[01] We are dealing only with general principles.
There are some matters of detail -- such as those arising from
the division of revenues between local and general governments
-- which upon application of these principles would come up, but
these it is not necessary here to discuss. When once principles
are settled, details will be readily adjusted.
[02] Nor without too much elaboration is
it possible to notice all the changes which would be wrought,
or would become possible, by a change which would readjust the
very foundation of society, but to some main features let me call
attention.
[03] Noticeable among these is the great
simplicity which would become possible in government. To collect
taxes, to prevent and punish evasions, to check and countercheck
revenues drawn from so many distinct sources, now make up probably
three-fourths, perhaps seven-eighths of the business of government,
outside of the preservation of order, the maintenance of the military
arm, and the administration of justice. An immense and complicated
network of governmental machinery would thus be dispensed with.
[04] In the administration of justice there
would be a like saving of strain. Much of the civil business of
our courts arises from disputes as to ownership of land. These
would cease when the state was virtually acknowledge edged as
the sole owner of land, and all occupiers became practically rent-paying
tenants. The growth of morality consequent upon the cessation
of want would tend to a like diminution in other civil business
of the courts, which could be hastened by the adoption of the
common sense proposition of Bentham to abolish all laws for the
collection of debts and the enforcement of private contracts.
The rise of wages, the opening of opportunities for all to make
an easy and comfortable living, would at once lessen and would
soon eliminate from society the thieves, swindlers, and other
classes of criminals who spring from the unequal distribution
of wealth. Thus the administration of the criminal law, with all
its paraphernalia of policemen, detectives, prisons, and penitentiaries,
would, like the administration of the civil law, cease to make
such a drain upon the vital force and attention of society. We
should get rid not only of many judges, bailiffs, clerks, and
prison keepers, but of the great host of lawyers who are now maintained
at the expense of producers; and talent now wasted in legal subtleties
would be turned to higher pursuits.
[05] The legislative,
judicial, and executive functions of government would in this
way be vastly simplified. Nor can I think that the public debts
and the standing armies, which are historically the outgrowth
of the change from feudal to allodial tenures, would long remain
after the reversion to the old idea that the land of a country
is the common right of the people of the country. The former could
readily be paid off by a tax that would not lessen the wages of
labor nor check production, and the latter the growth of intelligence
and independence among the masses, aided, perhaps, by the progress
of invention, which is revolutionizing the military art, must
soon cause to disappear.
[06] Society would thus approach the ideal
of Jeffersonian democracy, the promised land of Herbert Spencer,
the abolition of government. But of government only as a directing
and repressive power. It would at the same time, and in the same
degree, become possible for it to realize the dream of socialism.
All this simplification and abrogation of the present functions
of government would make possible the assumption of certain other
functions which are now pressing for recognition. Government could
take upon itself the transmission of messages by telegraph, as
well as by mail; of building and operating railroads, as well
as of opening and maintaining common roads. With present functions
so simplified and reduced, functions such as these could be assumed
without danger or strain, and would be under the supervision of
public attention, which is now distracted. There would be a great
and increasing surplus revenue from the taxation of land values,
for material progress, which would go on with greatly accelerated
rapidity, would tend constantly to increase rent. This revenue
arising from the common property could be applied to the common
benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish
public tables -- they would be unnecessary; but we could establish
public baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music
and dancing balls, theaters, universities, technical schools,
shooting galleries, play grounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light,
and motive power, as well as water, might be conducted through
our streets at public expense; our roads be lined with fruit trees;
discoverers and inventors rewarded, scientific investigations
supported; and in a thousand ways the public revenues made to
foster efforts for the public benefit. We should reach the ideal
of the socialist, but not through government repression. Government
would change its character, and would become the administration
of a great co-operative society. It would become merely the agency
by which the common property was administered for the common benefit.
