind has been directed to the ‘exploitation of the globe.’² With a rather pathetic optimism, it is asserted that the contrast between the past and the future, already described as the contrast between the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation of nature by man, may also be summed up still more briefly as the contrast between war and peace.³ Even the character of our wars is changing: there are no longer wars of destruction and pillage, nor even for territorial possessions.⁴ Such was the confiding and innocent faith of 1829. There then we have one of the most familiar catch-phrases of the Saint-Simonians: the human race is to become one—united in the ‘exploitation of the globe by association.’

Meanwhile, how are we equipped for this great task of exploitation? The Saint-Simonians would have answered: ‘Very badly.’ They agreed with Saint-Simon that each science works on its own; and even if there be academies, ‘nulle grande vue n'harmonise leurs travaux.’⁵ But indeed what is wrong everywhere is precisely that there is ‘nulle grande vue.’ Saint-Simon had been apt to grovel before big business and industry, as the only homes of efficiency and competence; his followers, turning to industry, found that here also there was evidence of disorder. Here also everything was turned over to the uncertain chances of lumières individuelles. Once more it is a world of isolated efforts, in which, as often as not, management falls into incompetent hands.¹ This is the result of laissez faire, which assumes—quite fallaciously—that personal interest will always be in harmony with the general interest. Laissez faire means that a few happy people triumph—but at the cost of the complete ruin of countless victims. If we are to have the best use of property and of the machinery of production, these must be entrusted to the most competent hands—aux mains les plus habiles. But what in fact happens? The accident of birth distributes resources blindly, and if the proprietor is incompetent, or elects to be an oisif there is no remedy.²

We have reached the crux of the School's modification of the teaching of the Master. Things cannot be right, so long as the mere chance of birth, operating through the law of inheritance, distributes resources blindly throughout society. In such a world there can be no equality of opportunity, which is the only equality that matters: the competitors do not start fair. For though the Saint-Simonians have conceded that the exploitation of man by man is the mark of the past, in contrast with the association of all men which will prevail in the future, it must not be imagined that exploitation has ceased. It remains—and here the Saint-Simonians stretch out a hand to the Marxians—in the relationship of master and wage-earner, the last transformation that the system of slavery has undergone. The worker is indeed the descendant of the serf. The transaction between master and servant is not a free one. The worker, whose daily sustenance depends on the previous day's work, may exist only on conditions imposed upon him by a small group whom the law has invested with a monopoly of wealth, and to whom it has given the power, even while living in idleness, to dispose of the instruments of production. Consequently the worker is exploited materially, in-, tellectually and morally. Only one revolution remains to be accomplished—that, namely, which will put an end to this exploitation, completely and in all its forms.³ This is the language of Marx, rather than of the aristocratic Saint-Simon.

The remedy lies in a revision of our ideas regarding property. For even if property be regarded as the basis of the political order, the law regulating property is, nevertheless, subject to modification.⁴ Property, inasmuch as it enables some men to live in idleness, must be changed. It has become—and it is Proudhon speaking out of due season—‘the privilege of imposing a levy on the labour of others,’ le privilége de lever une prime sur le travail d'autrui.⁵ The obvious solution is of astonishing simplicity, though its repercussions are far-reaching. The evil springs from the fact that by inheritance wealth is handed on within the family.⁶ It is therefore only necessary to abolish inheritance and transfer to the State, ‘devenu Association des travailleurs,’ the right of succession. It is carefully explained that this does not mean community of goods; nor does it mean equality. It does mean that the privileges of birth will at last be completely extirpated, and that henceforth capacity and work will be the sole titles to wealth.¹

It will be seen how the Saint-Simonians, by an apparently slight alteration of the Saint-Simonian structure, have given the whole of the Master's doctrine an entirely revolutionary significance. Saint-Simon had asserted that equality was to be the mark of the new industrial age: he was right. In consequence, he proclaimed the abolition of all privileges: he did well. But on the question of property and the greatest of all privileges which is to be found in inheritance, the trumpet had given forth a very uncertain sound. In essence, the Saint-Simonian contribution was to insist that this privilege too must go: indeed, they made it the cardinal point of their programme.

The State, even if it is disguised as the ‘Association des travailleurs,’ thus becomes every man's heir; and, assuming that the State rises to its task, this universal heir will be committed to a complete scheme of State socialism. For obviously, in the course of little over a generation, it will own everything—or as near everything as makes no difference. In the vision of the Saint-Simonian school there was to be here a social institution which would be the depository of all the instruments of production, which would preside over that part of the exploitation of the globe which fell within its province, and which would direct production. In short, it would be possible to organise industry, and obtain that grande vue which was the dream of Saint-Simon and his disciples alike.²

Enough has been said in the foregoing pages to indicate the nature of the influence exercised by Saint-Simon, directly and through his school. He was the forerunner of Comte and of positivism; he was the apostle of big business combined with equal opportunity; at times almost a forerunner of ‘technocracy’; a believer in a business government, preferably with government replaced by administration—in that rather cryptic phrase. By their modest addition, the Saint-Simonians took a short cut to a complete system of State socialism. On one point, however, in order to avoid any misapprehension, a further word may be allowed. While insisting on equality of opportunity, the whole Saint-Simonian school set its countenance rigidly against any suggestion of equality in fact—the ‘real’ equality desired by Babeuf. Indeed, they almost boasted of their belief in the natural inequality of men; and (with some justification) regarded this as the basis of association, and as an indispensable condition of the social order.¹ It is, they would have said, precisely because men are unequal and unlike that you can dovetail them together. So also, they repudiated suggestions of equality of reward. Men were, in their familiar formula, to be placed according to their capacity, and rewarded according to their works. Indeed the idea of a hierarchy is almost too dear to the hearts of the Saint-Simonians. In the new State, become the universal heir, the social fund is to be exploited not merely by association, but hiérarchiquement—which somehow sounds a barbarous word. In looking to the future, what the Saint-Simonians hope to attain is ‘Order,’ which is expanded to mean ‘la hiérarchie la plus unitaire, la plus ferme.’² We seem to be trembling on the brink of the totalitarian State. Moreover, our uneasy feeling is somewhat accentuated by the writer of the introduction to the Doctrine de Saint-Simon who, in a passage aiming at eloquence, exclaims: ‘Partisans de l'égalité! Saint-Simon vous dit que les hommes sont inégaux.... Défenseurs de la Liberté! Saint-Simon vous dit que vous aurez des chefs’; and he goes on to add that those whom he is addressing may have desired in the past to get rid of detested masters, nevertheless they never said, ‘plus de guides pour l'humanité! plus de grands hommes!’³ Saint-Simon, groping for spiritual leadership, for torches and lumières; the Saint-Simonians, demanding of the future the ‘most unitary hierarchy’; Carlyle, in search of the hero and extolling hero-worship—what is all this but the Führerprinzip of latter days? Perhaps we have grown rather tired of the Führerprinzip and of all its works, and of the ‘qualities of leadership’ which the aspiring young are sometimes expected to reveal in the course of an oral examination. For the trouble about the Führerprinzip is that while it postulates a Leader, it equally postulates that all the rest shall be prepared to be led or misled as the case may be, and that they will with lamblike simplicity walk up any garden path they may be invited to enter. And there is this further evil consequence that the cult of leadership may be, and is, invoked to relieve the flock from all moral responsibility for what they may have done in too faithfully treading, in simplicity or in cowardice, in the Leader's footsteps. ‘As for these sheep, what have they done?’ The question derives from the Psalmist David in one of his less ecstatic moments; but with variation in intonation and application, it recurs throughout history whenever the Führerprinzip has succeeded in landing its victims in a mess. Enough, however, at this stage to note that, on one side, Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians alike, in their love of order, of hierarchy and of leadership, are at the roots of the tradition that blossoms in the full enunciation of the Führerprinzip.

NOTE.

One of the most important documents in Saint-Simonian literature is the letter which Enfantin and Bazard addressed jointly to the President of the Chamber of Deputies on 1st October, 1830. In a debate in the Chamber reference had been made to the Saint-Simonians, attributing to them advocacy of community of goods and the enunciation of immoral doctrines on the question of women. The letter, which is obviously the work of Bazard, contains one of the most concise statements of what the Saint-Simonians regarded as their essential tenets, and an extract from this document may be a useful addition to the foregoing chapter.

‘Le système de la communauté des biens s'entend universellement du partage égal entre tous les membres de la Société, soit du fonds lui-même de la production, soit des fruits du travail de tous.

‘Les Saint-Simoniens repoussent ce partage égal de la propriété, qui constituerait à leurs yeux une violence plus grande, une injustice plus révoltante que le partage inégal qui s'est effectué primitivement par la force des armes, par la conquête:

‘Car ils croient a l'INÉGALITÉ naturelle des hommes, et regardent cette inégalité comme la base même de l'association, comme la condition indispensable de l'ORDRE social.

‘Ils repoussent le système de la communauté des biens; car cette communauté serait une violation manifeste de la première de toutes les lois morales qu'ils ont reçu mission d'enseigner, et qui veut qu'à l'avenir chacun soit placé selon sa capacité, et rétribué selon ses œuvres.

‘Mais en vertu de cette loi, ils demandent l'abolition de tous les priviléges de la naissance sans exception, et par conséquent la destruction de l'HÉRITAGE, le plus grand de tous ces priviléges, celui qui les comprend tous aujourd'hui, et dont l'effet est de laisser au hasard la répartition des avantages sociaux, parmi le petit nombre de ceux qui peuvent y pretendre, et de condamner la classe la plus nombreuse à la dépravation, à l'ignorance, à la misère.

‘Ils demandent que tous les instrumens du travail, les terres et les capitaux, qui forment aujourd'hui le fonds morcelé des propriétés particulières, soient réunis en un fonds social, et que ce fonds soit exploité par association et HIÉRARCHIQUEMENT, de manière à ce que la tâche de chacun soit l'expression de sa capacité, et sa richesse le mesure de ses œuvres.

‘Les Saint-Simoniens ne viennent porter atteinte à la constitution de la propriété qu'en tant qu'elle consacre, pour quelques uns, le privilége impie de l'OISIVETÉ, c'est-à-dire celui de vivre du travail d'autrui; qu'en tant qu'elle abandonne au hasard de la naissance le classement social des individus.’

CHAPTER VII. CHARLES FOURIER↩

CHARLES FOURIER occupies a singular position among the fathers of socialism; indeed, viewed from any angle, he is a unique and enigmatical phenomenon. He was born in Besançon in 1772, the son of a linen-draper in reasonably easy circumstances. On leaving school, he travelled for a time, somewhat extensively, for various firms, visiting Belgium, Germany and Holland. On his father's death, he inherited sufficient to enable him to start business in Lyons. In the troubles of 1793, Lyons, revolting against the Convention, was bombarded. Fourier narrowly escaped being shot, and he did lose his entire fortune. Thereafter for two years he served, an unwilling soldier, in the army. During the remainder of his life, nothing happened to Fourier, not even marriage. He travelled for various firms; he was a clerk; he served commerce intermittently, but always on the lowest rung of the ladder. On the strength of an exiguous legacy, at times he did nothing; and he wrote a number of extraordinary books in which he said the same things over and over again. He floated about between modest private hotels and furnished apartments, and in this depressing environment he died in 1837, being then 65 years of age.

Such is the outline. Yet two reasonably authenticated incidents deserve mention for their influence on the development of his mind. When a boy in his father's shop—indeed at the age of five, it is said—he received correction from his father for revealing to a customer some petty trick in the retail business; and the infant Fourier, realising that commerce was built on deceit, swore, like the infant Hannibal, that he would destroy the great enemy, which in this case was commerce. He complained that he was taught to tell the truth in church, and to tell lies in his father's shop. References to this ‘Hannibal oath’ occur throughout the literature of Fourier. Later, having attained man's estate and being at Marseilles, it was his duty to assist at dead of night in discharging into the harbour a cargo of rice, which the owners had allowed to spoil in expectation of a rise in price. Fourier, observing the stealthy destruction of what had once been food, and thinking of the hungry men sleeping uneasily all around, realised anew the shortcomings of civilisation and of commerce alike, and found occasion to renew his ‘Hannibal oath.’ Fourier did not succeed in destroying commerce; on the contrary, he spent a large part of his life as one of the least of its bondsmen. But the two legends are none the less significant.

As to the man himself, Fourier is almost the perfect example of furtive insignificance. Indeed he is worse than that. His was the insignificance, the timidity, the absurdity which inevitably provoke a smile even in recollection. An apostle of chaotic liberty, he nevertheless had a mania for orderliness, and was never happy unless things could be docketed and arranged in series. Even when he gained disciples, he never could be prevailed upon to speak, and throughout life had a great gift of silence. Old maidish in his habits, he had two passions, one for cats and the other for flowers. Perhaps music should be added as a third: he never could resist the impulse to march behind the band. Only very moderately educated in his youth, he belongs to the race of authors who have no desire to know what others have thought or said. Despite his modesty, he has accordingly no hesitation in proclaiming himself the first person for two thousand years to illumine the world's darkness. In a phrase which should give comfort to all, Emile Faguet has said of him that he has the disadvantages of ignorance which are great, and the advantages of ignorance which are enormous. ‘Moi seul’ and ‘moi le premier’ are recurrent motives in the writings of this unheroic commercial traveller who was cast for the part of Timorous rather than of Great-Heart. Take, as an example at random, one resonant blast of his goose-quill;

Moi seul j'aurai confondu vingt siècles d'imbécillité politique; et c'est à moi seul que les générations présentes et futures devront l'initiative de leur immense bonheur. Avant moi l'humanité a perdu plusieurs mille ans à lutter follement contre la nature; moi le premier...

and so on, rising to one of his few recurrent tags: ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius.’¹

Fourier, moreover, has a childish, rather than a childlike, faith in God and the goodness of God. Indeed, in some respects, Fourier's ‘theology,’ to give it a somewhat pretentious name, provides the foundation-stone of all his theories, and will require to be noticed in somewhat greater detail presently. Lastly, and it is the point which distinguishes him from the rest of mankind, Fourier was blessed or cursed with a most riotous and unpruned imagination, so unrestrained indeed that it is doubtful how far he could have passed any of the ordinary tests of sanity. There is nothing which his disordered imagination cannot vividly conceive, either at the foundation of the world or in the days of Harmony yet to be realised, and he writes it all down in the minutest detail, with the calm assurance of a perpetual private secretary to Providence from whom nothing has been concealed. It would perhaps be unjust to suggest that no writer, living or dead, has ever produced a larger volume of outrageous nonsense than has Fourier. A much subtler diagnosis is required. In him the form is always much more grotesque than the substance; but undeniably he clothes all he has to say in a fantasy and an imagery which are so charged with the ludicrous that Fourier is scarcely to be read without, intermittently, loud guffaws of uproarious and irreverent laughter. Moreover, everything about Fourier is bizarre. A reader not accustomed to such things may be surprised to find a ‘Postface’ at the end of a volume, or to be confronted with an ‘extroduction,’ a ‘postienne’ or a ‘citerlogue.’ The diatonic scale turns up in unexpected places; there are strange symbols, K's, X's, and Y's, now lying on their back, now standing upside down. In at least one case (La Fausse Industrie), the pagination would defy an army of detectives to unravel. Fourier may at times be a hilarious farce: at times he is also an impenetrable mystification. Let no one, approaching Fourier, imagine that he is taking up a volume marked by the decorum, the austerity and the conventionality of John Stuart Mill.

Before attempting to give a more or less orderly account of that chaos that is Charles Fourier, it may be permissible to state briefly wherein lies his significance, and what is his place in the unfolding of socialist doctrine. Stated somewhat summarily, the importance of Fourier lies in the fact that, like Saint-Simon, he is a link, and a very interesting link, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They are indeed very different links, though they have this in common, that these two fathers of socialism are not in essence particularly socialistic; they are disfigured by strangely conservative features which do not appear in the child. They both cling to property; they are alike devotees of inequality. The essence of Fourier is that, as he looked round the world, he saw that everything was wrong, not merely a few things here and there, but the whole scheme of things. It was in a sense civilisation itself that was wrong—civilisation with all its attendant conventions and consequences. In this respect he is an echo, perhaps a caricaturing echo, of that greater voice from the eighteenth century, of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who also found that somehow the human race had taken the wrong turning. And if both found that our civilisation was a poor thing, a whited sepulchre, there is this to be said for the insignificant Fourier, as against his mightier predecessor, that he was at least constructive. Rousseau is after all little more than a wail of despair, an ineffective wringing of hands. But Fourier knew, with the utmost precision and definiteness he knew, what he wanted and what had to be done, and how in short the world could be put right in the brief space of two years. It is only necessary to abandon Morality, that evil legacy of civilisation, and to listen to our natural impulses, and we should straightway overcome all the trickery, the deceits, the hypocrisy, the divided interests, the parasitism which is what civilisation is. We shall in fact have established Harmony, and Harmony is the co-operation of men who sing at their work. Nothing could be simpler. It only requires a capitalist, and not even a very big one, to give the thing a start, and the rest is as easy as falling off a house.

In a sense Fourier's religion provides the starting-point of all his observations and of all his criticisms. It pervades all his thoughts, and it will constantly recur in almost every paragraph of this chapter; for this reason it may be as well to seek at the outset the dominant idées mères of Fourier on this subject. The old truth that man created God in his own image, that ‘thou thoughtest I was altogether such an one as thyself,’ is nowhere more startingly illustrated than in the case of Fourier. That God is good, that God has done well in all that he has done, that he has done nothing without a meaning and a purpose, sum up in general terms the essence of Fourier's religion; but with the acute logic of a somewhat unbalanced mind, he pushes this body of doctrine to conclusions which are much less orthodox than are usually drawn from these premises. He is severe on those who ‘half believe’ in God.¹ Belief in the goodness of God implies belief in the goodness of all that God has done; it is therefore inconsistent with a belief that a good God could make man with evil impulses and passions against which men have to wage incessant war. This, which is the line of the moralist and the theologian, is to establish war between God and man; indeed it is to set God at war with himself. We should seek for the laws of God in the impulses that come from God²; he foresaw, for example, that we should wish to eat three times a day. Those who write facetiously about ‘la galanterie et la gourmandise’ are ignorant of the importance which God attaches to our pleasures; for it is by ‘Attraction’—by pleasure—and not by constraint, that God governs the universe. It is thus that he governs planets and insects; it is thus that he intended to govern Man.

Moreover, in creating this unhappy world of ours, God was not engaged, as Burns would have put it, in trying out his ‘prentice hand.’ He has created milliards of globes before ours, and has thus acquired vast experience ‘pendant l'Eternité passée.’³ Elsewhere, even more patronisingly, he explains that God has had ample time to learn by experience in creating men in milliards of other worlds. In short, he knew what he was doing when he made men as they are; and instead of correcting the work of God, we should endeavour to find out how he meant his works to be used.⁴

And, primarily, God's intentions were that we should enjoy ourselves. Not only so, it would be an insult to God to expect him to provide merely mediocre pleasures.¹ To ask merely for our daily bread—le misérable pain, says Fourier, who never could abide bread—is to misconceive the magnanimity of God. In a phrase which comes with a certain shock by reason of its reversal of Christian ideas,² ‘Dieu nous doit beaucoup, puisqu'il peut beaucoup’; he owes us infinite happiness in this life and in the life to come. It is God who is our debtor. He hath made us, and not we ourselves; in fact (though Fourier does not stress the point) we were not consulted. He gave us a yearning for happiness; and as (by definition) his power is infinite, he owes us happiness pressed down and running over, a perpetual and unconditional pouring out of a blessing from the windows of heaven, so that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

Fourier, as has been hinted above, presents his criticisms of life and his social theories in a fantastic and indeed grotesque framework. It would be easy, by appropriate selections, to present him as a figure of farce and low comedy; but it would probably be equally wrong, again by appropriately different selections, to present him as a sober-minded and austere critic, adding his ponderous brick of thought to the construction of the socialist edifice. Many writers in their references to Fourier give the reader no hint, or but the merest hint, that Fourier was most emphatically not as other men: indeed in some respects he is a unique phenomenon in the world's literature. This designedly tactful drawing of a veil over Fourier's peculiarities is mistaken, if only because it gives a wrong and one-sided view of the man he was. After all, there is nothing to be ashamed of in being slightly deranged. For all we know, it may be the condition of the bulk of humanity: it all depends on the standards we choose to apply. But in the case of Fourier, there is this further most decisive reason against suppressing any acknowledgment of his eccentricities that his sanity and his apparent deviations from normal sanity are strangely intermingled. Indeed his whole criticism of civilisation to a certain extent postulates as a background his fantastic cosmogony and his views regarding the stages through which humanity must pass.

With this semi-apology for an apparent departure from accustomed austerity, we may endeavour to illustrate some of the more unexpected ideas which may surprise a reader embarking, unwarned, upon the turbulent waters of Fourier. Most intimately interwoven with the essence of his thought are his theories regarding the Cosmos. This world has been granted a life of 80,000 years; there are 40,000 of ascending vibrations and 40,000 of descending vibrations. The arithmetic may seem weak, since there is also a period of 8,000 years of complete happiness, the Apogée du Bonheur.¹ Doubtless this minor discrepancy is covered by Fourier's general reservation that everything he says is subject to an exception of an eighth or a ninth. In all there are 32 periods, 16 in the upward and 16 in the downward ladder. We are at present in the fifth of the first eight stages, having passed through what Fourier calls the Sectes Confuses, Sauvagerie, Patriarchat and Barbarie. Ahead of us lies Garantisme, a stage in which human rights will be effectively guaranteed to us; at times, however, it is rather suggested that we may by-pass Garantisme. These eight stages take up 5,000 years, and we shall then find ourselves in Harmony—indeed more and more delirious grades of Harmony, for 35,000 years. Thereafter for 8,000 years we shall have that lofty table-land of perfect bliss, after which the world will go downhill again through precisely the same stages in the inverse order; and at the end, if any of us are left, we shall be transported to another planet.

It is when we approach Harmony that things will begin to hum. A Northern Crown (after the manner of Saturn's rings) will encircle the Pole, shedding a beneficent aromatic dew on the earth. The sea will cease to be briny, and, greatest of delights, will be transformed into lemonade, for which unsatisfying beverage Fourier seems to have had a marked partiality. Six moons of a new and superior quality will replace our present inefficient satellite. A new race of animals will emerge. In place of the lion, there will be the anti-lion, all that a lion is not, docile and serviceable; there will be anti-wolves and anti-bears, and a whole race of really nice beasts. If things are only taken in hand at once, telescoping various stages, the anti-bug may be looked for in 1829, along with the anti-rat. This is indeed good news for ‘le beau Paris, si richement meublé de punaises,’ of which incidentally there are 42 varieties.² Our argosies, knitting land to land, will be drawn by anti-whales. After these marvels, it is perhaps rather a disappointment to know that we shall then live only 144 years, of which, however, 120 will be spent in the active exercise of love.³

It is perhaps a corollary to this lively interest in the history of the globe that Fourier is also so much concerned with the stars and the planets, which in so many ways influence our lives now and hereafter. The stars and planets are animated beings like ourselves, only perhaps more so. They also have their passions, and from their passions spring other stars and planets, but also plants and animals. The planets seem to be androgynous, like plants self-contained for purposes of reproduction; but they also have intercourse with other planets. Unless Fourier is more confused than usual, the Aurora Borealis merely betokens that the Earth is holding out lonely hands of love to Venus. Fourier tabulates at considerable length the various animals and plants we owe to Jupiter, the Sun, Venus and so on. The death of Phoebe (otherwise known as the Moon) plays a large part in this astronomical fantasy. Phoebe, whom he rather rudely calls a cadavre blafard, died of a putrid fever, contracted from the Earth fifty years before the Flood: it was indeed the death of Phoebe that caused the Flood. The absence of her contribution to the last creation caused some strange omissions in the animals and plants we ought to have had. In particular, the world has been the poorer by the absence of a very special gooseberry, of which it was robbed by the untimely decease of Phoebe. The discriminating reader will have begun to discern dimly how the anti-lion and the anti-bug are to be generated: another creation, under more favourable conditions and therefore consisting predominantly of good beasts, is pending, and will mark the transition to Harmony.¹

Fourier's concern for human happiness is not limited to what happens in this transitory life. He believes not merely in immortality; he believes also in metempsychosis. We shall return again and again, and keep on returning; and that is one reason why we should be so intensely interested in what is going to happen. It is important that this should be a world worth returning to. On all this, Fourier is as extensively and as exactly informed as he is regarding the death of Phoebe. He knows exactly how long we shall be away, when and how we shall return. He knows how what we do now influences the lives of those waiting to come back, and again it is all told with a wealth of ludicrous detail which may not be so exciting as his account of the passionate drama of the love affairs of the planets, but is equally full of information which, as the reviewers say, is not readily available elsewhere.

Enough perhaps of the fantastic side of Fourier; yet perhaps so much is necessary, firstly because these extravagances may not be dismissed as idle weeds that grow in the sustaining corn; they are, as has been suggested above, an integral part of Fourier; and secondly, because it is as well that the reader should know in advance that there are moments of wild surprise in the perusal of our author.¹ Yet it will be conceded that a writer with pretensions to seriousness who buries his message under such a superstructure of airy imaginings, imposes upon himself a very considerable handicap. Discarding, so far as one may, these outpourings of an unduly exuberant imagination, is it possible to detach the essentials of Fourier, and restate them, as they might have been stated by John Stuart Mill?

In rationalising Fourier, one may, in the first place, distinguish between a critical and destructive exposition of what is, and a constructive part designed to produce a happier world. On the former aspect—and to a large extent it explains the significance and the influence of Fourier—there never has been a more acute, a more uncompromising and unsparing critic of civilisation; his criticism is doubtless expressed with a Fourieresque exaggeration and bizarrerie, yet there are few honest men who can read Fourier without being made at times slightly uncomfortable, just as the virtuous may be disconcerted by the innocent prattling of a child. To borrow the words of Polonius, referring to another case where the question of sanity has been much debated, Fourier's barbs have a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.

As Fourier sees this world, it is not a question of things here and there being wrong: it is the whole scheme of things that stands condemned. In civilisation, every human relationship is warped by deceit, intrigue and falsehood. Repeatedly and rather plaintively, with the hurt cry of a disillusioned child, he laments that virtue and truth, which ought to lead to prosperity and wealth, in fact lead merely to poverty and disgrace. Virtue is less lucrative than vice; in this world you will get nowhere if you rely on la Vérité. If you want to succeed, you must swindle your way to success. La fourberie au plus haut degré²—there you find the chief mark of civilisation. The least desirable elements always come out on the top; honesty and integrity merely provide a short-cut to failure.

Is it necessary to say anything with regard to marriage, that bulwark of civilisation? Perhaps it would be wiser to refer the curious reader to the pages of Fourier for enlightenment. On this school of hypocrisy and deceit, Godwin's views are tepid and insipid compared to those of Fourier, who, at any moment, in contrast to the mediaeval ‘quinze joies de mariage,’ will provide the reader with a complete ‘Gamme des disgrâces de l'état conjugal.’¹ Fundamentally, what is wrong here is that ‘la fidélité perpétuelle en amour est contraire à la nature humaine’; and an institution resting on a wholly contrary false assumption must necessarily engender hypocrisy and falsehood. Fourier, holding the views he did, showed wisdom in dying a bachelor.

But to get back to safer ground and the items of the indictment against civilisation, it is further to be observed that civilisation rests on the mutual enmity of each against all, so that each indeed is forced by his own interests to desire the misfortunes of all the rest. In short, we each make our living out of the mishaps that befall our neighbours. On this characteristic point, it may, however, be as well to quote the words of Fourier:

Every person engaged in an industry is at war with the mass, and malevolent toward it from personal interest. A physician wishes his fellow citizens good, genuine cases of fevers, and an attorney good lawsuits in every family. An architect has need of a good conflagration which should reduce a quarter of the city to ashes, and a glazier desires a good hailstorm which should break all the panes of glass. A tailor, a shoemaker, wishes the public to use only poorly-dyed stuffs and shoes made of bad leather, so that a triple amount may be consumed—for the benefit of trade; that is their refrain. A court of justice regards it as opportune that France continues to commit a hundred and twenty thousand crimes and actionable offences, that number being necessary to maintain the criminal courts. It is thus that in civilised industry every individual is in intentional war against the mass.²

In civilisation, however, we are not only natural enemies of each other; if we be candid, we will admit that most of us are parasites. Take four men at random, and probably three are doing useless work that would not need to be done in a sane world. We set four children to look after five cows; and even so the grain is nibbled. Fourier, with his usual gusto, gives an appalling list of twelve classes of parasites, and few there be who escape his net. There are first of all three classes of domestic parasites which in all conscience are sufficiently sweeping. There are three-fourths of the women in the cities, and a half of the women in the country; there are likewise three-fourths of the children, condemned as entirely useless in the towns and of negligible use in the country; there are three-fourths of household domestics. Passing to social parasites, at one sweep there are the armies of the land and sea; there are the legions of administration (now known as the hordes of civil servants); half the manufactures are in effect useless; nine-tenths of merchants no better. And so we advance through absenteeism, the devotees of St. Monday, a most ruinous saint who is fêted fifty-two days in the year, and workers who lean on their spades to see a cat pass, ending with what he calls the seceders,? miscellaneous collection of sharpers, vagrants and beggars—now more politely called the unsocial elements.¹

Moreover, whatever we do, we do inefficiently. Everywhere civilisation is marked by gaspillages. The root evil on this side is our industrial incoherence. Industry, in his favourite word, is morcelée; it ought to be combinée. When Fourier, with a lordly sweep, consigns three-fourths of all women to a status of uselessness, he is not in any way denying the worth of women, or underestimating their afflictions. Anything but: Fourier is in fact almost the first, as he is certainly the most valiant, defender of Women's Cause. But he is maddened by the sight of 300 women, in 300 little houses, lighting 300 little fires, and cooking 300 little dinners in 300 little pots for 300 little men returning from their work; when three or four women, with the help of one large pot and one large fire, could produce better results. Possibly, as he says, three families could not be associated successfully; but 300 could. His illustrations, it is true, chiefly concern domestic arrangements and agriculture; he has little to say of industry, which indeed he habitually regarded with a certain repugnance. On the main point, however, he is clear: it takes 40 civilised people to do the work of five Harmonians, because of our absurd addiction to small units, because we refuse to associate.

If such be the views of Fourier with regard to the harmless necessary housewife, he cannot, in view of his youthful Hannibal oath, be expected to be tolerant of commerce. He quotes with approval the saying of St. Chrysostom that a merchant cannot be agreeable to God: ‘accordingly merchants are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, although the elect of all other professions are admitted, even a lawyer in the case of Saint-Ives.’ In a sense commerce represents in an extreme form the vices which mark civilisation; but apart from this general ground, it is condemned by Fourier in the main for two reasons which, however, intermingle. In the first place, commerce is the natural home of deceit and falsehood. What is commerce, he asks? The answer is: ‘C'est le mensonge avec tout son attirail, banqueroute, agiotage, usure et fourberies de toute espèce.’² Commerce, in a state of complete liberty, is a sewer of infamy, a cloaque d'infamies. It is a sphere of life from which truth is banished. In antiquity merchants were called little thieves, but they are no longer ‘des petits voleurs.’³ In one of his marvellous synoptic tables, Fourier arranges the crimes of commerce under 36 headings, over which the leisurely reader may ponder awestruck.¹ Moreover, the misdeeds of commerce operate in the direction of a universal worsening of the conditions of life:

One would have augured a reform of this sink of corruption, of this inept mechanism, which, by the concurrence of sixty malevolent characteristics,—makes industry a trap for the nations, and aggravates at once their wretchedness and their depravity. It is maintained that people are not more deceitful than they were formerly; nevertheless one could, half a century ago, obtain at a reasonable rate goods of a durable colour, and natural foods; to-day adulteration, knavery, prevail everywhere. The cultivator has become as great a defrauder as the merchant used to be. Dairy products, oils, wines, brandy, sugar, coffee, flour, everything is shamelessly debased. The masses can no longer procure natural foods; only slow poisons are sold them, such progress has the spirit of commerce made even in the smallest villages.²

This, though it savours somewhat of the folly of saying that the former times were better than these, against which we have been officially warned, is sufficiently clear. Commerce, leading to cut-throat competition and to la manie d'écraser, is a provocation to all the vices. Moreover, the frauds and other crimes of commerce are contagious.³

The second line of criticism is that commerce has usurped a place in society to which it is not entitled. Commerce should be subordinate; freedom of commerce should be subject to restrictions according to the needs of the social body.⁴ On the contrary, the merchant has become an industrial pirate, living at the expense of the manufacturer and producer, whose servant he ought to be. Indeed, the mercantile power tends to pass beyond this and to keep the governments themselves in tutelage.⁵ Perhaps, however, enough has been said to indicate the nature of Fourier's criticism of civilisation. We are all natural enemies, prospering on, and praying for, each other's misfortunes; most of us are parasites. Even those of us who do anything, do it badly. In different ways, marriage and commerce are fruitful nurseries of all the vices of hypocrisy and deceit. Civilisation, in short, is an endless morass of mess, inefficiency, swindling and lying—a sewer in which every human relationship is poisoned and warped.

Such is the diagnosis; and it will be conceded that if Fourier is even, as the saying is, substantially correct, it would be as well to seek for a remedy. As it happens, the remedy is of an astonishing simplicity. It is to put your trust in God and not in men, least of all in philosophers and theologians; it is to believe with childish simplicity in the goodness of God, and abolish the evil thing we call Morality. We are confronted once more, it will be observed, with Fourier's religion, from which indeed Fourier himself seldom escapes for more than a few pages, and of which something has already been said in anticipation. Not always without producing an absurd effect, Fourier likes to compare himself with Newton—sometimes, indeed, to Newton's disadvantage. Newton discovered the Law of Attraction; but, be it added, he confined himself to the useless side which ministers to mere curiosity. For in what way are we advantaged if we do know the weight of each of the planets?¹ Fourier regarded himself as the Newton of the spiritual and moral world. The great Law of Attraction governs the planets: so also God, the Governor of the Universe, governs men by attraction. Men may rely on compulsion and restraint; but not God. If he had meant to constrain us, he would have created a race of giants with the object of bullying us. He has, on the contrary, elected to give us attraction and repulsion impelling us in various directions, and he has distributed these in such proportions as are adequate for the achievement of his designs. This ‘attraction’ is, in the hands of God, a magic ring, transforming into pleasures functions which are in themselves repugnant. What could be more repugnant than the care of an infant—puking and muling, and worse? But God transforms this soin si déplaisant into a pleasure by giving the mother attraction passionnée pour ces travaux immondes.² This also explains the somewhat cryptic statement inscribed on Fourier's tombstone as a convenient summary of his gospel: ‘Les Attractions sont proportionelles aux Destinées.’ God, the great economist, distributes attractions just in the amount required to enable (and compel) us to fulfil our destined task.

There then, in Fourier's own view, is his great discovery, placing him, if anything, slightly above Newton. The Law of Attraction is manifested in the play of the human passions, by which we are impelled in one direction or another. All that is required is that we should respond to these promptings, that we should in fact obey this law of passional attraction. Humanity has lost two thousand years, because it has been on a false scent, blinded and misled by philosophers. Fourier has very decided opinions about philosophers. They are sophists, a more hateful race of men, if that be possible, even than merchants. For it is under their malign influence that men have plagued themselves with ideas of morality and of duties. If God be good, and if he implanted these passions in our hearts, he meant us to follow these passions. He does not despise the works of his hands. Humanity has been taught that these passions are things of evil, to be fought against and subdued. But this is a delusion. Fourier's premises will not allow him to admit that God could spoil his own work and be at enmity with himself.

Would that your Causer, ere knoll your knell
For this riot of passion, might deign to tell
Why, since It made you
Good in the germ,
It sent a worm,
To madden Its handiwork, when It might well
Not have assayed you.

Thus Thomas Hardy, facing the same problem, as he contemplates the portrait of a woman about to be hanged—speaking, Fourier would say, like a sophist in his assumption that God could mar what he had made, and that he could lay snares and gins for his creatures.¹ There is no passion that does not come from God, and there is therefore not one, not a single one—and Fourier's voice seems to rise—which is not good. It is neither God nor the passions that are evil; if in civilisation our passions are baneful, it is the environment that makes them so, and it is therefore men's environment and not men's passions that must be altered. And that for Fourier is indeed the whole problem. Assuming that men's passions are good, and this assumption is forced on us by their divine origin, how are we to modify men's environment so that these passions may, all and without exception, have free play? How can we arrange things so that Nero, following his passions, will be as useful a citizen as Marcus Aurelius?

Before this, it ought perhaps to have been hinted that the word ‘passion’ in its Fourieresque context may be ambiguous and misleading. It may be due to these philosophers and sophists whom Fourier could not abide, but indubitably ‘passion’ conveys the impression of something peculiarly purple in hue, an avenue at the end of which looms a crime passionel. In Fourier the ‘passions’ are little more than the various ways in which pleasure may be experienced or heightened; or putting it in other words, which Fourier would have said amount to the same thing, they are the various channels whereby God exercises attraction. Inevitably, much of Fourier's attention is devoted to an analysis of these human passions, and in fact vast tracts of incomprehensibility are devoted to this subject. There are in all twelve ‘passions’—or avenues along which we are lured to pleasure at the promptings of God; fortunately it is only with three, perhaps primarily only with two, that we are here concerned in this restricted study of Fourier. There are, firstly, the five passions corresponding to the five senses of taste, smell, hearing, sight and touch. These, among other things, account for the pleasures of gluttony and the opera, which occupy an altogether peculiar position in Fourier's scheme of things. Then there are, further, four passions of the soul, arising from men's need of sympathy and sociability; and these are represented by friendship, ambition, love and family affection. Of these it is significant that friendship and ambition are classified as ‘major,’ whereas love and ‘le famillisme’ appear subordinately as minor. As distinguished from the passions of the senses, which are concerned with ‘luxe,’ these four passions lead to the formation of groups. Then above these, there are three distributive or governing passions which, though perhaps not immediately comprehensible, lie at the core of Fourierism. To these three passions he gives the names of la Papillonne, la Cabaliste and la Composite. What are these so mysterious passions to which we are subject, and which are so important that they govern all the rest?

Firstly, be it observed that these distributive passions are wholly misunderstood in the civilised order, where, as they only lead to confusion and disaster, they are regarded as vices. The first of them, the Papillonne, represents man's love of variety and change: it is the butterfly in the heart of each of us. If God had meant us to spend fifteen hours a day in stupefying work, he would have given us a taste for monotony, an abhorrence of variety.¹ On the contrary he has placed a whispering butterfly close to our ear. God did not make man for monotony, any more than for monogamy. Fourier would have held that man is not made for mono-anything. Whatever we may be doing, we are presently hankering after something else. An hour and a half of any occupation is about as much as any of us can stand, without falling a victim to the roving eye and the wandering thought. There then is the Papillonne, the butterfly passion. Man is so made (and is so made deliberately and intentionally by God) that he desires, and his nature demands, constant change, not merely in work, but in all things. Who are we that we should stifle the voice of the butterfly, the prophet of God?

Secondly among the governing passions is La Cabaliste, which denotes men's love of intrigue and emulation, the passion that makes men take sides and work for their side. It is, we are told, a favourite passion among women: ‘elles aiment à l'excès l'intrigue.’² This is by no means a denigration: it merely proves their pre-eminent fitness for the new social order. Also in all deliberative assemblies, men tend to become pronounced Cabalists: having prayed that unity and concord may prevail, they at once rush into the lobbies in order to ‘cabaler et intriguer de plus belle.’ Fourier quotes the Almighty in reply to those who would have no rivalry among men:

The Deity mocks at them when they address a stupid prayer to him to make them all brothers, all united in opinion, according to the wish of Plato and Seneca. God answers them: ‘Milliards of years ago I created the passions such as the unity of the universe demanded; I am not going to change them to please the philosophers of an imperceptible globule, which must continue, like all the others, subject to the twelve passions, and particularly to the tenth, the Cabalist.’¹

This may be a somewhat unnecessarily crushing and undeserved retort to Plato and Seneca, who meant well and who are not accustomed to being called the philosophers of an imperceptible globule. Yet Fourier is right. A world in which every one agreed would be of a heartrending insipidity. It is, moreover, curious how Fourier is justified in strange places. Schools, which by nature have no ‘houses,’ have taken to the creation of fictional and notional houses, in order to stimulate the tumult and the shouting on sports day; in so doing, they are paying a distant tribute to Fourier. During the execution of the Soviet Five Years Plan, the frequent challenge of one factory to another in the matter of the time required to do a job would have been hailed by Fourier as a notable example of the Cabalist in action.

Of the Composite, ‘the most beautiful of the twelve passions,’² little need be said. We are told that it is incompatible with civilised labour, and for this reason it may be found somewhat elusive by those who have not advanced beyond civilisation. It is described as the blind enthusiasm which springs from the combination of two kinds of pleasure, a pleasure of the sense and a pleasure of the soul. It is perhaps possible to realise dimly what the Composite passion is, if we reflect how little pleasure there is in sharing a bottle with a surly man; how, even in the most delightful conversation, there is a sense of something lacking until our host ventures to ask: the question for which we have been waiting. Pleasures are more than proportionately heightened by the addition of pleasures of a different character; and this is the doing of the Composite passion. In the words of a knowledgable authority: ‘A concert of musick in a banquet of wine is as a signet of carbuncle set in gold.’ Fortunately, a comprehension of Fourier does not call for an exact appreciation of what precisely the Composite passion is.

So far we have been concerned with Fourier's analysis of this present evil world, his views on the nature of God and the psychological make-up of man, which in all things embodies the intentions of God. It remains to consider the constructive side of Fourier. How are we to transform the society we know into Harmony, where those we now call evil men will become virtuous citizens, precisely because they will then be able to satisfy those God-given instincts which now are so charged with evil consequences? Harmony will be a world where men will be governed by passional attraction, urging them in constantly changing directions, a world where monotony will be unknown, in which also men will be governed by the Cabalist passion, inciting them to rivalry and intrigue.

It is here that we come to what, if not the most characteristic, is at least the most celebrated of Fourier's contributions to speculation. Even if little else of Fourier's is remembered, it is at least generally known that he devised in imagination the Phalanx, that associative self-contained unit of co-operative workers on which Harmony will be built. ‘Theory’—though do not ask too curiously in what way—indicates that to start a Phalanx, 1,620 people will be required, or approximately 1,800 to allow for a margin; it is also desirable to find a pleasant situation, a valley with a broad river and fertile land, set in something of the mystery and the charm of forests. After all, we are raising the curtain on Fairyland, and some latitude may be allowed the dreamer. The Phalanx is to be self-supporting, although in a world of phalanxes, different units would necessarily specialise in different directions.

It would, however, be an error to assume that the Phalanx is a communistic body. It most emphatically is not. In certain respects this father of socialism is incorrigibly conservative in sentiment. It is true that all the members of the Phalanx live in one building, called the Phalanstère, a very sumptuous building with dining-halls, dancing-halls, pleasing colonnades and much more than West-end luxury can devise. But the Phalanstère does not destroy the individuality of those who dwell there. Anyone who chooses and who cares to pay extra may have his meals in his own room in preference to the larger dining-room. There are at least three tariffs, so that it is possible to dine cheaply or expensively; there are luxurious rooms and rooms which the race of landladies would call moderate. In fact there are wealthy and not-so-astonishingly wealthy Harmonians. There are, of course, no poor Harmonians: compared to anyone in civilisation, the eyes of the poorest Harmonian bulge out with fatness. According to his substance, each pays his money and takes his choice. In short, the Phalanstère is a conglomeration of service-flats to suit all purses. It is perhaps anticipating what may come later, and indeed discretion should perhaps suggest the omission of further discussion, but it may be mentioned that life in the Phalanstère is enormously simplified by the fact that all—fathers and mothers alike—are privileged to lead a bachelor existence.

It may be as well to emphasise on the threshold of the Phalanx, how pronouncedly inegalitarian Fourier is, how far removed he is from any attack on property as such. They accuse me of attacking property! he says with indignation—‘moi, inventeur du bouclier de la propriété.’¹ He constantly emphasises that the régime sociétaire is incompatible with equality: it calls for contrasts.² The Phalanx must therefore be composed of ‘gens très-inégaux en fortunes’³; in fact it is the extreme inequality prevailing in Harmony that makes the wheels go round. In short, Harmony is a place where ‘toute égalité est poison politique.’¹ Clearly there is not much of the leveller about Fourier.²

When we turn to the internal organisation of the Phalanx, the first question to be considered is the eternal problem of work. In this life, as we know it, for most of humanity work is something that is loathsome and repugnant. This is indeed part of Fourier's indictment of civilisation. In one of those strangely penetrating flashes which periodically stab through the Fourieresque phantasmagoria, he observes that ‘Morality ordains that we should love our work; let it then know how to make work lovable.’³ It is a just and profound observation. In Fourier's scheme of things, work is to be made attractive: le travail attrayant, indeed, becomes one of the watchwords of the school, and in a sense is accepted as a legacy in the anarchist tradition, which holds that men will do something rather than be completely idle, and that therefore the world's work may be accomplished by people fleeing from the boredom of standing with folded arms.

