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Title: Political Ideals

Author: Bertrand Russell

Posting Date: September 4, 2009 [EBook #4776]

Release Date: December, 2003
First Posted: March 17, 2002

Language: English

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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

I
 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.
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