Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day Part 12

or "middle men," and, therefore, undeserving of sympathy or consideration; but those behind their counters are distinctly workers.

Are they all to be included in the eight hours' proposal? If so, either one of two things: the shops will be shut sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, or their keepers will have to employ half as many hands again as they now do. "Good for the unemployed" may be replied, but who would have to pay for the additional labour? The consumers, of course, for no law is going to be pa.s.sed keeping tea and sugar, hats and coats at their present price; and it would be those that live by weekly wages who would thereby suffer the most. And if, in order to obviate such consequences, all who work in shops were to be excluded from the benefits of an Eight Hours Act, it would be grossly unjust that tens of thousands of toilers, as much ent.i.tled to consideration as those employed in any factory or mill, should be kept at work in order to minister to the convenience of their fellows, set free from a portion of their labour by the action of Parliament.

And this leads to a consideration of the proposal that all shops, with certain limited exceptions, shall be closed at a given hour. For the general reasons applicable to other employments, any such proposition ought to be strongly opposed. It would be a grievous hards.h.i.+p to the smaller tradesmen, with many of whom the best chance of making a living is after the great establishments have closed, and an intolerable nuisance to the working cla.s.ses who can only shop at what a legislator might consider a late hour. If attempted to be put in operation, it would necessitate the creation of an army of informers and inspectors to see that it was not evaded, and it would create an amount of annoyance to honest and hard-working traders for which no expected benefits from it could compensate. The small tradesman, threatened by the co-operative society on the one side and the "monster emporium" on the other, has enough to do to live, without being hara.s.sed by a law which he would be tempted constantly to evade, and which, if not evaded, might prove his ruin.

Much the same argument may be used concerning a point which, if the State interferes with the hours of labour, is certain to be raised, for it would have to be plainly stated whether all men would be forbidden under penalty to work overtime. If any such proposal is to be made, how is it to be carried out? Are we to have an additional body of inspectors, prying into every man's house to see whether extra work was being done; or is the hateful system of "the common informer" to be revived for the special benefit of working men?

The argument is not weakened by the fact that, in various directions, not only has the Legislature pa.s.sed enactments interfering with the amount and the price of labour, but that some of these continue in active operation. By means of the Factory Acts, for instance, it has directly intervened for the protection of women and children, and in so doing has been acting within that part of its duty which demands that it shall stand between the unprotected and overwhelming power. But there is no strict parallel between the case of the adult males of the working cla.s.ses and that of those women and children who have to toil. The former have again and again shown their power of preserving their own interests by combination; and the evils of State interference where it can possibly be avoided appear sufficient to induce the belief that it is to combination that the working cla.s.ses ought still to trust. If they cannot by this means put down overtime--and as yet they have not been able to do so--they cannot expect their countrymen to raise prices and run the risk of commercial ruin by doing for them what they ought to be able to do for themselves.

x.x.xIV.--SHOULD THE STATE INTERFERE WITH PROPERTY?

Having dealt with the manner in which the State interferes with labour, which to most is their only property, it is necessary to consider how it deals with capital, which is the fruit of labour, and how it thus interferes with some of what are termed "the rights of property."

This has been done in order to avoid greater ills, as in the case of the fixing of fair rents by judicial courts in Ireland and certain districts of the Highlands of Scotland; in others to prevent endless dispute and loss, as in the disposal, in specified proportions, of the personal property of those who die without a will; in a further series to prevent a virtual monopoly from becoming tyrannous, as in the compulsion of railway companies to run certain third-cla.s.s trains, and not to charge beyond a stated fare, or the restriction of the profits of gas companies to 10 per cent. unless a specified reduction in price is made to the consumers; in others, yet, for the supposed advantage of a cla.s.s, as in the custom of primogeniture, which gives all real property (that is, land) to the eldest son of a father who dies intestate; and, in others, for the presumed benefit of the community, at the expense of individual efforts, as in the limitation of the duration of patents for inventions to seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, and of copyright in books to forty-two years from the date of publication, or for the author's life and seven years after, whichever of these terms may be the longer.

As to the first three points--the fixing of fair rents in Ireland and the Highlands, the due division of the personal property of those who die without a will, and the limitation of the power of virtual monopolies--there is no need at this day to argue, for all are irrevocable. As to the fourth, there is no practical disagreement among leading politicians on both sides regarding the desirability of doing away with the custom of primogeniture, as enforced by law. But as to the fifth, it may be submitted that the State goes too far or not far enough.

Our legislators have been exceedingly tender towards every description of property except that created by certain of the highest phases of brain-power. If a man invents a machine which may save millions to the community, he loses all specific property in his invention after a given period of years; if he writes a book which may elevate mankind, his family are similarly condemned after a certain period to forfeit all claim upon the fruits of his labour. But if, instead of putting his brain to such uses, he merely makes a machine or lends a book for hire, there is no law to step in and deprive him of the profits if either machine or book lasts a century.