The secret of making work attractive is found by having appropriate regard to the passions, and in particular to the Papillonne and the Cabaliste. People should work at what attracts them, and no one should work at anything for more than an hour or an hour-and-a-half, or at the outside two hours. A spirit of rivalry and emulation should be infused into all labour, and accordingly the workers should be associated in series and groups in active but friendly competition. In a passage which is marked by an unaccustomed degree of orderliness, Fourier in one place enumerates seven essential conditions on which the attractiveness of societary work will depend. The first has a peculiarly modern ring about it. It is that every worker is to be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by a salary. Here it is possible to see the Guild Socialist horror of wage-slavery. The third embodies the principle of short sessions, two hours being the utmost limit of human enthusiasm in any direction. The fourth, suggested by the Cabaliste, is that work should be carried on by companies of friends, spontaneously united and stimulated by active rivalries. The sixth requires that division of labour (as Fourier understood it) should be carried to the last possible point, in order to give to everyone his appropriate opening. Underlying all these is the ‘pivotal’ condition of the guarantee of a minimum sufficient to free everyone from anxiety.¹

These principles may give a sufficient indication of the nature of the industrial organisation in Harmony. Work is carried on by groups united by a common interest and inspired by passion for their work. The groups are united together in series, and the principle of division of labour (always remembering that the phrase has here a rather special significance) is carried to the utmost degree possible in each group. Thus you may have competing groups devoted to the cultivation of white hyacinths, blue hyacinths and red hyacinths, the whole of these groups forming the series of hyacinth growers. There is an inordinate amount of discussion in Fourier regarding the proper grading of the groups. Inside the series there is the ascending and descending wing, as well as the centre, and these require to be carefully balanced. Normally the two wings will compete against the centre. There is one pleasant picture of 32 groups of pear-growers, ranging from the bâtardes dures to the bâtardes molles, through all degrees of hardness and softness, and showing how their rivalries may be stimulated. And indeed, with a little ingenuity, there need be no limit. Soft-pear growers compete against hard-pear growers; pear-growers compete against apple-growers; women pear-growers compete against men pear-growers. And each group has its banner under which it marches out to its task. It will be observed that when Fourier speaks of division of labour, his mind is not moving in the grooves of Adam Smith. It will also be apparent that when we pass the portals of the Phalanx, we move as in Fairyland, and our earthly cares do not extend beyond blue hyacinths and soft pears. It should be added that each worker joins as many groups as he wishes, normally from 30 to 50. In whatever directions his tastes lie, he will be able to work an occasional hour with the appropriate group.

It has already been remarked above that Fourier is no egalitarian. It is not merely that he regards inequality as something designed by God, and as a healthy influence in the life of Harmony; in other ways he is throughout extremely tender in his treatment of Capital. There is indeed something which would be slightly repulsive, if it were not wholly grotesque, in his attempts to wheedle Capital into acceptance of his scheme. He looked for a capitalist to launch his first Phalanx, and he kept a list of 4,000 ‘candidates,’ who might be persuaded to save humanity. Before these he dangled the whole gamut of hereditary sceptres. For the merest paltry sum anyone might have been Emperor, Calif, King, Duke or anything else. But apart from such adventitious rewards, Capital will be generously treated in Harmony. It is unnecessary to say that the economies of association and the zeal of enthusiastic workers spurred on by the Cabalist passion will result in a world bursting with prosperity. This surplus Fourier proposed to divide in the ratio of four-twelfths to Capital, five-twelfths to Labour and three-twelfths to Talent, a proportion which, giving less than a half to Labour, need certainly alarm no capitalist. It is here that we encounter one of the most characteristic ideas of Fourier. Prosperity will be so outrageous in the Phalanx that there is no reason why all should not be capitalists. To encourage this desirable end, he adopts a childish device whereby the rate of interest will vary inversely with the number of shares held in the Phalanx. The poor Harmonian (if a contradiction in terms may be permitted) will be able to look for a 30 per cent. or even a 40 per cent. return. The object of this is to convert him ‘d'emblée à l'esprit de propriété et de conservation, d'où naissent les bonnes mœurs,’¹ a horribly bourgeois sentiment. The medium Harmonian will get a modest 15 per cent. The wealthy Harmonian will have to put up with a beggarly 5 per cent. Thus there is no one in Harmony who need be without a share. Looking round him, he may say with complacency: ‘My library; my dining-hall; my fields’²—just as the worker in the South Metropolitan Gas Company may say: ‘My gas tanks, my railway trucks, my directors.’

But indeed Fourier goes much deeper than this. To all talk about the class struggle and about class consciousness, his answer is simple. It is, in effect, to confound the classes. If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? As a result there will be no battle. This ultimately is one reason why each one attaches himself to some thirty or more groups. In Harmony, each one will certainly be a capitalist. He may have shown talent (either in supervision or in invention) in the merino group or the street-paving group. In addition he may be entitled to remuneration as a worker in two dozen other groups. Under these circumstances he ceases to be exclusively a capitalist, a manager or a wage-earner. Each man becomes a microcosm, and such conflicting interests as might emerge are harmoniously resolved in the breasts of each. All realise in fact that if they push their interest too far in one direction, they will only damage themselves in another. There will be no conflicts, since each one will know that what he loses on the swings he will make up on the roundabouts.

The reward given to each series does not depend on the product of its work, but is professedly based on the necessity and usefulness of its task, and inversely on the agreeableness of the occupation. The application of this general principle reflects Fourier's own tastes. The cultivation of fruit ranks low, because no place is so delectable as an orchard. The opera, oddly enough to those who do not know Fourier, ranks first in the order of necessity. It has been indicated that a ‘pivotal’ condition of labour being made attractive is that a minimum be guaranteed. Fourier never fails to underline that society owes the individual a living, whether he earns it or not. In places, this takes the moderate form of a guarantee of work in health, and of assistance, a social minimum in case of infirmity; and indeed he speaks of an extension of assurance as one way of escaping from civilisation into the next state, le régime garantiste.¹ But elsewhere the guaranteed minimum rather suggests what in another quarter has been called the vagabond's wage. The reason for the minimum is of some interest. It is that civilisation has deprived us of certain rights which primitive man enjoyed—the chase, fishing, gathering’ and pasturage.² In another place he gives a more lengthy list of rights, with a pleasing addition in the form of l'insouciance, of which civilisation most certainly has deprived us.³ For these losses we are due compensation. Fourier, who is always precise, tells us exactly what the minimum should be:

Board at tables of the third class, five meals a day;

A decent suit, and uniforms for work and for ‘parade,’ as well as all the instruments for husbandry and manufacture;

Individual lodgings, consisting of a room with a cabinet, and admission to the public halls, to fêtes of the third class, and to plays in third-class logess.⁴

Work then is to be done under the influence of attraction. What is to happen in the case of work that is positively and of necessity disagreeable and even repulsive? It is a question on which there has been much discussion, sometimes rather puerile, in socialist literature. Fourier's solution is so characteristic, and in a sense so logical on his premises, that it deserves to be mentioned, even at the risk of straying into the field of education and the upbringing of the youth. The problem, expressed crudely, is that of scavenging in an ideal world where all follow their natural bent in competing in the cultivation of white and blue hyacinths. Applying Fourier's doctrine of passions, it is possible to get the solution at the first guess. Who are those among us who positively enjoy being dirty? Is not Fourier right in saying that at a certain age most boys and some girls are vrais maniaques de saleté, little devils for dirt, to translate freely. Parents daily reproach their offspring for what they foolishly regard as their unnatural dislike of cleanliness. They forget that all our passions are good, and given us for a purpose. Children have their defects; but this love of dirt is socially their salvation; they are in fact ‘passionately attracted’ to the work of scavenging, and this work is therefore entrusted to them, grouped together in the corporation known as ‘Little Hordes.’ But Fourier is here too Fourieresque to escape quotation:

The madness for dirt which prevails among children is merely an uncultivated germ, like wild fruit; it must be refined by applying to it the two forces of the religious unitary spirit, and of corporative honour. Supported by these two motives, repugnant occupations will become games, having indirect composite attraction....

For long I made the mistake of censuring this odd peculiarity in children, and of trying to make it disappear in the mechanism of the ‘passionate series’; that was to act like a Titan, wishing to change the work of God. I achieved no success until I decided to speculate in accordance with attraction, and to make use of the inclinations of childhood, as they have been created by Nature....

... There is nothing, therefore, left for children to do but to take over the field of unclean work,—charity of high statesmanship, since it saves from contempt the last industrial classes, and in consequence the intermediate classes also.¹

These Little Hordes ‘are always on foot at 3 o'clock in the morning, even in the depth of winter, attending to the animals, working in the slaughter-houses.’ The Little Hordes also repair the highways, turn out in any emergency, kill reptiles and vipers, and do all the other things Boy Scouts dream of doing.

There are two large questions on which Fourier has much to say, but as they lie somewhat off our main path, a brief notice may be sufficient. The first relates to education in general, and the second is the large question of the place of women in society, with the allied problems of marriage and feminism. The civilised child Fourier holds in complete detestation, and the tone of his voice, when he refers to them, suggests that he must have suffered at their hands: a man of somewhat eccentric habits, who talks loudly to himself as he walks the streets, frequently does. Children move him to a bitterness of irony which is unusual in Fourier. He speaks of ‘la société des tendres enfants hurlant, brisant, souillant, etc.,’² and of ‘le doux plaisir d'entendre un marmot hurler jour et nuit.’³ With an admirable right-and-left, he refers to ‘les tendres enfants, si dignes de leurs vertueux pères, petits vandales, bien dignes de grands vandales.’⁴ In short, they are a ‘race demoniaque,’ little anti-Christs.⁴

This is the product of civilisation, where we make the mistake of beginning education too late. The child is kept inactive until the age of six or seven, and then turned on to theory, whereas it has been for many years before that striving to express itself actively. The instincts of early childhood are to rummage, to make a noise and to imitate (singerie),¹ and these elementary instincts should be used to find out in what directions a child's tastes lie. From the age of two children will therefore be taken about by their nurses to places where people are working, and there will everywhere be small hammers and small tools so that the instinct to imitate will make even very young children useful workers before, with us, education begins at all.² At the age of 25 months, they will be proudly shelling peas, increasing the dividends payable to shareholders in the Phalanx. The great defect in our system is that one method is applied to all. In Harmony, relying on the imitative instinct and a child's readiness to learn from those a few months older, education will pursue a different course for each child, who will quite naturally reveal in what direction ‘passionate attraction’ draws him. And for further education, the two great instruments are cookery, to cultivate the active sense of taste and smell, and the opera, to cultivate the passive ones of sight and hearing. ‘Children and cats,’ as he tells us, ‘would be for ever nosing about the kitchen, if they were not chased away. As for the magic of the opera and of Fairyland made visible, there is nothing more captivating for a child.’³

Fourier would not be Fourier if he did not arrange his children into Nourissons (up to 15 months), Poupons (from 16 months to 33 months) and Bambins (from 34 to 54 months). Indeed there are subdivisions, for are there not Pouponnains, who are doucereux in disposition; Pouponnards, who are mutins; and Pouponnâtres, who are démoniaques?⁴ Of the later stages we have already met the ‘Little Hordes,’ whose duty it is to clean the streets and kill the reptiles. But these are the ‘bad’ children, who are passionately attracted to personal uncleanliness, that is to say, two-thirds of all boys and one-third of all girls. On the other hand, two-thirds of the girls and one-third of the boys are drawn in the direction of personal cleanliness and neatness. These are incorporated in the ‘Little Bands,’ who are the gentle element in life, and form the necessary counterpart to the Little Hordes. They give examples in good manners; they design costumes for ceremonials; they correct their parents' bad pronunciation—the little prigs. They look after the pigeons and the flowers.⁵

It is when we come to the next stage in the development of the young that Fourier caused most embarrassment to his followers, and indeed caused not a little embarrassment to himself. Despite distinctions and subtleties there is nothing remotely resembling marriage in Harmony, and at a certain stage the education of the young prepares him for what is to follow. Women at a certain age may select one of three grades of what we should call infidelity in these matters, enrolling themselves in the appropriate Corporation amoureuse; but as they may vary their option at any time, they might as well opt forthwith for the corporation that gives the greatest liberty. Even in the most binding union there is nothing wrong with inconstancy, provided it is a matter of reciprocal agreement; indeed short ‘truces’ (an unhappy word) for a few days will not be regarded as inconstancy, provided they are registered in the Chancellory of the Court of Love.¹ Such ‘truces’ are frequent, above all when there are ceremonial visits to the Phalanx: presumably something must be allowed in the sacred name of hospitality. Fourier was careful to explain that this transition to a state of completely free love would not take place until the third generation of Harmony, and further that it would be effected only with the unanimous consent of all concerned. As if this were not sufficient safeguard, he indicated that in the interval God would doubtless give a new revelation and expressly authorise the new code. After all, as he contrives to hint, the God of the Book of Genesis can scarcely be regarded as a bigoted advocate of monogamy. Finally, as he points out, the customs he advocates are those in force in the planet Herschel.

Waiving Jehovah and the planet Herschel, who on this question may not cut much ice, the interesting fact is that here again, as in Plato and Campanella and so many others, we have socialist thought passing condemnation on the family; and it is interesting to note what in this case are the underlying reasons. The first takes us straight back to Plato. It is that marriage and the family, inasmuch as they create special interests, are anti-social and prevent a man from doing his duties by his fellows. It is more or less the view of the Apostle Paul, with whom otherwise Fourier has little affinity: ‘He that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.’ Marriage, says Fourier, binds two people in a league against all that surrounds them, and makes them indifferent to public misfortunes; the highest praise that can be given to anyone is to say that marriage has not changed him.² When a man marries, it is a notice of dismissal to all his friends (and perhaps there is here a pathetic fragment of autobiography).³ In a hundred families there are a hundred egotists: not one is a citizen. Each considers himself justified in any swindle because he is working for his wife and children. Plato himself could not have expressed more forcibly the danger of worldly entanglements.¹

The other motive that urges Fourier to abolish the family and establish the reign of free love is, rather oddly, his championship of women. There has never been a more zealous, if perhaps injudicious, defender of women than Fourier. No one has emphasised so strongly that in civilisation woman is ‘made for slavery,’ and that, given a chance, she is fit for better things.² Of eight queens who have reigned ‘libres et sans époux,’ seven have reigned with glory; of eight kings, seven are usually accounted as duds. No one has more emphatically stated that the position assigned to woman is the acid test of any society.³ Women then must receive a larger freedom. The first and most fundamental wrong done to woman lies in the quiet assumption that all women were meant to be housekeepers. At most Nature has made only one woman in eight a ménagère.⁴ The result is that seven-eighths of women are misfits, in a perpetual state of irritation which affects the remaining eighth. So far are women from being naturally domesticated that not one woman in a hundred at the age of 30 knows how to set a fire.⁵ Women in fact were not intended for marriage.⁶ It is a recurrent thought in Fourier that God has given us our passions and instincts, not with reference to the 5,000 years of misery through which we are now passing, but to fit us for the 70,000 years of bliss that await us; and the ratio of one natural ménagère in eight indicates what proportion will be required domestically in these happier days. The situation might of course have been met by altering the ‘passions’ of women, as we draw near to Harmony; but apparently it is easier for God to create an anti-whale than to alter the disposition of a woman. Those women whom civilisation looks upon as vicious, because undomesticated, will find their place in Harmony; and that they may have freedom, domesticity is replaced by an unending succession of fleeting lovers, and any incidental children are entrusted to groups and series of nurses. It is a chastening reflection: with a great sum obtained they this freedom.

Perhaps we may take a last glance round the Phalanx before passing through the turnstile into the light of common day. In the construction of his Utopia, Fourier reveals himself as a man rent by two entirely contradictory and inconsistent passions. On the one hand it is a world of license, not to say licentiousness, of liberty in excess, of pleasure pursued to a point where the discussion becomes almost nauseating. His is a heaven, securely based on copulation and cookery. The joy of eating is almost converted into the central point in the machinery of God's providence. There are five meals a day, and these of such extent and quality as beggar all description. If the finest roast fowl from the table of the first gourmand of France were offered to the Harmonians, the official ‘tasters’ would overwhelm it with such a flood of criticism that a black ribbon of disgrace would be attached to the banner of the poulterers.¹ But Fourier is not content with pleasures coming as single spies: he will have what he calls a parcours of pleasures, seven or eight pleasures piled on each other, and—believe it or not—the rich Harmonian has two or three such parcours each day.²

On the other hand there is in Fourier the instinct of the subordinate clerk, the orderly book-keeper, and this requires that everything in the Phalanx should be docketed and tabulated, that everything should march like clockwork. In every one of the 2,985,984 phalanxes which will ultimately cover the globe, matters will move according to plan, with something of the rigidity of the military parade-ground. Punctuality in everything is the rule in Harmony—tout à minute fixe et sans attendre qui que ce soit.¹ Each day begins with a hymn and with fanfares, and with banners flying the groups and the series march off to their appointed tasks. And how comely it is and how reviving to observe how colourful a life we may lead, when once we have cast aside the sophists and the philosophers, and the nightmare of morality! The Bandes Roses, arriving from Persia, are followed by the Bandes Lilas from Japan, displaying their prowess against all comers in drama and in poetry²; there are pleasant reunions of the true friends of the turnip and of the equally true friends of the onion; there are perpetual meetings in the afternoon in the orchards, charged with intrigue and rivalry; and everyone is as agreeable and charming as the charming and agreeable people whom somehow we seem to meet only when we are on holiday.

The peculiarity of Fourier is that his terrible imagination compels him to see every general proposition in concrete form in the lives of individuals directly affected. Thus the arrangements in Harmony are always discussed by reference to events in the lives of Harmonians who, somewhat incongruously, usually bear classical names. Perhaps it would be truer to say that Fourier himself lived in Harmony as a way of escape from his drab life. The spacious Phalanstère was a refuge from his cramped lodgings; the five meals a day (and such meals!) reflected his bare table; the women who might be loved, and loved so excessively, in Harmony were all his landlady was not. Yet this curious habit of giving concrete shape to his argument is largely responsible for the aroma of absurdity which is never long absent from Fourier. For even when he is making a good point, the incident by which it is illustrated is frequently not far from buffoonery. Thus, to illustrate how happy is the father of undowered daughters in Harmony compared with one similarly placed in civilisation, he gives a full length biography of each of the six daughters of Damon—and rather scandalous biographies they are.³ So with Lunarius, who had a passion for eating spiders, but who nevertheless thereby fulfilled the intentions of the Almighty,⁴ and with countless other burlesque figures who pass through his pages, the effect is rather to delight the scoffer than to edify the humble.⁵

What is there of substance and of permanence to be derived from this strange farrago of mixed feeding? More perhaps than might be imagined, for Fourier, pruned of his exuberant excesses, has been a strangely abiding influence, above all in France. Following for once Fourier's excellent habit of enumeration, let us indicate some points in his legacy. In the first place, there has never been a more acute critic of the lack of organisation and the waste resulting from unrestrained individualism. Then, secondly, his influence has been very great in the development of the co-operative movement. The elimination of waste by co-operation has its greatest exponent in Fourier. It is perhaps not irrelevant to observe that in London, Paris, New York, and indeed all great cities, people are drifting to that hotel life which at least represents an approach to some of the aspects of the Phalanstère. It may be that the home will go down increasingly before the service flat. Thirdly, it is to Fourier's credit that he saw deep into the meaning of the conflicts of Labour and Capital, and in substance what he says on the desirability of confusion of the classes still merits our attention. The South Metropolitan Gas Company, with its harmonious history, is in its way a monument to Fourier. Then, fourthly, viewed in essence and apart from its embroideries, the Phalanx itself embodies a certain ideal. Fourier was no enemy of Capital, but he certainly detested industrialism. He was in fact an advocate of a ‘Back-to-the-land’ policy, and moreover, back-to-the-land with an emphasis on market gardening and fruit, with the population living in something that we should now call Garden Cities. Fifthly, we must allow him an abiding influence, above all on the anarchists, in connection with his doctrine of ‘attractive labour’; his emphasis on the autonomy of the Phalanx also ranges him with those opposed to centralisation.

Such was Fourier, a strange mixture of a child and of one hovering perilously near the thin line which divides sanity from insanity, with all the directness of a child and the strange intuitions of a madman. He is a figure never far removed from absurdity. Yet when we have finished smiling, it is a strangely pathetic, wistful, lonely figure that our unheroic hero presents. There are few things more moving in human biography than the ageing of Fourier. He had persuaded himself that a capitalist with lavish hands would come to him, and provide the means for the regeneration of the world. And like the timid, deferential gentleman that he was, he had made it known that he would be at home daily at a certain hour, in order that his expected patron might not be inconvenienced. For would it not be a terrible thing if the opportunity of saving the world should be thrown away by such a mischance as Fourier's absence when the benefactor of humanity arrived? So, for the last years of his life, whatever else might happen, Fourier was punctually at his post when the clocks chimed the appointed hour, waiting, attentively listening—doubtless each day, a new hope; each day, a fresh disappointment. And then one morning he was found dead in the little furnished room which he occupied, kneeling by the bedside. A greater than the unknown capitalist had called, and Fourier had slipped out of life as furtively as he had passed through it.

CHAPTER VIII. ROBERT OWEN↩

AMONG that queer bunch of visionary and Utopian socialists, to whom in some undefined proportion is usually ascribed the paternity of socialism, Robert Owen (1771–1858) presents some strange contrasts to his nearest bed-fellows. Saint-Simon had been an aristocrat, always conscious of the fact. Fourier, if we look at his drab life in the cold light of dawn, had been at best an unsuccessful commercial traveller. Godwin, to go further back, was obviously, in the world's estimation, destined to be a confused and bankrupt bookseller. Louis Blanc (coming further down than the fathers) was a journalist, graduating to an uneasy position in an uneasy government, as a prelude to a prolonged exile. It used to be a common reproach that one or other of many Cabinet Ministers, while aspiring to control the destiny of an empire, would have been incompetent to run a whelk-stall—though the special appropriateness of this particular entrepreneurial venture for purposes of comparison and contrast was never wholly clear. But the implied criticism, so far as it was justified, might certainly have been applied to the earlier socialists: they criticised the management of the world, but they themselves had ‘done nothing’ and had shown no marked ability, either in managing their own or other people's affairs. Robert Owen, up to a point, is a bird of entirely different plumage. True, he spent his last years in a rather undefined state of dependence; but so long as he cared for making money, he showed that he could do the trick. In the great years of his uprising, he made it clear that he could beat the magnates of the Industrial Revolution at their own game; if success in business and the accumulation of capital was to be the acid test of managing a whelk-stall, Robert Owen could give abundant evidence of his competence. Indeed, had his life stopped at the right moment (for this purpose) he might have been the ideal copy-book boy for innumerable volumes on Self-Help and Industry: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.’ If, in fact, Owen threw aside his supreme qualification for inclusion in the works of Samuel Smiles, it was an act of voluntary abdication, in pursuit of another vision.

As a matter of literal fact, Robert Owen did, on one momentous occasion, stand, or at least bow, before the Queen, on the presentation of Lord Melbourne—dressed up like a monkey, as he complained. Owen was then (1839) of doubtful respectability, and loyal hearts (in particular as represented by the delightfully named ‘Society for Peaceably Repressing Infidelity’) were moved to concern and alarm for the safety of their young and uncontaminated sovereign. Doubtless, however, the wisdom of Solomon should not be taken over literally; and in its broad interpretation, there is here another obvious contrast between Owen and the other founders. At the height of his influence and powers, Owen knew everyone; he was indeed a European figure. Saint-Simon had unquestionably his aristocratic connections, but somehow he rather gives the impression of a decayed gentleman, who has put much aside. Godwin at one time had an immense reputation, but it was essentially literary. Fourier knew no one, apart from his landladies and their cats, and latterly a few disciples as uninfluential as himself. But Owen, among the early socialists, is a portent: a man who has made money, and to whom at one time all doors were open.

One other preliminary consideration arises. Few figures in the history of socialism represent, as does Owen, the combination of theory and practice; and it follows that even in what is designed to be, as exclusively as may be, a history of thought and doctrine, the biography of Owen asserts itself. In a sense his Ufe was his socialism, and even if he had refrained from writing the whole of his lengthy series of books and pamphlets (and much more), he would still have been a remarkable figure in the history of socialism. Owen, once he yielded to the vice, never stopped writing, and he never ceased ‘trying’ and projecting; and in the fabric of his life, his writings and his strivings are inextricably interwoven.

It may, however, be possible even in the case of Owen to confine the biographical details within bounds. Owen was born in 1771 in Newtown, Montgomery, where his father had a combined business of sadler, ironmonger and postmaster. If Owen plunged young into life, it is not to be assumed that he was driven by poverty; it was merely the custom of the age and of his people. He seems to have acquired all that his school could teach him by the time he had reached seven, and thereafter for two years he was promoted to be an ‘usher’—two lost years, he regrets, ‘except,’ he adds, ‘that I thus early acquired the habit of teaching others what I knew.’ In view of the subsequent seventy-five years of didactic activity, this salvage from the wreck of these two years has an ominous and foreboding sound. At nine he was by way of being a shop assistant in his native town, and at ten he journeyed to London, and soon afterwards was employed at Stamford with a linen-draper bearing the improbable name of McGuffog. In spite of his labours, he was able to read much, confusedly, at Stamford. After some years, he was back in London, in a shop at Ludgate Hill, where he was grotesquely overworked; and so to Manchester, where his meteoric career began. By the age of 19, he had become manager to Drinkwater, cotton-mill owners in Manchester, with (having regard to the year, 1790, and his age) the almost princely salary of £300 a year. In due course, after various moves onwards and upwards—ever the conscientious, hard-working young man—there came in 1797 the purchase on behalf of himself and his partners of the New Lanark establishment from Dale (and subsequently, as becomes a business romance, his marriage to Miss Dale), and so finally in 1800 he came into his own kingdom, and in his own characteristic words, ‘entered upon the government of New Lanark.’

To a very large extent, Robert Owen is New Lanark, and New Lanark has little significance apart from Robert Owen. Here, also, his glory is unsullied; in everything else in the life of Owen there is frustration and failure, however greatly he may have designed; and indeed, as the years advance, there is too frequently a touch of the grotesque which is even more fatal than failure. But in New Lanark he wrought a miracle, not merely unaided, but in the face of obstacles over and above those inherent in the task. There were difficult partners, shying at philanthropy, and there were consequently business reshufflings. He was distrusted as an alien by the jealous Scot. He would have us believe that many of his flock knew only Gaelic¹; even in 1800, it was an unusual accomplishment among pauper children drafted from Edinburgh; perhaps their Scots accent was such that to Owen, a Welshman, it might just as well have been Gaelic. But despite friction with his partners and sullenness from his workers, at least in the early stages, Owen persevered until the face of New Lanark was entirely transformed. Doubtless Owen would have said that all this was a witness to the truth and the efficacy of the theories on which he acted. We shall presently survey his writings so far as they bear on this period; for the present it may be a sufficiently accurate first approximation to regard Owen as of the school of Godwin in these matters. The doctrine he sought to apply in New Lanark was the familiar theory of human irresponsibility, Godwin's ‘Necessity,’ the view that men are good or evil according to their environment, and that therefore an improved environment, resting on improved education, provides the path to all progress. It is, however, fairly clear that what wrought the miracle was Owen's personality, and not abstract devotion to the theory of ‘Necessity.’ Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that a thoroughgoing belief throughout a community that no one was responsible for anything might lead to the most deplorable results. If, the more I wallow in sin, the more eager do my fellow-men become to express their sympathy with me because of the malady from which I suffer, and to find excuses for me in the notorious deficiencies of my parents, it may be that I, enjoying sympathy, may qualify for still larger doses. It may be doubted whether even a sermon-tasting Scottish community would be reformed by listening to Owen preaching his favourite sermon; but there is nothing absurd in believing that they may have been saved, and perhaps awed, by his personality, his zeal, and his obvious sincerity in all the works of his hands.

New Lanark, when Owen assumed the government, was probably more degraded than most similar places at the time of the Industrial Revolution. To a considerable extent it had been recruited in Dale's time by child-labour drafted from the workhouses of Edinburgh and Glasgow at an incredibly early age. The adult population seems to have consisted largely of thieves, drunkards and blackguards. Systematically, Owen proceeded to turn this citadel of vice into a model village. He turned off the supply of over-juvenile juveniles, and as education was in his theory the centre of all things, he began his great work with infant schools. On this side of his activities Owen was not merely a pioneer, but he held views which entitle him to a place in the history and theory of education. That singing and dancing should occupy so large a place in the scheme of things was an innovation in this environment. Meanwhile, perhaps somewhat dictatorially and undoubtedly somewhat patriarchally, Owen continued the work of reformation. A tolerable standard of cleanliness was attained without too much effort. Drunkenness was a more difficult failing to eliminate; but even here, by controlling the public-houses, Owen got what he wanted. Scarcely any aspect of welfare known to us to-day was neglected by Owen in these years, culminating in the ‘Institution for the Formation of Character,’ the opening of which on January 1, 1816, was the occasion of one of Owen's most characteristic speeches. This institution was in fact meant to be a centre of communal life. During all these years, the fame of New Lanark spread, and increasingly it became a place of pilgrimage, visited by princes, prelates and potentates and by all and sundry who departed saying that the half had not been told. Looking back, towards the end of his life, Owen described the inhabitants of New Lanark as having been ‘literally a self-employing, self-supporting, self-educating, and self-governing population.’¹ This is perhaps New Lanark seen, not wholly justly, through a shimmer of years; for Owen always was, and never could be anything but, the benevolent autocrat. Yet, whether self-governed or more probably Owen-governed, it remains indisputable that out of the dross and grime of the Industrial Revolution, he made a fair community where little girls were taught to sing and dance, and where, as he boasts, there was not ‘one legal punishment inflicted upon any one of these people during that period.’ One may not inappropriately borrow the words used by Disraeli in describing another village which obviously drew its inspiration from New Lanark; ‘The men were well clad; the women had a blooming cheek; drunkenness was unknown; while the moral condition of the softer sex was proportionately elevated.’¹ This was the first stage of Owen's life, during which he was pre-eminently the successful and model employer, in all matters of welfare more than a century before his time.

In the second phase of his life, Owen was primarily a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions. The two parts of his life, although in a sense well-defined, inevitably overlap to a considerable extent. It is probable that almost from the outset Owen looked on New Lanark as a model on which the whole world was later to be fashioned. Along with fairly orthodox activities directed to a limitation of the hours of labour, he began increasingly fairly early in the New Lanark days, to advocate the establishment of communistic settlements, his famous ‘parallelograms.’ Much of later Owenite history is occupied with the attempt to establish such ‘villages of co-operation.’ Though he did not finally and formally sever his connection with New Lanark until a considerable number of years later, the turning-point in Owen's life was probably the public meeting which he addressed in London on August 21, 1817, when he went out of his way to make a frontal attack on ‘the errors—gross errors—that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to man.’² Later he was assumed to have made a similar frontal attack on the whole institution of marriage, although on one view he might have been interpreted as having merely demanded easier conditions of divorce. But the effect of his supposedly infidel and immoral views was to deprive Owen increasingly during the remainder of his Ufe of that very large measure of public, and indeed distinguished, support which he had enjoyed when he was primarily the model employer. Of his experiments in communism, the most famous was that of New Harmony in Indiana, which he acquired from the Rappites in 1824. Others were at Tytherly in Hampshire, and at Orbiston near Glasgow. All of these, sooner rather than later, fell into a decline and expired for reasons which will be found analysed in the biographies of Owen. New Harmony is also notable because it devoured a large part of the wealth previously accumulated by Owen, so that his later years were spent in comparative poverty. Apart from these communistic experiments, which were in a sense the fulfilment of certain of his New Lanark writings, Owen, back in Europe and finally severed from business, gave himself up to such projects as the ‘Grand National Consolidated Trades Union’ and the ‘National Equitable Labour Exchange,’ a marvellous store or bank, whose object it was to eliminate money in the ordinary sense. And so on to advanced old age Owen continued campaigning, never ceasing to proclaim the faith that was in him, though fewer listened, never desisting from writing, though fewer read and of these perhaps some read with a smile, ever scattering his seed in many fields, yet reaping no visible harvest.

Before turning to such of Owen's writings as it may be necessary to take down from the bookshelf, it may be well to supplement the foregoing bald biographical details by looking at the man himself. For again it is more important than it is with many of those who stray through this book that we should ask what manner of man this Robert Owen was. Admittedly, he is something of an enigma. Mr. Podmore, greatly daring, ventured to suggest that he ‘was not, by the modern standard, a good man of business.’¹ Certainly, over large tracts of his life, especially in the second phase, he showed precious little business or common sense. Yet on the crude test of ‘getting there,’ Owen advanced from being a miscellaneous message-boy to wealth, influence and controlling power in what, for such a transformation, was a remarkably short period of time. Probably the secret of business success was as much of a mystery in the days of the Industrial Revolution as in later times; but if business ability is proved by being successful at business; then it is difficult to deny that Owen, at least in his younger days, had this ability.

On this point there may have been something of a break in Owen's life; having made money in the first phase, he proceeded to show, in more senses than one, that he did not know the meaning of money. But in all other respects, Owen's life is of a singularly uniform texture. His dominating characteristic—one that may become rather nauseating if expressed too frequently—was without doubt the love of his fellow-men. Yet though Owen's presentation of benevolence may at times grate, he was unquestionably sincere; he was indeed aflame with a passionate love of humanity. With this it must be admitted that he never lived down the education he gave himself. In his early youth he read too much, and he read too much without guidance; as a consequence he read with more zeal than profit. An autobiography put together by an octogenarian may not be the safest authority on the intellectual development of the writer as a child; but if we are to believe Owen's Life, his views on all essential matters were ‘set’ by the time he was twelve. He had already discovered the ‘errors’ in all religions; he had already realised that he was but the creature of the influences to which he was subjected. As he went through life, Owen showed himself utterly incapable of shedding an old idea or of acquiring a new one. There is a devastating remark by Harriet Martineau to the effect that ‘Robert Owen is not the man to think differently of a book for having read it.’

The consequences were somewhat disturbing, both on his own contemporaries and on all who have come after. He imagined he was a pioneer when in fact he was but playing amateurishly with problems which have engaged the mind of man since the beginning of time. He became more and more dogmatic, the complete egotist, underrating all others, indeed assuming the ignorance of all others as a first axiom. Behind all he wrote, and doubtless behind all he spoke, could be heard the words: ‘I'm not arguing with you: I'm telling you.’ As a result he became the greatest bore of his generation, seizing every occasion to pour out interminably his theories on the formation of character. Yet his personality was such that he was greatly loved by those who knew him; we of subsequent generations, who may not see his countenance, can clutch at nothing to relieve our boredom. Owen is tolerable to anyone who confines himself to what he wrote up to 1821; but beyond that he kept on writing and writing and writing, saying the same thing over and over again, for ever returning to the same point of departure,

Like a homing pigeon, never by doubt diverted.

When we turn to his writings, it is, as has been indicated, almost absurdly true that the reader can get all that he needs or requires in a very small sample of the whole. The essays which are comprised in A New View of Society and the so-called Report to the County of Lanark are almost in themselves sufficient; even within this limited compound Owen says all the essential things much oftener than once.¹ Owen's point of departure is essentially the same as that of Godwin, although from this common central core he subsequently branches in different directions, above all in his applications. Almost the whole of Owen is comprised in one proposition which, with significantly little change, he continued to repeat throughout the years. That proposition is that our characters are made for us, and that accordingly we are in no way responsible for what we are. Owen considered that he had discovered a new science, which he called ‘the science of the influence of circumstances,’ though in fact the development of the science never got much beyond the frequent reiteration of the fundamental proposition.

As concise a statement as any is that contained in the Third Essay (of A New View of Society), where it takes this form with all the added emphasis of italicised type:

Every day will make it more and more evident that the character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly, created by his predecessors; that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible he ever can, form his own character.¹

This is the error which the human race must in some way formally renounce, and Owen resorts to what is, for him, considerable violence of language in denouncing this evil legacy. It is ‘a fundamental error of the highest possible magnitude’; it is ‘the true and sole origin of evil’; it has been ‘the Evil Genius of the world.’ Rising to further heights, the notion that individuals form their own character becomes ‘this hydra of human calamity, this immolator of every principle of rationality, this monster.’² Almost a generation later, the principle of Good is ‘the knowledge that man is formed, without his consent, by nature and society’; while the principle of Evil is ‘the supposition that man forms himself.’³

It follows, on Godwinian lines, that since our character is made for us, character may be moulded by changing the environment, but Owen differs from Godwin in the emphasis he lays on the mathematical precision with which any desired result can be obtained in this great human laboratory:

Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of the proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.⁴

Further it will become

evident to the understanding, that by far the greater part of the misery with which man is encircled may be easily dissipated and removed; and that with mathematical precision he may be surrounded with those circumstances which must gradually increase his happiness.⁵

This explains the importance of education in Owen's scheme of things; for there is literally nothing that education cannot do. Godwin, it will be remembered, shied at education as a possible regenerator, not because of his lack of faith in the power of education, but because of the impossibility of finding the right preceptors in a world where all school preceptors are fettered by their old school ties. But Owen has no such qualms, and education may produce the perfect community:

On the experience of a life devoted to the subject, I hesitate not to say, that the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. They are all necessary consequences of ignorance.¹

The plasticity, especially of the young, is a point to which Owen frequently recurs:

Human nature, save the minute differences which are ever found in all the compounds of the creation, is one and the same in all; it is without exception universally plastic.²

As a result of this plasticity and the mathematical precision with which the educational manipulator can work, ‘the rising generations may become in character, without any individual exceptions, whatever men can now desire them to be, that is not contrary to human nature.’³

With Owen it follows also that ignorance, vice and misery are more or less different words for the same thing, and that (as in Socrates and Godwin) knowledge and virtue are identified. It is not merely that, in general terms, ignorance is the sole obstacle in the way of realising a world without crime and without poverty; but that in some mysterious way (which flies in the face of most mundane experience) happiness is in proportion to knowledge:

When the knowledge he receives is true and unmixed with error, although it be limited, if the community in which he lives possesses the same kind and degree of knowledge, he will enjoy happiness in proportion to the extent of that knowledge. On the contrary, when the opinions which he receives are erroneous... his misery will be in proportion to the extent of those erroneous opinions.⁴

Again, as in Godwin, truth has but to be seen to be embraced: it imposes itself:

Let truth unaccompanied with error be placed before them; give them time to examine it and to see that it is in unison with all previously ascertained truths; and conviction and acknowledgment of it will follow of course.⁵

Such is the philosophical framework of all Owen's thoughts, and it is already adequately presented in A New View of Society, although in the foregoing summary a few supporting phrases have been borrowed from elsewhere. It will be noticed how close in all this he stands to Godwin. Men have their characters formed for them; no one can will his beliefs. No one is responsible for anything. Consequently the whole idea of punishment is out of place. Owen frequently complains that Society makes men criminals and then punishes them for their crimes. Also there is no conceivable foundation for private displeasure or public enmity; hence also ‘the irrationality of being angry with an individual for possessing qualities which he had not the means of preventing.’¹ This high standard of refraining from all anger, Owen endeavoured to realise, and with considerable success.

Into all these questions of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, heaven forbid that we should enter. With the discussion of such problems, it will be remembered, the fallen angels beguiled the tedium of their waiting hours, ‘and found no end in wandering mazes lost’; and to such higher intellects of more ampler leisure such issues may be left. It may merely be observed that the argument for improved environment does not require for its support the extreme view regarding the formation of man's character postulated by Owen. The wonderful works at New Lanark might have been founded on common sense, and not on the curious hybrid between metaphysics and theology which, in Owen's imagination, supplied the driving power.

Education, as has been noted, is to be the great engine of transformation. Apart from noting that Owen has a healthy distrust of bookish learning, and that his object is to make children rational creatures and not mere receptacles of decanted knowledge, skilled in knowing all the answers, his educational theories may be left to the educational expert.² But again, although this represents unquestionably one of the brightest sides of Owen, he frequently mars his argument by grotesque overstatements, and by the exuberant and buoyant expectations with which he regards the coming world. By the application of his system, he says, there will be produced characters which even in youth will ‘greatly surpass the wise and learned of the present and preceding times.’³ The adoption of his plans ‘will show the boasted acquirements of Greece, of Rome, and of all antiquity, to be the mere weakness of mental infancy.’⁴ And if these rosy prospects may be thought to be lacking in precision, there is nothing vague about his bold undertaking on behalf of the child properly trained on Owenite lines: ‘Before he is twelve years old he may with ease be trained to acquire a correct view of the outline of all the knowledge which men have yet attained.’⁵

Of remedial measures apart from education, Owen (at the stage of A New View of Society) suggests an overhauling of our legislation with a view to ‘withdrawing’ (by which presumably he means ‘repealing’) those laws which rest on the erroneous doctrine that man is responsible for the formation of his own character. It would be a curious question to enquire how far such an instruction to the Parliamentary draftsman might not result in the repeal of all existing legislation, and the diligent research student could possibly unearth passages in the later Owen indicating that he would not be averse from such a solution. But what he has in fact primarily in mind, as ripe for ‘withdrawal,’ are the laws which train the population to every kind of crime, those which encourage ‘the consumption of ardent spirits,’ those which legalise and sanction gin-shops and pot-houses, gambling and lotteries. To these, which are legitimate and orthodox fields of reform, Owen adds among the laws which should be withdrawn the rather cryptic phrase, ‘those of punishment.’¹ Contrary to his usual practice, he does not dwell on this; but the implication clearly is that all penalties of any kind should be abolished.

Alongside education and the repeal of laws inspired by the ‘erroneous principle,’ there is a third proposal in which Owen is a century in advance of his times. He suggests the need of a thorough-going system of labour statistics as a preliminary to the State providing work for the unemployed. The information is to be supplied ‘by the clergy, justices of the peace, or other more competent persons,’²—the ‘other more competent person’ being a distant foreshadowing and adumbration of the Ministry of Labour official. His suggested questionnaire is reasonably concise and to the point. The return should cover: (i) the average price of manual labour in each district; (ii) the number dependent on their labour (or the parish) for support, who are at the time unemployed, but are yet able to labour, i.e. the number available; (iii) the number partially employed, and the extent of their partial employment; (iv) a statement in respect of each of their former employments, and the ‘best conjectures’ as to the kind and quantity of work each may be supposed capable of performing. This ‘best conjecture’ seems to bring Owen agreeably into direct relationship with the manager of the present-day Employment Exchange, who also on many occasions is still reduced to his ‘best conjectures.’ And Owen adds to his discussion:

It would, perhaps, prove an interesting calculation, and useful to Government, to estimate how much its finances would be improved by giving proper employment to a million of its subjects, rather than by supporting that million in ignorance, idleness and crime...³

a question which, with appropriate modifications, some have still the temerity to ask.

So far we have been concerned with those aspects of Owen's teaching that spring more or less directly from his views on Man and the formation of Man's character. Perhaps those parts of his argument which rest on general humanitarian considerations, rather than on logic-chopping discussions on Man's will, make a stronger appeal to our generation, if only because here Owen is more universally human. Here indeed Owen rises to real eloquence—if indeed the eloquence be his; for there is a vague tradition that Owen, who became an increasingly barbarous writer as he advanced in years, had the prudence to have his earlier writings, or some of them, revised by Francis Place. When he pleads for justice to the oppressed, above all when he upholds the cause of the little children, he touches a chord which still vibrates; and he is, perhaps curiously, no less effective because in the earlier days his argument is reinforced by the consideration that it pays to be kind. The most famous of these passages—unfortunately too long for unabridged quotation here—is in the Address to the Superintendents of Manufactories, etc., originally prefixed to the Third Essay in A New View. Here he contrasts the care given to the animate and that given to the inanimate machines:

Many of you have long experienced in your manufacturing operations the advantages of substantial, well-contrived, and well-executed machinery.

Experience has also shown you the difference of the results between mechanism which is neat, clean, well-arranged, and always in a high state of repair; and that which is allowed to be dirty, in disorder, without the means of preventing unnecessary friction, and which therefore becomes, and works, much out of repair....

If, then, due care as to the state of your inanimate machines can produce such beneficial results, what may not be expected if you devote equal attention to your vital machines, which are far more wonderfully constructed?

When you shall acquire a right knowledge of these, of their curious mechanism, of their self-adjusting powers; when the proper main-spring shall be applied to their varied movements,—you will become conscious of their real value, and you will readily be induced to turn your thoughts more frequently from your inanimate to your living machines; you will discover that the latter may be easily trained and directed to procure a large increase of pecuniary gain, while you may also derive from them high and substantial gratification....

