The mainstream which has borne European society toward socialism during the past one
hundred years is the irresistible progress of democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered
this truth into the reluctant ears of the Old World two generations ago; and we have all
pretended to carry it about as part of our mental furniture ever since. But like most
epigrammatic commonplaces, it is not generally realized; and de Tocqueville's book has, in
due course, become a classic which everyone quotes and nobody reads. The progress of
democracy is, in fact, often imagined, as by Sir Henry Maine, to be merely the
substitution of one kind of political machinery for another; and there are many political
democrats today who cannot understand why social or economic matters should be mixed up
with politics at all. It was not for this that they broke the power of the aristocracy:
they were touched not so much with love of the many as with hatred of the few; and, as has
been acutely said---though usually by foolish persons---they are radicals merely because
they are not themselves lords. But it will not long be possible for any man to persist in
believing that the political organization of society can be completely altered without
corresponding changes in economic and social relations. De Tocqueville expressly pointed
out that the progress of democracy meant nothing less than a complete dissolution of the
nexus by which society was held together under the old regime. This dissolution is
followed by a period of anarchic spiritual isolation of the individual from his fellows,
and to that extent by a general denial of the very idea of society. But man is a social
animal; and after more or less interval there necessarily comes into existence a new
nexus, differing so entirely from the old-fashioned organization that the historic fossil
goes about denying that it is a nexus at all, or that any new nexus is possible or
desirable. To him, mostly through lack of economics, the progress of democracy is nothing
more than the destruction of old political privileges; and, naturally enough, few can see
any beauty in mere dissolution and destruction. Those few are the purely political
radicals abhorred of Comte and Carlyle: they are in social matters the empiricist
survivals from a pre-scientific age.
The mere Utopians, on the other hand, who wove the baseless fabric of their visions of
reconstructed society on their own private looms, equally failed, as a rule, to comprehend
the problem of the age. They were, in imagination, resuscitated Joseph the Seconds,
benevolent despots who would have poured the old world, had it only been fluid, into their
new molds. Against their crude plans the statesman, the radical, and the political
economist were united; for they took no account of the blind social forces which they
could not control, and which went on inexorably working out social salvation in ways
unsuspected by the Utopian.
In the present socialist movement these two streams are united: advocates of social
reconstruction have learnt the lesson of democracy, and know that it is through the slow
and gradual turning of the popular mind to new principles that social reorganization bit
by bit comes. All students of society who are abreast of their time, socialists as well as
individualists, realize that important organic changes can only be (1) democratic, and
thus acceptable to a majority of the people, and prepared for in the minds of all; (2)
gradual, and thus causing no dislocation, however rapid may be the rate of progress; (3)
not regarded as immoral by the mass of the people, and thus not subjectively demoralizing
to them; and (4) in this country at any rate, constitutional and peaceful. Socialists may
therefore be quite at one with radicals in their political methods. Radicals, on the other
hand, are perforce realizing that mere political leveling is quite insufficient to save a
state from anarchy and despair. Both sections have been driven to recognize that the root
of the difficulty is economic; and there is every day a wider consensus that the
inevitable outcome of democracy is the control by the people themselves, not only of their
own political organization but, through that, also of the main instruments of wealth
production; the gradual substitution of organized cooperation for the anarchy of the
competitive struggle; and the consequent recovery, in the only possible way, of what John
Stuart Mill calls "the enormous share which the possessors of the instruments of
industry are able to take from the produce." The economic side of the democratic
ideal is, in fact, socialism itself.
This new scientific conception of the social organism has put completely out of
countenance the cherished principles of the political economist and the philosophic
radical. We left them sailing gaily into anarchy on the stream of laissez faire.
Since then the tide has turned. The publication of John Stuart Mill's Political Economy in 1848 marks conveniently the boundary of the old individualist economics. Every edition
of Mill's book became more and more socialistic. After his death the world learnt the
personal history, penned by his own hand, of his development from a mere political
democrat to a convinced socialist.