[07] Does this seem impracticable? Consider
for a moment the vast changes that would be wrought in social
life by a change which would assure to labor its full reward;
which would banish want and the fear of want; and give to the
humblest freedom to develop in natural symmetry.
[08] In thinking of the possibilities of
social organization, we are apt to assume that greed is the strongest
of human motives, and that systems of administration can be safely
based only upon the idea that the fear of punishment is necessary
to keep men honest -- that selfish interests are always stronger
than general interests. Nothing could be further from the truth.
[09] From whence springs this lust for
gain, to gratify which men tread everything pure and noble under
their feet; to which they sacrifice all the higher possibilities
of life; which converts civility into a hollow pretense, patriotism
into a sham, and religion into hypocrisy; which makes so much
of civilized existence an Ishmaelitish warfare, of which the weapons
are cunning and fraud?
[10] Does it not spring from the existence
of want? Carlyle somewhere says that poverty is the hell of which
the modern Englishman is most afraid. And he is right. Poverty
is the openmouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized
society. And it is hell enough. The Vedas declare no truer thing
than when the wise crow Bushanda tells the eagle-bearer of Vishnu
that the keenest pain is in poverty. For poverty is not merely
deprivation; it means shame, degradation; the searing of the most
sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature as with hot irons;
the denial of the strongest impulses and the sweetest affections;
the wrenching of the most vital nerves. You love your wife, you
love your children; but would it not be easier to see them die
than to see them reduced to the pinch of want in which large classes
in every highly civilized community live? The strongest of animal
passions is that with which we cling to life, but it is an everyday
occurrence in civilized societies for men to put poison to their
mouths or pistols to their heads from fear of poverty, and for
one who does this there are probably a hundred who have the desire,
but are restrained by instinctive shrinking, by religious considerations,
or by family ties.
[11] From this hell of poverty, it is but
natural that men should make every effort to escape. With the
impulse to self-preservation and self-gratification combine nobler
feelings, and love as well as fear urges in the struggle. Many
a man does a mean thing, a dishonest thing, a greedy and grasping
and unjust thing, in the effort to place above want, or the fear
of want, mother or wife or children.
[12] And out of this condition of things
arises a public opinion which enlists, as an impelling power in
the struggle to grasp and to keep, one of the strongest perhaps
with many men the very strongest springs of human action. The
desire for approbation, the feeling that urges us to win the respect,
admiration, or sympathy of our fellows, is instinctive and universal.
Distorted sometimes into the most abnormal manifestations, it
may yet be everywhere perceived. It is potent with the veriest
savage, as with the most highly cultivated member of the most
polished society; it shows itself with the first gleam of intelligence,
and persists to the last breath. It triumphs over the love of
ease, over the sense of pain, over the dread of death. It dictates
the most trivial and the most important actions.
[13] The child just beginning to toddle
or to talk will make new efforts as its cunning little tricks
excite attention and laughter; the dying master of the world gathers
his robes around him, that he may pass away as becomes a king;
Chinese mothers will deform their daughters' feet by cruel stocks,
European women will sacrifice their own comfort and the comfort
of their families to similar dictates of fashion; the Polynesian,
that he may excite admiration by his beautiful tattoo, will hold
himself still while his flesh is torn by sharks' teeth; the North
American Indian, tied to the stake, will bear the most fiendish
tortures without a moan, and, that he may be respected and admired
as a great brave, will taunt his tormentors to new cruelties.
It is this that leads the forlorn hope; it is this that trims
the lamp of the pale student; it is this that impels men to strive,
to strain, to toil, and to die. It is this that raised the pyramids
and that fired the Ephesian dome.
[14] Now, men admire what they desire.
How sweet to the storm-stricken seems the safe harbor; food to
the hungry, drink to the thirsty, warmth to the shivering, rest
to the weary, power to the weak, knowledge to him in whom the
intellectual yearnings of the soul have been aroused. And thus
the sting of want and the fear of want make men admire above all
things the possession of riches, and to become wealthy is to become
respected, and admired, and influential. Get money -- honestly,
if you can, but at any rate get money! This is the lesson that
society is daily and hourly dinning in the ears of its members.