... And when in these transactions you estimate time by minutes, and the money expended for the chance of increased gain by fractions, will you not afford some of your attention to consider whether a portion of your time and capital would not be more advantageously applied to improve your living machines? From experience which cannot deceive me, I venture to assure you, that your time and money so applied, if directed by a true knowledge of the subject, would return you, not five, ten, or fifteen per cent. for your capital so expended, but often fifty, and in many cases a hundred per cent.¹

This somewhat lengthy quotation may perhaps be forgiven, because it shows Owen at his best, both in substance and in manner of expression, combining the sweetness of reason with the wisdom of serpents, reconciling philanthropy with fifteen per cent. When he deals with the evils of child labour in the Address to the British Master Manufacturers, there is just a suggestion of righteous indignation in the voice of Owen, although indignation was alien alike to his temperament and his principles. Pleading that no child should be employed under the age of twelve, he argues (as in the passage already quoted) that the child who is put to work at too early an age is an ‘inferior instrument’:

I think an intelligent slave master would not, on the sole principle of pecuniary gain, employ his young slaves even ten hours of the day at so early an age. And we know that judicious farmers will not prematurely put their young beasts of burden to work; and that when they do put them to work it is with great moderation at first, and, we must remember too, in a healthy atmosphere. But children from seven to eight years of age are employed with young persons and women of all ages, for fourteen or fifteen hours per day in many of our manufactures, carried on in buildings in which the atmosphere is by no means the most favourable to human life.¹

In his appeal to his fellow-manufacturers, another and more modern note creeps in. It is a plea for a policy of high wages on the ground of the importance of maintaining the purchasing-power of the population at large. No evil, he says, ought to be more dreaded by master-manufacturers than low wages of labour. By virtue of their numbers, the workers must always be the greatest consumers of all articles. High wages and general prosperity go together. Moreover, in the manufacturers' interest, the worker should not merely be well paid; he ought to have the time and the instruction necessary to make him a judicious purchaser.²

While Owen's starting-point in this matter is thus an appeal, as from one employer to another, to do the right thing in their own interest, he not unnaturally arrives at a condemnation of the ‘system’ and to the familiar analysis of the evils of individualism, which is more in line with the socialist tradition. So far as the worker is concerned, the position has been brought to ‘a point of real oppression.’ ‘The employer regards the employed as mere instruments of gain.’³ So also he speaks of the ‘blind avarice of commerce.’ More in line with the exploitation theories Owen refers to the inventions of the Industrial Revolution as having ‘created an aggregate of wealth, and placed it in the hands of a few, who, by its aid, continue to absorb the wealth produced by the industry of the many.’⁴ As a consequence, ‘the mass of the population are become mere slaves to the ignorance and caprice of those monopolists.’ Much later Owen was to speak of ‘the money-making, health-and-happiness-destroying factories of our country’¹; it is clear that even when he was part of the machine he looked at it dispassionately from the outside.

From this it is an easy transition to consider Owen's criticisms of individualism, although in fact the question arises more prominently in connection with his communistic proposals which will be noted presently. In the earlier writings, to which in fairness to Owen reference alone should be made, the most clear statement occurs in a passage in the Report to the County of Lanark in commendation of the principle of co-operation. Here, after having condemned the present arrangement of society as ‘the most anti-social, impolitic, and irrational that can be devised,’ he continues:

From this principle of individual interest have arisen all the divisions of mankind, the endless errors and mischiefs of class, sect, party, and of national antipathies, creating the angry and malevolent passions, and all the crimes and misery with which the human race have hitherto been afflicted.

In short, if there be one closet doctrine more contrary to truth than another, it is the notion that individual interest, as that term is now understood, is a more advantageous principle on which to found the social system, for the benefit of all, or of any, than the principle of union and mutual cooperation.²

There is in its implications an even more extreme passage in one of the London speeches of 1817—the notorious speech of August 21—where in contrasting life under what he calls the ‘cottage system’ as against complete co-operation, he paints a somewhat grotesquely glowing picture of what happens when all men have all things in common, so that even widowhood would not be the awful thing it now is. Even if a dear one dies ‘they have consolation in the certain knowledge that... they have many, many others remaining.’ ‘As far as the eye can reach or imagination extend’ there are thousands and thousands ready and willing to offer aid and consolation. As another poet has it:

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!

But indeed, when love of humanity becomes so diffused, it is in danger of becoming sloppy; and the Kuss der ganzen Welt may afford little real consolation in bereavement. As against this dream-world, where thousands and thousands are prepared to stand by, in the contrary condition:

All are individualised, cold and forbidding; each being compelled to take an hundred-fold more care of himself than would be otherwise necessary; because the ignorance of society has placed him in direct opposition to the thousands around him.¹

Later in life Owen came to denounce private property with a full-blooded vigour which may be equalled, but is certainly not excelled, elsewhere: ‘Private property is one of the great demoralising and repulsive powers, arising from the laws of men, and is the cause of innumerable crimes and gross injustice.... It is strongly calculated to make man look upon his fellow man as his enemy, and to create general suspicions of the motives and actions of strangers, and even of neighbours.... The evils of private property tend in all directions.’² But down these many alleys it is unnecessary to follow Owen.

We have listened to Owen giving most excellent advice to his fellow-manufacturers. Not unnaturally, Owen being Owen, counsel is also freely imparted to the other side. It is, however, less excellent advice, having regard to the frailty of man, and it derives its interest almost exclusively from the light which it throws on Owen and the curious workings of his mind. It is found at its best in An Address to the Working Classes, dated March 29, 1819. He assures the workers that ‘the time is at hand’—but unfortunately there is one formidable obstacle. All uncharitableness and anger must be laid aside; in other words, the working classes must rise to a full appreciation of the Owenite doctrine that no one is responsible for what they are, and that therefore there can be no rational ground for anger, even against their greatest oppressors and their most bitter enemies. Owen presents his favourite sermon in tabloid form for the rumination of the workers:

An endless multiplicity of circumstances, over which you had not the smallest control, placed you where you are, and as you are. In the same manner, others of your fellow-men have been formed by circumstances, equally uncontrollable by them, to become your enemies and grievous oppressors. In strict justice they are no more to be blamed for these results than you are; nor you than they; and, splendid as their exterior may be, this state of matters often causes them to suffer even more poignantly than you.³

If the workers show any desire violently to dispossess the rich of their power, emoluments and privileges, ‘the contention between the rich and the poor will never have an end.’ Owen indeed seeks to impose on the working classes a kind of Credo, an adherence to the only faith, as a necessary condition of the day being at hand:

Are you then prepared to look upon all your fellow-creatures, in power and out of power, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, good and bad, as beings formed solely by the circumstances of their birth, and who have been made as they are, whatever they may be, from causes which exclude the possibility of the smallest control on their parts in the formation of those faculties and qualities they may happen to possess? If you cannot see and comprehend this truth, then is the time not yet come for your deliverance from the depths of mental darkness and physical misery.¹

This line of argument is rendered possible because we are on the eve of a period when the poor will be able to relieve themselves of their poverty without infringing on the possessions of the rich. In future, ‘the least gifted member of society will experience a larger share of continued and permanent happiness than has hitherto fallen to the lot of the most fortunate.’ Besides, as is indeed obvious on Godwin's principles, the rich are not really such a bad lot. We have seen that frequently they suffer more poignantly than the poor: they ‘call for our pity, not blame.’ As if all that were not enough, Owen gives his own personal guarantee that the rich are not without their claim to a possible share of the world's decency:

It must be satisfactory to you to learn that I have had the most evident proofs from many individuals, high in these classes, that they have now a real desire to improve your condition.²

One wonders how the ‘working classes’ reacted to this curiously maddening mixture of naiveté, condescension, philosophical generalities, and sheer obtuseness. At least it helps one to understand the saying that in conversation with Owen ‘you could not put him in a passion nor keep yourself out of one.’³

In endeavouring to present a general picture of Owen's system of thought, a certain number of citations have already been given, which in their context will be found to have relation to his proposals for the establishment of communistic settlements, or villages of co-operation—‘Owen's parallelograms,’ as they were familiarly called with an intended touch of ridicule. There is little doubt that Owen from the outset regarded New Lanark as an experiment to be applied later to the whole nation, and indeed in the days of his more grandiose dreams, to the world at large. As early as the second essay in A New View he had asked what there was to prevent such a system from being immediately adopted into national practice.¹ The argument for his increasingly communistic settlements is first elaborated in the Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor (1817), and it occupies a central position in the Report to the County of Lanark (1820). Later, of course, it is the staple of all his writings.

In its first appearance, Owen's ‘Plan’ was devised as a remedy against unemployment. He had already postulated in A New View of Society that it was a primary duty of every government that cared for its subjects ‘to provide perpetual employment of real national utility, in which all who apply may be immediately occupied.’² The acknowledgment of such a duty was more than ever urgent in the circumstances of the times, of which Owen gives a penetrating analysis. The Industrial Revolution had, he argued, brought with it greatly increased productive power. In the result, ‘individual interest... found mechanism to be a cheaper agency than manual labour’; workers were accordingly dismissed, and ‘labour in consequence rapidly fell in value.’³ It was this fall in the value of labour which, Owen contended, had to be remedied and for which his Plan was devised. If value is thus to be restored to manual labour, it can be done only by employment on the land, and accordingly what is aimed at is the creation of ‘limited communities of individuals, on the principle of united labour and expenditure, having their basis in agriculture, and in which all should have mutual and common interests.’⁴ Elsewhere, in the Lanark Report, he speaks of the great error that has been committed ‘in separating the worker from his food.’⁵ The worker therefore is to go back to the land, but not wholly to the land; the habitations of Owen's vision are described as ‘combined agricultural and manufacturing villages.⁶

Such settlements are to be financed by the State in one way or another. The minimum number in each will be 300, ‘men, women and children in their natural proportions,’ with a maximum of 2,000; but somewhere between 800 and 1200 is indicated as the optimum.⁷ The inhabitants will live in large buildings arranged in a parallelogram, and the apportionment of the various wings to their respective uses is amply detailed by Owen. Pleasing pictorial representations of these may be unearthed by diligent students in the literature of the period. They are obviously first cousins of the Phalanstère, although Fourier, on whom Owen acted as a perpetual irritant, never admitted kinship. Of the success of such villages of co-operation Owen never entertained any doubt. He held that with the increased power of production, it was possible ‘to saturate the world with wealth’¹; but owing to our mismanagement—and here he strikes a modern note—‘in the midst of the most ample means to create wealth, all are in poverty, or in imminent danger from the effects of poverty upon others.’²

As additional aids to prosperity, Owen has two further recommendations. The first is that we should abandon the plough and return to the spade.³ It may be doubted whether Owen knew very much about either the spade or the plough; but that, of course, is no reason why he should not dilate at very considerable length on the superiority of the spade as an agricultural instrument. With the spade, Great Britain and Ireland could support in high comfort a population greatly exceeding one hundred millions; whereas, relying on the plough, it was already supposed to be greatly overpopulated. Owen's passion for the spade is perhaps best viewed as merely an additional resonant bee in his teeming bonnet; but of course it may be linked up with a semiconscious realisation that if ever his villages of co-operation were realised, having regard to their population and the area assigned to them, their agriculture would probably of necessity have to take the form of market gardening.

The other aid to prosperity is concerned with more fundamental problems, being nothing less than a suggestion for a new standard of value, which is necessary, if we are, in a pleasing phrase, ‘to let prosperity loose on the country.’⁴ Owen, it is to be feared, was not a currency expert—who is?—and a perusal of his arguments may produce in the mind of the reader a pale reflection of that confusion in which Owen groped. On the side of theory his observations have some interest, inasmuch as they show Owen stretching forth a hand—a somewhat shaky hand—towards Marx; on the practical and historical side, they have some significance as supplying the basis on which that later fiasco, the National Equitable Labour Exchange, was based.

Expressed broadly, Owen's position here is tolerably clear. It is ‘that the natural standard of value is, in principle, human labour, or the combined manual and mental powers of men called into action.’⁵ Obviously, the difficulty under any circumstances of applying a labour standard will be considerably accentuated by lumping manual and mental powers together. It would be an invidious task to check up on the amount of effort (and experience) the spring poet puts into a love song. In order to make labour the standard of value, it will be necessary, says Owen, to ascertain the amount of it in all articles to be bought or sold.¹ All articles thereafter are to be exchanged at what he calls their ‘prime cost.’ The awkward fact, as was made manifest in the experience of the National Equitable Labour Exchange, is that there can never be any guarantee that people at large will be willing to exchange at the rates so determined, assuming indeed that it is possible to determine such rates at all. Almost inevitably a notional number of hours comes to be assigned as that necessary for the commodity's production, and in arriving at a decision in this matter, the calculator consciously or unconsciously bases himself on what is happening in the open market, where the despised money prices prevail. Owen, although he fails to make his proposals clear, at least remained faithful to the view that money, as we know it, is an evil. Much later he declared that until we should have disabused our minds of this insane money-mystery, it was impossible that the world could be other than a great lunatic asylum.² At this later stage a paper money resting on the credit of the British Empire appears to represent his aspirations.³

Thus launched, preferably with the aid of the spade and a new standard of value, the villages of co-operation will propagate until all the world is shaped in their similitude. It is the usual naively pathetic vision which has sustained so many dreamers, again rather reminiscent of Fourier's faith in the triumphant spread of the Phalanstère, but perhaps still more in line with Louis Blanc's confidence that competition would be driven out by competition, so that the beaten capitalist would come creeping into the workshop. Not merely will society permit these new establishments to supersede other forms of enterprise, since these latter are ‘wretchedly degrading’⁴; a more cogent argument is that the parish poor, for whom in the first place these projects were devised, will under the new arrangements become the envy of the rich and the indolent.⁵ Here indeed is an inverted principle of ‘greater eligibility.’ No wonder that Owen could say that the utmost bounds of his ambition was to become an undistinguished member of one of these happy villages⁶; or that he could claim with his usual buoyancy that ‘to resist the introduction of this plan, in any part of the world, will now be as vain and useless, as for man by his puny efforts to endeavour to preclude from the earth the vivifying rays of the sun.¹

Owen is commendably vague as to how his parallelograms are to be run; but it is perhaps of the essence of dreams that they achieve their effect by the vividness of the general impression rather than by consistency of operative detail. The villages, townships, or whatever they may be called, are to be governed by Committees of all the members of a certain seniority. But in the last analysis, they will run themselves, so that in a sense we come back to Godwin once more: ‘In a short time the ease with which these associations will proceed in all their operations will be such as to render the business of governing a mere recreation.’² Later in life, as his dreams became still more exuberant, Owen was to make the surprising discovery that each township was to become ‘the immediate agent of God, to carry into execution the laws of the Universal Creating Power’³; and on this basis he exercised his fancy and ingenuity in strange flights of constitution-mongering. But there was one current bogy in particular which Owen would in no wise allow to becloud his vision of a world gone parallelogram. This was the suggestion that the Malthusian devil of over-population might lurk in ambush on the path towards his earthly paradise. Owen will not have Malthus at any price. In an observation which may not indeed go to the root of the matter, but at least goes some distance in that direction, he remarks that Malthus ‘has not told us how much more food an intelligent and industrious people will create from the same soil, than will be produced by one ignorant and ill-governed.’⁴ Even if one may not accept his suggestion that the ratio is as one to infinity (meaning, of course, as infinity to one), this remains a just observation, and more to the point than his general argument that ‘each individual brings into the world with him the means... sufficient to enable him to produce food equal to more than ten times his consumption.’⁵ His attitude is stated more explicitly in one of his later writings, where in effect his answer is that the question cannot arise until the whole surface of the globe is studded with parallelograms; if that time ever does arise, the population of the world (having been for long indoctrinated with Owenism) will be ‘highly good, intelligent and rational,’ and they will know far better what to do than this present most irrational generation. But to worry about these questions at the present moment, when the earth is comparatively a waste and a forest, is ‘one of the thousand insanities with which the present generation is afflicted.⁶ Thus, like the burden of the National Debt, in old-fashioned Financial Science, the responsibility is waltzed on to a future generation; but the underlying assumption which justifies this postponement is that the village of co-operation will march relentlessly across the sands of the Sahara, through the dark swamps of the upper Amazon, and across the lonely high places of Tibet.

Perhaps it is not expedient, within the allotted framework, to carry further the presentation of Robert Owen. His views on marriage are outside our province, and are only of slight interest because here is still one further point in which he approaches somewhat to Godwin. His views on religion are of some significance because of the reasons underlying his comprehensive antagonism towards all the orthodoxies of the world; it was that all known religions were guilty of the fundamental error involved in holding that a man may be held responsible for the formation of his character, and trafficked in rewards and punishments accordingly. They were therefore guilty of what, in Owen's eyes, was the greatest of all heresies; they were tied to the ‘principle of evil’ On a larger canvas it would be interesting to illustrate Owen's dislike of political action and agitation, and indeed his distrust of the political machine generally. Though the second part of his life was a succession of fiascos, ending in the shoals and shallows of a very peculiar type of spiritualism, there is nevertheless force in the contention that in countless ways he was one of the most pervading influences in the later nineteenth century, and that, in current jargon, his was a seminal mind. Yet the ordinary man turns back to the miracle of New Lanark, as the crowning achievement of Owen, who, in the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, showed, even if in undemocratic ways and building on strange principles, what love could do to regenerate a fallen community. And even if the second part of his life was barren of achievement, so far as the world's coarse thumb and finger could assess, Owen's life is memorable, if not unique, in presenting us with a man who achieved wealth and success, and yet, counting these as dross, cast them aside to gain for his fellow-men a greater salvation: ‘Blessed is the rich that is found without blemish, and hath not gone after gold. Who is he? and we will call him blessed; for wonderful things hath he done among his people.’

CHAPTER IX. LOUIS BLANC↩

UNLIKE most of those whom we encounter in these pages, Louis Blanc (1813–1882), in addition to occupying a very distinct corner in the development of socialist thought, was also for a time an active and practising politician, having been a member of the provisional government after the Revolution of 1848. This incursion into the limelight was followed by a prolonged period of exile in England, from which he did not return to France until 1870, when he again appeared on the political stage, without, however, getting anywhere in particular. His intromissions with public affairs do not concern us here, and we are accordingly spared the problem of disentangling the connection, if any, between the fiasco of the National Workshops of 1848 and the proposals bearing on the same issue which are of the very essence of Blanc's writings. But, if one may judge from the printed word, it is difficult to imagine anyone less fitted than was Louis Blanc for the trials, the tribulations and the responsibilities of a politician's existence.

On the other hand he had very great gifts as a journalist, and was indeed a supremely successful journalist at a surprisingly early age. He was also professedly a historian, waging war against the Bourgeoisie throughout the ages, and laying up for posterity numerous volumes which at this distance of time posterity, at least in this country, very wisely refuses to read.¹ For the present generation, and for all who come hereafter, he is the author of one book, L'Organisation du Travail, which originally appeared in substance in La Revue du Progrès Social, in 1839. It is a short book, even when expanded with replies to critics which were added in subsequent editions. And of subsequent editions there were many, for in this work Louis Blanc contrived to write a best-seller.

Nor is it difficult to understand the success which attended L'Organisation du Travail. There is a persuasiveness and a glitter about it, which could scarcely fail to turn the heads of those to whom it was addressed. Yet the qualities which made it so effective on its appearance now perhaps make us feel that it has worn rather thin. Never was there a writer given to so violent exaggeration. Few have cultivated so gaudy and flamboyant a style, or been so familiar with the rhetorical question which expects no answer. His pages are cluttered up with marks of exclamation and of interrogation. There are immeasurably far too many Quoi's, and Eh quoi's, and Mais quoi's. The result is a heady beverage which may appear great stuff to a reader in a moment of exaltation, but somehow it sounds rather differently when read in the cold light of dawn. In short, Louis Blanc has neither moderation, nor restraint, nor sense of proportion, and such merits as he possesses seem, on a second reading, to be contaminated with the meretricious and the cheap.

The significance of Louis Blanc lies in the fact that in a sense he represents the transition from Utopian socialism to what, for convenience, may be termed proletarian socialism. We have left behind the wild imaginings of Fourier, the revelations of Saint-Simon and the parallelograms of Owen. For Louis Blanc claims to have a sense of reality, and he would like to be regarded as moderate. ‘To prepare for the future without breaking violently with the past,’ as he once described his purpose, is an excellent ideal. Doubtless, with Fourier and Owen, he is an ‘associationist,’ but the form of association at which he aims has a more modern flavour; nor is it expected that some generous millionaire will by his touch heal and renew this putrescent world.

For, among much that is nebulous, Louis Blanc sees with extreme clarity just exactly whence our salvation must come: Our safety cometh from the State. Blanc may or may not have been original in this, but at least no one before had so clearly taught that the State, with which we are familiar here and now, such as it is, must be used to establish a new social order. Social and political reform are intertwined; if the former is the aim and object, the latter is the means. For it is not enough to decide, according to the rules of reason, justice and humanity, where you want to get to in this matter of the organisation of labour. You must be in a position to give effect to the principles decided upon. Power is needed; and power is ultimately a matter of laws, tribunals and soldiers—in a word, the State. In a somewhat famous sentence he adds the warning that if you do not make use of the State as an instrument, you will encounter it as an obstacle. Moreover, the magnitude of the task of emancipating the proletarians is such that all the power of the State is needed. What is required is that they should be given the necessary tools of production; and here precisely is the function of the government. In a definition, more arresting than just, ‘the State is, or ought to be, the Banker of the Poor.’¹

Thus the State must intervene; there is indeed no other authority to whom appeal can be made. Authority is invoked, it should be observed, in the name of Liberty itself; for Liberty, in the world as seen by Blanc, is but an affair of theoretical rights which cannot be enforced. There can be no liberty where an ‘immense weakness’ confronts an ‘immense strength’. The State must make these rights a reality, and for this purpose it must be a strong State, since there are those who in their weakness need its protection.²

But though a strong State is needed now, it is significant that Blanc regards this as a temporary necessity. When there is no longer an inferior class, no longer any downtrodden, there will no longer be the same need of a strong and active government. At the first blush this is curiously suggestive of the ‘withering-away’ of the State, as contemplated later by Marx and Engels; but of course the reason for the ‘withering-away’ is diametrically opposed in the two cases. For Marx-Engels, the State is the expression of the dominant class, and when there are no longer classes, there can clearly be no dominant class (and equally no class to be exploited), and therefore there can no longer be a State, if the Marxian conception of the State is true. In Louis Blanc's vision, on the other hand, the State is potentially and in design a beneficent agency as the protector of the downtrodden; but when the weak and defenceless are no longer defenceless and weak, though the State may continue to exist, it will no longer require the giant's strength needed to make it an adequate protector.

Such is the framework as set out in the Introduction; and though Morelly may have pointed in the same direction, and though it is possible to find in the noble confusion of Saint-Simon's mind, suggestions of the beneficent State, Louis Blanc may claim credit for having brought socialism into everyday politics, and made it a matter of the ballot-box. Also, for what it is worth, he may be given some credit for realising that the State, whether we like it or not, is there, occupying the ground; and for the rather Fabian argument, that it is better to make use of it than to force it into the opposing camp. There is one other point of interest relating to the framework, as it emerges in the introduction. In intention and profession, at least, Louis Blanc is remote from the class struggle and its implications. In some editions, the opening sentence is an appeal to the rich, since the cause of the poor is their cause also. It is on this note that the Introduction ends, and though the passage is marred by an unusually heavy dose of Blanc's tinsel rhetoric, the intention is clearly to express in moving language the solidarity and the community of interest that link all classes, and to unite the efforts of all in the work of emancipation. If, as has sometimes been suggested, Louis Blanc represents the swing of socialism to the left, it is significant that he thus so completely disowns the doctrine of the class struggle which was later to become the core of scientific socialism.

Much of the success of Louis Blanc as a propagandist is due to the simplicity of his diagnosis. Like Mr. Blatchford in his more robust days, he avoids unnecessary and confusing complications. There is a certain measure of truth in the criticism which suggests that ‘in Louis Blanc's creed whatever is, is wrong.’ And the reason for the wrongness of everything is to be found in the existence of competition. In a sense Louis Blanc was so successful because he set himself too easy a task. Nothing is easier than to show how monstrously unjust is this world, unless perhaps it is to prove how grotesque and baneful may be the effects of competition. Neither youth nor inexperience need deter anyone from enlarging on either of these themes. And in fact Louis Blanc, with his congenital tendency to exaggeration, his exuberant rhetoric, his unfettered loquacity and mais-quoisity, does it remarkably well. He avoids the initial tactical mistake, into which so many fall, of suggesting that some have a good time at the expense of others. In fact, this is a thoroughly bad world for everybody, for rich and poor alike, and no one is really interested in the maintenance of the existing social order. How unhappy are the happy, could you but see into their hearts. For every poor man who grows pale from hunger, there is a rich man who turns pale from fear. Competition may be a system which exterminates the ordinary people; but likewise it impoverishes and ruins the Bourgeoisie. All are interested in putting an end to the existing system: here also is solidarity.

In the eyes of Louis Blanc, contemplating a world inhabited by proletarians with nothing but their labour to offer in the market-place, the fundamental right is the droit au travail. Indeed, with his incessant preaching of the droit au travail, he was probably the spiritual father and begetter of the Revolution of 1848. In considering the effect of competition on the worker, the crucial question is whether it can assure him work. And here in a much quoted and characteristic passage is Louis Blanc on what competition does for the worker:

What is competition, relative to the workers? It is work put up to auction. An entrepreneur has need of a worker: three present themselves.... How much for your work?... Three francs: I have a wife and children.... Good. And you?... Two and a half francs: I have no children, but I have a wife.... Marvellous. And you?... Two francs are enough for me: I am alone.... You get the job. The transaction is ended: the bargain is concluded. What will become of the two proletarians who are excluded? It is to be hoped that they will allow themselves to die of hunger. But suppose they become thieves? Have no fear; we have policemen. And murderers? We have the hangman. As for the most fortunate of the three, his triumph is only provisional. If there should come along a fourth worker sufficiently sturdy to fast every other day, wages will slide down to the bottom: there will be a new pariah, a new recruit for the convict-prison, perhaps!¹

It is to be hoped that this picturesque and dramatic passage sounds better in French than it does in halting English. The view here expressed by Louis Blanc is, of course, merely an extremely rigid statement of the so-called Iron Law of Wages, frequently, but wrongly, fathered on Ricardo. It is easy, and it is true, to say in the case of Marx and many before his time, that they did not foresee the effects of the Trade Union movement in this sphere. Probably Marx, breathing the fetid air of the British Museum, reading round about 1860 the Blue Books of 1810, was at least a generation, if not two, behind the times in which he lived. But the comforting reflection that Trade Unions have probably to a large extent equalised bargaining power, and nullified the foolishly-so-called Iron Law of Wages, should not blind us to the fact that probably at the time when this principle was first enunciated by Turgot (if Turgot it was), it was probably a fairly accurate statement of what happened. For, left to themselves in an eighteenth-century ‘state of nature,’ there is no employer who would not prefer to pay a low wage rather than a high, if given an assurance of equal efficiency in every respect between the employees. This is indeed all that is implied in the original statement of Turgot, who, needless to say, is less dramatic than Blanc. In any case, Louis Blanc is satisfied that under competition a continuous fall in wages is necessarily a general, and in no way an exceptional, phenomenon.

This fall in wages means poverty, and poverty means crime. Blanc proves the extent of crime by producing appropriate statistics, and he illustrates the enormity of crime by revolting reports from the Police Courts. This is of interest only because it is implicitly part of Blanc's case that all crime is due to poverty, and that therefore at one remove all crime is due to competition. Like nearly all the earlier socialists (in this very different from later schools), he showed a touching solicitude for the reputation of the Almighty in this matter. He dare not claim that men are born necessarily perverse, ‘for fear of blaspheming God.’ Rather would he believe that the work of God is good and holy: ‘Let us not be impious merely in order that we may absolve ourselves from the charge of having spoiled it.’² He then refers to certain unnamed ‘great philosophers’ who have thrown doubts on man's free will: in any case it can hardly exist for the poor who suffer from ‘la tyrannie des choses,’ which claims as its victims all who are in need of nourishment, clothing or shelter. There is a good deal of fine confusion in this medley of philosophy and theology, but Blanc's argument is meaningless, unless it means that all crimes can be attributed to our defective social organisation as embodied in the prevalence of competition.

For all this evil Louis Blanc naturally claims that there can be only one remedy, that, namely, devised by Louis Blanc—in other words, a ‘saine organisation du travail.’¹ His rather disgruntled frame of mind, his instinctive abhorrence of all moderation despite contrary professions, are well seen in his attitude towards the proposals of other well-meaning reformers. Take, for example, the whole question of savings and the establishment of Savings Banks as a means of raising the worker. Had Blanc been content to say that it is rather futile to expect savings from a worker, living under the harsh dispensation of the Iron Law of Wages, he would merely have been expressing the reasonably defensible. But, remembering that whatever is, is wrong, Louis Blanc must still be talking. What are these Caisses d'Epargne anyhow? Their deposits are only in part the fruit of honest labour. They are blind receivers of illicit profits: they receive—indeed after encouraging them—all who present themselves, ‘from the servant who has robbed his master to the courtesan who has sold her beauty.’² This throws a startling light on the activities of Savings Banks; and Savings Bank Managers, who have read their Louis Blanc, realising that increased deposits in all probability reflect increased embezzlement and prostitution, would accordingly do well to moderate their annual speeches of self-congratulation.³

But apart from this lurid sidelight, Blanc argues that under present conditions, the practice of saving is a vice rather than a virtue. Firstly, it attaches the worker too securely to the existing order from fear of losing his savings—an argument that springs from the sentiment that has prompted the long-continued opposition of Trade Unions towards profit-sharing schemes. Nor is it an argument that can be lightly dismissed as wholly without substance. The worker who has shares in the enterprise in which he works, who has, in one form or another, given his savings into the custody of the government, has undeniably, for good or for evil or more probably for both, given hostages to fortune. It is part of that process of ‘bourgeoisification,’ later to be so lamented as the grave of revolutionary impulses. Yet it is an argument which requires careful statement, if only because in unskilful hands it tends to become a plea that the worker should be kept unhappy, in order that he may continue to be discontented and revolutionary.

But going beyond this, saving, in an individualistic world, is merely another symptom of selfishness and depravity: he who saves for his old age merely demonstrates how little faith he puts in the goodness of his fellow-men. Blanc here states so clearly what others have hinted at, that he may be allowed to speak for himself:

In itself, thrift is an excellent thing: it would be merely puerile and foolish affectation to deny it. But,—and it should be carefully noted,—when combined with individualism, thrift engenders egotism; it competes with alms-giving; it imperceptibly dries up in the best natures the sources of charity; it replaces by a greedy satisfaction the holy poetry of benevolence. Combined with association, on the other hand, thrift acquires a respectable character, a sacred importance. To save only for one's self is to manifest an act of distrust with regard to one's fellows and with regard to the future; but to save for others at the same time as for one's self, ce serait pratiquer la grande prudence, ce serait donner à la sagesse les proportions du dévouement.¹

This last phrase is best left in the original, because though it may have meant something to Louis Blanc, it is difficult to say what it can mean to anyone else, and mistranslation is accordingly almost inevitable.

But to go still deeper into the depths, poverty, springing from competition, brings with it ultimately the dissolution of the family and all the horrors of infanticide, enfants trouvés, child labour and much more—a ‘homicidal regime which compels fathers to exploit their own children.’² But would factory legislation, by limiting the hours of juvenile employment, afford any protection? The parents have no desire for such legislation, for the simple reason that they cannot afford it: to keep the house going, the wages of child labour is necessary, and thus competition is preparing for the future (it sounds even more horrible in French) une génération décrépite, estropiée, gangrenée, pourrie.³ Lastly, there is education, also advocated by some as a weapon of regeneration. Louis Blanc quotes with approval the view that where you open a factory, you may as well close the school.⁴ Once again, the worker cannot afford it: if he is called upon to decide between the school and the factory, he cannot for a moment be in doubt. For the factory has one decisive pull in its favour; ‘in the school, the child is taught; in the factory, he is paid.’¹ It is here significant as between Louis Blanc and Owen, at whom in all this he is tilting, that Blanc makes the calm continental assumption that beneficent legislation, even if passed, will be broken, whereas Owen proceeds on the humdrum Anglo-Saxon assumption that we are a law-abiding nation, and that Factory Acts and Education Acts will be administered, even if parents are tepid.

Such are the baneful effects of competition on the worker; but it is no less a cause of ruin for the Bourgeoisie. In a florid passage, Louis Blanc shows the evil effects of ‘cheapness,’ which is supposed to sum up the benefits of competition. If, however, cheapness profits the consumer, it does so at the cost of bringing ruinous anarchy among the producers.² And indeed Louis Blanc elsewhere, in what is almost a parody of himself, proves, on the same lines as applied to workers, how destructive competition is likewise to the employer, how ‘where one man stands erect, another has been killed.’ ‘You are going into business: Good: but where will you get your customers?’—‘I will take those of my neighbour.’—‘Then your neighbour will die.’—‘What can I do about it? If it had not been he, it would have been I.’ Thus in bright chatty conversation, he drives home the point.

Thus is the malady laid bare: competition, ruining all alike, transforms the whole of industry into a battlefield strewn with dead bodies. And the simple diagnosis points to a simple remedy. It is merely necessary to eliminate competition, and this task must be taken in hand by the State, having regard to the pre-eminent rôle which Blanc in his introduction has already assigned to the State. The Government, being viewed as ‘the supreme regulator of production,’ should raise a loan and with this should create what are here called ateliers nationaux (social workshops) in the most important branches of industry.³ The State, as the founder of the workshops, will draw up the necessary statutes. To these workshops will be summoned all workers who can offer ‘guarantees of morality’—whatever that may be. Wages would be equal, though on this point Blanc oscillates somewhat, being restrained by the consideration that at the outset the false and anti-social education from which the world has hitherto suffered will offer an obstacle to the immediate realisation of the ultimate ideal. During the first year the government would run the show, at least to the extent of ‘regulating the hierarchy of functions’; but after a year's tutelage, the workers having meanwhile had time to ‘appreciate each other,’ the workshops will be run by popular election among the workers—in short, democracy in industry.⁴ To complete the picture of the internal arrangements of the workshops, the net profits are to be divided annually into three portions, the first to be divided equally among the members of the association; the second to be devoted to the support of the aged and infirm, and also to help other industries suffering from ‘crises,’ since here mutual aid is seemly; and the third to be set apart for the provision of tools for those who wish to join the association, with a view to the indefinite extension of the system. Moreover, while at the outset each worker will have freedom to dispose of his wages as may seem good, yet the manifest advantages of a life in common will soon conduct them from an association in work to a fuller voluntary association in the satisfaction of their needs and pleasures.¹ In short, the social or national workshop will tend to develop into a communistic cell.

It is, however, in the relationship existing between these ‘workshops,’ launched by the State, and the remaining individualistic sector of enterprise that Blanc is most interesting. The State, in taking action, resorts to the weapon of competition in order to secure the disappearance of competition: despite the scriptural warning, it purposes to make use of Beelzebub in order to drive out Beelzebub. The capitalists, if they so wish, will be allowed to enter, and will be guaranteed interest on the capital they bring with them; but otherwise, except in so far as they work, there will be nothing for them. In effect, the individual employers may retire into private life as debenture holders—probably, from Blanc's point of view, had he thought more about it, a weak point in the scheme. If, however, the representatives of private enterprise should elect to continue the struggle, then there would soon be made manifest the pleasing spectacle of competition serving the high end of extirpating competition. For, after a short struggle, private enterprise would be defeated. It could not stand up against a system enjoying all the economies resulting from a communal life, where ‘all the workers, without exception, are interested in producing quickly and well.’² Here indeed would be a competition very different from that with which we are now familiar—a competition designed only to attain the pacific absorption of the individual private workshops in the social workshops. And the outcome would be the happiest imaginable: from all quarters, workers and capitalists would flock (accourir) to the national workshop.

Beyond this, there would later on inevitably be further ramifications. In any given industry, the various workshops could not be allowed to compete against each other: there would therefore be for each industry un atelier central, to which all the others would be subsidiary and supplementary. In short, in more modern or more ancient phraseology (which so often come to the same thing) the industry would be transformed into the semblance of a self-governing guild. Inevitably, also, there looms up the further stage of establishing some kind of solidarity between the various industries: and from this lofty peak in the Delectable Mountains, we can surely descry from afar the ways of pleasantness of Guild Socialism.¹

Agriculture has always presented a difficult problem in socialist theory. Blanc endeavours to deal with it along the lines of his proposals for industry. Collateral successions are to be abolished, and declared communal property. In this way each commune would acquire a domain which would be inalienable and which would presumably be extended, until in time all the available land vested in the commune. Cultivation would be on a large scale, and as the principles of the ateliers sociaux would apply, the net result would appear to be a joint exploitation of the lands of the commune by the available agricultural population.²

Perhaps we have followed Louis Blanc as far as is profitable in an enterprise of this magnitude. In summary, it may be said that his diagnosis was too simple, and that the remedy prescribed reveals the same defect. To attribute all the maladies of this world to competition shows a singular lack of knowledge of the profundities of the human heart and of the many sources from which evil may spring. His remedy is ultimately a strong State in which all property and all enterprise shall vest. Louis Blanc of course denied this, but his feverish denials carry little conviction. In later editions of Organisation du Travail he reprinted criticisms and reviews of his work together with his triumphant replies to his critics. This procedure has the merit of doubling the length of a rather short book, but it cannot be said that it adds materially to the substance of the original statement. One point of interest, does, however, emerge. In these pages, Louis Blanc shows himself almost abnormally sensitive with regard to any suggestion that his view of the State resembles that of Saint-Simon (or should it be that of the Saint-Simonians?). In rebutting the charge that he contemplates a devouring State, he is at pains to show how limited are the powers he in fact assigns to the Government. His view is that the State is to be the regulator of industry: it is not itself to be the entrepreneur. There is to be a mere administrative intervention in the first year. He adds with that naive innocence of the world of business which not unnaturally distinguished Socialism in its irresponsible days: la machine une fois montée, elle marcherait d'elle-même. Unfortunately, there are few things in this life which, even when mounted, march of themselves. As against the Saint-Simonian purpose of transforming the State into ‘le pape de l'industrie,’ in his solution the State merely provides a code of legislation.³ Elsewhere he endeavours to escape the taint of what is assumed to be the Saint-Simonian State by remarking that whereas Saint-Simonianism had thought in terms of L'Etat propriétaire, he, Louis Blanc, had spoken in terms of la Société propriétaire.⁴ But in fact the difference, especially on Louis Blanc's assumptions, is not so énorme as he would gladly believe. Before the critics had wounded him with their suggestions of his indebtedness to Saint-Simon, he had called upon the State to ‘put itself resolutely at the head of Industry.’¹ There is a convenient, if inconsequent, German proverb which observes that ‘whoever says A, says B’: and even if Louis Blanc flatters himself that he would confine the State's intervention to the first year, he would in time have discovered that he had begotten an omnicompetent and omnivorous State.

Louis Blanc's Utopia (for such it is) has also this feature in common with other Utopias that he asks, alas, too much of human nature, forgetful of the Mr. Hyde who is attached to every Dr. Jekyll. It is the everlasting dilemma, the vicious circle of all Utopias, that they are caught between two irreconcilable propositions, firstly, that to inhabit Utopia, man must have a higher moral stature than he now possesses: and secondly, that the only way to attain to this higher moral stature is to have lived for some time, indeed to have been brought up in Utopia, away from the perverse social institutions of this world which are the sole cause of our depravity. Louis Blanc was not wholly consistent in his pronouncements on the problem of distribution. At first he had allowed wages to be graded according to the ‘hierarchy of functions,’ but this was merely a concession to the false and anti-social education which has corrupted us. Later he moved towards equality of reward; but also, as the highest ideal, he advocated remuneration according to needs. He realises the need of a ‘stimulus’—the question that had also troubled William Thompson whom we shall meet presently. He clings, however, to the view, contrary to all evidence and probability, that the mere fact that the worker will share in the prosperity produced will induce him to labour with zeal and intensity. There is here still personal interest, but as all are in the same boat it is purified and becomes ‘an encouragement to fraternity.’² He never faces up to the obvious consideration that this ‘personal interest’ becomes painfully exiguous, when the fruit of a single worker's zeal is shared with a large number of his fellows, and in fact becomes almost precisely nothing at all in an atmosphere of national guilds such as, in effect, Blanc contemplated. This ‘personal interest,’ however it may be purified, must indeed be supplemented by a noble sense of duty in the heart of every worker—one of the first fruits of living in the new Utopia. Doubtless there must be a stimulus; but, he asks with many others, must the reward be a material one, measured in terms of wealth? Positions of authority, it is suggested, are not among the things in which one ought to traffic. By cutting out the emphasis on material reward, authority would be made more worthy of respect and less a subject of envy; such a course would cut out the greedy mediocrity and limit authority to those who have a call. In a phrase of the kind beloved by Blanc, this would transform obedience into an act of gratitude. In the final statement of Louis Blanc's ideal, a man's needs are the indication given by God of what Society owes him; his abilities, on the other hand, are equally a God-given indication of what he owes society. The legitimate empire of superior ability should be confirmed not by the extent of the tribute levied on society, but by the magnitude of the services rendered to society.¹ Here is a standard of conduct which may well bring a blush to the hardened forehead of even the most self-righteous among us. In the last resort Louis Blanc's society is to work through a universal dissemination of the principle of Noblesse oblige, by the glow that comes from the consciousness of work well done, and by an overflowing gratitude welling up in every heart towards those who are so self-sacrificing as to shoulder the responsibilities of life. It is magnificent; but it is not for this world. Noblesse oblige, on this standard, begins to fray at the edges for most of us as we approach the pensionable age. These inhabitants of the national workshops who thus harbour such elevated sentiments on waking up in their Utopia have shed nearly all the qualities of frail and sinful men as we know them. The point would not be worth elaborating but for the fact, so characteristic of a great deal of socialism on the more Utopian side, that, as has been observed in an earlier chapter, it makes its task easy by creating a new unfallen man to walk, transfigured, the golden streets of the New Jerusalem.

By a curious irony, Louis Blanc, more than most reformers, was brought within measurable distance of being given an opportunity of realising his dreams. For, as has been said, after the Revolution of 1848, he was one of the leading members of the Provisional Government, and perhaps that government is now most enduringly remembered by the extraordinary fiasco attending its policy of establishing national workshops. Louis Blanc's reputation naturally did not escape all the retrospective slinging of mud which this gigantic failure occasioned. But it seems probable that he cannot be held directly responsible for a scheme which ended so disastrously, and which, as he protested, was not in accordance with his idea of things. If, however, he was not directly responsible for the scandal of the ateliers nationaux, he can hardly escape a certain mediate responsibility. Louis Blanc's incessant preaching of the ‘right to work’ was an important ingredient in the ferment which produced 1848, and the national workshops represented the attempt of the government to redeem the pledges which Blanc was supposed to have given. It is a complicated story, and those who wish to assess the rights and wrongs of the issue must look elsewhere for the evidence.

CHAPTER X. P. J. PROUDHON↩

OF all the writers whose works have gone to the fashioning of socialism, none occupies so peculiar and ambiguous a position as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; none has been so perpetually a cause of exasperation and annoyance to the commentators and the critics, who quite obviously have, for the most part, never quite known what to make of him. Doubtless, here as elsewhere, the early years helped to make the man, and may in part (though not wholly) explain the enigma of Proudhon's psychological make-up. Born in 1809 at Besançon (Fourier's town) he experienced in his early days the bitterness of extreme poverty, and the shame that poverty may bring to a sensitive temperament. Though his father worked in the town, the tradition and the background of the family tied them to the land. The memories of the days when he herded cattle in the fields around Besançon remained with Proudhon, and in odd ways helped, until the end of his life, to make him a peasant at heart. Arrived at years to take up something more than casual employment, Proudhon became a printer's compositor. It was both a fortunate and an unfortunate choice—fortunate, in that the sensitive cowherd had been a bookish lad, so that his new work lay in the line of one of his interests; unfortunate, in that it gave him the opportunity of reading all the books set up in the establishment. Proudhon, in fact, never lived down the surfeit of theology which he imbibed at this period, as an incidental by-product of his daily activity. He became, and he remained through life, a man of vast, if somewhat undigested, erudition, which he was never at any pains to conceal. It has been the custom to decry Proudhon, as one who too easily got beyond his depths; yet it is only fair to acknowledge that the four volumes of De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise probably contain more miscellaneous and abstruse learning than is likely to be encountered in any other book of comparable size, apart from an encyclopaedia. The award of a scholarship by the Academy of Besançon enabled Proudhon to read and study more systematically, and the publication of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? made him known and, indeed, what is no less desirable, perhaps even notorious. Thereafter his life was a prolonged campaign of pamphleteering, if the term may be used with reference to such substantial works as Proudhon normally produced, varied by a slight and unsuccessful incursion into active politics as a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848. He had his share of persecutions and his periods of imprisonment, but as imprisonment was not allowed to interfere with his writing, it was more or less an unnoticed incident in his life. Also at times it appeared inexpedient to live in France; but again, a writer, with the pen of a ready writer, may write as readily in Brussels as in Paris or Besançon. He wrote to the end, and indeed he left a very considerable number of volumes to be published posthumously. But he left no school; and Proudhon, detesting ‘sects,’ would probably have preferred it so.

For indeed it is in the loneliness of Proudhon that we find his most arresting characteristic; it is scarcely a figure of speech to say that he went through life in a minority of one. It is probably in any case impossible to understand Proudhon; but there can certainly be no beginning of an understanding until the springs of his loneliness are laid bare. One governing consideration has already been indicated. Proudhon was, in his very bones, of the people. In applying to the Academy of Besançon for the award of his scholarship, he had expressed the intention of devoting his studies to the improvement of the physical, the moral, and the intellectual condition ‘de la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre.’¹ The words are a literal transcription from Saint-Simon's last testament. Much later he was proud to boast that he had enjoyed the rare advantage of being born of the people and of remaining one of the people.² In this, of course, he was not unique. There are, however, two points which should be borne in mind in assessing the influence of Proudhon's origin. The first is that up to the point now reached, nearly all those who, in the socialist sense, had spoken for the people, had nevertheless not been of the people. The second modifying consideration is that, mingled with Proudhon's somewhat too acute consciousness of his plebeian origin, there are memories of a world which had not been overkind to him in the early days of his schoolboy poverty. Proudhon was therefore sent into the world conscious that he was different from others, and prepared to be antagonistic to others.

