https://OneMoreLibrary.

com

Political Ideals
Bertrand Russell

The Century Co., New York, 1917

 POLITICAL IDEALS

by

Bertrand Russell

CONTENTS
I: Political Ideals
II: Capitalism and the Wage System
III: Pitfalls in Socialism
IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control
V: National Independence and Internationalism

Chapter I: Political Ideals

 In dark days, men need a clear faith and a well-grounded hope; and as
the outcome of these, the calm courage which takes no account of
hardships by the way. The times through which we are passing have
afforded to many of us a confirmation of our faith. We see that the things
we had thought evil are really evil, and we know more definitely than we
ever did before the directions in which men must move if a better world is
to arise on the ruins of the one which is now hurling itself into destruction.
We see that men's political dealings with one another are based on wholly
wrong ideals, and can only be saved by quite different ideals from
continuing to be a source of suffering, devastation, and sin.

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The
aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as
possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside or above
the various men, women, and children who compose the world. The
problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in such a
way that each severally may have as much of good in his existence as
possible. And this problem requires that we should first consider what it is
that we think good in the individual life.

To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to

lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by
some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the impatient
administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his opinion, and turning
out a set of pupils all of whom will give the same definite answer on a
doubtful point. Mr. Bernard Shaw is said to hold that Troilus and Cressida
is the best of Shakespeare's plays. Although I disagree with this opinion, I
should welcome it in a pupil as a sign of individuality; but most teachers
would not tolerate such a heterodox view. Not only teachers, but all
commonplace persons in authority, desire in their subordinates that kind of
uniformity which makes their actions easily predictable and never
inconvenient. The result is that they crush initiative and individuality
when they can, and when they cannot, they quarrel with it.

It is not one ideal for all men, but a separate ideal for each separate
man, that has to be realized if possible. Every man has it in his being to
develop into something good or bad: there is a best possible for him, and a
worst possible. His circumstances will determine whether his capacities
for good are developed or crushed, and whether his bad impulses are
strengthened or gradually diverted into better channels.

But although we cannot set up in any detail an ideal of character which

is to be universally applicable—although we cannot say, for instance, that
all men ought to be industrious, or self-sacrificing, or fond of music—
there are some broad principles which can be used to guide our estimates
as to what is possible or desirable.

We may distinguish two sorts of goods, and two corresponding sorts of

impulses. There are goods in regard to which individual possession is
possible, and there are goods in which all can share alike. The food and
clothing of one man is not the food and clothing of another; if the supply
is insufficient, what one man has is obtained at the expense of some other
man. This applies to material goods generally, and therefore to the greater
part of the present economic life of the world. On the other hand, mental
and spiritual goods do not belong to one man to the exclusion of another. If
one man knows a science, that does not prevent others from knowing it; on
the contrary, it helps them to acquire the knowledge. If one man is a great
artist or poet, that does not prevent others from painting pictures or
writing poems, but helps to create the atmosphere in which such things are
possible. If one man is full of good-will toward others, that does not mean
that there is less good-will to be shared among the rest; the more good-
will one man has, the more he is likely to create among others. In such
matters there is no possession, because there is not a definite amount to be
shared; any increase anywhere tends to produce an increase everywhere.

There are two kinds of impulses, corresponding to the two kinds of

goods. There are possessive impulses, which aim at acquiring or retaining
private goods that cannot be shared; these center in the impulse of
property. And there are creative or constructive impulses, which aim at
bringing into the world or making available for use the kind of goods in
which there is no privacy and no possession.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest
part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery.
The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What
shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give
to these things is taken away from matters of more importance. And what
is worse, the habit of mind engendered by thinking of these things is a bad
one; it leads to competition, envy, domination, cruelty, and almost all the
moral evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use
of force. Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the
robber. Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. You may kill an
artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may
put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so
doing acquire the love which made his happiness. Force is impotent in
such matters; it is only as regards material goods that it is effective. For
this reason the men who believe in force are the men whose thoughts and
desires are preoccupied with material goods.

The possessive impulses, when they are strong, infect activities which
ought to be purely creative. A man who has made some valuable discovery
may be filled with jealousy of a rival discoverer. If one man has found a
cure for cancer and another has found a cure for consumption, one of them
may be delighted if the other man's discovery turns out a mistake, instead
of regretting the suffering of patients which would otherwise have been
avoided. In such cases, instead of desiring knowledge for its own sake, or
for the sake of its usefulness, a man is desiring it as a means to reputation.
Every creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the
aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the more successful saint. Most
affection is accompanied by some tinge of jealousy, which is a possessive
impulse intruding into the creative region. Worst of all, in this direction, is
the sheer envy of those who have missed everything worth having in life,
and who are instinctively bent on preventing others from enjoying what
they have not had. There is often much of this in the attitude of the old
toward the young.

There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural

impulse of growth, and this is just as true of mental as of physical
development. Physical development is helped by air and nourishment and
exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment which made
Chinese women's feet small. In just the same way mental development
may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside influences
that help are those that merely provide encouragement or mental food or
opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The influences that hinder
are those that interfere with growth by applying any kind of force, whether
discipline or authority or fear or the tyranny of public opinion or the
necessity of engaging in some totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all
influences are those that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse,
which is what shows itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such
influences are likely to do a man an inward danger from which he will
never recover.

Those who realize the harm that can be done to others by any use of
force against them, and the worthlessness of the goods that can be
acquired by force, will be very full of respect for the liberty of others; they
will not try to bind them or fetter them; they will be slow to judge and
swift to sympathize; they will treat every human being with a kind of
tenderness, because the principle of good in him is at once fragile and
infinitely precious. They will not condemn those who are unlike
themselves; they will know and feel that individuality brings differences
and uniformity means death. They will wish each human being to be as
much a living thing and as little a mechanical product as it is possible to
be; they will cherish in each one just those things which the harsh usage of
a ruthless world would destroy. In one word, all their dealings with others
will be inspired by a deep impulse of reverence.

What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative

impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession;
reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in
ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is necessary to a
good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward defeat if he is to
remain whole, but must feel the courage and the hope and the will to live
by the best that is in him, whatever outward or inward obstacles it may
encounter. So far as it lies in a man's own power, his life will realize its
best possibilities if it has three things: creative rather than possessive
impulses, reverence for others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in
himself.
 Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm
that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather than
possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence between
human beings? Do they preserve self-respect?

In all these ways the institutions under which we live are very far
indeed from what they ought to be.

Institutions, and especially economic systems, have a profound

influence in molding the characters of men and women. They may
encourage adventure and hope, or timidity and the pursuit of safety. They
may open men's minds to great possibilities, or close them against
everything but the risk of obscure misfortune. They may make a man's
happiness depend upon what he adds to the general possessions of the
world, or upon what he can secure for himself of the private goods in
which others cannot share. Modern capitalism forces the wrong decision
of these alternatives upon all who are not heroic or exceptionally
fortunate.

Men's impulses are molded, partly by their native disposition, partly by

opportunity and environment, especially early environment. Direct
preaching can do very little to change impulses, though it can lead people
to restrain the direct expression of them, often with the result that the
impulses go underground and come to the surface again in some contorted
form. When we have discovered what kinds of impulse we desire, we must
not rest content with preaching, or with trying to produce the outward
manifestation without the inner spring; we must try rather to alter
institutions in the way that will, of itself, modify the life of impulse in the
desired direction.

At present our institutions rest upon two things: property and power.
Both of these are very unjustly distributed; both, in the actual world, are of
great importance to the happiness of the individual. Both are possessive
goods; yet without them many of the goods in which all might share are
hard to acquire as things are now.

Without property, as things are, a man has no freedom, and no security

for the necessities of a tolerable life; without power, he has no opportunity
for initiative. If men are to have free play for their creative impulses, they
must be liberated from sordid cares by a certain measure of security, and
they must have a sufficient share of power to be able to exercise initiative
as regards the course and conditions of their lives.

Few men can succeed in being creative rather than possessive in a

world which is wholly built on competition, where the great majority
would fall into utter destitution if they became careless as to the
acquisition of material goods, where honor and power and respect are
given to wealth rather than to wisdom, where the law embodies and
consecrates the injustice of those who have toward those who have not. In
such an environment even those whom nature has endowed with great
creative gifts become infected with the poison of competition. Men
combine in groups to attain more strength in the scramble for material
goods, and loyalty to the group spreads a halo of quasi-idealism round the
central impulse of greed. Trade-unions and the Labor party are no more
exempt from this vice than other parties and other sections of society;
though they are largely inspired by the hope of a radically better world.
They are too often led astray by the immediate object of securing for
themselves a large share of material goods. That this desire is in
accordance with justice, it is impossible to deny; but something larger and
more constructive is needed as a political ideal, if the victors of to-morrow
are not to become the oppressors of the day after. The inspiration and
outcome of a reforming movement ought to be freedom and a generous
spirit, not niggling restrictions and regulations.

The present economic system concentrates initiative in the hands of a

small number of very rich men. Those who are not capitalists have, almost
always, very little choice as to their activities when once they have
selected a trade or profession; they are not part of the power that moves
the mechanism, but only a passive portion of the machinery. Despite
political democracy, there is still an extraordinary degree of difference in
the power of self-direction belonging to a capitalist and to a man who has
to earn his living. Economic affairs touch men's lives, at most times, much
more intimately than political questions. At present the man who has no
capital usually has to sell himself to some large organization, such as a
railway company, for example. He has no voice in its management, and no
liberty in politics except what his trade-union can secure for him. If he
happens to desire a form of liberty which is not thought important by his
trade-union, he is powerless; he must submit or starve.

Exactly the same thing happens to professional men. Probably a

majority of journalists are engaged in writing for newspapers whose
politics they disagree with; only a man of wealth can own a large
newspaper, and only an accident can enable the point of view or the
interests of those who are not wealthy to find expression in a newspaper. A
large part of the best brains of the country are in the civil service, where
the condition of their employment is silence about the evils which cannot
be concealed from them. A Nonconformist minister loses his livelihood if
his views displease his congregation; a member of Parliament loses his
seat if he is not sufficiently supple or sufficiently stupid to follow or share
all the turns and twists of public opinion. In every walk of life,
independence of mind is punished by failure, more and more as economic
organizations grow larger and more rigid. Is it surprising that men become
increasingly docile, increasingly ready to submit to dictation and to forego
the right of thinking for themselves? Yet along such lines civilization can
only sink into a Byzantine immobility.

Fear of destitution is not a motive out of which a free creative life can
grow, yet it is the chief motive which inspires the daily work of most
wage-earners. The hope of possessing more wealth and power than any
man ought to have, which is the corresponding motive of the rich, is quite
as bad in its effects; it compels men to close their minds against justice,
and to prevent themselves from thinking honestly on social questions
while in the depths of their hearts they uneasily feel that their pleasures
are bought by the miseries of others. The injustices of destitution and
wealth alike ought to be rendered impossible. Then a great fear would be
removed from the lives of the many, and hope would have to take on a
better form in the lives of the few.