The change in tone since then has been such that one competent economist, professedly
anti-socialist, publishes regretfully to the world that all the younger men are now
socialists, as well as many of the older professors. It is, indeed, mainly from these that
the world has learnt how faulty were the earlier economic generalizations, and, above all,
how incomplete as guides for social or political action. These generalizations are
accordingly now to be met with only in leading articles, sermons, or the speeches of
ministers or bishops. The economist himself knows them no more.
The result of this development of sociology is to compel a revision of the relative
importance of liberty and equality as principles to be kept in view in social
administration. In Bentham's celebrated "ends" to be aimed at in a civil code,
liberty stands predominant over equality, on the ground that full equality can be
maintained only by the loss of security for the fruits of labor. That exposition remains
as true as ever; but the question for decision remains, how much liberty? Economic
analysis has destroyed the value of the old criterion of respect for the equal liberty of
others. Bentham, whose economics were weak, paid no attention to the perpetual tribute on
the fruits of others' labor which full private property in land inevitably creates. In his
view liberty and security to property meant that every worker should be free to obtain the
full result of his own labor; and there appeared no inconsistency between them. The
political economist now knows that with free competition and private property in land and
capital, no individual can possibly obtain the full result of his own labor. The student
of industrial development, moreover, finds it steadily more and more impossible to trace
what is precisely the result of each separate man's toil. Complete rights of liberty and
property necessarily involved, for example, the spoliation of the Irish cottier tenant for
the benefit of Lord Clanricarde. What then becomes of the Benthamic principle of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number? When the Benthamite comes to understand the law
of rent, which of the two will he abandon? For he cannot escape the lesson of the century,
taught alike by the economists, the statesmen, and the "practical men," that
complete individual liberty, with unrestrained private ownership of the instruments of
wealth production, is irreconcilable with the common weal. The free struggle for existence
among ourselves menaces our survival as a healthy and permanent social organism.
Evolution, Professor Huxley declares, is the substitution of consciously regulated
coordination among the units of each organism, for blind anarchic competition. Thirty
years ago Herbert Spencer demonstrated the incompatibility of full private property in
land with the modern democratic state; and almost every economist now preaches the same
doctrine. The radical is rapidly arriving, from practical experience, at similar
conclusions; and the steady increase of the government regulation of private enterprise,
the growth of municipal administration, and the rapid shifting of the burden of taxation
directly to rent and interest, mark in treble lines the statesman's unconscious
abandonment of the old individualism, and our irresistible glide into collectivist
socialism.
It was inevitable that the democracy should learn this lesson. With the masses
painfully conscious of the failure of individualism to create a decent social life for
four-fifths of the people, it might have been foreseen that individualism could not
survive their advent to political power. If private property in land and capital
necessarily keeps the many workers permanently poor (through no fault of their own) in
order to make the few idlers rich (from no merit of their own), private property in land
and capital will inevitably go the way of the feudalism which it superseded. The economic
analysis confirms the rough generalization of the suffering people. The history of
industrial evolution points to the same result; and for two generations the world's chief
ethical teachers have been urging the same lesson. No wonder the heavens of individualism
are rolling up before our eyes like a scroll; and even the bishops believe and tremble.
It is, of course, possible, as Sir Henry Maine and others have suggested, that the
whole experience of the century is a mistake, and that political power will once more
swing back into the hands of a monarch or an aristocratic oligarchy. It is, indeed, want
of faith in democracy which holds back most educated sympathizers with socialism from
frankly accepting its principles. What the economic side of such political atavism would
be it is not easy to forecast. The machine industry and steam power could hardly be
dismissed with the caucus and the ballot box. So long, however, as democracy in political
administration continues to be the dominant principle, socialism may be quite safely
predicted as its economic obverse, in spite of those freaks or aberrations of democracy
which have already here and there thrown up a short-lived monarchy or a romantic
dictatorship. Every increase in the political power of the proletariat will most surely be
used by them for their economic and social protection. In England, at any rate, the
history of the century serves at once as their guide and their justification.