Moreover, Proudhon was temperamentally destructive and critical. His instinct was to attack everything and everybody. Towards the end of his life, he showed a considerable degree of sensitiveness with regard to the charge that his contribution had been purely negative, and he produced an impressive list of his positive contributions to thought.³ But the record is against him. Nier, toujours nier, he had proudly proclaimed to be his principle of procedure, and as early as What is Property? he had boasted that he had taken an oath to be faithful to his work of demolition, and that he would continue to pursue truth à travers les ruines et les décombres.¹ If not exactly in the Mephistophelian sense, his was essentially a Geist der stets verneint. Moreover, Proudhon, more than most writers, periodically expressed a phobia of the commonplace; the fact that a view is commonly held, or held by a considerable number of his fellow-men is for him sufficient reason for holding it to be not merely erroneous but absurd. His choice is invariably for a daring paradox in preference to a hackneyed truth. Further, if the paradox appears to be one that is likely to shock, it becomes still more desirable, as more calculated to arrest attention.²

The result is that Proudhon throughout life rushed about like an infuriated bull, tossing all his fellow-socialists aloft on his indignant horns. Even in his own lifetime, the critics found amusement in collecting choice posies of Proudhon's abuse of all other socialists and all other schools of socialism. Louis Blanc is the ‘declared enemy of Liberty’³; Cabet is abused with a refreshing persistence which never flags. There is something invigorating in a supposedly leading socialist who declares roundly that ‘le socialisme n'est rien, n'a jamais rien été, ne sera jamais rien,’⁴ or who asks impatiently whether his correspondent has ever found in socialism autre chose que de la vanité et de la bêtise.⁵ More devastating is an exclamation addressed to the communists, which somehow sounds almost unduly grotesque if translated into English: ‘Loin de moi, communistes! votre présence m'est une puanteur, et votre vue me dégoûte.’⁶ Rousseau, a respected name if not a respectable character, becomes the ‘Genevese charlatan.’⁷ Indeed Proudhon washes his hands of everybody: ‘Comme homme de réalisation et de progrès, je répudie de toutes mes forces le socialisme, vide d'idées, impuissant, immoral, propre seulement à faire des dupes et des escrocs.’⁸

All this is very confusing to those who like their specimens of humanity to be neatly docketed. The confusion is rendered worse by Proudhon's incurable tendency to violent language and to extravagant utterances which he did not mean, or did not wholly mean, or did not mean without qualification. For long Proudhon was generally known exclusively in virtue of two statements, firstly, that ‘La propriété, c'est le vol’—that property is theft—which throughout his life served as his signature-tune; and secondly that ‘Dieu, c'est le mal’—that God is the principle of evil. But in fact, as we shall see presently, Proudhon did not in the least believe that property was theft: indeed he spent a large part of his life proclaiming the virtues of property and preaching the universalisation of property. A more scrupulous Proudhon would have said, not that property is theft, but that under certain circumstances property may enable its owner to acquire an income in ways of which he, Proudhon, disapproved. But such a statement would clearly have been useless as a signature-tune. Nor did Proudhon really believe that God is the principle of evil. He found much currently accepted theological doctrine obscure, not to say incomprehensible, and he was in no way attracted to the God whom certain of his neighbours professed to serve. But again in probably neither of these respects was he unique.

Proudhon's natural impulse to ‘demolition,’ his thirsty joy in attacking and refuting any statement made by anyone, would probably in any case have made it a difficult task to reduce him to a formula. Unfortunately, Proudhon, falling under the influence of Hegel, exalted his besetting weakness into a fundamental principle which he elected to follow in the development of his thought. It is highly probable, as Marx suggests, that Proudhon did not understand Hegel—but in such a matter who is justified in throwing the first stone? Proudhon confesses that the Hegelian dialectic intoxicated him—la dialectique m'enivrait¹—and the symptoms of his intoxication are manifest everywhere, but particularly in the Contradictions Economiques. Periodically, Proudhon gives elementary lessons for babes in Hegelian principles, and rather scolds the world for not being properly initiated. In practice, the great principle that the thesis should give way to the antithesis, and that both should be reconciled in the synthesis, does not quite work out that way in Proudhon. He appears to have flattered himself that he was conforming to Hegelian principles if he argued on both sides of a question. His devotion to antinomies is revealed in the extreme intellectual delight which he experienced in showing that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were alike equally absurd answers to any given question. But the peculiarity of Proudhon is that, despite professions and intentions, he never really gets to a synthesis. The 950 pages (approximately) of the Contradictions Economiques are devoted, in the name of Hegel, to a mutual destruction of the arguments, for and against, on most of the subjects of current human interest. Emile Faguet has admirably shown what a snare a supposed devotion to Hegel may be to a mind of Proudhon's type. If he is trapped in a glaring contradiction, he has but to say: ‘Ah, but I was then expounding the thesis, whereas now I am in the anti-thesis.’ If presently he says something which is consistent with neither of the contradictory doctrines to which he has already pinned his faith, he has but to say: ‘And this, my friends, is by way of being the synthesis.’ As interpreted by Proudhon, Hegelianism was not merely a licence, it was an injunction to be self-contradictory. Thus in the matter of property, Proudhon's utterances cover the whole gamut of possible views on the subject; yet he never admitted inconsistency or contradiction. On the contrary, in putting forward one extreme view, he boasted of the glory due to him for having expressed the entirely contrary view. Later, the intoxication occasioned by Hegel wore off. In one of his posthumous works, Proudhon acknowledges that the thesis and the antithesis are not in fact resolved; the problem is not that of their fusion, qui serait la mort, but of their equilibrium.¹ This somewhat tardy abjuration of Hegel, however, came too late to prevent a lifetime devoted to ransacking the world for contradictions.

All these influences help to explain why this ‘enfant terrible du socialisme,’ to adopt a phrase from Malon, has been somewhat gingerly treated by the critics. He fits in nowhere. On the first encounter, and indeed much later, he appears to be a mass of extravagant, irresponsible and contradictory contentions leading nowhere. It also explains why there is such considerable diversity in the various presentations of Proudhon. According to taste, and by judicious selection of citations, Proudhon may be made to appear as the embodiment of revolutionary destructiveness or the essence of die-hard individualism. A writer who is so elusive and so Protean has only himself to blame if in the end the world finds the task of attempting comprehension disproportionate to the reward.

Yet Proudhon, in the anarchist and syndicalist tradition, has been an influence, and indeed one of the greatest. It is therefore not permissible, as was rather the tendency a generation ago, to thrust him aside as a negligible purveyor of cheap catch-phrases, much as the apparent chaos of his writings might tempt one to pursue such a course. Moreover there is, fundamentally, much more consistency than may at first sight appear. If he be pruned of his exaggerations, his violences, and his paradoxes; if (not so easy a task) allowance is made for the element of negation, and of the negation of the negation which a misconstrued Hegelianism imposed upon him, there are certain cardinal points on which Proudhon remained immovable and invariable. Doubtless a summary of the essential Proudhon should conclude, and not precede, any attempted exposition of his ‘doctrine’; but in view of the difficulty which Proudhon has presented to the humble seeker for understanding for almost a century, it may be permissible in the present chapter, even at the risk of repetition, to reverse the logical procedure. A brief statement of the points on which Proudhon was relatively invariable may provide a guide through the Proudhonian jungle, a framework into which his contradictory statements may fit with a minimum appearance of contradiction.

The fundamental conception in Proudhon—the idée mère, to use that convenient phrase—is that of justice. He has his own definition of justice, but for the present it is unnecessary to come to closer grips with this most elusive of virtues. That justice should be done is the supreme test in all things, and lengthy stretches in Proudhon resolve themselves into hymns in praise of justice. It is because property may give rise to an unjust source of income that property is theft: it is because property, if rightly used and justly distributed, need not do so, that Proudhon is enabled to maintain simultaneously that property is liberty and the salvation of society. It is in ‘justice’ that we must seek the overriding consideration. In practice, putting aside Proudhon's definition, justice is throughout very largely interchangeable with ‘equality’; and we may therefore say that justice, interpreted as equivalent to equality, is the first of the constant elements in Proudhon's waywardness.

Secondly, Proudhon is consistent in his extreme individualism, which manifests itself in an incessant feud against all kinds of authority. The two most obvious authorities, issuing commands to the individual, are the State and the Church; and, accordingly, Proudhon is consistently anarchist and anti-clerical. But more intelligent than most, he has sufficient insight to realise that most of the forms of socialism then in vogue are in their way as authoritarian as the most authoritarian and arbitrary State, and that the tyranny of socialism may be as oppressive to the individual as the tyranny of the State under which we now groan. This explains the unending feud he carried on against ‘communists,’ and in particular against Louis Blanc and Cabet, who represented the types of authoritarian socialism which were especially repugnant to him. Justice, interpreted as equality, and freedom from restraint, represented by the extremest individualistic liberty, are then the two principles which commanded Proudhon's unwavering loyalty. Perhaps just here is a further explanation of the confusion which swamps Proudhon. For in spite of the tradition of the French Revolution which harnessed Freedom and Equality along with Fraternity, it may be doubted whether Proudhon's two ideals, as he interpreted them, are in fact reconcilable. If we are to have real equality, we must be coerced into it by the State or by some other authority; if, on the other hand, we are to have unrestrained, unfettered, untrammelled liberty, then among other things we must be left free to be unequal. It is a dilemma which in fact Proudhon never solved, and in a sense it pursued him into many fields of controversy.

Probably a systematic statement of Proudhon's theories ought not to begin with a consideration of his views on Property, but should rather approach this subject as a particular illustration of his more general doctrines regarding Justice. As, however, such a systematic statement of the chaos that is Proudhon is in any case impossible, there is a certain advantage in beginning where Proudhon in effect began, especially as the subject of Property, cutting across all other conceivable topics, runs throughout the whole of Proudhon's writings from his earliest work of real significance to the posthumous volume which was designed as a full and complete statement of his views on this question. Let it be premised that although Proudhon does not expressly say so, it is primarily property in land that he has in mind, as is perhaps fitting in one who remained at heart a peasant. It was the opening paragraph of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? that made Proudhon. In this somewhat too notorious passage, he remarks that if, in reply to the question: What is Slavery? he were to answer in a word ?'est l'assassinat, he would at once be understood. Why then can he have no hope of being understood if, in reply to the question: What is Property? he replies with equal truth that Property is theft, although this is but the previous proposition expressed in different words?¹ There then is the proposition, La Propriété, c'est le vol! which for the vast majority of Proudhon's contemporaries and for most of the world ever since was the essential and, indeed, almost the sole contribution of Proudhon to the advancement of thought. Unfortunately it was not even original, and critics were not slow to point out that identical words had been used by Brissot, and Emile Faguet quite properly cites similar expressions in Saint-Simon and Morelly, adding characteristically that the thought ‘a toujours été dans le cœur de ceux qui ne possèdent pas.’ But Proudhon remained bombastically and childishly proud of his great discovery, even while advancing views regarding property which were entirely inconsistent with his primary title to glory:

The definition of Property (he exclaims) is mine, and my whole ambition is to prove that I have understood its meaning and its scope. La Propriété, c'est le vol! Not in a thousand years is utterance given twice to such a saying as this. I have no possession in the world other than this definition of Property; but I hold it more precious than the millions of the Rothschilds, and I venture to say that it will be the most considerable event of the government of Louis Philippe.²

As to the unworthy suggestion that this, his most precious possession, was also a theft—from Brissot or another—Proudhon can but shrug his shoulders somewhat cavalierly. Brissot, he observes, did not understand the meaning of his own words¹: and with even more indignation he challenges his accusers to prove that Brissot knew what he was saying!² Thus might one find excuses for plagiarising the Apocalypse by calling on the prosecution to prove that St. John understood what he had written.

The essence of Proudhon's first attack on Property is extremely simple, though inevitably (the author being the man he was) the argument overflows its banks in contrary directions. But in essence, had Proudhon been compelled to summarise his argument in six pages, he would have said that the customary expositions of the right of property are inadequate. In the main (and again it should be recalled that he is consciously or unconsciously thinking of land) the basis of property is ordinarily found either in the right of first occupancy or in the so-called ‘Labour Right,’ with which we are familiar in Locke and Mill—the right of the producer to what he has himself produced. So far as occupancy is concerned, it is argued that there can be no right created against later comers or later generations: ‘si les premiers occupants ont tout occupé, qu'est-ce que les derniers venus occuperont?’³ Going back to Cicero's rather foolish analogy drawn from seats in a theatre, to Grotius and others, the utmost that can be conceded is that all have an equal right to what is necessary for their maintenance. Thus the argument in favour of property (so far as permissible) leads to an argument for equality, which is the negation of property.⁴

Nor (according to Proudhon) can labour give a right to property, along the lines of Locke's argument. According to Locke, the worker ‘mixes his labour’ with the gifts of nature, and what results is his, as a kind of extension of his personality; but clearly this argument assumes that the gifts of nature are not yet appropriated. In a world where all things are appropriated, the lone labourer has nothing wherewith to mix his labour. If a worker assiduously mingles his labour with the waters of the Tweed, and elicits a salmon, so far from the salmon being his property, he will (unless fortunate) be prosecuted for poaching, since, in what used to pass for a witticism in Scotland, ‘the Earth is the Laird's, and the fullness thereof.’

Indeed anyone whose duty it is to expound to the young the more or less commonly accepted ‘bases of private property’ must confess, if he be honest, that he approaches the subject with a somewhat apologetic air. The generally accepted ‘bases of private property’ comprise a curious medley of juridical, moral and economic considerations, and give but a dusty answer, if they give an answer at all, to the fundamental question of why private property exists. Indeed—no uncommon occurrence in life—they tend to give an answer to the wrong question. Assuming that it has been decided that private property shall be allowed to exist, then it is permissible to say that property may be founded on labour, or contract, or prescription, or on any other ground that may be deemed valid. But to the deeper question of why property should exist at all, these various considerations are not relevant. To any one brought up in Icaria or any other Utopia, who should challenge the right of private property in toto, it is obviously no answer to plead the right of prescription, and to say in effect: ‘I am justified in owning this, because it has been mine for a long time.’ To the profounder question which centres in the justification of private property as such, it is probable that there is no satisfactory theoretical answer; and this is, in a sense, the sum and substance of Proudhon's dissertation. All that the sensible man can do (and it is what Proudhon does elsewhere, when he is sensible) is to fall back on Aristotle, and plead that private property is justified because it is in accordance with human nature and satisfies a natural human instinct.

As in the case of the argument for property based on occupation, Proudhon contends that the labour basis, in so far as permissible, also tends to equality. In most of his discussion on this point, he is more obscure than usual, but the main point advanced in support of his position here is that wealth is produced socially: the greater the number of workers, the smaller is the task assigned to each, so that natural inequality in men's endowments is neutralised in an expanding society.¹ A wholly different argument is that the higher capacities which on orthodox (and Saint-Simonian) theory call for higher remuneration, are made possible only when society has sufficiently enlarged itself to allow the creation of such superior posts. It is, he would seem to argue, the queue at the cinema door that makes the film star, who would languish if restricted to the population of St. Kilda or Tristan da Cunha. Thus it is society, and not the individual, which creates the more responsible position.² The familiar fact of mutual interdependence makes the work of production a common and joint effort. In a phrase which deserves to be pondered, he speaks of the worker as being, with regard to society, a debtor who necessarily dies insolvent.³ None of us ever can meet our obligations to our fellows. Largely, therefore, because no one can claim merit, and because the work of no one can be isolated, the development of society is towards equality.

In the course of his diffuse argument on this question, Proudhon throws out an idea, of which, if one may borrow his own reference to Brissot, he does not appear to have realised the full significance: at least he does not return to it, as he does to most ideas dear to his heart. It is, however, of some interest as containing the germ of a theory of exploitation different from that which Marx was later to place on the centre of the stage. He argues that the worker, even after he has received his wages, has a natural right of property over the thing he has produced. This is so because the worker is necessarily underpaid. While the employer pays so many days’ wages in respect of the effort of each worker, nothing is paid in respect of ‘cette force immense qui résulte de l'union et de l'harmonie des travailleurs.’ There is an additional productivity arising from union, and this ‘force collective’ goes unremunerated. This explains, in a phrase used by Proudhon but more familiar elsewhere, the ‘exploitation de l'homme par l'homme.’¹

To return more closely to the central question of property, we have seen that ‘Property is theft’; yet it is obvious, even at the moment of its utterance, that this portentous formula, as has been well expressed by Suranyi-Ungar, has a somewhat hohlen Klang, a hollow sound; that it is but an inhaltsloses Kampfgeschrei. For even in this first and most extreme pamphlet, it is not really property that Proudhon condemns; it is what, with a curious affectation of learning, he calls the droit d'aubaine inherent in property—that quality which enables the owner to exact a revenue from others. In an illuminating phrase in his posthumous Théorie de la Propriété Proudhon explains that by property he means the sum total of the abuses that may spring from property.² It is a curious procedure to define an institution as the abuses which may be associated with that institution; yet this is what Proudhon does when disporting in that field of dialectic in which Property is theft.

The right of aubaine may, of course, take different forms: rent in respect of land or houses, interest on investments, gains and profits—in short, all possible revenues deriving from possession, all the possible devices whereby ‘le propriétaire moissonne et ne laboure pas, récolte et ne cultive pas, consomme et ne produit pas, jouit et n'exerce rien.’³ Here we come to the crux of Proudhon on this question of property. It is this droit d'aubaine that constitutes the right of theft, le droit de vol⁴; if property can be purified by the infusion of his beloved justice, so that it no longer enables the owner to exact a revenue, so that the elements ‘hostile to sociability’ are eliminated,⁵ then indeed property will no longer be anathema. At this stage Proudhon flatters himself that he has done the trick when he replaces property by possession, so that the privileges of ownership will be restricted to the usufruct.

Proudhon ends Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? with a characteristic boast that as a result of his tract, ‘Property is vanquished; it will never again raise its head.’¹ To learn how blessed and beneficial, how essential and eternal a thing property is, one must turn to the Contradictions Economiques and the posthumous Théorie de la Propriété. The Système des Contradictions Economiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère, to give it its full title for once, is a somewhat maddening book, and Karl Marx is not the only one who has been maddened beyond endurance by its 960 ample pages. Fortunately there are now few who expose themselves to the risk. It represents a spurious Hegelianism run mad. There are doubtless considerable stretches where interest revives; somewhat oddly, one of the most effective passages is that devoted to a destructive criticism of orthodox socialism. Yet the effect of the whole is asphyxiating. In design, Proudhon aims at discussing such things as Value, Division of Labour, Machinery, Competition, Monopoly, and much more, showing in each case how that which is good and necessary leads to that which is evil and deplorable. Division of labour, for example, is a condition of progress; but as the arts progress, there is retrogression of the artisan. ‘Comment un principe dont le développement est visiblement utile, peut-il être en même temps funeste?’² This question, as it happens, has specific reference to competition, but in fact it governs the whole of the two bulky volumes. It is, of course, designed to be the Hegelian thesis and antithesis, but Proudhon is singularly ineffective in getting anywhere near a synthesis. The scheme of this, his most pretentious work, does in fact, however, provide an elastic framework within which he may argue on both sides of any given question.

In the main, however, on the question now before us, the weight of the argument in the Contradictions Economiques is not merely on the legitimacy of property, but indeed on the necessity of its universalisation. In the opening pages he introduces the new theme by admitting that the renting or hiring of land (le loyer), as indeed of money or any other object of value, is a spontaneous and universal fact, ‘qui a sa source au plus profond de notre nature,’ and which by its development becomes one of the most potent springs of organisation.³ Now he depicts the fatal consequences which would follow the abolition of property: ‘With the destruction of property, society would fall into a disorganisation without end.’⁴ He identifies property with the family, which, for Proudhon, the strictest of all puritans, is the most sacred of all institutions: ‘La famille et la propriété marchent de front, appuyées l'une sur l'autre.’ The aim of the legislator is, not to abolish, but to realise for everyone three things which are intertwined: le mariage, la famille, la propriété. Moreover, in the interests of the family, there must be inheritance; for without inheritance there can be neither husbands nor wives, neither ancestors nor descendants. There must be inheritance, ‘parce que la famille ne doit jamais périr.’¹ Here it is Proudhon, the patriarch, the incurable individualist, who is speaking. Even if, with every desire to render Proudhon comprehensible, the ideas of property and possession are kept apart, it is difficult to see how ‘possession,’ to which inheritance in this patriarchal sense has been added, differs from property in the ordinary sense.

In the posthumous Théorie de la Propriété we make further progress in discovering how property, purged by justice—that is to say, deprived of its power to exact a revenue from others—becomes not merely defensible, but praiseworthy. And indeed we are provided with a wholly new, and highly curious, theory in defence of property; and, odd as it may appear in the light of all that has gone before, a reason for preferring ‘property’ to the more anæmic ‘possession’ originally commended for our acceptance. The impulse to this new theory of property is to be found in the horror with which Proudhon, as an extreme individualist and anarchist, regarded any State or any authority. Accordingly he now argues that the justification of property is to be found, not in its origins but in its ‘ends.’² The State being what it is, it is necessary to create a counterpoise, to balance its power. The only possible and adequate counterpoise for this purpose is in fact to be found in property. Property has always been the most redoubtable enemy and the most perfidious ally of the prevailing power, and that is why every Government and every Church distrusts property. Property is the greatest revolutionary force in existence, and the only one that can be opposed to that mysterious thing which Proudhon calls ‘le pouvoir.’ The formidable power of the State can be balanced only by uniting the power of the proprietors, and thus may liberty be guaranteed. Nor can this miraculous effect be produced by ‘possession’ in the Proudhonian sense: for possession, implying thereby usufruct as apart from absolute ownership, is itself dependent on the State, and instead of opposing the State, it will come to its aid.³ Property is thus a liberating influence,⁴ and indeed it has always been so regarded in the liberal tradition. Much of this may not appear to be a very convincing defence of property, especially if it be remembered that Proudhon, when approving property, thinks in terms of small and preferably peasant proprietors; but it is not without interest in revealing the flexibility and the versatility of Proudhon's mind.

For the rest, the Théorie de la Propriété tends to become a panegyric of property, it being always understood that property is now purged and purified of the unjust droit d'aubaine, and the equally offensive jus abutendi of the Roman lawyers. If marriage were the right to abuse one's wife, would it, he pertinently asks, be a respectable institution?¹ But assuming that property is divested of such unsocial accretions, it emerges free of reproach, and no praise is too high for it. It is by virtue of property that the ego, which is ‘individuel, insocial, avare, envieux, jaloux, plein d'orgueil et de mauvaise foi,’ ceases to possess all these undesirable characteristics, and is transformed into something higher.² Thus in what is perhaps the most crucial sentence on this subject, ‘Property which is in its origin a principle vicious in itself and anti-social, is destined to become, precisely through its generalisation, the pivot and the mainspring of the whole system.’³ ‘Property,’ he exclaims elsewhere, ‘must never perish; it must remain in the heart of man as a perpetual stimulant to labour.’⁴ Indeed, Proudhon ends by regarding himself as the saviour of property: ‘Odd, that after waging war against property for fifteen years, I am perhaps destined to save it from the inexpert hands of its defenders.’⁵ Finally, for those who share Proudhon's delight in a concatenation of adjectives, property appears as ‘libérale, fédérative, décentralisatrice, républicaine, égalitaire, progressive, justicière’—all of these being in the Proudhonian sense adjectives of commendation.⁶ Such is the end of the journey which began with the loud trumpeting of the identity of property and theft, and the triumphant proclamation that property would never again raise its head.

At the risk of a somewhat disproportioned account of Proudhon's writings as a whole, his views on property have been examined in some detail in the foregoing paragraphs, for two reasons. Firstly it may give some idea of the chaos (perhaps more apparent than real), of the inconsistencies and contradictions in which he chose to cloud all that he had to say. We have seen how he damns and praises property in the same breath; and while asserting that property will be the salvation of society, he boasts of the glory due to him for having discovered that property is theft. In fact, as has been indicated, property at times means for Proudhon ‘property,’ and at times it means the ‘abuses of property.’ If, sacrificing literary grace, he had called them P₁ and P₂, his argument might have been clearer and his conclusions less apparently contradictory. The second reason for dealing in some detail with Proudhon's views on property is that, though he may have been more influential elsewhere, it was this subject that made him known, and for long it was on this that his fame (or his notoriety) rested. Not much of Proudhon's writings has passed into general knowledge, and for this Proudhon is himself largely to blame; but the first thing that is known of him (even if frequently it is also the last) is that he fathered (or step-fathered) the great phrase that property is theft. It has therefore seemed excusable to examine what in fact he did say.

Property, it has been seen, will become sacred, if it is purged and infused with justice. It is time to consider how this purging process can be effected. Broadly, the remedy obviously lies in extirpating the droit d'aubaine, the power to extract a revenue from others which property confers on its owner. In a characteristic phrase, property in land deprived of its rent will be ‘cured of its leprosy’¹; and the same applies to other types of ownership. Justice must be introduced; and on one view, the whole of Proudhon is a groping after justice and an attempt to apply it—as he conceives it—to all human relationships. Whether justice in the abstract is an ideal which can be attained is extremely doubtful. It is perhaps even open to question whether we know what we mean when we speak of justice; or whether (Plato's Republic notwithstanding) any of us could define justice without using terms which are even more elusive and ambiguous. Doubtless, it may be possible to give a limited and circumscribed definition of justice which would bring it within the field of human pursuit; but justice in the large eludes us.²

Proudhon, of course, has his own definition of justice; but as used by him throughout his endless writings, the word overflows all definitions, and becomes the living God. La Justice est le Dieu suprême, elle est le Dieu vivant.³ When he compels himself to be more specific, justice, putting it somewhat colloquially, may be summed up as involving respect for human dignity in our neighbours as well as in ourselves.⁴ His complete definition may be given: Justice is ‘the respect, spontaneously felt and reciprocally guaranteed, of human dignity, in whatsoever person and in whatsoever circumstance it may be compromised, and to whatsoever risk its defence may expose us.’⁵

The first and most obvious application of justice, however it may be defined, is in the elimination of the droit d'aubaine, where interest represents the heaviest burden resting on labour.¹ The reduction of the rate of interest to approximately zero accordingly became to a surprising extent the panacea which, with unusual consistency, Proudhon throughout his life advanced as a cure for the world's ills. It is rather odd how frequently writers who are blessed with an enviable ignorance of the mysteries of money, turn to a monetary solution of the perplexities of this life. The organisation of a Bank which would give free credit, or at least credit at a minimal rate to cover office expenses, was of all projects the dearest to. Proudhon's heart, and indeed considerable steps were taken to bring it into existence. What Proudhon says with regard to the organisation of credit and indeed on money generally, somewhat resembles the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, wherein the prophet discourses of the whoredoms of Aholah and Aholibah. While it is possible to apprehend generally what is the theme of discussion, few readers could conscientiously say that they grasp the course of the argument.

Although Proudhon flatters himself that ‘les hommes du métier’ will easily comprehend his train of thought,² fortunately only the connoisseur in museum-pieces need trouble about the details of his Bank. As expressed in general terms by Proudhon, the underlying idea is that the workers should mutually guarantee each other in respect of both work and a market, and that for this purpose they should accept as money their mutual obligations.³ The workers require credit, but credit is just precisely what the State cannot give. The State possesses nothing but debts and bayonets.⁴ In a phrase which doubtless delighted the author, the State, eternally unproductive, is not the prince of credit, but ‘le type du discrédit.’¹ The workers must therefore provide their own credit; they will do so by rendering each other mutual support. Credit can be organised, putting into practice the principle that products exchange against products. Credit must be given so large a basis that no demand can exhaust it. To do this, the sovereignty of money must be destroyed, and to this end every product of labour must become current money. Under the domination of the money system as we know it, credit is unilateral; with a system of reciprocity, credit will be bilateral. In more technical language, Proudhon claims that his proposal is merely a generalisation of ‘la lettre de change.’² To the Bank erected for the purpose, the would-be borrower will present himself with the title of his property; the Bank will give him coupons to the value of two-thirds or three-quarters of his property, and the coupons will henceforth be money.³ The emission of this new paper can never be excessive, provided it takes place only against ‘bonnes valeurs de commerce’ and according to the demand for discount.⁴ Thus by providing gratuitous credit in this simple way, Proudhon imagined that, applying the principle of ‘Mutualism,’ he had overcome that loathly dragon, le droit d'aubaine.⁵

Proudhon's Bank, designed to provide free credit, has been cited as an example of what he called indifferently ‘Mutualité’ or ‘Mutualisme.’ This Système mutuelliste to which Proudhon looked forward as providing a better world is in its widest definition a society which holds together its members by promising and assuring ‘service pour service, valeur pour valeur, crédit pour crédit, garantie pour garantie.’⁶ Mutualism is in fact Proudhon's particular brand of socialism, and is doubtless best considered as part of the general question of his views on government.

It is doubtless on this side, on the question of government, that Proudhon has been most influential, though indeed not most notorious: here also he was probably most consistent. As a starting-point, it should be noted that fundamentally he was an outrageously extreme individualist. There are a number of pages in the Contradictions Economiques in praise of competition in which the orthodox views of the ultra-classical school of English Political Economy are expressed with a disgusting nudity and crudity. Man, he tells us, emerges from his indolence only when need disquiets him; the surest way of extinguishing his genius is to deliver him from all anxiety, and transfer to the State the responsibility of his inertia. A man may love his fellow to the point of dying for him, but not to the point of working for him. Again, the only encouragement to work is to be found in profit. Men are so constituted that ‘dès que leur bien particulier les sollicite, ils désertent le bien général.’¹ All this might be the voice of McCulloch in one of his graver lapses into orthodoxy. Nor is this merely a comment on the weaknesses of others from which, after the manner of writers, he claims to be personally free. In scoffing at the ‘fraternity’ of the socialists and their schemes of distribution, he exclaims: ‘I intend to be rewarded in the measure of my work: otherwise, I stop working.’² Elsewhere his comment on the problem of the small shopkeeper is remarkable in a prophet of equality: ‘Au plus diligent et au plus probe la faveur des chalands.’³ What more could James Mill desire?

This extreme individualism carries Proudhon further, and makes him the first conscious advocate of what, with a curious affectation in the matter of hyphens, he calls an-archy; for an anarchist is merely the limiting case of a liberal individualist whose commonsense has become infinitesimal. Incessantly and perpetually, in season and out of season, he protests against all that government stands for: ‘We do not admit the government of man by man any more than the exploitation of man by man.’⁴ With a more personal and rebellious note, he exclaims: ‘Whoever lays his hands on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant; and I declare him my enemy.’⁶ He speaks consistently of the State as of something he would not touch with a barge-pole: ‘I have never asked the State to do anything,’ and again ‘I want no State even for a servant.’⁶ The same attitude is observed with regard to laws: ‘If there must be legislation (I wish) to be my own legislator.’⁷ Even more emphatic is this complete renunciation of the Law and all its doings: ‘In so far as I have not wanted the law, in so far as I have not consented to it, voted for it, signed it, I am under no obligation to it; it has no existence.’⁸ He protests, like an exponent of the theory of multiple sovereignty, against ‘cette funeste théorie de la compétence de l'État.’¹ The State becomes a monster: it is ‘that fictitious being, without intelligence, without passion, without morality, that we call the State.’² To be governed—but it requires the best part of a page to present briefly and concisely the degradation of being governed. It is among other things (for this is merely a selection):

to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, taxed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so... enrolled, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished... repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured.³

Any one harbouring such views is of necessity an anarchist, believing that the State is void of virtue. In particular, however, the State is worse than useless for any kind of revolutionary activity. That Louis Blanc failed to realise this, and sought to make use of the State as his tool, explains the contempt which colours all Proudhon's references to Blanc. His emphasis on this point again takes us to the roots of syndicalism. You cannot by Satan cast out Satan, and you cannot by the State effect a revolution. He has much to say about revolutions par en haut, and revolutions par en bas⁴; but any revolutionary activity is repugnant to the State which in its very essence is counter-revolutionary. Every revolution, to be efficacious, must be spontaneous: it must spring, not from the head of the powers-that-be, but from the entrails of the people.⁵ The root-cause of his lively criticism of his contemporary socialists is his contention that they did not realise this; they worshipped power and thirsted for authority. Authority has its seat in the family and nowhere else, and Louis Blanc's mistake was to transfer and apply to the State what was true only of the individual and the family.⁶

Nor is this antagonism to the State confined solely to States which are ordinarily regarded as of the authoritarian and repressive type. The idea of nationality, of the sovereignty of the people, of democracy, and of association were in Proudhon's day much in evidence, and were hailed as the angels of freedom and of progress. Perhaps just for this reason they left Proudhon frigid, or provoked him to the congenial task of destruction. In the matter of nationality, the two outstanding cases of his time were presented by Poland and Italy. On each Proudhon went his own wayward way, looking on the unification of Italy, for reasons to be noted presently, as a mistake. No one has more effectively laid bare the elusiveness of the ‘people,’ for whom sovereignty is claimed. It is sometimes said, he observes, that the people rose as a single man: and he goes on to ask, ‘pense-t-il aussi comme un seul homme? réfléchit-il? raisonne-t-il? conclut-il? a-t-il de la mémoire, de l'imagination, des idées?’ These and many more searching questions await an answer: if they cannot be answered, then ‘your respect for the sovereignty of the people is but an absurd fetichism.’¹ It is but a fiction, a myth.²

On democracy and the machinery of democracy, Proudhon also pours forth his contempt, coming rather close to certain modern schools of thought who would claim that all representation is bound to be misrepresentation. In a somewhat startling phrase he asserts that government is by divine right (as he would probably admit it to be in the case of a father of a family), or it is nothing: democratic government is but a contradiction. Is the ballot, he asks, more trustworthy than tradition or heredity?³ In any case, what do numbers prove? By adding together votes, you can never arrive at any general thought.⁴ The greatest men may not be able to find a solution; yet ten million citizens, ‘feebly minded,’ can infallibly solve the problem of the revolution!⁵ Nor can there be any legitimate representation of the people; all electoral systems are merely ‘des mécaniques à mensonge’; the deputy never represents more than one idea, one interest; all the rest are pitilessly excluded.⁶ Half the electors plus one may decide the election; in which case half the electors minus one are for ever unrepresented or misrepresented. It has again been a familiar line of argument in these latter days; it suffices to prove to Proudhon that democracy is a Chimère.⁷

With regard to association, Proudhon is not wholly condemnatory, but his attitude is, if anything, on the icy side of tepid. Acknowledging that he distrusts fraternity, he finds in ‘association in general’ more evil than good. Here, as elsewhere, his antagonism springs from his distrust of Utopias and fine words. Association is for him merely a dogma. It is neither a directing principle nor an industrial force: there is nothing in it which makes the worker stronger or quicker, reduces the cost of production, or achieves any measurable end.⁸ In its essence, association is sterile and indeed injurious, since it places fetters on the liberty of the worker: ‘Never, except in spite of himself, and because he cannot do otherwise, does man associate.’⁹ This again is a curious reflection of a world in which there are no trade unions, no need for trade unions, and no appreciation of trade unions. This is well illustrated by the case in which Proudhon does admit association, and which he introduces as if it were exceptional. There are, he realises, ‘certain industries, which require the combined employment of a large number of workers, a vast array of machines and hands,’ and much more. Where there is great division of labour and a considerable collective force, association among the workers imposes itself of necessity; and every such industry is ‘destined to become a society or company of workers.’¹ That Proudhon should have laid the emphasis where he did, placing the field of non-association before the field of association, shows how much he moved in thought in the village and in the world of small industry. Yet with regard to these ‘certain industries’ his vision was that of the Guild of recent thought: ‘A railroad, a mine, a factory, a ship, are to the workers who use them what a hive is to the bees, at once their tool and their home, their country, their territory, their property.’² In the main, however, his criticism of association is that of the confirmed individualist. Either association is compulsory, or it is voluntary. If compulsory, then it is merely slavery; if voluntary, what guarantee can there be that the members will work according to their capacity, or that the association will reward them according to their needs?³

In the light of this antagonism to all government and to all the machinery of government, and indeed of his dislike of anything that brings men together, Proudhon could not fail to be an anarchist. Government must disappear, and indeed anarchy is approaching daily. ‘La liberté, toujours la liberté, rien que la liberté, et pas de gouvernementalisme’—there, he exclaims, is the whole revolutionary catechism.⁴ What, in Proudhon's vision, is to take the place of the detested governmental machine? Two ideas, which are in a way interlocked, provide the clues to Proudhon's anarchy. The first is mutuality or mutualism which has already been mentioned in connection with gratuitous credit; the second is the development and extension of a system of free contracts. The système mutuelliste is in some ways so much the whole substance of Proudhon on the constructive side, that it may be as well to give one of the more lucid definitions of what it implies. Under mutuality:

la société, doit être considerée, non comme une hiérarchie de fonctions et de facultés, mais comme un système d'équilibrations entre forces libres, dans lequel chacune est assurée de jouir des mêmes droits à la condition de remplir les mêmes devoirs, d'obtenir les mêmes avantages en échange des mêmes services, système par conséquent essentiellement égalitaire et libéral, qui exclut toute acception de fortunes, de rang et de classes.¹

With this system of reciprocal rights and duties, it is necessary to consider the important part assigned by Proudhon to contract. Outside the family, there is no place for authority²; contract is accordingly the only moral bond which free and equal beings can accept. Moreover, while Proudhon claimed that he was in no way a consenting party to law, he acknowledged that he was of necessity a consenting party to any contract into which he might enter. A system of contract must therefore replace a system of laws; and as contracts necessarily imply that they are made between equals, such a system will furnish the blessed trinity of Liberty, Equality and Freedom, with Order thrown in. The contract, he claims, solves all problems.³ Thus in the end there will be no void caused by dissolving, submerging and suppressing the whole governmental machine: industrial organisation will take the place of government, and in place of laws there will be contracts.

Let no one raise foolishly commonsense objections that Proudhon's anarchy, or any other anarchy, would not ‘work.’ To ask what would happen if... is merely to reveal ignorance of the conventions and of the rules of the game. There is, however, this to be said for Proudhon's anarchy, that even if a world wallowing in contracts, with no power to enforce them, is something of a nightmare, the spirit of Proudhon's anarchy suggests certain halfway houses which are by no means so repugnant to experience. For at the root of all Proudhon's political theories the one constant element is hatred of the dominating centralised authority; the one remedy is decentralisation and still more decentralisation, and this is quite a practical policy, provided one stops short of making every man his own lawgiver. Mutuality on the political and international plane becomes federalism,⁴ and Proudhon is the prophet of federalism. The twentieth century, he prophesies, will open the era of federations⁵; and even if events have not so far fulfilled his prophecy, the idea is certainly in the air. The advantage of federalism in Proudhon's eyes is that it tends to diminish power by breaking it up. His opposition to the national movement in Italy in so far as it tended to lead to unification, was caused by the view he took that Italy (as it then was) was specially created for a federal constitution. In any case, the fewer centralised states the better. Every centralised State is by its very nature annexationist, but ‘une confédération demeure sans force pour la conquête,’ just as it discourages the effervescence of the masses.¹

One other aspect of Proudhon's federalism plays a considerable part in history. He represents, for reasons already given, the claims of the local authority against the central State. The question of municipal liberties is, he says somewhat extravagantly, the whole of federation.² In practice this, of course, means, in Proudhon's environment, the claims of the Commune, for which he claims sovereignty as against the State. A highly significant passage may be cited in an abridged form, as it gives the whole of Proudhon on this point, and is not without importance in connection with subsequent political theory:

La commune est par essence, comme l'homme, comme la famille, comme toute individualité et toute collectivité intelligente, morale et libre, un être souverain. En cette qualité la commune a le droit de se gouverner elle-même, de s'administrer, de s'imposer des taxes, de disposer de ses propriétés et de ses revenus.... La commune, en conséquence, prend des arrêtés, rend des ordonnances: qui empêche qu'elle aille jusqu'à se donner des lois?³

It is on this quasi-political side that Proudhon becomes a figure of importance in the development of thought. The conception of federalism passed to Bakunin; and as embodied in Bakunin, became a rock of offence to Marx and the seed of dissension in the First International. The Paris Commune was inspired by Proudhonian ideas. Later, his doctrines He at the root of much that became syndicalism: the social theories behind Guild Socialism are Proudhonian in essence. The eclipse of the old doctrine of sovereignty in our time could appeal to his writings for justification. He showed, none more clearly, how unrepresentative a representative system may be, and in the bubbling cauldron of political speculation this too has been an ingredient in later times. Proudhon stands by the side of all who support the London County Council against the Ministry of Health; the Borough of Wandsworth against the London County Council; the ward committee against the Borough of Wandsworth; the Trade Union Branch against the Trade Union Executive Committee; the Presbytery against the General Assembly; the Kirk Session against the Presbytery; and whether they know it or not, all these dissidents are in his debt.

In dealing with a writer so diffuse and contradictory as Proudhon, who moreover aims at discussing every aspect of everything, any attempt to grasp the essentials in a few pages is bound to lead to the exclusion of much that may be of interest in itself or might claim a place in a full-length study, but which is less essential when Proudhon is viewed as a link in a chain. Nevertheless, a slight reference to a few points which have been by-passed in the foregoing pages may be of service in completing the picture.

The first and most obvious question is that of value, that miry pit in which, as it happens, Proudhon flounders more than most. Justice, the chief characteristic of the Système Mutuelliste, will limp unless value is determined.¹ On the main point, he is in the Marxian line, orthodox and unsurprising. It is labour that determines value, and for this purpose labour is to be measured by time.² But this is complicated by a curious idea that value has in some way to be constituée.³ This, so far, has been done only for gold or silver. As the saying is cryptic, it may be given in his own words, so that each may interpret it according to his will and capacity: ‘Or, ce que nul n'a remarqué, c'est que de toutes les marchandises, l'or et l'argent sont les premières dont la valeur soit arrivée a sa constitution.’⁴ On the general principle, justice requires that every product shall exchange for another product which shall have cost the same sum of effort and expense.⁵ This is comprehensible or at least familiar, even if practical difficulties leap to the eyes. Proudhon, however, in effect, suggests an elaborate system of price control. There is virtue in the prix fixe; and very naively he says that la vente à prix fixe is more dignified than la vente à marchandage; indeed if we all sold at prix fixe, we should have Mutuality.⁶ But who in a Proudhonian world is to fix prices remains a mystery. If authority, then we continue to groan under governmental tyranny; if the ‘law of supply and demand,’ then we are still in the jungle of injustice.

Something has already been said about equality, which in Proudhon's earliest tract had figured as a necessary condition of liberty.⁷ Equality is in general for Proudhon the manifestation of justice. Yet he is here curiously rent between an abstract and somewhat intellectual love of equality and his individualistic instincts to let the best shop-keeper get the largest number of customers. But in his egalitarian moments he tries to persuade himself against his better judgment, and by curious arguments, that men are in fact equal, and that equality is the law of nature. The progress of society, he holds, tends to make all alike and is leading us to an equivalence of talents and knowledge.⁸ The man of genius is merely a man of good constitution who has had the opportunity of working, thinking and analysing, whereas the dull dog is merely one who has killed his intelligence by his inertia.⁹ This is somewhat to over-simplify the problems of psychology. Greatly daring, he goes beyond this and argues that equality is the law of Nature. The number of days in the year is constant; the years are equal; the revolutions of the moon, if slightly variable, return to equality. The amount of rain in the year is sensibly constant. Equality governs the oceans where flux and reflux march with the regularity of a pendulum. Leaf is equal to leaf; flower to flower. Inequality comes not from the essence of things, but from the ‘milieu.’¹ Never surely was there such a fantastic argument for the equality of man.

