A Critical Examination of Socialism Part 10

Of the individual demands or proposals now put forward by socialists, many point to objects which are individually desirable and are within limits practicable; but what hinders, more than anything else, any successful attempt to realise them is the fact that they are at present placed in a false setting. They resemble a demand for candles on the part of visitors at an hotel, who would have, if they did not get them, to go to bed in the dark--a demand which would be contested by n.o.body if it were not that those who made it demanded the candles only as a means of setting fire to the bed-curtains. The demands for old-age pensions, and for government action on behalf of the unemployed, for example, as now put forward in Great Britain, by labour Members who identify the interests of labour with socialism, are demands of this precise kind.

The care of the aged, the care of the unwillingly and the discipline of the willingly idle, are among the most important objects to which social statesmanship can address itself; but the doctrines of socialism hinder instead of facilitate the accomplishment of them, because they identify the cure of certain diseased parts of the social organism with a treatment that would be ruinous to the health and ultimately to the life of the whole.

We may, however, look forward to a time, and may do our best to hasten it, when, the fallacies of socialism being discredited and the mischief which they produce having exhausted itself, we may be able to recognise that they have done permanent good as well as temporary evil--partly because their very perverseness and their varying and acc.u.mulating absurdities will have compelled men to recognise, and accept as self-evident, the countervailing truths which to many of the sanest thinkers have hitherto remained obscure; and partly because socialism, no matter how false as a theory of society, and no matter how impracticable as a social programme, will have called attention to evils which might otherwise have escaped attention, or been relegated to the cla.s.s of evils for which no alleviation is possible.

Even to suggest the manner in which these evils would be treated by a sound and scientific statesmanship would be wholly beyond the scope of a volume such as the present, for this reason, if for no other, that, as has been said already, the evils in question are not one but many, each demanding special and separate treatment, just as ophthalmia demands a treatment other than that demanded by whooping-cough. But one general observation may be fitly made, in conclusion, which will apply to all of them. These remedies cannot be included under the heading of any mere general augmentation of the pecuniary reward of labour taken in the aggregate. The portion of the national dividend which goes to labour now, in progressive countries such as Great Britain, Germany, and America, is immensely greater than it was a hundred years ago, and unless industrial progress is arrested its tendency is to rise still further. The main evils to which a scientific statesmanship should address itself arise from the incidental conditions under which this dividend is spent--conditions, largely improvable, which at present deprive it of its full purchasing power. Of this I will give one example--the present structure of great industrial towns. It cannot be doubted that, if the sums now spent on the construction and maintenance of insanitary slums and alleys were employed in a scientific manner, a rent which has now to be paid for accommodation of the most degrading kind would suffice to command, on the strictest business principles, homes superior to those which, if its amount were doubled, would hardly be forthcoming for the labourer in most of our existing streets; while the purchasing power of the existing income of labour would be increased concurrently, and perhaps to a yet greater extent if much of the education, which now has no other effect than of generating impracticable ideas as to the abstract rights of man, were devoted to developing in men and women alike a greater mastery of the mere arts of household management.

But in merely mentioning these subjects I am transgressing my proper limits. I mention them only with a view to reminding the reader once more that the object of this volume is not to suggest, or supply arguments for maintaining that existing conditions are perfect, or that socialists are visionaries in declaring that they are capable of improvement. Its object has been to expose that radical misconception of facts which renders demands visionary that would not be visionary otherwise, and to stimulate all sane and statesmanlike reformers by helping them to see, and also to explain to others, that the improved conditions which socialism blindly clamours for are practicable only in proportion as they are dissociated from the theories of socialism.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Like all generalisation dealing with complex matters, this must be qualified by individual exceptions. For example, men who have made fortunes for themselves, and have added to the world's stock, by work in the gold-fields, have been in many cases _labourers_, directing their own efforts by their own intelligence. But some men have been exceptional in one or other of two ways--either in propinquity to the scene of action, or (and this is the more common case) in handihood, determination, and courage. It is not every one who has it in him to go in search of gold to Alaska.