But security and liberty are only the negative conditions for good
political institutions. When they have been won, we need also the positive
condition: encouragement of creative energy. Security alone might
produce a smug and stationary society; it demands creativeness as its
counterpart, in order to keep alive the adventure and interest of life, and
the movement toward perpetually new and better things. There can be no
final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage
progress toward others still better. Without effort and change, human life
cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but
a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

It is a sad evidence of the weariness mankind has suffered from

excessive toil that his heavens have usually been places where nothing
ever happened or changed. Fatigue produces the illusion that only rest is
needed for happiness; but when men have rested for a time, boredom
drives them to renewed activity. For this reason, a happy life must be one
in which there is activity. If it is also to be a useful life, the activity ought
to be as far as possible creative, not merely predatory or defensive. But
creative activity requires imagination and originality, which are apt to be
subversive of the status quo. At present, those who have power dread a
disturbance of the status quo, lest their unjust privileges should be taken
away. In combination with the instinct for conventionality,[1] which man
shares with the other gregarious animals, those who profit by the existing
order have established a system which punishes originality and starves
imagination from the moment of first going to school down to the time of
death and burial. The whole spirit in which education is conducted needs
to be changed, in order that children may be encouraged to think and feel
for themselves, not to acquiesce passively in the thoughts and feelings of
others. It is not rewards after the event that will produce initiative, but a
certain mental atmosphere. There have been times when such an
atmosphere existed: the great days of Greece, and Elizabethan England,
may serve as examples. But in our own day the tyranny of vast machine-
like organizations, governed from above by men who know and care little
for the lives of those whom they control, is killing individuality and
freedom of mind, and forcing men more and more to conform to a uniform
pattern.
[1] In England this is called "a sense of humor."

Vast organizations are an inevitable element in modern life, and it is

useless to aim at their abolition, as has been done by some reformers, for
instance, William Morris. It is true that they make the preservation of
individuality more difficult, but what is needed is a way of combining
them with the greatest possible scope for individual initiative.

One very important step toward this end would be to render democratic
the government of every organization. At present, our legislative
institutions are more or less democratic, except for the important fact that
women are excluded. But our administration is still purely bureaucratic,
and our economic organizations are monarchical or oligarchic. Every
limited liability company is run by a small number of self-appointed or
coöpted directors. There can be no real freedom or democracy until the
men who do the work in a business also control its management.

Another measure which would do much to increase liberty would be an

increase of self-government for subordinate groups, whether geographical
or economic or defined by some common belief, like religious sects. A
modern state is so vast and its machinery is so little understood that even
when a man has a vote he does not feel himself any effective part of the
force which determines its policy. Except in matters where he can act in
conjunction with an exceptionally powerful group, he feels himself almost
impotent, and the government remains a remote impersonal circumstance,
which must be simply endured, like the weather. By a share in the control
of smaller bodies, a man might regain some of that sense of personal
opportunity and responsibility which belonged to the citizen of a city-state
in ancient Greece or medieval Italy.

When any group of men has a strong corporate consciousness—such as

belongs, for example, to a nation or a trade or a religious body—liberty
demands that it should be free to decide for itself all matters which are of
great importance to the outside world. This is the basis of the universal
claim for national independence. But nations are by no means the only
groups which ought to have self-government for their internal concerns.
And nations, like other groups, ought not to have complete liberty of
action in matters which are of equal concern to foreign nations. Liberty
demands self-government, but not the right to interfere with others. The
greatest degree of liberty is not secured by anarchy. The reconciliation of
liberty with government is a difficult problem, but it is one which any
political theory must face.
 The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law to
secure certain ends which the holders of power consider desirable. The
coercion of an individual or a group by force is always in itself more or
less harmful. But if there were no government, the result would not be an
absence of force in men's relations to each other; it would merely be the
exercise of force by those who had strong predatory instincts,
necessitating either slavery or a perpetual readiness to repel force with
force on the part of those whose instincts were less violent. This is the
state of affairs at present in international relations, owing to the fact that
no international government exists. The results of anarchy between states
should suffice to persuade us that anarchism has no solution to offer for
the evils of the world.

There is probably one purpose, and only one, for which the use of force
by a government is beneficent, and that is to diminish the total amount of
force used m the world. It is clear, for example, that the legal prohibition
of murder diminishes the total amount of violence in the world. And no
one would maintain that parents should have unlimited freedom to ill-treat
their children. So long as some men wish to do violence to others, there
cannot be complete liberty, for either the wish to do violence must be
restrained, or the victims must be left to suffer. For this reason, although
individuals and societies should have the utmost freedom as regards their
own affairs, they ought not to have complete freedom as regards their
dealings with others. To give freedom to the strong to oppress the weak is
not the way to secure the greatest possible amount of freedom in the
world. This is the basis of the socialist revolt against the kind of freedom
which used to be advocated by laissez-faire economists.

Democracy is a device—the best so far invented—for diminishing as

much as possible the interference of governments with liberty. If a nation
is divided into two sections which cannot both have their way, democracy
theoretically insures that the majority shall have their way. But democracy
is not at all an adequate device unless it is accompanied by a very great
amount of devolution. Love of uniformity, or the mere pleasure of
interfering, or dislike of differing tastes and temperaments, may often lead
a majority to control a minority in matters which do not really concern the
majority. We should none of us like to have the internal affairs of Great
Britain settled by a parliament of the world, if ever such a body came into
existence. Nevertheless, there are matters which such a body could settle
much better than any existing instrument of government.

The theory of the legitimate use of force in human affairs, where a

government exists, seems clear. Force should only be used against those
who attempt to use force against others, or against those who will not
respect the law in cases where a common decision is necessary and a
minority are opposed to the action of the majority. These seem legitimate
occasions for the use of force; and they should be legitimate occasions in
international affairs, if an international government existed. The problem
of the legitimate occasions for the use of force in the absence of a
government is a different one, with which we are not at present concerned.

Although a government must have the power to use force, and may on
occasion use it legitimately, the aim of the reformers to have such
institutions as will diminish the need for actual coercion will be found to
have this effect. Most of us abstain, for instance, from theft, not because it
is illegal, but because we feel no desire to steal. The more men learn to
live creatively rather than possessively, the less their wishes will lead
them to thwart others or to attempt violent interference with their liberty.
Most of the conflicts of interests, which lead individuals or organizations
into disputes, are purely imaginary, and would be seen to be so if men
aimed more at the goods in which all can share, and less at those private
possessions that are the source of strife. In proportion as men live
creatively, they cease to wish to interfere with others by force. Very many
matters in which, at present, common action is thought indispensable,
might well be left to individual decision. It used to be thought absolutely
necessary that all the inhabitants of a country should have the same
religion, but we now know that there is no such necessity. In like manner it
will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many
uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.

Good political institutions would weaken the impulse toward force and
domination in two ways: first, by increasing the opportunities for the
creative impulses, and by shaping education so as to strengthen these
impulses; secondly, by diminishing the outlets for the possessive instincts.
The diffusion of power, both in the political and the economic sphere,
instead of its concentration in the hands of officials and captains of
industry, would greatly diminish the opportunities for acquiring the habit
of command, out of which the desire for exercising tyranny is apt to
spring. Autonomy, both for districts and for organizations, would leave
fewer occasions when governments were called upon to make decisions as
to other people's concerns. And the abolition of capitalism and the wage
system would remove the chief incentive to fear and greed, those
correlative passions by which all free life is choked and gagged.

Few men seem to realize how many of the evils from which we suffer
are wholly unnecessary, and that they could be abolished by a united effort
within a few years. If a majority in every civilized country so desired, we
could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty, quite half the illness
in the world, the whole economic slavery which binds down nine tenths of
our population; we could fill the world with beauty and joy, and secure the
reign of universal peace. It is only because men are apathetic that this is
not achieved, only because imagination is sluggish, and what always has
been is regarded as what always must be. With good-will, generosity,
intelligence, these things could be brought about.

Chapter II: Capitalism and the Wage System

The world is full of preventible evils which most men would be glad to
see prevented.

Nevertheless, these evils persist, and nothing effective is done toward

abolishing them.

This paradox produces astonishment in inexperienced reformers, and

too often produces disillusionment in those who have come to know the
difficulty of changing human institutions.

War is recognized as an evil by an immense majority in every civilized

country; but this recognition does not prevent war.

The unjust distribution of wealth must be obviously an evil to those

who are not prosperous, and they are nine tenths of the population.
Nevertheless it continues unabated.

The tyranny of the holders of power is a source of needless suffering

and misfortune to very large sections of mankind; but power remains in
few hands, and tends, if anything, to grow more concentrated.

I wish first to study the evils of our present institutions, and the causes
of the very limited success of reformers in the past, and then to suggest
reasons for the hope of a more lasting and permanent success in the near
future.

The war has come as a challenge to all who desire a better world. The
system which cannot save mankind from such an appalling disaster is at
fault somewhere, and cannot be amended in any lasting way unless the
danger of great wars in the future can be made very small.

But war is only the final flower of an evil tree. Even in times of peace,
most men live lives of monotonous labor, most women are condemned to
a drudgery which almost kills the possibility of happiness before youth is
past, most children are allowed to grow up in ignorance of all that would
enlarge their thoughts or stimulate their imagination. The few who are
more fortunate are rendered illiberal by their unjust privileges, and
oppressive through fear of the awakening indignation of the masses. From
the highest to the lowest, almost all men are absorbed in the economic
struggle: the struggle to acquire what is their due or to retain what is not
their due. Material possessions, in fact or in desire, dominate our outlook,
usually to the exclusion of all generous and creative impulses.
Possessiveness—the passion to have and to hold—is the ultimate source of
war, and the foundation of all the ills from which the political world is
suffering. Only by diminishing the strength of this passion and its hold
upon our daily lives can new institutions bring permanent benefit to
mankind.

Institutions which will diminish the sway of greed are possible, but
only through a complete reconstruction of our whole economic system.
Capitalism and the wage system must be abolished; they are twin monsters
which are eating up the life of the world. In place of them we need a
system which will hold in cheek men's predatory impulses, and will
diminish the economic injustice that allows some to be rich in idleness
while others are poor in spite of unremitting labor; but above all we need a
system which will destroy the tyranny of the employer, by making men at
the same time secure against destitution and able to find scope for
individual initiative in the control of the industry by which they live. A
better system can do all these things, and can be established by the
democracy whenever it grows weary of enduring evils which there is no
reason to endure.

We may distinguish four purposes at which an economic system may

aim: first, it may aim at the greatest possible production of goods and at
facilitating technical progress; second, it may aim at securing distributive
justice; third, it may aim at giving security against destitution; and, fourth,
it may aim at liberating creative impulses and diminishing possessive
impulses.

Of these four purposes the last is the most important. Security is chiefly
important as a means to it. State socialism, though it might give material
security and more justice than we have at present, would probably fail to
liberate creative impulses or produce a progressive society.

Our present system fails in all four purposes. It is chiefly defended on

the ground that it achieves the first of the four purposes, namely, the
greatest possible production of material goods, but it only does this in a
very short-sighted way, by methods which are wasteful in the long run
both of human material and of natural resources.

Capitalistic enterprise involves a ruthless belief in the importance of

increasing material production to the utmost possible extent now and in
the immediate future. In obedience to this belief, new portions of the
earth's surface are continually brought under the sway of industrialism.
Vast tracts of Africa become recruiting grounds for the labor required in
the gold and diamond mines of the Rand, Rhodesia, and Kimberley; for
this purpose, the population is demoralized, taxed, driven into revolt, and
exposed to the contamination of European vice and disease. Healthy and
vigorous races from Southern Europe are tempted to America, where
sweating and slum life reduce their vitality if they do not actually cause
their death. What damage is done to our own urban populations by the
conditions under which they live, we all know. And what is true of the
human riches of the world is no less true of the physical resources. The
mines, forests, and wheat-fields of the world are all being exploited at a
rate which must practically exhaust them at no distant date. On the side of
material production, the world is living too fast; in a kind of delirium,
almost all the energy of the world has rushed into the immediate
production of something, no matter what, and no matter at what cost. And
yet our present system is defended on the ground that it safeguards
progress!