Perhaps, and still more oddly, the desire that man should be equal explains Proudhon's paradoxical appearance as an apologist of war. In one of his most perverse books, La Guerre et la Paix, Proudhon reveals himself, for the greater part of its 800 pages, as an enthusiastic defender of ‘le droit de la force.’ War is represented as a religious revelation, a revelation of the ideal; it is even—most perverse of all, and in Proudhon of all people—a revelation of Justice. Doubtless before he has exhausted the subject, it is indicated that war, like religion, is something that mankind has outgrown, and indeed that war ‘a tenu sa dernière assise’ in the events leading to 1815.² But the effect of the whole volume is to convey the impression of a Prussian enthusiasm for war as such. Fundamentally, however, as Emile Faguet has indicated, war is commended because it is, or is supposed to be, a leveller, and equality can be attained by eliminating the weak as well as by more humanitarian methods. This too is his attitude to inferior races; for, despite his devotion to equality, he admits that such exist. There are ‘races mal nées ou abâtardies,’ races whose inferiority will be only more clearly demonstrated by any attempt to educate them. But the remedy here is that they will be absorbed, ‘et finiront par s'éteindre.’ ‘L'EGALITE OU LA MORT!’ he exclaims in capital letters, ‘such is the law of the revolution.’ It is an echo of Babeuf, but with a new significance; for now we are to attain equality by snuffing out those who are inferior.³

There is, however, a limit to the egalitarianism of Proudhon, and it is highly significant. All the earlier Utopian socialists had been feminists proclaiming the equality of woman, seeking to remedy her manifold wrongs. Proudhon is the great exception. He does not like woman. She is ‘impudique et provocatrice par nature’⁴—an observation which somehow suggests kinship with some of the more pointed ex parte statements in the Book of Ecclesiasticus. He would have approved, though he could not have devised in its terseness, that somewhat whimsical simile, according to which ‘from garments cometh a moth, and from women wickedness,’ so that woman's depravity is seen to be but the spontaneous and effortless flowering of her personality. In all his utterances on this question, one suspects in Proudhon (as in Fourier) a complex deriving from unrevealed early experience. He writes habitually like an adolescent who has not recovered from the outrage of having been seduced, or like a Joseph fleeing from a danger too great to be challenged. For Proudhon woman is essentially inferior, a creature to be kept in her place (which is by the fireside), one who finds her expression only through a father, a husband, a brother or a lover. He observes, just in passing, that the day on which his wife is given a vote will be the day of his divorce¹; and for once one feels that here is a thesis to which there can be no anti-thesis. When contrasted with Thompson, Fourier, Godwin and many others, this complete denial of women's rights is curious—or perhaps it may not be so curious. To no one did the sacredness of the home and the family mean so much; to no one was any suggestion of scortatory love² so nauseating and repugnant (it was this that had made the communists a puanteur); no one was ever of a more ferocious and uncompromising chastity than was Proudhon. Communism might be all very well for prostitutes and nuns, but it was not for the mothers of families.³ The home, for Proudhon, was everything, the one cell in society where authority prevailed, and within that home everything must be subject to the ‘master.’ It is the morality of the austere and puritanical peasant.⁴

Lastly, in this brief catalogue of references to points lying somewhat off the main path, Proudhon was of course anti-religious, or at least (if one wishes to be fastidious in the use of language) he was anticlerical and anti-Christian. Did he not coin the phrase: ‘Dieu, c'est le mal’? And indeed those who search will find even more astonishing observations. That enormous book, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise, is indeed merely a lengthy over-grown anti-clerical tract, the theme of which is that Justice is to be found with the Revolution and not with the Church. A very considerable section of that early essay in destruction, De la Création de l'Ordre dans l'Humanité is devoted to proving the hostility of religion to science and progress, and to the establishment of the simple proposition that ‘l'homme est destiné à vivre sans religion.’¹ We are not concerned with Proudhon's theology (if such it may be called), but it is interesting to note the varying impulse to the anti-religious attitude of so many of the early socialists, apart from amiable optimists like Fourier. Godwin's irreligion was based on the fact that all religions, and especially Christianity, taught obedience and submission, whereas the first lesson of morality is to learn to disobey: the only command should in effect come from one's own conscience. Owen's quarrel with religion was that all religions had failed to grasp ‘the science of circumstances’; they held that men were responsible for what they were, whereas our characters are made for us. Proudhon, on the other hand, was anticlerical, because (as he saw it) the Church stood for injustice, both in the large sense and in the more restricted sense of his own definition. For what justice is there—though he did not so express it—in the doctrine of Predestination or the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Divines? Starting from Proudhon's peculiar definition of justice, that it means respect for human dignity in one's self and others, the impulse to anti-clericalism is even stronger. For the Church in Proudhon's eyes is chiefly concerned in teaching us to despise ourselves: we are full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores, and our righteousness is as filthy rags. The first principle of Christianity—to quote Proudhon rather than Isaiah—is ‘la condemnation du moi humain, le mépris de la personne, le viol de la conscience’; its fundamental assumption is that the natural state of man is a state of sin.² And this, according to Proudhon, is to strike at the roots of justice. We are here, though with a very different driving force, nearer to Saint-Simon, who, in substance if not in terms, dissented from the doctrine of original sin and all its implications, for the very simple reason that, unlike St. Paul, he did not regard himself or his fellows as sinners in any remarkable or outstanding degree.

So perforce we must leave Proudhon, the most difficult and the most elusive of all the great figures in the history of socialism. Glaring and confusing as are the apparent contradictions in his writings, they are not greater or more astonishing than the contradictions in the man himself. He was a writer of infinite violence when armed with a fountain-pen or its mid-nineteenth-century equivalent; but the bitterness and the gall were in the fountain-pen and not in his heart. In himself he was the simplest and least offensive of men, just and upright, austere and incorruptible—if it were not for the pain it would have caused him, one might even have added that he lived a god-fearing life. The most moving pages in Proudhon—pages of real eloquence—are those in which he recalls his early days as a cowherd beside the Doubs.¹ He was always at heart a peasant, and he had all the virtues and some of the limitations of the best type of peasantry. Had fate been kind to him, it would have made him a patriarch, with patient and placid cows and a very placid and patient wife—sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-Place—surrounded by his children's grandchildren, running to do his bidding. For what Proudhon desired was a village of individualistic peasant owners, free from the offensiveness of wealth, a wife who could always be found in the kitchen, and—‘that the tooth of usury be grinded that it bite not too much’—an agreeable bank granting loans at? per cent. Reybaud speaks of Owen as a combination in which Abraham is greatly astonished to find himself in contact with Babeuf. The picture is even truer of Proudhon.

CHAPTER XI. EARLY ENGLISH SOCIALISM↩

IN the present chapter some consideration is given to certain representatives of a group of English writers who, though individually not of great importance or reputation, are nevertheless not without interest and significance, when viewed as a company. We have become more aware than were our predecessors half a century ago that the essential elements of the Marxian way of thinking may be found expounded with much lucidity, though without the Marxian trimmings, in certain writers, some of whom were almost unknown in their own day, and who have only been rescued from oblivion at a much later date. For our present purpose, and pending a closer examination in the next chapter, we may regard the essence of Marx as consisting of a doctrine of exploitation, of ‘unpaid labour,’ arising from the fact that a worker who may be able to support himself by labouring for a certain number of hours, is nevertheless compelled, as a result of the sale of his labourpower, to work for a longer period, so that the proceeds of these unremunerated hours fall into the lap of the capitalist. It should be observed that if strict regard were had to chronology, these writers ought to have been presented at an earlier stage of this history; but as the interest which they evoke derives very largely from the extent to which they anticipate scientific socialism, it has been thought expedient to keep them waiting until we are on the threshold of Marx.

THE AGRARIANS

On the way to the English pre-Marxian socialists, it may, however, be as well to glance at certain representatives of agrarian socialism, who taught the doctrine of theft and spoliation as applied to land. For this purpose it may be sufficient to cite Spence and Ogilvie.

(a) SPENCE

Thomas Spence (1750–1814) is in himself rather a poor creature of little capacity and less gifts; but, oddly, he became a symbol and played a certain part in history. At the age of 25, Spence, who was a school-teacher, delivered, to the Philosophical Society of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a lecture on The Real Rights of Man, ‘for printing of which,’ as he boasts, ‘the Society did the Author the honour to expel him.’ The parents of his scholars seem to have conferred upon him a somewhat similar honour. It is not much of a lecture, but it carried Spence through life, and it has been printed more frequently than its exiguous merits justify. The rest of his life was devoted to political agitation of various kinds. He formed a sect, the ‘Spenceans,’ and framed a constitution for the ‘Spencean Commonwealth.’ He was sent to prison when, passing beyond philosophic dissertations on natural law, he exhorted his hearers to scalp the landed proprietors. Among his various journalistic adventures he edited for a short time a periodical with the pleasing title, Pigs' Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude: he was, however, seldom so inspired. But though he may claim the honour of having been made the subject of a biography, his ideas, such as they were, are all contained in the few pages of the Newcastle lecture which launched him on his career.¹

The essence of the lecture is an appeal to natural law, under which all have an equal property in the land: in the language of a more recent generation, ‘God gave the land to the people.’ Nor can this right be bartered away, for succeeding generations are also interested, and in this matter ancestors have no right to deprive their posterity of their due inheritance. Consequently, it follows that at any given time the land belongs to the living inhabitants of any country. In fact, however, the land has been claimed by a few, without whose permission others may not live. The first landholders were usurpers and tyrants, and all who have come after have owned by virtue of inheritance or purchase from the original usurpers. The landowner may in law oblige every living creature to remove off his property, and if they acted in concert, and took their property into their hands, ‘all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here.’²

Spence's remedy is that the inhabitants of each parish should meet and take over their long-lost rights. The land being thus vested in the parish or corporation, the rent would be paid into the parish treasury, and used for all manner of laudable ends, instead of being applied ‘to support and spread luxury, pride and all manner of vice.’³ Beyond this, Spence moves away into a world of Godwinian anarchy in which the central government fades away, and we are left with a world of parish councils, who contrive to do very little, for the excellent reason that there is very little for them to do. ‘Government does not meddle in every trifle,’⁴ having the good sense to leave most things to the inactivity of the parish councils. Moreover, there will be no taxes apart from the rents that flow into the parish treasuries; for with a central government that has abdicated or been emasculated, expenditure will be wondrously cut down: there will be no custom-house men, no collectors, no army, no pensioners, ‘nor such like ruination vermin to maintain.’¹ Civil servants have had many hard things said about them, but this is as unkind as any. The end of Spence is thus a world of Godwinian parish councils, maintained by the rent of the land which has been vested in the parish.

(b) OGILVIE

Of entirely different calibre is William Ogilvie (1736–1819), a Professor in King's College, Aberdeen, who in addition to professing humanity, also professed a practical interest in agriculture. His Essay on the Right of Property in Land appeared in 1782, and as befits professorial dignity, it would appear to have been his sole contribution to current controversy. As he indicated on the title-page of his work, Ogilvie also is interested in the Law of Nature, and its bearing on this issue. The earth, he holds, was given to man ‘in common occupancy’²; but from this general right, no one can derive a title to more than an equal share of the soil of the country.³ This title to an equal share is, moreover, indefeasible; it is a birthright which cannot be renounced. It is antecedent to municipal laws and cannot be abolished by them. It is the duty therefore of the State to reserve for its citizens the opportunity of entering upon this birthright, should they so desire.⁴

It is odd that Ogilvie, with others of the same tendency, groping after the teaching of Natural Law in these matters, should so invariably have interpreted the ‘Law of Nature’ as applying within the frontiers of a State to the inhabitants of that State; for there is here a glaring and obvious fallacy. It is always somewhat risky to endeavour to codify too precisely the contents of Natural Law, or to pry too curiously into the mind of the Creator, forgetful of the words of a high authority in these matters that ‘verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.’ Even if, in the careful language of Locke, ‘God gave the earth in common to all men,’ it does not follow that he gave the soil of England to the English, or the soil of France to the French; and indeed, looking over the history of the last two thousand years, it is extremely probable that he did not. From the basic principle that ‘God gave the earth in common to all men,’ Ogilvie may not properly infer that any one of us is entitled to the 46-millionth part (approximately) of the soil of Great Britain (with possible modifications in respect of Northern Ireland); on the contrary, my lawful claims would be to the appropriate aliquot part of the surface of the whole world, and the like claim would be vested in every inhabitant of China, Peru and Liechtenstein.

Reverting to Ogilvie, the difficulty with which he is confronted springs from his realisation that, interwoven with the right we each have to hold our proportionate share of the soil, is the other right, based on labour in respect of improvements effected.¹ For he is too much of a practical agriculturalist to be willing to forget this. To combine these two possibly conflicting principles should be the object of all agrarian laws.² In his endeavour to disentangle what is due to a cultivator who is in possession of more than his appropriate fraction and who has effected improvements in all the land which he occupies, Ogilvie divides the purchase price of land into three portions. There is, firstly, the original value of the soil (the bloodless elusive ghost which hereafter Ricardo is destined to pursue); there is, secondly, the value of the improvements due to the proprietor or his predecessors; and, thirdly, there is the ‘contingent or improvable value,’ by which is meant the value it may yet receive from cultivation—a hypothetical potential increase. Any landowner is entitled to all three portions in respect of the land that may be assigned to him as his due share; but in respect of his excess holding beyond his quota, he is entitled only to the second portion; to the original and to the contingent value of his excess holding he can have no claim.³ It is a pleasing academic solution, but would be a maddening problem to submit for the determination of a chartered accountant in any particular case.

Not merely does Natural Law call, so far is is practicable, for a settlement of the population on the soil, but such a course is also manifestly in the public interest. Ogilvie could scarcely be of his time without being a Utilitarian, believing that the end of the State is the increase of public happiness; as a Professor of Humanity, he could scarcely fail to identify happiness with virtue; as a part-time agriculturalist, he knew that the cultivators of the soil were the most virtuous of men. There is indeed a pronounced physiocratic strain in Ogilvie, who believed that labour devoted to agriculture increased public wealth more than if applied in any other direction. He is indeed somewhat depreciatory with regard to the importance of manufactures and commerce. ‘That nation,’ he observes, ‘is greatly deceived and misled which bestows any encouragement on manufactures for exportation or for any purpose but the necessary internal supply’—at least, until agriculture has reached its fullest development.⁴

If a multiplication of workers on the land would thus be advantageous in every direction, so contrariwise the ‘exorbitant right of property in land’ brings with it many pernicious consequences. It is in his discussion of this aspect of the question that Ogilvie qualifies for admission to a section leading to the forerunners of Marx. Owing to this engrossing of land by a few men ‘the happiness of mankind has been for ages more invaded and restrained, than by all the tyranny of kings, the imposture of priests, and the chicane of lawyers, taken to gether, though these are supposed to be the greatest evils that afflict the societies of human kind.’¹ ‘By exacting exorbitant rents,’ he adds, ‘they exercise a most pernicious usury, and deprive industry that is actually exerted of its due reward.’² It is a monopoly tending to the starvation of the population at large no less than would a monopoly of bakers, so that in the end, as he observes alliteratively, ‘the race becomes dwarfish, debilitated and deformed’³ While the landlords object to the taxes imposed by the State, and clamour against pensions, they should remember that ‘their own large incomes are indeed pensions, and salaries of sinecure offices.’ ‘Whoever,’ he adds, generalising, ‘enjoys any revenue not proportioned to such industry or exertion of his own, or of his ancestors, is a freebooter, who has found means to cheat or to rob the public, and more especially the indigent of that district in which he lives.’ Moreover, the hereditary revenue of the landholder increases without any effort of his: ‘It is a premium given to idleness.’⁴

This is the voice of a Boanerges, rather than of a Professor of Humanity. It will be observed that rent—or at least exorbitant rent—is attacked because it deprives industry of its due reward; and it is further implied that revenues should be proportional to industry or exertion—although indeed in the crucial passage he is prepared to allow our ancestors to work for us. But when Ogilvie turns from denunciatory analysis to practical proposals, his roaring becomes as innocuous as the cooing of the amorous turtle-dove. Indeed, in the light of his talk about freebooters, Ogilvie may well have been astonished at his own moderation. For what it all comes to is that every citizen of the age of twenty-one may claim a holding of not more than forty acres, to be assigned in perpetuity for residence and cultivation. Into the details and possible modifications of the scheme it is unnecessary to enter; but the holding is not to be had free. There is to be a rent, even if a fair rent, payable to the landlord, and also a temporary rent payable to the former tenant. Also, even if it is tucked away in a footnote, the claimant must show that he is a man of some substance. It is significant also of Ogilvie's gentleness in practice that among the lands which may not be taken for this purpose is ‘the farm or park belonging to the lord of the manor,’ that is to say, the freebooter's own special farm. More astonishing is the suggestion that the new holder of land should ‘pay to the lord of the manor certain aids and services of a feudal nature, so regulated as to produce that degree of connection and dependence which may be expedient for preserving order and subordination in the country without danger of giving rise to oppression and abuse.’ Thus, despite the vehemence of his denunciations, when it comes to practice, Ogilvie produces no more than a modest measure for the encouragement of small holdings, encumbered by conditions that are extremely discouraging.¹

Perhaps not in themselves of great importance, yet significant as showing how utterly remote Ogilvie fundamentally was from any proletarian or democratic instincts are certain observations he makes on the problem of how these changes may be brought about. His suggestion is that the reform might be effected by a conquering monarch at the head of his victorious army; and he goes so far as to suggest that the attainment of such a reform ‘might even in the eye of reason and philosophy almost justify the ambitious desire of conquest in the breast of a heroic prince.’² Also ‘princes sitting on disputed thrones’ might use the scheme as a bribe to render their seat more easy.³ It is the figure of Frederick the Great that he has here in mind. It is rather odd to look to the generous disposition of a heroic Hitler or a triumphant Tamberlaine for the achievement of agrarian reform.

Such are Spence and Ogilvie, representatives of the tradition of agrarian socialism; they may not have much in common with the pre-Marxians, but at least in respect of one kind of property—land—they popularised the ideas of theft, robbery and spoliation.

THE PRE-MARXIANS

The English pre-Marxians, meaning thereby those writers who arrived at what is substantially the Marxian theory of exploitation and of surplus value—not infrequently, like Marx, building on Ricardo—are, for our purpose, five in number. They are Charles Hall (? 1745-? 1825), William Thompson (1785–1833), Thomas Hodgskin (1783–1869), J. F. Bray (?-?) and John Gray (1799-? 1850). It is impossible, and probably undesirable, to consider these Marxian forerunners in any detail, but enough should be said of each to give the flavour of the group.

(c) CHARLES HALL

Charles Hall inevitably comes first in the bunch of early anticipators of Karl Marx, partly because the date of his birth so decrees; and partly because his attitude of mind and the solutions which he advocates demand that he should be placed as near as possible to the agrarians who have just been noticed. Little is known of him except that he was a physician, and obviously a ‘good physician,’ in the West Country; he had a large family, and he died in a debtor's prison—not because he was insolvent, but because he refused to come out. He did not in fact acknowledge the debt in dispute; and, like a man of high principle, he refused to purchase his liberty by acquiescing in the demands of injustice.

He was a good physician, and he wrote as a good physician. To those who would ask why a doctor, a mere doctor, should consider himself competent to write on such matters, he replies, and with justice, that no one is so well qualified as a doctor to write about the conditions of the people:

He is admitted into the dwellings of all ranks of people, and into the innermost parts of them: he sees them by their fire-side, at their tables, and in their beds: he sees them at work, and at their recreations: he sees them in health, in sickness, and in the article of death: he is frequently made acquainted with their hopes, and their fears, their successes and their disappointments, as these have often a relation to their diseases; and, possessing their confidence, they frequently also unbosom themselves to him on matters not connected with the state of their healths.¹

Such is the proud boast of the family doctor, and it is well founded. The physician, always assuming that he is a good physician, has unique opportunities of getting to know his fellow-men. In the case of Hall, this quality colours his whole discussion. Somehow he conveys in fuller measure than any other writer in the socialist tradition, the impression that he has lived very near to suffering humanity.

Hall's one book bears the title, The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States, and his thesis is a simple one. It is that however much civilisation, and with it the concomitants of civilisation, may have been of advantage to a privileged minority, it has depressed and rendered miserable the bulk of humanity. In every respect, and however matters may be viewed, the poor in civilised countries are uniformly taken advantage of, and get nothing out of the assumed progress of humanity. In a book wholly concerned with the effects of civilisation, it is well to ask at the outset what in fact the author means by ‘civilisation.’ Hall is ready with a precise definition: civilisation ‘consists in the study and knowledge of the sciences, and in the production and enjoyment of the conveniences, the elegancies, and luxuries of life’²—but, as the argument proceeds to make clear, these conveniences, elegancies and luxuries are not for the poor. They are reserved for the privileged.

The outstanding feature of society as seen by Hall in the daily pursuit of his calling lies in the division between the rich and the poor. The poor are not merely neglected: they are the forgotten men. Politicians and statesmen may be interested in instituting enquiries into other aspects of the life of the nation, but when it comes to

the state and condition of the great mass of the people: how are they fed; how they are clothed; what kind of houses they live in; how they are supplied with fuel; how they are instructed; in short, what advantages, corporeal, mental, and even spiritual, they enjoy or are deprived of,

no one (he is writing in 1805) is so curious as to ask. It is the miserable state of the poor that Hall places in the forefront. Most fundamentally, ‘the poor are not in fact furnished with the requisite quantity of the necessaries of life.’¹ Their employment in manufactures is injurious to their health; their minds are necessarily uncultivated; their moral and spiritual instruction is neglected.

When we turn to consider Hall's analysis of the causes and consequences of this prevailing poverty of the poor, we are at once confronted with a bias which affects the whole discussion. Hall is profoundly antagonistic to trade and manufactures; in an almost physiocratic sense, he regards agriculture as natural. If it be asked why there is scarcity, he does not tarry for an answer. It is that ‘a sufficient number of hands are not employed on the land.’² Hall is quite clear that no sane man would ever voluntarily abandon the land for any other occupation: ‘it was never through choice that manufactures were entered into by any people’³ He gives a somewhat gloomy, but not too gloomy account (having regard to the date, 1805) of the horrors of manufactures. Despite their variety, they are all

carried on within doors, in confined rooms, shutting out the pleasant objects of nature, frequently within frames like cages, in offensive atmospheres, generally rendered more nauseous by the effluvia of the subject worked on, always by that of the bodies and filthy clothes of the workmen; their postures bent, doubled, and every way distorted.⁴

Despite the repulsive nature of manufactures, however, the wealth of the rich ‘draws off the labour from the cultivation of the land' by a kind of compulsion,’⁵ and directs it above all to what Hall calls ‘refined manufactures,’ created exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich. The compulsion so exercised is indeed summarised in a formula: the rich in effect say:

If you will labour for me in such and such a way, I will give you out of those things such as you stand in need of; but unless you will do these things which I require of you, you shall have none of them.⁶

There is thus no voluntary labour contract, but rather a state of coercion which derives its sanction from the wealth of the rich, and which leaves the poor no choice.’⁷ This indeed, in a notable definition, is the essence of wealth. ‘Wealth,’ says Hall, ‘is the possession of that which gives power over, and commands the labour of man: it is, therefore, power; and into that, and that only, ultimately resolvable.’⁸ Nor is this a mere metaphor or simile. The power of the rich is as strong and effective as that of the most absolute monarch that ever lived:

To condemn so many to the mines; to confine such numbers to such nauseous, irksome, unwholesome, destructive employments, is more than equal to any kingly power on earth.¹

The fact that wealth means power vested in one to order the lives of others means likewise that there is a complete opposition of interests between the two classes. Wealth is an advantage to the possessor, precisely because, and only to the extent to which, it is a disadvantage to the non-possessor. What the possessor has, the non-possessor is deprived of: ‘The situation of the rich and the poor, like the alge braic terms plus and minus, are in direct opposition to, and destructive of each other.’² There is here no suggestion of ‘economic harmonies’; indeed the foundations of the doctrine of the class war could not be more clearly expounded.

But wealth is not merely power over the labour of others; it is, in Hall's analysis, power at large, in a sense which points to the Marxian doctrine of the class State. In civilised states, he tells us, the wealthy part ‘have in their hands all power: the legislative, the executive, and judiciary, in all their branches, viz. ecclesiastical, magisterial, martial, etc’³ As a consequence the rich form an aristocracy, in which the effective power is lodged: ‘It is wealth universally that puts power into the hands of those that have it.’⁴

We have seen the poor labouring for the rich under the coercion of ‘absolute necessity.’ Hall makes a laudable effort to estimate what portion of the proceeds of the labour of the people at large is appropriated by the rich, and how much is left for their own use. The calculation is probably not above reproach, and indeed the statistical material of the time was hardly such as to justify the attempt being made. What is more significant than the conclusion at which he arrived is the fact that he endeavoured to express the problem in concrete terms, and that in doing so, he came very near to the Marxian formula for surplus value. After presenting his estimate, he says:

If this statement is true, eight-tenths of the people consume only one-eighth of the produce of their labour: hence one day in eight, or one hour in a day, is all the time the poor man is allowed to work for himself, his wife and his children. All the other days, or all the other hours of the day, he works for other people.⁵

One other Marxian dogma which is stated with remarkable precision is that of the Increasing Degradation of the Working Classes. It follows almost automatically from the view that the rich and the poor are in the relation of plus and minus, combined with the uncontested fact (in 1805) that the rich are growing richer. Increase of the wealth and the power of the few must therefore mean ‘an increase of poverty in the people, as it subjects them to new and additional demands for the produce of their labour.’¹ As a consequence, it is argued that the poor are becoming every day poorer and poorer in most States. Further, this increasing misery or degradation (not that Hall uses the expression) is occasioned in the two ways which are indicated later in The Communist Manifesto. It is ‘brought about not only by those, already in a state of subjection, being placed in a state of still greater subjection; but also because more people are reduced to that state’² This is almost an anticipatory glimpse of the process whereby the lower strata of the middle class, the small tradespeople, and many more ‘sink gradually into the proletariat’³ It should perhaps be added that on this point Hair almost goes beyond Marx, for he holds that there is no limit to the extent to which this increasing Marxian misery may be carried. There are no bounds, he asserts, to the quantity of labour that the rich may have the power of claiming from the people, and it follows likewise that there are no bounds to the ‘diminution of the necessaries of life that remain to the poor for their own use’⁴

Before looking at Hall from a somewhat wider point of view, one last connecting link with the later Marx-Lenin tradition may be noted. Hall is emphatic that wars, if not exclusively, are yet predominantly, attributable to what a subsequent generation has come to call the Capitalistic System. ‘The objects of all wars,’ he says, ‘whether near or distant, are to increase trade, or to extend territory’; they are occasioned, in a rather odd phrase, by ‘the ambition or irritability of the rich’⁵ Wars are caused by the wealthy, and their object is an increase of wealth. To this he adds, as a further comment, that the education of the children of the rich tends in the same direction; the jargon had not then been invented, but he implies that they are educated to think imperially.⁶

So far we have in the main been concerned with those aspects of Hall which would arrest the attention of a Marxian student, reading backwards. In fairness to Hall, however, one ought to have regard to the general framework in which these Marxian sentiments find expression. In essence, it may be said that Hall is primarily an agrarian with a quite peculiarly strong antipathy against manufactures and trade, pushed indeed at times almost to the verge of paradox. The inequality which Hall analyses has, in his view, its distant source in the original appropriation of land and its distribution among a few.¹ This is clearly in conflict with the design of the Almighty, which was that the land should belong to the people, and that the people should never be divorced from the land:

It is evident, therefore, that the Creator intended the land for the use of the creatures he has put on it. Consequently, that no creature ought to be cut off from the possession of some part or other of the earth, and that in such quantity as to furnish him with the necessaries of life.²

It is a recurrent thought in Hall that the impotence of the poor springs from the fact that they are thus cut off from the possession of some part of the earth. ‘If every person had an allotment of land,’ he says in one place, ‘the labour of the people would remain free, and under their own direction’³ Such an arrangement would, in more modern phraseology, restore equality of bargaining power; the poor would no longer be under that ‘absolute necessity’ which now subjects them to the will of others.

As against agriculture (at least of the peasant-proprietor type) which stimulates men to industriousness and restores to them their freedom, trade and manufactures exist exclusively for the rich, and are merely additional means of exploitation. Take, for example, trade. The essence of trade is to send out of the country what the poor, the great mass of mankind, have occasion for, and to bring back ‘what is consumed almost wholly by a small part of these nations, viz. the rich.’⁴ Very few imported goods, he argues, come down to the use of the poor. The rich are thus enabled to consume in a short time the work of many people: or, if the phrase be preferred, it enables them ‘to commit greater waste than it would otherwise be in their power to do.’⁵ This is almost the voice of Veblen, analysing the phenomenon of ‘conspicuous waste.’ Nor will Hall have anything to do with the antiquated argument that the expenditure of the rich is ‘good for,’ and gives employment to, the poor. Very tersely he observes that ‘the rich are employed in the consumption, not in the production of things.’⁶ Moreover (and it is an echo of scholasticism) all trade is a species of exploitation. These articles which are the subject of trade are all the products of labourers, manufacturers¹ and others, ‘from whom they are obtained for less than their full value: a profit otherwise could not be made on them.’² Thus the traders also subsist on ‘the fruits of the labour of the poor.’ Nor is the position more favourable if we turn to ‘manufactures’ in the more modern sense of the word. It is true that Hall distinguishes between manufactures ‘of the grosser kind,’ that is to say, of articles in general use, and those manufactures which are ‘more refined.’³; and he is certainly more indulgent and tender to the former. But the impulse given by the rich is all in the direction of ‘refined manufactures’⁴ which the poor produce, but may never enjoy. Indeed, with a touch of paradox, Hall claims that extensive manufactures are both a cause and a sign of poverty in a nation, the argument resting on the contention that none but the poor and the destitute would ever consent to engage in industry:

The great quantities of manufactured goods suppose a great number of manufacturers,⁵ who, if they were not poor, would not submit to the employments that produce them.⁶

The remedies which Hall suggests spring from his general views of what constitutes a healthy society, rather than from the Marxian elements with which he spices his discussion. In his description of what is required in the ‘happiest state,’ where activity and rest are held in harmonious balance, he postulates two governing principles. The first is that each man should labour so much only as is necessary for his family; and the second is that each should enjoy the whole fruits of his labours.⁷ They are alike principles which tend to give a somewhat elusive answer when it is sought to apply them to specific instances. It is unnecessary to consider in any detail Hall's more detailed proposals. He would abolish primogeniture.⁸ Refined manufactures—the particular object of his detestation—he would either entirely prohibit by law, or alternatively he would burden them with such taxation as would effectively limit their production.⁹ Taxation, indeed, should be imposed on none but the rich. Lastly, he proposes a scheme of extreme agrarian reform, whereby land would be vested in the State, and distributed among the entire population, remaining inalienable but subject to periodic redistribution.¹⁰ He dreams wistfully of the Mosaic Law, of the year of Jubile, and of Sparta. In an odd way, since the two men are entirely different, there is nevertheless in the final result a certain kinship with Mably. Hall also would lead us back to a simpler life, to a world which has forsworn luxuries and ‘refined manufactures,’ where everyone, in the secure possession of a few acres, will live happily even if plainly, tyrannised by none,. content with nine bean rows and a hive for the honey-bee. It is easy enough to criticise Hall: he doubtless lacked a rigorous economic discipline. Even in his time it may be doubted whether foreign trade could be discussed on the simple assumption that we exported the necessities of the poor and imported the luxuries of the rich. It may be doubted whether he is quite right in his interpretation of human psychology, whether in fact the comparative allurements of agriculture and manufactures, so far as concerns vast numbers of the population, are quite in accordance with his interpretation. Nevertheless, The Effects of Civilisation is a book with a peculiarly persuasive quality. The argument marches in an orderly manner; the case for the oppressed is all the more cogent, because it is stated with admirable restraint; behind the fines there is very obviously a large-hearted man. Of all the English anticipators of Marx, Hall is the one whose greater acquaintance one would most ardently desire. A day with Hall visiting his patients would have been a day well spent.

(d) WILLIAM THOMPSON

William Thompson, according to Foxwell, ‘deserves to be regarded as chief of the English Socialist School’; Menger refers to him as ‘the most eminent founder of scientific socialism’¹ Yet most readers who turn to his chief work, known for short as An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824),² will doubtless experience a numbing sense of disappointment. A man of ample leisure, he devoted his leisure to the leisurely exposition of his views. In his style, he is something of a hangover from the eighteenth century, and he moves unhurriedly through his 600 closely printed pages, saying what he has to say at inordinate length (and not infrequently saying it oftener than once); unveiling the obvious with dignity and decorum, taking delight in expanding a sentence into a paragraph, a paragraph into a page. ‘Why demonstrate what no one disputes?’ he asks on one occasion, and the reader is startled into momentary attention by this psychic example of thought-reading stretching across the ages. Thompson has great merits; but he torpedoes himself by his unconquerable dreariness and prolixity. Even though for some reason he was reprinted in a third edition (abridged) as late as 1869, it is a fairly safe assumption that never hereafter will anyone read all, or most, of Thompson unless goaded on by a misplaced sense of duty.

Thompson adopts as his starting-point an extreme and repulsive form of Utilitarianism. ‘The greatest possible quantity of human happiness,’ ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ ‘the happiness of the community,’ and ‘the happiness of the whole,’ are expressions which he considers may be indifferently used.¹ It is for the ethical expert to follow Thompson into this field, but the innocent non-ethical outsider may be allowed a certain scepticism regarding the perfect interchangeability of these phrases. In any case, he comes down in the end in favour of accepting as the criterion ‘the greatest quantity of happiness, wherever it may be found to alight.’ If one human being could prove that he was so fashioned as to be endowed with an indefinitely greater capacity for happiness than the rest of his fellow-men, then wealth and all the other means of happiness ought to be ‘applied’ to him.² Consistently with this, if out of ten men, the slavery of nine and the superlative happiness of the tenth were to represent together a higher sum-total of human happiness than that attainable by any other possible arrangement, then this distribution should be adopted.³ Here indeed is a glad gospel for those who attach importance to their capacity for enjoyment.

But indeed, although Thompson commits himself to these startling theoretical possibilities, he does not in practice allow things to work out so favourably for the expert in pleasures. For he tells us on the next page that ‘all sane individuals are capable of equal enjoyment from equal portions of the objects of wealth.’⁴ This proposition is not only extremely doubtful in itself, but it also raises the awkward question of the position of one who is not sane. Should we all sacrifice ourselves to enhance the ecstasy of an unusually potentially cheerful idiot? But again, it is hardly claimed that this basic proposition is in fact true; it is rather that any contrary proposition would be incapable of proof: ‘to us therefore such inequalities of capabilities of enjoyment do not exist, because they are by us inappreciable;... they can no more than the galvanic fluid be seized and measured.’⁵ In other words, the calculus of happiness does not enable us to calculate. These are deep and troubled waters; but so much had to be said to show how whole-heartedly Thompson believed that the increase of the sum-total of human happiness should be the end of all human endeavour; and inasmuch as wealth is produced to create happiness, that distribution of wealth is best which yields ‘the greatest possible quantity of happiness to those, the society or community, that produce it.’⁶

What then is the nature of this wealth, which is to be so distributed as to maximise human happiness? It is noteworthy that Thompson, like others of his school, defines wealth in such wise that the definition already contains implicitly the distant end which he hopes to prove. Wealth is defined as ‘that portion of the physical materials or means of enjoyment which is afforded by the labor and knowledge of man turning to use the animate or inanimate materials or productions of nature.’¹ Not merely is it true to say that ‘without labor there is no wealth’; but likewise ‘Labor is the sole parent of wealth’² Petty had allowed wealth to have a father and mother; Thompson assigns to wealth a parthenogenetic origin. Neither rarity, nor beauty, nor the pleasure to be derived from it; neither necessity nor utility can make an object wealth. Wealth springs from labour alone—always assuming that desire is present.³ Without suggesting any dishonest intent (for Thompson was the most honourable of men) it should be obvious that if the definition selected gives in advance an assurance that labour is the sole parent of wealth, this ought to be a considerable aid towards proving that wealth may be attributed entirely to labour.

We reach the central point in Thompson's thought, if we reflect that wealth is produced by labour, and that accordingly labour requires a stimulus to induce it to maintain the maximum of production. Is it, consistently with justice, possible to find such a stimulus? Or is there an everlasting conflict between the claims of justice and the claims of efficiency? It is a difficulty that Thompson never solved, perhaps for the adequately excellent reason that it is insoluble. It is, moreover, a difficulty which lies, an ineluctable stumbling-block, at the threshold of many socialist systems. If we attain justice, assuming that we know what justice is, do we run a fair chance of drying up the world's production? Putting it otherwise, if we concede as just the workers’ ‘right to the whole produce of labour,’ may we not be opening the door to the horridest inequality, of all things the most unjust? How far are certain of the ideals of socialism indistinguishable from the extremest and most selfish individualism? In the last analysisputting it in ethical terms—may we not each individually be acting with extreme selfishness in insisting that we receive the tribute of our just rights?

The dilemma is a familiar one and has often been urged by bourgeois economists; but it has never been more clearly stated than by Thompson. The inferences which he draws from the utilitarian theory impel him to regard equality as the ultimate expression of justice; but the necessity of finding a ‘stimulus’ simultaneously impels him to give the worker the whole fruits of his labour: for is not labour the sole parent of wealth, and accordingly is not the acknowledgment of this claim not merely another form of justice, but also the most cogent encouragement the worker can receive? For clearly the strongest possible stimulus is to be found in giving to the worker what Thompson calls ‘security.’¹ ‘Security,’ as he is well aware, is here used in rather a special sense. In fact, he distinguishes in this matter between genuine and false or spurious security.² Genuine security, as he understands it, means ‘the exclusive possession by every man of all the advantages of his labour’—in other words, the right of each worker to the whole produce of his individual labour; moreover, without security in this sense, ‘labour would not be called forth.’ False or spurious security, on the other hand, is something designed ‘to soothe the imaginary alarms of the rich, protecting mere possession, however acquired.’ But clearly, in so far as equality is attained, it will in general be at the expense of ‘security,’ in Thompson's sense of the word, and therefore will stultify the workers' stimulus to production. The application of equality would accordingly in such cases destroy the source of supply. Moreover, in an unexpectedly frank phrase, Thompson acknowledges that ‘non-production is a greater evil than inequality of distribution’³; likewise he acknowledges that the individual producers, unable to fight down the old Adam, would never consent that what they had produced for their own purposes and enjoyment should be taken from them and distributed to increase the happiness of others.⁴ Thus we see Thompson, confronted with the familiar difficulty that a theoretically more equitable system of distribution may get you no further, if its effect is to dry up the flow of production; or, to put it otherwise, we observe him torn between two conflicting ideals of justice, endeavouring to attain a basis of reconciliation.

Thompson's solution is not very satisfactory, and obviously he did not find it so. His general principle is that ‘wherever equality does not lessen production, it should be the sole object pursued. Wherever it decreases really useful production... it saps its own existence, and should cease.’⁵ In amplifying his argument, he postulates, after the manner of the theoretical economist, a hypothetical world where the necessary goods are produced independent of human effort, but only in quantities sufficient to give a limited supply. In these imaginary circumstances, an entire equality of distribution is the only equitable rule.⁶ But as soon as we turn to a world where these same goods are produced by labour, a new law of distribution must be introduced, since ‘every one sees that the blessings of equality cannot in this case be obtained without injury... to those whose exclusive labor has been employed in the production of the articles in question.’¹ The new law must seek to give the worker Thompsonian security, to which absolute equality must be sacrificed. But the resulting inequality, so far as it is regarded as permissible, must be reduced to a minimum. To the two fundamental principles that labour shall be free and voluntary, and that labour shall have ‘security’ as here understood, he now adds, as a step to the realisation of his compromise, a third condition, namely, that all exchanges, which inevitably arise in a world of division of labour, shall likewise be free and voluntary. It is in his discussion of this third principle that Thompson comes into the full stream of pre-Marxian thought. For in the past, and in the world as he saw it, there have been no ‘voluntary exchanges.’ The sole consideration has been ‘to enrich the dominant party, at the expense of the greater number of the community, of the productive laborers, seizing the products of their labor by force.²’ Force, in fact, has been universally prevalent: only in the United States of America (though Bray, now waiting to testify, might have taught him otherwise) have exchanges been voluntary. The whole tribe of ‘bounties, protections, apprenticeships, guilds, corporations, monopolies,’ and much more, all alike invade the sacred principle of security, and the no less sacred principle of equality, ‘which should never be departed from but in obedience to security,’ thus depriving the worker of his due.³

Among these deductions or ‘defalcations’ abstracted from what would otherwise be the reward of the worker, rent and profit naturally call for special consideration.⁴ It is significant that Thompson does not entirely wipe the capitalist out of the picture, as perhaps on the logic of his assumptions he ought. ‘Doubtless,’ he says, referring to capital products, ‘the laborer must pay for the use of these, when so unfortunate as not himself to possess them.’⁵ All these deductions, whether called profits, or taxes, or theft, discourage production.⁶ Moreover these capital goods are entirely attributable to the worker, and without the worker they are useless: ‘'Twas labor that gave to all these their value as wealth, before they came into the hands of the mechanic; and by his additional labor alone can their value be still further increased.’⁷ Nevertheless, despite his use of such unambiguous words as ‘defalcation’ and ‘theft,’ the only question raised by Thompson in confronting the problem of the relation of the worker to the employer relates to the amount payable for the use of capital goods: ‘the question is how much of the products of his labor ought to be subtracted for their use.’¹

Here then is the central problem: what should the worker pay for the hire of capital? And here he suggests, perhaps in rather misleading phraseology, what he called ‘two measures of the value of this use,’ according as the problem is viewed by the worker or the employer, respectively.² From the point of view of the worker, the contribution would be, briefly, the cost of replacement of the capital over the period of its depreciation and exhaustion, together with compensation to the owner to enable him to live ‘in equal comfort with the more actively employed productive laborers.’ The capitalist, on the other hand, looks for the additional value produced by labour in consequence of the use of machinery: ‘the whole of such surplus value to be enjoyed by the capitalist for his superior intelligence and skill in accumulating and advancing to the laborers his capital or the use of it.’ The ‘surplus value’ here spoken of by Thompson is not quite the same as the more notorious ‘surplus value’ of a later date; nevertheless the first, even if perhaps fortuitous, collocation of these two words on page 167 of Thompson's work almost deserves to rank as an event in socialist literature.

We thus arrive at Thompson's analysis of exploitation. In one place he states that the constant effort of the whole machinery of society has been ‘to deceive, and induce, to terrify and compel, the productive laborer to work for the smallest possible portion of the produce of his own labor.’³ This, of course, is merely crude and unrefined Ricardo, as later distilled into Marx. In the passage in which he alights on the phrase ‘surplus value’ the test is somewhat different. Here it is rather that the labourer shall be allowed to enjoy what he formerly enjoyed: ‘Before the invention of machinery... what was the amount of produce which the unaided powers of the laborer produced? Whatever that was, let him still enjoy’—along with the comfort of working with better tools.⁴ On the other hand, all the additional wealth due to the use of machinery goes to the capitalist, ‘as a reward for and stimulus to his superior intelligence in the fabrication or acquisition’ of the necessary buildings and machinery. While the worker's position thus remains stationary, the total fruits of progress fall to existing wealth. On the basis of the employers’ interpretation of what is due (and this is what is operative), it is inevitable that there should be vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of those who possess, at the expense of the less fortunate; and Thompson, in a glowing passage, which is singularly suggestive of the more prophetic pages in Marx, denounces the greed and the rapacity of the capitalist.¹

Perplexed by the insoluble problem of reconciling the conflicting claims of equality with those of the worker's right to his product (‘security’), Thompson turned more and more to what he called ‘voluntary equality in the distribution of wealth.’ By this phrase, in effect, he meant co-operation along Owenite lines, and the concluding part of his Distribution of Wealth and the later pamphlet, Labor Rewarded, tend to be expositions of the co-operative gospel. Labor Rewarded, it may be noted, professes in the first edition to be written by ‘One of the Idle Classes.’² In this later work he realises, more clearly than before, the impracticable selfishness implicit in the socialist ideal, if interpreted to mean that each worker should be individually assured of the entire product of his labour. ‘Were every active laborer strictly to consume himself the whole produce of his labor, what would be the consequences? The aged would starve. The very young would starve. Many women in producing and rearing children would starve.’ In fact, though he does not carry the argument so far, if all the farmers all over the world consumed all that they produce, the bulk of the world would starve. Thompson's difficulty has merely to be stated in order to indicate that what each produces is in fact indeterminate. The conclusion that he draws, however, is merely that ‘a necessity for mutual co-operation, for the mutual insurance of numbers, to a certain extent, immediately presents itself.’¹ Into his plea for co-operation it is not possible to enter here. But Labor Rewarded, though not adding much to its ponderous predecessor, has its interests. As the title may suggest, it is written in partial criticism of Hodgskin's Labour Defended; and, odd as it may appear, it is written as a mild plea on behalf of the capitalist against the harshness of Hodgskin. For Hodgskin would have entirely cut off all supplies from those living on interest and profit. That they ought not to fare better than other people Thompson readily admits: ‘but that they are not entitled to any share of the national produce will perhaps be conceded by few.’² On the other hand, he protests against the ‘preposterous claims of mental laborers to an exorbitant portion,’ such as he imagines he detects in Hodgskin. Why should he ‘shove capitalists out of the field of competition altogether,’ merely in order that ‘he himself and his associates may step into their vacant places.’³ It would, Thompson says, be a sorry exchange if the productive classes Were to pamper ‘a new host of conceited swaggerers... instead of the old stupid herd of capitalists.’⁴ Thompson, of course, was a landlord and a capitalist; Hodgskin looked upon himself as an intellectual. But, apart from this interchange of courtesies, which is of some slight entertainment-value in illustrating how hard it is, even for an enlightened altruistic utilitarian, to suppress the whisperings of self, Thompson is surprisingly sound in pointing out how difficult it is to eliminate the capitalist. From free exchanges (a principle dear to his heart) there springs the possibility of accumulation; from accumulation there springs the capitalist in posse: ‘you cannot abridge the exchanges and consequent accumulations of the capitalist without at the same time abridging all barter.’⁵ And no less searching is the question, springing from his love of unlimited freedom in all exchanges and contracts: ‘Why not permit the laborer to exchange for the use of a house, a horse, a machine, as well as for its possession?’⁶

Enough has perhaps been said to indicate the core of Thompson's criticisms, his perplexities and hesitations. But though they may not have much relevance to his place in the development of socialist doctrines, there are two passages which linger in the memory, revealing the man. The first is in the section dealing with the evils of competition, and for a moment the reader feels transported to the extravagant world of Fourier, whom it would be pleasing to think that Thompson had read. In words which come very closely to those used in one of Fourier's immortal libels, Thompson tells us:

In medicine, it is the interest of the physician to cure diseases, but to cure them as slowly and with as much profit as the competition of other medical men will permit. It is the interest of all medical men that diseases should exist and prevail, or their trade would be decreased ten or one hundred fold.

