Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/401

DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 379 It is, however, time to bring this survey to a close. These ' diffic?ties ' of Individualism will appeal more strongly to some persons than to others. The evils of inequality of wealth will come home more forcibly to the three millions of the 'submerged tenth in want of the bare necessaries of life than they will to the small class provided with every luxury at the cost of the rest. The ethical objection to any diminution in the incomes of those who do us the fayour to own our land will vary in strength according, in the main, to our economic or political prepossessions. The indiscriminate multiplication of the unfit, like the drunken- ness of the masses, will appear as a cause or an effect of social inequality according to our actual information about the poor, and our disposition towards them. The luxury of the rich may strike us as a sign either of national wealth or of national mal- adjustment of resources to needs. The autocratic administration of industry will appear either as the beneficent direction of the appropriate captains of industry, or as the tyranny of a pro- prietary class over those who have no alternative but to become its wage-slaves. The struggle of the slaves among themselves, of the proprietors among themselves, and of each class with the other, may be to us 'the beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb on the shoulders of another, and remain there;' ? or it may loom to us, out of the blood and tears and misery of the strife, as a horrible remnant of the barbarism from which man has half risen since ' We dined, as a rule, on each other: What matter ? the toughest survived.' ? That survival from an obsolescent form of the struggle for existence may seem the best guarantee for the continuance of the community and the race; or it may, on the other hand, appear a suicidal internecine conflict, as fatal as that between the belly and the members. All through the tale two views are possible, and we shah take the one or the other according to our knowledge and temperament. This power of prepossession and unconscious bias constitutes, indeed, the special difficulty of the Individualists of to-day. Aristotle found it easy to convince himself and his friends that slavery was absolutely necessary to civilization. The Liberty and Property Defence League has the more difficult task of convincing, not the proprietary class, but our modern slaves, into whose ? Sir Henry Maine, Potmlar Government, pp 49, 50. a May Kendall, Dreams to Sell, ' Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus.' See D. G. Ritchie's Darwinism and Politics.