It cannot be said that our present economic system is any more

successful in regard to the other three objects which ought to be aimed at.
Among the many obvious evils of capitalism and the wage system, none
are more glaring than that they encourage predatory instincts, that they
allow economic injustice, and that they give great scope to the tyranny of
the employer.

As to predatory instincts, we may say, broadly speaking, that in a state

of nature there would be two ways of acquiring riches—one by production,
the other by robbery. Under our existing system, although what is
recognized as robbery is forbidden, there are nevertheless many ways of
becoming rich without contributing anything to the wealth of the
community. Ownership of land or capital, whether acquired or inherited,
gives a legal right to a permanent income. Although most people have to
produce in order to live, a privileged minority are able to live in luxury
without producing anything at all. As these are the men who are not only
the most fortunate but also the most respected, there is a general desire to
enter their ranks, and a widespread unwillingness to face the fact that there
is no justification whatever for incomes derived in this way. And apart
from the passive enjoyment of rent or interest, the methods of acquiring
wealth are very largely predatory. It is not, as a rule, by means of useful
inventions, or of any other action which increases the general wealth of the
community, that men amass fortunes; it is much more often by skill in
exploiting or circumventing others. Nor is it only among the rich that our
present régime promotes a narrowly acquisitive spirit. The constant risk of
destitution compels most men to fill a great part of their time and thought
with the economic struggle. There is a theory that this increases the total
output of wealth by the community. But for reasons to which I shall return
later, I believe this theory to be wholly mistaken.

Economic injustice is perhaps the most obvious evil of our present

system. It would be utterly absurd to maintain that the men who inherit
great wealth deserve better of the community than those who have to work
for their living. I am not prepared to maintain that economic justice
requires an exactly equal income for everybody. Some kinds of work
require a larger income for efficiency than others do; but there is
economic injustice as soon as a man has more than his share, unless it is
because his efficiency in his work requires it, or as a reward for some
definite service. But this point is so obvious that it needs no elaboration.

The modern growth of monopolies in the shape of trusts, cartels,

federations of employers and so on has greatly increased the power of the
capitalist to levy toll on the community. This tendency will not cease of
itself, but only through definite action on the part of those who do not
profit by the capitalist régime. Unfortunately the distinction between the
proletariat and the capitalist is not so sharp as it was in the minds of
socialist theorizers. Trade-unions have funds in various securities; friendly
societies are large capitalists; and many individuals eke out their wages by
invested savings. All this increases the difficulty of any clear-cut radical
change in our economic system. But it does not diminish the desirability
of such a change.

Such a system as that suggested by the French syndicalists, in which

each trade would be self-governing and completely independent, without
the control of any central authority, would not secure economic justice.
Some trades are in a much stronger bargaining position than others. Coal
and transport, for example, could paralyze the national life, and could levy
blackmail by threatening to do so. On the other hand, such people as
school teachers, for example, could rouse very little terror by the threat of
a strike and would be in a very weak bargaining position. Justice can never
be secured by any system of unrestrained force exercised by interested
parties in their own interests. For this reason the abolition of the state,
which the syndicalists seem to desire, would be a measure not compatible
with economic justice.

The tyranny of the employer, which at present robs the greater part of
most men's lives of all liberty and all initiative, is unavoidable so long as
the employer retains the right of dismissal with consequent loss of pay.
This right is supposed to be essential in order that men may have an
incentive to work thoroughly. But as men grow more civilized, incentives
based on hope become increasingly preferable to those that are based on
fear. It would be far better that men should be rewarded for working well
than that they should be punished for working badly. This system is
already in operation in the civil service, where a man is only dismissed for
some exceptional degree of vice or virtue, such as murder or illegal
abstention from it. Sufficient pay to ensure a livelihood ought to be given
to every person who is willing to work, independently of the question
whether the particular work at which he is skilled is wanted at the moment
or not. If it is not wanted, some new trade which is wanted ought to be
taught at the public expense. Why, for example, should a hansom-cab
driver be allowed to suffer on account of the introduction of taxies? He has
not committed any crime, and the fact that his work is no longer wanted is
due to causes entirely outside his control. Instead of being allowed to
starve, he ought to be given instruction in motor driving or in whatever
other trade may seem most suitable. At present, owing to the fact that all
industrial changes tend to cause hardships to some section of wage-
earners, there is a tendency to technical conservatism on the part of labor,
a dislike of innovations, new processes, and new methods. But such
changes, if they are in the permanent interest of the community, ought to
be carried out without allowing them to bring unmerited loss to those
sections of the community whose labor is no longer wanted in the old
form. The instinctive conservatism of mankind is sure to make all
processes of production change more slowly than they should. It is a pity
to add to this by the avoidable conservatism which is forced upon
organized labor at present through the unjust workings of a change.

It will be said that men will not work well if the fear of dismissal does
not spur them on. I think it is only a small percentage of whom this would
be true at present. And those of whom it would be true might easily
become industrious if they were given more congenial work or a wiser
training. The residue who cannot be coaxed into industry by any such
methods are probably to be regarded as pathological cases, requiring
medical rather than penal treatment. And against this residue must be set
the very much larger number who are now ruined in health or in morale by
the terrible uncertainty of their livelihood and the great irregularity of
their employment. To very many, security would bring a quite new
possibility of physical and moral health.

The most dangerous aspect of the tyranny of the employer is the power
which it gives him of interfering with men's activities outside their
working hours. A man may be dismissed because the employer dislikes his
religion or his politics, or chooses to think his private life immoral. He
may be dismissed because he tries to produce a spirit of independence
among his fellow employees. He may fail completely to find employment
merely on the ground that he is better educated than most and therefore
more dangerous. Such cases actually occur at present. This evil would not
be remedied, but rather intensified, under state socialism, because, where
the State is the only employer, there is no refuge from its prejudices such
as may now accidentally arise through the differing opinions of different
men. The State would be able to enforce any system of beliefs it happened
to like, and it is almost certain that it would do so. Freedom of thought
would be penalized, and all independence of spirit would die out.

Any rigid system would involve this evil. It is very necessary that there
should be diversity and lack of complete systematization. Minorities must
be able to live and develop their opinions freely. If this is not secured, the
instinct of persecution and conformity will force all men into one mold
and make all vital progress impossible.

For these reasons, no one ought to be allowed to suffer destitution so

long as he or she is willing to work. And no kind of inquiry ought to be
made into opinion or private life. It is only on this basis that it is possible
to build up an economic system not founded upon tyranny and terror.

II

The power of the economic reformer is limited by the technical

productivity of labor. So long as it was necessary to the bare subsistence of
the human race that most men should work very long hours for a pittance,
so long no civilization was possible except an aristocratic one; if there
were to be men with sufficient leisure for any mental life, there had to be
others who were sacrificed for the good of the few. But the time when such
a system was necessary has passed away with the progress of machinery. It
would be possible now, if we had a wise economic system, for all who
have mental needs to find satisfaction for them. By a few hours a day of
manual work, a man can produce as much as is necessary for his own
subsistence; and if he is willing to forgo luxuries, that is all that the
community has a right to demand of him. It ought to be open to all who so
desire to do short hours of work for little pay, and devote their leisure to
whatever pursuit happens to attract them. No doubt the great majority of
those who chose this course would spend their time in mere amusement, as
most of the rich do at present. But it could not be said, in such a society,
that they were parasites upon the labor of others. And there would be a
minority who would give their hours of nominal idleness to science or art
or literature, or some other pursuit out of which fundamental progress may
come. In all such matters, organization and system can only do harm. The
one thing that can be done is to provide opportunity, without repining at
the waste that results from most men failing to make good use of the
opportunity.

But except in cases of unusual laziness or eccentric ambition, most men

would elect to do a full day's work for a full day's pay. For these, who
would form the immense majority, the important thing is that ordinary
work should, as far as possible, afford interest and independence and scope
for initiative. These things are more important than income, as soon as a
certain minimum has been reached. They can be secured by gild socialism,
by industrial self-government subject to state control as regards the
relations of a trade to the rest of the community. So far as I know, they
cannot be secured in any other way.

Guild socialism, as advocated by Mr. Orage and the "New Age," is

associated with a polemic against "political" action, and in favor of direct
economic action by trade-unions. It shares this with syndicalism, from
which most of what is new in it is derived. But I see no reason for this
attitude; political and economic action seem to me equally necessary, each
in its own time and place. I think there is danger in the attempt to use the
machinery of the present capitalist state for socialistic purposes. But there
is need of political action to transform the machinery of the state, side by
side with the transformation which we hope to see in economic
institutions. In this country, neither transformation is likely to be brought
about by a sudden revolution; we must expect each to come step by step, if
at all, and I doubt if either could or should advance very far without the
other.

The economic system we should ultimately wish to see would be one in

which the state would be the sole recipient of economic rent, while private
capitalistic enterprises should be replaced by self-governing combinations
of those who actually do the work. It ought to be optional whether a man
does a whole day's work for a whole day's pay, or half a day's work for half
a day's pay, except in cases where such an arrangement would cause
practical inconvenience. A man's pay should not cease through the
accident of his work being no longer needed, but should continue so long
as he is willing to work, a new trade being taught him at the public
expense, if necessary. Unwillingness to work should be treated medically
or educationally, when it could not be overcome by a change to some more
congenial occupation.

The workers in a given industry should all be combined in one

autonomous unit, and their work should not be subject to any outside
control. The state should fix the price at which they produce, but should
leave the industry self-governing in all other respects. In fixing prices, the
state should, as far as possible, allow each industry to profit by any
improvements which it might introduce into its own processes, but should
endeavor to prevent undeserved loss or gain through changes in external
economic conditions. In this way there would be every incentive to
progress, with the least possible danger of unmerited destitution. And
although large economic organizations will continue, as they are bound to
do, there will be a diffusion of power which will take away the sense of
individual impotence from which men and women suffer at present.

III

Some men, though they may admit that such a system would be
desirable, will argue that it is impossible to bring it about, and that
therefore we must concentrate on more immediate objects.

I think it must be conceded that a political party ought to have

proximate aims, measures which it hopes to carry in the next session or
the next parliament, as well as a more distant goal. Marxian socialism, as
it existed in Germany, seemed to me to suffer in this way: although the
party was numerically powerful, it was politically weak, because it had no
minor measures to demand while waiting for the revolution. And when, at
last, German socialism was captured by those who desired a less
impracticable policy, the modification which occurred was of exactly the
wrong kind: acquiescence in bad policies, such as militarism and
imperialism, rather than advocacy of partial reforms which, however
inadequate, would still have been steps in the right direction.

A similar defect was inherent in the policy of French syndicalism as it

existed before the war. Everything was to wait for the general strike; after
adequate preparation, one day the whole proletariat would unanimously
refuse to work, the property owners would acknowledge their defeat, and
agree to abandon all their privileges rather than starve. This is a dramatic
conception; but love of drama is a great enemy of true vision. Men cannot
be trained, except under very rare circumstances, to do something
suddenly which is very different from what they have been doing before. If
the general strike were to succeed, the victors, despite their anarchism,
would be compelled at once to form an administration, to create a new
police force to prevent looting and wanton destruction, to establish a
provisional government issuing dictatorial orders to the various sections
of revolutionaries. Now the syndicalists are opposed in principle to all
political action; they would feel that they were departing from their theory
in taking the necessary practical steps, and they would be without the
required training because of their previous abstention from politics. For
these reasons it is likely that, even after a syndicalist revolution, actual
power would fall into the hands of men who were not really syndicalists.

