CHAPTER IV
THE INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM
1. Religion.
The revolt against capitalism and the dominance of property over men has moved intellectual and artistic as well as economic sentiments. Sir Thomas More wrote not as a victim, but as a sensitive onlooker; the pioneers of modern Socialism were as a rule men of substance, troubled in spirit rather than in pocket. That there should be such protests is no cause for wonder, for commercialism has coarsened everything it has touched. It is frankly materialist in its inspiration. Its gospel is the worldly laws of acquiring, and it consequently must be in sharp conflict with every other gospel embodying the spiritual laws of being.
As one would therefore expect, Christian ethic has frequently borne a troubled testimony against the industrial order of commercialism. The economics and politics of the Prophets, and the spirit of the Gospels are awkward inspirations in the existing order, and would be revolutionary if they were not only preached from temples but put into practice in market-places. This is seen whenever a breath of fresh wind blows over our faith and it is felt as a motive power in daily conduct; its social significance then comes to the front, the idea of human equality which is inseparable from it becomes active, and the reminiscences of the communist experiments with which its history began awake in it again and turn men to look in Socialist directions for the fulfilment of its spirit. A Christian revival as a rule strengthens the active body of social ethics. Thus the rise of Nonconformity, though apparently the result of only a fervid evangelical propaganda, proceeded apace with an increasingly emphatic assertion of human equality and social right, and in consequence the fruit of the religious agitation was political and social reform.
The first society of Christian Socialists was the product of that reinvigoration of the life of the Church and renewal of interest in religious affairs which began with the Tractarian movement. The doctrines of Kingsley and his friends do not sound either very robust or very inspiring from this distance. They can never be dissociated from a pose of snobbishness and from an antiquated and fanciful view of the superiority and inferiority of classes. A recent writer has said of Otto Effert that his Socialism consists in an appeal to the gentlemen of all the countries to unite. That may be said of the Christian Socialists. Still, these Socialists of nearly seventy years ago illustrate in the clearest possible way the inevitability with which an enlivened Christian faith turns like the needle of a compass in Socialist directions.
On its critical side, however, the movement was quite firm. Its political affinities may not appear now-a-days to be very attractive, but its economic and social repulsions were of the right kind. It abhorred Manchesterism with its philosophy of individualism and its results of poverty. It assailed competition as being of Satan, and urged that the best life of the community was bound up in co-operation. It had a firm belief in the organised community acting consciously and guarding and promoting human well-being. Only in this way could moral results be secured and virtue be made the gateway to reward. So it held that Socialism was a product of Christianity. Co-operation on the largest and most complete scale was the social mechanism through which alone Christianity could work. Ludlow, one of its founders and also one of the best of men, had been in France and had become enamoured of Proudhon. He returned to England full of the ideas of "mutualism," and consequently Christian Socialism will always be associated with co-operative production and the self-governing workshop.
The movement died after a short life extending from 1848 to 1852, leaving as its progeny a book or two like Kingsley’s Alton Locke, a beautiful life or two of which that of Maurice was the most saintly, and the self-governing workshop which, after a generation of heart-breaking failure, is at last meeting with some success. It also left the trace of a tradition in the Church itself.
Later on, when the social movement again gathered in importance and in socialistic consciousness, Christian Socialism revived round this tradition. The Guild of St. Matthew was founded in 1877, some of the leaders of the Free Churches, without forming any separate organisation, associated themselves openly with Socialism, and many of the younger ministers of all denominations ranged themselves behind the same banner. An association of Free Church Socialist clergymen was founded in 1905, and the Church Socialist League in 1904. Now, the Church in all its sections is permeated with Socialism.
The competitive system cannot be reconciled with Christianity. It is a struggle for the survival of those whose only virtue is that they are the most adaptable; religion can never abandon the desire to supplant such a struggle by a method of selection which will secure the survival of graces and virtues. It must frequently result in glaring instances of the triumph of the unjust and of the otherwise unworthy; religion must always regard such results as indications that the conditions which produce them are alien to it. It is frankly a reign of wealth, whereas though religion may approve of the authority of a gilded aristocracy—divine right—or of a sober democracy—divine equality—it never can justify to itself a sovereignty of money, an empire of plutoeracy. Above all, religion must resent the attempts made by commercialism to measure virtues by their economic advantages and to appreciate—or depreciate—saints in accordance with whether they are or are not useful in counting-houses. However strenuously the economic needs of churches and chapels may strive to proclaim peace between these two essentially antagonistic systems of ethics, the peace thus patched up must always be unhappy and unnatural to both sides, and rebellion must frequently break out. As early Christianity had to challenge and change the life of Rome, so later Christianity must one day challenge and change the life of modern capitalist society.