This criticism, of course, mutatis mutandis, applies to the whole world, and is so applied by Fourier, and indeed by Thompson, who finds everywhere a conflict between competition and benevolence. But having pointed to the doctor's natural tendency to cure disease as slowly as possible, carefully nursing a good illness, fearful lest it may be terminated by an untimely recovery, Thompson proceeds to add an illuminating comment:

Hence the almost universal inattention, nursed by the interests of physicians, to regimen, to the preservation of health, by attention to food, air, moisture, cleanliness, and all other circumstances influencing it.¹

That Thompson should thus, in 1824, so seize on the essentials of preventive medicine, italicising the crucial words, places him in the heart of one of our current controversies.

The other incidentally interesting point shows him in line with Bray in rebelling against the tyranny of parents. All parents, he finds, have a ‘tremendously despotic power’ over the minds and the bodies of their offspring; and this power, which is inseparable from the system of individual competition, is ‘liable to enormous abuses.’ Accordingly, this part of parental power, tending to evil purposes, should be ‘lopped off,’ leaving only that part that can be turned to ‘purposes of beneficence’—doubtless the equivalent of Bray's caressings of parental love. The same idea, of course, occurs in Fourier. On the whole, the best authorities seem to agree that there is much to be said in favour of the abolition—or the ‘lopping off’—of parents.

(e) THOMAS HODGSKIN

Among the English forerunners of Marx, it is Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) who gives most clearly the impression of intellectual eminence and distinction, and who leaves most acutely a feeling that here was one designed for greatness which, owing to the misfits of time and of life, was never attained. An officer in the Navy, his lively sensitiveness to injustice impelled him to publish in 1813 An Essay on Naval Discipline, which naturally resulted in the enforced abandonment of his profession. In 1815 he went abroad in order to observe the world and its ways, and for three years he wandered about France and Italy, but above all Germany, doing most of his travels on foot. After his return, he published in 1820 two very weighty volumes of Travels in the North of Germany, in which innocent Reisebtlder are interlarded with anarchistic and revolutionary digressions, doubtless to the amazement and perturbation of many of his readers. As one of his contemporaries complained, the information which the author conveyed was ‘interspersed with remarks, not in the best taste or indicating the soundest judgment and principles.’ In 1825, he wrote the short pamphlet which gives him his place in history, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital. Meanwhile he had become active in the establishment of the London Mechanics' Institution, where he delivered lectures which subsequently developed into Popular Political Economy (1827), where ‘popular,’ as Hodgskin himself points out, does not mean ‘amusing,’ but rather that the subject is approached from the point of view of the people. Somewhat later he published a volume in the form of letters addressed to Lord Brougham on The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted; and thereafter in the lugubrious and pathetic phrase of M. Halévy—sombre as an epitaph—Hodgskin ‘disparaït, après 1832, dans l'obscurité du journalisme anonyme.’¹

Somewhat curiously, perhaps, the fundamental element in Hodgskin is a blend of Adam Smith and Godwin. He has the liberal distrust of the State, which in the anarchist becomes an obsession; and never by any chance does he shed his individualism. His very extensive book of travel is now chiefly of interest because of his reactions to the spectacle of ‘the much governed countries of Germany,’² and he eagerly seizes every opportunity of underlining the evils of government interference. Thus one typical comment is that ‘we may conclude that the real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.’³ This sentiment may indeed rise to a full confession of anarchist faith as in the following disturbing conclusion to a general chapter on the government of Hanover:

When it is remarked, that the prosperity of every nation is in an inverse proportion to the power and to the interference of its government, we may be almost tempted to believe the common opinion, that governments are necessary and beneficial, is one of those general prejudices which men have inherited from an ignorant and barbarous age, and which more extensive knowledge and greater civilisation will shew to be an error full of evil.⁴

Elsewhere he throws doubts on the utility of legislative assemblies generally, pointing out that ‘the whole of European legislation, in so far as the production of wealth is concerned, is, and has long been, a violation of all those natural laws by which wealth is produced.’¹ Nature, he reminds us, in a phrase reminiscent of the Physiocrats, has already made laws for the conduct of individuals and of nations, and further legislative assemblies would but increase the evils of too much government. Indeed he supports the extreme anarchist view that the existence of a penal law defeats its own end: it puts evil thoughts into our minds, and perversely we are beguiled into doing something which otherwise would never have entered into our heads to do: ‘when men are told they must not do any certain action under the penalty of being hung, they are immediately persuaded that it will be a great advantage to them to do it, provided they can escape detection.’² The ultimate ideal, in short, is to get away from the House of Commons and other similar institutions, looking forward to a time when the human race ‘will lose the idle reverence with which it now worships some individuals, and submit itself only to reason as its natural lord and sovereign.’³ In the unpublished correspondence with Place, and in his later writings which M. Halévy has piously retrieved in part from the tomb of anonymous journalism in which they were interred, there are even more extreme statements of his leanings to anarchism. It is, however, clear from what Hodgskin published under his own name, that the framework of his thought was fundamentally anarchistic.

No less interesting is it to note the sanity and the tolerance of Hodgskin in unexpected places. On the whole anarchists are somewhat innocent of the ways of the world which they condemn; but this criticism cannot be levelled against Hodgskin. His observations with regard to Trade in his Poptilar Political Economy are singularly appreciative. Retail dealers are ‘indispensable agents,’ and he sniffs at Mr. Owen, who imagines that in his co-operative parallelograms he can do without this useful race of men.⁴ When he turns to the wholesale trader, his dissertation resolves itself into a hymn in praise of trade and of the blessedness of free trade, which Adam Smith himself could not have bettered.⁵ Moreover his defence of this race of men is on familiar lines. ‘They take to their business with no such high object in view; they are led to it by an instinctive view of their own interest.’ But, while labouring for themselves they are useful to others. Their motives may be selfish, but the consequences of their proceedings are none the less beneficial.⁶ This is not merely the shadow of Adam Smith's invisible hand: it is the hand itself. Moreover, bankers—a much abused tribe—‘are still very important, and have long been very useful labourers.’⁷ Even here Hodgskin's laissez faire principles do not desert him: ‘Banking, let us never forget... is altogether a private business, and no more needs to be regulated by meddling statesmen, than the business of paper-making.’¹

One further example of surprising orthodoxy may be cited. Although Hodgskin has much to say of money-price and natural-price, his discussion leads to no revolutionary proposals. Indeed, his conclusion is that the price system is not merely the index to the wants of society; it is even ‘the finger of Heaven, indicating to all men how they may employ their time and talents most profitably for themselves, and most beneficially for the whole society.’² Even an orthodox economist of these days, brought up on Tales from the Viennese Woods, may well be forgiven if his faith falters when invited to identify the price-system with the finger of Heaven.

This extreme individualism, overflowing into anarchy, might, of itself, place Hodgskin in the line that runs from Godwin to Bakunin, and beyond. Within this framework, it is necessary to seek for those elements that make him a forerunner of Marx. Here the essential point in Hodgskin is to be found in the supreme importance which he attaches to labour in the scheme of things, and to his development of ideas which, on this point, he can claim to derive from Smith and Ricardo. For Hodgskin, labour is everything. In what is doubtless a rhetorical hyperbole, he tells us that ‘Labour, enlightened, well-directed labour, converts the sterile rock into a fertile field; and it is no exaggeration to say that it gathers bread from the salt wave.’³ In other words, his purpose is to eliminate land and capital, the other so-called factors of production, or alternatively reduce them to labour.⁴ Land does not create wealth, any more than rain or sunshine; and in a lengthy letter to Place, quoted by M. Halévy, he subjects the whole of the Ricardian analysis of Rent to a destructive criticism which is far from ineffective.⁵ Apart from human labour, there are, he argues, no original and indestructible qualities of the soil, and wages on the land are determined by the fact that the soil of Europe was formerly cultivated by slaves, and by memories of the remuneration formerly given to slaves.⁶ That the days of slavery and of bondsmen cast their shadows over the present is an idea that frequently recurs in Hodgskin's writings.

In the small pamphlet, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital,⁷ Hodgskin is chiefly concerned with the elimination of Capital as an agent of production, relying on an analysis of the teaching of economists on the question. First of all, what is this circulating capital, on which, according to McCulloch and the elder Mill, the worker is dependent while he is working?¹ Clearly, no capitalist possesses stores of commodities which he advances to his workers. Those things which the worker requires are produced as operations advance. Bread, for example, is baked daily; the capitalist does not start off with a store of bread which will see the job through. No worker depends on a previously prepared stock, for no such stock exists.² What he does depend on is the ‘co-existing labour’ of other workers. In short,

all classes of men carry on their daily toils in the full confidence that while each is engaged in his particular occupation some others will prepare whatever he requires, both for his immediate and future consumption and use.³

Turning to fixed capital, it is not merely that the necessary instruments and tools are nothing more than the products of labour: more emphatically the argument rests on the fact that in themselves these are but’ inert, decaying and dead matter,’ unless they are’ guided, directed and applied by skilful hands.’⁴ In short, ‘fixed capital does not derive its utility from previous, but present labour; and does not bring its owner a profit because it has been stored up, but because it is a means of obtaining a command over labour.’⁵ Thus capital becomes ‘a sort of cabalistic word’⁶; ‘it is a miserable delusion to call capital something saved.’

With this emphasis on the supremacy of labour, implicit in the Ricardian theory of value, Hodgskin is able likewise to appeal to the Ricardian teaching on wages. Waiving reservations and refinements, in the gloomy Ricardian world wages are naturally such as will enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist, and perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution. ‘Such,’ comments Hodgskin in confirmation, ‘is all which the nature of profit or interest on capital will allow them to receive, and such has ever been their reward.’⁷ Thus while the benefits of division of labour should naturally belong to the labourers, ‘all the produce of increasing skill and knowledge, falls into the power of the rapacious landlord, the usurious capitalist, and the profligate dependents on, and profligate supporters of, profligate governments.’⁸ Capital, the universal middleman, is in a position to exact, and its demands are without bounds.

There are three points of general interest in which Hodgskin is more enlightened than some other members of this group. The first relates to the vexed question of the right of the worker to what he has himself produced. At times Hodgskin, perhaps incautiously, uses language in this matter which tends to a somewhat revolting and selfish individualism¹; but in his guarded moments, as in Labour Defended, he realises that in a complex world, resting on division of labour, it is impossible to speak of anyone producing anything, since everything becomes a joint venture: ‘there is no longer anything which we can call the natural reward of individual labour.’ There is nothing the worker can seize and say: ‘this is my product, this will I keep to myself.’² This is a just observation, and it is a consideration which torpedoes much socialist argument, including also some of Hodgskin's own most effective passages. Nor is it easy to devise a solution. Hodgskin's own suggestion is futile to the point of fatuity. It is that the question be left to be settled by ‘the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves,’ but when the meaning of labour is extended, as Hodgskin is willing to extend it, this assuredly offers no broad highway to the paradise of industrial peace. The second point of some interest is that Hodgskin finds it expedient to enter a mild protest against the tendency to restrict ‘labour’ to manual labour. Mental skill is as important as muscular exertion, and accordingly Hodgskin, writing anonymously as a ‘Labourer,’ reinforces his nomde-plume by cautioning his fellow-labourers ‘not to limit the term labour to the operations of the hands.’³

And thirdly, Hodgskin is extraordinarily clear as to the distinction between the capitalist and the undertaker, whose functions are frequently merged in one person. ‘Masters,’ he says emphatically, ‘are labourers as well as their journeymen,’ and in so far as they are labourers, their interests are identical with those of their men. It is as capitalists that they appear as middlemen and oppressors, and for correct reasoning it is necessary to divide that part of the master which makes him a labourer from that other part in virtue of which he is a capitalist and an oppressor.⁴ The wages of the master have been ‘blended’ with the profits of the capitalist,⁵ and though doubtless their labours have been remunerated too highly, it is clear that Hodgskin has no objection to ‘wages of management’ as such. Indeed, he rather casts a fly over the noses of the employers by suggesting that in the event of the profit of the capitalist being diminished, ‘the masters, as skilled labourers, will share in the increased rewards of industry.’⁶

Hodgskin's pre-eminent service is thus in pushing towards their final conclusions the implications of classical political economy, above all as represented by the Ricardian theories of value and wages; and his criticism is accompanied by a generous sentiment of indignation which at times rises to eloquence, as in a notable passage towards the end of Labour Defended:

I am certain, however, that till the triumph of labour be complete; till productive industry alone be opulent, and till idleness alone be poor, till the admirable maxim that ‘he who sows shall reap’ be solidly established; till the right of property shall be founded on principles of justice, and not on those of slavery; till man shall be held more in honour than the clod he treads on, or the machine he guides—there cannot, and there ought not to be either peace on earth or goodwill amongst men.¹

Yet, after a full diet of Hodgskin, most readers will feel a certain sense of disappointment that so little is said as to the path to be followed to realise his dreams. Hodgskin is in no way hostile to property. Property, he assures us, is the result of natural laws, and indeed he speaks of the ‘sacredness of the present right of property’—although, it is true, this sacredness is chiefly emphasised against ‘the aggressions and violations of government.’² But property, to be justified, must be based on individual industry: the ideal is that ‘labour shall be opulent and idleness have nothing.’³ But although in the passage from Labour Defended cited above, Hodgskin recognises the difficulty, under modern conditions, of saying what any one produces, nevertheless in general he continues to think in terms of an individual worker producing something which will be irrevocably his, to the exclusion of all others. Property, indeed, is defined as a man's right ‘to appropriate whatever he creates by his own labour.’ He is, however, somewhat vague as to his ultimate ends, as to how these aims may be attained, as to how, if attained, they may be preserved, unless serious limitations are imposed on that right of property which he regards as essential. In short the stubborn individualism, not to say anarchism, which lies at the foundation of Hodgskin's thoughts exercises throughout a somewhat paralysing influence on his aspirations to socialism.

(f) J. F. BRAY

Of J.' F. Bray, the author of Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (1839), very little is known beyond the fact that his name appears on the title-page of this book. Of all the pre-Marxian writers, he is perhaps in places the most Marxian. Though at times not wholly guiltless of a certain repetitiveness, he nevertheless writes with fire in the essential passages, so that even after more than a century he holds the attention more than most of his contemporaries. His background is not markedly dissimilar from that of other members of the group, and may be described as a blend of Owen and Godwin. More specifically, he is frankly utilitarian. Like others of his age, he can claim insight into the mind of the Almighty and is zealous for the reputation of his Creator. ‘To assert that, amidst a universe of joy, man alone is born to sorrow and to trouble, is to commit a foul libel upon the Almighty and perfect disposer of all things!’¹ ‘The Creator,’ as he elsewhere observes, ‘intended all creatures to be happy’²; if a man is now unhappy, it is because he exists in an unnatural state. Further, he is at one with Owen and Godwin in his extreme belief that men are made by their environment, and that by the application of the appropriate environment they can be made into anything. Character, whether good or bad, is but a factitious quality acquired by man. The European and the Ethiopian, different as they may be, could be made to change characters and opinions by effecting an exchange of the influences to which they have been respectively exposed.³ ‘Circumstances,’ that blessed word that fascinated Owen, ‘furnish the seed of good or ill, and man is but as the soil in which they grow.’⁴ Lastly, Bray is a most thorough-going pessimist with regard to things as they are: ‘it is certain that a worse system than the present one can by no possibility be devised.’⁵ The voice of pessimism could not be more emphatic.

If men, despite the intention of the Creator, are thus, and ever have been unhappy, what is the secret enemy, ‘the Great Enemy,’ that has thus frustrated the scheme of things?⁶ With a great cloud of other witnesses, Bray points to the ‘institution of property as it now exists’; later, and perhaps not wholly consistently, he follows Rousseau in declaring that ‘all the wrongs and the woes which man has ever committed or endured, may be traced to the assumption of a right in the soil, by certain individuals and classes, to the exclusion of other individuals and classes.’⁷ The secret enemy is thus to be found in the existence of property, especially in land, and in the fact that whereas man was meant to live ‘in communion,’ there is division between employers and employed, between idlers and workers. Also this is not a question of Government: Bray glances at the conditions of republican America, and witnessing there the extremes of inequality, he is content to shrug his shoulders.⁸

In seeking to refashion the world it is necessary to go to the root of the matter and to adhere to first principles, and Bray takes pride in doing so. Of such first principles, he enunciates four which, he claims, are ‘promulgated in the great book of Nature.’ The first is that all men are alike; their nature and their wants are the same Secondly, with reasons annexed, every human being ought to labour. Thirdly, since men are alike, their rights must be equal, and consequently the earth, from which all draw their sustenance, must be the common property of all its inhabitants. To these he adds, fourthly, on a somewhat different plane, that equality of labour ought to receive equality of reward.¹ As against these first principles, instituted by the Creator for the guidance and welfare of man, we are confronted with a world in which property in land has led by degrees to what in effect is property in man, in which all laws are tyrannical and all known governments are irresponsible.²

Proceeding, Bray calls the exponents of Political Economy to the witness-box; for it is a favourite sport of the time to cross-examine these hostile witnesses, and extort from them damaging admissions, thus ‘fighting them upon their own ground and with their own weapons.’³ The economists, who are here a somewhat shadowy race, have laid down three conditions for the production of wealth; firstly, that there shall be labour; secondly, that there shall be accumulations of former labour, known as capital; and thirdly, that there shall be exchanges.⁴

How in the eyes of Bray, looking around him, are these conditions observed? With regard to the first, it is argued that the injunction to labour applies to society as a whole; it is a general law to which there are no reservations. Somewhat absurdly, we are told that ‘the ban—“THOU SHALT LABOUR”—rests alike on all created beings. To this great law, from the minutest animalcule in a drop of water, to the most stupendous whale which dives beneath the waves of the ocean, there are naturally, and there should be artificially, no exceptions.’ The ban can only be avoided by one man at the expense of another; if some escape labour, the burden rests heavier elsewhere. Moreover, although with less felicity of expression, he anticipates Browning's observation that all service ranks the same with God. Inequality of value in labour is no reason for inequality of reward. Convenience and justice alike are on the side of equality of reward, provided there has been equal application of labour. We are all ‘links,’ and in effect one job is not more important than another. If the inventor wants more than the man who works his invention, he can rely on ‘the tribute of our admiration.’ Such in outline is Bray's argument, in which, as might be pointed out in a junior debating society, the condition that ‘there shall be labour’ is surreptitiously changed in mid-stream to the divine injunction, ‘Thou shalt labour,’ addressed alike to the minutest animalcule and the most stupendous whale.⁵

With regard to the second of the conditions fathered on the ‘econo mists,’ that of the necessary ‘accumulations,’ Bray endeavours to eliminate the individual from the picture, and to make wealth a national inheritance and its continuance a national responsibility. Our ‘accumulations’ come from preceding generations, and we ‘merely hold them as it were in trust, for the benefit of ourselves and our successors’¹ It is our duty to hand on these accumulations with an appropriate increase: but it is vain to ask the ‘productive classes,’ as Bray almost invariably calls them, to accumulate, since the existing accumulations ‘which have been handed down for the benefit of the present generation as a whole,’ have been appropriated and are enjoyed exclusively by particular individuals and classes. It will be observed that, without expressly saying so, Bray makes the nation, or the State, the universal heir on the demise of each of its citizens: all inherited wealth belongs to the community. It is an approach to the view, if not of Saint-Simon, at least of the Saint-Simonians.²

It is with regard to the third condition, namely, that there shall be exchanges, that Bray is most effective and most obviously the begetter of Marxian thought. An exchange takes place between two parties, each of whom gives to the other something which he desires less than that which he receives in exchange.³ The example to which he devotes his entire attention is the pre-eminently Marxian one of the labour contract between the worker and the employer. In a system of exchange, it is necessary that the parties should be not merely mutually benefited, but also equally benefited. ‘Equal values should always exchange for equal values’—a dark saying which postulates that we know what value is. Exchange should therefore be ‘equal’: it is Bray's thesis that in this imperfect world all exchanges are ‘unequal exchanges,’ and it is in the curse of unequal exchanges that we must look for the root of all our troubles. For what happens now is that the worker gives the capitalist the labour of a whole year in exchange for the value of only half a year⁴; he gives the employer six days’ labour for an equivalent worth only four or five days’ labour.⁵ Indeed it is an understatement to say that we are here dealing with unequal exchanges: strictly speaking, there is no exchange whatever. For the capitalist gives nothing. He gives no labour, for he is innocent of work; he clearly gives no capital, for by definition a capitalist is incessantly growing more and more wealthy. What really happens is that ‘the capitalists and proprietors do no more than give the working man, for his labour of one week, a part of the wealth which they obtained from him the week before!’ He gives the worker nothing for something. The whole transaction is thus, in the words of Bray, a palpable deception, a mere farce, a barefaced though legalised robbery.⁶ All this is of the essence of Marx, and it is perhaps not wholly insular pride that makes one feel that in some ways it is rather better done than in Marx. Nor does Bray fall behind in his purple passages, as when he declares that ‘this wealth has all been derived from the bones and sinews of the working classes during successive ages, and it has been taken from them by the fraudulent and slavery-creating system of unequal exchanges.’¹ It is also due to the unseen magic of these unequal exchanges that Capital and Labour have become two separate and antagonistic powers; and that the wealth and supremacy of one class is based upon the poverty and degradation of the other.² It is only an extension of the same argument that, in the matter of taxation, the whole burden rests on the workers, since the capitalists, inasmuch as they give no aid in production, have nothing of their own with which to pay taxes. Likewise, of course, the establishment of equal exchanges would compel the idler to work.³

To meet such a situation, a complete change of system is necessary. Bray devotes considerable space to proving what he calls the ‘Inutility’ of the remedies ordinarily advanced. All suggestions fail because they aim at effects, leaving causes sacred and untouched⁴: but what else is to be expected from ‘shallow-pated drivellers’? Political remedies are useless; so likewise are the efforts of Trade Unions. In an illuminating phrase, these aim merely at ‘the partial amelioration of the condition of the working class as a working class.’⁵ In other words, Trade Unions would leave the employer-employed nexus intact. Emigration, then a popular remedy, would under existing conditions merely alter the scene of the workers’ injustices. As to the form of society which should replace that in which mankind now suffers, Bray is clear that ‘community of possessions is in every respect the most perfect form of society which man can institute,’⁶ and the phrase is almost an echo of Plato. Unfortunately, it demands a ‘corresponding degree of excellence’ of those who would enter this earthly paradise. Bray is clear-sighted here on a point where many visionaries have been blind. He realises that past communistic experiments have often failed because those who entered ‘were taken almost promiscuously from the world at large, and they carried with them their old feelings, prejudices and habits.’⁷ There is a certain danger in filling the streets of the New Jerusalem with the damaged goods of this world, tainted by ‘the foul and loathsome selfishness which now more or less accompanies every action, clings to every thought, and pollutes every aspiration.’⁸ Consequently, those who seek to introduce the new system must be possessed of sufficient capital to tide over the period of man's regeneration, or alternatively we must be content for the present with a half-way house.¹

To the elaboration of such an ‘intermediate resting-place,’ which he describes elsewhere as ‘fitted to take society as it is, and to prepare the way for other and better changes,’² Bray devotes considerable attention; but on this point it is perhaps unnecessary to follow him in any detail here. He was obviously impressed by the progress and efficiency of Joint Stock Companies, and he had the insight to realise that ‘these companies are usurping, in all directions, the places and occupations hitherto confined to individual capitalists and traders.’³ He is accordingly inspired to propose that there should be a ‘jointstock modification of society.’⁴ Each trade is to establish within itself the germs of a future company. In the end, society will be ‘as it were, one great joint-stock company, composed of an indefinite number of smaller companies, all labouring, producing and exchanging with each other on terms of the most perfect equality’⁵; and, of course, the individual employers and capitalists will be superseded. Bray's account, especially on the side of finance (where he is invariably weak) is not wholly clear; but the end result, so far as it is possible to visualise it, would appear to yield a society which would be something like a cross between the projects of Robert Owen and Louis Blanc.

There is, however, one point in this ‘joint-stock system’ which is of more than topical interest. Bray is one of the earliest and most extreme advocates of Family Endowment, and would end the dependence of wives on their husbands and of children on their parents. ‘The maintenance and education of children by their parents is,’ he declares, ‘a glaring defect in every social system in which the practice prevails.’ Every child should be looked upon as the child of society, and parents should have ‘no offices to perform but the caressings of parental love.’⁶ Bray is entirely silent as to the machinery, financial and otherwise, required to realise his scheme of family endowment; but as an instalment towards the complete ‘community’ which is his ultimate aim, the disappearance of the family is almost inevitably imposed upon him.

From the point of view of persuasive propaganda, Bray is probably the most effective of the English pre-Marxians. Perhaps on a second, and still more on subsequent perusals, the reader may have an uneasy feeling that not infrequently he contrives to smuggle the thesis to be proved in amongst the definitions and the postulates from which he starts out. But, of course, he is not unique in this respect. Indeed, it is perhaps the essence of successful propaganda.

(g) JOHN GRAY

John Gray is one of the liveliest of the early English anticipators of Marx; but his greater liveliness has not prevented him from becoming, like some other members of the group, a somewhat shadowy figure. He is said to have been of Scottish extraction, to have worked in London in his younger days and to have returned to Scotland later, where, contrary to the views of Dr. Johnson, greater prosperity awaited him. After the manner of mankind, he would seem to have become less revolutionary with advancing years. Here we are concerned with his earlier days as represented by his Lecture on Human Happiness, which, published in 1825, when Marx was seven years old, provides in many ways a somewhat remarkable anticipation of certain of the cornerstones of the Marxian edifice.

Gray's starting-point is in some ways reminiscent of Adam Smith, who placed Division of Labour in Chapter 1 of Book I, and founded it on a peculiar ‘propensity to truck.’ According to Gray it is a ‘propensity to exchange labour for labour’ that enables men to leave the lower creation behind.¹ It is through barter, and not through the defects of government, that the possibility of tyrannising was introduced into the world; it is on barter and barter alone that society is founded; on barter and barter alone that all institutions rest. This startingpoint is cunningly chosen in order to emphasise later the importance of just exchanges. Further, Gray, as becomes his times, is undilutedly utilitarian: happiness is ‘the end and object of every human pursuit.’² Nor will he be fobbed off with the soothing consolation that happiness consists in the pursuit and not in the possession of the object desired. With the voice of common sense, Gray makes it clear that when he pursues, he means to get there; that while he is prepared to travel joyfully, he also means to arrive.

Which of us, when overtaken with hunger or thirst, ever found more pleasure in the pursuit than in the enjoyment of food? Which of us, if by chance exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, drenched with rain, or frozen with cold, ever experienced more pleasure in the search of a fireside than in the enjoyment of it?³

To the importance of barter as the basis of civil society, to the utilitarian assumption that happiness is alone what matters, it is necessary, in order to complete Gray's fundamental assumptions, to add the distinction between productive and unproductive labour—that evil legacy of the Physiocrats. Every necessary, convenience or comfort of life comes from labour. Various types of labour are indicated, and all who do not fall within this classification are unproductive and useless members of society, and are (in the largest capitals) a. ‘DIRECT TAX’ on the productive classes.¹ Moreover, Gray's idea of productive labour is extremely narrow. As he says elsewhere, with all the added emphasis of italics, ‘they only are productive members of society who apply their own hands either to the cultivation of the earth itself, or to the preparing and appropriating the produce of the earth to the uses of life’²; beyond this, he makes a somewhat grudging concession in the case of merchants, manufacturers and others (‘mere distributors of wealth’) who are ‘useful only in a sufficient number.’

With these guides to our footsteps, let us see what society, as we know it, looks like. Gray's general view, disclosed in a passing observation, is that it is wonderful that ‘the existing arrangements of society drive comparatively so few men mad.’³ He had been much impressed, as were all his generation, by Colquhoun's General View of Society, which purported to show, for 1812, how the New Property in Great Britain and Ireland, arising from various sources, was distributed among the various classes of the community.⁴ On the restricted definition of ‘productive labour’ to which Gray adheres, his conclusion, on the figures given by him, is that the productive classes fall considerably short of half the total population, and that they receive only about a fifth of what they produce.¹ Gray is most interesting and at times most spicy in the comments which he adds on the fifty-one categories into which, building on Colquhoun, he divides the population, and which indeed he annotates seriatim. Thus in sweeping aside that comprehensive group labelled ‘Nobility, Gentry, Knights, Esquires, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he adds, very much in the manner of Owen, the extenuating plea, that ‘it has been the misfortune, not the fault, of the higher classes, to be born under an unjust system.’² On his modest proposal for the abolition of every kind of lawyer ‘without a single exception,’ Gray speaks with the authentic voice of Godwin. Like many others, he seems to be under the curious impression that all law is criminal law, and that all lawyers spend all their waking hours in trafficking with crime and criminals. The argument for abolishing lawyers is that punishment, so far from preventing crime, has an invariable tendency to increase it. The magnitude of crime keeps pace with the magnitude of punishment. ‘Invariable kindness’ is the only effective prescription. We must exhibit to the understanding, without anger, the effects which bad actions produce in society. It is gratifying to know that this mode of treatment can never fail to produce the desired effect—although, admittedly, it must be persevered in.³ Could Godwin himself have put it more clearly?

In his comment on the group of ‘Shopkeepers and Tradesmen retailing goods,’ Gray achieves an effect of extravavagant fantasy which is more in line with Fourier. The number of these, he remarks with sobriety, is ‘limited not to those who are really required to transact the business of a town in a rational and proper manner, but to those who can get a living in it.’ As for the race of shopkeepers themselves, he says with a fine irony:

Certain it is that these men are not unproductive, for never, upon the face of the earth, was there anything half so productive of deception and falsehood, folly and extravagance, slavery of the corporeal, and prostitution of the intellectual faculties of man, as the present system of retail trade.... A fourth or fifth part of their time is expended in decorating their shop windows, that is, in spoiling goods, and at least half of it in waiting about for their customers or doing nothing useful.⁴

Somewhat in the same spirit, and on this same question of retail trade, there is a passage elsewhere to the effect that false representation is the inevitable end of competition. Equal capitals, with equal skill and industry, will command goods at equal prices; and consequently, there follows a never-ceasing competition in which each strives to make his goods appear cheaper than his neighbour's. Truth is of no use here, and it follows that falsehood must be resorted to:

What says experience? There is not one advertisement in one hundred, which appears in the public prints, relating to the prices of goods in retail shops, but what is untrue. Let any man deny this, who knows anything of business. The printers of newspapers ought to place all advertisements from retail shops, under the head of ‘Falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.’ Can general sincerity exist in such a state of society as this?¹

Without venturing on an assessment of the justice of Gray's final conclusion, it will be observed that the underlying postulate is that there exists everywhere ‘equal industry and skill’—in other words, he assumes the existence of that uniformity of man which so frequently emerges in the socialist tradition.

In this analysis of society, what are we to make of the ‘independent classes’? Remembering the primary assumption that everything comes from labour, then these independent classes are of all men the most dependent. They are indeed doubly dependent: they are dependent on the industry of their fellow-creatures, and they are dependent on the injustice which enables them to command it. The first point is proved by an obvious train of reasoning:

They are dependent upon the baker for their bread, and upon the butcher for their meat. They are dependent upon the bricklayer for their houses, and upon the upholsterer for the furnishing of them. They are dependent upon the tailor and upon the dressmaker for their clothes; and upon their valets and maids to put them on. If there is a name which, better than any other, will describe this class of men, it is the word DEPENDENTS.²

If it be argued in rebuttal that they live on their property, then Gray replies, almost in the words of Marx, that’ Labour is the sole foundation of property, and that, in fact, all property is nothing more than accumulated labour.’³ If the defence further is that they give an equivalent in money for what they consume, then it may be answered that the money is not theirs to give. It springs from Rent and Interest, which have no foundation in justice, and therefore the independent classes are solely dependent upon injustice for their daily bread. To us in these days there again appears to be undue emphasis on rent and interest, which are not the sole, nor, in our times, the main sources of excessive gains. Whatever breeds millionaires nowadays, it is certainly neither rent nor interest in any exact sense. So far as rent is concerned, in Gray's view it rests solely on the ‘power and custom of obtaining it.’⁴ Interest is merely another method of obtaining labour without giving an equivalent for it. In a rather ridiculous illustration, he imagines a manufacturer of hats, accumulating 10,000 hats valued at 20s. each. He turns these into money, and after living well for a lifetime, he still has intact the equivalent of his 10,000 hats. ‘Can the bee do this? Can the ant do this?’ he pertinently asks.¹ It is like a burlesque inversion of a music-hall song of a generation ago, which, after reciting the accomplishments of a hen, asked with equal relevance: ‘Could Lloyd George do it?’ As St. Paul observed, there are diversities of gifts.

As against this type of spoliation, ‘all just contracts have for their foundation equal quantities of labour.’ This, of course, is drawn from Ricardo unalloyed, slurring all the points of difficulty; but it is in line with Gray's starting-point that society is based on barter, and that it is by the door of barter—unjust barter—that tyranny enters into the world.

In contrast with the sorry state of the world as we see it, what, Gray asks, would be the position if the ‘useful labourer’ were allowed to ‘keep for his own use the property he creates’?² For this is the only reform required: and it will be observed that it has the strict individualistic tendencies of all rigorous announcements of the right of each to his entire produce. To take only one suggestive point in passing, this right of each to his whole produce without impairment, is clearly inconsistent with any form of Poor Law or public assistance, otherwise than on a voluntary basis. Logically, indeed, it may be doubted whether it can be reconciled with any system of taxation, other than that which might be imposed by a State ridden by the extremest laissez faire doctrine. The result of such a reform, in Gray's opinion, would however be to produce a state of universal opulence for all, at the cost of but a few hours’ daily work; for Gray, like most of the group, is a convinced adherent of the ‘poverty-in-the-midst-of-the-possibility-of-plenty’ idea. He refers to the most important truth ever submitted to the mind of man, which is that, while poverty prevails,

those very inhabitants, aided by the great mechanic power of which they are possessed, are capable of creating, by their own labour, all those necessaries and comforts of life to an almost unlimited extent, certainly to an extent amply sufficient to supply the wants of every member of their respective communities.³

In analysing why society falls short of its potentialities in this respect, Gray in part discloses points of view with which we are, now at least, familiar; in part also he dwells in darkness. Fundamentally, he endeavours to show that at present Capital is brought into competition with Capital, instead of being brought to act in conjunction with it. This is a clear pointer in the direction of the replacement of competition by co-operation. There are, it is argued, two natural limits to the production of wealth, to be found, firstly, in the exhaustion of our productive powers, or, secondly, in the satisfaction of our needs. But we have created a third, and unnatural, limit to production, as represented by Competition.¹

This third limitation of production springs fundamentally from the fact that, as things are at present, production is determined by, and is dependent upon, demand. The question is never that of ascertaining how much is required to satisfy the needs of mankind; but rather, how much can be disposed of at a profit. What is produced has no regard to the satisfaction of our wants or the extent of our powers of production; it is determined solely by a calculation as to how much the market can absorb and still yield a profit.² It is unnecessary to observe that this argument is one of the corner-stones of Guild Socialism of a later generation, crystallised in the familiar phrase that production, as we know it, is for profit and not for use.

So far, we are on easy and familiar ground. If, however, production is limited by demand, the next stage in the argument is to enquire what it is that limits demand. Demand is nothing more than the aggregate quantity of wealth which ‘the labour, the services, and the property’ of the whole community will command.³ But this, in each case, according to Gray, is kept down to a minimum by the influence of competition. So far as concerns wages, the argument is obvious, and in the circumstances of the time sufficiently cogent. It is a straightforward invocation of Ricardian and Marxian ideas. The competition of the unemployed, ‘candidates for employment,’ has the effect of ‘keeping down the quantity obtained by the mass, to that portion which is just sufficient to support bodily strength and to continue their race.’⁴ But Gray is not content with an Iron Law of Wages: he will have an Iron Law operative throughout the whole of society, manifesting itself in an Iron Law of Profit, and an Iron Law of Interest, and so on. Thus profits are cut down to a minimum by competition, each being compelled by competition to sell as near as may be to cost price; and the same, mutatis mutandis, applied to the rent of houses and the interest on money. These conclusions lead to a general principle:

That, therefore, the income of EVERY INDIVIDUAL, and consequently of the WHOLE COMMUNITY, except only those persons who have fixed money incomes, is LIMITED BY COMPETITION, and that each obtains the LEAST that his labour, his services, or the use of his property CAN POSSIBLY BE OBTAINED FOR.⁵

This analysis, be it said with all respect, is not merely confused; it defeats the end of Gray's argument, if it does not border on the absurd. The exploitation of the worker under a Ricardian-Lassallean Iron Law is a sufficiently comprehensible concept; but the exploitation, where it exists, is to the advantage of the other party to the transaction. Here we are asked to view (sympathetically) the landlord and the capitalist being ground down to the lowest rent or the lowest rate of interest he can possibly accept (as doubtless he may be under the inexorable law of Austrian economics where the margin dominates the situation); but a society which is characterised by exploitation must manifest exploiters and exploitees. Gray's world is one consisting entirely of exploitees—apart from those who are in receipt of fixed money incomes. Even these, it may be observed incidentally, will doubtless have their incomes fixed as low as possible: in a world where the Iron Law of Wages is stalking about seeking whom it may devour, even an Education Authority, in fixing the wages of its teachers, will obey its stern behests.

The final result of this unnatural restraint on production is more clearly stated than the argument on which it rests. It is that the inhabitants of this country are now ‘in possession of powers by which they can create wealth without any known limits, and yet one-half of them are in a state of actual poverty.’¹

Perhaps Gray tails off in cogency towards the end of his argument. His diagnosis—which is broadly that of an insufficiency of purchasing power everywhere—would seem to point to a monetary solution; and indeed it was the question of money with which Gray concerned himself in his later years. At the stage of the Lecture on Human Happiness he is content to say that competition, the unnatural barrier which forces poverty upon us, must be abolished. But apart from giving an assurance that it could be abolished at any time, without the slightest difficulty, it cannot be said that he is very helpful to any crusader who would seek to follow in his footsteps. No doubt he appends articles of agreement for the formation of a community on principles of mutual co-operation, which seem to foreshadow a cross between Owen and Fourier. Those who are interested in the affiliation of ideas will note with interest how much of Fourier there is in the seventeenth of these articles, which lays down that every species of co-operative exertion is to be rendered attractive to the members; and that one way of engendering attraction is ‘by the facility and variety of occupations, no one occupation continuing, except by choice, for more than two or three successive hours.’² Fourier's butterfly, while demurring to the monstrous and inordinate length of these ‘sessions,’ would have conceded that Gray was on the right lines.

Such is John Gray, and though he may not have completed the journey to the Finland Station, his place as an exponent of Marxism at a time when Marx was still playing marbles, or should have been playing marbles, in the streets of Trier, is sufficiently remarkable. He taught that property was but accumulated labour; he taught the doctrine of exploitation, indeed of robbery and of spoliation; he taught that the competition of the unemployed (later to be enrolled as the Industrial Reserve Army) pressed down wages until they were merely sufficient to enable the workers to continue their race. If something more specifically Marxian in phraseology is required, let it be recalled that Gray explained the poverty of the poor by the fact that there are ‘persons who buy their labour from them at one price, and sell it at another.’

CHAPTER XII. SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM↩

(a) MARX AND ENGELS

DURING the last generation Marx has occasioned such a devastating torrent of exposition, criticism, deification and denigration, that here, if anywhere, one might be justified in waving the still curious reader to the ample and accessible literature, pressed down and running over, which may so easily be found elsewhere on the subject. Yet though this inordinate flood of books, and of books upon books, might well afford any prudent man complete justification for refusing to write one further book on Marx, it can hardly be invoked as an adequate plea for silence where, as here, we are concerned with successive phases of socialist thought and with their mutual inter-reactions. Accordingly, much as a sensitive typewriter may rebel against being called upon to perform so hackneyed a task, it is necessary that we should seek to reproduce sufficient of the essential core of Marx to understand his place in the succession. Unfortunately, on any line of approach, it is a rather large and intractable core, with numerous facets.

We are not here concerned with Marx's biography, except in so far as it is related to, or helps to explain, his doctrine. He was born in 1818 in Trier, and like most of the theorists of socialism he belonged to what he himself would have called the Bourgeoisie. He was of Jewish descent, but his family had undergone a recent conversion to Christianity. It has been ingeniously suggested that, in an anti-semitic environment, the converted Jew suffers doubly. He is treated as a Jew, without having the moral support and consolation of knowing that he is one of God's chosen people. Marx married, as the Victorians would have said, ‘above him.’ His wife, Jenny von Westphalen, was of a family with distinctly superior connections, a fact of which rather oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) Marx seems to have been rather proud. From his entrance upon the world until 1848 he lived the life of a professional revolutionary, with no rest for the sole of his foot. From 1848 until 1883 he was a political exile, living, but for minor interludes, in London. The year 1848 represents a landmark in Marx's life: he remained curiously a man of 1848. The conditions under which he did his work in London, above all in the earlier years, make it something of a miracle that he ever did any work at all. The real hero, or martyr, of the Marx household was his wife: but it is unwise of a revolutionary to marry a Jenny von Westphalen and take her to Dean Street. She seems to have been something of a saint; but even a saint may be pardoned for becoming neurotic if she happens to be married to a Karl Marx. No one so qualified as she to claim for herself the familiar hymn: ‘Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.’ In a world full of the glorification of Marx, somewhat scant justice has been done to his suffering wife.

Further, Marx was throughout his London life increasingly dependent in a sense and to an extent which would have been entirely repugnant to any ordinary man, and which in his innermost soul must have been repugnant even to him, successful as he may have been in concealing it. It was Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) who kept the Marx household going, and without his unstinted and inexhaustible generosity it would probably have foundered quite early in the days of London exile. All these circumstances in his life naturally tended to undermine Marx's self-respect and confidence, and to produce in him an almost complete example of the manifestations of the Inferiority Complex. He was suspicious of everyone; he quarrelled sooner or later with everyone—Engels alone excepted; he was arrogant and self-assertive; for all who did not acknowledge his superiority, he had the supremest contempt. In his heart there was envy and bitterness and hatred; for the world at large he had neither tolerance nor love.

Engels, who has been mentioned as the material saviour of the Marx household, was, however, much more than that. The collaboration of Marx and Engels is surely something that is unique in literary history. Many of the most significant Marxian productions—including The Communist Manifesto, ‘the best thing Marx ever wrote’—were in fact written jointly. It was Engels who edited (and some would suggest that he rather more than edited) the second and third volumes of Capital after Marx's death. For almost forty years there was scarcely a thought of Marx which was not also a thought of Engels. He was the one friend whose friendship for Marx endured, though indeed it was sorely tried on one occasion. That it did endure was due solely to Engels' extraordinary willingness to play second fiddle and to subordinate himself in all things. He tied himself to an uncongenial occupation (which, strictly speaking, it ought to have been against their joint-conscience for him to accept) entirely in order to gain the means which enabled Marx to frequent the British Museum as a full-timer. There have been many instances in history where a man has sacrificed everything for a woman, and doubtless just as many where a woman has sacrificed everything for a man. It is not easy to find a parallel to the case of Engels who, for the sake of a common cause, gave his whole life in order that another, with no claims of blood or relationship upon him, should be exempted from the necessity of earning his own livelihood. Despite his own very considerable independent work, Engels has until recently stood somewhat overmuch in the shadow of Marx. The ‘Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute’ in Moscow has, by its title, at last done tardy justice to Engels' place in the scheme of things.

Marx was the founder of ‘Scientific Socialism,’ as opposed to ‘Utopian Socialism.’ The distinction, of which Marx and Engels were very conscious, may call for a preliminary word of explanation. The ‘Utopians’ were pre-eminently Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. In The Communist Manifesto, the reproach directed against them is that they had no knowledge of the Proletariat as such; they made their appeal to the whole of society, by preference to the ruling classes; they dreamed fantastic pictures of a new society, and even sought to create ‘duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem.’ To the Utopians, socialism was the expression of absolute truth.¹ They appealed to morality; whereas, ‘from a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further.’² The Utopians constructed the outlines of a new society out of their own heads,³ and looked round, like Fourier, for a capitalist to ‘launch’ it. In other words, they did not have a philosophy of history. The function of scientific socialism was to reveal socialism as ‘a necessary product of historical development.’ Given a knowledge of the laws according to which human history unrolls itself, the scientific socialist could show, with a wealth of obstetrical metaphor for which they manifested a marked partiality (invoking wombs, midwives and umbilical cords),⁴ that the existing capitalistic society could not fail to give birth to a socialist order. The appeal to morality and justice, the vision and the dream, were replaced by an understanding and acceptance of historical development.

Many commentators have stressed the view that Marx can in no respect lay claim to ‘originality.’ It may be true; it is certainly immaterial. It may not be so in the world of science and scientific discovery; but in the realm of thought, there are few ideas which, with a little ingenuity, cannot be shown to have had a long ante-natal history, or perhaps to be but the restatement of something suggested out of due season to an earlier generation. In the words of a musical critic, dealing with the somewhat analogous question of musical plagiarism, ‘it is not the tune that matters, but what you do with the tune.’⁵ In the same way, it is doubtless true that the component parts of Marxian thought can be traced to a multitude of sources. He collected his bricks from many masons' yards; but he used them to construct a building which was very much according to his own design.