Another objection to a program which is to be realized suddenly at

some remote date by a revolution or a general strike is that enthusiasm
flags when there is nothing to do meanwhile, and no partial success to
lessen the weariness of waiting. The only sort of movement which can
succeed by such methods is one where the sentiment and the program are
both very simple, as is the case in rebellions of oppressed nations. But the
line of demarcation between capitalist and wage-earner is not sharp, like
the line between Turk and Armenian, or between an Englishman and a
native of India. Those who have advocated the social revolution have been
mistaken in their political methods, chiefly because they have not realized
how many people there are in the community whose sympathies and
interests lie half on the side of capital, half on the side of labor. These
people make a clear-cut revolutionary policy very difficult.

For these reasons, those who aim at an economic reconstruction which

is not likely to be completed to-morrow must, if they are to have any hope
of success, be able to approach their goal by degrees, through measures
which are of some use in themselves, even if they should not ultimately
lead to the desired end. There must be activities which train men for those
that they are ultimately to carry out, and there must be possible
achievements in the near future, not only a vague hope of a distant
paradise.

But although I believe that all this is true, I believe no less firmly that
really vital and radical reform requires some vision beyond the immediate
future, some realization of what human beings might make of human life
if they chose. Without some such hope, men will not have the energy and
enthusiasm necessary to overcome opposition, or the steadfastness to
persist when their aims are for the moment unpopular. Every man who has
really sincere desire for any great amelioration in the conditions of life has
first to face ridicule, then persecution, then cajolery and attempts at subtle
corruption. We know from painful experience how few pass unscathed
through these three ordeals. The last especially, when the reformer is
shown all the kingdoms of the earth, is difficult, indeed almost impossible,
except for those who have made their ultimate goal vivid to themselves by
clear and definite thought.

Economic systems are concerned essentially with the production and

distribution of material goods. Our present system is wasteful on the
production side, and unjust on the side of distribution. It involves a life of
slavery to economic forces for the great majority of the community, and
for the minority a degree of power over the lives of others which no man
ought to have. In a good community the production of the necessaries of
existence would be a mere preliminary to the important and interesting
part of life, except for those who find a pleasure in some part of the work
of producing necessaries. It is not in the least necessary that economic
needs should dominate man as they do at present. This is rendered
necessary at present, partly by the inequalities of wealth, partly by the fact
that things of real value, such as a good education, are difficult to acquire,
except for the well-to-do.

Private ownership of land and capital is not defensible on grounds of

justice, or on the ground that it is an economical way of producing what
the community needs. But the chief objections to it are that it stunts the
lives of men and women, that it enshrines a ruthless possessiveness in all
the respect which is given to success, that it leads men to fill the greater
part of their time and thought with the acquisition of purely material
goods, and that it affords a terrible obstacle to the advancement of
civilization and creative energy.

The approach to a system free from these evils need not be sudden; it is
perfectly possible to proceed step by step towards economic freedom and
industrial self-government. It is not true that there is any outward
difficulty in creating the kind of institutions that we have been
considering. If organized labor wishes to create them, nothing could stand
in its way. The difficulty involved is merely the difficulty of inspiring men
with hope, of giving them enough imagination to see that the evils from
which they suffer are unnecessary, and enough thought to understand how
the evils are to be cured. This is a difficulty which can be overcome by
time and energy. But it will not be overcome if the leaders of organized
labor have no breadth of outlook, no vision, no hopes beyond some slight
superficial improvement within the framework of the existing system.
Revolutionary action may be unnecessary, but revolutionary thought is
indispensable, and, as the outcome of thought, a rational and constructive
hope.

Chapter III: Pitfalls in Socialism

In its early days, socialism was a revolutionary movement of which the

object was the liberation of the wage-earning classes and the
establishment of freedom and justice. The passage from capitalism to the
new régime was to be sudden and violent: capitalists were to be
expropriated without compensation, and their power was not to be
replaced by any new authority.

Gradually a change came over the spirit of socialism. In France,

socialists became members of the government, and made and unmade
parliamentary majorities. In Germany, social democracy grew so strong
that it became impossible for it to resist the temptation to barter away
some of its intransigeance in return for government recognition of its
claims. In England, the Fabians taught the advantage of reform as against
revolution, and of conciliatory bargaining as against irreconcilable
antagonism.

The method of gradual reform has many merits as compared to the

method of revolution, and I have no wish to preach revolution. But gradual
reform has certain dangers, to wit, the ownership or control of businesses
hitherto in private hands, and by encouraging legislative interference for
the benefit of various sections of the wage-earning classes. I think it is at
least doubtful whether such measures do anything at all to contribute
toward the ideals which inspired the early socialists and still inspire the
great majority of those who advocate some form of socialism.

Let us take as an illustration such a measure as state purchase of

railways. This is a typical object of state socialism, thoroughly
practicable, already achieved in many countries, and clearly the sort of
step that must be taken in any piecemeal approach to complete
collectivism. Yet I see no reason to believe that any real advance toward
democracy, freedom, or economic justice is achieved when a state takes
over the railways after full compensation to the shareholders.

Economic justice demands a diminution, if not a total abolition, of the

proportion of the national income which goes to the recipients of rent and
interest. But when the holders of railway shares are given government
stock to replace their shares, they are given the prospect of an income in
perpetuity equal to what they might reasonably expect to have derived
from their shares. Unless there is reason to expect a great increase in the
earnings of railways, the whole operation does nothing to alter the
distribution of wealth. This could only be effected if the present owners
were expropriated, or paid less than the market value, or given a mere life-
interest as compensation. When full value is given, economic justice is not
advanced in any degree.

There is equally little advance toward freedom. The men employed on

the railway have no more voice than they had before in the management of
the railway, or in the wages and conditions of work. Instead of having to
fight the directors, with the possibility of an appeal to the government,
they now have to fight the government directly; and experience does not
lead to the view that a government department has any special tenderness
toward the claims of labor. If they strike, they have to contend against the
whole organized power of the state, which they can only do successfully if
they happen to have a strong public opinion on their side. In view of the
influence which the state can always exercise on the press, public opinion
is likely to be biased against them, particularly when a nominally
progressive government is in power. There will no longer be the possibility
of divergences between the policies of different railways. Railway men in
England derived advantages for many years from the comparatively liberal
policy of the North Eastern Railway, which they were able to use as an
argument for a similar policy elsewhere. Such possibilities are excluded
by the dead uniformity of state administration.

And there is no real advance toward democracy. The administration of

the railways will be in the hands of officials whose bias and associations
separate them from labor, and who will develop an autocratic temper
through the habit of power. The democratic machinery by which these
officials are nominally controlled is cumbrous and remote, and can only
be brought into operation on first-class issues which rouse the interest of
the whole nation. Even then it is very likely that the superior education of
the officials and the government, combined with the advantages of their
position, will enable them to mislead the public as to the issues, and
alienate the general sympathy even from the most excellent cause.

I do not deny that these evils exist at present; I say only that they will
not be remedied by such measures as the nationalization of railways in the
present economic and political environment. A greater upheaval, and a
greater change in men's habits of mind, is necessary for any really vital
progress.

II

State socialism, even in a nation which possesses the form of political

democracy, is not a truly democratic system. The way in which it fails to
be democratic may be made plain by an analogy from the political sphere.
Every democrat recognizes that the Irish ought to have self-government
for Irish affairs, and ought not to be told that they have no grievance
because they share in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is essential
to democracy that any group of citizens whose interests or desires separate
them at all widely from the rest of the community should be free to decide
their internal affairs for themselves. And what is true of national or local
groups is equally true of economic groups, such as miners or railway men.
The national machinery of general elections is by no means sufficient to
secure for groups of this kind the freedom which they ought to have.

The power of officials, which is a great and growing danger in the

modern state, arises from the fact that the majority of the voters, who
constitute the only ultimate popular control over officials, are as a rule not
interested in any one particular question, and are therefore not likely to
interfere effectively against an official who is thwarting the wishes of the
minority who are interested. The official is nominally subject to indirect
popular control, but not to the control of those who are directly affected by
his action. The bulk of the public will either never hear about the matter in
dispute, or, if they do hear, will form a hasty opinion based upon
inadequate information, which is far more likely to come from the side of
the officials than from the section of the community which is affected by
the question at issue. In an important political issue, some degree of
knowledge is likely to be diffused in time; but in other matters there is
little hope that this will happen.

It may be said that the power of officials is much less dangerous than
the power of capitalists, because officials have no economic interests that
are opposed to those of wage-earners. But this argument involves far too
simple a theory of political human nature—a theory which orthodox
socialism adopted from the classical political economy, and has tended to
retain in spite of growing evidence of its falsity. Economic self-interest,
and even economic class-interest, is by no means the only important
political motive. Officials, whose salary is generally quite unaffected by
their decisions on particular questions, are likely, if they are of average
honesty, to decide according to their view of the public interest; but their
view will none the less have a bias which will often lead them wrong. It is
important to understand this bias before entrusting our destinies too
unreservedly to government departments.

The first thing to observe is that, in any very large organization, and
above all in a great state, officials and legislators are usually very remote
from those whom they govern, and not imaginatively acquainted with the
conditions of life to which their decisions will be applied. This makes
them ignorant of much that they ought to know, even when they are
industrious and willing to learn whatever can be taught by statistics and
blue-books. The one thing they understand intimately is the office routine
and the administrative rules. The result is an undue anxiety to secure a
uniform system. I have heard of a French minister of education taking out
his watch, and remarking, "At this moment all the children of such and
such an age in France are learning so and so." This is the ideal of the
administrator, an ideal utterly fatal to free growth, initiative, experiment,
or any far reaching innovation. Laziness is not one of the motives
recognized in textbooks on political theory, because all ordinary
knowledge of human nature is considered unworthy of the dignity of these
works; yet we all know that laziness is an immensely powerful motive
with all but a small minority of mankind.

Unfortunately, in this case laziness is reinforced by love of power,

which leads energetic officials to create the systems which lazy officials
like to administer. The energetic official inevitably dislikes anything that
he does not control. His official sanction must be obtained before anything
can be done. Whatever he finds in existence he wishes to alter in some
way, so as to have the satisfaction of feeling his power and making it felt.
If he is conscientious, he will think out some perfectly uniform and rigid
scheme which he believes to be the best possible, and he will then impose
this scheme ruthlessly, whatever promising growths he may have to lop
down for the sake of symmetry. The result inevitably has something of the
deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as compared with the beauty
and richness of an ancient city which has lived and grown with the
separate lives and individualities of many generations. What has grown is
always more living than what has been decreed; but the energetic official
will always prefer the tidiness of what he has decreed to the apparent
disorder of spontaneous growth.

The mere possession of power tends to produce a love of power, which

is a very dangerous motive, because the only sure proof of power consists
in preventing others from doing what they wish to do. The essential theory
of democracy is the diffusion of power among the whole people, so that
the evils produced by one man's possession of great power shall be
obviated. But the diffusion of power through democracy is only effective
when the voters take an interest in the question involved. When the
question does not interest them, they do not attempt to control the
administration, and all actual power passes into the hands of officials.

For this reason, the true ends of democracy are not achieved by state
socialism or by any system which places great power in the hands of men
subject to no popular control except that which is more or less indirectly
exercised through parliament.

Any fresh survey of men's political actions shows that, in those who
have enough energy to be politically effective, love of power is a stronger
motive than economic self-interest. Love of power actuates the great
millionaires, who have far more money than they can spend, but continue
to amass wealth merely in order to control more and more of the world's
finance.[2] Love of power is obviously the ruling motive of many
politicians. It is also the chief cause of wars, which are admittedly almost
always a bad speculation from the mere point of view of wealth. For this
reason, a new economic system which merely attacks economic motives
and does not interfere with the concentration of power is not likely to
effect any very great improvement in the world. This is one of the chief
reasons for regarding state socialism with suspicion.
[2] Cf. J. A. Hobson, "The Evolution of Modern Capitalism."