2. Literature.
This challenge has not only come from the religious sentiments, but from all activities of the intellect. The religious revival which produced Christian Socialism was itself the result of a literary movement.
The long reign of the formal and the classical when, as Taine said, men of letters adopted a style by which they held "as by their coats," was closed by the end of the eighteenth century, and men were beginning to return to nature for the refreshment of their souls and to history for the invigoration of their minds. This change in outlook and inspiration brought the poets into companionship with man as well as with nature, and the Cottar's Saturday Night came to be written and Shelley's magnificent songs of democracy and liberty to be sung. Wordsworth gave the simple dales-men the mien of godlike dignity, and Coleridge bathed the whole of life in a glow of spiritual equality. The new literary movement divided. The main stream appeared to flow backwards to mediævalism and the ages of romance, and it refreshed the political system which grew up to contest supremacy with the growths of the Revolution; the other, the waters of which were often mingled with those of the first, bearing Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Swinburne, flowed onward in a somewhat hesitating and twisting current, in the direction of Social Democracy. But neither stream freshened commercialism. The industrial order was shunned by both. The cash nexus, the self-made rich man, the lack of good taste which the plutocracy showed, the brutalising of the lower classes, the destruction of the beautiful in nature, the enclosure of spots hallowed by beauty, the religion of utility—in a word, Manchesterism—have been attacked, lampooned and insulted (sometimes, be it said, misrepresented, but that of itself is significant) by both the romantic and humanist schools of literature.
There are men who live where wealth is made. They hear the hum of the wheels all day; all day their eyes wander over stocks and ledger pages. It is difficult for them to use wealth. They may clothe themselves in all the appearances of richness, but the coverings fit badly on their backs, and no one can ever be deceived by their show. Now, when a new and rich wealth-producing epoch comes and gains pour in upon people in a great rush, this kind of rich man is produced. Political economy is written to explain and justify him; ethical systems are built up solely from his virtues; his success is canonised. But the praise is only temporary. The world cannot continue to live and yet make obeisance to him. The minds who see past him and through him revolt against him. Hence every literary genius during the middle of the nineteenth century poured hot scorn or icy cold water upon the successes of his times. It is true these writers were generally only unhappy critics or defiant rebels; they were not reconstructive; they only harped upon the desires of their imagination. Ruskin's vagueness has left us a number of illuminating aphorisms like: "There is no wealth but life"; Carlyle's passion has fashioned for us the mediæval-modern community of Past and Present and thrown out volcanic eruptions of fault-finding; Dickens' pilloryings led to the removal of some of the blotches in the face of society as he found it, but when he had described and had mingled his descriptions with the sobbing protests of charity, he could do no more; Thackeray's gentlemen were dead or dying or had never been born; Wagner was a Childe Harold; Victor Hugo amiably and mournfully shook his head. But they stirred up enthusiasm and touched slumbering consciences into wakefulness. They prevented "the man with the muck rake" having it all his own way.
The world cannot exist without peace, leisure and beauty, and the whirring of wheels, the speeding of production, the depressing of vitality, the creation of ugly and slummy towns, the transcendence of cash, darkened and blighted the realms of the imagination, as the smoking chimneys darkened and blighted the landscapes. The arts fell to the lowest possible level. Domestic art in particular sank far down. The house itself and everything which it contained became a mere utilitarian shelter without a touch of beauty or idea. Things which used to express personality and give delight, were hustled out by machines, and craftsmanship decayed. Whatever exception can be taken to that statement is due to the fact that there were always coteries in revolt which though living in the period were not of it.