Why this difference? The theory appears to be that the community is ent.i.tled to profit after a certain period by the brains of its members, when used in the creative or inventive direction; but if the claim be good, has not the State an equal right to profit after a similar period by the brains of its members when used in trading ways? Why should brains exercised in one direction be handicapped in comparison with those exercised in another? The answer may be that the inventor or author employs no capital, that the trader does, and that, therefore, whatever profit the former is allowed to make is a profit upon nothing, while in the latter case the profit is directly upon the capital employed, which ought not to be interfered with.

But this is to adopt the fallacy that capital is necessarily the same thing as money. The capital of an inventor or an author is his brains, which he expends upon his invention or his book; and the community has exactly the same right to deprive the widow and the orphan of a fortune because it was made by a lucky speculation, for instance, forty-two years before, as of their property in a book because it was published that length of time previous. It is true that the State does not fully exercise this right, and protects the family of the mere money-maker while it despoils that of the brain-worker; but the principle is one which contains larger possibilities than the former have yet realized.

The argument that it is for the benefit of the community that only a certain amount of time should be given to the inventor or the author in which to make a profit is dangerous, because it can so easily be applied to other species of property. Why not to the body of the machine as well as to its principle, why not to the pages of the book as well as to what they contain? And even if it is never pushed so far, there are certain species of property now protected by the law which will not improbably be attacked upon this same ground of "the benefit of the community"

before very long; and it is difficult to see how they can be defended as long as the statutes affecting copyright and patents exist.

The most striking of such kinds of property is that in minerals. A man buys an estate for farming, grazing, or, it may be, purposes of pleasure. Some time afterwards minerals are found beneath it, and, though he has neither placed them there nor may a.s.sist to get them out, he is privileged to charge "mining royalties" upon every ton that is raised as long as there is any to be obtained. Why should not his power in this direction be limited? He takes everything and gives nothing; the author or inventor gives everything and takes little. It would be as much for "the benefit of the community" to have the former's minerals after a given period, with no reward to himself, as to have the latter's books or machines. Why, then, should bullion be carefully protected and brains despoiled? If it be replied that when a man has bought a plot of ground it is his to the centre of the earth at one side and to the sky on the other, may it not be submitted that the former portion of the right ought to be restricted, while the latter certainly does not exist, for the law steps in at point after point to control his use of the land between the surface and the sky?

The State, therefore, interferes with property, as it is, in a most material degree: instances of such interference have been scattered through these pages, and the tendency of the future is likely to be towards more than less interference. And there is hardly any that can be proposed, even of the extremest kind, for which it would not be possible to find a precedent.

x.x.xV.--OUGHT THE STATE TO FIND FOOD AND WORK FOR ALL?

The State thus interfering with both capital and labour, it is sometimes contended that its duties ought to be so extended as to find food and work for all. There is a captivating sound about the proposition which has commended it to many without a due weighing of the probable results.

It is a matter upon which a hasty generalization, though springing from the purest motives, may do vast harm, and is one, therefore, which all ought most carefully to consider before expressing an opinion upon it.

Cardinal Manning, in an article published in the winter of 1887, carried the theory of the public duty of feeding the hungry to its extremest point in these words--"All men are bound by natural obligations, if they can, to feed the hungry. But it may be said that granting the obligation in the giver does not prove a right in the receiver. To which I answer that the obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of every man to life, and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life.

So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a natural right to his neighbour's bread."

With all deference, the last sentence must be stated to be false, both in logic and morals. If it were true, it would justify immediate raids by the starving upon the nearest baker's shop, and one wonders what the Cardinal would say if he happened to be the baker. Granting that every one has a right to live, there is no equivalent right to live at other people's expense. It is true that, by our Poor Law, a system has been created by which no one need starve, but that does not justify the theft of bread. There is a preliminary question to be put even in the case of the starving, and that is as to why they are in that condition. If it be because they have been idle, or drunken, or generally worthless, as in many cases it is, the mere fact that they are starving does not ent.i.tle them to sack a baker's shop. They will be fed by the Poor Law if they take the necessary steps, but if they are able-bodied they will have to work for their food; and as most human beings have to do the same, where is the hards.h.i.+p?

It will be replied by some that the Poor Law works harshly towards the deserving poor, but that is an argument for amendment, not for abolition or indiscriminate extension. And if it be further said that the food supplied is meagre and the lodgings rough, it must be remembered that the poor-rate is paid by a very large number whose food is no more plentiful and whose lodgings are certainly worse. As for the argument that some people starve rather than "enter the house," it is not easy to see what relief could be given by the State without infringing that spirit.