The sources of Marx may be glanced at, even if in the space available here the glance may be little more than an enumeration. Firstly, there was Hegel, who dominated his earlier years; for Marx belonged to a generation when Hegelianism was as fashionable as Fabianism in the late 'nineties. From Hegel he learned the principle of development by contrast and by conflict. Every state, condition or proposition calls forth its negation, which in turn provokes the negation of the negation, which contains in itself the original positive and the subsequent negation. Every thesis reacts to its anti-thesis, which leads to the synthesis, combining both thesis and anti-thesis. Hegel had yoked his apparatus to the car of idealism. It was Feuerbach who made Marx a ‘materialist,’ but though Marx abandoned Hegel's idealism, he continued throughout life to think in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, and to find particular pleasure in anything that might seem to exemplify the negation of the negation. Hegelianism is the kind of thing that ought to be left to Hegelians who presumably know the secret of Hegel. In less expert hands, as in those of Proudhon, it seems to the illiterate and ignorant outsider to become a mere toy which enables every swing of every pendulum to be regarded as the embodiment of a great philosophical principle.¹ Enough here to note that it was from Hegel that Marx learned that development, the unfolding of events, results from the conflicts of opposites, leading to a synthesis on a new plane.²

From the earlier French socialists, with whom he had contacts during the period of his residence in Paris, it is probable that Marx derived the phrase, if not precisely his conception, of the ‘class war.’ For indeed, the idea of the class war, if one so chooses, goes back to a famous phrase in Plato's Republic; but before Marx, the ‘class war’ (expressed or implied) had been conceived rather in terms of the conflict of interests between rich and poor. Neither Marx nor Engels was interested in the poor as such; like a good deal of modern social legislation, they tended to restrict their interest to ‘employed persons’; and the class war, from being the conflict between rich and poor, became the war between employer and employed—which is not by any means necessarily the same war. On the economic side, the affiliation and sources of Marx are clear beyond all shadow of dubiety. He is merely the continuator of classical English Political Economy. To the outward eye of the unsophisticated man, the Marxian theory of value is no more than Ricardo transcribed, doubtless supported by a proof which Ricardo surely would have disdained. It is necessary to state this identity with extreme circumspection, for in truth (as we shall see presently) no one quite knows what Marx meant by value, and consequently no one can say with assurance what the Marxian theory of value involves. But as a first approximation, and keeping in mind the possibility that Marx may have meant something quite different from what he appeared to say, it remains true that on all this question of value, Marx is substantially Ricardo. Lastly, the conception of surplus value, as has been seen in the foregoing chapter, was familiar to Gray, Hodgskin and the other members of the rediscovered group of early English socialists, and was expressed by them with the utmost precision, though again doubtless without the Marxian trimmings.

Such a survey of the Marxian system as the scope of this chapter allows may conveniently be brought under four headings, though it is of the essence of Marx's genius that the various parts of the completed structure are most intricately and ingeniously interwoven. There is, firstly, a background, a view of history—a ‘philosophy of history,’ in the ordinary phrase—which is embodied in what has acquired the rather misleading title of the ‘Materialist Conception of History.’ This again is manifested in a perpetually recurring and never-ending class struggle in which the negation of the negation leads to ever new negations. Secondly, there is the economic analysis, which represents the central core in the system so far as Marx endeavours to be rein wissenschaftlich. This is concerned with the exposition of a theory of value, and is applied to lay bare the secrets and the procedure of capitalist exploitation. There is, thirdly, a body of prophecy, designed to show the future development of the capitalistic system and its ultimate destination. Lastly, there is a view of the State, with some shadowed hints as to the technique of revolution and the far-off haven when we shall have outgrown the need of the machinery of the State. Each of these aspects of Marxism may be briefly surveyed.

The Materialist Conception of History is not too happy in its baptismal name: Mr. Cole has suggested as an improvement the ‘Realist Conception of History,’ but, having noted its inadequacy, it may be convenient to adhere to the familiar phrase. Adam Smith says somewhere that’ the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.’¹ In their context, these words may not have a pronounced Marxian flavour; but when unscrupulously detached, they represent a fair first approximation to the Materialist Conception of History. In their enunciation of this view of the unrolling of events, Marx and Engels were concerned to repudiate the ‘idealist’ view of history, that men are what they are by virtue of ideal influences, that they are fashioned by their religion, their laws, their literature and their art. The relationship, they would hold, is the other way round. In what was supposed to be an epigrammatic summary of the theory, ‘it is not religion that makes men, but men who make their religion.’ In an innocuous and generalised summary given by Engels, the essence of the theory is ‘to trace political events back to the effects of what are, in the last resort, economic causes.’¹ The economic factor, above all the manner in which men earn their daily bread, provides the dynamic factor in history, in the light of which everything else—the structure of society, religion, law and art—must find their explanation.

Rather oddly, in the matter of what some have regarded as the most characteristic and original feature of the Marxian system, there is nowhere, either in Marx or Engels, an adequate or systematic account of the Materialist Conception of History, and of its implications. It is scattered about in odd pages and paragraphs, and probably the clearest expressions are to be found in Engels rather than in Marx. What has come to be regarded as the most significant and completest statement is contained in the Preface to Marx's Critique of Political Economy. There is a frequently quoted passage in one of Engels’ later introductions to The Communist Manifesto. Strange as it may appear, one of the best known ‘sources’ for the Marxian theory is in a speech delivered by Engels at the graveside of Marx. There is at least one significant passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire; the theory is scattered pretty liberally up and down German Ideology; the anthologist of the Materialist Conception will find some quite useful quotations in Anti-Dühring; and lastly (or lastly to be noted here), it is a frequent and recurrent theme in the correspondence of Marx and Engels.

In view of the considerable controversy which the Materialist Conception of History has occasioned, and of the sparseness and diffusion of the authoritative sources, there may be advantage in assembling a few of the more significant sentences in which Marx and Engels themselves declared their faith. Take, first of all, a short extract from the clearest of Marx's statements:

In the social production of their means of existence men enter into definite necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of these productive relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Preface to Critique of Political Economy).

From The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, as foundation, there is built a superstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships.¹

From The German Ideology, out of a considerable number of possible quotations, a few sentences may be selected:

By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.... What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.²

We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.... Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.³

From the same work a mangled sentence may be taken explaining that their view of history was to start out from the simple material production of life:

and so, from this starting point, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growths.⁴

A statement of some interest derives from The Poverty of Philosophy:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces, men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.⁵

Two snippets may be given from Engels, speaking alone, in order that he may make his special contribution to this anthology. The first is from Anti-Dühring:

The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production, and with production the exchange of its products, is the basis of every social order; that in every society which has appeared in history the distribution of the products, and with it the division of society into classes or estates, is determined by what is produced and how it is produced, and how the product is exchanged. According to this conception, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men, in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange; they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the period concerned.¹

The second is from the speech at the graveside of Marx. Engels then said that Marx had

discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.²

Lastly, though it is strictly outside the scope of this chapter, yet nevertheless is interesting as illustrative of a tradition, two sentences from Lenin may be given:

People always were and always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.³

By disclosing that all ideas and all the various tendencies, without exception, have their roots in the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism pointed the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of rise, development, and decline of social-economic formations.⁴

Intentionally and of design, we have courted the danger of wearying the reader with this short selection of somewhat ponderous pro-nouncements. The Materialist Conception of History tends to be discussed somewhat in the air. It is not always made clear just how far the theory was carried by Marx and Engels, who frequently dealt with the question in an obiter dictum, or in an incidental aside. Accordingly it seemed expedient to reproduce textually a few of the more precise statements of the principle, so that it might be presented in the authentic voice of the authors, rather than in a summary or commentary which might be suspected of distortion. The general contention, as laid down in the earlier statements, is, however, clear. It is the economic factor—so it is argued—above all, as that is embodied in the conditions of production, that ultimately determines all things. It governs the structure of the society in which men live. It fashions their religion; it determines their laws; it shapes their literature and their art. The spiritual is determined by the material; things are in the saddle and ride mankind. It is a view which, despite disclaimers, tends to a doctrine of fatalism.¹

Inextricably bound up with the Materialist Conception of History, at least in its Marxian presentation, is the theory of the Class Struggle. The Materialist Conception of History, indeed, expresses itself in and through an everlasting struggle between classes. The Communist Manifesto puts this in the forefront: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ The Manifesto proceeds to record the opposition of freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, leaping somewhat too lightly through the centuries. There is no history, apart from the record of class struggles; and presumably what is left of history when the class struggle is decanted is but the record of insignificant trivialities. The phase of the class struggle (reached in 1848) was revealed in the opposition of interests between the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. The theory of the class struggle, as found in Marx, is, of course, merely a somewhat mechanical application of the Hegelian formula. Hegelianism requires that the negation, having asserted itself, should proceed to struggle with its opposite and rise to a higher synthesis, the negation of the negation; and accordingly, classes must toe the line and behave accordingly, whether they like it or not. It is, however, by no means obvious—as is implicit in Marxism—why the struggle pending in 1848 between Capitalism and the Proletariat should conduct us to the final synthesis and the disappearance of all classes, leading, as Mr. Bertrand Russell notes with horror, to a state of Byzantine immobility.

One aspect of this continuous class struggle, though perhaps it has not received much notice from the commentators, is nevertheless curious and significant. The later editions of The Communist Manifesto have a correcting footnote to the famous opening sentence, pointing out that, to be exact, the proposition that all history is the history of class struggles should be restricted to ‘recorded history.’ For Engels, as he grew older, fell under the influence of theories explaining the origin of society; and he became satisfied that there had been an early golden age, when there was neither property nor a State. The Origin of the Family, in large stretches, is a glorification of this lost paradise, in contrast with later unhappier times. These questions had better be left to the expert, in whose number it may be doubted whether Engels had claims to be included. It is, however, always of interest to note where, in the view of our authorities, the human race took the wrong turning. In this case, the evil thing was the introduction of division of labour, so near and so dear to the heart of Adam Smith. Division of labour and private property are, we are told, identical expressions. Division of labour implies unequal distribution both of labour and of its products.¹ A more emphatic indication of the far-off source of the class war in division of labour may be found in this passage:

The division of labour implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labour, of tools and materials, and thus the splitting up of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the division between capital and labour, and the different forms of property itself.²

Primitive society (the so-called ‘gentile constitution,’ in Engels' phraseology) was shattered by division of labour and the consequent cleavage of society into classes.³ That the principle of division of labour lies at the root of all class struggles also provides the theme for the concluding section of Anti-Dühring, where, as we shall see later, Engels (with Marx's approval) draws, quite logically, a pretty picture of a Utopia where division of labour, like some other things, will have withered away.⁴ In attempting an assessment of the social philosophy of Marx and Engels, it is perhaps necessary to distinguish between the earlier and more rigid statements of the Materialist Conception of History, and what it tended to become later under criticism. For beyond a doubt it was watered down with the years. In one of his later letters addressed to J. Bloch (September 21, 1890), Engels goes far towards emptying the doctrine of its characteristic content, and acknowledges that Marx and he were partly to blame if the younger generation (or some of them) had laid more stress on the economic side than was due.

If, however, we take the Materialist Conception of History, in its earlier forms, stimulating as it may be in providing a canon of interpretation, it is obvious that it falls short at many points. History cannot be explained solely in terms of the economic factor, because the other factors, however they may have originated, do in fact attain to an independent existence. Religion and patriotism, a country's laws and traditions, certainly develop into primary forces, imperiously dictating in defiance of economic considerations.

The most obvious difficulty of the Materialist Conception of History, at least in its less guarded statements, is seen in its helplessness when confronted with the problem of mind, and of the influence of mind on mind. Doubtless great men are conditioned by their environment, but they are certainly not produced by their environment; we all reflect our times. It is easy enough to persuade ourselves that any of the leaders of humanity could have appeared only when he did appear. It is absurd to assume that any great man was bound to appear at the appropriate juncture. When he was old enough to know better, Engels, in a letter of January 25, 1894, more or less champions this extraordinary view. That Napoleon, ‘just that particular Corsican,’ appeared and did what he did, was an accident, but if just that particular Corsican had failed to turn up, ‘another would have filled the place’—apparently with equal efficiency. ‘The man has always been found as soon as he became necessary.’ Presumably the man is also found as soon as he is unnecessary, of whom there are many at large in the world in these latter days. Engels can hardly have thought of the curious theological implications of the view that we all have somewhere our deputy ready to do our work when we are put out of action. It is indeed by no means overwhelmingly obvious that if Hegel and Marx had died in their infancy, the Hegelian philosophy would have been produced by someone called Schmidt to give a flavour to the three volumes of Capital, written by some one called Meyer: on the whole, the chances are against it.

Indeed, it may be doubted whether one can eliminate from history the possibility of mighty repercussions, springing from trivial and non-economic causes. There have been some who have suspended the world's destiny from the classical shapeliness of Cleopatra's nose. If Shakespeare is right, she was probably not the woman to allow a mere broken nose, had such befallen her, to stand between her and the fulfilment of her destiny. Without, however, invoking such a far-fetched and hackneyed example, it might be interesting to speculate on the consequences to this country of the virginity of Queen Elizabeth. Had she married and had issue, there would clearly have been no union of the Crowns in 1603; and, the opportunity missed, who knows when it might have recurred? Perhaps ‘ultimately’ it might have been all the same; but for some centuries many things in these islands might have been entirely different.

In the Marxian statement, the class struggle is so intimately a part of the Materialist Conception of History, that anything tending to undermine faith in the general doctrine must also weaken the plausibility of the view that the eternal ineluctable class struggle provides the whole content of history. The class war, however, is so much the entire substance of syndicalism later, that it may be wise to listen to the syndicalists before coming to a conclusion in the matter.¹ Two things only need be said here. The first is that, quite obviously, it is absurd to seek to show that there must be an economic occasion to every conflict in history. Perhaps ultimately the moral factor is a more potent divider of men than is the economic; men consciously engage in conflict, in defiance of the dictates of their economic interests. Mr. Penty, to whom the Guild Socialist movement owed so much in its early development, expressed the point unambiguously: ‘it is the moral issue,’ he observed, ‘that finally divides men.’² Wars based on religion or national feeling play a considerable part in the unrolling of events. Religion and patriotism, as has been seen, are real forces, much as Marx and Engels may deplore them as superfluous luxuries, in process of atrophy. It is significant of their short-sightedness in certain respects that they could, as far back as The German Ideology, declare that big industry in all countries had created a class ‘with which nationality is already dead.’³

The other preliminary point to be noted at this stage is that where the sentiment of the class war does exist to-day, it is very largely attributable to the teaching of Marx himself. The contrast between rich and poor goes back to Plato and the Book of Ecclesiasticus, and doubtless beyond. Marx's peculiar contribution was to discover that in the relationship of employer and employed, there were such seeds of antagonism that the whole of society, so long as there were employers and employed, could be nothing but a perpetual warfare between these two classes. Mr. Bertrand Russell's conclusion was that Marx by his teaching created the class war which he had prophesied⁴; and M. Gonnard, somewhat too ingeniously, finds in this a demonstration of the falsity of the central Marxian thesis, since the class struggle is thus due to an ideological cause, namely, ‘l'idée de la lutte de classes: De sorte que là où Marx semble avoir raison—il a tort.’⁵ This, if not exactly convincing, is at least subtle.

The Materialist Conception of History has thus, in the general Marxian presentation, provided us with the key to the understanding of the world's history: the doctrine of the class war shows us the mechanics of the theory. In the everlasting unfolding of the class war, in which the under-dog becomes the top-dog, only to beget a new under-dog, called for short the negation of the negation, we have reached (1848) the stage where the position of the Bourgeoisie, of the Capitalist, is challenged by the rising Proletariat. It becomes necessary, therefore, to consider the hidden springs of this antagonism, and to reveal how the worker is inevitably exploited by his employer. This leads to the Marxian theory of value, with its corollary or adjunct, the doctrine of surplus value, which most Marxians regard as more important than its parent doctrine.

Here we reach the core of Marx, and here Marx becomes rein wissenschaftlich. Also, because he becomes rein wissenschaftlich, he places his demonstration of the theory of value in the opening sections of the first volume of Capital: ‘die schwerst verständliche nicht nur, sondern auch die schwächste,’ not only the most difficult to understand, but also the weakest, as a sympathetic critic has very justly observed.¹ The discussion of the Marxian theory of value offers such a well-trampled field, and the perusal of Marx in his more characteristically Marxian moments is so emphatically as the climbing up a sandy way to the feet of the aged, that few readers will look for, and none will find here, a systematic survey of the salient features of Volume I of Capital, with digressive glances at later volumes. It should be sufficient to say just enough to recall what everyone is supposed to know, and to provide a basis for the few comments which it may be necessary to make here. Unfortunately, while there is little doubt as to what Marx said—for the printed word is there to testify—there seems to be increasing doubt among his intelligent followers as to whether Marx quite succeeded in saying what he meant, since it seems fairly obvious that he cannot have meant what he said. The present generation has profited from one excellent volume bearing the title What, Marx Really Meant, but there is still room for another on What Marx Really Meant, Actually. For the present, in summarising, we shall proceed on the assumption that in general Marx meant what he said; or, in other words, we shall meanwhile stifle those doubts as to the meaning of Volume I of Capital which naturally became vocal a generation later with the publication of Volume III.

With (it is hoped) no greater inaccuracy than is perhaps inevitable in a condensed summary for revision purposes, it may be said that in its broad shape the Marxian theory of value is merely the Ricardian theory, transplanted and in some ways made more rigid. The opening pages, with a courage that Ricardo lacked, attempted a rigorous proof, ultimately resting on the contention (or assumption) that ‘commodities’ are exclusively the products of labour, and that labour is (after the exclusion of other possibilities) the only element common to two commodities whose exchange is in question. Accordingly, the equation, expressing the ratio of exchange, tells us that labour, the common element, is present in equal quantities in the commodities exchanged. The proof, as such, is a mere burlesque, and involves such crude disregard for the ordinary laws of reasoning that, if indeed it were seriously intended, it affords striking evidence of that complete absence of self-criticism which in some ways distinguished Marx. ‘Sie sieht aus wie ein Beweis—ist aber keiner,’ says Wilbrandt with much restraint: ‘It looks like a proof, but in fact is none.’¹ In pursuance of this train of reasoning, we must, however, cease to think of labour as being the labour of a joiner or a mason; we must train ourselves to think in terms of that elusive abstraction, the element in labour which is common to all labour, or ‘human labour in the abstract’ whatever that may be. One further reservation is necessary at this stage: labour may be inefficient or unskilful, and a bungling worker, by expending more of his bungling labour or by working with, primitive tools, clearly does not thereby increase the value of his product. The labour that determines value is therefore the labour that is socially necessary in the conditions of production of the time.

But, apart from the question of normal efficiency, it may further be said that all labour is not effective. It is possible to labour and produce nothing that anybody wants. In such a case, the labour does not count as labour, whatever else it may count as. So, also, more labour than is socially necessary may be devoted to the production of a commodity, so that a glut arises. In that case, the labour is not to be counted as labour to the full extent. In short, though of course Marx does not so express it, labour is to be graded up or down until the right answer is obtained. Another example of manipulation occurs in the problem of how to deal with skilled labour; for skilled labour, in the Marxian world, is merely simple labour intensified or multiplied. The reduction of one to the other is made by a process which goes on behind the backs of the workers; but again the solution is quite clearly a glaring example of reasoning in a circle. If you want to find the appropriate multiplier which will put the work of a skilled engineer and a charwoman on an equality, you can only consult the market and find out what happens there. In order (apparently) to explain the situation in the market, you get from the market the multiplier which, when appropriately used, will give a satisfactory explanation of the behaviour of the market. Subject to these rather far-reaching embroideries, the value of a commodity is nothing more than the labour embodied in it.

But this Labour Theory of Value is for Marx but a stepping-stone towards unveiling the secret of capitalistic accumulation, of the exploitation to which the worker is subjected. This is made clear in the doctrine of surplus value, which is by way of being a pendent to the theory of value. Accumulation and exploitation are possible because there happens to be on the market for sale a commodity possessing quite peculiar properties. This is ‘labour-power,’ which on the Marxian view is quite distinct from labour. Labour-power, not labour, is the commodity which the capitalist purchases. Now labour-power also has its value. Ricardo has taught us, as he has taught Marx, what that is. The natural price to pay for labour is that which enables the worker to subsist and continue his race; in fact, it is the cost of production of labour. This is the value quite properly paid for labour-power; but when labour-power is used, it gives off more value than it cost. The worker may make enough for his maintenance (his necessary wage) in six hours; but he has sold himself with his labour-power, and he may be made to work ten or twelve hours each day. The difference (in this case, the work of four or six hours) represents the exploitation of the worker; it is unpaid labour appropriated by the capitalist.

It will be observed that the whole of the surplus value is derived from labour. Indeed, on the theory, as initially stated, it would appear to be derived from the individual worker; each individual worker would appear to be robbed by his own particular employer. This view is, however, modified by later elaborations of the analysis. That the surplus value comes from labour, and from labour alone, is reinforced by a distinction which is fundamental to the Marxian analysis. Capital is differentiated by Marx into constant and variable capital, corresponding broadly to the distinction between machinery and wages. But machinery yields no surplus value. It is of the essence of a machine that, in being used up, it transfers its value, neither more nor less, to the product. Whatever be thought of the validity of the argument, it has at least the advantage that it thrusts on labour the whole burden of providing surplus value. It should be noted for its significance later that industries will vary from each other according to their organic composition’; the ratio of constant to variable capital, low in some industries, will be high elsewhere.

Capital exists in order that surplus value may be created, and that it may be created more abundantly. There are two obvious ways of achieving this end. There is the possibility of prolonging the workingday (supplemented by reduction of meal-hours); there is equally the possibility of reducing the number of hours during which the worker must necessarily labour in order to secure his own maintenance. If, by further introduction of machinery or by improved technical processes, it is made possible for the worker to earn his subsistence in four hours instead of six, two additional hours will have been made available for the production of surplus value. Surplus value may further be increased by roping in the wives and the children; for the theory of the so-called Iron Law of Wages (whether as in Ricardo or in Lassalle) postulates that the family wage should be no more than sufficient for the maintenance of the family. Theoretically, therefore, the long-run result of employing the wives and the children is that their services are got for nothing, to the greater increase of surplus value.

Along these lines, then, capital seeks to satisfy its insatiable lust for increased surplus value. But here we encounter the first of the two snares which, quite apart from many other besetting difficulties, in the end brought the Marxian system, on this side at least, to irremediable confusion. The capitalist, thirsting for surplus value, introduces more and more machinery, in order thereby to cut down the time required for the worker's maintenance and so increase the number of hours available for the production of surplus value. But, as we have seen, constant capital yields no surplus value, which can be derived only from variable capital. There is something whimsical in the suggestion that, in order to increase surplus value, the capitalist 4hus cuts down that part of capital which yields surplus value, replacing it by that part of capital which can yield none. The contradiction is glaring, and Marx's explanation will resolve it only for those who can humbly say: Credo quia impossibile. Marx, according to Engels, was well versed in mathematics, though he never got the length of understanding the meaning and the limitations of an average. Nevertheless, he found an average a very present help in time of trouble.¹ It is unnecessary here to go into detail in the matter of the explanation offered. Briefly, it would seem to be that the surplus value is averaged out and distributed among the employers; and though doubtless the introduction of machinery reduces the amount of surplus value, nevertheless the employer who takes this course secures for himself a bigger whack of what is going.

The other ‘inherent contradiction’ has proved even more fatal to the solidity of the Marxian structure, and has proved the fruitful mother of a whole literature devoted to the alleged inconsistency between the first and the third Volumes of Capital. The difficulty here arises from Marx's assertion, imposed upon him by his propagandist tendencies, that all surplus value springs from labour alone, combined with the other fact stressed by him that the ‘organic composition’ (the ratio of constant to variable capital) varies enormously from one industry to another. From these two propositions, it should follow that an industry with a high percentage of variable capital should enjoy a higher rate of profit than one in which labour occupies a less important place. It obviously is not so. The capitalist looks for a more or less uniform rate of profit in all enterprises; he does not expect, and he certainly does not get, an abnormally high rate of profit in industries where there is much labour to be exploited, nor an abnormally low rate where machinery has stepped in to do the bulk of the work. The difficulty is frankly faced in Volume I of Capital; but the solution (though it appears in the Marx-Engels correspondence) was not given to the public until the appearance of the third volume, twenty-seven years later. The text of the explanation will be found by the enquiring reader in the ninth chapter of that volume; but for a comprehension of what is contained in this statement, he must rely on an inner illumination. Mr. Postgate's statement on the subject is admirable: surplus value, he says, ‘is shared out over the whole capitalist class, by a very complicated and esoteric process, which cannot be explained here’¹—nor anywhere else, he might almost have added, had he wished to make his delphic utterance somewhat less delphic. It would be well if Mr. Postgate's reticent example were followed by all subsequent Marxian commentators, as it shall certainly be followed here.

The one fact that does emerge from Marx's tangled attempt to reconcile the uniform rate of profit with his original labour theory of value is that commodities are now said to exchange at their ‘prices of production,’ which is equivalent to their cost-price plus the average profit—not at their ‘value.’ Indeed, it is only by the merest accident that commodities will exchange at their value; apart from a contingency which is so remote as to be negligible, commodities will exchange above or below their ‘values,’ the extent to which some sell above their ‘values’ being balanced by the corresponding extent to which others sell below their ‘values.’ And here, if the reader has not already done so, he may well pull himself together and ask what indeed is this thing that Marx calls value. For it would not occur to one reader in a thousand, coming to Capital with a virgin mind and a candid spirit, that in the first volume Marx was doing anything other than searching for an explanation of value which would tell us in what ratio commodities would exchange against each other, and that the Law of Value which he reached was in fact meant to explain prices. In the third volume we have clearly stated a distinction between prices and value, and we are told that commodities never (or so nearly never as to make no difference) exchange at their value, but at a price which is above or below their value. No wonder that the publication of the third volume called for a process of mental readjustment.

The mess in fact cannot be tidied up; nor is it worth while composing an Apology for Chaos. The labour theory of value is, however, so much the core of Marxism, viewed as a system with claims to be rein wissenschaftlich that a few general observations may perhaps be tolerated. In the first place, it is universally acknowledged that Marx's Theory of Value is that part of the system which has frayed most, and most irretrievably, with the passage of time. Having discussed the problem of value for well over two thousand years, it is probable that the human race will continue the discussion, so long as they retain the power of reason and of speech; and also (despite J. S. Mill) it is extremely improbable that they will ever be able to say that this ghost is effectively laid. But at least it can be said with some assurance that the type of theory which Marx took over from Ricardo is for ever dead beyond hope of resurrection. We have learned from the Austrians that value cannot be explained as a summation of past costs; value looks to the future and to use in the future. No doubt the Austrian way of thinking is also beginning to show threadbare patches; and the indications are that the next generation will manipulate ‘scales of preference,’ and slide along ‘curves of indifference.’ But nothing can ever bring back the way of thinking in which the Marxian theory of value is rooted; it was indeed part of Marx's misfortune that he should adopt for his purpose a theory already moribund.

A second consideration that cannot fail to bring an increasing sense of discomfort to a balanced reader of Marx and of orthodox Marxian literature alike is that so frequently words in ordinary use are employed with a special connotation, the reader generally being left to sense the difference. For Marx, the individual worker and the individual employer have no real existence except in so far as they represent the class to which they belong. He argues in terms of an abstract worker and an abstract employer, each of them as anæmic as that other Victorian ghost, the economic man. Nowhere is there any suggestion that work and management are alike human functions, that business may be a ticklish affair, in which money may be lost as well as made. In Marx's world, at least in the earlier phases of the exposition, an employer just cannot help making money: all he has to do is to employ workers, and if he doubles the number of his workers, he will double the flow of surplus value. And in the same way all workers are alike and interchangeable. Sometimes the essential ideas of a school are most clearly seen in the exposition of orthodox and uninspired disciples, if only because they are less intelligent and more unguarded. Kautsky somewhere accepts the view that any five adult farm labourers will do as much as any other five.¹ The argument, of course, holds not merely of farm labourers. Just as the employers automatically decant surplus value in proportion to the number of workers employed, so workers also, as indistinguishable as a flock of sheep, automatically give off surplus value. There is no skill, no management, no competence anywhere.

The most glaring and pervasive distortion of an everyday term is of course with regard to ‘Capital’ itself, the most crucial word in the whole discussion. In Marx, as indeed throughout Marxian literature, capital has a meaning to which the whole world, outside Marxian colleges, is a complete stranger. For Marx, it is not every one who owns wealth who is a capitalist; nor is he necessarily a capitalist who, possessing the means of production, uses these to accumulate gain. A capitalist is one who, being himself idle, lives entirely on surplus value extracted from workers in his employment. If, by one of the devices familiar in the pages of Hans Andersen and Grimm, an industrious apprentice could invent a machine capable of doing all the work of Lancashire, then if only he could work it himself, he might corner the cotton of the world and hold humanity to ransom, but he would apparently leave the Marxian court with clean hands, so far as surplus value is concerned. The beginning of evil is in a contract of employment. The point could be illustrated from Marx himself, but again it may be more instructive to see it in the broad stream of the Marxian tradition. Thus the faithful Kautsky, before he became Kautsky the Renegade, defines capital as ‘value that breeds surplusvalue.’¹ Even more illuminating is Kautsky in a later passage drawn from the same source:

The employer of wage workers only becomes a capitalist when the mass of surplus-value created by them is large enough to assure him a comfortable income and to increase his wealth, without his being obliged to put his own shoulder to the wheel.²

Mr. Emile Burns expresses the same view when he remarks that

Property (whatever the physical form) only becomes capital in the economic sense when it is used to produce surplus value; that is, when it is used to employ workers, who in the course of producing things also produce surplus value.³

So also with regard to smaller people, who are to be allowed to escape the damnation of being capitalists:

It does not make any difference whether in fact he employs one or two men; the point is that he works, and must work, because he cannot live on the labour of the few men he is able to employ.⁴

The implications here are curious: if surplus value is a species of theft, apparently it becomes reprehensible only if enough is taken to put the robber at his ease; if he is obliged to eke out his plunder by doing some work of his own, he escapes condemnation, apparently under the happy dispensation of de minimis. For the present, however, we are concerned with the fact that in the Marxian tradition, capital is not capital unless it enables the owner to live entirely on surplus value, and unless in fact he does live in idleness on his surplus value.⁵

One last point is of interest in visualising the Marxian world which is governed by the Marxian Law of Value. It is a world in which all workers are engaged in the manufacture of ‘commodities’—‘vendible commodities/ to use the offending phrase in which Adam Smith sought the test of ‘productive labour.’ Now it is a long time since all labour was embodied in ‘vendible commodities,’ and for good or evil we are moving to a position in which ‘services’ bulk more and more largely in what labour does. It is indeed a mark of advancing society. Mr. Colin Clark has familiarised us with the increasing importance of tertiary, as against primary and secondary industry. Heaven forbid that anyone to-day should entangle himself in the old quagmire which concerns itself with the distinction between productive and unproductive labour; but obviously the armies of administration (of all kinds), of transport, of entertainment—to go no further—do not fit in with a Marxian world where the production of commodities with a view to sale exhausts the whole content of economic life. It would be difficult, for instance, for the Musicians’ Union to express their grievances and claims within the framework of Marxian ideology.

The Marxian world, in short, is a wholly abstract, artificial and unreal construction, entirely distinct from that in which any of us have pursued our economic activities. Doubtless, in all sciences, it is a common procedure to make simplifying assumptions, and from the original hypothesis to make a gradual approach to reality—even if some of us may refuse to contemplate a world where ‘the only consumable good is a single species of economic cake.’ The Marxian world is just as unreal as this example drawn from unimpeachable economic orthodoxy. The objection to the Marxian assumptions is not that they are assumptions, not that they represent a departure from reality; but that their author never makes it clear that they are abstractions. Marx writes throughout as if he were concerned with reality: he never warns his readers that, as a first step and in order to simplify his reasoning, he is meanwhile arguing on certain not wholly real assumptions and hypotheses. The reader never knows at any moment whether he is concerned with abstraction or reality; and it is fairly clear that Marx himself neither knew nor cared. Indeed it took the world at large almost two generations to realise that just here perhaps lies the greatest obstacle to a comprehension of Marx.

For indeed it becomes ever increasingly clear that the real issue on this, the central element of Marxian doctrine, is not whether he succeeded in ‘establishing his case,’ but rather, what was the case he was trying to establish. The unanswerable, if not very satisfactory, reply to such criticisms of Marx as are contained, for instance, in the classical exposition of Böhm-Bawerk, or more recently in that by Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, is that while the critic may be very successfully directing his artillery against something that Marx (quite obviously) said, in fact (whether he said it or not) Marx meant something entirely different. This retort is indeed almost a matter of course from the Marxian side. Thus Dr. Lindsay—and in this respect he is not unique—admits that ‘no one can read and master these refutations without agreeing that they are unanswerable on the assumption that they describe correctly the question that Marx was trying to answer and Marx's answer to it.’¹ Instead of repeating these misdirected criticisms, it may be more instructive to interrogate a few of the more intelligent admirers of Marx, and ascertain, if possible, what they make of it all; in particular, arising out of the ‘apparent discrepancy’ between the first and third Volume (to use the discreet phraseology of Whitehall), what they think Marx meant by the labour theory of value; and, to particularise still further, what they think he meant by ‘value.’ In view of the space already squandered on Marx, only a few witnesses may be cited.

Because he is rather in line with the argument developed in the preceding paragraphs, Croce may be taken first. He points out that it is far from easy to understand the exact nature of the investigation which Marx carried out. And he adds (which is not wholly surprising) that ‘it does not appear that the author himself always realised fully the peculiar character of his investigation.’² Capital, we are told, is an abstract investigation, concerned with ‘an ideal and formal society, deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred as actual facts in the course of history.’³ It would be difficult to express more emphatically the view that Capital has as much relation to actuality as would be possessed by a discussion of the application of the Pareto line to the Kingdom of Heaven. Lastly, not to linger too long with Croce, it may be instructive to note the test he applied in assessing the Marxian theory of value. He asked himself, he says: ‘Under what conditions and assumptions is Marx's theory thinkable?’ It is Croce who italicises the last word.

Loria is perhaps scarcely a serious critic; yet, as the writer who has excelled all others in the extravagance of his eulogies of Capital, he ought to be heard. For him Capital ‘is a masterpiece wherein all is great, all alike incomparable and wonderful’—and much more. Yet to Loria the third Volume of Capital was a death-blow to the system, and the consciousness that it would prove to be so explains Marx's failure to complete Capital in his lifetime: ‘Need we wonder that his hand trembled, that his spirit quailed, before the inexorable act of destruction?’⁴ This is somewhat too melodramatic; Marx's failure to complete Capital is indeed something of a problem, but it is more likely that the explanation was rooted in his liver. For the present purpose, however, we are concerned to note that the third volume forces Loria to the view that Marx's ‘fundamental economic theory is essentially vitiated and sophisticated, and that he is himself responsible for reducing it to hopeless absurdity.’⁵

Let us cast the net somewhat wider. Professor Wilbrandt, in his very sensitive appreciation of Karl Marx, offers us two points which are of some interest towards an appreciation of what Marx's admirers think that Marx really meant. The first is a rather naive admission that the first Volume (1867) was bound to be misunderstood, until such time as the third appeared.¹ In the course of these twenty-seven years Marx himself died, and as there are some who would place on Engels a not inconsiderable share of the responsibility for the third Volume, it might be a matter for consideration whether Marx himself ever had an opportunity of understanding Volume I—which, of course, is more or less what Croce says. In fact, however, it was not the publication of the third Volume which made possible a comprehension of the first: it would be truer to say that the publication of the third Volume imposed, post-haste, a revision of the orthodox interpretation of the first Volume, if a show of consistency was to be maintained.

The other significant contribution made by Wilbrandt towards a comprehension of Marx is, at the first blush, rather surprising. In opposition to the view that Capital represents an analysis of the workings of an abstract capitalism, not of any particular capitalistic State, but of a State which corresponds to the concept of pure capitalism as ideally conceived, Wilbrandt would have us believe that Marx, in writing the first volume, had in mind pre-capitalistic mediaeval conditions; and in this consideration alone do we find justification for Marx.² It is not the usual view; but it has at least this in common with the totally opposed conception, that it makes it clear that whatever Marx may have been talking about, it was certainly not this world that we know here and now.

We are not without guides in our own country. On the whole, probably Dr. Lindsay sheds as much darkness as light on the questions he illumines. He has learned from Croce that the capitalism which Marx is analysing does not exist, since no society is completely capitalistic. He outlines a possible view, and adds: ‘If this is really the kernel of Marx's doctrine...,’ but somehow there is no assurance in his voice that it is.³ He realises that if Marx is to escape the charge of being an incapable bungler, it must be allowed that he is talking of economic value in two senses,’ firstly, in the sense of price, and secondly in a peculiar sense of his own.’⁴ But we are still left very much in the dark as to the nature of that peculiarly Marxian value, which flits back from the third Volume to illumine the dark places in the first Volume of Capital—that value described by Loria as a ‘fantastical or transcendental value’ which neither possessed nor could possess any relationship to facts.¹ Dr. Lindsay at least realises that some definition of the elusive ‘value’ is required, and he suggests that ‘intrinsic exchange value is for Marx the value which a commodity would have in a properly organised society where labour was performing its proper function.’² Apart from legitimate doubts as to where such a view could be founded in Marx, it will be observed that we are very properly left to guess for ourselves what is a properly organised society, and when labour is performing its proper function—two very sizable hares to start in one sentence.

It is to Mr. Cole that we owe the alluring and confident title: What Marx Really Meant. On the immediate question, he argues—and rightly, if regard is to be had to the third Volume—that the Marxian theory of value is somewhat unique in not being a theory of prices; indeed, as he adds, it is doubtful whether in the end it has any point of contact at all with prices.³ As to the elusive Marxian ‘value,’ we are told that in Marx's writings, ‘value’ came to mean what commodities were really worth in consequence of the amounts of labour incorporated in them, as something quite distinct from the prices which they actually fetched, or tended to fetch, in the market.’⁴ But the identity of value and embodied labour was surely something that Marx thought he had proved (and which therefore required proof) in the opening pages of Capital. It is true that Croce also says that Marx assumed the equivalence of value and labour. If the identity of value and labour is a matter of definition and assumption, then at least we know the meaning Marx attaches to ‘value’; but in that case the pretended proof in the opening chapter is mere eye-wash; since one states, but does not prove, definitions. Also in that case it is to be feared that the whole of Capital, resting on an arbitrary definition which implies the conclusion to be reached, is an example of wandering vainly in a circle, even more glaring than the most critical critics had thought possible. If, on the other hand, the identity of value and labour is a matter of proof and not of definition, we are still left to grope for the meaning Marx attaches to ‘value.’

The theory to which Mr. Cole guides us is that ‘the Marxian theory of value is a theory, not of prices, but of the social distribution of the resources of production.’⁵ If we must read into Marx something that is not very obviously there, if (as with Croce) our approach is to be determined by asking under what conditions and assumptions Marx's theory is ‘thinkable,’ then this is as good a theory as any other: in fact it is better than most. The difficulty which Mr. Cole quite obviously and naturally feels is that in the course of all these thousands of pages, Marx himself said so little in support of what Marx really meant. ‘Why,’ Mr. Cole asks, ‘why does Marx, in the first Volume of Das Kapital, so often speak as if commodities did tend to sell at their values, whereas such a view is plainly inconsistent with his case, and he makes it abundantly clear later on in his book that they do not?’¹ It is to be hoped that there is a better answer than Mr. Cole suggests. If throughout Volume I Marx speaks quite generally as if commodities tended to sell at their values, the plain man would suggest that it was probably because this idea was most frequently in Marx's mind. Marx was almost criminally careless in neglecting to define his terms, and the natural result of such carelessness is that words jostle about in the mind, each trailing half a dozen potential meanings, with consequent confusion of thought. With just a touch of scorn, Croce speaks of Marx as having ‘despised and neglected all such preliminary and exact explanations as might have made his task plain.’² It is significant, in connection with Mr. Cole's question, that Engels, playing the part of official interpreter, also speaks as if the opening chapters of Capital provided a guide to the price-tickets in Bond Street. Anti-Dühring is for the most part a most dreadful book—fit only to be one of six books given to Hitler on a desert island—yet it has its uses as an official summary of Marxism as then understood. It is instructive to ponder what Engels implies when he speaks of ‘the law of value of modern bourgeois economics, according to which the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in it.’³

We shall presently, in a subsequent chapter, hear Sorel at some length on Marx and the essence of Marx; but perhaps he may be allowed a somewhat premature appearance on the issue now before us. Sorel is quite obviously flummoxed by the difficulty which must confront all intelligent Marxians: seeing that Marx so clearly cannot have meant what he said, why on earth did he so signally fail to say what he meant? Having reduced the most of Marx to ‘mythical images’ in the Sorelian sense, the objection that apparently Marx did not himself realise that he was a purveyor of myths is met in a rather beautiful and ingenuous phrase: ‘C'est qu'il était fort passionné et que, maintes fois, la passion l'a empêché de reconnaïtre des réalités tres claires.’⁴

Other witnesses must be allowed an even shorter time in which to testify. There is Mr. Beer, who in all this part of Marx finds political and social slogans rather than economic truths.¹ The question of what Marx really meant is here disposed of somewhat too unblushingly. Marx, it is suggested, gives us slogans; he gives us Sorelian myths; and when you come to slogans and myths, the question of meaning, the question of truth fades into the background. It does not greatly matter what Marx meant, or indeed whether he meant anything: he produced half a dozen excellent battle cries. With more ‘spirituality,’ but substantially on the same lines, Mrs. Joan Robinson recalls an observation of Voltaire to the effect that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft, provided they are simultaneously given a sufficiency of arsenic. The sheep, it is suggested, are the complacent apologists of capitalism: for the rest ‘Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.’²

This anthology, drawn from the friends and admirers of Marx, becomes tedious; but the cloud of witnesses may yield a profitable lesson, not so easily to be learned otherwise. To witness Böhm-Bawerk or Mr. Joseph carving up Marx is but a pedestrian pleasure; for these are but pedestrian writers, who are so pedestrian as to clutch at the plain meaning of words, not realising that what Marx really meant has no necessary connection with what Marx undeniably said. To witness Marx surrounded by his friends is, however, a joy of an entirely different order. For it is fairly clear that none of them really knows what Marx really meant; they are even in considerable doubt as to what he was talking about; there are hints that Marx himself did not know what he was doing. In particular, there is no one to tell us what Marx thought he meant by ‘value.’ And indeed, what all these conjectures reveal is somewhat astounding, and, one would like to think, unique. Capital is, in one sense, a three-volume treatise, expounding a theory of value and its manifold applications. Yet Marx never condescends to say what he means by ‘value,’ which accordingly is what anyone cares to make it as he follows the unfolding scroll from 1867 to 1894. Nor does anyone know to what world all this applies. Is it to the world in which Marx wrote? Or to an abstract, ‘pure,’ capitalist world existing ideally in the imagination, and nowhere else? Or (odd as the suggestion may appear) was Marx (probably unconsciously) thinking in terms of mediaeval conditions? No one knows. Are we concerned with Wissenschaft, slogans, myths, or incantations? Marx, it has been said, was a prophet—albeit a prophet whose ambitions lay in another direction—and perhaps this suggestion provides the best approach. One does not apply to Jeremiah and Ezekiel the tests to which less inspired men are subjected. Perhaps the mistake the world and most of the critics have made is just that they have not sufficiently regarded Marx as a prophet—a man above logic, uttering cryptic and incomprehensible words, which every man may interpret as he chooses.’¹

No apology need be made for attaching the foregoing somewhat general discussion to the consideration of the Marxian Theory of Value and of surplus value. For these, thin as they may have worn, are the core of Marxism as a ‘system.’ Engels indeed finds in the Materialist Conception of History and in the doctrine of surplus value the whole of Marx and the whole of socialism. The remaining parts of Marx must be dealt with much more summarily. Firstly, there are the various ‘prophecies,’ the indications of the path capitalism would follow until the birth of the new order. We left the capitalist grasping in every direction for increased surplus value—rather short-sightedly introducing machinery with this end in view. Various results follow. There is thus created the Industrial Reserve Army, a force maintained to do the bidding of capitalism when occasion arises. With this there is necessarily the disappearance of all the middle classes, thrust down into the proletariat, sunk in ever-increasing misery and degradation. There is the Law—or Principle, or Prophecy or whatever it may be called—of the Concentration of Capital: ever fewer and bigger capitalists at one end with an increasing mass of misery at the other, until finally the expropriators are expropriated, and a new order begins. That the spoilers will one day be despoiled is, of course, in a sense, the common substance of all prophecy: in the words of an earlier Hebrew seer, the far-off day is one in which it can be said that ‘the extortioner is at an end, the spoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.’

It was the dilatoriness of the world in fulfilling the Marxian prophecies that later led to ‘Revisionism.’ Probably Marx is on strongest grounds as a specific prophet in regard to the Industrial Reserve Army. No doubt the modern problem of mass unemployment does not quite fit into the Marxian framework of prophecy: like a thorough-going pessimist, Marx looked forward to an uninterrupted process of continual pejoration. Yet, without doubt, unemployment, by whatever name it is called, is the greatest sore in our present social structure, and it is at our peril that we fail to find a remedy. In the matter of the concentration of capital, a half-hearted claim may be advanced on behalf of Marx. Concentration there clearly has been; but it has been primarily concentration of management. It is doubtful whether there has been any significant concentration of possession; and in any case, there has been simultaneously considerable diffusion of wealth. The small owner, cherishing a tendency to a ‘bourgeois’ frame of mind, abounds. On the disappearance of the middle classes, the prophecies of Marx have been entirely wide of the mark. Society has, with admirable stubbornness, refused to segregate itself into two extreme camps.