III

The problem of the distribution of power is a more difficult one than

the problem of the distribution of wealth. The machinery of representative
government has concentrated on ultimate power as the only important
matter, and has ignored immediate executive power. Almost nothing has
been done to democratize administration. Government officials, in virtue
of their income, security, and social position, are likely to be on the side of
the rich, who have been their daily associates ever since the time of school
and college. And whether or not they are on the side of the rich, they are
not likely, for the reasons we have been considering, to be genuinely in
favor of progress. What applies to government officials applies also to
members of Parliament, with the sole difference that they have had to
recommend themselves to a constituency. This, however, only adds
hypocrisy to the other qualities of a ruling caste. Whoever has stood in the
lobby of the House of Commons watching members emerge with
wandering eye and hypothetical smile, until the constituent is espied, his
arm taken, "my dear fellow" whispered in his ear, and his steps guided
toward the inner precincts—whoever, observing this, has realized that
these are the arts by which men become and remain legislators, can hardly
fail to feel that democracy as it exists is not an absolutely perfect
instrument of government. It is a painful fact that the ordinary voter, at
any rate in England, is quite blind to insincerity. The man who does not
care about any definite political measures can generally be won by
corruption or flattery, open or concealed; the man who is set on securing
reforms will generally prefer an ambitious windbag to a man who desires
the public good without possessing a ready tongue. And the ambitious
windbag, as soon as he has become a power by the enthusiasm he has
aroused, will sell his influence to the governing clique, sometimes openly,
sometimes by the more subtle method of intentionally failing at a crisis.
This is part of the normal working of democracy as embodied in
representative institutions. Yet a cure must be found if democracy is not to
remain a farce.

One of the sources of evil in modern large democracies is the fact that
most of the electorate have no direct or vital interest in most of the
questions that arise. Should Welsh children be allowed the use of the
Welsh language in schools? Should gipsies be compelled to abandon their
nomadic life at the bidding of the education authorities? Should miners
have an eight-hour day? Should Christian Scientists be compelled to call
in doctors in case of serious illness? These are matters of passionate
interest to certain sections of the community, but of very little interest to
the great majority. If they are decided according to the wishes of the
numerical majority, the intense desires of a minority will be overborne by
the very slight and uninformed whims of the indifferent remainder. If the
minority are geographically concentrated, so that they can decide elections
in a certain number of constituencies, like the Welsh and the miners, they
have a good chance of getting their way, by the wholly beneficent process
which its enemies describe as log-rolling. But if they are scattered and
politically feeble, like the gipsies and the Christian Scientists, they stand a
very poor chance against the prejudices of the majority. Even when they
are geographically concentrated, like the Irish, they may fail to obtain
their wishes, because they arouse some hostility or some instinct of
domination in the majority. Such a state of affairs is the negation of all
democratic principles.

The tyranny of the majority is a very real danger. It is a mistake to

suppose that the majority is necessarily right. On every new question the
majority is always wrong at first. In matters where the state must act as a
whole, such as tariffs, for example, decision by majorities is probably the
best method that can be devised. But there are a great many questions in
which there is no need of a uniform decision. Religion is recognized as
one of these. Education ought to be one, provided a certain minimum
standard is attained. Military service clearly ought to be one. Wherever
divergent action by different groups is possible without anarchy, it ought
to be permitted. In such cases it will be found by those who consider past
history that, whenever any new fundamental issue arises, the majority are
in the wrong, because they are guided by prejudice and habit. Progress
comes through the gradual effect of a minority in converting opinion and
altering custom. At one time—not so very long ago—it was considered
monstrous wickedness to maintain that old women ought not to be burnt as
witches. If those who held this opinion had been forcibly suppressed, we
should still be steeped in medieval superstition. For such reasons, it is of
the utmost importance that the majority should refrain from imposing its
will as regards matters in which uniformity is not absolutely necessary.

IV

The cure for the evils and dangers which we have been considering is a
very great extension of devolution and federal government. Wherever
there is a national consciousness, as in Wales and Ireland, the area in
which it exists ought to be allowed to decide all purely local affairs
without external interference. But there are many matters which ought to
be left to the management, not of local groups, but of trade groups, or of
organizations embodying some set of opinions. In the East, men are
subject to different laws according to the religion they profess. Something
of this kind is necessary if any semblance of liberty is to exist where there
is great divergence in beliefs.

Some matters are essentially geographical; for instance, gas and water,
roads, tariffs, armies and navies. These must be decided by an authority
representing an area. How large the area ought to be, depends upon
accidents of topography and sentiment, and also upon the nature of the
matter involved. Gas and water require a small area, roads a somewhat
larger one, while the only satisfactory area for an army or a navy is the
whole planet, since no smaller area will prevent war.

But the proper unit in most economic questions, and also in most
questions that are intimately concerned with personal opinions, is not
geographical at all. The internal management of railways ought not to be
in the hands of the geographical state, for reasons which we have already
considered. Still less ought it to be in the hands of a set of irresponsible
capitalists. The only truly democratic system would be one which left the
internal management of railways in the hands of the men who work on
them. These men should elect the general manager, and a parliament of
directors if necessary. All questions of wages, conditions of labor, running
of trains, and acquisition of material, should be in the hands of a body
responsible only to those actually engaged in the work of the railway.

The same arguments apply to other large trades: mining, iron and steel,
cotton, and so on. British trade-unionism, it seems to me, has erred in
conceiving labor and capital as both permanent forces, which were to be
brought to some equality of strength by the organization of labor. This
seems to me too modest an ideal. The ideal which I should wish to
substitute involves the conquest of democracy and self-government in the
economic sphere as in the political sphere, and the total abolition of the
power now wielded by the capitalist. The man who works on a railway
ought to have a voice in the government of the railway, just as much as the
man who works in a state has a right to a voice in the management of his
state. The concentration of business initiative in the hands of the
employers is a great evil, and robs the employees of their legitimate share
of interest in the larger problems of their trade.
 French syndicalists were the first to advocate the system of trade
autonomy as a better solution than state socialism. But in their view the
trades were to be independent, almost like sovereign states at present.
Such a system would not promote peace, any more than it does at present
in international relations. In the affairs of any body of men, we may
broadly distinguish what may be called questions of home politics from
questions of foreign politics. Every group sufficiently well-marked to
constitute a political entity ought to be autonomous in regard to internal
matters, but not in regard to those that directly affect the outside world. If
two groups are both entirely free as regards their relations to each other,
there is no way of averting the danger of an open or covert appeal to force.
The relations of a group of men to the outside world ought, whenever
possible, to be controlled by a neutral authority. It is here that the state is
necessary for adjusting the relations between different trades. The men
who make some commodity should be entirely free as regards hours of
labor, distribution of the total earnings of the trade, and all questions of
business management. But they should not be free as regards the price of
what they produce, since price is a matter concerning their relations to the
rest of the community. If there were nominal freedom in regard to price,
there would be a danger of a constant tug-of-war, in which those trades
which were most immediately necessary to the existence of the
community could always obtain an unfair advantage. Force is no more
admirable in the economic sphere than in dealings between states. In order
to secure the maximum of freedom with the minimum of force, the
universal principle is: Autonomy within each politically important group,
and a neutral authority for deciding questions involving relations between
groups. The neutral authority should, of course, rest on a democratic basis,
but should, if possible, represent a constituency wider than that of the
groups concerned. In international affairs the only adequate authority
would be one representing all civilized nations.

In order to prevent undue extension of the power of such authorities, it

is desirable and necessary that the various autonomous groups should be
very jealous of their liberties, and very ready to resist by political means
any encroachments upon their independence. State socialism does not
tolerate such groups, each with their own officials responsible to the
group. Consequently it abandons the internal affairs of a group to the
control of men not responsible to that group or specially aware of its
needs. This opens the door to tyranny and to the destruction of initiative.
These dangers are avoided by a system which allows any group of men to
combine for any given purpose, provided it is not predatory, and to claim
from the central authority such self-government as is necessary to the
carrying out of the purpose. Churches of various denominations afford an
instance. Their autonomy was won by centuries of warfare and
persecution. It is to be hoped that a less terrible struggle will be required
to achieve the same result in the economic sphere. But whatever the
obstacles, I believe the importance of liberty is as great in the one case as
it has been admitted to be in the other.

Chapter IV: Individual Liberty and Public Control

Society cannot exist without law and order, and cannot advance except
through the initiative of vigorous innovators. Yet law and order are always
hostile to innovations, and innovators are almost always, to some extent,
anarchists. Those whose minds are dominated by fear of a relapse towards
barbarism will emphasize the importance of law and order, while those
who are inspired by the hope of an advance towards civilization will
usually be more conscious of the need of individual initiative. Both
temperaments are necessary, and wisdom lies in allowing each to operate
freely where it is beneficent. But those who are on the side of law and
order, since they are reinforced by custom and the instinct for upholding
the status quo, have no need of a reasoned defense. It is the innovators
who have difficulty in being allowed to exist and work. Each generation
believes that this difficulty is a thing of the past, but each generation is
only tolerant of past innovations. Those of its own day are met with the
same persecution as though the principle of toleration had never been
heard of.
 "In early society," says Westermarck, "customs are not only moral
rules, but the only moral rules ever thought of. The savage strictly
complies with the Hegelian command that no man must have a private
conscience. The following statement, which refers to the Tinnevelly
Shanars, may be quoted as a typical example: 'Solitary individuals
amongst them rarely adopt any new opinions, or any new course of
procedure. They follow the multitude to do evil, and they follow the
multitude to do good. They think in herds.'"[3]
[3] "The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas," 2d edition, Vol. I, p.
119.

Those among ourselves who have never thought a thought or done a

deed in the slightest degree different from the thoughts and deeds of our
neighbors will congratulate themselves on the difference between us and
the savage. But those who have ever attempted any real innovation cannot
help feeling that the people they know are not so very unlike the
Tinnevelly Shanars.

Under the influence of socialism, even progressive opinion, in recent

years, has been hostile to individual liberty. Liberty is associated, in the
minds of reformers, with laissez-faire, the Manchester School, and the
exploitation of women and children which resulted from what was
euphemistically called "free competition." All these things were evil, and
required state interference; in fact, there is need of an immense increase of
state action in regard to cognate evils which still exist. In everything that
concerns the economic life of the community, as regards both distribution
and conditions of production, what is required is more public control, not
less—how much more, I do not profess to know.

Another direction in which there is urgent need of the substitution of

law and order for anarchy is international relations. At present, each
sovereign state has complete individual freedom, subject only to the
sanction of war. This individual freedom will have to be curtailed in regard
to external relations if wars are ever to cease.

But when we pass outside the sphere of material possessions, we find

that the arguments in favor of public control almost entirely disappear.
 Religion, to begin with, is recognized as a matter in which the state
ought not to interfere. Whether a man is Christian, Mahometan, or Jew is a
question of no public concern, so long as he obeys the laws; and the laws
ought to be such as men of all religions can obey. Yet even here there are
limits. No civilized state would tolerate a religion demanding human
sacrifice. The English in India put an end to suttee, in spite of a fixed
principle of non-interference with native religious customs. Perhaps they
were wrong to prevent suttee, yet almost every European would have done
the same. We cannot effectively doubt that such practices ought to be
stopped, however we may theorize in favor of religious liberty.

In such cases, the interference with liberty is imposed from without by

a higher civilization. But the more common case, and the more interesting,
is when an independent state interferes on behalf of custom against
individuals who are feeling their way toward more civilized beliefs and
institutions.