But there is a question most intimately affecting this matter which, though of the highest importance, cannot be discussed here as it deserves, and that is the question of population, concerning which Mill truly says, "Every one has a right to live. We will suppose this granted. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. If a man cannot support even himself unless others help him, those others are ent.i.tled to say that they do not also undertake the support of any offspring which it is physically possible for him to summon into the world.... It would be possible for the State to guarantee employment at ample wages to all who are born. But if it does this, it is bound in self-protection, and for the sake of every purpose for which government exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent....

It cannot, with impunity, take the feeding upon itself and leave the multiplying free."

And so, while the Poor Law ought to be carried out in the humanest and most liberal fas.h.i.+on compatible with the interests of the poor who pay the rates as well as the poor who benefit by them, any movement for so extending it as to bring more persons under its operation, and thus to further pauperize the community, would be dangerous. We had enough of that under the system swept away by the Act of 1834, the hideous demoralization caused by which should be studied to-day by those who are eager for a freer dispensation of State relief.

The arguments against the State going further than at present in the direction of giving food to all are equally good as against providing work for all. Relief works have ever been centres of corruption and waste of the worst type, while "national workshops" have not been so brilliant a success in the form of dockyards and a.r.s.enals as to warrant an extension of the system to all the trades we practise.

The theory that the State is bound to provide work for all was never more concisely put than in the original draft of the French Republican Const.i.tution after the Revolution of 1848, the seventh article of which ran thus: "The right of labour is the right which every man has to live by his labour. It is the duty of Society, through the channels of production and other means at its command, hereafter to be organized, to provide work for such able-bodied men as cannot find it for themselves."

But even a Government imbued with Socialistic tendencies found this to be much too strong, and modified it thus: "It is the duty of Society by fraternal a.s.sistance to protect the lives of necessitous citizens, either by finding them work as far as possible, or by providing for those who are incapacitated for work and who have no families to support them." Yet the modified form was not found to work well in actual practice, and the history of the failure of the French National Workshops of 1848 remains as an eloquent testimony to the fact that the State ought to interfere as little as possible with industrial enterprises and private concerns.

x.x.xVI.--HOW OUGHT WE TO DEAL WITH SOCIALISM?

Even the considerations already put forward do not exhaust the social question, for only in the briefest fas.h.i.+on have been touched the important points which that question involves. And there is yet left to be discussed the att.i.tude which ought to be adopted towards that body of opinions upon public affairs vaguely known as "Socialism."

The att.i.tude of some is simply denunciatory, for there is a cla.s.s of politician which always imputes base motives to those with whom it disagrees, and which is so proficient in abuse that it apparently thinks it a waste of time to argue. That cla.s.s has been painfully in evidence in regard to the Socialists. It is considered that--so true is the old proverb that if you give a dog a bad name you may as well hang him--nothing more need be done respecting a new and therefore unpopular doctrine than to so label it as to ensure its repudiation by honest but unthinking men. And thus the name "Socialist" is applied as equivalent to thief; and men utterly ignorant of what the words imply link Socialist to Nihilist, Communist to Anarchist, as if each were equal to each, and all therefore equal to one another.

This has been the favourite device of the opponents of all new doctrines, political or social, philosophical or religious. To be ridiculed, to be persecuted, even to be slain has been the fate of the would-be elevators of their kind, as the roll of fame, which includes the names of Socrates and Galileo, Luther and Savonarola, Voltaire and Roger Bacon, Mazzini and Darwin will testify. The Socialists now are hardly called worse names than were applied to geologists fifty years ago, and to Evolutionists but the other day. Atheists, of course, they have been named, for Atheist is the epithet customarily applied by ignorant and bigoted men, who have made G.o.d in their own image, to those more zealous in endeavouring to raise humanity.

Against any such method of dealing with public questions all fair-minded men should strongly, and without ceasing, protest. And as Socialism is spreading among the ma.s.ses, it is in the highest degree important that the fact should be studied calmly and without prejudice. Hard words break no bones, and contumely tends to strengthen any cause in which there is an atom of good.

Socialism, therefore, should be dealt with in an inquiring and not an abusive spirit, and with the determination to accept from it whatever of good to the community we may find it to contain. There is another method which Prince Bismarck has been trying for years, and with the signal lack of success that always comes from trying to stamp out an opinion by force of law. In presumed defence of "society" and "order"--two excellent things, but often the excuse for despots to perpetrate cruel injustice upon the liberty-loving and the poor--he has secured law after law for the purpose of "putting down Socialism;" men have been torn from their homes because of their opinions; the right of public meeting has been placed at the mercy of the police; the press has been gagged, and every means taken to stamp out a body of opinions some of which even the German Chancellor himself cannot help sharing. And with what result?