Men instinctively admire virtue and truth, but the sting of want
and the fear of want make them even more strongly admire the rich
and sympathize with the fortunate. It is well to be honest and
just, and men will commend it; but he who by fraud and injustice
gets him a million dollars will have more respect, and admiration,
and influence, more eye service and lip service, if not heart
service, than he who refuses it. The one may have his reward in
the future; he may know that his name is writ in the Book of Life,
and that for him is the white robe and the palm branch of the
victor against temptation; but the other has his reward in the
present. His name is writ in the list of "our substantial citizens";
he has the courtship of men and the flattery of women; the best
pew in the church and the personal regard of the eloquent clergyman
who in the name of Christ preaches the Gospel of Dives, and tones
down into a meaningless flower of Eastern speech the stern metaphor
of the camel and the needle's eye. He may be a patron of arts,
a M÷cenas to men of letters; may profit by the converse of the
intelligent, and be polished by the attrition of the refined.
His alms may feed the poor, and help the struggling, and bring
sunshine into desolate places; and noble public institutions commemorate,
after he is gone, his name and his fame. It is not in the guise
of a hideous monster, with horns and tall, that Satan tempts the
children of men, but as an angel of light. His promises are not
alone of the kingdoms of the world, but of mental and moral principalities
and powers. He appeals not only to the animal appetites, but to
the cravings that stir in man because he is more than an animal.
[15] Take the case of those miserable "men
with muck rakes," who are to be seen in every community as plainly
as Bunyan saw their type in his vision -- who, long after they
have accumulated wealth enough to satisfy every desire, go on
working, scheming, striving to add riches to riches. It was the
desire "to be something"; nay, in many cases, the desire to do
noble and generous deeds, that started them on a career of money
getting. And what compels them to it long after every possible
need is satisfied, what urges them still with unsatisfied and
ravenous greed, is not merely the force of tyrannous habit, but
the subtler gratifications which the possession of riches gives
-- the sense of power and influence, the sense of being looked
up to and respected, the sense that their wealth not merely raises
them above want, but makes them men of mark in the community in
which they live. It is this that makes the rich man so loath to
part with his money, so anxious to get more.
[16] Against temptations that thus appeal
to the strongest impulses of our nature, the sanctions of law
and the precepts of religion can effect but little; and the wonder
is, not that men are so self-seeking, but that they are not much
more so. That under present circumstances men are not more grasping,
more unfaithful, more selfish than they are, proves the goodness
and fruitfulness of human nature, the ceaseless flow of the perennial
fountains from which its moral qualities are fed. All of us have
mothers; most of us have children, and so faith, and purity, and
unselfishness can never be utterly banished from the world, howsoever
bad be social adjustments.
[17] But whatever is potent for evil may
be made potent for good. The change I have proposed would destroy
the conditions that distort impulses in themselves beneficent,
and would transmute the forces which now tend to disintegrate
society into forces which would tend to unite and purify it.
[18] Give labor a free field and its full
earnings; take for the benefit of the whole community that fund
which the growth of the community creates, and want and the fear
of want would be gone. The springs of production would be set
free, and the enormous increase of wealth would give the poorest
ample comfort. Men would no more worry about finding employment
than they worry about finding air to breathe; they need have no
more care about physical necessities than do the lilies of the
field. The progress of science, the march of invention, the diffusion
of knowledge, would bring their benefits to all.