When literature is used as an index of the mind of the people, one searches in vain except on the very rarest of occasions for political demands or systematic criticism in the pages of novelists and poets. But one finds in these pages the spirit which is behind programmes. The great literary genius is seldom a man of the past, a mere classicist, a bookman. He gathers up in himself the spirit of his time. Of events and of the clashings of parties going on around him he may know nothing, but of the impelling underlying forces, the tides of fundamental feelings that are sweeping his time along, he knows more than most men. Therefore, if the list of actual Socialists amongst the literary and artistic geniuses who have lived during the commercialist epoch is small though by no means insignificant, that shows little one way or another, The artistic protest against commercialism can be traced in a well-defined current of critical idealism most ample in its proportions right through last century. What is but vague and critical in the protest has in due time become definite and constructive under the moulding fingers of Socialism. For instance, the influence of both Carlyle and Ruskin has been a powerful tendency in the direction of Socialism although neither of them could be said to show much appreciation of the most essential foundations—e.g. democracy—of the fabric of the socialist system. The evolution of William Morris followed the path of that of many a humble man. He was the child of Ruskin and Carlyle. But he did not use his love of the romantic and of the beautiful only as a cudgel by which to beat the back of his time, or as an inspiration for the coinage of phrases of literary and ethical beauty. It led him to Socialism. He saw that the drudgery of the machine-minder and the factory hand must crush out the joy in life which is the mother of art. Or, as he said himself: "Slavery lies between us and art." But Morris was the exception. The socialistic spirit transfuses the work of the artist as a rule; the artist does not appear as a propagandist, a lecturer, a chairman of meetings. That work is done by other types of mind.
Remembering this, we turn to the writers of the last century and find that our Socialism freely tinges their work. The wells of refreshment of which they drank are those which we frequent. Wordsworth's magnificent sonnet which stands up like the doleful message of an Israelitish prophet: "The world is too much with us," is the vision which the Socialist sees and seeks to guard against. From an opposite direction altogether Dickens approaches to fulfil the same mission. He was more of the demagogue and less of the poet. He was class conscious and never drew the portrait of an aristocrat without a flaw. He had no system but inexhaustible reservoirs of feeling, and that feeling in its quality was the same as inspired Burns to write of "yon birkie ca'd a lord" and "a man's a man for a' that." These may be but evidences of political prejudice. Well, it is the political prejudice which in time, and after being hammered into shape and tempered on the anvil of reason, becomes Socialism. Through the work of both the poet and the novelist ran the broad and deep tendency towards democracy, towards social equality and economic justice—that is, towards Socialist change.
In short, the poets and writers of the century that is past, in the main contemned their own age. They did not ennoble it for they were not of it. They laughed at what it cherished. They were Utopians and reformers in relation to it. Meredith and Hardy, Tolstoy and Ibsen, Turgenev and Anatole France; Burne Jones and Watts, the Pre-Raphaelites and the founders of the schools of arts and crafts—all pointed a way out of the weary dulness, the brutalising strife and the hardening materialism of commercialism, or were in revolt against a state which Matthew Arnold said, "materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower class." Romanticism, culture, humanism, all declined to accept the companionship of commercialism, and if they at the same time declined to label themselves Socialist, they worshipped with Socialists, drank from the same sparkling springs of energy, and scanned the horizon with expectant hopes for the same dawn. Moreover, those who were inspired by them brought down from the empyrean into the fogs and dust of the day, their thoughts and prophecies, their criticisms and their dreams; and Socialism was the result. The common mind sees the ways and means over the tops of which genius gazes heavenwards and consequently neither sees nor troubles about them. Some of the best literary and artistic work of the last century has been but as drum taps to which the step of Socialism kept time.
3. Science.
On its scientific side, this movement has been equally well marked, though in this country, unfortunately, scientific men have not been distinguished since Faraday's time for that democratic humility which is the crownof intellectuality. Science in Great Britain has run after social honours and even its Liberalism soon decayed. We have not, therefore, in this country that circle of the intellectual democracy which has enriched liberal thought on the Continent. Curie and Lombroso were Socialists, and we can claim the most distinguished of all our living scientists, Alfred Russel Wallace. A brilliant, if small, body of scientific men keeps him company. But again a mere catalogue of names is meaningless.
The reason why Socialism and the scientific mind should be congenial to each other is not far to seek. The scientist loves order and is repelled by disorder. The same intellectual promptings which lead him to invent a water tap which will not drip, will make him take an interest in proposals to do away with the industrial wastage of unemployment. For his schools, for his laboratories, for his research work, he has generally to turn to the state. He knows by bitter experience, particularly if his field is that of any of the human and social sciences, that privately endowed teaching places are not free;[1] if he deals with the physiological group of sciences, he knows the havoc which competitive industry makes with nerves and bodily health, with hygiene and physique. But, above all, the man who lives in an intellectual atmosphere and with an intellectual companionship must be repelled by the qualities which can amass property to-day and which, in consequence, give tone to society. An intellectual aristocracy must be in revolt against a commercial plutocracy.