That, after ten years of this wretched work, the Socialists--though prevented from public meeting, speaking, or writing--are multiplying in Germany in an ever-growing proportion; that in Berlin, the capital of the empire, they number tens of thousands of electors as their adherents; and that Prince Bismarck is ever asking for extended powers to crush a force which, in its free state, as yielding to the touch as water, is mighty when compressed.

With an even greater power of police, and no restriction at all from the laws, the Czar has failed as signally to extirpate Nihilism. Ideas cannot be killed in this fas.h.i.+on, though their holders can be and are rendered more dangerous. Mill certainly considered that "the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pa.s.s into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes;" and he was of opinion that "no reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire." But it may be submitted that, when arguing about the persecution of ideas to-day, we must not forget the immense additional force given to them by means of printing. The secret presses of Germany and Russia "spread the light;" and there is nothing so certain as that the very charm which comes from the possession of that which is prohibited aids in strengthening a movement which is under the ban of the law.

But, it may be said, the efforts of those who would attempt to put down Socialism are not to be considered in the light of political persecution, and are not to be compared with religious persecution, for they are directed solely to the suppression of "anti-social" doctrines, the adoption of which would be fatal not only to States as they now exist, but to society itself. A more precise definition must be asked, however, of the doctrines thus described. Though opposed to an eight hours' bill, to land nationalization, and to national workshops, leading points in the Socialist programme, I cannot conceive how, if they were all adopted within the next year, such dire results could from them flow.

Every new body of doctrine which gives hope to the ma.s.ses and threatens the domination of the privileged among men has been described with equal virulence by its antagonists. Read the charges upon which Christians were condemned under the Roman Empire; read those brought against Luther and his co-reformers when first Protestantism threatened the Church of Rome; remember those thrown at the Puritans when they tried to secure for Englishmen liberty of thought and action. They were in every case that the doctrines were anti-social; that if adopted they would wreck the then condition of society; and that they were in the highest degree perilous to the State. For it is the fate of all preachers of a new doctrine to be treated as rogues until their persecutors are proved to be fools.

Admittedly there are some theories advanced by men calling themselves Socialists which, if adopted, would seriously conflict with the existing order of society; but to condemn every proposal put forward as Socialist because there are Socialists who have said strange, and sometimes stupid, things would be monstrous. It is a controversial trick of a peculiarly poor order to attempt to hold the leaders of any movement responsible for the hare-brained ideas of some of their followers. Not to repudiate them is not to signify agreement, or our party leaders would possess some of the most extravagant doctrines ever conceived by man.

Besides, one must always sever the conventional beliefs from the real.

No sensible person considers Christianity untrue because even the churches would regard him as a madman who literally adopted the injunction to sell all that he had to give to the poor. In any body of doctrines there are always some which its adherents hold, but do not stand by.

And, therefore, charity as well as common sense demands that the tall talk on both sides--for there is not a great deal to choose between them in this respect--should cease; but the trick is too easily learned to be quickly dropped. The idea of the well-to-do that all would go smoothly if it were not for "agitators" and "mob-orators" is as absurd as the contention of the Socialist that most of our ills are due to the "profit-monger." Your "agitator" or your "mob-orator" would have not the least influence if he did not voice the feelings, the longings, and the hopes of his silent friends. And as for the "profit-monger," is not the workman who is better off than the poorest among his fellows deserving the name?

Let us have fair play all round to ideas as well as to men. If, in the supposed interests of society, every movement designed to upraise the poor is suppressed, the tendency must be to force men towards Anarchism and Nihilism, by causing them to wish to destroy that order of things which to them acts so unjustly. Despair is a fatal counsellor, and those who would identify the welfare of the State with that of the mere money-getter are its frequent cause. It is easier to raise the devil than to lay him, and appeals to the merely animal instinct in man--whether to protect his own property or to take that of others, with a complete ignoring of his duties as well as his rights--must end in ruin and shame.

"There is among the English working cla.s.ses," once observed Sir Robert Peel, "too much suffering and too much perplexity. It is a disgrace and a danger to our civilization. It is absolutely necessary that we should render the condition of the manual labourer less hard and less precarious. We cannot do everything, but something may be effected, and something ought to be done." Though nearly forty years have pa.s.sed since that statesman's death, we are still groping blindly for the something which ought to be done for the poor; and such strength as Socialism possesses is derived from the general spread of the feeling which Peel put into words, and which no politician--much more no statesman--can afford to neglect.

And that is why the politics of the future will be largely affected by the social questions now coming to the front. From the opinions of many who are pressing them forward one may profoundly differ, but justice demands that all they advance should be examined without prejudice, and with the determination to accept that which is good, from whatever quarter it may come.

x.x.xVII.--WHAT SHOULD BE THE LIBERAL PROGRAMME?