[19] With this abolition of want and the
fear of want, the admiration of riches would decay, and men would
seek the respect and approbation of their fellows in other modes
than by the acquisition and display of wealth. In this way there
would be brought to the management of public affairs, and the
administration of common funds, the skill, the attention, the
fidelity, and integrity that can now be secured only for private
interests, and a railroad or gas works might be operated on public
account, not only more economically and efficiently than as at
present, under joint-stock management, but as economically and
efficiently as would be possible under a single ownership. The
prize of the Olympian games, that called forth the most strenuous
exertions of all Greece, was but a wreath of wild olive; for a
bit of ribbon men have over and over again performed services
no money could have bought.
[20] Shortsighted is the philosophy which
counts on selfishness as the master motive of human action. It
is blind to facts of which the world is full. It sees not the
present, and reads not the past aright. If you would move men
to action, to what shall you appeal? Not to their pockets, but
to their patriotism; not to selfishness, but to sympathy. Self-interest
is, as it were, a mechanical force-potent, it is true; capable
of large and wide results. But there is in human nature what may
be likened to a chemical force; which melts and fuses and overwhelms;
to which nothing seems impossible. "All that a man hath will he
give for his life" -- that is self-interest. But in loyalty to
higher impulses men will give even life.
[21] It is not selfishness that enriches
the annals of every people with heroes and saints. It is not selfishness
that on every page of the world's history bursts out in sudden
splendor of noble deeds or sheds the soft radiance of benignant
lives. It was not selfishness that turned Gautama's back to his
royal home or bade the Maid of Orleans lift the sword from the
altar; that held the Three Hundred in the Pass of Thermopyl÷ or
gathered into Winkelried's bosom the sheaf of spears; that chained
Vincent de Paul to the bench of the galley, or brought little
starving children, during the Indian famine, tottering to the
relief stations with yet weaker starvelings in their arms. Call
it religion, patriotism, sympathy, the enthusiasm for humanity,
or the love of God -- give it what name you will; there is yet
a force which overcomes and drives out selfishness; a force which
is the electricity of the moral universe; a force beside which
all others are weak. Everywhere that men have lived it has shown
its power, and today, as ever, the world is full of it. To be
pitied is the man who has never seen and never felt it. Look around!
among common men and women, amid the care and the struggle of
daily life, in the jar of the noisy street and amid the squalor
where want hides -- every here and there is the darkness lighted
with the tremulous play of its lambent flames. He who has not
seen it has walked with shut eyes. He who looks may see, as says
Plutarch, that "the soul has a principle of kindness in itself,
and is born to love, as well as to perceive, think, or remember."
[22] And this force of forces -- that now
goes to waste or assumes perverted forms -- we may use for the
strengthening, and building up, and ennobling of society, if we
but will, just as we now use physical forces that once seemed
but powers of destruction. All we have to do is but to give it
freedom and scope. The wrong that produces inequality; the wrong
that in the midst of abundance tortures men with want or harries
them with the fear of want; that stunts them physically, degrades
them intellectually, and distorts them morally, is what alone
prevents harmonious social development. For "all that is from
the gods is full of providence. We are made for co-operation --
like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper
and lower teeth."
[23] There are people into whose heads
it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than
that which now exists -- who imagine that the idea that there
could be a state of society in which greed would be banished,
prisons stand empty, individual interests be subordinated to general
interests, and no one seek to rob or to oppress his neighbor,
is but the dream of impracticable dreamers, for whom these practical,
levelheaded men, who pride themselves on recognizing facts as
they are, have a hearty contempt. But such men -- though some
of them write books, and some of them occupy the chairs of universities,
and some of them stand in pulpits -- do not think.
[24] If they were accustomed to dine in
such eating houses as are to be found in the lower quarters of
London and Paris, where the knives and forks are chained to the
table, they would deem it the natural, ineradicable disposition
of man to carry off the knife and fork with which he has eaten.
[25] Take a company of well-bred men and
women dining together. There is no struggling for food, no attempt
on the part of any one to get more than his neighbor; no attempt
to gorge or to carry off. On the contrary, each one is anxious
to help his neighbor before he partakes himself; to offer to others
the best rather than pick it out for himself; and should any one
show the slightest disposition to prefer the gratification of
his own appetite to that of the others, or in any way to act the
pig or pilferer, the swift and heavy penalty of social contempt
and ostracism would show how such conduct is reprobated by common
opinion.