"In New South Wales," says Westermarck, "the first-born of every lubra
used to be eaten by the tribe 'as part of a religious ceremony.' In the realm
of Khai-muh, in China, according to a native account, it was customary to
kill and devour the eldest son alive. Among certain tribes in British
Columbia the first child is often sacrificed to the sun. The Indians of
Florida, according to Le Moyne de Morgues, sacrificed the first-born son
to the chief....'"[4]
[4] Op cit., p. 459.

There are pages and pages of such instances.

There is nothing analogous to these practices among ourselves. When

the first-born in Florida was told that his king and country needed him,
this was a mere mistake, and with us mistakes of this kind do not occur.
But it is interesting to inquire how these superstitions died out, in such
cases, for example, as that of Khai-muh, where foreign compulsion is
improbable. We may surmise that some parents, under the selfish
influence of parental affection, were led to doubt whether the sun would
really be angry if the eldest child were allowed to live. Such rationalism
would be regarded as very dangerous, since it was calculated to damage
the harvest. For generations the opinion would be cherished in secret by a
handful of cranks, who would not be able to act upon it. At last, by
concealment or flight, a few parents would save their children from the
sacrifice. Such parents would be regarded as lacking all public spirit, and
as willing to endanger the community for their private pleasure. But
gradually it would appear that the state remained intact, and the crops
were no worse than in former years. Then, by a fiction, a child would be
deemed to have been sacrificed if it was solemnly dedicated to agriculture
or some other work of national importance chosen by the chief. It would
be many generations before the child would be allowed to choose its own
occupation after it had grown old enough to know its own tastes and
capacities. And during all those generations, children would be reminded
that only an act of grace had allowed them to live at all, and would exist
under the shadow of a purely imaginary duty to the state.

The position of those parents who first disbelieved in the utility of

infant sacrifice illustrates all the difficulties which arise in connection
with the adjustment of individual freedom to public control. The
authorities, believing the sacrifice necessary for the good of the
community, were bound to insist upon it; the parents, believing it useless,
were equally bound to do everything in their power toward saving the
child. How ought both parties to act in such a case?

The duty of the skeptical parent is plain: to save the child by any
possible means, to preach the uselessness of the sacrifice in season and out
of season, and to endure patiently whatever penalty the law may indict for
evasion. But the duty of the authorities is far less clear. So long as they
remain firmly persuaded that the universal sacrifice of the first-born is
indispensable, they are bound to persecute those who seek to undermine
this belief. But they will, if they are conscientious, very carefully examine
the arguments of opponents, and be willing in advance to admit that these
arguments may be sound. They will carefully search their own hearts to
see whether hatred of children or pleasure in cruelty has anything to do
with their belief. They will remember that in the past history of Khai-muh
there are innumerable instances of beliefs, now known to be false, on
account of which those who disagreed with the prevalent view were put to
death. Finally they will reflect that, though errors which are traditional are
often wide-spread, new beliefs seldom win acceptance unless they are
nearer to the truth than what they replace; and they will conclude that a
new belief is probably either an advance, or so unlikely to become
common as to be innocuous. All these considerations will make them
hesitate before they resort to punishment.

II

The study of past times and uncivilized races makes it clear beyond
question that the customary beliefs of tribes or nations are almost
invariably false. It is difficult to divest ourselves completely of the
customary beliefs of our own age and nation, but it is not very difficult to
achieve a certain degree of doubt in regard to them. The Inquisitor who
burnt men at the stake was acting with true humanity if all his beliefs were
correct; but if they were in error at any point, he was inflicting a wholly
unnecessary cruelty. A good working maxim in such matters is this: Do
not trust customary beliefs so far as to perform actions which must be
disastrous unless the beliefs in question are wholly true. The world would
be utterly bad, in the opinion of the average Englishman, unless he could
say "Britannia rules the waves"; in the opinion of the average German,
unless he could say "Deutschland über alles." For the sake of these beliefs,
they are willing to destroy European civilization. If the beliefs should
happen to be false, their action is regrettable.

One fact which emerges from these considerations is that no obstacle

should be placed in the way of thought and its expression, nor yet in the
way of statements of fact. This was formerly common ground among
liberal thinkers, though it was never quite realized in the practice of
civilized countries. But it has recently become, throughout Europe, a
dangerous paradox, on account of which men suffer imprisonment or
starvation. For this reason it has again become worth stating. The grounds
for it are so evident that I should be ashamed to repeat them if they were
not universally ignored. But in the actual world it is very necessary to
repeat them.
 To attain complete truth is not given to mortals, but to advance toward
it by successive steps is not impossible. On any matter of general interest,
there is usually, in any given community at any given time, a received
opinion, which is accepted as a matter of course by all who give no special
thought to the matter. Any questioning of the received opinion rouses
hostility, for a number of reasons.

The most important of these is the instinct of conventionality, which

exists in all gregarious animals and often leads them to put to death any
markedly peculiar member of the herd.

The next most important is the feeling of insecurity aroused by doubt as

to the beliefs by which we are in the habit of regulating our lives. Whoever
has tried to explain the philosophy of Berkeley to a plain man will have
seen in its unadulterated form the anger aroused by this feeling. What the
plain man derives from Berkeley's philosophy at a first hearing is an
uncomfortable suspicion that nothing is solid, so that it is rash to sit on a
chair or to expect the floor to sustain us. Because this suspicion is
uncomfortable, it is irritating, except to those who regard the whole
argument as merely nonsense. And in a more or less analogous way any
questioning of what has been taken for granted destroys the feeling of
standing on solid ground, and produces a condition of bewildered fear.

A third reason which makes men dislike novel opinions is that vested
interests are bound up with old beliefs. The long fight of the church
against science, from Giordano Bruno to Darwin, is attributable to this
motive among others. The horror of socialism which existed in the remote
past was entirely attributable to this cause. But it would be a mistake to
assume, as is done by those who seek economic motives everywhere, that
vested interests are the principal source of anger against novelties in
thought. If this were the case, intellectual progress would be much more
rapid than it is.

The instinct of conventionality, horror of uncertainty, and vested

interests, all militate against the acceptance of a new idea. And it is even
harder to think of a new idea than to get it accepted; most people might
spend a lifetime in reflection without ever making a genuinely original
discovery.
 In view of all these obstacles, it is not likely that any society at any
time will suffer from a plethora of heretical opinions. Least of all is this
likely in a modern civilized society, where the conditions of life are in
constant rapid change, and demand, for successful adaptation, an equally
rapid change in intellectual outlook. There should be an attempt, therefore,
to encourage, rather than discourage, the expression of new beliefs and the
dissemination of knowledge tending to support them. But the very
opposite is, in fact, the case. From childhood upward, everything is done
to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by
misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate
possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt
in time of peace and of prison or a traitor's death in time of war. Yet such
men are known to have been in the past the chief benefactors of mankind,
and are the very men who receive most honor as soon as they are safely
dead.

The whole realm of thought and opinion is utterly unsuited to public

control; it ought to be as free, and as spontaneous as is possible to those
who know what others have believed. The state is justified in insisting that
children shall be educated, but it is not justified in forcing their education
to proceed on a uniform plan and to be directed to the production of a dead
level of glib uniformity. Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a
matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function
of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of
education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism,
not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government
officials.

III

Questions of practical morals raise more difficult problems than

questions of mere opinion. The thugs honestly believe it their duty to
commit murders, but the government does not acquiesce. The
conscientious objectors honestly hold the opposite opinion, and again the
government does not acquiesce. Killing is a state prerogative; it is equally
criminal to do it unbidden and not to do it when bidden. The same applies
to theft, unless it is on a large scale or by one who is already rich. Thugs
and thieves are men who use force in their dealings with their neighbors,
and we may lay it down broadly that the private use of force should be
prohibited except in rare cases, however conscientious may be its motive.
But this principle will not justify compelling men to use force at the
bidding of the state, when they do not believe it justified by the occasion.
The punishment of conscientious objectors seems clearly a violation of
individual liberty within its legitimate sphere.

It is generally assumed without question that the state has a right to

punish certain kinds of sexual irregularity. No one doubts that the
Mormons sincerely believed polygamy to be a desirable practice, yet the
United States required them to abandon its legal recognition, and probably
any other Christian country would have done likewise. Nevertheless, I do
not think this prohibition was wise. Polygamy is legally permitted in many
parts of the world, but is not much practised except by chiefs and
potentates. If, as Europeans generally believe, it is an undesirable custom,
it is probable that the Mormons would have soon abandoned it, except
perhaps for a few men of exceptional position. If, on the other hand, it had
proved a successful experiment, the world would have acquired a piece of
knowledge which it is now unable to possess. I think in all such cases the
law should only intervene when there is some injury inflicted without the
consent of the injured person.

It is obvious that men and women would not tolerate having their wives
or husbands selected by the state, whatever eugenists might have to say in
favor of such a plan. In this it seems clear that ordinary public opinion is
in the right, not because people choose wisely, but because any choice of
their own is better than a forced marriage. What applies to marriage ought
also to apply to the choice of a trade or profession; although some men
have no marked preferences, most men greatly prefer some occupations to
others, and are far more likely to be useful citizens if they follow their
preferences than if they are thwarted by a public authority.

The case of the man who has an intense conviction that he ought to do a
certain kind of work is peculiar, and perhaps not very common; but it is
important because it includes some very important individuals. Joan of
Arc and Florence Nightingale defied convention in obedience to a feeling
of this sort; reformers and agitators in unpopular causes, such as Mazzini,
have belonged to this class; so have many men of science. In cases of this
kind the individual conviction deserves the greatest respect, even if there
seems no obvious justification for it. Obedience to the impulse is very
unlikely to do much harm, and may well do great good. The practical
difficulty is to distinguish such impulses from desires which produce
similar manifestations. Many young people wish to be authors without
having an impulse to write any particular book, or wish to be painters
without having an impulse to create any particular picture. But a little
experience will usually show the difference between a genuine and a
spurious impulse; and there is less harm in indulging the spurious impulse
for a time than in thwarting the impulse which is genuine. Nevertheless,
the plain man almost always has a tendency to thwart the genuine impulse,
because it seems anarchic and unreasonable, and is seldom able to give a
good account of itself in advance.

What is markedly true of some notable personalities is true, in a lesser

degree, of almost every individual who has much vigor or force of life;
there is an impulse towards activity of some kind, as a rule not very
definite in youth, but growing gradually more sharply outlined under the
influence of education and opportunity. The direct impulse toward a kind
of activity for its own sake must be distinguished from the desire for the
expected effects of the activity. A young man may desire the rewards of
great achievement without having any spontaneous impulse toward the
activities which lead to achievement. But those who actually achieve
much, although they may desire the rewards, have also something in their
nature which inclines them to choose a certain kind of work as the road
which they must travel if their ambition is to be satisfied. This artist's
impulse, as it may be called, is a thing of infinite value to the individual,
and often to the world; to respect it in oneself and in others makes up nine
tenths of the good life. In most human beings it is rather frail, rather easily
destroyed or disturbed; parents and teachers are too often hostile to it, and
our economic system crushes out its last remnants in young men and
young women. The result is that human beings cease to be individual, or to
retain the native pride that is their birthright; they become machine-made,
tame, convenient for the bureaucrat and the drill-sergeant, capable of
being tabulated in statistics without anything being omitted. This is the
fundamental evil resulting from lack of liberty; and it is an evil which is
being continually intensified as population grows more dense and the
machinery of organization grows more efficient.