The doctrine of the increasing degradation and misery of the working classes is of some interest in Marxian exegesis, because apparently it is susceptible of four, if not five, different interpretations. Not every dogma is so considerate of tender consciences. As enunciated in The Communist Manifesto—whatever arguments may subsequently have been advanced to the contrary—it is clear that we are concerned with literal and absolutely increasing misery:

The modern worker, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks ever deeper beneath the social conditions of his own class. The labourer becomes the pauper, and pauperism increases even more rapidly than population and wealth.¹

Looking round, after consulting our grandparents, it is quite obvious that the poor have not become poorer since 1848; there has not been ‘increasing misery.’ With one way of dodging the whole question, we are already familiar. ‘When Marx talked of increasing misery,’ we are told by one authority, ‘he was talking of what would be the outcome of unmodified capitalism.’ Now capitalism, it is argued, has never existed by itself, and accordingly the historical facts can neither confirm nor refute the accuracy of Marx's diagnosis. He was merely concerned with the ‘logical effect of a hypothetical capitalism on wages.’ This, of course, is merely to transfer Marx to the fairyland of hypothetical capitalism in which no one else is specially interested.² But, apart from the literal interpretation, which alone fits The Communist Manifesto (and Engels), and Dr. Lindsay's escape to unreality, there remains a choice of three other possible interpretations. Firstly, the increasing misery may be ‘relative’ and not absolute. The working classes may possibly have improved their position, but not in proportion to the increased wealth of the community as a whole. This doctrine has kinship with Rodbertus's ‘Diminishing Wage Share.’ If the rate of progress made by the working classes is less favourable than that made by their more fortunate betters, then relatively (so it might be argued) their position may be said to be one of increasing misery. It is doubtful whether even this case can be established, especially in the light of the level of taxation we now enjoy. Secondly, there is the psychological explanation of ‘misery,’ which Muckle, for instance, considers the only defensible interpretation.¹ On this view, quite irrespective of wages, and whether they be high or low, capitalism imposes degradation, springing from dependence and subjection. In the Gotha programme, the psychological theory alone appears:

In present-day society, the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the resulting dependence of the working class is the cause of misery and servitude in all its forms.²

Later, in Guild Socialism, this appears as the ‘beastliness’ of the wage system and of wage-slavery; the mere fact of receiving wages makes men increasingly and acutely unhappy.

But there is still a further interpretation of the doctrine of ‘increasing misery,’ which may perhaps be described as the theory of ‘delayed action.’ This theory to a certain extent holds out a hand towards Lenin. It will be found expounded in the pages of Mr. Cole. Marx, he holds, foresaw the advent of the age of economic imperialism.³ It is only as the era of wars of colonial conquest and of imperial rivalries is reached, that the capitalist system turns

by an inherent tendency which it cannot escape, into a fetter upon the effective use of the available resources. At this stage, but not until this stage has been reached, Marx holds that the capitalist system involves, by virtue of its essential nature, a fall in the working-class standard of life.⁴

Putting it otherwise, so long as capitalism continued to be a developing system, a rise in working-class standards would be possible; but with capitalism in difficulties, the situation would be otherwise, and workingclass standards would be forced down. ‘This interpretation alone,’ says Mr. Cole, ‘is consistent both with what Marx said and with the subsequent evolution of capitalism.’⁵ It is not every prophet whose prophecies are so indulgently reinterpreted in the light of subsequent evolution. According to Mr. Cole, the change-over took place in this country in the first decade of the twentieth century; in actual fact, it is fairly clear that Marx, writing in 1848 (however he may have modified his views later), was satisfied that capitalism was already in extreme difficulties, and that the axe had been laid to the root of the tree. The doctrine of increasing misery (of immiserization, to use Professor Schumpeter's convenient but barbarous translation) has doubtless played a larger part in continental controversy than with us; it is, however, of some interest here as illustrating the latitude of interpretation consistent with orthodoxy. You may side-track the whole doctrine to an abstract capitalism that never was on land or sea; or you may declare yourself an adherent of the literal, the relative, the psychological, or the ‘delayed-action’ school of thought.

In the foregoing pages, little has been said, except by way of implication, regarding the Marxian view of the State, the nature of the coming revolution, or of what may be thereafter. On the nature of the State, there are innumerable passages in Marx and Engels alike, enabling the position to be stated with precision and clarity. On the other hand, on the inevitable revolution, still more on the structure of society and the working of the machine thereafter, Marx is extremely reticent; and reliance must therefore be placed on gleanings from relatively few passages which have in consequence received an eminence which in themselves they hardly merit.

The Marxian view of the State, as it now exists, is, in a sense, a corollary of the Materialist Conception of History. The State is ‘nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.’¹ The words may vary, but the idea remains constant: the State is a class organisation, representing the interests and reflecting the ideas of the dominant class. Marx's description of the July Monarchy in France may have specific reference to one State, but the general conception is common to all: it was ‘nothing other than a joint stock company for the exploitation of French national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among ministers, Chambers, 140,000 voters and their adherents.’² Moreover, being the expression of the dominance of a class, and therefore part of the machinery of the class struggle, the essence of State power lies in its ‘purely repressive character.’ More tersely, if we may invite Engels to his customary role of singing in unison: ‘The State is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another.’³ With the reiterated assertion that the State is a class organisation, it is scarcely too much to say that the political philosophy of Marx begins and ends.

In turning to the future, Marx was designedly vague. The expropriators are in due course to be expropriated; but by what process this will be accomplished, just precisely what will be the situation on the morrow of the revolution, are questions to which Marx gives no limpid answers; nor does he regard it as his function to give detailed prescriptions in such matters. Yet on one point he is clear. When the expropriators are expropriated, there will still for a time be need of a State, even if not of the old State machine which is contaminated in too many respects by virtue of its old associations. The French Commune served Marx and Engels alike as an interesting object-lesson in the technique of revolution, and it is interesting to note Engels’ words (written in 1891): ‘The Commune was compelled to recognise from the outset that the working class, once come to power, could not carry on business with the old State machine.’¹ Doubtless the ultimate purpose of the revolution will be the abolition of all classes, but this end will not be attained forthwith. The new organisation—State, call it what you will—will still be a class organisation, but now the dominant class whose interests it will represent will be the proletariat. The locus classicus for this is contained in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.²

This is the somewhat too famous and too frequently misunderstood ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ The present State with all its class machinery will be replaced by a State which will be no less a class organisation, making no claims to comprehensiveness or to impartiality. The difference between the present bourgeois State and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is that the State we know aims at the maintenance of class distinctions and its own permanence, resting on these distinctions; whereas the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ by aiming at the abolition of all classes, prepares the way for its own extinction.

For in this matter the Engels-Marx theory is beautifully logical, as a theory, however badly it may fit the facts of future revolutions. For if the State, by its very essence, is the expression of the interests of a class, it follows that with the total, final and irrevocable abolition of classes, the State must also disappear. The abolition of classes implies the abolition of the State; and in a society where there are no classes, there can be no State. Unfortunately, the passages in which this view is most clearly expressed derive from Engels rather than from Marx—not that it matters in the case of these twin souls. The most familiar is a passage from Anti-Dühring, from which a few sentences must almost inevitably be quoted, if only because of the celebrity of the culminating phrase.

When ultimately it (the State) becomes really representative of society as a whole, it makes itself superfluous. As soon as there is no longer any class of society to be held in subjection... there is nothing more to be repressed which would make a special repressive force, a State, necessary, The first act in which the State really comes forward as the representative of society as a whole... is at the same time its last independent act as a State. The interference of the State power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The State is not’ abolished,’ it withers away.¹

No less emphatic, but perhaps even more contemptuous, is a somewhat less well-known passage from The Origin of the Family:

We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The State inevitably falls with them. The society which organises production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole State machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.²

Such is the ‘withering away of the State,’ the culminating far-distant point to which Marxian politics tends.³ Saint-Simon also, it will be recalled, played with this same idea of replacing government by administration; yet it is the merest will-o'-the-wisp. It is not so easy to ‘take things out of politics.’ Even when matters have been reduced to a state of ‘Byzantine immobility,’ it is possible for men to wrangle over ‘administration’—indeed it is impossible that they should not do so. Easy enough to say that we shall take the Unemployment Assistance Board out of politics and run it as a business show without a Minister to speak of; but that does not prevent the most violent storms from raging in Parliament and in the country, as soon as the unfortunate Board formulates its first Means Test. But the interesting—indeed the rather fascinating—point is that we are here back in a state of Godwinian anarchy, with ‘free associations of producers’ jostling each other in the void.

One glimpse of the future, indeed, takes us straight into a Fourieresque Utopia. It will be recalled that the remote beginnings of separation into classes are attributed in Marxian theory to division of labour. The Marxians, in their curious way, are nothing if not logical, according to their lights. Just as the State, on the Marxian definition, must ‘wither away’ when classes are no more; so also, if division of labour is the ultimate cause of the existence of classes, it too must be for ever scotched to prevent the re-emergence of classes. In a communist world, everyone must do everything. This antipathy to division of labour appears in Capital; more specifically, and at greater length, it gives a rosy glow to the concluding pages of Anti-Dühring. The former division of labour, it is said, must disappear. Productive labour in the new golden age will become a means to the emancipation of men

by giving each individual the opportunity to develop and exercise all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions; in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of a burden.¹

That each individual should have the opportunity of developing all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions, is a dream which will cheer the vision only of the simple-minded, oblivious of the restrictions imposed by the narrow limits of human life. For life is a series of acts of choice, and each choice is at the same time a renunciation and an act of abdication.

Something unborn within me dies
     With each new day;
And every night before me lies
     A straiter way.

Even the inhabitant of Engels’ future fairyland will have to decide sooner or later whether he wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury or First Sea Lord, whether he should seek to excel as a violinist or as a pugilist, whether he should elect to know all about Chinese literature or about the hidden pages in the life of the mackerel. The passage in The German Ideology is even more diverting in revealing the ultimate confusion which would prevail in a world which sets out to realise the ideals of Marxian confusion:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing to-day and another to-morrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.²

A short week-end on a farm might have convinced Marx that the cattle themselves might have some objection to being reared in this casual manner, in the evening. On the more general issue it is odd that what is usually regarded as the most authoritarian school of socialism should thus culminate in anarchy; that the writers who were most openly contemptuous of Utopias should lead us to a Utopia to which even Fourier could scarcely add any finishing touches.

That this chapter has assumed more ample dimensions than was designed may perhaps be excused on the ground of the central position which Marx occupies in determining the later development of socialism, and the quite unique influence which he has exercised on thought and on the march of events. Yet Marx remains an abiding and inscrutable riddle. His system has worn thin to the point of being threadbare; his most devoted followers show little compunction in throwing most of him overboard, provided they can make a pretence of hanging on to something of the Marxian legacy. Probably the most significant and enduring portion of Marx is contained in the Materialist Conception of History; for here there is something which (especially if restated sensibly as by Mr. Cole) does at least provide an interesting technique in historical interpretation. It is unfortunate that with it he linked up the doctrine of the class struggle, which has had a narrowing and sterilising effect on the subsequent development of socialism. Next to this, the most significant portion of Marx to-day is probably to be found in that aspect which links up with Lenin, as in the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and the technique of revolution. This is not a question of Wissenschaft; but at least we here see Marx as a power and an influence. On the other hand, the whole theory of value (so far as comprehensible) is dead beyond the power of recovery, and none so poor as do it reverence; and with it, the doctrine of surplus-value must also go, for it is in essence an inference from the theory of value. There is nothing so silly as the fairly common affectation that, though the theory of value may be sacrificed as bad economics and as unessential, the doctrine of surplus-value nevertheless may be left intact. It did not require a Karl Marx to come from Trier to the British Museum to prove to us that the poor have, more often than not, had a rough deal in history. If this is what is meant by retaining the doctrine of surplus-value, it clearly does not require ‘scientific’ proof; moreover this is not what the doctrine of surplus-value teaches us. Its essence lies in the contention that whenever one person is employed and paid wages by another, he is necessarily defrauded—a proposition not so easily swallowed. So likewise, the ‘specific’ prophecies for the most part have refused to be fulfilled, as indeed is sufficiently evidenced by the development of Revisionism which was provoked into existence by the failure of the world to follow the lines forecast in Marxian prophecy. On the whole, then, little of Marx is left; and what does endure is not strictly of the essence of the Marxian system.

One other point is of some interest. It has been seen that the best authorities seem to be agreed that Marx was concerned with the study of an abstract world, which never has existed or could exist, of a hypothetical capitalism,’ in Dr. Lindsay's phrase. Now if this is so, the success of Marx rests on his having been completely misunderstood. We have seen Professor Wilbrandt underline the same point from a different angle. There was, in his view, no possibility of understanding the first Volume of Capital (1867) until the appearance of the third in 1894. Yet in these years the bases of Marx's influence were laid. It is difficult to recall any other similar case where a book has been influential largely because it has been misunderstood.

Nor can it reasonably be said that Marx's influence rests on his captivating style. Parts of Volume I of Capital have a certain quality of fire; but in the main he is a villainous writer, and he is no better in German than in English. Anyone who doubts may try his teeth in the first fifteen pages of Capital. Or take such a sentence as this; ‘The relation of the productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the occupation or activity of the individuals.’ This is not a specially bad sentence; indeed there are far worse sentences in the page that precedes and that which follows; but, being longer, they are not so apt for quotation. But can anyone say that a dog's breakfast of sentences like that quoted is the stuff to fire the proletariat to action?

Nor was Marx, on the record of his life, the kind of man who would be expected to make an appeal to the workers of the world. It may be doubted whether he met or knew any honest-to-God British or German workers, or would have known how to deal with them, or speak to them, if he had. His natural associates were intellectual revolutionary exiles and international intriguers—a very different type of person from the worker to whom he thought he was appealing. Nor indeed can it be said that Marx had any real knowledge of the world he was so active in analysing. He did not, with a curious eye and a question on his lips, haunt places where men work. Doubtless he knew a vast deal, but it was derived from blue-books, already fading history when he read them. Wilbrandt has an unintentionally illuminating phrase on this matter. Speaking of the relationship of Marx and Engels, he says: Engels ist sein Auge für die Wirklichkeit—it was Engels who was his ‘eye for reality.’¹ It is said in high commendation of Engels: in fact it reveals the nakedness of Marx. For Reality is precisely the thing that none of us can see through the eyes of another. Marx spent much of his life chewing his intellectual cud, with his back firmly planted towards the window.

Yet despite his prosy and interminable dullness, despite the confusions and inherent contradictions of his theories, despite his manifold defects in temperament and disposition, rendering him the least fitted of men to be a hero of the people, the indubitable fact remains that Marx has proved the most influential figure of the nineteenth century. Perhaps some approach to an explanation of this mystery may be found in the fact that the Marxian tradition and influence has developed along two very different lines. In this country at least, Marx has tended to become in the main the cult of a somewhat anæmic intelligentsia who, like Marx himself, prefer to see reality through the eyes of another. In this rarefied atmosphere, it is possible to discuss which of five possible interpretations should be placed on the doctrine of ‘increasing misery’; or just how a theory devised for a hypothetical capitalism may be applied to a capitalism which is not so hypothetical. But beyond this, there are those who believe in Marx without having read him—perhaps who believe in Marx just because they have not read him. It is probably a safe surmise that to-day the third Volume of Capital is even less read than that single chapter which has conferred immortality on the prophet Obadiah, and when read, is read with as little comprehension. Just as, according to some and to judge from their practice, a good Christian need not read his Bible, so a good Marxian does not need to read his Marx: he knows it is there. Thus, for the great body of the faithful, Marx has become the inspired author of a body of Sorelian myths, which sum up, and fit in with, their general view of life, which clarify and illumine their daily strivings, which rationalise and crystallise their instincts. And these people, quite rightly, are not concerned with the metaphysical refinements of a theory of value. They accept the fact of ‘exploitation’ which has been proved by Marx, whom the doubter can read if he can and if he so chooses—by Marx who had read so many books that the list of his references runs to pages and pages of close type. Moreover ‘increasing misery’ means ‘increasing misery,’ neither more nor less; and in a world where we all feel so much less fortunate than we think we ought to be, it is comforting to be told that we are right, and to know who is responsible for our unhappiness. This is what Marx did, and here lies the secret of his influence. To consider whether Marx was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; to dredge Volumes I and III of Capital for inconsistencies or logical flaws, to ‘refute’ the Marxian system is, in the last resort, sheer waste of time; for when we consort with Marx we are no longer in the world of reason or logic. He saw visions—clear visions of the passing of all things, much more nebulous visions of how all things may be made new. And his visions, or some of them, awoke a responsive chord in the hearts of many men. Perhaps the last word may be allowed to Professor Wilbrandt: ‘Das ganze System ist Darstellung, nicht Beweis.’¹ The Marxian system, if we may translate not over accurately, is pictorial representation, not proof. He gives us a vision; and visions soar above logic.

NOTE ON VALUE.

Without allowing one's self to be beguiled into the awful morass of the Theory of Value, this at least may be said in partial illumination of Marx's later desire to differentiate between Value and Price. No one who has ever seen behind the scenes of a Price Regulation Committee will ever again lecture with a light heart on the Marshallian, or any other theory of Value. Prices to-day are to a large extent fixed somewhat arbitrarily within a moderately wide range. The theoretical reason for this is that most commodities are virtually joint products, inasmuch as no industrial unit produces one article only, or one line only of a given article. This means that ‘cost of production’ tends to be indeterminate. There are always common costs, ‘overheads,’ the distribution of which is largely a matter of policy. If a firm wishes to push a line, it will relieve it of most of its share of overhead costs; if elsewhere the ‘traffic’ will bear more, it will be called upon to bear more than its share. In addition, the retail end may add on a flat rate of 33.33 per cent, or 50 per cent., irrespective of the specific cost of marketing the commodity in question, thereafter smoothing out the answer to the nearest convenient round figure, which may be 2s. 11¾d. With this, there is the whole problem of price-differences, determined in part by tradition, and in part by what the public wants and expects. In selling a cheap, a medium and a superior line of any commodity, the spacing is more or less rigidly determined in advance; and the public 1s. 11d. may be suspicious if the next price is less than 3s. 1¹/₂d., or whatever it may be. Also there are certain prices on which there rests a kind of taboo. It would be interesting to speculate on the economic implications of the cryptic aphorism that ‘11s. 11d. isn't a price.’ If 11s. 11d. isn't a price, what on earth is it? Does it fail to qualify as a price, because 11s. 11d. looks silly on a price ticket, especially if the symbol for a shilling is inclined at the same angle as the various ‘1's’? Or is it because ‘Eleven, eleven’ may be confusing to the ear as doubtless ‘Seven, double seven, double seven’ may be to a telephonist? On the other hand, 9s. 9d. seems to be a price. The realisation that prices contain an arbitrary element may well provoke the curious enquirer into groping for a ‘Value’ which is not thus subject to caprice. But at least terms should be defined; and in seeking for truth one should not wander in a circle.

(b) LASSALLE

Marx has become, for later generations, so exclusively and sufficiently the exponent of scientific socialism—especially if ‘Marx’ be taken as a convenient abbreviation for the Marx-Engels partnership—that any embroidery in the way of pendents might almost be regarded as unnecessary. Yet there are two other names which may not in justice be passed over altogether in silence, even if, in the field of theory and thought, they add but little that is specifically their own to the Marxian edifice. There is, in the first place, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), somewhat younger than Marx, a man who perhaps figures more prominently in the history of the socialist movement than in the history of socialist theory; and there is, secondly, Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805–1875), Marx's senior, pre-eminently a Fabian thinker who, shunning the busy hum of men, philosophised in retirement, and who, as some would have it at one time, was one of the writers whose ideas Marx appropriated.

Ignoring strict chronology, Lassalle may be glanced at first, in deference to his greater place in history.¹ Many of the writers caught in the net of this volume are somewhat enigmatic figures; none, at least in some respects, is more enigmatic than Lassalle—whether he be a fascinating enigma, as George Meredith apparently found him,² or a somewhat repulsive and repugnant enigma, depends to a large extent on the biographer whose guidance is, for the time being, accepted. George Brandes, writing sympathetically, finds in him a caged eagle, a tragedy of greatness, marred by ‘an impure deposit of pride and haughtiness.’³ On the other hand, anyone reading the extraordinary biography by Mr. Arno Schirokauer is left, despite its apparent panegyric intentions, with the impression that in Lassalle we have surely plumbed the deepest depths of human offensiveness. It is fairly clear that everything that Lassalle did or wrote dripped with vanity and conceit. He was a showman, a fop and a dandy; at times legitimate doubts arise as to his sincerity; his private letters are frequently nauseating. On the other hand, the meretricious tinsel which somehow adheres to Lassalle throughout Schirokauer's biography just fails to fit in with the obvious learning, scholarship and industry manifested in the authorship of Das System der Erworbenen Rechte, which, with its 900 pages of meat, is the kind of professorial work which is not lightly displaced from its appointed station on the shelves of the Law Library. Nor does the final tragedy of his death in a more than usually foolish and unnecessary duel, with all the attendant circumstances, fit in with the part he essayed to play as a Tribune of the People, or for that matter with the authorship of the Acquired Rights. And this the German workers felt quite distinctly, even if dumbly, after his death. Labour leaders do not get killed in silly duels—least of all where the occasion of the duel is a daughter of the Philistines. The fundamental doubt remains whether Lassalle throughout may not have been merely a skilful actor in the melodrama of life.

Nevertheless, though there may be doubts as to what Lassalle in his innermost core really was, there can be no dubiety as to what he did. He carried the gospel of Marx (and of others) to those for whom it was designed. He made socialism a political movement; to him was due the creation of the General Union of German Workers (the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein). No honest workman in his senses will ever profess to enjoy the Marxian subtleties and subterfuges of the opening chapters of Capital; Marxism in itself is an indigestible by-product of a sedentary life spent in the British Museum. Lassalle was the missionary, the interpreter, the populariser, endowed with the gift of tongues and inflammatory rhetoric, an admirable Aaron to Marx's Moses. Large tracts of Marx are calculated to extinguish any fire: Lassalle was nothing but fire, and in the last two years of his life he was a whirlwind, an ascending tornado, leading up to the final climax or anti-climax. And at least he had his reward. He may now have tended to fade into the background with the passage of years, when to all but a few the shortcomings of the ‘Fortschrittspartei’ are no longer of vital interest; for it is the fate of the politician to sink into insignificance when his peculiar problems are forgotten. But at the time of his death he was a giant and a flaming symbol, compared to Marx. He became a legend, the theme of folk-song, one of the great dead who would come again to deliver his people.¹

We are here concerned, at the most, with the briefest possible statement of Lassalle's position, indicating, so far as may be, the points on which his contribution diverges from that of Marx. Summarised in a sentence, with the injustice which such an extreme summary always entails, Lassalle's position may be said to be based theoretically on a straightforward Marxian foundation; but he differs from Marx with regard to the programme of action for the immediate future. Here, despite his denials, he draws his inspiration from Louis Blanc, and as a necessary consequence he further differs fundamentally from Marx in his conception of what the State is, and of what can be done by and through the State.

Of the very considerable spate of publications that distinguished the concluding stormy years of Lassalle's agitation—there were twenty in twenty-seven months!—probably the three most significant will yield sufficient for our purpose. There is, firstly, the Arbeiter-Programm, a speech delivered on April 12, 1862, outlining a general philosophy and a general programme for the Workers’ Movement. There is, secondly, the Offenes Antwortschreiben, a statement of Lassalle's views, written on request, clarifying the relationship of the Workers’ Party to other parties (above all, to the Fortschrittspartei) in the political configuration of the time. There is, thirdly, the socalled Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, which, according to Bernstein, is Lassalle's chief work in the social-economic field. Schulze-Delitzsch was at the time an eminent member of the Liberal Party, posing as something of an economist and a philanthropist, given to the gospel of Self-Help and Savings Banks. His views largely reflected the orthodox middle-class complacency of Bastiat. Lassalle took it upon himself to deflate Schulze-Delitzsch; but the moderately extensive pamphlet in which he does so can hardly be said to be pleasant reading. He quotes, almost in extenso, a recent publication by Schulze, and for 250 pages he pours upon his antagonist a flood of vituperative contempt, treating him as the world's greatest nit-wit, and, if one may borrow a picturesque, if perhaps unjustifiable, phrase from Sir Thomas Urquhart, railing at him like a tripe-seller's wife.

We are here concerned with those aspects of Lassalle which do not fall neatly inside the Marxian hold-all, and to a certain extent with those elements of Marxism to which Lassalle gave a special emphasis, implanting them in the popular mind by popularising a phrase which has endured. It is of the essence of ‘Scientific Socialism,’ which seeks to prove that the coming of socialism is part of the ineluctable march of events, that it must be based on a philosophy of history. Lassalle's ‘philosophy of history,’ if the dignified phrase be permissible, is simple and pervasive. He views all history as divided into three periods by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. In a sweeping generalisation, he holds that revolutions can never be made; all that can be done is to give legal recognition and effect to a revolution that has already taken place in the actual relationships existing in a society. In short, a revolution is an acknowledgement and endorsement of what has already taken place.¹

On this view, the French Revolution of 1789 chronicled the fact that the nobility, whose power rested on the possession of land, had been reduced to a position of complete insignificance, and had become dependent on the Bourgeoisie.² It gave the tiers état in law the position it had already acquired in fact.³ But this third estate did not really represent the cause of the whole of humanitjy.⁴ What emerged was a Bourgeoisie, with a claim to privilege resting on property qualification. Kapitalbesitz had now become the determinant of political power, in place of land.⁵ The French Revolution had doubtless declared Labour to be free, but it had endowed the worker with no Kapital He was rechtlich frei und faktisch mittellos—free in the eyes of the law, but in fact without means, compelled to sell life itself for the means of life.⁶ The year 1789 had displaced the Nobility, resting on land, in favour of the Bourgeoisie, resting on ‘capital-possession’; the year 1848, displacing the Bourgeoisie, was destined to usher in the era of humanity, securely planted on universal suffrage—of all which, more hereafter. Thus does Lassalle divide the history of humanity into two eternities, separated by a brief interval of fifty-nine years.

Though Lassalle was writing and speaking in 1862–63—well after the revolution of 1848—his analysis would indicate that the new era had not so far enjoyed a very effective dawn. In the main, though perhaps more picturesquely and with greater propaganda skill, the core of his proof of exploitation coincides with that given by Marx. The worker always pays; he is always the loser. First of all, there bulks largely in Lassalle's mind a point which had not then attracted the attention it was to receive later: the relative merits and consequences of direct and indirect taxation. In the nature of things, indirect taxation rests preponderatingly on the poorer classes; in more modern language, it is regressive. But, in the world known to Lassalle, the bulk of the State's income was derived from indirect taxation, mostly paid by the poor; political power, on the other hand, under the property qualification, was based on direct taxation, which contributed little. This elaborate system of indirect taxation was the device—Lassalle called it the ‘institution’—whereby the Bourgeoisie contrived that large capital should continue to enjoy immunity from the burden of taxation.¹

The central proof of exploitation is pure Marx, without the Marxian complications and involutions, and therefore more comprehensible and more convincing: in short, it is more in line with the early English anticipators of Marxism. The worker receives bare subsistence (Lebensnotdurft); the entrepreneur takes the rest.² But if it would involve vain repetition to state the substance of Lassalle's views at greater length, three incidental points arising out of the manner of his statement should be noted. In the first place, Lassalle invented, or at least he gets the credit of having invented, the phrase which describes the alleged tendency of wages to subsistence-level as the ‘Iron Law of Wages.’ It is an old doctrine, to be found in the pages of Turgot in a more classic and precise form than that which Ricardo gave to it. Strictly speaking, Lassalle called it ‘das eherne Gesetz,’ which is a ‘brazen law,’ rather than an iron law: in any case, being metallic, it does not greatly matter. A maniac for accuracy might indeed point out that what he most frequently called it was ‘das eherne und grausame Gesetz,’ which somehow sounds even more horrible. In a way, this baptismal effort was, in the field of letters, Lassalle's crowning achievement. The Iron (or the Brazen) Law of Wages was an idea with immense propaganda possibilities which Lassalle exploited to the uttermost. The paternity of the phrase, indeed, has a fair chance of being, in the long run, Lassalle's most abiding title to fame.

The second point to note is that Lassalle's statement of the ‘Iron Law’ has its roots intertwined with a primitive and crude Malthusianism. Indeed, the Iron Law of Wages, to be made plausible, demands that any temporary aberration of the wage-level above the subsistence line will be at once neutralised by a devastating torrent of children. This in fact is Lassalle's position: if the worker receives enough for his subsistence, he will automatically produce the next generation for the employer's behoof.¹

The third point arising from Lassalle's use of the Iron Law has reference to his relationship to Ricardo. It had been rather an affectation of the scientific socialists and their early English predecessors to claim that they were attacking the orthodox economists with their own weapons: and it has long been a commonplace (perhaps originally intended as a paradox) to look upon Marx and his fellows as the last of the classical school. Lassalle himself states the position with admirable clarity. Ricardo, he says, had carried ‘bürgerliche Oekonomie’ (may we say the classical school?) to its highest point, where the only possible further development was to transform it into ‘Sozial-Oekonomie’: ‘Socialism’ (if one may thus freely translate Sozial-Oekonomie) is nothing other than a fight against Ricardo, but it is at the same time a fight which is just as much an immanent continuation of his doctrine. The point is well and justly made.²

A somewhat different (perhaps even inconsistent) source of exploitation brings Lassalle more closely into touch with Proudhon. He attaches a quite extraordinary importance to the principle of division of labour, and draws from it conclusions which reach far in various directions. It is, among other things, one of the impulses to exploitation. He argues, dubiously, that it is only under division of labour that labour can produce any surplus above subsistence level.³ It doubtless depends on what is meant by ‘division of labour,’ which admittedly is patient of many interpretations. He argues further, and much more indefensibly, that division of labour is the source of all wealth—‘die Theiling der Arbeit ist die Quelle aller Reichthümer.’ What the capitalist does is to appropriate the advantages of division of labour and the ever-increasing productivity that springs from it.⁴

The principle of division of labour is further used by Lassalle to develop an idea very dear to his heart; order, he held, prevailed in production, whereas in distribution we are confronted with chaos. It is of the essence of division of labour (it is indeed a text-book commonplace) that it means a more complicated pattern; it means an extended chain between the producer and the consumer. There may have been a time when men; in Marxian language, produced ‘use-values’—living on the work of their own hands. Now no one produces anything that is even sellable, or on which he can live.¹ And it is indeed true that the wretch who makes the eighteenth part of a pin, can neither sell the eighteenth part of a pin, nor feed it to his wife. With the lengthening chain to the consumer at the world's end, we are all liable to be upset by what happens anywhere. Consequently, in opposition to liberal complacency regarding man's ‘responsibility’ for his actions, Lassalle replies in a phrase which pleased him, that in the economic sphere to-day each man is made responsible precisely for what he has not done.² In all this, we are subject to chance, and where chance prevails the freedom of the individual no longer exists.³ There is also a further contrast which also leads to an epigram: as against the traditional theory (as in Locke) which speaks of the ‘labour basis’ of private property, and founds property in the right of the labourer to what he has himself produced, we are living in an age in which everyone aids in the production of ‘exchange-values’ designed to pass into circulation, and in which therefore everyone can call that ‘his’ which in fact he has not produced. In a rather famous and untranslatable phrase: ‘Das Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden’⁴; which, though, it has sometimes been thought to be a free appropriation from Proudhon, in fact represents a different line of approach.

Combining these various lines of thought, it is possible to descry dimly on what grounds Lassalle, with something of the guile of the later Fabians, was able to suggest that we were already, even if unconsciously, living in a semi-socialised world. For the mere existence of division of labour binds us together; it implies work carried on in union; it is a bond linking society together with a view to production.⁵ In production there is therefore order, the order of the workshop, the order that springs from union for a common end. But not so with distribution. The deep inner contradiction in our organisation is that we have Gemeinsamkeit in production, and Individualismus in distribution.⁶ We are accordingly living in a state of ‘anarchic socialism.’⁷ Something of the order, of the Gemeinsamkeit, that prevails in production must be introduced elsewhere, so that our socialism may cease to be one-sided. Lassalle, it must be admitted, is here less plausible than the Fabians.

It is when Lassalle turns to the question of immediate remedies that he diverges sharply from Marx and Rodbertus. We have already seen that the French Revolution, while giving the worker an empty freedom, nevertheless refrained from giving him any capital; and he therefore remained helpless, forced to sell himself, when face to face with the entrepreneur. What must be done is to convert, or degrade capital into what it should be, to wit, a lifeless instrument in the service of labour.¹ A large part of the Offenes Antwortschreiben is devoted to revealing the inadequacy of the Schulzian proposals, which appealed to the principles of responsibility, of self-help and other kindred virtues. But Lassalle, heavily armed with the Iron Law of Wages—das eherne und grausame Gesetz—knows the answer which effectively crushes all these rose-tinted proposals for reform. Nothing is done to raise the general level. Savings Banks, for example, may help a few, and even these not effectively: the final result is merely to prolong the death-struggle. Consumers’ Co-operative Societies are in the same case. For in the background there is always the eherne und grausame Gesetz, so that if, exceptionally and against all probability, it were possible to raise the general condition of the workers under the banner of Self-help, immediately and automatically the ‘Iron Law’ would depress their wages by precisely the amount by which their position had speciously been bettered.² Along these lines, the Iron Law, as visualised and applied by Lassalle, is seen to be an insurmountable barrier blocking all aspirations towards benevolent amelioration.

Yet, if the worker is to be saved, the Iron Law must be circumvented. The solution in its phraseology is somewhat suggestive of Fourier; in its substance, it is, as near as may be, straightforward Louis Blanc. The workers—or rather the Arbeiterstand, the workers as a class—must become their own ‘undertakers.’ The principle of association doubtless does provide the path to salvation, but it must find its application and extension in the field of production, in fabrikmässige Grossproduktion. Industry is therefore to be transformed by the creation of productive associations—guilds, ateliers, or whatever they may have been called at different eras—with ownership and control vesting in the workers. In this way, and the phrase sets many chords vibrating, the distinction between wages and profits (between Arbeitslohn and Unternehmergewinn) disappears, as indeed does the conception of wages itself. Labour will receive as its reward the produce of labour, the Arbeitsertrag³

The final solution, as has been indicated, so closely resembles that proposed by Louis Blanc that, in the pleasing German phrase, it would scarcely be ‘rewarding’ to pursue it in further detail. Lassalle protested vigorously against being identified with the ‘ateliers nationaux’ of unhappy memory. Perhaps rightly: for it is at least an open question how far Louis Blanc was himself identified with, or responsible for, the ‘ateliers nationaux,’ or how far they reflected his ideas. Yet no one who reads Louis Blanc and Lassalle together can have any doubt that their proposals, as embodied in the printed word, are substantially identical: if there are minor differences, they are of an order of magnitude which at this distance of time makes the issue one of purely antiquarian and specialist interest.

Of greater importance than the ultimate view of a world of co-operative workshops is the question relating to the manner of their establishment. For here Lassalle, in discussing ways and means, adds as a kind of pendent his theory of the State. It is perhaps the most significant feature in Lassalle, as it is the least Marxian. Obviously the workers cannot, of themselves, effect the transition; for this, they must look to the State, whose business and task it is to further the great cause of free association among the workers, and whose ‘most sacred duty’ it is to provide the necessary means.¹ This is indeed a very different State from that which flits furtively in the background of Marx and Engels, and which ultimately colours the stream leading to syndicalism, where the State is regarded as of necessity a tyrannous class organisation, of which the best that can be hoped is that some day it will be smashed and that later, when there are no more classes, its successor will itself wither away. What then is the State in Lassalle's eyes? Addressing the German workers, he tells them that the State belongs to them and to the needy classes, and that they and their association are the State. The State is ‘die grosse Organisation, die grosse Assoziation der arbeitenden Klassen.’²

Here is a very positive and active State, bubbling over with benevolent subsidies; and Lassalle consciously contrasts it, in a passage which is almost classic, with the contrary ‘bourgeois’ view of the State, which is that the purpose of the State consists, solely and exclusively, in the protection of the personal freedom of the individual, and of his property. This is indeed the laissez faire idea of the State which tended (as in von Humboldt) to limit the State's functions to protection in the narrowest sense. In a phrase which has endured, Lassalle characterised this conception as a Nachtwächteridee, viewing the State as a night-watchman, solely concerned in preventing the ft and burglary; and he adds significantly that, in this liberal view, if there were no longer any thieves or robbers, then the State would become a superfluity.¹ Thus, the far-off consummation devoutly desired by the anarchist, the syndicalist, and the later communist is spoken of by Lassalle in the confident tone of one who produces an unanswerable reductio ad absurdum.

So far from wishing to reduce the State's function to a minimum, or looking forward with equanimity to the process of its withering away, Lassalle sees in it, now and hereafter, an abiding engine for the moral uplift and regeneration of mankind. He becomes almost lyrical in his praises of the State. In the Arbeiter-Programm, the State exists to develop the freedom of mankind; it is the union of individuals into a spiritual whole; its purpose is to enable the individual to attain heights which he could never have reached by his own unaided efforts.² In the Offenes Antwortschreiben he is, if possible, even more emphatic. There he argues that it is the task and the purpose of the State to facilitate and bring about the cultural progress of mankind; and he adds in words of almost excessive emphasis: ‘Dies ist sein Beruf. Dazu existiert er; hat immer dazu gedient und dienen müssen.’³ This is more in line with that worship of the State as something divine which, Marx and his school apart, runs through so much of German thought.

All very well for Lassalle to assure his hearers that they are the State; but are they? Has he not himself described them as the ‘disinherited’? All very well to say that it is the State's most sacred duty to launch a thousand ships in the form of productive associations; but was the Prussian State of 1862 likely to rise to its most sacred duty? This brings us to a last point which indeed is the first plank in Lassalle's immediate political programme. The State will only rise to the height of its duty when it represents the whole of the people; and therefore the immediate objective must be the attainment of universal suffrage.⁴ When the workers have obtained this, all other things will be added unto them. But this is the first essential condition, and this explains the foundations of Lassalle's policy, which was that the workers should form a political party, distinct from and apart from all others, and that this party should concentrate on the attainment of the suffrage as the first step to the enjoyment of the ‘helping hand’ of the State. In the light of subsequent disillusionments and later criticisms, it is rather pathetic to note the touching faith which Lassalle displayed in the efficacy of the ballot-box. It is rather assumed that the attainment of universal suffrage and the official opening of the New Jerusalem will more or less synchronise, with the least imaginable time-lag.

Such is Lassalle: so far as theory is concerned, largely a purveyor and populariser of Marxian doctrine, though it should be remembered that, in the nature of things, he was denied the opportunity of reading Capital, and therefore had to draw his sustenance from the earlier writings of Marx. Above all he concentrated on ‘exploitation,’ in so far as that has its roots in the ‘Iron Law’—a phrase to which, with great propagandist skill, he gave enduring currency.¹ But he was latterly a politician even more than a theorist of socialism; and as such he deviates from orthodox Marxism in his faith in the State, in his view of the uses to which the State can be put, and of the help which the State can afford—once the elected body, by a system of universal suffrage, has been made a true reflection of the people at large. If he is not, as he has sometimes been called, the first State Socialist—that title should rather go to Louis Blanc—he is probably the first who was prepared to be a Labour Prime Minister; nor would he have disdained an Earldom on his retirement.

In the foregoing brief summary of Lassalle's views, it has been assumed that he meant what he said. Perhaps it is immaterial whether he did or did not. Yet, to revert to a point touched upon at the outset, in reading Lassalle and of Lassalle, one is haunted by the gnawing doubt whether he was in fact moved by any consideration other than a passion for the limelight and the furtherance of his own glittering career. There are traditional (and doubtless apocryphal) tales of bright young things with their eyes on Parliament, realising that they might get in each other's way in the race for the Premiership if they adhered to the same Party, and accordingly resolving the difficulty by leaving it to the toss of a coin to determine which should go Liberal and which Conservative. It would take too long, and in any case would be outside the scope of this discussion to consider just precisely what incidents and phrases, perhaps of no great importance in themselves, give rise to the suspicion that Lassalle in the same way might very well have argued with equal dexterity and declaimed with equal eloquence in any other cause, if glory and applause had beckoned elsewhere. Nor need we in this matter be unduly affected by the obiter dicta of Marx, generously scattered throughout his correspondence, on the subject of Lassalle's shortcomings. Lassalle had been both generous and helpful to Marx; he was a very dangerous potential rival—both excellent reasons for Marx's increasing contempt and hatred. Lassalle's luxurious, sybaritic and apolaustic private life; the fantastic publicity of the Countess Hatzfeld affair; the noise and the fury of political agitation; the opening moves in the political chess-game with Bismarck; the final folly of his death in a duel—all this is much more the raw material of a spectacular 120-minute film than a page from real life; and from a film hero one does not necessarily ask for translucent sincerity. The indubitable historical fact is that it was Lassalle, whatever his qualities and vanities, who created the German Workers’ Movement as a political force.

(c) RODBERTUS

Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805–1875), who here appears third among the exponents of scientific socialism, might claim, if only on chronological grounds, the right to the highest seat. At one time, indeed, his delirious followers claimed for him a place in the German firmament comparable to that ordinarily assigned to Goethe, and feuds as to the extent to which Marx plagiarised Rodbertus periodically illumine an otherwise dull page. It may be an unworthy suspicion, but it is difficult, two (or three) generations after the event, to resist the impression that the quite obviously unjustifiable adulation of Rodbertus has its hidden springs in a desire to play down Marx by those to whom Marx was antipathetic. While this may have been a highly natural impulse, the results are not always happy. When one overhears the worshippers of Rodbertus speaking of Unser Denker, almost is one persuaded to be a Marxian.

But if in Germany Rodbertus was for a time a philosopher almost grotesquely overrated (by some), he has exercised no influence and has never excited more than the most tepid interest in this country. Even the gallant, if somewhat uninspired, attempt of the late Sir Edward Gonner to present The Social Philosophy of Rodbertus to the English-speaking world made little impression on the general indifference. Rodbertus has remained little more than a name which the navigator of the Marxian wastes periodically encounters on the fringes of his explorations.

While therefore he may not be ignored, nevertheless in this country and for this generation, he receives adequate attention if, despite his priority in time, he is treated somewhat summarily as a supplementary note to Marx. The man himself, in his aloofness from the battle, in his leisured air of well-being, provides an interesting contrast to Marx and Lassalle alike. He was a lawyer, practising—but not for too long—in the State service. While still young, he bought the estate of Jagetzow in Pomerania, and was consequently known as Rodbertus-Jagetzow. He played some part in local politics, and indeed was for a few weeks, in 1848, Minister of Education. Thereafter he was the cultured country squire, dividing his time between the management of his estate and speculations on what was wrong with the world, and how, given a few centuries, it could be put right. In the peace of his Rittergut, he was able to view things from afar.

Rodbertus, in his general theoretical position, is not far removed from Marx; though indeed the same is true of the early English pre-Marxian socialists. In other words, he is largely engaged in pushing Ricardian conclusions a stage further to serve ends of which Ricardo never dreamed. There is a good deal of justification for calling him the ‘Ricardo of Economic Socialism’—a phrase coined by Wagner.¹ But though Rodbertus and Marx are not far apart in the main as theoretical analysts of the world and of ‘Capital,’ there is nevertheless a considerable difference in the atmosphere. Rodbertus is interested in the ‘Social Problem’ and its solution. He would have said that his life was devoted Zur Beleuchtung der Sozialen Frage—to quote the title of his most significant book—to the illumination of the social problem. And if anyone asks what he understood by the ‘social problem,’ the answer here is singularly precise, and perhaps somewhat limited. Expressly in his own words, the social problem consists, and consists exclusively, in Pauperismus and Handelskrisen—in the prevalent increasing poverty and in commercial crises.² Rodbertus throughout is concerned, directly or indirectly, with these two questions and with these two questions alone. It is indeed his unquestioned merit that no one previously had placed what we should now call the Trade Cycle so completely and so emphatically in the centre of things, as in large measure the source of the world's maladies.

The dominant factor in Rodbertus’ economic theorising is to be found in his unquestioning acceptance of the Ricardian Law of Wages, in the sense in which it was also understood by Lassalle. Whether or not this was a faithful interpretation is immaterial. Wages, he asserts, have never, or for any length of time, been above the necessary subsistence level.³ He uses the same adjective as does Lassalle: it is the grausame Gesetz, whereby wages gravitate to the level of bare necessities.⁴ To arrive, almost prematurely, at the central and most characteristic idea in Rodbertus’ presentation, we must combine this statement of the Iron Law of Wages in its most brazen form with the undoubted fact that wealth is increasing, that we are living in an age of ever-increasing abundance. If wages are depressed to subsistence level (with, if possible, a tendency downwards), while the sum total of wealth is simultaneously increasing, it follows naturally and ineluctably that that part of the national dividend that is devoted to wages must represent a diminishing share of the nation's income. Thus we arrive at the Law of the Diminishing Wage Share. The amount of wages need not decline absolutely; with an increase in the number of workers, the total wage-bill would presumably rise. But the proportion which it bears to the total will, as things are, go on falling. Wages, the reward of the ‘labouring classes,’ will be a perpetually shrinking share of the nation's wealth.¹

It is this Law of