[26] All this is so common as to excite
no remark, as to seem the natural state of things. Yet it is no
more natural that men should not be greedy of food than that they
should not be greedy of wealth. They are greedy of food when they
are not assured that there will be a fair and equitable distribution
which will give each enough. But when these conditions are assured,
they cease to be greedy of food. And so in society, as at present
constituted, men are greedy of wealth because the conditions of
distribution are so unjust that instead of each being sure of
enough, many are certain to be condemned to want. It is the "devil
catch the hindmost" of present social adjustments that causes
the race and scramble for wealth, in which all considerations
of justice, mercy, religion, and sentiment are trampled under
foot; in which men forget their own souls, and struggle to the
very verge of the grave for what they cannot take beyond. But
an equitable distribution of wealth, that would exempt all from
the fear of want, would destroy the greed of wealth, just as in
polite society the greed of food has been destroyed.
[27] On the crowded steamers of the early
California lines there was often a marked difference between the
manners of the steerage and the cabin, which illustrates this
principle of human nature. An abundance of food was provided for
the steerage as for the cabin, but in the former there were no
regulations which insured efficient service, and the meals became
a scramble. In the cabin, on the contrary, where each was allotted
his place and there was no fear that everyone would not get enough,
there was no such scrambling and waste as were witnessed in the
steerage. The difference was not in the character of the people,
but simply in this fact. The cabin passenger transferred to the
steerage would participate in the greedy rush, and the steerage
passenger transferred to the cabin would at once become decorous
and polite. The same difference would show itself in society in
general were the present unjust distribution of wealth replaced
by a just distribution.
[28] Consider this existing fact of a cultivated
and refined society, in which all the coarser passions are held
in check, not by force, not by law, but by common opinion and
the mutual desire of pleasing. If this is possible for a part
of a community, it is possible for a whole community. There are
states of society in which every one has to go armed -- in which
every one has to hold himself in readiness to defend person and
property with the strong hand. If we have progressed beyond that,
we may progress still further.
[29] But it may be said, to banish want
and the fear of want, would be to destroy the stimulus to exertion;
men would become simply idlers, and such a happy state of general
comfort and content would be the death of progress. This is the
old slaveholders' argument, that men can be driven to labor only
with the lash. Nothing is more untrue.
[30] Want might be banished, but desire
would remain. Man is the unsatisfied animal. He has but begun
to explore, and the universe lies before him. Each step that he
takes opens new vistas and kindles new desires. He is the constructive
animal; he builds, he improves, he invents, and puts together,
and the greater the thing he does, the greater the thing he wants
to do. He is more than an animal. Whatever be the intelligence
that breathes through nature, it is in that likeness that man
is made. The steamship, driven by her throbbing engines through
the sea, is in kind, though not in degree, as much a creation
as the whale that swims beneath. The telescope and the microscope,
what are they but added eyes, which man has made for himself;
the soft webs and fair colors in which our women array themselves,
do they not answer to the plumage that nature gives the bird?
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something,
for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the
sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
[31] As soon as a child can command its
muscles, it will begin to make mud pies or dress a doll; its play
is but the imitation of the work of its elders; its very destructiveness
arises from the desire to be doing something, from the satisfaction
of seeing itself accomplish something. There is no such thing
as the pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Our very
amusements amuse only as they are, or simulate, the learning or
the doing of something. The moment they cease to appeal either
to our inquisitive or to our constructive powers, they cease to
amuse. It will spoil the interest of the novel reader to be told
just how the story will end; it is only the chance and the skill
involved in the game that enable the card player to "kill time"
by shuffling bits of pasteboard. The luxurious frivolities of
Versailles were possible to human beings only because the king
thought he was governing a kingdom and the courtiers were in pursuit
of fresh honors and new pensions. People who lead what are called
lives of fashion and pleasure must have some other object in view,
or they would die of ennui; they support it only because they
imagine that they are gaining position, making friends, or improving
the chances of their children. Shut a man up, and deny him employment,
and he must either die or go mad.