The things that men desire are many and various: admiration, affection,
power, security, ease, outlets for energy, are among the commonest of
motives. But such abstractions do not touch what makes the difference
between one man and another. Whenever I go to the zoölogical gardens, I
am struck by the fact that all the movements of a stork have some
common quality, differing from the movements of a parrot or an ostrich. It
is impossible to put in words what the common quality is, and yet we feel
that each thing an animal does is the sort of thing we might expect that
animal to do. This indefinable quality constitutes the individuality of the
animal, and gives rise to the pleasure we feel in watching the animal's
actions. In a human being, provided he has not been crushed by an
economic or governmental machine, there is the same kind of
individuality, a something distinctive without which no man or woman can
achieve much of importance, or retain the full dignity which is native to
human beings. It is this distinctive individuality that is loved by the artist,
whether painter or writer. The artist himself, and the man who is creative
in no matter what direction, has more of it than the average man. Any
society which crushes this quality, whether intentionally or by accident,
must soon become utterly lifeless and traditional, without hope of progress
and without any purpose in its being. To preserve and strengthen the
impulse that makes individuality should be the foremost object of all
political institutions.

IV

We now arrive at certain general principles in regard to individual

liberty and public control.
 The greater part of human impulses may be divided into two classes,
those which are possessive and those which are constructive or creative.
Social institutions are the garments or embodiments of impulses, and may
be classified roughly according to the impulses which they embody.
Property is the direct expression of possessiveness; science and art are
among the most direct expressions of creativeness. Possessiveness is
either defensive or aggressive; it seeks either to retain against a robber, or
to acquire from a present holder. In either case an attitude of hostility
toward others is of its essence. It would be a mistake to suppose that
defensive possessiveness is always justifiable, while the aggressive kind is
always blameworthy; where there is great injustice in the status quo, the
exact opposite may be the case, and ordinarily neither is justifiable.

State interference with the actions of individuals is necessitated by

possessiveness. Some goods can be acquired or retained by force, while
others cannot. A wife can be acquired by force, as the Romans acquired
the Sabine women; but a wife's affection cannot be acquired in this way.
There is no record that the Romans desired the affection of the Sabine
women; and those in whom possessive impulses are strong tend to care
chiefly for the goods that force can secure. All material goods belong to
this class. Liberty in regard to such goods, if it were unrestricted, would
make the strong rich and the weak poor. In a capitalistic society, owing to
the partial restraints imposed by law, it makes cunning men rich and
honest men poor, because the force of the state is put at men's disposal,
not according to any just or rational principle, but according to a set of
traditional maxims of which the explanation is purely historical.

In all that concerns possession and the use of force, unrestrained liberty
involves anarchy and injustice. Freedom to kill, freedom to rob, freedom
to defraud, no longer belong to individuals, though they still belong to
great states, and are exercised by them in the name of patriotism. Neither
individuals nor states ought to be free to exert force on their own
initiative, except in such sudden emergencies as will subsequently be
admitted in justification by a court of law. The reason for this is that the
exertion of force by one individual against another is always an evil on
both sides, and can only be tolerated when it is compensated by some
overwhelming resultant good. In order to minimize the amount of force
actually exerted in the world, it is necessary that there should be a public
authority, a repository of practically irresistible force, whose function
should be primarily to repress the private use of force. A use of force is
private when it is exerted by one of the interested parties, or by his friends
or accomplices, not by a public neutral authority according to some rule
which is intended to be in the public interest.

The régime of private property under which we live does much too
little to restrain the private use of force. When a man owns a piece of land,
for example, he may use force against trespassers, though they must not
use force against him. It is clear that some restriction of the liberty of
trespass is necessary for the cultivation of the land. But if such powers are
to be given to an individual, the state ought to satisfy itself that he
occupies no more land than he is warranted in occupying in the public
interest, and that the share of the produce of the land that comes to him is
no more than a just reward for his labors. Probably the only way in which
such ends can be achieved is by state ownership of land. The possessors of
land and capital are able at present, by economic pressure, to use force
against those who have no possessions. This force is sanctioned by law,
while force exercised by the poor against the rich is illegal. Such a state of
things is unjust, and does not diminish the use of private force as much as
it might be diminished.

The whole realm of the possessive impulses, and of the use of force to
which they give rise, stands in need of control by a public neutral
authority, in the interests of liberty no less than of justice. Within a nation,
this public authority will naturally be the state; in relations between
nations, if the present anarchy is to cease, it will have to be some
international parliament.

But the motive underlying the public control of men's possessive

impulses should always be the increase of liberty, both by the prevention
of private tyranny and by the liberation of creative impulses. If public
control is not to do more harm than good, it must be so exercised as to
leave the utmost freedom of private initiative in all those ways that do not
involve the private use of force. In this respect all governments have
always failed egregiously, and there is no evidence that they are
improving.

The creative impulses, unlike those that are possessive, are directed to
ends in which one man's gain is not another man's loss. The man who
makes a scientific discovery or writes a poem is enriching others at the
same time as himself. Any increase in knowledge or good-will is a gain to
all who are affected by it, not only to the actual possessor. Those who feel
the joy of life are a happiness to others as well as to themselves. Force
cannot create such things, though it can destroy them; no principle of
distributive justice applies to them, since the gain of each is the gain of
all. For these reasons, the creative part of a man's activity ought to be as
free as possible from all public control, in order that it may remain
spontaneous and full of vigor. The only function of the state in regard to
this part of the individual life should be to do everything possible toward
providing outlets and opportunities.

In every life a part is governed by the community, and a part by private

initiative. The part governed by private initiative is greatest in the most
important individuals, such as men of genius and creative thinkers. This
part ought only to be restricted when it is predatory; otherwise, everything
ought to be done to make it as great and as vigorous as possible. The
object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to
make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own
personality. In the choice of a means of livelihood all young men and
young women ought, as far as possible, to be able to choose what is
attractive to them; if no money-making occupation is attractive, they
ought to be free to do little work for little pay, and spend their leisure as
they choose. Any kind of censure on freedom of thought or on the
dissemination of knowledge is, of course, to be condemned utterly.

Huge organizations, both political and economic, are one of the

distinguishing characteristics of the modern world. These organizations
have immense power, and often use their power to discourage originality
in thought and action. They ought, on the contrary, to give the freest scope
that is possible without producing anarchy or violent conflict. They ought
not to take cognizance of any part of a man's life except what is concerned
with the legitimate objects of public control, namely, possessions and the
use of force. And they ought, by devolution, to leave as large a share of
control as possible in the hands of individuals and small groups. If this is
not done, the men at the head of these vast organizations will infallibly
become tyrannous through the habit of excessive power, and will in time
interfere in ways that crush out individual initiative.

The problem which faces the modern world is the combination of

individual initiative with the increase in the scope and size of
organizations. Unless it is solved, individuals will grow less and less full
of life and vigor, and more and more passively submissive to conditions
imposed upon them. A society composed of such individuals cannot be
progressive or add much to the world's stock of mental and spiritual
possessions. Only personal liberty and the encouragement of initiative can
secure these things. Those who resist authority when it encroaches upon
the legitimate sphere of the individual are performing a service to society,
however little society may value it. In regard to the past, this is universally
acknowledged; but it is no less true in regard to the present and the future.

Chapter V: National Independence and Internationalism

In the relations between states, as in the relations of groups within a

single state, what is to be desired is independence for each as regards
internal affairs, and law rather than private force as regards external
affairs. But as regards groups within a state, it is internal independence
that must be emphasized, since that is what is lacking; subjection to law
has been secured, on the whole, since the end of the Middle Ages. In the
relations between states, on the contrary, it is law and a central
government that are lacking, since independence exists for external as for
internal affairs. The stage we have reached in the affairs of Europe
corresponds to the stage reached in our internal affairs during the Wars of
the Roses, when turbulent barons frustrated the attempt to make them keep
the king's peace. Thus, although the goal is the same in the two cases, the
steps to be taken in order to achieve it are quite different.

There can be no good international system until the boundaries of states

coincide as nearly as possible with the boundaries of nations.

But it is not easy to say what we mean by a nation. Are the Irish a
nation? Home Rulers say yes, Unionists say no. Are the Ulstermen a
nation? Unionists say yes, Home Rulers say no. In all such cases it is a
party question whether we are to call a group a nation or not. A German
will tell you that the Russian Poles are a nation, but as for the Prussian
Poles, they, of course, are part of Prussia. Professors can always be hired
to prove, by arguments of race or language or history, that a group about
which there is a dispute is, or is not, a nation, as may be desired by those
whom the professors serve. If we are to avoid all these controversies, we
must first of all endeavor to find some definition of a nation.

A nation is not to be defined by affinities of language or a common

historical origin, though these things often help to produce a nation.
Switzerland is a nation, despite diversities of race, religion, and language.
England and Scotland now form one nation, though they did not do so at
the time of the Civil War. This is shown by Cromwell's saying, in the
height of the conflict, that he would rather be subject to the domain of the
royalists than to that of the Scotch. Great Britain was one state before it
was one nation; on the other hand, Germany was one nation before it was
one state.

What constitutes a nation is a sentiment and an instinct, a sentiment of

similarity and an instinct of belonging to the same group or herd. The
instinct is an extension of the instinct which constitutes a flock of sheep,
or any other group of gregarious animals. The sentiment which goes with
this is like a milder and more extended form of family feeling. When we
return to England after being on the Continent, we feel something friendly
in the familiar ways, and it is easy to believe that Englishmen on the
whole are virtuous, while many foreigners are full of designing
wickedness.
 Such feelings make it easy to organize a nation into a state. It is not
difficult, as a rule, to acquiesce in the orders of a national government. We
feel that it is our government, and that its decrees are more or less the
same as those which we should have given if we ourselves had been the
governors. There is an instinctive and usually unconscious sense of a
common purpose animating the members of a nation. This becomes
especially vivid when there is war or a danger of war. Any one who, at
such a time, stands out against the orders of his government feels an inner
conflict quite different from any that he would feel in standing out against
the orders of a foreign government in whose power he might happen to
find himself. If he stands out, he does so with some more or less conscious
hope that his government may in time come to think as he does; whereas,
in standing out against a foreign government, no such hope is necessary.
This group instinct, however it may have arisen, is what constitutes a
nation, and what makes it important that the boundaries of nations should
also be the boundaries of states.

National sentiment is a fact, and should be taken account of by

institutions. When it is ignored, it is intensified and becomes a source of
strife. It can only be rendered harmless by being given free play, so long as
it is not predatory. But it is not, in itself, a good or admirable feeling.
There is nothing rational and nothing desirable in a limitation of sympathy
which confines it to a fragment of the human race. Diversities of manners
and customs and traditions are, on the whole, a good thing, since they
enable different nations to produce different types of excellence. But in
national feeling there is always latent or explicit an element of hostility to
foreigners. National feeling, as we know it, could not exist in a nation
which was wholly free from external pressure of a hostile kind.

And group feeling produces a limited and often harmful kind of

morality. Men come to identify the good with what serves the interests of
their own group, and the bad with what works against those interests, even
if it should happen to be in the interests of mankind as a whole. This group
morality is very much in evidence during war, and is taken for granted in
men's ordinary thought. Although almost all Englishmen consider the
defeat of Germany desirable for the good of the world, yet nevertheless
most of them honor a German for fighting for his country, because it has
not occurred to them that his actions ought to be guided by a morality
higher than that of the group.

A man does right, as a rule, to have his thoughts more occupied with
the interests of his own nation than with those of others, because his
actions are more likely to affect his own nation. But in time of war, and in
all matters which are of equal concern to other nations and to his own, a
man ought to take account of the universal welfare, and not allow his
survey to be limited by the interest, or supposed interest, of his own group
or nation.