Moreover, as I shall point out in a later chapter, the Socialist method is the scientific method. It is the method of evolution applied to society. It assumes that society is fulfilling its past in evolving the more efficient forms of the future; from certain well-observed tendencies and features it constructs working hypotheses, and it uses these hypotheses as guides for experiments which by condemning or justifying them open the way for further and still more comprehensive hypotheses. Thus the whole of society, its organisation, its institutions, its activities, is brought within the sway of natural law, not merely on its descriptive and historical side but on its experimental side, and administration and legislation become arts pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his laboratory. Socialism alone is worthy now-a-days of the title of scientific politics.
But society as the subject matter for scientific study and treatment has hardly more than crossed the threshold of the laboratory. Sir Francis Galton's imperfect application of theories of heredity to government is still the best contribution made by science to the subject. Public health, family needs, school hygiene, the whole field of Eugenics in its widest and most proper scope, is as sparsely tenanted by scientific investigators as central Australia is by agriculturists. But an emigration of interest has commenced and the evidence is so clear that one is tempted to prophesy that the science which is to add laurels to the twentieth century, as biology gave laurels to the nineteenth, is the science of sociology, including social heredity, social health, and social organisation; and in that science Socialist theory and programmes must find a central place. Socialism has made sociology important.
Thus our Socialism has its roots dug deep in literature, art, science, religion—in all the creative activities of the intellect. Sometimes these express themselves only as a revolt, sometimes as yearnings after the phantastical, sometimes they wander back to the religious brotherhoods that once were but which went out with the conditions which made them possible, sometimes they content themselves with singing of the ideal. But when the passions and longing they awaken, the principles and motives they proclaim, the rules and methods they demand, are all gathered together and systematised as a guide for practical politics and an impulse for immediate activity, it is Socialism which they create and encourage as their economic environment—Socialism, the revolt against individualist commercialism, the hypothesis from which the future organisation of society is to be built up, the ideal city to which the feet of men seeking a rational life and a moral community must always wander.
4. Comfort.
Nor is this intellectual appeal confined to what are called the intellectual classes.
Marx, taking an all too narrow stand on the economic determinism of history, was compelled to lay down the law of increasing misery as the law of Socialism. The rich were to get richer and the poor poorer. Wealth was to gather in the hands of a very few and misery was to become general. Then the change was to come. There is far more in the Marxian forecast than appears in the experience of the last two or three generations. It was unfortunate in its moment of publication. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers who also believed in it, were justified by events far more than Marx, For the workers were then going down into very shadowy paths. But in Marx’s time a vast expansion of commerce was imminent. Never had commerce leaped forward with such bounds as it did in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the working classes shared in the general increase in wealth. Engels described the black cloud which overhung the working classes just at the moment when some rays of light were penetrating it. Marx said that Socialism would come because misery would increase; as a matter of fact Socialism spread whilst misery was being lightened. Therefore a reply to the Marxian dogma is not a reply to Socialism.
There are two possible avenues down which Socialism may come. It may come from the darkness of misery, its way lit by flaming torches; or it may come from the advancing dawn of prosperity, its way lit by the steady broadening of the day. For the past generation or so, it has come by the latter way. We are better clothed than our grandfathers, we are better housed than they, we have a wider choice for consumption than they had. What then? Satisfaction? Or more hungering and thirsting? Certainly more hungering and thirsting. It is interesting as a matter of personal experience to note that the strength of Socialism is not found in the slummy and most miserable quarters in towns, but in those quarters upon which the sun of prosperity manages to shine. It is the skilled artisan, the trade unionist, the member of the friendly society, the young workman who reads and thinks, who are the recruits to the army of Socialism. The explanation is not difficult to discover. In dealing with horses we are dealing with stomachs only; in dealing with men, we are dealing with stomachs and heads. The needs of a horse present a purely quantitative problem in the supply of hay, the needs of a man present a qualitative one in the supply of intellectual happiness. Man is not satisfied with a little. Everything he acquires broadens his horizon and reveals in a widening sweep the hitherto unattained.
Socialism is therefore not a fleeing from the wrath which is to come, but a stretching out towards a state where more of the blessings now enjoyed are to be the lot of men. Its driving force is intellectual as well as economic. The spread of education, the sharpening of a sense of self-respect, the awakening of imagination, the increase of comfort amongst the workers, enhance the attractiveness of the Socialist appeal and prepare the soil for the Socialist seed. Give us more religion of the true kind, more literary and artistic culture, more science, and the opportunities of Socialism are thereby increased.
- ↑ President Hadley of Yale is responsible for the statement that "a University is more likely to obtain money if it gives the property owners reason to believe that vested rights will not be interfered with." (Quoted in Spargo's Common Sense of Socialism, p. 65.)