[32] It is not labor in itself that is
repugnant to man; it is not the natural necessity for exertion
which is a curse. It is only labor which produces nothing -- exertion
of which he cannot see the results. To toil day after day, and
yet get but the necessaries of life, this is indeed hard; it is
like the infernal punishment of compelling a man to pump lest
he be drowned, or to trudge on a treadmill lest he be crushed.
But, released from this necessity, men would but work the harder
and the better, for then they would work as their inclinations
led them; then would they seem to be really doing something for
themselves or for others. Was Humboldt's life an idle one? Did
Franklin find no occupation when he retired from the printing
business with enough to live on? Is Herbert Spencer a laggard?
Did Michael Angelo paint for board and clothes?
[33] The fact is that the work which improves
the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and
increases power, and enriches literature, and elevates thought,
is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves,
driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal
necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for its own
sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear,
or display. In a state of society where want was abolished, work
of this sort would be enormously increased.
[34] I am inclined to think that the result
of confiscating rent in the manner I have proposed would be to
cause the organization of labor, wherever large capitals were
used, to assume the co-operative form, since the more equal diffusion
of wealth would unite capitalist and laborer in the same person.
But whether this would be so or not is of little moment. The hard
toll of routine labor would disappear. Wages would be too high
and opportunities too great to compel any man to stint and starve
the higher qualities of his nature, and in every avocation the
brain would aid the hand. Work, even of the coarser kinds, would
become a lightsome thing, and the tendency of modern production
to subdivision would not involve monotony or the contraction of
ability in the worker; but would be relieved by short hours, by
change, by the alternation of intellectual with manual occupations.
There would result, not only the utilization of productive forces
now going to waste; not only would our present knowledge, now
so imperfectly applied, be fully used; but from the mobility of
labor and the mental activity which would be generated, there
would result advances in the methods of production that we now
cannot imagine.
[35] For, greatest of all the enormous
wastes which the present constitution of society involves, is
that of mental power. How infinitesimal are the forces that concur
to the advance of civilization, as compared to the forces that
lie latent! How few are the thinkers, the discoverers, the inventors,
the organizers, as compared with the great mass of the people!
Yet such men are born in plenty; it is the conditions that permit
so few to develop. There are among men infinite diversities of
aptitude and inclination, as there are such infinite diversities
in physical structure that among a million there will not be two
that cannot be told apart. But, both from observation and reflection,
I am inclined to think that the differences of natural power are
no greater than the differences of stature or of physical strength.
Turn to the lives of great men, and see how easily they might
never have been heard of. Had Caesar come of a proletarian family;
had Napoleon entered the world a few years earlier; had Columbus
gone into the Church instead of going to sea; had Shakespeare
been apprenticed to a cobbler or chimney sweep; had Sir Isaac
Newton been assigned by fate the education and the toil of an
agricultural laborer; had Dr. Adam Smith been born in the coal
hews, or Herbert Spencer forced to get his living as a factory
operative, what would their talents have availed? But there would
have been, it will be said, other Caesars or Napoleons, Columbuses
or Shakespeares, Newtons, Smiths or Spencers. This is true. And
it shows bow prolific is our human nature. As the common worker
is on need transformed into queen bee, so, when circumstances
favor his development, what might otherwise pass for a common
man rises into a hero or leader, discoverer or teacher, sage or
saint. So widely has the sower scattered the seed, so strong is
the germinative force that bids it bud and blossom. But, alas,
for the stony ground, and the birds and the tares! For one who
attains his full stature, how many are stunted and deformed.
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