So long as national feeling exists, it is very important that each nation

should be self-governing as regards its internal affairs. Government can
only be carried on by force and tyranny if its subjects view it with hostile
eyes, and they will so view it if they feel that it belongs to an alien nation.
This principle meets with difficulties in cases where men of different
nations live side by side in the same area, as happens in some parts of the
Balkans. There are also difficulties in regard to places which, for some
geographical reason, are of great international importance, such as the
Suez Canal and the Panama Canal. In such cases the purely local desires of
the inhabitants may have to give way before larger interests. But in
general, at any rate as applied to civilized communities, the principle that
the boundaries of nations ought to coincide with the boundaries of states
has very few exceptions.

This principle, however, does not decide how the relations between
states are to be regulated, or how a conflict of interests between rival
states is to be decided. At present, every great state claims absolute
sovereignty, not only in regard to its internal affairs but also in regard to
its external actions. This claim to absolute sovereignty leads it into
conflict with similar claims on the part of other great states. Such conflicts
at present can only be decided by war or diplomacy, and diplomacy is in
essence nothing but the threat of war. There is no more justification for the
claim to absolute sovereignty on the part of a state than there would be for
a similar claim on the part of an individual. The claim to absolute
sovereignty is, in effect, a claim that all external affairs are to be regulated
purely by force, and that when two nations or groups of nations are
interested in a question, the decision shall depend solely upon which of
them is, or is believed to be, the stronger. This is nothing but primitive
anarchy, "the war of all against all," which Hobbes asserted to be the
original state of mankind.

There cannot be secure peace in the world, or any decision of

international questions according to international law, until states are
willing to part with their absolute sovereignty as regards their external
relations, and to leave the decision in such matters to some international
instrument of government.[5] An international government will have to be
legislative as well as judicial. It is not enough that there should be a Hague
tribunal, deciding matters according to some already existing system of
international law; it is necessary also that there should be a body capable
of enacting international law, and this body will have to have the power of
transferring territory from one state to another, when it is persuaded that
adequate grounds exist for such a transference. Friends of peace will make
a mistake if they unduly glorify the status quo. Some nations grow, while
others dwindle; the population of an area may change its character by
emigration and immigration. There is no good reason why states should
resent changes in their boundaries under such conditions, and if no
international authority has power to make changes of this kind, the
temptations to war will sometimes become irresistible.

[5] For detailed scheme of international government see "International

Government," by L. Woolf. Allen & Unwin.

The international authority ought to possess an army and navy, and

these ought to be the only army and navy in existence. The only legitimate
use of force is to diminish the total amount of force exercised in the world.
So long as men are free to indulge their predatory instincts, some men or
groups of men will take advantage of this freedom for oppression and
robbery. Just as the police are necessary to prevent the use of force by
private citizens, so an international police will be necessary to prevent the
lawless use of force by separate states.

But I think it is reasonable to hope that if ever an international

government, possessed of the only army and navy in the world, came into
existence, the need of force to enact obedience to its decisions would be
very temporary. In a short time the benefits resulting from the substitution
of law for anarchy would become so obvious that the international
government would acquire an unquestioned authority, and no state would
dream of rebelling against its decisions. As soon as this stage had been
reached, the international army and navy would become unnecessary.

We have still a very long road to travel before we arrive at the

establishment of an international authority, but it is not very difficult to
foresee the steps by which this result will be gradually reached. There is
likely to be a continual increase in the practice of submitting disputes to
arbitration, and in the realization that the supposed conflicts of interest
between different states are mainly illusory. Even where there is a real
conflict of interest, it must in time become obvious that neither of the
states concerned would suffer as much by giving way as by fighting. With
the progress of inventions, war, when it does occur, is bound to become
increasingly destructive. The civilized races of the world are faced with
the alternative of coöperation or mutual destruction. The present war is
making this alternative daily more evident. And it is difficult to believe
that, when the enmities which it has generated have had time to cool,
civilized men will deliberately choose to destroy civilization, rather than
acquiesce in the abolition of war.

The matters in which the interests of nations are supposed to clash are
mainly three: tariffs, which are a delusion; the exploitation of inferior
races, which is a crime; pride of power and dominion, which is a
schoolboy folly.

The economic argument against tariffs is familiar, and I shall not repeat
it. The only reason why it fails to carry conviction is the enmity between
nations. Nobody proposes to set up a tariff between England and Scotland,
or between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Yet the arguments by which tariffs
between nations are supported might be used just as well to defend tariffs
between counties. Universal free trade would indubitably be of economic
benefit to mankind, and would be adopted to-morrow if it were not for the
hatred and suspicion which nations feel one toward another. From the
point of view of preserving the peace of the world, free trade between the
different civilized states is not so important as the open door in their
dependencies. The desire for exclusive markets is one of the most potent
causes of war.

Exploiting what are called "inferior races" has become one of the main
objects of European statecraft. It is not only, or primarily, trade that is
desired, but opportunities for investment; finance is more concerned in the
matter than industry. Rival diplomatists are very often the servants,
conscious or unconscious, of rival groups of financiers. The financiers,
though themselves of no particular nation, understand the art of appealing
to national prejudice, and of inducing the taxpayer to incur expenditure of
which they reap the benefit. The evils which they produce at home, and the
devastation that they spread among the races whom they exploit, are part
of the price which the world has to pay for its acquiescence in the
capitalist régime.

But neither tariffs nor financiers would be able to cause serious trouble,
if it were not for the sentiment of national pride. National pride might be
on the whole beneficent, if it took the direction of emulation in the things
that are important to civilization. If we prided ourselves upon our poets,
our men of science, or the justice and humanity of our social system, we
might find in national pride a stimulus to useful endeavors. But such
matters play a very small part. National pride, as it exists now, is almost
exclusively concerned with power and dominion, with the extent of
territory that a nation owns, and with its capacity for enforcing its will
against the opposition of other nations. In this it is reinforced by group
morality. To nine citizens out of ten it seems self-evident, whenever the
will of their own nation clashes with that of another, that their own nation
must be in the right. Even if it were not in the right on the particular issue,
yet it stands in general for so much nobler ideals than those represented by
the other nation to the dispute, that any increase in its power is bound to be
for the good of mankind. Since all nations equally believe this of
themselves, all are equally ready to insist upon the victory of their own
side in any dispute in which they believe that they have a good hope of
victory. While this temper persists, the hope of international coöperation
must remain dim.
 If men could divest themselves of the sentiment of rivalry and hostility
between different nations, they would perceive that the matters in which
the interests of different nations coincide immeasurably outweigh those in
which they clash; they would perceive, to begin with, that trade is not to be
compared to warfare; that the man who sells you goods is not doing you an
injury. No one considers that the butcher and the baker are his enemies
because they drain him of money. Yet as soon as goods come from a
foreign country, we are asked to believe that we suffer a terrible injury in
purchasing them. No one remembers that it is by means of goods exported
that we purchase them. But in the country to which we export, it is the
goods we send which are thought dangerous, and the goods we buy are
forgotten. The whole conception of trade, which has been forced upon us
by manufacturers who dreaded foreign competition, by trusts which
desired to secure monopolies, and by economists poisoned by the virus of
nationalism, is totally and absolutely false. Trade results simply from
division of labor. A man cannot himself make all the goods of which he
has need, and therefore he must exchange his produce with that of other
people. What applies to the individual, applies in exactly the same way to
the nation. There is no reason to desire that a nation should itself produce
all the goods of which it has need; it is better that it should specialize upon
those goods which it can produce to most advantage, and should exchange
its surplus with the surplus of other goods produced by other countries.
There is no use in sending goods out of the country except in order to get
other goods in return. A butcher who is always willing to part with his
meat but not willing to take bread from the baker, or boots from the
bootmaker, or clothes from the tailor, would soon find himself in a sorry
plight. Yet he would be no more foolish than the protectionist who desires
that we should send goods abroad without receiving payment in the shape
of goods imported from abroad.

The wage system has made people believe that what a man needs is
work. This, of course, is absurd. What he needs is the goods produced by
work, and the less work involved in making a given amount of goods, the
better. But owing to our economic system, every economy in methods of
production enables employers to dismiss some of their employees, and to
cause destitution, where a better system would produce only an increase of
wages or a diminution in the hours of work without any corresponding
diminution of wages.

Our economic system is topsyturvy. It makes the interest of the

individual conflict with the interest of the community in a thousand ways
in which no such conflict ought to exist. Under a better system the benefits
of free trade and the evils of tariffs would be obvious to all.

Apart from trade, the interests of nations coincide in all that makes
what we call civilization. Inventions and discoveries bring benefit to all.
The progress of science is a matter of equal concern to the whole civilized
world. Whether a man of science is an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a
German is a matter of no real importance. His discoveries are open to all,
and nothing but intelligence is required in order to profit by them. The
whole world of art and literature and learning is international; what is
done in one country is not done for that country, but for mankind. If we ask
ourselves what are the things that raise mankind above the brutes, what are
the things that make us think the human race more valuable than any
species of animals, we shall find that none of them are things in which any
one nation can have exclusive property, but all are things in which the
whole world can share. Those who have any care for these things, those
who wish to see mankind fruitful in the work which men alone can do, will
take little account of national boundaries, and have little care to what state
a man happens to owe allegiance.

The importance of international coöperation outside the sphere of

politics has been brought home to me by my own experience. Until lately I
was engaged in teaching a new science which few men in the world were
able to teach. My own work in this science was based chiefly upon the
work of a German and an Italian. My pupils came from all over the
civilized world: France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Greece, Japan, China,
India, and America. None of us was conscious of any sense of national
divisions. We felt ourselves an outpost of civilization, building a new road
into the virgin forest of the unknown. All coöperated in the common task,
and in the interest of such a work the political enmities of nations seemed
trivial, temporary, and futile.
 But it is not only in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of abstruse
science that international coöperation is vital to the progress of
civilization. All our economic problems, all the questions of securing the
rights of labor, all the hopes of freedom at home and humanity abroad, rest
upon the creation of international good-will.

So long as hatred, suspicion, and fear dominate the feelings of men

toward each other, so long we cannot hope to escape from the tyranny of
violence and brute force. Men must learn to be conscious of the common
interests of mankind in which all are at one, rather than of those supposed
interests in which the nations are divided. It is not necessary, or even
desirable, to obliterate the differences of manners and custom and
tradition between different nations. These differences enable each nation
to make its own distinctive contribution to the sum total of the world's
civilization.

What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all

national characteristics that one associates with couriers, wagon-lit
attendants, and others, who have had everything distinctive obliterated by
multiple and trivial contacts with men of every civilized country. Such
cosmopolitanism is the result of loss, not gain. The international spirit
which we should wish to see produced will be something added to love of
country, not something taken away. Just as patriotism does not prevent a
man from feeling family affection, so the international spirit ought not to
prevent a man from feeling affection for his own country. But it will
somewhat alter the character of that affection. The things which he will
desire for his own country will no longer be things which can only be
acquired at the expense of others, but rather those things in which the
excellence of any one country is to the advantage of all the world. He will
wish his own country to be great in the arts of peace, to be eminent in
thought and science, to be magnanimous and just and generous. He will
wish it to help mankind on the way toward that better world of liberty and
international concord which must be realized if any happiness is to be left
to man. He will not desire for his country the passing triumphs of a narrow
possessiveness, but rather the enduring triumph of having helped to
embody in human affairs something of that spirit of brotherhood which
Christ taught and which the Christian churches have forgotten. He will see
that this spirit embodies not only the highest morality, but also the truest
wisdom, and the only road by which the nations, torn and bleeding with
the wounds which scientific madness has inflicted, can emerge into a life
where growth is possible and joy is not banished at the frenzied call of
unreal and fictitious duties. Deeds inspired by hate are not duties,
whatever pain and self-sacrifice they may involve. Life and hope for the
world are to be found only in the deeds of love.